Best practices for improving your benchmarks performance

You will learn

Learn how to review the Benchmarks report to better understand your data and make necessary adjustments to effectively grow your business. If you notice performance indicators that are ranked as Poor or Fair, investigate further to find out the underlying causes and implement the recommended improvement strategies below.

Best practices for improving your results

The Benchmarks reports are accessible from Analytics > Benchmarks. Once inside the section, you will see a tab or dashboard for each area of your performance, including Overview, Business performance, Email campaigns, SMS campaigns, Flows, and Signup forms.

Using the benchmarks Overview dashboard

The Overview page provides a high-level overview of your business and allows you to see which areas you excel in and where you need to improve. Take this as an opportunity to expand upon what is working and change up areas where you may be struggling.

Take note here on this dashboard of:

• Your top-performing metrics and continue to build upon those.
• Your low-performing metrics. You may try to:
  • Mimic what is working among your more successful performance indicators.
  • Focus on troubleshooting the root causes of your low KPIs. 
  • Review the specific performance benchmark dashboards (Business, Campaign, SMS, and Flows) in more detail. 

Using the Business performance dashboard

In the Business performance dashboard, you can analyze performance indicators relate to revenue and orders.

Fixing a low Average cart size or Average order count

If your Average cart size or Average order count are low (i.e. ranking as Poor or Fair), you will want to employ strategies that encourage customers to increase the number of products they buy in each transaction. These strategies could include:

• Using a cross-sell segment
  You can see who has purchased or added a specific item to their cart and then target those customers with offers or ads pertaining to a similar item that they may be interested in. Additionally, in a product review or cross-sell flow you can encourage these related items in an automated process.
• Using promotions 
  Consider using promotions such as buy one, get one free to encourage buying additional products. You could also provide additional gifts, samples, or even free shipping over a certain threshold to encourage your customers to buy additional items.

Fixing a low Average order value

If you see low average order values (i.e. ranking as Poor or Fair), you will want to target low-value customers with content specific to their shopping habits. These strategies could include:

• Pushing higher value items
  Include more information in newsletter campaigns and popups around higher value items and detail why the product is worth the extra cost.
• Promoting best-selling or related items in a timely way
  Focus on increasing your customers' buying habits right around the time of their purchases or expected next purchase. Promote bestselling products and products related to their recent purchases.
• Using customer testimonials or reviews
  Highlight testimonials, reviews, or user-generated content (UGC) to encourage customers to purchase.

Fixing a high Percentage of orders returned

If you see a rise in returned orders (i.e., ranking as Poor or Fair), you will want to address the costs you are losing to these orders, plus the potential harm it could have on your products and brand reputation. Strategies to bring down return numbers could include:

• Reviewing your product descriptions
  Consider how you can edit the copy of your product descriptions to make them more accurate. See if there may be a misunderstanding that arises in how a product fits specific customer expectations.
• Reviewing issues related to product, service, or shipping
  Check to see if there is an issue directly relating to the product, service, or how your customer is getting the product. See if there are issues with your product supply-chain (e.g., wrong products or SKU shipped, poor quality, etc.) or shipping (e.g., product arrives broken, late, etc.) that is causing your customers to return in higher numbers.

Using the Email campaign or SMS campaign dashboards

Your email or SMS campaign dashboards highlight benchmarks related to both your deliverability and marketing performance. 

Fixing issues with email or SMS deliverability

Deliverability is a crucial component of maintaining a successful email marketing strategy. For general information on improving deliverability, head to our email or SMS deliverability guides. Below are some general sending principles you can follow to improve any Poor or Fair performance indicators, including:

• Considering what content resonates
  If your spam rate is high or open rate is low, consider who your audience is, what content resonates best with them, and what they are expecting to see. Review your subject lines for emails, and for both SMS and email, make sure that you have a clear call-to-action (CTA) or body content that engages your audience.
• Considering when you are sending and how often
  Review how often you are sending to your email and SMS audiences overall and make sure not to overwhelm them. In particular for SMS, since these messages are often seen as more intrusive, make sure you are not sending too often and you are sending during non-quiet hours.
• Cleaning list and use engaged segments
  You may need to clean your list or build an engaged segment to send to. Additionally, ensure that you are only sending to consented profiles that specifically want to hear from your brand.
• Making sure emails are not clipping
  Gmail clipping will not only affect your email design but also your ability to gauge opens properly and determine who wants to see your emails or even unsubscribe from them. Make sure to reduce the size of your email to ensure the optimal customer experience.
• Regularly reviewing email inbox provider performance
  Be sure to monitor your deliverability performance often to ensure that your emails hit the inbox and you remain in good standing among inbox providers. (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.).

Fixing issues with email or SMS marketing performance

If your marketing performance metrics are not performing as you want them to, look into what the root cause of this problem is and seek out what resonates well with your subscribers. Besides the deliverability strategies listed above, you may also want to:

• Make sure you are using a clear brand voice
  Your copy should maintain a clear brand voice that is consistent across your email content as well as SMS, forms, ads, and website.
• Employ buying guides
  Consider creating buying guides to help increase conversions for customers who may not know what product to look for but are interested in your brand.
• Consider your price or incentives
  If you have recently increased the price of your products or offered fewer discounts, a drop in incentives may translate to a decrease in clicks. Potentially reintroduce these incentives or even special discounts to encourage repeated clicks and thus purchases.
  
• Consider if content is repetitive or stale
  If customers are getting too much of the same content, they may be less likely to click into your messages. Avoid sending the same product offerings or message content to the same profiles. Instead, keep them engaged with new collections and creative content.
  

Using the Flows dashboard

If your flow metrics are not as high as you’d like them to be, you will want to go through your flows to ensure that each is performing as expected. In addition to many of the general email and SMS best practices listed above, you may also want to:

• Split your flows
  It may be advantageous to split your flows based on the information you have collected about your audience and ensure they are receiving the correct and relevant content.
• Set appropriate time delays
  Make sure that you are not overwhelming your audience with too many messages in a short amount of time.
• Test your flows
  Conduct A/B tests on your flow messages to ensure that the content is optimized for your subscribers. Continue to iterate and determine what content continues to resonate the best with individual audiences or segments.
• Consider best practices for that flow
  Each type of flow has its own inherent best practices. Review the guides below to ensure you are following the optimal strategies for that flow:
  • Welcome series
  • Abandoned cart
  • Browse abandonment
  • Customer thank you

Using the Signup forms dashboard

The Signup forms page provides a view of your popups’ success through the submit rates and comparing your results to peer benchmarks. If you find that your submit rates are in the Poor or Fair categories, you may want to implement the following best practices:

• Employ an optimization test
  A form optimization test in Klaviyo utilizes AI to determine the best display timings automatically. Use this test to better understand when to display a form to someone and increase the likelihood of submission.
• Employ an A/B test
  A form A/B test allows you to determine what specific elements (e.g., content, images, fields, etc.) of your forms are resonating with customers. Use this test to see what variables in your form help to increase submission rates.
• Review your form targeting settings
  Make sure to review which forms are appearing and when for each of your different audiences and ensure they are accurate. You can target a form based on a visitor’s location, device type, list membership, URL, UTM parameters, cart contents, etc. 
• Make sure your form is mobile optimized
  For all audiences on mobile devices, ensure that the form they see are optimized for mobile screens including length, are clear, navigable, and easy to fill out on mobile devices, have a CTA, have a dismiss or close button, etc.
  
  

Additional resources

• How to use benchmarks reports
• Troubleshooting decreasing KPIs