Popl: Email + SMS From <20% to 50-60% of Total Revenue Over 21 Months
21-month engagement · Jan 2022 · 21 months (through Sep 2023)
— Verified results
RESULT.01
50–60%
Revenue from email & SMS (was <20%)
RESULT.02
21 months
Full engagement duration
RESULT.03
B2B + B2C
Separate customer journeys built
RESULT.04
YC-backed
Popl scale at engagement
— The challenge
What Popl was up against.
Popl had material email deliverability issues and were generating less than 20% of total revenue from email and SMS. As a Y-Combinator backed company with $2.2M raised and backers including Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, the stakes were high. The brand was running both B2B (corporate orders for branded business cards) and B2C (individual NFC product purchases), but their email infrastructure was treating both audiences identically, with predictable underperformance on both fronts. Deliverability was the most urgent problem: emails were landing in spam more often than not, and engagement metrics didn't reflect the actual interest in the brand.
— Our approach
How we engaged.
The engagement started with deliverability triage: authentication audit, sender reputation analysis, list hygiene, and a 30-day warm-up protocol on the existing sending domain. With deliverability stabilised, the work shifted to architecture. Pete designed separate B2B and B2C customer journeys, each with their own flow logic, segmentation, and content calendar. The B2B side needed longer consideration cycles, decision-maker-aware messaging, and bulk-order handling. The B2C side needed standard ecommerce flows: welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back. Coordinated with Popl's VP of Operations, Pete built the daily, weekly, and monthly content and promotion calendars, plus the segmentation logic that routed each subscriber into the right journey. After 21 months of compounding work, the foundation was solid enough that Popl chose to bring the program in-house with a dedicated team.
— The outcome, unpacked
How a Dual-Audience Klaviyo Account Should Actually Work
Most agencies running a B2B + B2C account treat them as one list with different tags. That works at small scale and breaks down quickly. Popl's account was rebuilt around the principle that B2B and B2C are different products with different sales cycles, and the Klaviyo architecture should reflect that, separate flow trees, separate segmentation, separate campaign calendars, and only some shared brand identity at the template level.
Deliverability had been the choke point. The fix was straightforward in process but disciplined in execution: full authentication review (DKIM, SPF, DMARC at the right policy levels), engagement-based suppression of subscribers who hadn't opened in 90+ days (which initially shrank the active list but improved sender reputation almost immediately), and a deliberate 30-day warm-up cycle to rebuild domain reputation with the major mailbox providers. By month two, inbox placement was at 95%+ and stayed there.
Once deliverability was stable, the revenue work moved fast. B2C side: standard ecommerce flows configured properly for the first time, welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, replenishment for accessories, win-back. B2B side: long-cycle nurture for prospects, post-purchase onboarding for corporate orders, and account-based campaigns for accounts running multi-quarter engagements. Cross-pollination happened where it made sense (B2C buyers who might bring Popl into their workplace), but with deliberate routing rather than blast sends.
After 21 months of compounding, the program was contributing 50-60% of total revenue, well above the 20% target Pete had originally been engaged to address. The handoff to in-house was clean because the architecture was documented and the segmentation logic was something the team could maintain and extend.
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