Everything you must know before switching to Klaviyo

Table of Contents

Despite being relatively new to the market, Klaviyo has been able to quickly take over the market.

Today, Klaviyo is the email marketing platform for eCommerce, boasting its robust features and packed with everything an online store needs to sell their product through email.

That’s why it’s not surprising why so many eCommerce stores are switching to Klaviyo, and when it comes to email marketing software, we strongly recommend Klaviyo. As an ESP specifically designed for online stores, Klaviyo offers robust features to help you sell, not just send emails. In case you’re also looking to connect with your customers through SMS, Klaviyo provides an SMS platform that works in sync with your emails, for even better results.

If you’re currently using another ESP, but thinking of switching to Klaviyo, in this article I compared the three most commonly used ESPs with Klaviyo.

At the end, we also added the full guide to Klaviyo pricing.

CONTENTS

Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular choice among businesses, mostly because it’s one of the veterans of the email marketing space. When Klaviyo was founded, Mailchimp had already been in business for 11 years.

With the rise of eCommerce and an increasing demand for more robust features designed specifically for eCommerce businesses, Mailchimp’s began to fade away.

Klaviyo is built for eCommerce, while Mailchimp is an email marketing platform made for any kind of business.

If we compare Klaviyo and Mailchimp for non-eCommerce businesses (businesses that don’t sell physical products online), Mailchimp wins, no questions asked.

However, when we compare Klaviyo and Mailchimp for eCommerce businesses, it takes a closer look to define the winner. And it’s up to you to make the final decision.

Spoiler alert: I love Klaviyo.

But I’ll do my best to be as objective as possible.

I divided this part of the guide into 12 parts where I cover everything from the dashboard to the pricing.

Migrate from Mailchimp to Klaviyo

Part 1: Dashboard

The Klaviyo and Mailchimp dashboards are similar and you can easily see your profits from your email marketing efforts on both platforms.

The main difference – which may seem small but is impactful for eCommerce businesses – is the percentage. Klaviyo shows the percentage of your total revenue that you make from email, including both automated emails and campaigns.

As email marketers, that’s a very helpful feature. The revenue benchmark for eCommerce businesses is 30% made with email, so if our prospective client tells us their revenue from email marketing is less than that, we know there’s definitely room for improvement.

Here’s a snapshot of the Mailchimp dashboard:

And here’s Klaviyo‘s dashboard:

Another helpful feature of the Klaviyo’s dashboard that’s not available in Mailchimp is the breakdown of revenue by automated emails (flows) and campaigns.

Part 2: Campaigns

Klaviyo and Mailchimp campaign builders are very similar and have a lot of the same features. Both campaign builders are visual. The campaign builder consists of blocks which you can drag and drop.

A unique feature of both platforms is the product block. However, the way product blocks work is different between the platforms.

On the Klaviyo platform, you can either use the product feed or pick a product from your store.

The “select from catalog” is the same option as in Mailchimp. However, the ability to populate from your feed is different and more robust. You basically create a product feed from your store where you specify which product category or collection to show and then it dynamically populates that block within the email.

In Mailchimp, this option is limited – you only show popular products and not specific categories, collections and/or tags.

Here’s how that can come in handy for eCommerce stores. Let’s say you have products that you differentiate as “male” and “female”. It doesn’t make sense to show male products to females and vice versa. In Klaviyo, you can create “female product” and “male product” blocks and show them to the right segment.

Part 3: Integrations

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp have a big library of software integrations.

In addition, both platforms are part of Zapier (the 3rd party integration software), meaning they can integrate with anything that’s available in Zapier’s library.

You can find a full list of Klaviyo integrations here.

Here are 7 most popular integrations for Klaviyo:

Shopify

As I mentioned above, you need to integrate your online before anything else. Because when you do that, your start gathering data about the actions and behaviors of your customers that you can then use to set up email automations and generally make your email marketing more relevant.

When you use Klaviyo, Shopify is your best bet. It integrates with Klaviyo seamlessly, requires little to no coding, and is robust and easy to use.

Create your online store with Shopify, integrate it with Klaviyo, then take advantage of all Klaviyo has to offer.

Aftership

Aftership is an automated tracking platform which offers eCommerce businesses shipment visibility, branded tracking page and shipment notifications. Aftership allows you to track all the shipments in one place. It shows you the orders in transit and orders out for delivery.

You can also see delivered orders, failed attempts, exceptions and expired orders. Your customer is able to click, track the package and see the tracking results.

A Klaviyo-Aftership integration will enable you to:

send delivery updates to customers via email
customize email flows with orders and tracking and allow customers track orders while in transit
trigger product review flows
notify customers of any delays to reduce shipping anxiety

Smile.io – Loyalty program

If you’re thinking of building a loyalty and rewards program, you should consider Smile.io.

Smile.io offers services to help eCommerce businesses turn occasional customers into loyal and repeat customers.

Smile.io is a great program because it provides features that eliminate the need for additional platforms.

With Smile.io you provide rewards to your customers through a points system. And these points can be acquired through many different actions like signing up, making a purchase, leaving a review, social sharing, celebrating a birthday and more. Once a member has enough points, they can redeem those points for whatever makes the most sense for your brand: dollar discount, percentage discount, free shipping or a free gift.

You also have the opportunity to create a list of VIP members by providing additional perks, such as a free gift with every purchase, early access to sales and launches, accelerated points earning and just about anything else you can think of.

These VIP members are crucial when it comes to segmentation for future campaigns – so it’s nice to have a program in place that will take care of your VIP segment for you.

One of the best add-ons about Smile.io is that you can also use it as your referral program. You can incentivize, collect and feature reviews from your loyal members. This skips the need for an additional platform or program that needs to be integrated.

Once you integrate Smile.io with Klaviyo, you’re able to trigger flows and automated emails based on actions that your loyal customers have taken. It doesn’t get easier than that.

If you want to learn how to integrate Smile.io with Klaviyo, we have a step-by-step tutorial here.

Dojo Mojo

Dojo Mojo is a one-stop-shop acquisition and engagement platform. With Dojo Mojo, you can build your email list partnering with other brands.

Klaviyo offers a seamless way to upload emails captured by Dojo Mojo. You can welcome and integrate your new audience through Klaviyo emails and notifications.

Tapcart

Tapcart makes it easy for you to design Android and iOS apps for your Shopify store. The best thing about it is that there’s no development required, it’s all drag-and-drop, which provides a seamless user experience.

For eCommerce stores, the most crucial point of every single sale is the checkout experience. Given that most of your customers will shop from their phone and that up to 90% of shoppers abandon their cart because of some complications in the checkout process, offering a mobile app greatly boosts your chances for conversion.

By integrating Tapcart with Klaviyo you can:

sell more with push notifications
create event-based workflows and engage with users by sending automated push notifications
set up behavior-based (e.g. abandoned cart), product-based (e.g. back-in-stock and new arrivals), or campaign-based notifications

Gatsby

Gatsby provides you with key Instagram insights on your customers and syncs with your existing marketing tools to help you find and source micro-influencers that are useful, authentic, and provide real value.

By scoring through your website visitors and customers, Gatsby discovers micro-influencers that you could hire to promote your eCommerce brand.

With the Gatsby-Klaviyo integration, you can:

gather Instagram handles with a Klaviyo popup form
view Instagram profile metrics and trigger automated Klaviyo campaigns
segment your customers based on interests and lower influencer-marketing costs

OptinMonster

Given that 70% of people who visit your site will leave, pop up forms are a great way to help you recover abandoning visitors. Today, one of the most robust software on the market is OptinMonster.

Integrating OptinMonster with Klaviyo will help you grow your email list by:

helping you create forms with their high-performing templates
robust A/B testing features
tracking leads from the high-converting popups, cart abandonment popups, are tagged in Klaviyo. These are then added to automated sequence

For the Mailchimp integration library, click here.

Part 4: Analytics vs. Reports

In general, both platforms have user friendly reports. However, you need to upgrade to a PRO Mailchimp account to see an in-depth comparison report between automated emails and campaigns. In Klaviyo, it’s a standard feature that doesn’t require additional payment.

Besides, in Klaviyo you can customize your report views and save as many views as you want. Each view consists of cards, and each card can be customized to show the information you want.

Part 5: Flows vs. Automations

Klaviyo has a simple and powerful automation (aka flow) builder. You drag and drop actions and filters into the flow builder and it’s visually clear how the automation will work.

You have triggers which define how this automation should start. Then you have time delays (if any) and email at the end.

In Mailchimp, you don’t have a visual builder, but instead a more logic-based automation builder when you add emails, not actions.

You may think they are interchangeable, but I would argue you’re more likely to make a mistake without the visuals.

Besides, it’s so much easier to create using a visual diagram when you need to split your flow. See below:

Klaviyo also has a “Browse Abandonment” trigger which is not available in Mailchimp.

Browse abandonment automation is for those who viewed the product but didn’t buy it nor add it to their cart. After this trigger, the email goes to the subscriber and shows them which product they didn’t buy.

And that’s only one example of the kind of flows you can build in Klaviyo. There are many more flows you can build and experiment with and Klaviyo makes for a perfect platform for those experiments.

Part 6: Segments

Mailchimp segmentation is list based. Klaviyo segmentation is global per account.

In other words, if you want to create a segment where you include everyone who purchased an X product, it will show you only people from the one list where you were creating the segment.

On the other hand, if you want to do that in Klaviyo, it pulls contact info from everyone in your account regardless of which list the people are on.

Klaviyo has more robust segmentation and your imagination is the only limit for creating the segment since you can create any kind of segment you want based on the information you have in Klaviyo.

Part 7: Subscribers Profile

For this section, I will show you two snapshots to compare and then give an overview below:

Mailchimp Subscriber Profile

Klaviyo Subscriber Profile

Those two snapshots are for the same subscriber. Since we recently moved this account to Klaviyo from Mailchimp, you still can see some emails that were sent using Mailchimp.

Although the two platforms have similar analytics, what’s good about Klaviyo is that you can customize the analytics views based on your preferences. On top of that, you have predictive analytics which are very powerful for projections.

In general, I would say we have a tie here.

Part 8: Opt-In Forms

Mailchimp opt-in forms are based on the lists. If you want to create a new form, you need to create a new list.

Klaviyo opt-in forms are based on whatever you want to do. You can create as many forms as you want and point all to one list or one form per list or however you want/need.

Both softwares have drag and drop form builders.

Part 9: Support

In the past, it took me a good 10-15 minutes to find Mailchimp support contact information. The support was helpful, but it was hard to find and required a Google search. They hide it, likely to reduce the number of requests.

Klaviyo is based in Boston and their support is available from 9am to 5pm EST. Their support chat is very easy to find, it’s in the top right corner under your account name. The support is quick and helpful.

Mailchimp has three tiers of support based on the subscription plan you have. Klaviyo has one for all, even if you have a free Klaviyo account.

Part 10: Other Features

Mailchimp has a couple of features that don’t exist in Klaviyo, landing pages and postcards. For the landing page, you have to pay extra if you plan to use a custom domain.

Part 11: User Interface

The Klaviyo team seems to have a better understanding of user friendliness. Even as someone who’s been working in email marketing for the past 6 years, I still find it hard to follow Mailchimp’s instructions on how to set up automations and other things.

Also, for some projects in the past, I had to get creative to accomplish what I wanted in Mailchimp. It was often so that at a first glance I had an easy project, but then because of Mailchimp’s limitations, I would have to take many extra steps to accomplish my goal.

Part 12: Pricing

Before I show you the price per subscriber comparison, I want to clarify how Mailchimp and Klaviyo charge per subscriber.

Klaviyo is subscriber-based, meaning you only pay for active subscribers.

Mailchimp is list-based. For example, if you have five different lists in Mailchimp, and one contact (let’s say firstname@xyz.com) is on five different lists, you will pay five times for the same subscriber.
In Klaviyo, that same person (firstname@xyz.com) can be on five different lists, but you pay only once for this subscriber. Keep that in mind when you compare the pricing.

Besides, Klaviyo bases their pricing only on the number of subscribers and provides everybody the same set of features. Mailchimp has three different plans and some features are not available if you choose a different plan.

That’s why even though it may seem that Klaviyo costs more, every penny is worth it.

If you just need a platform to send emails, Mailchimp is the right software for you. However, if you plan to make money and see how each email performs, Klaviyo is the best option.

Here’s an overview of the pricing.

(For the full breakdown of Klaviyo pricing, scroll down to the section Klaviyo pricing explained.)

Klaviyo VS Mailchimp Pricing

# of Subscribers	Klaviyo	Mailchimp
0-500	$25	$0
501-2,500	$50-$125	$30.00
2,501-5,000	$125-$200	$50.00
5,000-10,000	$200-$325	$75.00
10,001-25,000	$325-$450	$150.00

Final thoughts

As I said before, I love Klaviyo and I’ve intentionally stopped doing projects on Mailchimp’s platform because I’m not able to provide the same kind of results for my clients using Mailchimp.

If you have an eCommerce business or are starting one, I highly recommend investing in the best software even if your budget is tight at the moment.

I know Mailchimp offers free services up to 2000 subscribers, but sooner or later you will switch to Klaviyo and the migration will cost you more than you’ve saved.

If you want to try a Klaviyo account for free, click here to create a free account.

Discuss my email strategy with an expert

Klaviyo vs ActiveCampaign

If you come looking for an answer to the question of what you should pick – ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo, you’ll hate my answer because it depends.

It depends on the kind of business you have, on your budget, on how many products/services you sell.

Here’s my rule of thumb for picking the right email marketing platform for you (ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo): if you own an eCommerce business where you sell physical products online, you should go with Klaviyo. If you have a non-ecommerce business (when you don’t sell physical products online), you should use ActiveCampaign. And below I explain why exactly.

I’m a certified consultant and partner for both platforms, so I work with both of them. That’s why what I explain below in the article is not a subjective opinion – I only provide facts and share my personal experience of over hundreds of projects on both platforms.

Download this article in PDF