Klaviyo side-project: Connor Barley’s Boston Pots
Klaviyo side-project is a series highlighting internal Klaviyo employees’ personal entrepreneurial pursuits.
Background at Klaviyo:
I am a Senior Solutions Architect at Klaviyo working with small to medium sized customers and have been with Klaviyo for 3 years.
What is your side project?
I’ve always been passionate about ceramic art and had pursued that during my high school and college days. During COVID I was stuck at home and got the itch to start making pottery again, so I ordered the equipment needed and built an at-home studio. I decided it would be great to start a business out of it so I started actually making pottery, spun up a Shopify store and was off to the races from there!
Does your side project use Klaviyo, how?
I use the Shopify<>Klaviyo integration for my store. Since I’m mainly just using the built in features like Campaigns and Flows, I took a lot of the pre-built Flows Klaviyo offers and added my own spin to them. Currently, I use an Abandoned Cart and Welcome Series, but I’d like to start implementing Back In Stock and others, on top of sending Campaigns to my subscribers.
All in all, the main features I use are: Flows, Campaigns, Product Feeds, and Segmentation.
Since my store is relatively simple, I don’t use a ton of Klaviyo’s APIs, but I do use our Javascript Library to cookie users and send a custom event to my account when customers request a custom order. That “Requested Custom Order” event then powers a Flow that sends a confirmation message to both myself (using the Notification action in Flows) and the person who requested a custom order including details specifying my creative process and next steps in the custom order lifecycle.
Tips, Tricks, and Learnings:
How to translate your data into the Klaviyo data model?
The Shopify<>Klaviyo integration takes care of most of this for me. The one use case where I relied on API work was the Custom Order flow. I translated the data given through a 3rd party form into our Track API as an event. Knowing that Klaviyo can segment on top-level event properties, my main focus was getting data into my account in a way that I could both display the custom order data in an email, and also segment on it so it could be useful for me in the future.
When to send the data to Klaviyo from your app/product?
I used our javascript library, which I hooked up to a HubSpot form by using HubSpot’s built in submission event listener. From there, I was able to wait for the form to be filled out, then fire a Track request to Klaviyo using the javascript API.
Challenges that were faced/overcome?
Working with both HubSpot’s and Klaviyo’s api together was my main challenge. Since custom orders are in the eye of the beholder so to speak, I wanted to give my customers the ability to attach images to their custom order request so I could have a frame of reference when creating the pottery. Klaviyo doesn’t offer this natively, so I used HubSpot. Finally, finding documents and the “right way” to do this with HubSpot’s APIs was the hard part, but once I had the methods down and the data needed, sending an event to Klaviyo via the Javascript Library was a breeze!
Check out Connor’s store here — Boston Pots
To learn more about integrating with Klaviyo, check out developers.klaviyo.com
