Klaviyo review: Best features for ecommerce? [2024]

Klaviyo is an established ecommerce marketing tool that’s slowly becoming the standard for many online stores.

The platform has robust marketing automation, personalization, and reporting features that set it apart from its competitors. Their target audience is mainly larger ecommerce stores with bigger budgets.

Whether Klaviyo is the right tool for you will depend on your business type, size, and marketing budget.

Is Klaviyo the right tool for me?

Klaviyo screenshots

What is Klaviyo used for? 

Besides sending email and SMS campaigns, this software solution helps businesses build lists, manage contacts, and optimize customer data to drive business revenue.

Klaviyo’s features stand out for their depth, especially when it comes to ecommerce marketing. The tool has extensive segmentation options, numerous automated workflow conditions, and strong personalization capabilities.

Klaviyo also includes AI-powered predictions that enable marketers to plan more effectively and come up with agile marketing strategies.

Klaviyo features: An in-depth review

This feature-by-feature review discusses Klaviyo’s pros and cons in detail to give you a better understanding of the tool’s capabilities.

Ease of getting started ★★★★★

Klaviyo’s onboarding process is pretty straightforward and the user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate.

The email editor menu is easy to spot and each menu item has multiple helpful options. When building your campaign, for instance, you get a drag-and-drop items section that lets you easily add content blocks to your selected template.

Making a switch from another email marketing tool?

Klaviyo lets you import data, such as your contacts and engagement reports from your previous email marketing service provider into your current account.

During the signup process, you can also:

• Sync your ecommerce account if you’re running your store on a platform like Shopify or BigCommerce.
• Add your brand images, logos, colors, and fonts once during signup and easily sync those with your campaigns and signup forms.

You don’t need to provide any credit card details when you sign up, which is great.

Although Klaviyo has a user-friendly interface, it can be difficult to enjoy its advanced features to their full extent if you’re a beginner and don’t have prior experience. 

Speaking of which — pay attention to your database document formatting when importing your contacts. Klaviyo is quite strict with its rules. It took us quite some time to make it right, although all the other tools accepted our initial document version.

Building an email campaign ★★★★★

If you’re looking for inspiration for your next promotional campaign, you’re more than likely to find it on Klaviyo’s list of templates. 

There are over 140 attractive, humorous, themed email templates for your regular newsletters and seasonal campaigns.

Other email template options Klaviyo provides include:

• Basic, customizable templates if you want maximum control over your design
• Templates from your previous campaigns that you can repurpose
• Shopify notification templates for items like order confirmations, shipping updates, and more

The email campaign builder itself is intuitive. The content block feature lets you pull items directly from your product page into your email. It also lets you include dynamic and static recommendations in your campaigns.

Here are other useful features that set this tool apart:

• An AI subject line assistant to help draft compelling email subject lines
• Limitless editing options for resizing design blocks, texts, headers, buttons, etc.
• Desktop and mobile view options in the email editor
• The option to save sections of your campaigns like your header or footer for reuse in future emails

With Klaviyo, you can build email, SMS, and mobile push notifications campaigns depending on your marketing strategy. 

One downside to this tool is that, unlike Omnisend, there’s no unique discount code generator, which is a great feature for ecommerce businesses.

Marketing automation ★★★★★

Automated email workflows refer to a series of emails or texts that are triggered by certain user actions.

At the end of January, Klaviyo launched a new automation builder which is even more powerful. There are more than 70 marketing automation flows created. Some popular workflows include:

• Welcome emails triggered by signup 
• Cart abandonment emails when a user leaves without buying
• Cross-sell triggers based on completed transactions
• Price-drop alerts for VIP buyers
• Happy birthday messages with discounted prices
• Order and shipping updates triggered by a purchase

Klaviyo provides most of these default automation workflows together with prebuilt templates, layouts, and text examples.

With Klaviyo’s automation, personalization is key. The tool uses your integrations to pull customer data from your online store and other apps for more targeted automated brand communication. 

It also offers dynamic content, a personalization feature that allows you to send highly relevant content to your audiences, such as abandoned cart products or recommendations. 

You can reach your customers at any stage of their marketing journey with Klaviyo’s automation workflows. By adding different triggers and conditional splits, you can build powerful and highly personalized brand communications.

In addition to emails, if you have customer phone numbers and the mobile ecommerce app, you can also add SMS and mobile push notifications to your workflows. This is pretty impressive. Only a few tools in the market can offer such powerful marketing automation. 

Signup forms and landing pages ★★★★★

Signup forms and landing pages help you grow your email and SMS lists. The information collected using these forms also helps fuel personalization.

Klaviyo’s customizable signup forms are easy to use and can be added directly to your website, landing page, or confirmation page. There are over 50 popups, flyouts, and embed templates to choose from.

You can also build your signup forms from scratch using Klaviyo’s popup editor. This lets you create unique forms and customize everything to match your brand.

Other signup form options include:

• A/B testing: This feature lets you optimize your list collection by testing form items like color and location. It then sets the winning options to default for future forms.
• Multi-step forms: These let you collect more data from customers by asking for information one step at a time.
• Form teasers: These let you add a tiny page widget so visitors can open the form when they feel ready.

In addition, on Klaviyo, you will find comprehensive signup form performance reports, including signup rates, impressions, and actual signups. 

Is anything missing?

Actually, yes. Klaviyo, unlike Omnisend or Mailchimp, does not include landing page templates or a landing page builder. However, you can use their full-page forms to set those up if you’re experienced enough.

Managing subscriber lists with Klaviyo

List management with Klaviyo is easy. To get you started, the tool provides prebuilt segments into which you can categorize your email and SMS contacts. You can also use your own lists with duplicate subscribers on them. Unlike Mailchimp, you won’t be charged for them.

Besides basic segments, Klaviyo also provides a list of conditions to help you get more specific with your segments as your list grows.

Segmentation ★★★★★

One of the most significant features that Klaviyo provides is its segment builder. This tool lets you categorize your email contacts by their email activities, demographics, location, buying behavior, and more.

Some of the common options you have with Klaviyo are:

• Actions a prospect has or has not taken
• Customer profile
• Location, for the US, Canada, and the EU based on zip code 
• The option to exclude people from the EU if you haven’t collected GDPR-approved consent
• Whether someone has consented to receive SMS campaigns
• If someone is or isn’t on a list
• If someone is or isn’t suppressed for email
• Predictive analytics about someone

Klaviyo’s segmentation options are extensive and include advanced filters, conditions, and “AND”/“OR” connectors. The tool updates your segmented lists in real-time, as your contacts meet or stop meeting set conditions. 

All in all, Klaviyo’s segmentation part is very powerful and can bring you significant results. However, you will probably need some time to figure it out and set everything up. 

Analytics ★★★★★

Klaviyo’s reporting is one of the features that set it apart from other email marketing platforms. It provides wide and in-depth insights into your marketing performance.

Klaviyo lets you track standard campaign metrics, such as email engagement rates, sales, conversion rates, website visits, and more.

But also, Klaviyo offers something unique: 

• It lets customers schedule their reports and receive them via email. 
• The tool has a predictive analytics feature that predicts things like a customer’s next order date, lifetime value, churn probability, demographics, spending capacity, etc. This is especially useful for ecommerce store owners.
• Benchmark feature lets you compare your performance against that of other businesses in your industry.

So, for example, you can see what your conversion funnel looks like for campaigns sent over the last 90 days compared across different conversion metrics, including attributed site visits, checkouts, and purchases.

All these reporting capabilities allow you to see a comprehensive view of your marketing efforts. On the other hand, it’s not so easy to do that because of the scope and lack of experience for those who are just starting.

Customer support ★★★★☆

Like Mailchimp, Klaviyo’s customer support varies depending on which plan the user is on:

• Klaviyo’s free plan users get email support for the first 60 days. 
• Customers who buy paid plans get 24/5 email and chat support.
• There’s no phone support available.

Unfortunately, the support response time to our query was pretty slow compared to other email marketing platforms.

Klaviyo Academy and the Help Center have all the tutorials and information you need to get started. They also have video tutorials on YouTube that are pretty useful, especially for holiday preparations.

Integrations ★★★★★

Klaviyo provides 300+ integrations with third-party applications for payments, increased personalization, and revenue growth.

Top of the list is its seamless integration with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, and more.

It also provides integrations with:

• Advertising platforms like Facebook, Google Ads, etc.
• Affiliate marketing tools like Refersion, Referral Candy, 29Next, etc.
• Payment platforms like Square, Recurly, Sufio, etc.
• CRM software like Salesforce, Endear, etc.

Compatibility with other marketing channels ★★★★★

Besides email marketing, Klaviyo lets you run your campaigns and marketing automation via other channels as well. These include:

• Facebook Ads and Google Ads retargeting (via integration)
• SMS campaigns
• App push notifications

Generative AI tools ★★★★★

At the end of February, Klaviyo introduced new AI features, including Segments AI, and Email AI. Now this platform offers a lot of valuable AI assistance for marketers.

Klaviyo pricing plans ★★★☆☆

Is Klaviyo free?

Well, Klaviyo comes with three plans—Free, Email, and Email & SMS.

Klaviyo’s Free plan offers the vast majority of all features, including advanced ecommerce functionality. The only limitation is that you can use those features in the database with up to 250 contacts. 

So this is mainly for testing the platform out with a small segment of your entire database. From our point of view, for businesses with 250 contacts in total, Klaviyo is too powerful, and you should look for better alternatives.

In general, Klaviyo’s pricing is more expensive compared to its email marketing counterparts like Omnisend and Mailchimp.

What can you get in Klaviyo for free? 

Klaviyo Paid Plans 

Paid Klaviyo plans cost $20 for 500 contacts and the price goes up with the number of contacts.

If you’re looking for the same value but are just starting, or are on a somewhat limited budget, here are a few top Klaviyo alternatives for you.

Klaviyo competitors

Omnisend

Just like Klaviyo, Omnisend is a specialized email marketing tool for ecommerce businesses. Both tools have powerful automation, segmentation, and email+SMS marketing capabilities. Also, recently they launched an announcement about Product reviews coming to Omnisend.

Omnisend’s pricing is more affordable and the interface is easier to navigate, which makes it suitable for both beginners and experienced marketers. It also offers 24/7 email and chat support on all plans, unlike Klaviyo.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is another email marketing tool that you can try. It has a wide variety of features that would be great for most businesses.

If you’re a solopreneur or you own a startup, Mailchimp’s a great option because it’s easy to navigate without needing prior email marketing knowledge. Its automation features, great reporting, and easy-to-use campaign builder could be just what your business needs. 

Brevo

If you’re looking for a cheaper email marketing tool, then Brevo is a good alternative. The tool prices its packages based on the number of emails you send, as opposed to the number of people on your list.

Brevo also has more marketing channels besides email marketing and SMS. The tool provides live chat marketing for Facebook and Whatsapp chat. However, it lacks advanced marketing automation features and would be suitable for smaller businesses.

Klaviyo review: Wrap up

Evidently, Klaviyo is a powerful ecommerce marketing tool with lots of unique features that make it stand out. Among other powerful functions, the tool uses AI to generate subject lines and predict customer behavior.

You can build targeted automated email workflows, create eye-catching campaigns, and nurture your leads with email, SMS, and mobile push notifications campaigns.

But is it the best tool for your business? 

Powerful as it is, Klaviyo may not be the right solution for you.  For one, it’s best suited for larger ecommerce companies.

If you own a small to medium-sized ecommerce store, Klaviyo’s pricing may be too high and you may not need some of its advanced features. A great alternative email marketing automation tool would be Omnisend.

FAQs

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Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.