Klaviyo, a modern marketing platform, helps e-commerce brands grow by enabling them to build high value relationships with consumers at scale. Like most industries, the email and marketing automation space is crowded and competitive. Nearly every company, no matter the industry, needs help with email or marketing automation and seeks out software to assist their efforts. Since the industry is so competitive, the Klaviyo team needed a way to automate their market research and get a deep understanding of what their competitors were doing. Brian Whalley, Director of Product Management at Klaviyo, found the missing piece to their competitive intelligence strategy - Crayon.
There were two key reasons why an automated competitive intelligence solution was essential to the Klaviyo team, Brian told us. “Before Crayon, we were finding that our competitor information was constantly out of date, and we needed a way to stay up to date with industry changes, in real time. We also needed a process for successfully sharing intel across the whole organization.” In the past, competitive intelligence at Klaviyo was done using a Google Sheet, which was a manual process for collecting data and distributing it to the team. Once they were able to put Crayon in place, they could immediately see the impact of delivering real-time, actionable intelligence to their team.
Competitive intelligence isn’t just tracking one competitor or one action, it’s tracking many competitors and every action they take. The Klaviyo team wanted to have dynamic competitive intelligence that would benefit their product management and product marketing strategies. The Product Management team and Product Marketing team care about a wide range of competitive intelligence data points, including competitor news, team changes, software updates, pricing, packaging, press, and of course, product updates. With a vast competitive landscape and new updates occurring daily, Michael Greene, Product Marketing Manager, says, “I always have Crayon running in the background, providing me with constant competitive updates that I can reference at any moment.” That way, he can get competitive updates, without losing productivity or time throughout his day.
Another important part of competitive intelligence is effectively communicating the data. In an organization of hundreds of employees, communicating competitive intel across the entire organization can be a difficult task. If your organization uses an instant message software, such as Slack, it can be a vital channel for communicating intelligence. The Klaviyo team created a competitive intelligence focused Slack channel and integrated it with Crayon so, now, new competitive updates are communicated to their whole team right away. This has transformed their strategy from manual data collection and communication, to automated data collection and instant team communication.
