Hi Community!
You might have seen me popping into Community threads here and there, but today I wanted to share some of my experiences with you all in regards to utilizing transactional messages to build your brand’s deliverability. Deliverability is a huge factor in email marketing and your brand’s success so you should always be aware of how you’re doing and of course, looking for ways to always improve! Having a good deliverability rates for your email sends, essentially lets the inboxes that they can trust you and have a good ‘sender reputation’ essentially.
However, as we sought to increase our deliverability rates, we also gained a lot of insight into the process of merging profiles in Klaviyo that I think could benefit the Community at large too!
Identifying the Opportunity at Hand
Transactional messages typically have high engagement rates as most customers want to know if their order was received and/or shipped and are very likely to open these emails. Essentially, my client and I realized that we could leverage these high engagement rates to build up a healthier sender reputation.
Additionally, we realized that if we transferred these messages from Shopify to Klaviyo we could continue to customize and control the brand experience (among other benefits).
The Challenge of Typos in Email Addresses
However, once we finished migrating the transactional messages from Shopify and launched them from Klaviyo, there were a couple of initial issues that popped up. These issues were not specific to Klaviyo, but more about how the messages functioned when customers accidentally provided their email addresses with a typo or two.
As you might have seen in Klaviyo topics, Klaviyo treats every email address as a unique identifier. This is used to identify existing customer and add new profile or event data to an existing email addresses that’s used. So if a customer accidentally types in their ‘normal’ email address, but with a typo, this incorrect address is technically a ‘new’, not existing, address in Klaviyo and therefore a net-new profile is created for this ‘unique’ email.
In the case of transactional emails, if a customer submitted their email address with an error - those users would never receive the messages to confirm their order details because the transactional emails went to the email address with a typo, not the email that’s registered with their Klaviyo profile.
The Beauty of Profile Merging
In order for a customer to receive their transactional emails, the profile with the incorrect email address’s profile would need to be merged with the customer’s existing profile, with their correct email address.
Thankfully, Klaviyo makes the process of merging two accounts pretty straightforward using the “Merge Profile” button at the bottom of each profile summary page. However, what was more interesting about this process wasn’t actually merging the account, but what to expect from Klaviyo after you’ve merged two accounts together.
What We Learned:
Factors such as how soon the incorrect profile is merged with the correct profile containing the correct email address and how much time has passed since the customer most recently made a purchase (or triggered an event), will influence how Klaviyo manages different types of messages that were previously sent to the incorrect email address.
If the accounts are merged within a few hours to a few days, Klaviyo will automatically send the messages to the merged profile. If the order occurred outside of this duration, then the transactional emails would not be automatically sent and would need to be manually sent from the Messages section within the profile.
To best understand how this works, please consider the following two scenarios:
Scenario 1:
-
A customer placed an order 5 days ago, but entered in the wrong email address when completing their order
-
On the 5th day after their order was placed, the incorrect profile is merged with the correct profile
-
Because the order was placed within 7-days when the two accounts were merged, Klaviyo will automatically send the order and/or ship notifications shortly after merging the account.
Scenario 2:
-
A customer placed an order 8 days ago, and entered in the wrong email address when completing their order
-
On the 8th day after their order was placed, the incorrect profile is merged with the correct profile
-
Because the order was placed longer than 7-days ago when the profiles were merged, Klaviyo will NOT automatically send the order and/or ship confirmation emails and any notifications will need to be sent manually.
In Scenario 2, you would navigate to the top of the profile, click on Messages, select Skipped, and find the Order and/or Ship Confirmation emails listed. From there, you can click on the “Resend” link and the associated message will be sent to the correct profile.
Outside of transactional messages, any other messages, such as campaigns or marketing flows, also have a duration period where Klaviyo will automatically send those messages following the merge of two accounts. However, this window for transactional messages is much shorter.
Any campaigns or messages sent in the last 4-hours of when the two profiles are merged, will be automatically sent after the profiles are merged. If a message was originally sent longer than 4 hours prior to when the profiles were merged, they will appear in the Skipped message panel and can be resent manually.
Final Thoughts to the Community
The idea of merging two profiles together is easy and may seem straightforward, but you should note the larger implications when it comes to sending messages to these users. Understanding how Klaviyo handles recent, or past, messages sent to a merged profile could inundate a customer with a large number of messages at once, which is definitely not what either of you want. So, ensure you can nail down where in the timeline this incorrect email address was created in relation to the order history.
Now, you can strategically think about a customer and the messages they should or should not receive at the time of merging to ensure you provide them the best customer experience with your brand!
-
Learn more about me on my Champion profile page!
Resources Available to Keep Learning:
- How to Monitor Email Deliverability Performance
- Understanding Deliverability Best Practices
- Guide to Email Deliverability
- Using Flows to Send Transactional Email Messages
- How to Delete, Merge and Export a Profile