Nic and Christiana Trapani wanted to cut email marketing costs for Door County Candle. Every dollar counts when you’re a small business.
Trading Klaviyo for Seguno paid off in ways far beyond financial perks for their flagship business. It created the capacity to launch a third brand, Luba Libations.
“We've gained enough time that we can grow a startup from scratch and not be stressed out about it,” Nic says.
Klaviyo’s complexities ate up their time. Frequent data clashes with Shopify’s data stifled progress the most. As Nic explains, “I can’t move fast if I don’t trust my data. And small businesses win on speed.”
Now, there’s one source of truth. Because Seguno lives in Shopify, there’s no more data wrangling.
It’s restored their confidence in making quick decisions and provided a stress-free growth tool they never had with Klaviyo.
Leaving Klaviyo’s constrictions
The Trapanis heard from everyone that Klaviyo was the best email marketing platform, so they started using it soon after moving Door County Candle’s ecommerce to Shopify.
Their experience unraveled a different story.
“We are owner-operators. We need to operate our business because if we're not, no one else is,” Nic says. “So, when I have to resort to learning HTML to craft an email that doesn't look like somebody one week out of marketing school made it, that's a problem.”
They managed the challenges until a six-month road project damaged foot traffic at their retail site. They needed to cut expenses: in-store sales drive about 60% of revenue and they donate a portion of every sale to charity.
Nic found Seguno through a Shopify Winter Editions update. Competitive pricing lured him initially, but other features sealed the decision:
- Tech stack consolidation. Because Seguno is Shopify-native, it’s one less platform to handle. They also eliminated Mailchimp, which they used for their first venture, Door County Delivered.
- A UX design that matches Shopify. Familiarity equals time savings, which is invaluable to Nic.
- Canva integration within the email editor. The team uses the design app every day. A seamless integration means they can design and drop assets into emails without formatting fights.
Improving deliverability and reducing technical challenges
The transition began with personalized onboarding assistance. When migrating Door County Candle’s subscriber list, Seguno’s deliverability manager removed about half of all emails after identifying them as long dormant or dead.
The deep scrub improved the inboxing rate. Click-through and open rates are better, and they noticed a jump in traffic and orders immediately after the cleaning.
Comparing year-over-year data, Seguno emails generated 8.76% higher revenue than Klaviyo emails. And during the first year of Seguno use, email drove 10% of total sales — up from 7% in the prior year with Klaviyo.
“I think that it's easy in these success stories to focus on how much revenue you’ve generated. I almost don't care about that,” Nic says, expressing frustration about overpaying Klaviyo for inactive accounts. “Maintaining a healthy, accurate list of qualified and engaged customers is more important.”
“People are telling me, ‘We’re getting your blogs again,’” Christiana says, referring to her inspirational “Sunday Reflections” installment. “And there were a lot of other issues we didn't know about.”
Variable fields sometimes failed. List conflicts arose, with convoluted segmentation and data mismatches leading to sending mishaps.
The shared Seguno-Shopify dataset has eliminated all of those concerns.
See all the platform differences in our Seguno vs Klaviyo comparison guide.
Getting more marketing tools out of Seguno
Christiana is grateful Nic found Seguno. “It has given me time to plan campaigns and the bigger picture for growing the brand. I’m not stuck in the little, ancillary things.” Key ways Seguno has made a difference:
Better design in less time
Christiana didn’t need to train her marketing assistant because of the app’s minimal learning curve. Ease of use has meant:
- Higher-quality emails that generate better engagement. Nic says Klaviyo-generated emails were boring and simplistic. “Many times we repeated the formatting because we didn't want to put in the effort or couldn't figure out how to do what we wanted to do.”
- Fewer hours needed for email creation. The Trapanis typically spent six hours creating one email. Now, the team typically cranks out four emails for Door County Candle, two for Luba Librations, and two for Door County Delivered in the same amount of time.
Popups they actually use
Whereas Christiana barely used Klaviyo’s complicated popup solution, Seguno’s requires little effort. Door County Candle’s website popups capture emails and preferences for segmenting opportunities. The list has grown by about 11% over the first 18 months of use.
She also uses popups to steer page visits, promote the fundraising program, and announce webinars.
Renewed belief in automations
Gone is the stress over emails rendering poorly or automations triggering incorrectly.
Christiana says automations are a breeze in Seguno. She created eight flows using customizable templates with built-in logic. Together, they contribute 22% of email-generated sales.
Slashing expenses while expanding email marketing
Email marketing costs $1,000 less per month than Klaviyo. That covers all three companies.
Nic says an annual savings of $12K is “a massive deal” for a small business. It enables them to make investments, whether it’s buying equipment, adopting a new technology, or advertising to attract new customers.
They’re paying less and getting more. While Seguno charges by subscriber account and allows unlimited emails, Klaviyo’s pricing structure revolves around a monthly email send cap.
Most times, they restricted messages — by pausing automations, skipping last-chance reminders, or limiting sends near holidays — rather than pay for overages.
“We were constantly worried about hitting the limit,” Christiana says, recalling the perpetual monitoring. “That’s not a good use of your time. We were trying to be strategic, but it was a mess.”
Unlimited sending with Seguno means they can:
- Stick to a steady newsletter cadence of Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday
- Keep automations running
- Grow the list without fear of surprise charges
Maintaining momentum and growing with Seguno
Seguno wasn’t just a confidence boost that opened the door to Luba Libations. It was integral to getting the new brand off the ground.
Christiana spun up a popup and welcome automation, and leveraged Seguno reviews and a site banner via the Dynamic Banners app. Combined, they “took away a big part of the growing pain.”
For Door County Candle, the goals are to grow the company and its community by increasing segmented marketing campaigns, boosting the loyalty program, and expanding the fundraising program with automations.
They’ll make those things happen with the app suite that keeps them moving fast.
“I love Seguno so much,” Christiana says. “It’s an easy thing to love.”
