At Govalo, we’re reinventing the digital gifting experience—but we can’t do it alone. Merchants use a variety of different apps and integrations to deliver the best customer experience possible, and so we plan to partner with the best in the industry to offer our customers the ability to build that ideal experience. With that in mind, who better than Klaviyo to work with on our first official integration.
Thousands of brands use Klaviyo for custom creative marketing solutions - it’s a direct channel to their customers, allowing them to not only deliver promotional campaigns but provide vital order information, personalized recommendations, and more. We want to make it easy for them to also build gift cards directly into flows, and truly make the most of gift cards as part of their wider strategy. With everything from brand loyalty, to retention strategies, Govalo gift cards partner perfectly with the Klaviyo product.
With our integration, you’ll be able to use Klaviyo templates to customize your gift card recipient emails, and create different flows that can trigger gift cards for your customers. It’s the first step in ensuring our Govalo users have everything they need to run successful gifting campaigns.
How to connect Govalo and Klaviyo
First thing’s first, in order to start sending better gift card emails you need to hook up Govalo and Klaviyo.
Connecting within Govalo
Step #1 - From within the Govalo dashboard, navigate to “Settings” and select “Customize Emails”
Step #2 - Select Klaviyo from the drop-down menu under “Select email source”.
Step #3 - Add your public API key from Klaviyo and click “Save” to complete the connection on this side. If you’re not sure where to find this, click here for our guide on how to do so.
Completing the connection in Klaviyo
Once you’ve finished adding your Klaviyo API key to Govalo, you’ll need to go onto your Klaviyo account to set up a flow. This will make sure your customers get their email when they receive a gift card.
Step #1 - In the side menu on your Klaviyo dashboard, navigate to “Flows”, then “Create flow”.
Step #2 - On the following screen, select “Create from scratch”.
Step #3 - In the resulting pop-up, enter “Received gift card” into the Name field.
Step #4 - Now it’s time to set up the flow and triggers. For the “Flow Trigger”, select “Received gift card”.
Step #5 - Drag and drop “Email” from the list of actions into the flow under the trigger.
Step #6 - From here, you can select a template and customize the email the recipient will be sent. You can do so by selecting the email within the flow, and clicking “Configure Content” which will lead you to designing your email.
Once this crucial first step has been completed, you can start building out different flows, customizing templates, and more to truly make the most of the Govalo x Klaviyo integration.
For those merchants on our Premium and Enterprise plans, our support team can help you through this process to get the most out of this integration. If you want more information on this feature, don’t hesitate to reach out.
4 ways to enhance your gift card experience with email
Email is your most direct channel with both the gift card buyer and recipient, therefore it’s important to make the most of that vital touchpoint. Small enhancements to your email marketing strategy for gift cards can result in big rewards for retention and customer satisfaction. Let’s look at some of the ways you can use your Klaviyo integration to improve your Govalo gift card experience.
#1 - Customize gift card emails with your store’s branding
Step one in improving any part of your store experience is to make it actually look and feel like part of your store experience. Template emails are great - they give merchants a solid starting point with all the information they’d need to include. However the key word is “template”; if you want your emails to stand out and be a valuable part of your experience, you need to customize them to suit your store and brand.
Easy ways to customize your gift card emails:
- Change wording and language to suit your brand’s tone and personality.
- Change the colors and fonts to match your store branding.
- Add images, logos, gifs, etc. to add a little bit of extra flair.
These small changes will mean that your gift card emails align with the rest of your store’s branding, ensuring a smooth and consistent customer experience from start to finish. No default text and stock imagery add that extra little touch that your customer will notice.
#2 - Engage the gift buyer with thank you emails and holiday reminders
It’s easy to assume that the focus for the gift card should be on the recipient as they’ll make the end purchase, however it’s important to remember that the customer who purchased the gift card still spent money and has their own experience. How they feel about that experience can influence their perception of your brand, and that can then lead to a future purchase, recommending your brand to someone else, or leaving a review.
Here are some simple ways to engage gift buyers:
Thank You Emails
These are a staple of email automation, but you can always go one step further to truly tailor the experience. Purchasing a gift card is a different experience to buying a product or service - they’re not going to be the one to receive an order, it’ll be whoever they gave the gift card to. Therefore the wording and messaging in a “thank you” email should reflect that difference. For example “Thanks for giving the gift of [product]!”, and thanking the customer for their purchase of a gift card specifically letting them know that you’ll ensure a great experience for their gift recipient.
You can also then follow this up with a further thank you email letting the customer know their recipient has opened the gift card. This gives them the peace of mind knowing it was received, and gives your brand another opportunity to engage them.
Feedback Follow-up
Your gift cards are still products and your gift card customers still go through your store experience, therefore those customers will have opinions and thoughts they may want to share. 93% of customers say they read reviews, and they’re willing to spend 31% more on a business with excellent reviews. Buying a gift can be especially difficult, and future customers may rely on the feedback of previous gift card customers to decide whether or not to make a purchase.
Have a separate flow for feedback from those who purchased gift cards, asking for feedback on their experience. You can direct this to your gift card product page, general site reviews, or a third party site such as Google to try and build up some positive feedback externally for when customers are conducting research.
Holiday and Event Reminders
Your engagement with gift card customers can and should go beyond the point of purchase - if they had a great experience, then you want to remind them of that next time a holiday or event comes up. When you’re sending email campaigns to different audiences around key holidays such as Mother’s Day and Christmas, for example, be sure to create a separate campaign to send to gift card customers especially if they previously purchased a gift card around that time of year.
If they purchased a gift card at a different time of year not associated with a holiday, then it can be tricky to know why they bought it. In this case, set up a more general gift card campaign that is triggered to send one year after their initial purchase. Remind them of the benefits of buying a gift card - schedule sending, sent directly to the recipient, an easy gifting option etc. - and link them to the product page.
#3 - Improve the recipient experience with reminder emails
Did you know that 50% of US customers say they’ve lost out on using a gift card at some point? Whatever the reason, it doesn’t feel good to remember you have a gift card only to either not be able to find it easily or realize it has expired. That’s why reminder emails can be a vital part of the customer experience for the recipient.
With new customers coming via gift cards these reminders are especially important as your emails will form a large part of their first impression of your store. They may never have heard of your brand before, and won’t have gone through the same discovery and research phase as the person who bought the card or a regular new customer. Existing customers have experience with your store and brand, therefore you want to give them even more reason to remain loyal.
Send reminders tailored to the activity and data you have for each customer, this will allow you to tailor the messaging and frequency of reminder emails. For new customers, you may want this messaging to reflect their inexperience with your brand i.e. “Hey new friend! [x] sent you a gift card - we can’t wait to show you what [product] can really do. Here are some helpful links to get you started”. Whereas an existing customer may get messaging along the lines of “Welcome back”.
When it comes to frequency, you want this to reflect the activity with the original email. If they haven’t opened the gift card after a week, send a reminder so they have easy access right away. If they have opened it, but haven’t placed an order after two weeks, send a reminder. Increase the time between reminders depending on activity on your store and with those initial reminder emails, so that you strike the balance of being helpful without spamming customers.
It’s also important to send balance reminders if a gift card is partially spent. The frequency of these should reflect your typical time-to-reorder period and products. The first should be sent directly after the initial order just to let the customer know that they have remaining balance. After that, say you sell beauty products and the typical reorder period is about 3 months - that’s when you should send your next balance reminder. If there is no typical use period, then it should reflect your average period between orders for regular customers e.g. it may be 4 months on average before a customer places their next order.
#4 - Segment your audience to personalize gift card email flows
Personalization has been a growing trend in ecommerce for a while now, and it’s also key to a great email strategy. Use segmentation to give your gift card recipients a better experience, with personalized recommendations based on their personal preferences, incentives based on their previous activity with your store, and more.
Here are some segmentation options to consider:
- New vs Returning Customers
- AOV and LTV (Average Order Value and Lifetime Value)
- Cart/Browse Abandonment
- Loyalty program engagement
- Email campaign activity
By creating these different segments within your gift card recipient audience, you can send emails that will actually engage them and enhance their experience. Let’s take a look at a couple of specific examples.
We’ve mentioned already that a new customer coming to you via a gift card will have a very different experience compared to a regular new customer who discovered your store based on their own research. Therefore they’re going to need more brand buy-in if you want to turn them from a customer just trying to spend a gift card into a customer that wants to come back time and again once that card is spent. Create a separate “Welcome” flow that triggers once they open their gift card. This will then give them all the brand information and education they need to really buy into your store and engage them in the same way as a regular new customer. This flow can then be personalized based on their activity - if they add to cart or browse specific products, they’ll be shown those products as recommendations.
Returning customers will be familiar with your brand and therefore don’t need the same level of education and introduction as a new customer. Instead focus on tailoring it to the data you have on their preferences and engagement. Send tailored recommendations for what they could use their gift card balance on, based on the products they’ve already purchased - that might be replenishing something, or something which complements what they’ve bought before.
Finally if you want to offer incentives as part of your gift card experience, segmentation can really help you to offer the right kind of incentive that works for each customer segment and your bottom line. For example to encourage earlier redemption you may want to offer a discount, in which case you might want to give new customers a smaller percentage discount than a returning customer with a high AOV. It can extend to other goals beyond redemption, for instance if you want to encourage loyalty program membership, you can offer gift card customers bonus points if they sign up for your program or existing members extra perks when they spend their gift card.
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We’re delighted to be an official Klaviyo partner, and look forward to seeing what merchants will do using both Govalo and Klaviyo to enhance their gift card strategy.
Want to join us in building a better digital gifting experience? Click here to learn more and apply for our flagship Partner Program.