In 2017, when our team at Hazel Village, an ethically-made stuffed animal company, started its loyalty program – aptly called the Hazelnuts – we did everything manually. Once a month we would assign discount codes to new members of the program, send them their discount codes, tag them on Shopify, and maintain a complex list of customers who had spent more than $250 on our website. Our previous email provider did not have an integration with Shopify, making communicating with Hazelnuts nearly impossible. It was when we switched to Klaviyo and were able to use segmenting and flows to maintain the Hazelnuts that the program was able to grow and thrive in a way it had never been able to before!

The rules for how to be a Hazelnut are simple:

1. Spend $250 over more than 2 orders on Hazel Village’s website. 
2. Place at least 1 order a year.

Once a customer becomes a Hazelnut, they receive:

1. Free shipping on domestic orders and $5 towards international shipping.
2. Access to an exclusive Hazelnuts blog.
3. Access to Instagram Close Friends content.
4. Access to a special Hazelnuts community.
5. Exclusive behind-the-scenes content, including a weekly newsletter called Hazelnut Weekly. 

There are many different programs that exist to manage a loyalty program, but being a small business on a budget meant that we needed to do as much as we could with the existing tools at our disposal. As soon as Hazel Village had access to Klaviyo’s segmenting and flows, our small team was able to focus on growing and engaging the community! Take a look at how we did it:

Taking advantage of Klaviyo segmenting. Thanks to Klaviyo’s integration with Shopify, we created a Hazelnuts segment that included all customers who met the qualifications for Hazelnut status. 

With frequent high volume launches, we need to make sure that the Hazelnuts get extra information with ease. When a new collection is announced, the Hazelnuts segment receives a special email with access to exclusive looks at the collection before the rest of the customer base!

Using flows to communicate with customers and integrate them into the community. As soon as a person joins that segment, they enter into the “You’re a Hazelnut!” flow. Using flow rules, we were able to personalize the messages to Hazelnuts depending on if they were subscribed to email marketing. When setting up this flow, we communicated with the team at Klaviyo to make this flow transactional so that any customer can receive it and opt in or out of receiving Hazelnut perks.

The Hazelnut flow allowed us to share all of the necessary information about joining the Hazelnuts in addition to helping us organize our segments, making it super easy for communicating with our loyal customers. When sending campaign emails, we have a separate segment that is just Hazelnuts who are on our larger Hazel Village list – ensuring that only people who have opted in to our marketing will receive emails.

Using universal templates to make sure important and personalized information are easily available. We use universal templates so that Hazelnuts can see specific information targeted to them on their emails, and can now with ease send out our weekly newsletter “Hazelnut Weekly” to keep everyone up to date on everything related to the world of stuffed animals. Since switching to Klaviyo, the Hazelnuts group has doubled in size and brought in nearly 75% of Hazel Village’s annual revenue.

Promote the Hazelnuts Loyalty Program to customers close to achieving Hazelnuts status. By using flows, we were also able to promote the Hazelnuts by messaging customers who were close to achieving Hazelnuts status but had not quite made it there. This has brought in thousands of extra dollars in incremental revenue as it inspires customers to purchase in order to be able to access all of the incredible Hazelnut perks. Recently, we have even begun experimenting with targeting customers with high predicted CLV!

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