Rosalie Gale (owner of Ugly Baby AND Monster) had been using Mailchimp as her ESP (that's Email Service Provider for you non-nerds) for a long time. And she made it work...until it didn't work for her.
What did work was Rosalie's content within an email campaign. Truth be told, I've been an email subscriber of hers for a very long time. Every time I saw a new email from Ugly Baby, I opened and read it immediately.
You know why?
The emails were usually funny.
Rosalie would sometimes give her subscribers behind-the-scenes happenings of her life and business, and they were always entertaining.
It's also the reason I have at least five pieces of Shower Art affixed to a window in my studio.
Who says email is dead?
But like many folks, Mailchimp's "nickel and dimed" approach to features, and their seemingly constant "improvements" of their interface made Rosalie not want to send any more of those funny emails.
So she thought that by switching to Omnisend would help solve those problems.
We realized that was a mistake.
Many times I opt to bundle website and email services, as they tend to lend a hand to one another.
Initially, I thought that I would just stumble through using Omnisend to see if it could be another option for clients looking to uplevel their email and SMS marketing workflow.
But Omnisend's interface was not any better than Mailchimp (this could have changed by now), and I was worried that Omnisend didn't take into account the folks who had unsubscribed in Mailchimp...which could result in spam complaints.
Not something you want for anyone, let alone someone switching their ESP!
Enter Klaviyo.
Klaviyo is a platform that was literally built for ecommerce, and their integration with Shopify makes you wonder if they really are BFFs (if platforms could form friendships).
Klaviyo and Shopify = BFFs
We opted to make the switch from Mailchimp to Klaviyo instead.
In order to have a clean list of subscribers, we combed through all the lists from Mailchimp and carefully imported Rosalie's subscribers for Ugly Baby into her new Klaviyo account.
Once we got all the tricky list stuff out of the way, I crafted some custom letter bead illustrations, chalk unicorn illustrations, and other illustrations to add some color to Rosalie's Klaviyo template.
