Klaviyo Tool Review | Scripted

Published by Ciara Antolini on Friday, February 11, 2022 in Marketing Agencies, Tool Review, Tools, Tools Reviews.

E-commerce marketing is a complex web of interconnected themes: customer experience, management and strategy, marketing technologies, and the operations that run them. But at the center, threading through all those facets are data collection; storage; management to activate such data when needed for any given project or campaign. When you put all of those together, you get an automated marketing platform. 

Today, many brands are using Klaviyo as their e-commerce marketing automation tool. Headquartered in Boston, MA, and founded in 2012, Klaviyo has taken email marketing to a new level with a modern technology stack. Klaviyo doubled its customer base from 2019 to early 2021, putting them closer to becoming a household name for data-driven e-commerce automation. More sophisticated than MailChimp and ConstantContact, but not as expensive or complicated as HubSpot or SharpSpring.   

But is Klaviyo the right choice for your e-commerce brand?

In this review of Klaviyo, I will cover everything you need to know about this e-commerce marketing platform including:

• What Is Klaviyo? Pros and Cons
• Klaviyo Features
• Klaviyo Reviews
• Klaviyo Pricing
• Alternatives to Klaviyo

What to Consider When Looking for Email Automation Tools

Klaviyo is an email marketing platform that makes it easy for merchants to automate their customer retention campaigns. With Klaviyo, brands can set up automated emails for abandoned carts, order follow-ups, reviews, and retention emails with ease. 

Klaviyo is set up to serve e-commerce stores that run on Shopify, Bigcommerce, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Magento, or direct integration with custom solutions. In addition to automated emails for shopping experience follow-up, marketers can send personalized newsletters and personalized thank you's. 

50% of Klaviyo customers are in the United States, but they have customers across Europe, Australia, Canada, Denmark, and India. Most retailers who use Klaviyo are selling less than $50M per year, but large and medium-sized businesses use them as well. 

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is more than email automation; it’s also a shopping analytics tool that generates data-rich dashboards for your marketing team. It can create a customer profile based off their browsing history and their interactions with the emails you've sent them. The powerful segmentation feature lets marketers send the right message at the perfect time, which will help boost conversion rates and increase ROI!

The prerequisites for building using Klaviyo are no longer restricted by the type of e-commerce store that runs your website. If you have a custom e-commerce platform or don’t use one of the “big players” such as WooCommerce or BigCommerce, Klaviyo offers direct integration.

Pros of Klaviyo

• Powerful segmentation for customer data and personalized email campaigns
• Integrates with Facebook
• Pre-built autoresponders
• Website tracking
• A/B testing capability 

Cons of Klaviyo

• Issues with Gmail delivery (Gmail clips the messages)
• Advanced functionality can require technical assistance from developers or senior marketers
• Users report slow loading times during the holiday season
• Pricier than many competitors

Klaviyo Features & Benefits

Personalization

Klaviyo is the perfect tool to get your eCommerce store’s data and create highly personalized campaigns. With Klaviyo, you can target email marketing messages based on customer interests or products they purchased in order to offer them discounts for items related to their niche!

Revenue Reporting & Campaign Tracking

Klaviyo's integration with your eCommerce platform allows them to provide accurate reporting on how much revenue was generated through each of your email campaigns, sequences, and segments. Now you know exactly how much that promotional email campaign made and have a baseline for improvement.

Plans & Pricing

The best part of Klaviyo pricing is the flexibility - No annual contracts and no hidden fees. Many report that it’s pricier than the competition, but they feel it’s worth it and keep using it. 

Pricing is broken into three Tiers:

• Email Marketing
• SMS Text
• Email and SMS

Pricing is based on volume. The plan is free for those with 250 contacts or less, giving companies a chance to test out the platform before they invest the time in setting it up. Pricing can range from $700 - $2,000 per month, with the higher tier maxing out around 200,000 customer profiles. Klaviyo recommends a custom pricing plan for companies with more than 150,000 contacts. 

Customer Reviews

Klaviyo has raving fans, especially when it comes to recovering sales from abandoned carts. Most of the reviews that are less than five stars refer to the difficulty in using the platform itself or the customer service. 

“I like how Klaviyo integrates with our website and makes eCommerce simple and easy to manage - to an extent. More on that later. I can easily clean up my audiences and keep engaged email users on top of my list and get strong ROI. The templates are also designer-friendly, as well as, user-friendly! I am a jack of all trades in my position, so it's nice to have pre-made templates that make it simpler to get content out to our users.”  --Marketing Director, Small Business 

“I love this app. Easy to use and helpful with staying in touch with customers! I almost always get some type of return when I run my campaigns. ” – Shopify Store Owner

Alternatives to Klaviyo

Klaviyo’s biggest competitors are MailChimp and Constant Contact, but in reality, Klaviyo offers much more than either of these companies. Below, we’ve compared Klaviyo with companies that align with their customer data features. 

ActiveCampaign

Klaviyo offers 1:1 customized messaging to your contacts, but only when they are on your website. ActiveCampaign lets you automate communications with customers and prospects no matter where they are interacting with someone from the company or if it is through social media. 

Reviewers point to Klaviyo as having a better dashboard and better direct integrations without having to rely on Zapier. 

ConvertKit

Both platforms have impressive ratings and awards, but Klaviyo is a better fit for high-volume e-commerce companies. ConvertKit also offers features for service providers, and they don’t provide the robust customer data profiles that Klaviyo does. 

OmniSend

If you’re just getting started with your e-commerce business, OminSend might be a better match if you won’t have a budget to expand your marketing campaigns for a while. OminSend doesn’t offer the segmentation features that Klaviyo does, and there are fewer templates available. 

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is more of a CRM with email marketing features than an email marketing tool with customer data intelligence. ActiveCampaign offers more templates, contact scoring, triggers, and pipeline management. If you’re considering ActiveCampaign over Klaviyo, be sure to talk with your sales and customer support teams to make sure they’ll use all of the CRM and scoring features. 

As you consider your next steps toward growing your e-commerce business, delegate the tasks that are slowing you down. Do you need more help with copywriting for product descriptions? Not sure what to write in a newsletter? Buy newsletter content to speed up the process.

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