Merchtable — Lifecycle Architecture & Long-Term Partnership

Merchtable powers ecommerce for hundreds of artists and bands, giving fans direct access to official merch. It's not a standard DTC brand — it's a platform, with a custom API, hundreds of distinct catalogs, and artists who often manage their own fan communications. That means the standard Klaviyo playbook doesn't apply, and most out-of-the-box solutions simply don't work. I've been their retained lifecycle and technical partner since late 2022. 

At Merchtable's scale, traditional flow architecture breaks down fast. Building dedicated abandonment flows, order confirmations, and post-purchase touchpoints for each artist was unsustainable — and with a custom API rather than a native Shopify integration, the usual workarounds weren't available either. The program needed an architecture that could scale across hundreds of brands without requiring manual setup every time a new artist came on board.

Rather than treating each artist as a separate implementation, I designed a dynamic content architecture that powers the entire customer communication system from a handful of master flows. Browse abandonment, cart abandonment, checkout abandonment, order confirmation, and AfterShip shipping notifications all use dynamic content blocks to automatically pull in artist-specific products, bundles, and messaging. New artists onboard without new flows. The system scales itself.

I applied the same logic to pop-up forms — tiered exit intent offers calibrated to where a fan was in the purchase funnel, shown only to non-subscribers. One specific brands' cart exit pop-up alone converted at nearly 29%.

The architecture was first proven at scale through a single artist pilot — three segmented sends targeting prior purchasers, non-purchaser subscribers, and cross-sell audiences separately, across 21,000+ recipients. Open rates ran between 85–87% and the sends averaged $0.65 revenue per recipient overall, with the highest-intent segment approaching $1.00 RPE — well above industry benchmarks of $0.08–$0.15. That pilot became the template for the broader program.

Within the first year, email grew a 10% increase of total platform ecommerce revenue — driven entirely through flows, with a 68% average open rate and a 264%+ increase in conversion rate year-over-year. The Abandoned Cart and Welcome Series flows were the top two revenue drivers individually. The boygenius Welcome Series converted at an 82.5% open rate and drove 25% of all email flow revenue in Q3 2023.

As the partnership has grown, I've expanded into technical infrastructure work on Merchtable's custom-domain stores — managing DNS records, DMARC authentication, setting up custom sending domains, and forwarding all customer communications through a unified Merchtable sending domain structure.

The solution covering their core challenges empowered Merchtable to scale marketing across hundreds of brands while maintaining a highly personalized experience for fans. It’s a prime example of using Klaviyo’s dynamic content and segmentation to solve complexity with elegant automation.

Three years in, the partnership is still growing — and so is the program. What started as a flow architecture problem has expanded into a full retained engagement spanning lifecycle strategy, technical infrastructure, and platform development. It's been a genuine collaboration, and one I'm proud to still be part of.