How Smart Home Beveiliging’s personalised marketing strategy drove a 242% revenue increase
242%
YoY increase in revenue driven by email
50%
of email subscribers convert into customers
45%
of all sales come from returning customers
When Thomas Bak was eight, someone broke into his house. After seeing how such an event could make him feel in danger when he thought he was safe, home safety took on a new meaning for him. Now, he strives to help others stay safe in their homes. He founded Smart Home Beveiliging, an ecommerce business based in the Netherlands, which sells products to make people’s homes smarter and safer, such as video doorbells, smart video cameras, and complete home alarm systems. For peace of mind wherever they are, people can control their products via Smart Home Beveiliging’s innovative mobile app.
Thomas partners with Jesse and Dennis Kroon, owners of the digital marketing agency, Ecommerce Accelerator to create customer experiences that drive revenue and repeat business.
Jesse and Dennis are passionate about helping their clients grow their business with cost-effective marketing strategies to inspire people to make a purchase.
For most ecommerce stores, it’s common for around 98 percent of people to leave your store without making a purchase. But those people can still convert—they simply need more touch points with your brand before they decide to buy. Creating those touch points with ads is expensive and increases the cost of acquiring a new customer, which reduces your profit margins.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
So how do the experts at Ecommerce Accelerator grow businesses without pouring additional money into third-party advertising? By creating a personalised customer lifecycle to drive loyalty and conversions through email marketing and Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration.
A pivotal time to reduce reliance on paid advertising
With data privacy laws constantly changing and acquisition costs on the rise, Jesse and Dennis say it’s never been more important to own your customer data and take control of your marketing and the entire customer journey.
Paid advertising is great for generating first-time traffic to your store, but it’s expensive to retarget, nurture, and convert new customers who don’t purchase straight away.
Dennis Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Instead of focusing on third-party platforms, Ecommerce Accelerator looks to owned marketing channels to create meaningful experiences that create customer loyalty and higher revenue—and that’s exactly what they did for Smart Home Beveiliging.
You can increase your customer lifetime value (CLV) by inspiring your current customer base to make additional purchases—and we feel email is the best way to do that. Email is first-party data, so you own it. But with channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Google, they own the relationship—you’re just renting it.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
A personalised customer journey—from acquisition to post-purchase
Since the Ecommerce Accelerator team sees email as a major marketing channel for Smart Home Beveiliging, it’s only natural that they’d seek out an email marketing tool that’s easy to integrate with WooCommerce, Smart Home Beveiliging’s ecommerce platform.
Enter Klaviyo—which Jesse and Dennis use exclusively over any other email service provider (ESP).
We think Klaviyo is the best email tool for ecommerce stores, and via the one-click integrations with WooCommerce, Shopify, etc., we have all the customer data available that we need to personalise the customer journey and make relevant offers to each person. With other tools—like MailChimp—you’re a lot more limited, which leads to a more generic customer journey, and therefore, a less memorable customer experience.
Dennis Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Through Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration, Jesse and Dennis can see valuable data about Smart Home Beveiliging’s customers—like which products they’ve viewed or purchased—which they can then use to improve the buying experience.
With Klaviyo, we have a data pool available that we can use at any moment with no need for a third-party integration or tool to pass on that data, which makes setting up segmented email flows and more complex customer journeys a lot easier, faster, and more fun. And because it’s so easy, you also end up using your data more, which leads to better communication with customers, leading to more conversions.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Read on to find out exactly how Jesse and Dennis use this data to optimise each core stage of the customer journey—from acquisition through conversion to post-purchase—for Smart Home Beveiliging.
The optimised form that boosted Smart Home Beveiliging’s subscribers
As Jesse and Dennis explained, many web browsers are unlikely to click “buy” on their first visit to your website, so the duo always optimises this part of the customer journey for clients like Smart Home Beveiliging.
In particular, Ecommerce Accelerator optimised Smart Home Beveiliging’s signup form to maximise the number of leads they can convert into email subscribers, and eventually, customers.
By focusing on the signup form, you can make a big impact because it’s how people enter your email list. When you can improve that, all your future campaigns and flows go to more people. When we implement new pop-ups for our clients, we immediately set up an A/B test because we know it can help us optimise it a lot.
Dennis Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
While a common approach is to offer people an enticing discount in exchange for their email address, Jesse and Dennis set up something a little different for Smart Home Beveiliging.
They offer a small discount of five percent to new subscribers—which lasts for 14 days—and they later adjust other discounts based on where a customer is in their journey.
With the Klaviyo and WooCommerce integration, we’re able to offer discounts more strategically throughout the entire customer lifecycle, so we can protect our clients’ profit margins. We don’t just give everybody a discount. We first see if that person buys something at the full price, then we offer different levels of discount if they’re looking and looking but not buying.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Initially, Smart Home Beveiliging’s signup form also showed an additional field asking consumers whether they were interested in smart home solutions, security systems, or both.
It turned out that most people just wanted security or both, so we removed that question to increase the conversion of the form. Instead, we now use what people are looking at in the shop itself to determine which product categories they’re interested in.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
By changing the signup form to increase its conversion rate, Jesse and Dennis could help Smart Home Beveiliging to reduce their dependence on paid advertising and remarketing, which can be costly strategies—especially for competitive niches like smart home technology.
Instead of paying Facebook a dollar or euro to get someone to come back to the website, we just email them, and only give a discount if people buy.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
More email subscribers also mean more opportunity for Smart Home Beveiliging to convert them into customers—and loyal ones at that.
Email allows us to follow up with people for free via automated flows, so we can develop a relationship with them and guide them to their first purchase. That’s what’s so valuable about email—you can do that for free automatically, and send personalised content so easily.
Dennis Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
How Smart Home Beveiliging nurtures customers with personalised content
So, what exactly does this personalised email content look like for Smart Home Beveiliging?
Once someone’s filled in their details via the signup form, they go through Smart Home Beveiliging’s automated welcome series, which comprises seven emails across two weeks.
Their welcome series sees average open rates in the high eighties and low nineties with click rates above 30 percent, as well—easily double industry benchmarks. These results prove the strategies Ecommerce Accelerator has put in place for Smart Home Beveiliging are working exceptionally well.
Smart Home Beveiliging’s welcome series is so powerful because it’s targeted to what subscribers are most interested in hearing more about—once again, powered by data.
We split the welcome flow based on what products people are viewing. Say you’re looking at security cameras, we’ll send you a guide on how to make the right decision when buying a security camera. Or if you’re looking at a smart doorbell with a camera inside it, we’ll send you a guide about the doorbell instead.
Dennis Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Alongside helpful buying guides, tips, and blog posts, subscribers also see reviews from other customers for the products they’ve been looking at, alongside content framed like a story to drive home the impact of having a secure home even more.
If you tell a story, then it’ll help to make things stick. A price drop can create some urgency, but in a few days, you’ve forgotten about it. But a story about how a product can change your life, or make something better, can plant the seed that grows into a purchase.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Besides a personalised welcome flow, the Ecommerce Accelerator team also uses a targeted approach for Smart Home Beveiliging’s visitors who browse but don’t buy. With Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration, Jesse and Dennis can see how customers interact on the website to create timely, relevant messages and personalized browse abandonment emails.
We’ve set up a category-specific browse abandonment flow. Whenever someone views a security system but doesn’t buy one, for example, we send them an email a day later and offer to help them with choosing the right security solution for their home.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
This approach drives engagement and revenue—Smart Home Beveiliging’s browse abandonment emails see an average open rate of over 60 percent and around 2.4 percent of people who receive them place an order.
The browse abandonment flow works well because it’s so targeted, which is only possible because of Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration. We can see so much data like when somebody viewed a product, how many times they viewed it, which category the product’s in, did they buy it or not, did they add it to their cart or not, and lots of other valuable data.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
What drives Smart Home Beveiliging’s customer loyalty and repeat business?
Jesse and Dennis constantly look for ways to increase their clients’ CLV by cross-selling and upselling to people who’ve already purchased.
One of their strategies for upselling is to highlight how other products can help people make the most of their purchases—like creating targeted content to educate recent customers about an exclusive offer.
After someone makes a purchase and we see they haven’t bought WiFi Cubes in the past, for example, we offer them a special discount if they add the WiFi Cubes to their order, which we’ve set a time limit of four hours on. We’re seeing great results—like an 83 percent average open rate and a 1.2 percent placed order rate—because it’s such a relevant offer.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Besides this targeted offer, Jesse and Dennis created other cross-sells as part of Smart Home Beveiliging’s post-purchase email flow, which highlights their best-selling products across the entire store—but only if they haven’t already bought them.
If someone bought a camera, but not a doorbell with a camera, then we highlight the doorbell in an email and explain how they can expand their home security by adding new devices in and around the house. We highlight use cases, benefits, customer stories, reviews, and stuff like that. It’s working really well. We’re seeing high open and click-through rates and it’s also one of our best performing flows for revenue.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Having a strong customer retention strategy like this in place also means Smart Home Beveiliging can reduce their reliance on costly advertising in the post-purchase phase of the customer lifecycle, as well.
By convincing customers to come back and buy again via email marketing, our clients—like Smart Home Beveiliging—can grow their revenue and profits from the customers they already have without having to spend money on ads, which makes repeat purchases more profitable for the business. We say to all of our clients: ‘If you invest in email and spend the time setting it up now, it’ll set you up for the future.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator
Smart technology, smart strategies, smart future
Speaking of the future, Jesse and Dennis were keen to share what lies in store for Smart Home Beveiliging and their digital marketing strategies:
As advertising costs rise and the cost of acquiring a new customer increases, focusing on customer retention to grow revenue is one of the most important things in Smart Home Beveiliging’s digital strategy. Generating a profitable repeat purchase rate from email plays a huge role in that.
Jesse Kroon, Co-Founder, Ecommerce Accelerator