How Klaviyo More than Doubled Its Conference Attendance in One Year

The 2018 user conference focused on a simple goal: Bring the Klaviyo community together so that the team could meet them face-to-face and show them everything the platform has to offer. Capacity was limited to 300 people — an amount that proved to be too small.

After selling out the inaugural conference, it was immediately apparent that the company needed to invest in more events. A small but mighty team was tasked to travel the United States and host a series of free, intimate one-day workshops. The 2019 Klaviyo:BOS conference also needed to be bigger and better, so they doubled their attendance goal.

“Based on where we were moving as a company, we decided the conference should have a dual purpose,” says Morgan Laskey, Klaviyo’s Community Marketing Events Manager. “We wanted to support our community through thought leadership about the industry and provide education about how brands can use owned marketing and the marketing channels within their control—email, website, and mobile—to reduce their reliance on other paid advertising channels and third-party marketplaces like Google, Facebook, and Amazon where costs continue to rise despite brands continuing to see little in return, including virtually no data about the customers they acquire through those channels. We also wanted to highlight some of our fastest-growing customers who could provide actionable, real-life strategies and share the best practices they used with Klaviyo to own their marketing and grow their businesses.”

This expansion made sense for the business. But in order to reach beyond their customer database and create buzz for both the annual conference and its workshops, Klaviyo turned to a mutual client who’d rise to the challenge.

“I’ve done both small and large-scale events for almost a decade and already knew Eventbrite would be critical to our success when I joined the company,” says Laskey. “So I was happy to learn Klaviyo was already using the platform.”

To sell additional tickets, Klaviyo’s team came up with a “Friendship Day” promotion. As part of the special, attendees could buy one ticket for themselves and get one for a friend or colleague for free.

According to Laskey, customers loved the promotion and how simple it was to redeem, which helped boost ticket sales by nearly 40%.

“In only our second year of holding Klaviyo:BOS, a vast majority of the tickets were paid for. Normally at this early stage, you’re giving out a significant number of free tickets just to get people to show up. We didn't have that problem. In fact, we surpassed our attendees goal by 35%! We saw this as a huge success that we processed through Eventbrite,” Laskey says.