Expanding your online brand to sell in different countries can be a high-wire act that requires a lot of precision. You must think of various factors like different currencies, payment methods, shipping logistics, localizing your marketing strategies, and understanding the regulations of each country. It’s a complex task that includes crafting unique email marketing strategies, designing relevant signup forms, and creating specific email flows for different markets.

Fortunately, using Shopify Markets combined with Klaviyo simplifies this challenge. These tools work together at the email marketing platform level to streamline the process. By effectively using Klaviyo, you can manage your entire customer base across various countries through a single account, allowing for efficient consolidation of your email lists.

What is Shopify Markets?

Shopify Markets is a powerful feature of Shopify that simplifies the process of selling globally from a single store. This tool is designed to manage multiple aspects of international e-commerce with ease. By using Shopify Markets, you can tailor your online store to different countries or regions, handling things like currency conversion, language translation, local payment methods, and setting specific pricing and shipping rules for each market.

Shopify Plus now offers extensive documentation on how to manage these key features of Shopify Markets.

• Set up automatic redirection for your visitors
• Pricing in local currencies
• International domains
• Localization and translation
• Duties and import taxes
• Payments
• Shipping and Markets
• Publishing products with Markets

(Markets is available to merchants worldwide on Basic, Shopify, Advanced, and Shopify Plus plans.)

Why This is Better Than Separate Stores Per Country

Owning multiple online stores and managing them independently – including managing products, prices, and inventory separately – is a huge operational cost, more time-consuming, and way more complex. The shift to Shopify Markets on the Shopify Plus platform consolidates all functionalities into one dashboard, providing a more streamlined and efficient approach to selling to a global customer base. 

What Klaviyo Offers to Sell Internationally

Klaviyo is the most dominant CRM platform in the Shopify ecosystem for many reasons, but perhaps the prime reason is its seamless integration with Shopify and the technologies built around the e-commerce platform. Specifically, by integrating your Shopify Markets store with Klaviyo, you’ll be able to:

• Perform advanced segmentation of your Klaviyo customer profiles based on their active storefront (in your email marketing campaign targeting and in your email automation flows).
• Communicate with them in their preferred language and currency (which results in less friction, a better customer journey, and ultimately more conversions).
• Generate reporting for your individual storefronts (which is a massive problem when having to do this across separate Klaviyo accounts)

Why This is Better Than One Klaviyo Account Per Country

Echoing our prior points about owning and managing multiple storefronts independently, managing separate email lists in different Klaviyo accounts is operationally taxing and complex. A unified, single-account approach on Klaviyo, in conjunction with Shopify Plus, simplifies management, reduces costs, and ensures a consistent, branded experience for international customers.

Passing Shopify’s Customer Locale in your Klaviyo Account

Klaviyo’s Frantisek Friedl has written a great step-by-step guide on how to integrate Shopify Markets with Klaviyo. Your developer can follow these steps for a smooth integration. Essentially, the process involves:

• Tracking each shopper’s language and currency preferences (which correspond to a country)
• Passing that information on to Klaviyo on the profile level of each customer
• Using that to localize the email content and adjust our email segmentation, so users receive a more personalized customer experience (e.g., localized products, product feeds, etc.). 

Shopify Markets has a property called ‘Locale’ that helps in doing exactly this. You’ll need to insert a Javascript code into your Shopify theme. This code makes sure that the ‘Locale’ information is captured by Klaviyo. Then, you can set up a Shopify Flow that automatically sends this data (“shopify_locale”:”{{customer.locale}}”) to Klaviyo whenever a new customer account is created.

Scenario One: Consolidating Existing Country Accounts In 1 Klaviyo Master Account

In this scenario, the high-level objective is to move all the data of all of your Klaviyo accounts into a single Klaviyo account, ideally the one that has the highest send volume, and manage all of your territories from there. Here’s how to start: 

• Create a Staging  Klaviyo Account (test environment) and integrate it with your Shopify Markets instance.
• Use this account to create flows, templates, sign-up forms, and so on, so they’re ready to copy into the main account. You might want to clone flows and templates you want from the other accounts to speed up the process. 
• Start moving Klaviyo data from other Klaviyo accounts into the (future) main account, focusing on commonly used metrics like email engagement events from the last 6 months, SMS events, list subscription events, and any other high-priority events you might be using.

To complete the migration of events, you will require the help of your developers. Specifically, they’ll be able to pull these data points using Klaviyo’s Get Events API, and import them into the main account using Klaviyo’s Create Event API.

Ideally, you should set up a periodic sync so that the desired events and data from the regional accounts are passed on to the main account and are up to date for when you go live.

Scenario Two: Adding a New Country To Your Existing Klaviyo Account

In this scenario, your objective is to start targeting users in a new, different country, without really disrupting your existing Klaviyo setup.

The first step of the process – setting up Klaviyo to use Shopify markets data – is the same. What’s different is that you don’t really need to consolidate data and events, nor do you really need to set up a staging environment (though you still could, just for safety reasons).

Key Considerations for Managing Different Locations From Klaviyo

When expanding your online brand internationally with Klaviyo and Shopify Markets, there are several key considerations to keep in mind. Here’s a list of points to help guide you through the process:

• Prefer Percentage Discounts: To avoid currency confusion, try to switch all discounts to a percentage format instead of a fixed amount. 

• Create Location-Specific Flows: Develop separate flows for each location (e.g., US Checkout Abandonment, UK Checkout Abandonment, DE Checkout Abandonment) to avoid sending incorrect emails to multi-location users.

• Manual Linking in Product Blocks: If using Klaviyo manual product blocks, manually check and adjust links to ensure they direct users to the correct country-specific product pages.
  • Alternatively, follow this Product Catalog internationalization deep dive by Klaviyo (requires technical support by a qualified developer). 

• Test Dynamic Links: In key flows like Checkout and Browse Abandonment, test if dynamic links correctly adjust to user location.
  • If not, seek developer assistance to fix the issue.

• Segment Updates: Update and duplicate all segments based on location.
  • For example, include your regular definitions (e.g., Clicked Email at least once in the last 120 days) AND shopify_locale equals “CA.” Be sure to use AND instead of OR.
  • Avoid this common mistake we see in other agencies: shopify_locale does NOT equal [Country 1] OR does not equal [country 2] OR does not equal [country 3]. Supposing your goal is to target [Country 4] and exclude the other 3 countries, your definition does the exact opposite: It includes all of them because it uses OR instead of AND.

• Do Not Overcomplicate Localization: Unless you are a very mature organization, with dedicated regional teams, you should keep some (or most) content consistent across locations, changing the featured products, currencies, and links, when applicable.
  • Similarly, if you’re now expanding to a new territory, you should consider utilizing historical top performers from other regions, and modifying the content and links as needed. 
  • Once you do start localizing more deeply, avoid hiring translators who are just fluent in a language. What you want is people who understand marketing and cultural nuances deeply. In essence, a small regional division. 

• Location-Based Popups: Develop different signup popups for each location, considering factors like:
  • Different lists for users based on location.
  • Varied incentives.
  • Unique URLs in popup behavior.
  • Ensuring the products shown in the images are available in the countries.

• SMS Confirmation Variations: Adapt the SMS confirmation process to the regional practices (e.g., direct confirmation messages in the US vs. manual number entry in the UK).

By following these considerations, you can effectively manage your international presence using Klaviyo and Shopify Plus, ensuring a cohesive and successful global expansion.

Ready to expand efficiently into a new market?

Combining Shopify Markets and Klaviyo results in a seamless integration that powers up your e-commerce business, helping it grow into new markets efficiently However, the journey to happy customers and successful expansion needs more than that. It requires a dedicated approach to managing your email lists, creating relevant content, and optimizing email flows to resonate with diverse customer bases. This is where YOCTO can be your invaluable partner.

Our deep understanding of the e-commerce industry and experience in custom integrations means that our marketing team is well-equipped to meet your unique business needs. Whether it’s enhancing your marketing emails, broadening your product catalog into new markets, or personalizing your email automation to boost your email revenue, YOCTO is here to help.

Team up with YOCTO to fully realize the potential of your e-commerce business in the global market. We’re committed to working with you to ensure a smooth and successful expansion, focusing on e-commerce sales. Click here to schedule a discovery call.