Developer Showcase #5: Jani Kykyri, Head of Product, Woolman
Background
I’m Jani Kykyri, Head of Product, from Woolman, Europe’s largest Shopify Plus partner. Our data team is passionate about helping D2C brands build and develop their business by more closely knowing their customers and owning their customer data. We have created our own analytics product, Ellis, to give customers tools for data-driven D2C.
Ellis is a D2C business management platform helping mainly Shopify Plus merchants excel in D2C. Ellis is a SaaS service by Woolman that enables the full utilization of eCommerce data to offer visibility and analysis for a customers’ business. Ellis was initially co-created with some of the largest D2C brands on the planet including both traditional brands with 100+ years of history as well as fast growing modern digitally native vertical brands. Specifically, our solution helps brands with multiple Shopify stores and those who use Shopify POS in their physical stores.
Why did we connect Ellis with Klaviyo?
Connecting Klaviyo to Ellis was a preferred choice for us, due to its superior functionality over competitors and the deep co-operation between Woolman and Klaviyo. Klaviyo has been our preferred customer data and automation platform recommendation for 5+ years.
Ellis utilizes Klaviyo’s data for:
- D2C optimized dashboards needed to operate, analyze, and predict business
- AI-driven analyses and insights to support merchant’s decision making
- Built-in data warehouse
- Standardized data connectors to Shopify Plus and many other services like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, email (Klaviyo) and loyalty programs (e.g. Yotpo, Loyalty Lion)
Ellis dashboards provide insights on customers, sales, marketing, traffic, products, inventory, shipping, and more. Data analysis is performed by calculating primary and supporting metrics, statistical methods, and by using Machine Learning models to segment customers accordingly.
Connecting Klaviyo data with other digital marketing data is crucial to building a complete view of how different D2C marketing channels are performing — this helps merchants to choose the right channels to invest in.
Klaviyo Insights
Ellis uses Klaviyo for two main use cases:
- Gathering marketing metrics and campaign statistics from Klaviyo to present activity summaries
- Pushing customer segments created in Ellis to Klaviyo enabling ultra targeted email marketing (we do support custom first party data points as segmentation rules)
Klaviyo’s new APIs offer an extensive set of functionality and enables building specific integrations in an efficient manner. Ellis utilizes several Klaviyo data objects, the most important including ‘profiles’, ‘metrics’, and ‘catalogs’. However, instead of direct API integration, we chose an alternative approach where we enabled Klaviyo’s extensive data model replication through Fivetran’s ETL tool connected to Ellis proprietary data warehouse built on top of Google BigQuery.
The Klaviyo → Fivetran → Google BigQuery data pipeline has proved to be very robust and required minimal maintenance. Loading the whole data model is the only way to enable analyses Ellis is performing for combined customer data.
For pushing and updating customer segments to Klaviyo, the ‘List & Segments’ API provides all the needed functionality for Ellis.
Tips, Tricks, and Learnings
Klaviyo offers well-documented accessible API’s for tools like Ellis. From a developer experience perspective, we didn’t encounter any obstacles integrating Klaviyo’s data into our data warehouse. On top of excellent documentation, we received good advice from the Klaviyo’s developer experience team around the differences between ‘List’ and ‘Segment’ concepts.
Additionally, Klaviyo, similarly to Ellis, has its own customer segmentation capabilities built-in. For syncing Ellis segments to Klaviyo, we create ‘List’ objects in Klaviyo and utilize CRUD operations to keep those lists up to date as Ellis segments change.
Conclusion
Woolman has worked with 350+ Shopify brands, and has seen Klaviyo as the preferred customer data and marketing automation solution for most of them. Therefore, combining Klaviyo’s data with Woolman’s Ellis data platform was a natural choice and helps us to build comprehensive customer and marketing dashboards for our data platform users. Our combined data helps to build comprehensive customer understanding and save time.
Ellis users have seen significant value from our Klaviyo integration. Specifically, customer segment management is easier and the integration provides a complete view of different marketing channels in a single place, where automations can be compared as example with paid social and influencer marketing.
Furthermore, the overall feedback received from our customers has been very positive and feel they’ve gotten more out of Klaviyo by the deepened integration with Ellis supporting their holistic D2C data needs!
