Sarah & Sebastian

Challenges faced by Sarah & Sebastian

With a disparate system that was not cohesive and inconsistent, Sarah & Sebastian started facing some challenges—namely three:

1. They were using Mailchimp but had no native integration with their Shopify platform, making it difficult to manage their eCommerce operations efficiently. 
2. Their innovative piercing service required a lot of transactional emails, including reminders, care instructions, and cancellation notifications, but they were struggling to provide a more on-brand and reliable email experience. 
3. They were undergoing a digital redesign, and all their email templates needed a brand uplift to match the new guidelines. 

Elephant Room was chosen as the agency to help Sarah & Sebastian overcome these challenges after a scoping and pitching process with multiple vendors. We proposed a solution that involved integrating our custom-built middleware to connect Sarah & Sebastian’s booking platform (Acuity) with Klaviyo. 

Combining the agility that Klaviyo offered and Elephant Room’s technical service stream with Klaviyo appealed to Sarah & Sebastian—despite not being 100% sold on Klaviyo.

The cherry on top was the work Elephant Room had previously done for other brands, such as Bed Threads, that aligned with Sarah & Sebastian’s brand aesthetic.

Migrating MailChimp to Klaviyo

Elephant Room’s CRM Lead, Ashleigh, was highly skilled in managing the migration process to Klaviyo. This helped Sarah & Sebastian have a clear understanding of what to expect during the transition. 

This included IP warming, converting the flows, creating necessary building blocks to prevent emails from ending up in spam and ensuring the migration was compliant from both tax and technical perspectives.

Connecting bespoke systems into Klaviyo

Elephant Room built a “Save to Calendar” widget inside the email template for piercing reminders. This allowed clients to easily add a piercing appointment to their calendar with the studio's location, date, and time. 

Elephant Room’s middleware pulled data from several sources and Klaviyo acted as the machine that processed the information. Klaviyo's events API allowed Elephant Room to build flows based on specific events like starting a checkout or making a booking. 

Additionally, Klaviyo was able to integrate well with the retail POS system, allowing in-store bookings to be immediately reflected in Klaviyo's system. This had a major impact for the business and created a seamless, omnichannel experience for the physical and digital aspects of the business.

Aside from email reminders, SMS messages were dialled into the process for timely booking reminders—"Hey, your booking is in three days. Click this link for more information." This feature was built into Klaviyo's SMS platform, along with automation flows, making it a convenient and effective part of Sarah & Sebastian’s automation flows.

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À la carte email design

Elephant Room designed a master email template that could be easily customised by the client. This template consisted of 15 different section blocks that could be combined in various permutations to create unique email templates. 

The Klaviyo WYSIWYG editor was utilised to create the templates, using all of Klaviyo’s native email-building features—with no hard coding involved. 

Elephant Room wanted to empower the client and make their solution as autonomous as possible instead of encouraging dependence on the agency, which significantly sped up how quickly and easily the Sarah & Sebastian marketing team was able to run their email strategy. 

The scope of work included the design of win-back flows, welcome flows, and acuity flows.

Unlocking optics & measurement of success with Klaviyo integration

Sarah & Sebastian’s native integration with Klaviyo allows them to track revenue, which historically could never be done with MailChimp and Shopify’s poor integration. 

The ability to track revenue has provided the brand with valuable insights into the effectiveness of its campaigns and flows. The win-back, welcome, and Acuity flows have been designed to enhance the customer experience and increase consistency. 

The use of transactional flows has ensured that the emails have a 100% delivery rate and are not relegated to the promotions folder. This has given the brand the ability to better measure its own success and reduce customer support inquiries—resulting in a better brand experience for Sarah & Sebastian’s customers. 

With Elephant Room and Klaviyo at the helm, Sarah & Sebastian transformed their disjointed eCommerce operations into an experience almost as beautifully bespoke as their own jewellery designs.