Jenna Crane is the Director of Product Marketing at Klaviyo, a leading software platform that helps ecommerce businesses use effective marketing strategies to drive revenue.
Jenna has an extensive career in marketing for digital brands. Before joining Klaviyo last year, Jenna was the Product Marketing Lead for Drift, the Director of Marketing at Klara, the Product Marketing Lead at Dropbox, and the Content Marketing Manager at Upwork.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Jenna Crane discusses her role at Klaviyo
- How Klaviyo’s structure and strategy is taking marketing to the next level
- What is the origin of Klaviyo’s name?
- How Klaviyo is ahead of the curve when it comes to emotional connections in the ecommerce space
- How to create unique experiences beyond the transaction
- Klaviyo’s successful venture into SMS marketing
- The future of the customer experience for marketers
- How is the ecommerce landscape changing?
- Jenna mentions some of her favorite brands that do a powerful job with marketing and building the customer experience
In this episode…
If you’re an ecommerce company, you’ve heard of Klaviyo. However, you may not know the magic behind the marketing software. Luckily, Jenna Crane is here to tell you all about it.
Jenna Crane is the Director of Product Marketing at Klaviyo, a leading software platform that helps ecommerce businesses use effective marketing strategies to drive revenue. She has over a decade of experience in product, content, lifecycle, and social media marketing. She is passionate about uncovering the human interaction behind digital strategy. She’s here to tell you all about it and give you tips on effective marketing along the way.
On this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin talks with the Director of Product Marketing at Klaviyo, Jenna Crane. They discuss how Klaviyo is taking marketing to the next level, emotional connection in the ecommerce space, crafting a unique customer experience, and much more. Stay tuned!
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Joshua Chin on LinkedIn
- Chronos Agency
- Jenna Crane on LinkedIn
- Klaviyo
- Sign up for Klaviyo here – bit.ly/chronos-klaviyo
Special Mentions:
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency.
If you are a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand that wants to unlock the optimum customer lifetime value through email marketing, then look no further than Chronos Agency!
Our team of passionate email marketing experts has helped hundreds of brands generate over $70 million in return from email alone, and our clients receive an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts.
Chronos Agency has worked with a variety of brands, including Truly Beauty, Alya Skin, and many more. Our mission is to help real businesses achieve real results.
If you want to take your revenue to the next level using email marketing, be sure to email our team at sales@chronos.agency or visit chronos.agency to learn more.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top founders and experts in the ecommerce industry and take an in depth look at the struggles and successes in growing ecommerce brands profitably.
Joshua Chin 0:21
Josh Chin here I’m the host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top experts, entrepreneurs and shakers in the ecommerce industry. And we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes in growing a brand. Now this episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency. If you run a direct to consumer ecommerce brand that’s ready to scale and double your customer lifetime value through lifecycle marketing Chronos is your company. And we help brands like Truly Beauty, Alias Skin and Doctor Livengood. Scale profits with email, SMS and mobile push while getting an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts. And if you’re interested to continue on this conversation, the next step is to email us at sales@chronos.agency, or you can go to Chronos.agency to learn more. And today’s guest is someone really special. Jenna Crane is the Director of Product Marketing at Klaviyo, the leading owned marketing platform for ecommerce brands of all sizes. I’m wearing the T shirt right now, Klaviyo. Jenna is a veteran product marketer. Prior to Klaviyo she drove product growth and loyalty for brands like Drift, Dropbox, and Upwork. And I’m so happy to have you here. Jenna, welcome to the show.
Jenna Crane 1:40
Thank you so much. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Joshua Chin 1:44
So let’s dive into it. Tell me a little bit about about you about Jenna, and what exactly is your role in Klaviyo?
Jenna Crane 1:54
Yeah, so I have a really fun and exciting job, which is to build out the the product marketing team at Klaviyo. We actually haven’t really had a traditional product marketing team before at Klaviyo so I’m going from, you know, two of us at the beginning of this year to will be about nine by the end of the year. And yeah, just building on the foundation of product marketing, which is some of my favorite thing. One of my favorite things to do, you know, messaging and positioning customer insights, enablement for our internal teams a launch process, helping shape the roadmap, really helping the rest of the company deeply understand our customers and, and their needs and their pain points and helping to to make sure we’re building the best product that really serves their needs.
Joshua Chin 2:47
That’s incredible. And that’s, that’s definitely not an easy task. I’ve been a Klaviyo user and partner for a long time now, and we’ve seen Klaviyo’s growth from when we were at the HQ in Boston back in 2019. I think you guys were at about 300 employees 300 people strong. Today you guys are at what 900? Close to?
Jenna Crane 3:11
Yeah, I mean, I can’t even imagine what it. I mean, I’ve only been here since late February. So the team that that was around in 2019 they left the office at about 300 people and they’re going to come back to an office later this year have close to 1000 people which is just wild.
Joshua Chin 3:32
That’s insane. Yeah. A little bit of a about a marketing Klaviyo as a product now, Klaviyo as a as a software and as a company has been such an interesting case, from an outsider’s point of view, whereby the product market itself Klaviyo is such a great tool and it has such great product marketing market fit to ecommerce brands, especially on Shopify WooCommerce. It there is very little marketing to do, especially at the beginning, there’s a lot of the marketing is done through referrals and word of mouth. And I’m just curious about your strategy and taking that to the next level. What What would that look like?
Jenna Crane 4:20
Yeah, so um, it is, you’re exactly right. And that’s actually kind of how we got here. So the first, you know, stages of the company’s growth, our CEO, Andrew believes strongly that first you deeply understand your customers, then you build products that solve their problems and meet their needs, and then you bring it to market. So the first kind of phase of the company’s growth has really been in those two stages. And we’ve had, you know, just kind of the MVP of marketing. And then now we’ve, you know, really hit our stride. We have a really strong product, great product market fit, like you said, a lot of a lot of customers who are super happy. And so now we can, you know, really scale that the marketing and what that means is, you know, continuing to generate awareness for Klaviyo. So we’ve had a lot of organic awareness, which has been great. But you know, how do we go beyond that and make cleveo a household brand name. Because, you know, once you start learning about it and start getting into it, it really does sell itself, it’s such a powerful product. So we’re generating awareness is a big focus for my team. We also, you know, we kind of fit in an interesting place in the in the market where we do email and SMS and, you know, website forums and social audiences. But we also have this super strong data component, we were actually a database company to begin with, before we turn into a marketing communications company. So, um, so there’s elements of a customer data platform CDP, and what we do as well, so we kind of sit at the intersection of these two categories. And that can be difficult to explain and to really show the value of that. So that’s another thing that my team is focusing on is, how do we, how do we describe what we do and really bring to life the value of having all of your data in one place unlocked, so you can use that to drive really powerful, relevant, hyper personalized messages to people? So there’s a big messaging and positioning element to that as well, making sure anybody in the company that you can just that you just ping and say, you know, how would you describe Klaviyo, that they have a very similar, consistent, compelling answer to that, and they have all the resources to be able to tell that story well.
Joshua Chin 6:49
That’s huge. And that sounds like a huge task, because Klaviyo does so many things. So well. It’s hard to, to kind of summarize that into a book or let alone a paragraph or a sentence that really kind of encapsulate all of that. Let’s talk a little bit about the origins of the name Klaviyo. A lot of people pronounce Klaviyo as Klaviyo. And I know that’s not the right way to pronounce it, because I actually had a shirt that says Kla-vi-yo. Yeah, so tell me about that.
Jenna Crane 7:24
Yeah, so it is Klaviyo. But the origin of the name is from clavija, which is the Spanish word for I think it’s called the Teton the thing that you stick in, in a rock wall when you’re rock climbing that in the thinking there from what I understand I wasn’t there in the beginning but um, but that we really wanted to make it something reference to something that is so critical to to businesses or you know, as rock climbers to their lives, like something you rely on when you’re doing something as difficult and risky as rock climbing or starting a business so it’s based on the Spanish clavija.
Joshua Chin 8:06
Clavija love that and then know a little bit about Klaviyo’s evolution of over the years. But before that, he calm as a as a landscape, right? Ecommerce has evolved from being sort of like an online transaction type type of a nature to a relationship based landscape to now an experiential, emotional one, where there are like actual connections that people are building with online brands. And I don’t think anyone could have predicted that to happen, but it almost seemed like Klaviyo saw this coming before many out there, especially lots of other email softwares in the market. What did, yeah, yeah. So how did that happen? Was that a intent with intentional thing? Or was it kind of just saying that clearly fell into?
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