Klaviyo Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
November 6, 2024

There are 14 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to Klaviyo's Third Quarter Fiscal 20 24 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Zilli, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Operator

You may begin.

Speaker 1

Thanks. Good afternoon and thanks for joining Klaviyo's Q3 2024 earnings call. Our earnings press release, investor presentation, SEC filings and a replay of today's call can be found on our IR website at investors. Klavio.com. With me on the call today are Andrew Bialeky, Co Founder and CEO and Amanda Whalen, CFO.

Speaker 1

As a reminder, our commentary today will include non GAAP measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's earnings press release or earnings release supplemental materials, which can be found on our Investor Relations website. Additionally, some of our comments today may contain forward looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, which could change. Should any of these risks materialize or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual company results could differ materially from these forward looking statements. A description of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions and other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent report on Form 10 ks and subsequent reports on Form 10 Q.

Speaker 1

Except as required by law, we do not undertake any responsibility to update these forward looking statements. With that, I'll now turn it over to Andrew.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Billy, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Cleggio drove another strong quarter of results in Q3, delivering revenue of $235,000,000 growing 34% year over year. More than 157,000 customers around the world continue to rely on Klaviyo's data and marketing platform to grow revenue by leveraging 1st party consumer data to create highly personalized AI powered communications over email, SMS and push notifications. Klaviyo powers smarter digital relationships. Using real time first party data, our vertically integrated platform enables our customers to quickly and intuitively customize segments, orchestrate omnichannel campaigns and measure every interaction.

Speaker 2

Instead of requiring developer support, marketers can leverage Klaviyo AI to get work done faster, optimize campaign testing and generate creative strategies. Klaviyo makes complex tasks simple and scalable, making marketers much more efficient. Enabling customers to centralize their consumer data on Klaviyo allows them to build more personalized engagement, which ultimately drives more revenue. This is a key differentiator for Klaviyo as many companies are dealing with a fragmented experience, trying to manage consumer experiences across multiple marketing solutions. Companies choose Klaviyo to modernize and consolidate their tech stack because our platform is easy to use, flexible and capable of handling even the most difficult use cases.

Speaker 2

This is particularly true at the high end of the market, where our platform and our best in class integrations drive value and create efficiencies. In the Q3, we announced our partnership with Authentic Brands Group, an IP company that owns more than 50 large well known brands, including Vince Camuto, Billabong, BC Shoes and GC Couture. Authentic came to Klaviyo to modernize their tech stack across select brands within their portfolio. We're excited to build our partnership with Authentic Brands and help them deepen their relationships with their consumers across many of their brands. Every business wants to know their consumer and deliver an experience that beats the competition so consumers keep coming back.

Speaker 2

Marketers are leveraging multiple channels with increasing complexity to reach this goal. But trying to combine data across multiple systems is more difficult as the business scales. With multiple channels, CDP and reviews natively built on one unified platform, Klaviyo makes marketers more efficient. Rag and Bone, an iconic fashion brand, joined Klaviyo this quarter to consolidate on our vertically integrated platform. And this is another example of an upmarket business turning to Klaviyo for a unified view of the consumer.

Speaker 2

They were using a legacy marketing vendor with several other point solutions. And due to this fragmented stack, they were having a difficult time getting an aggregated view of their consumers' lifestyle. Centralizing their consumer data with Klaviyo helped them unlock increased customer lifetime value across online and in store purchases. In the highly competitive fashion industry that relies on brand loyalty, we believe this will be a game changer. We had a similar win with Prest, the leader in the cold pressed juice and champion of functional wellness.

Speaker 2

They were using multiple point solutions and were struggling with reporting, basic personalization and poor segmentation. They consolidated onto Klaviyo, leveraging email, SMS and CDP to drive more personalized communications with their consumers. Beyond our new customer wins upmarket, we continue to drive cross sell growth, particularly with SMS, as customers see the value in leveraging multiple channels on one platform. We recently expanded our relationship with Spot and Tango, a fresh dog food delivery service and a Klaviyo email customer for the past 5 years. They were looking to drive an omnichannel strategy to create highly segmented, unified consumer outreach and so added SMS to drive further conversion.

Speaker 2

Moving next to international. We are continuing our investments across go to market and project engineering to address this large growth opportunity. We started a new relationship with The Body Shop, a U. K.-based global beauty brand with more than 30,000,000 global consumers. They were one of the largest customers on a legacy vendor solution, but were unable to deliver personalized communications due to the complexity of the system.

Speaker 2

Working with the new Klaviyo partner, Absolute Labs, they did a full strategy review and chose Klaviyo to consolidate from 9 different tools to 1, enabling greater personalization and streamlining their marketing tech stack. On the product side, we now support SMS in 18 countries, recently added coverage in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Italy and Portugal. Additionally, following the successful launch of our French language products in Q2, we made flowsai and segmentsai available in French, further expanding our features and functionality to those customers. And just a few weeks ago, we announced our projects available in 5 new languages: German, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish and Italian. Klaviyo is now available in 7 languages, including our customer help center, where we offer an immense amount of resources for all of our customers.

Speaker 2

In addition to making our product available in more languages, we're constantly working to make our platform smarter and more automated for our customers with Klaviyo AI. Our AI driven content creation tools and streamlined automation setup allow customers to move faster and more efficiently. We're designing these features to boost productivity, even customer engagement and drive revenue growth. As part of our quarterly feature release last week, we announced enhanced e mail AI, which takes an existing template and creates multiple new versions based on a text prompt. The prompt can call for copy changes or new sections being added and the new email will match branding and voice, removing the need for manual editing.

Speaker 2

For our enterprise and international customers, we released portfolio earlier this year. And now with portfolio level metric mapping, customers can set up custom metrics that span multiple brand accounts within a holding company. For instance, if one brand within the portfolio uses Shopify and another uses BigCommerce, rather than managing separate revenue reports, Playdio allows our users to create a unified revenue metric. For complex businesses, we give the flexibility for brands to create these types of metrics and easily analyze performance across all brands and integrations, providing consistent reporting at the portfolio level. We've also been expanding our product offerings over the last 18 months beyond email and SMS with reviews and CDP.

Speaker 2

Our reviews product continues to make progress empowering brands to understand their customers, and we're seeing customers who want to consolidate their applications and related spend with Klaviyo. Happy Wax, a Klaviyo customer for several years using both e mail and SMS, added reviews earlier this year, resulting in a 27% increase in the number of reviews they collected over their 1st 100 days using the product. As we expand our product capabilities beyond messaging and marketing, providing a powerful data and analytics platform enables marketers to uncover important insights and take action. We're really excited about our progress in CDP and compared to other CDPs in market, our differentiation lies in its vertical integration, making it fast to implement, key value and scale. We recently launched a new action center within our RFM analysis report containing pre built starting points for customers to enable key use cases, like triggering automation based on key inflection points found in RFM.

Speaker 2

Ultimately, this allows brands to shorten the time from insight to action. We also launched a new product analysis feature, which provides customers easy access to insight about their product catalog and purchase behavior. Using this flexible dashboard, brands can find insights on every product, including their repeat purchase timing and what products consumers tend to buy together or in succession. This new feature makes it simpler than ever to build a strong merchandising strategy, giving brands insights on how to promote the right product at the right time to drive repeat purchases and ultimately grow customer lifetime value. This quarter, Harney and Sons, a company known for their high quality teas, added CDP for product and RFM analysis.

Speaker 2

By leveraging the advanced analytics capabilities on our platform, they created a consumer segment of possible churn risk and set a onetime win back campaign. This targeted approach ultimately led to an average order value that was 29% higher than their year to date average order value. In fact, their CEO said this was the one campaign that paid for the 1st 3 months of the CDP products. While we continue to make great progress on our product and growth initiatives, we know that we can't do this alone. Our ecosystem of third party partners, including marketing agencies, system integrators and developers are key to our success and create important network effects for Klaviyo.

Speaker 2

We continue to see new partners proactively reach out to join our partner ecosystem, further expanding our reach. Partners are also continuing to build on Klaviyo, adding 20 new applications to our integration directory in the last 3 months as well as contributing more than 40 new flow templates that customers can implement quickly and easily. Our 3rd party platform integrations continue to be a strong differentiator for Klaviyo, allowing customers to connect nearly 400 technologies, giving them more choice and enabling them to combine first party data on our platform. Our team is constantly working to build new connections with other companies. And in Q3, we launched our integration with Canva, which has achieved the fastest adoption growth of any integration in our history.

Speaker 2

Design and content creation is one of the key roles of marketing, particularly for smaller businesses and has a large impact on performance. With this integration, customers can now bring images from Klaviyo into Canva and designs from Canva into Klaviyo for use across our platform. These integrations are driving customers to Klaviyo as we saw in Q3 with True Food Kitchen, a healthy restaurant chain with over 45 locations across the U. S. They moved from a traditional marketing platform to Kladeo because of how well we integrated with their tech stack, particularly with Ollo and OpenTable, as well as several other softwares they use.

Speaker 2

They are extremely excited about the power of the Klaydio platform and our ability to help them execute on differentiated strategies going forward. I'd like to end by thanking all Klaviyo's for their hard work in supporting our customers and continuing to make Klaviyo a leading data and marketing platform. As our customers gear up for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season, our teams are ensuring they have the support they need. Last BSDM, Klaviyo Health Brands generate almost $60,000,000 of Klaviyo attributed value or KV per hour at peak times. This year, we're excited to help our customers hit their biggest holiday goals yet and are making it easier for them with the Black Friday Cyber Monday Hub, a dedicated space in app where users can plan, strategize and prepare for their upcoming holiday season.

Speaker 2

Before I hand it over to Mana, I wanted to highlight 2 recent leadership hires. Sarabhi Gupta joined as our Chief Technology Officer in September, and earlier today, we announced that Adil Lalhi will be joining as our new Chief Product Officer later this month. Both leaders bring deep experience in scaling world class businesses and will help us continue to grow and deliver exceptional value to our customers. Ed, my co founder, who has been serving as our Chief Product Officer, will transition to become our Chief Strategy Officer. Ed has obviously played a tremendous role in growing Klaviyo and I'm excited for him to take a more holistic strategic role to help drive Klaviyo forward over the next several years.

Speaker 2

And with that, I'll turn it over to Anna.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Andrew. Klaviyo delivered another quarter of strong financial performance in Q3, driving efficient growth at scale. Revenue grew 34% year over year to $235,000,000 and we reported a 14% non GAAP operating margin continuing our consistent top and bottom line performance. We are delivering on our 4 primary growth factors adding new customers, growing in the mid market, expanding with existing customers and expanding internationally. In Q3, we added over 6,000 new customers and we now have more than 157,000 customers, up 16% year over year.

Speaker 3

Similar to last quarter, we saw softness in the SMB market and strength in entrepreneurs and in the high end of the market. The diversity of our customer base across size and geography allowed us to deliver another strong quarter despite the softness in one part of the business. Speaking of the high end of the market, we are really pleased with the results from our go to market initiatives we implemented last year to support our move to upmarket. At the end of Q3, we had 2,619 customers generating over $50,000 in ARR, which was up 54% year over year. We also had another record high number of customers landing in this cohort in the quarter, a great sign of the traction we're making upmarket.

Speaker 3

In addition to the customers you heard Andrew speak about, we also partnered with Lulus, a digitally native women's fashion brand that was looking to enhance its tech infrastructure, streamline processes and improve its reporting capabilities. In Q3, they adopted Klaviyo for email and are in the process of consolidating SMS with us. With both channels unified, Lulu's will be able to leverage our advanced flows, segmentation and AI tools to deliver more personalized omnichannel communications. We continue to drive expansion with our existing customers as they grow their usage and add new products as can be seen in our dollar based net revenue retention rate or NRR, which was 110% for the quarter. As we've been discussing the last few quarters, this quarterly decline in NRR was expected.

Speaker 3

As a reminder, NRR is composed of 3 factors: gross retention, cross sell of additional products and expansion of existing products. Our gross retention remains strong, which is a great indication of the value we drive for customers that makes Klaviyo a must have platform for them. Our cross sell efforts have also been quite strong, especially with email customers adding SMS. In fact, as of Q3, more than 80% of our top 50 customers now use Klaviyo SMS. And excluding our entrepreneur cohort nearly 25% of our combined SMB and mid market customers are using Klaviyo SMS.

Speaker 3

We're very pleased with that progress. On expansion, we continue hearing from some customers especially in the SMB space that macro pressure is continuing and that they are very focused on the ROI of their software spend. Additionally, with the success upmarket that I just discussed, we're seeing many new Klaviyo customers land with multiple products from the start. There are obvious benefits to landing bigger multi product deals. However, it can also limit the expansion opportunities within those customers, which has a negative effect on NRR.

Speaker 3

This pressure on expansion continues to be consistent with what we've been speaking about over the course of the year. As a result, our expectations for continued decline in NRR in the near term haven't changed and we expect this expansion pressure to have a modest impact on our growth going into next year. As you heard from Andrew, we're making great progress internationally on both the go to market and product front and that is driving strong results. EMEA delivered very strong growth at 45% year over year and APAC accelerated from last quarter. Combined, our international revenue grew 41% year over year sustaining the rate of last quarter.

Speaker 3

These are great results and we remain focused on making our product easy to use for our international customers including with additional language launches as Andrew mentioned. Local language availability is an important unlock to bring more companies onto our platform and we'll continue to make our product available in more languages going forward. Moving on, non GAAP gross profit for the quarter was $183,000,000 representing a non GAAP gross margin of 78%, down 200 basis points year over year. In addition to the impact from our growing SMS product, gross margin was also pressured as a result of starting our Black Friday Cyber Monday preparation a bit earlier this year, which increased costs related to infrastructure and testing. As a reminder, due to the seasonality of our business in Q4, we expect Q4 gross margins to be down as a result of elevated email and SMS sending volumes related to the holiday season.

Speaker 3

We continue to expect our full year non GAAP gross margin to be down about 1 point from last year. Turning to non GAAP operating expenses. Sales and marketing and R and D expenses as a percentage of revenue came in relatively consistent with prior quarters. G and A expense was 12% of revenue, down 580 basis points year over year, primarily as the result of an additional international tax related reserve release, similar to what we saw last quarter. Additionally, you may recall from our Q3 call last year that we had approximately $6,000,000 in IPO related expenses that did not reoccur this year.

Speaker 3

Normalized for this tax release and the one time IPO related expenses, non GAAP G and A expense as a percentage of revenue would have been down roughly 100 basis points year over year. For the Q3, our non GAAP operating income was $34,000,000 representing a non GAAP operating margin of 14%. This was better than expected as a result of the revenue over performance, the leverage driven primarily in G and A operating expenses and headcount coming in a bit lighter than expected for the quarter. We generated free cash flow of $34,000,000 during the quarter, up 57% from the prior year due to higher profit and higher interest income. Moving to guidance.

Speaker 3

For the Q4, we expect revenue to be $256,000,000 to $258,000,000 representing growth of 27% to 28% year over year. This guidance takes into account the continued softness in the expansion component of NRR as well as the commentary from SMB customers around macro pressure. We expect 4th quarter non GAAP operating income of $7,000,000 to $9,000,000 representing a non GAAP operating margin of 3%. This guidance includes a sequential and year over year decline as a result of expense of a new employee cash bonus program that will begin this fiscal year, which we are implementing in Q4. We have not previously had a cash short term incentive program for employees outside of those associated with our go to market team.

Speaker 3

This will allow us to enhance our ability to align pay with performance. It will also better align our compensation structure to peers in the market and will allow us to reduce go forward equity grants as a proportion of total compensation. We estimate the program will impact Q4 in the low teens 1,000,000 of dollars, which represents a catch up accrual for bonus payments we will make in Q1 FY 2025 for fiscal 2024 performance. Looking ahead, we will accrue for this program throughout each fiscal year. For the Q4, we expect fully diluted shares outstanding to be approximately 306,000,000.

Speaker 3

Dollars For the full year, we are raising our revenue guidance to be $923,000,000 to $925,000,000 for year over year growth of 32% to 33%. As a result of the bonus program, for the full year, we are revising our non GAAP operating income guidance range to $104,000,000 to $106,000,000 representing a non GAAP operating margin of 11%. This is consistent with the expectations we set at the start of the year that we would keep our 2024 non GAAP operating margins roughly flat with 2023. Finally, for the full year, we expect fully diluted share count to be approximately 299,000,000. We are very pleased to be delivering this elevated level of growth at scale for FY 2024.

Speaker 3

Q4 is our seasonally largest quarter from a revenue perspective and has a significant influence on our outlook for 2025. While we're not providing 2025 guidance at this time, based on the trends that we are seeing, strength at the low and high end of the market and pressure on customer expansion that we've been discussing since the start of the year, we expect our 2025 revenue growth rate will decelerate modestly from our Q4 guidance. Due to the success of our go to market and product investment initiatives this year, we plan to continue to make choiceful investments in 2025 with particular focus on growing our international footprint. As a result, operating margin is projected to remain relatively consistent to 2024 as we continue to invest for growth in our large addressable market. We will provide formal guidance for fiscal 2025 on our Q4 call along with additional details around our investments.

Speaker 3

In closing, these strong results are a clear indication that Klaviyo's platform is driving success for our customers. We're well positioned to continue our success adding new customers, growing in the mid market, expanding with existing customers and expanding internationally. We are excited about supporting our customers through their busiest season and driving a successful Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend with Klaviyo. And with that, we'll open the call up for Q and A. Operator?

Operator

Thank you. We'll now begin the question and answer session. And your first question comes from DJ Hayes with Canaccord. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hey, thanks guys and congrats on the nice quarter. And Amanda, I appreciate the early look at 2025. AB, can you just give us an update on your various customer acquisition engines or channels, whether that's through Shopify, marketing agencies, direct selling, like anything stand out to you in terms of performing particularly well or vice versa?

Speaker 2

Yes, sure. So just as a reminder for everyone, we think about acquisition from a couple of different channels. So obviously, our marketing team is focused on what we described as inbound acquisition. So that's driving awareness, folks coming to Klaviyo. We have a freemium motion, so allowing customers of all sizes to get started for free, try Klaviyo out that really set up our sales team for success.

Speaker 2

We have like as you alluded to, partners are a big part of how we do customer acquisition, both digital agencies, have several 1,000 in our program as well as big tech platforms, obviously Shopify amongst those. And then finally, our sales team as we're moving more into the mid market enterprise, we do have a sales driven motion for customer acquisition there. So across those and it was rough it was kind of aligned a little bit to customer segments. We obviously spend more of our marketing effort is aimed at the SMB and what we call the lower part of SMB Entrepreneur part of the market. And our sales team is more focused on the mid market enterprise side.

Speaker 2

So we're seeing I think we're seeing some strength across all three. With our Entrepreneur segment, we're seeing really nice growth there. That was kind of smaller SMBs, largely driven by acquisition through Shopify and other platforms that cater to entrepreneurs that are maybe just starting out as well as a lot of our digital marketing efforts. And on the high side with mid market enterprise brands, I think we're really starting to find a groove with our both our sales team as well as larger partners. We're putting more of those into our partner program to help drive demand as well as working with some of those larger platforms that work with more enterprise brands.

Speaker 2

So I think we're excited about all three of those motions and both the rest of this year, leading the holidays and next year, we're going to keep using those 3 as our kind of 3 tent poles for acquisition.

Speaker 4

Yes, makes sense. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Thanks. Congrats for me as well. And Amanda and Andrew, like the softness like that you kind of mentioned on the call, like if you think about the economy, like we've been in like in tougher times for a while and you guys have been kind of actually managing this kind of pretty well. Like did you see like a change again like in the last quarter that do you think it's kind of more macro? Or do you think it could be like election uncertainty and that kind of plays a role here?

Speaker 5

I'm just saying it's like we've been in this kind of environment for a while and most other people talk about more stabilization on lower levels, but stabilization. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Sure. Thanks, Raimo. I would say that what we're seeing is consistent. As you said, we've been in this macro environment for a while and the trends that we are seeing within our particularly focused on our SMB segment of customers remain very consistent with what we've seen and what we've discussed in prior quarters. We're seeing some softness in new customer acquisition.

Speaker 3

We're seeing some softness in expansion, but we are not seeing that macro environment or the impact become either materially better or materially worse. It has been steady. And what we hear from customers based on our conversations with them is that it's clear that we are in a value based market, meaning that customers are very focused on the value that they're getting from their software. In this environment, we are really pleased with the way that we are able to deliver strong results because we're a must have for customers to help them drive their revenue and drive their growth. The other thing that I think is important to remember is that we have a very diverse customer base both in terms of size ranging all the way from, as Andrew said, entrepreneurs

Speaker 2

all

Speaker 3

the way up to global enterprises as well as geographies around the world, which means that we're not reliant on either one specific type of customer or one region to drive our performance. So in fact, this quarter, we saw strength in the entrepreneurs and we also saw strength in the high end of the market. I think the last factor that's important to think about in this environment is that it's important to remember Klaviyo is not indexed to GMV. We index to digital relationships and the digital relationships that our customers are building with their consumers. And so especially during this time of year, as we get close to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, helping our customers engage with their consumers in the right way over the right channel with the right message at the right time is extremely important because that is how we help our customers thrive.

Speaker 5

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Makes sense.

Operator

Your next question comes from Scott Berg with Needham. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question and nice quarter here. A. B, I just wanted to ask on the 2 new hires that you mentioned, the CTO and CPO. Your platform, I know you've talked pretty extensively about the database kind of bottoms up platform and the benefit you all receive from that.

Speaker 6

But how do these 2 new hires, how are you expecting them to impact the technology kind of footprint going forward?

Speaker 2

Sure. Yes, we've got a great team. We have some big ambitions and I'm very excited for Sarah being a deal to join forces because I know they have ambition that matches our own. I think for all leadership hires, there's maybe 2 core traits you look for. One is that kind of humility, the ability to dig into the details, roll up your sleeves.

Speaker 2

And the second is having seen things at scale. And so I think that second point is particularly material for what you're talking about. Adele actually, as I was getting to know him, we're spending time. Adele is actually a Kladeo customer. 1 of the businesses he started was one of our early customers.

Speaker 2

So he's got a lot of context for the space. And for both Surabhi and Adil, they've worked on some of the planet scale infrastructure. So as we think about Klaviyo as the source of truth for consumer data, for businesses, being that system of record, how do you build systems that are very elastic, very scalable, very reliable, very secure? I'm excited that they both have a lot of experience building that. So I think we've done a really good job with our engineering team today in kind of instilling that in our culture.

Speaker 2

And I think they're going to help us scale that quite a bit.

Speaker 5

Wonderful.

Operator

Your next question comes from Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Thank you. Good afternoon. A. B, the Q4 guide here does suggest the business is poised to cross over $1,000,000,000 during the year. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on and product vision here on the next $1,000,000,000 Wall Street always wants more.

Speaker 7

You're bringing new talent. You have a strong balance sheet, good cash flow. You could always lean into M and A. Walk us through kind of the appetite to add that next $1,000,000,000 and how much you're going to lean into M and A, internal investment, walk us through that vision that would be helpful. Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes, for sure. Well, I think it's hopefully, it will not take us nearly as long as you get to the second $1,000,000,000 to get to the first one, because we got we'd like to get that pretty quickly. So let me talk about a couple of things. Amanda talked about the 4 areas that we're focused. Continuing to get more SMBs on this Klaviyo platform, doing that internationally, expanding up into the mid market and enterprise, and then also growing our product portfolio.

Speaker 2

So maybe speak a little bit about the product side and I'll come back to the customers we're going to serve. A mantra we've had inside of Klaviyo is if we're going to build a product, it's going to be best in class. The word we use is premium. And so a few years ago Klaviyo's core product was a database and then kind of email and marketing on top of that. We've taken approach of, well, how do we extend to all of the messaging channels that matter for business?

Speaker 2

And so that's why we put big investments in SMS. And now going forward, we're doing a lot more with mobile applications and experiences there as well as social channel, things like WhatsApp and other social networks. So I think we can do a lot more than just email and go way beyond that into all of messaging and marketing. What we're doing with reviews, that's another product category that's very important to a lot of marketers. And then even think beyond that, we think about like, what are the other customer experiences that you can use the source of truth that we're building this database to power, to personalize, to measure, to use AI to automate those experiences get smarter over time.

Speaker 2

And that's what we're doing with CDP. A lot of CDP usage we've seen comes from analytics, businesses that want to understand who their customers are and immediately take action. So we're excited about the growth that we're seeing with that product. And then we think about the other services, the other touch points that a business has with its consumers. So things like what's the website or the in store experience as well as what's the customer service experience.

Speaker 2

And our ambition is to make sure all of those services, all of those experiences are great for the customer and high value to the business. And so for some of those, we're considering building and some of that will be organic. We're also will be open to doing M and A. But we also very much, if we look at our ecosystem and our partners, we have a lot of great partners that have built features that we can't get to or help us address various use cases domestically, internationally, different verticals. So it's also an approach that we'll take.

Speaker 2

But ultimately, we want to be that source of truth about who your customers are and the entire the software platform that used to drive customer experiences that drive revenue.

Speaker 7

Helpful color. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Michael Byrd with Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Hey, congrats on the quarter. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to touch on the international opportunity quickly. Things seem to be operating on all cylinders there and you had some pretty nice announcements across languages as well as native capabilities there. What how can we think about the progress since launching those?

Speaker 8

I know it's early on, but across the new languages and the 5 new regions, any initial takeaways there that you can leverage for new geographies as you expand? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Sure. Thank you so much for the question, Michael. And we are very excited about the progress that we're seeing across international. This quarter particular strength in EMEA with 45% revenue growth. And when you talk about some of the impacts that expanding languages and that focus on international is having in the business, this quarter we saw notable strength in our new business across France, Germany, Spain and Finland in particular.

Speaker 3

We are focused this quarter and going forward on adding local language speaking sales reps to support that product capability, so that we can support local language selling in regions like Germany, France, Spain and Italy. In terms of other progress that we're seeing in the business, it's leading to some great wins. We had terrific wins this quarter internationally, not only with The Body Shop, but also with Manelli and Passionata, all of which are great brands internationally. And I think another important part to call out is the strength of our partner network and the impacts that our partner led approach is having on our international growth. We are very appreciative of our partners around the globe, including companies like PrestaShop, Think Digital and Oz among many others.

Speaker 3

They are helping to support us as we expand outside of the United States. Still early days, but I can tell that the customer response has been terrific for the launch of 5 new languages, German, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish and Italian. It was just in October, but they are very excited and we are excited to see how they can continue to drive growth internationally.

Speaker 5

Awesome. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Rob Oliver with Baird. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Great. Good evening. Thanks for taking my question. AB, mine is for you. A.

Speaker 9

B. Mine is for you. A couple of questions ago, Brent asked about next leg of growth to $2,000,000,000 And when you look at some of the other products aside from SMS, which is obviously number 1 on cross sell, I know Amanda called that cross sell still as an area of strength. Maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing from reviews and then in particular CDP where I know you guys made some changes to how you package the CDP solution and would love to get an update on how that sort of bifurcation of the product is perhaps driving incremental wins? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. I think going forward, we very much look at being going from a single product company we worked 3 years ago to a multiproduct company and a platform, something where you can buy all of gout cases or a lot of the applications that integrate. That's our goal. So I'll start with SMS and then I'll talk about CDP. For SMS, we talked about how 80% of our top 50 customers are using SMS.

Speaker 2

I think it was in the early remarks. And I think that shows that's messaging a lot of demand from both SMB, but as well as mid market and enterprise and a lot of users there. So we're very excited what that tells about the story around wanting to consolidate, wanting things on our platform because of what the data that we have. We're doing more to expand coverage there. So we also mentioned that we've expanded SMS coverage to more 6 more countries, predominantly in Europe.

Speaker 2

And we're also doing deeper integrations with SMS into other functionality that's outside of Play So for example, if you do advertising, you're doing demand gen on other platforms for instance, Meta Platform, you can now rather than just collecting emails, you can also collect phone numbers and have a seamless integration with SMS. So I think we're really, really good progress there. We continue to look at like adoption rates and what percent of our customers can adopt and how do we make it easier for them to not just do it through our sales team, but also do it through partners and obviously do it directly through our products. So really, really excited about the progress there. I we're going to see that carry over into other messaging channels that we've been working on, right?

Speaker 2

Mobile, in the future WhatsApp and other social channels. And then the CDP story, I've mentioned going beyond just, clearly it's more than just more than just using us for marketing. Yes, what we've done with CDP is we realized there's really 2 core use cases. The first is around analytics and understanding who your customers are and the second is around data governance. And for that analytics use case, we've seen a great amount of customer adoption.

Speaker 2

They really understand the purpose of our product. What we want to do is say, if you want to understand who your customers are and you want to build say a funnel of where are my customers dropping off, where they I get first time purchasers, but not repeat purchasers. We made our products so easy that you can click in the UI and immediately turn that into a marketing campaign or a marketing automation. And so we're shortening this loop from insight to action and we're seeing that customers get, in fact the ROI is great because the cost of our CDP product pays for itself almost immediately in terms of incremental revenue or KV as we say. So I think that analytics product, I think that's going to be a big driver of growth going forward.

Speaker 2

And we're excited about that. It's starting to change how people think about Klaviyo as not just email, not even just messaging and marketing, but actually even beyond that. So very excited about that. We've got a lot more in the works that I'm sure we'll be sharing in the future.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you for all the color. Appreciate it.

Operator

Your next question comes from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Speaker 10

Thank you guys for taking the question and congratulations on a solid quarter. I wanted to dig into the NRR commentary a little bit and why it weighs on growth into next year. I was a little bit surprised because it sounds like the upsell motion is going and the cross sell motion is going quite well for you guys, particularly with S&S. But the Switch portfolio is expanding really nicely. The expansions have been pressured by macro for a while.

Speaker 10

And so you're anniversarying that and that's not like a net new impact into next year. And the bigger land, I mean, that's just you're accruing the revenues elsewhere rather than NRR, you're just getting it upfront. So can you touch us a little bit of why NRR continues sliding like why there's not better offsets from cross sell and why that's an incremental pressure on revenue growth into the forward year?

Speaker 3

Sure. Great to hear from you, Keith. Thanks so much for the question. As we said, we don't guide to NRR specifically, but we do expect that it will continue to decline in the near term and that expectation for a near term decline hasn't changed. So if you break NRR into its components, there are 3 primary components of NRR.

Speaker 3

1st is retention, 2nd is expansion of existing products and third is cross sell. Retention on the retention side, our gross retention remains strong because we are a must have for our customers. On the expansion side, if you split that into expansion of products, existing products and then cross sell, expansion of existing products tends to be the largest of our overall expansion. It's a significant driver of NRR and that is part of why we're talking about the impacts that we're seeing there. We continue to hear from customers that it's a value based market, particularly among SMBs.

Speaker 3

They are very mindful of their spend. They are intentional about the messages that they're sending. And then also as I mentioned earlier in the prepared remarks and as you mentioned as well, as we move up market customers tend to land larger with multiple products that leaves less opportunity for expansion. It is a good thing overall. We like landing larger and earlier, but it does create some pressure on that expansion component of NRR.

Speaker 3

And because of those two factors, we expect that that decline and the expansion is going to continue. It's consistent with what we've seen, but again because our NRR is a trailing 12 month calculation and we first started seeing this appear last year, that's part of why you're seeing that impact into next year. On the cross sell side, we are very pleased with the progress we're seeing, not only with customers adopting SMS, but also CDP and reviews. And we continue to see customers who expand with us. A great example this quarter was Spot and Tango who added SMS after they had already been using Klaviyo for email.

Speaker 3

We also added another customer this quarter in the beauty and skincare space who had previously switched to Klaviyo for email and this quarter they added SMS in order to improve their multi channel messaging. And we continue to hear from customers that they see real value in that consolidation. Most importantly, they see value from it because it creates a better experience for their consumers, because consolidation helps them more effectively engage consumers across channels. They also see value because it simplifies the way that our customers run their businesses. It makes it easier for them to have a comprehensive view of performance and reporting all under one roof with Klaviyo.

Speaker 3

So we believe that that trend is going to continue to be an important driver of cross sell going forward.

Speaker 10

Got it. Just a quick follow-up. If we think about the expansion within SMB being somewhat macro related, can we read through that like you're assuming a continued sort of the continuation of the current macro environment you're seeing right now, which hasn't been great into next year. So like we can take it away as saying you're being conservative about sort of macro assumptions into 2025?

Speaker 3

I think that's a fair assumption. As we said this and we said earlier on the call as well, this trend has been pretty consistent all year. And because it has been consistent, we're assuming that that's going to continue at a similar rate as we head into next year. So to the extent that the macro environment changes, we could see a shift there, but I think it's the prudent thing to do to assume that the current environment is going to stay stable.

Speaker 10

Absolutely. That's super helpful. Thank you so much, Amanda.

Operator

Your next question comes from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Speaker 2

All right.

Speaker 11

Thank you very much. I wanted to touch on the market traction. It sounds like to the earlier point you were making, Amanda, just then that your customers are landing larger. You're seeing the 50 ks customer count increase quite a bit, and you have a host of kind of large logos to show for it. But as you move further up market, how are you seeing the competitive dynamics change?

Speaker 4

How

Speaker 11

are you seeing the vendors that you're displacing change? And what impact is it having on win rates and sales cycles in particular? And then as you look into next year on the NRR front, what should we expect from those larger customers? Because it seems like some of the pressure is with smaller customers. But should we expect 1 year out after landing, 2 years out after landing that those larger customers might actually expand at a faster rate than your customer base today?

Speaker 11

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Sure. I'll take the first part on competition, how we see their spend and adoption of our products growing over time. So from a competitive dynamic, as we move up into the mid market enterprise, we built Klaviyo to be the system of record and extremely scalable. And then obviously, like marketing on top of that, that also scales as well. So very pleased about what the expansion we're seeing there.

Speaker 2

We're competing largely with companies that didn't start products that didn't start as a database. They really were marketing products. Some of them cover just a single channel, could be e mail, could be text messaging, could be mobile. And I think the fact that we cover all of those channels is a competitive advantage for us. And the fact that we built this kind of data engine underneath.

Speaker 2

So we see a lot of folks modernizing off of maybe some older technology. And I think that's going to be a very durable trend. And then as we're landing those, Mena already talked and spoke to us. We're seeing a lot of customers actually want to adopt more of our product set upfront, which is great. And I think over time, as I talked about like we plan to expand our product portfolio.

Speaker 2

We like what we're seeing from SMS and CDP and analytics reviews. And we expect that to grow over time. And so I do think there's opportunities for those businesses to grow with us. And I'll add to the components of NRR that Amanda mentioned, one that we can start to take advantage of when we get into the enterprise is expanding across business units and geographies. One of the patterns we've seen is like when we land with enterprise businesses, there's actually an opportunity to start with maybe a brand or a region and then grow from there.

Speaker 2

So anyways, I think there's a lot of room to both grow logos as well as then expand their spend in our how much that business is relying on Klaviyo for all of the different parts.

Speaker 5

Okay. Understood. Perfect. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Derrick Wood with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Thanks. Amanda, another impressive quarter around margins. It sounds like there's a lot of moving parts to consider in Q4. And I guess by my calculation, ex the cash bonus payments operating margin guide would be around 8%, which is still down from the mid teens year to date. Could you just comment on how to think about some of the seasonal factors, especially the degree of seasonal compression and gross margins and the seasonal uptick in sales and marketing spend?

Speaker 4

And remind us why you tend to see such big ramp in sales and marketing spend in Q4?

Speaker 3

Thank you. It's a great question. I appreciate you asking it. On operating income, we discussed in the prepared remarks, the guidance includes the impact of the accrual for the new cash bonus program. Think of that in the low teens 1,000,000 of dollars as a catch up accrual for all of fiscal 2024.

Speaker 3

In terms of the underlying performance, what we're expecting in Q4 is our normal typical seasonality in the business. What we tend to see in our business in Q4 is a bit of gross margin pressure, which comes from a result of increased sending volumes. And those sending volumes come with higher expenses in Q4, just based purely on volume as well as additional marketing expenses. This is the most important time of year for our customers. It is a time when we want to be front and center with them.

Speaker 3

And so we tend to market more in Q4 to be make sure that we are top of mind for customers in this really critical time for them. What we are expecting this quarter and this year in Q4 Q4 is very much in line with that typical seasonality. So if you took out the impact of the new bonus program, our Q4 guidance would be in line with what was implied when we issued our Q3 and full year operating income guidance this quarter.

Speaker 5

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Thanks, A. B, Amanda and Zillie. My question is kind of a multiparter here. First, in terms of just another reminder for us, Amanda, in terms of 4Q, how does that usually look in terms of seasonality of winning new customers? I don't know, do they want to keep kind of those kind of decisions off the table because of the holiday selling or because of your up market motion, you could still see some strong activity in terms of new customer business?

Speaker 8

And then the second part of this question is, appreciate the macro dynamics and value based kind of decisioning by your customers. Do you assume in the holiday period that like your existing cohorts of SMS customers are actually going to send lower volumes than last year? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Sure. Thanks so much, Terry. I'll take the ads first and then we can talk a little bit about what happens with SMS in Q4. So from an ads perspective, historically Q4 is a seasonally strong quarter for us. Now we don't separately forecast net adds, but we do tend to see many customers come to us in Q4, particularly at that lower end of the market, right as they get ready for that holiday season.

Speaker 3

It is important though to remember that as we are moving more and more up market, we may add fewer but higher quality customers and we think that's a worthwhile trade off over time. So said differently, one mid market customer or an enterprise customer can be worth several entrepreneur customers in terms of LTV. So that's why you may see some movement in that Q4 number, but it does tend to historically be seasonally strong. On SMS, what we are seeing in SMS volume is that SMS tends to be seasonally strong as a result of the holiday season. It is a great time for brands to use SMS because it's a highly time sensitive time.

Speaker 3

It gets consumers' attention during that narrow window of that 5 day period for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And we would anticipate that we're going to see that again with SMS this year. In terms of SMS and kind of what's happening with the overall trends there, what we're seeing is customers adding more subscribers and seeing healthy growth in terms of their subscriber base with SMS. They are being intentional about the number of messages that they send per subscriber. And that is somewhat consistent or has been consistent with what we've seen in the prior quarter.

Speaker 3

So overall, continued healthy growth in that channel, just at a little bit of a moderated pace in terms of the sending versus what we would have seen in past. Yes, I think a great example of customers and how they think about switching over during the quarter and the impact that Black Friday Cyber Monday has this is Lulu's. Lulu's this quarter really wanted to take advantage of the personalization and the advanced capabilities that our platform has. And despite a very tight migration goal, they switched over to Klaviyo so that they could get on SMS and deliver those personalized messages ahead of Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Operator

Your next question comes from Nick Altman with Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Hi, this is John Gomez on for Nick Altman. Thanks for taking my question.

Speaker 5

Can you talk about

Speaker 8

your pipeline for upmarket logos? And when you think about the pipeline and seasonality upmarket, should we expect the bulk of that strength to come in Q4 given that's the biggest renewal quarter and perhaps this provides the best opportunity for displacement activity?

Speaker 2

Yes. So just in terms of pipeline, when we think about again, we work with a lot of retailers. So as Amanda was alluding to, a lot of our enterprise customers are not making buying and switching decisions in Q4. Typically, they'll do that offset by a couple of months or a quarter. And we still I mean, we do get some larger folks that will say, hey, I'm going to rush right before the holidays, right before Thanksgiving, I want to go now.

Speaker 2

But in general, we think this is a quarter to really build up those relationships in that pipeline. And we see a lot of that actually materialize into customers post the holidays when folks say, okay, we've now gotten through the rush. And so in January, we can start to make decisions about upgrading their tech stack or consolidating more products to our platform.

Speaker 8

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Mark Zektowicz from The Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.

Speaker 12

Thank you. I was just curious if Shopify's more recent expansion and success that they're having at the enterprise level is starting to trickle into your pipeline and sort of how your preparedness and go to market looks there relative to mid market? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. So our partnership with Shopify just continues to get better and better. And definitely as they're working with larger and larger retailers and businesses, we're doing the same. So I think going to market together is a motion that we've worked on collectively. And I think the reason this works so well is the combination nature of, hey, Klaviyo is this kind of this customer platform.

Speaker 2

We've got all the customer data and then we can help power the customer experiences. Obviously, we work with Shopify team to integrate really well. And when from a customer's point of view, from a retailer's point of view, I think this idea of commerce and marketing working together, I mean, they think of those as they're 2 different products, 2 different categories, but they have to integrate really tightly. And so the integration that we've worked on over the last decade with the Shopify team, I think is really paying off. And that's a model by the way that as we start to do more with enterprise businesses, we want to replicate.

Speaker 2

Are there other platforms both inside and outside of e commerce and retail and even other verticals that we can work with where we say, hey, these two technologies really work well together, we expose APIs, you can do custom development, but you also know out of the box, things are just going to work. Data is going to flow back and forth really well. So we're excited about the progress there and definitely working with Shopify has been great.

Speaker 12

Excellent. Thank you.

Operator

And our last question comes from Cale Valente with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Speaker 13

Hi. Thank you for taking my question and congrats on the quarter. Building on kind of the discussion we had on integrating the e commerce and the marketing layers, can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you're helping Klaviyo Connect to add audiences? I know this came up last quarter. So curious kind of what use cases you're seeing and how you see that potentially expanding over time?

Speaker 13

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Sure. Kelly, do you mind repeating your question? It just cut out for a second in the middle.

Speaker 13

Sorry. Yes, I just wanted to hear about how you're helping Klaviyo customers connect to ad audiences. I know that came up on the call last quarter. So just curious what kind of like use cases you're seeing and how you see that expanding over time?

Speaker 2

Sure. Yes. So think about Klaviyo as how we can help with marketing. There's a big chunk of the marketing budget that fits into advertising in doing demand generation and raising awareness. It's really important that Klaviyo as a platform integrates tightly with the Google, the Metas, we talked about TikTok, I think it was last quarter.

Speaker 2

So all those platforms, Pinterest, we want to integrate with all of those. And the way that typically works is folks think of Klaviyo as part of their acquisition funnel. So when new customers come to the website, how can you through forms and other data capture, how can you make sure you build a relationship with that visitors that you don't have to maybe spend as much retargeting and getting them to come back? And then how can you use Klaviyo and messaging over email, SMS and mobile to actually convert them into a first time or paying customer. So we're important part of that acquisition funnel and then also we like to give us the ability to pass that data back to those ad platforms.

Speaker 2

So we've done a lot of work that if you have say a best customer list inside of Klaviyo that you can't secure based on all the data you have, can you pass that back to those ad platforms as signal for the maybe types of consumers that are a good fit for your brands, you can get better targeting. So we think of Playgo is very much more than just helping you retain and get customer keep customers coming back. We also have a big job to do on the acquisition side as well.

Operator

Great. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

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Key Takeaways

  • Klaviyo reported Q3 revenue of $235 million, up 34% year-over-year, serving over 157,000 customers worldwide on its data and marketing platform.
  • Non-GAAP operating income was $34 million with a 14% operating margin, and full-year revenue guidance was raised to $923–925 million.
  • International revenue grew 41% year-over-year, as Klaviyo expanded SMS support to 18 countries and added five new product languages (German, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish, Italian).
  • Management noted ongoing softness in SMB expansion and anticipated further modest pressure on net revenue retention (NRR), guiding Q4 revenue growth to 27–28%.
  • The company enhanced its product suite with AI-driven email generation tools and new CDP analytics features—streamlining automation, personalization, and insight-to-action workflows.
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Earnings Conference Call
Klaviyo Q3 2024
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