The strength of email marketing is its ability to deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience. Websites can’t do that. Social posts can’t do that. Blogs can’t do that. But emails can, if you collect the right data. Here’s how.

Profile Property Buttons: The Why ?

Not long ago my colleague wrote about a great Klaviyo feature, Property Links, which help collect even more useful data from our customers. At the time, we had just decided to increase our email frequency which, counterintuitively, decreased our unsubscribe rate considerably. Our members heard our point of view more often, and more depth made more sense. 

Nevertheless, giving our subscribers a choice of how many emails per week they would like to receive seemed to return the goodwill they had shown our additional sends and would surely strengthen the list over time. Now I knew how to accomplish that!

First, we made a campaign asking them their frequency preference. (See this in Image 1 and the results in Image 2.) We included this question also in the first email of our Welcome flow. We got the following result: compared to the previous month we noticed a 50%+ CTR increase in the Welcome flow’s initial email in which we posed the question.

This powerful tool is not only good for improving segmentation and personalization. By using Preference Buttons we can increase our CTR resulting in better engagement. It also makes email more interactive. In the long term, our emails become both more interesting and trustworthy which should raise conversion rates.

For example, in this Halloween email, our content was the same across our list, but we used Preference Buttons to personalize the introduction. (See Image 3.) No matter what recipients answered, our product would help them enjoy Halloween’s festivities. 

Plus, presenting an interactive option helped focus the readers on visualizing that night, into which our products could easily fit. It also gave us useful psychographic data we could leverage during subsequent holiday promotions.

Profile Property Buttons: The How ? 

First, we set up buttons just like you would for a Call-to-Action. However, instead of pointing them to a URL with a discount code, we used Klaviyo’s update_property_link’ tag. This tag first collects information from the recipient, entering it as a property in the recipeint’s profile, and then redirects them to a URL. 

In the email template editor, we selected our Preference Button and entered the following into the Link URL section: {% update_property_link ‘profile_property’ ‘property_value’ ‘redirect_link’ %}.

From there, we changed each section of the code to customize it as follows:

• ‘profile_property’: the profile property we wanted to create; in this case, Halloween Event.
• ‘property_value’: the value that the particular button corresponds to; for example, Staying In.
• ‘redirect_link’: the URL that we wanted to redirect them to after they click the button; for example one of our products that worked well for their Halloween choice, whether it was going out somewhere or staying in.

It won’t be necessary to update Halloween preferences until the Fall, but, from our earlier example, recipients’ send frequency preference might change within a year. Accordingly, we have sent emails that provide an opportunity to update this. As with any Profile Property, recipients can only select one value as their choice, but if the current selection overwrites a prior one, Klaviyo automatically updates the record to reflect the latest decision.

Once you begin to collect data like this, you then use it in your subsequent emails.  You can create segments that use these properties as conditions in the definition, like we do for send frequency. You can also use the data to personalize emails. For example, we could find out how Halloween at home worked out, modifying the message for those who purchased the product we recommended and for those who did not. 

You can even split flows by different properties. For example, we could make a winback flow targeting recipients who presumably like to go out on the holidays, based on their Halloween choice, versus ones who prefer to stay in.

What experiences have you had with Profile Properties, either through Preference Buttons or even a Managed Preference Page, which lets you update several properties at once? Comment below and let us know!

Marko Kojadinovic and Thomas McClintock

Hustler Marketing