I want to share my experience with D2C (direct to client) brand email marketing. Initially, I was creating HTML emails with react-email and sending them through Postmark's broadcast stream. The open rates were very good - 40-50%, and it had solid deliverability.
When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder.
This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps.
I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too.
Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.
When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder.
This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps.
I spent 5 days building a custom solution with:
- Simple drag-and-drop email builder - Dynamic coupon generation with dynamic criterias - Template variables - SQL-based segmentation (<-- priceless!) - Automated flows (abandoned carts, welcome series, etc..) -SMS integration
I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too.
Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.