If you’re a long time Klaviyo user, you might not be a big fan of their email and SMS capture forms. Up to this point, they’ve had pretty limited functionality in terms of customization, multiple capture steps, and layouts.
Many of the clients we’ve worked with have used forms from 3rd parties like JustUno, Exit Intelligence, or Shopify 3rd party plugin forms to get access to animations, A/B testing, and other features. While some of them are nice to have, Klaviyo has recently stepped their form game up to be more competitive from a styling perspective.
But this blog post isn’t a sales pitch about Klaviyo’s form styling, but rather a point about an often overlooked, but helpful benefit for identifying subscriber interests early on in their lifecycle with you — web tracking.
But don’t we already get web tracking with Klaviyo?
Yes, but not as early as you might want. If you follow Klaviyo’s instructions on setting up web tracking, you’ll get to see the ‘active on site’ and ‘viewed product’ events once Klaviyo has identified a user through it’s cookie process, which can be done in one of two ways:
- When you click through an email to the website, Klaviyo’s link tracking identifies users and ties their email address to the web activity from that point on.
- When you submit a Klaviyo form with an email address, Klaviyo ties that cookie to the email address and begins tracking activity from that point on.
Simple enough right? Not exactly. There are 2 key details for you to understand.
First is the italicized phrase, ‘from that point on’. Klaviyo will not share any web activity of a user prior to them clicking the link or submitting a form, because there hasn’t been an acknowledgement of tracking consent yet granted by the potential subscriber until that point. Therefore, Klaviyo won’t share any of that info in their user profile until they can confirm the consent. This may seem frustrating to you as a marketer, but it’s a great way to look after privacy of users.
The other key phrase is ‘When you submit a Klaviyo form‘.
Here’s the deal. When you submit a Klaviyo form, Klaviyo is using it’s own web tracking as well as it’s form to tie together the cookie and the email address in their database. When you use a form from another system like JustUno, that system has it’s own cookie to identify traffic to show forms to, and of course it’ll pass the email address of the visitor who submitted the email, but with the majority of integrations it will not pass and tie the cookie to Klaviyo.
What this actually means is that when a 3rd party form gets submitted and that users email address makes it into Klaviyo, you still won’t actually be able to track their web activity until they click a link in one of your emails.
Why web tracking for email subscribers early is important
Not being able to track subscribers until they click a link in your emails may not seem like a big deal, but there are few things that might make you reconsider.
Identifying subscriber interests early on in their lifecycle
With web tracking available from the start of a user journey, you’ll be able to make inferences about some of their key interests. For example, if you’re an apparel brand that has men’s and women’s options, you’ll be able to infer their clothing interests based on which pages and product categories they viewed.
While you could of course explicitly ask in the form, the more questions and clicks you require in submitting forms, the less likely users are to submit those forms.
For some of our clients with limited product lines, we tailor their welcome series messaging based on activity of which products they started looking at first. Without being clued into their initial web browsing activity, you lose out some of this info, and therefore have to send generic email messaging to eventually tie the cookie and email address together. When you’re trying to make a great first impression with email, you want to be as targeted as you can.
Having the ability to time your email follow ups strategically
Not every new subscriber is going to click your emails, even if they might be interested in your brand initially. If some of that interest wavers, you won’t have any idea as to when a follow up or winback should take place for that subscriber. With web tracking, you have a much better idea of how long, or when, you can attempt to bring back interest through continued emails. For all you know, they could be visiting your website every day, or haven’t at all, since that initial visit. Without web tracking your segmentation abilities are limited and if you’re doing proactive list management, you may be missing opportunities.
Given how expensive it is to acquire new subscribers, it’s worth identifying as much of their behavior as early as you can in their journey. Those initial experiences are critical in improving your conversion rate through email with enhanced personalization and segmentation.
Need help reconfiguring your lead capture and email conversion processes?