Klaviyo

Pros

If you want flexibility in segmenting your drips (or flows as they call it) then you need to use Klaviyo. We were using Mailchimp and kept finding areas that made it time consuming, confusing, or just not built to have a flexible drip campaign where contacts receive emails based on rules.

For example you can easily create a series of emails that are only sent to contacts that meet a specific criteria and do it all within one drip through a "workflow" like drag and drop builder.

You can also sync up to your facebook leads and save money on Zapier which is what you need to use if with Mailchimp.

Cons

While Zapier immediately pulls in leads from Facebook, Klaviyo only syncs every 2 hours. A lead getting a welcome email right away is SUPER important, but this means they don't hear from us for some time and it's negatively impacted our first email open rates -- almost cut it in half.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Klaviyo

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Klaviyo

Pros

I find the email builder to be easy to use and the emails look good. The ability to choose different content based on desktop or mobile is HUGE for me.

Cons

My least favourite thing about Klaviyo is probably that you can only upload one image at a time. It's a small thing but it annoys me every time.Also, it bills based on profiles, and takes ALL profiles from your Woocommerce account whether they're signed up for email or not. When I made noises about this, they said I should reduce the number of profiles on woocommerce, but that would mean losing valuable customer data in an industry where customer relationships can last for decades.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Klaviyo

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Klaviyo

Pros

The Klaviyo application is very powerful, no doubt.

Cons

The UI for the automation flow filters are not intuitive and not well designed. Basic requirements for flows are unnecessarily difficult to implement.

When you contact Klaviyo support, staff gives information that contradicts their published documentation and often don't actually give the correct advice at all, resulting going around in circles trying to get issues resolved.

Klaviyo list management is also poor, and like some other platforms (seems to be a trend), Klaviyo gears the system towards pushing you to pay for more customer profiles than you actually need and then when you try to clean or remove profiles you have to go through manual processes, whereas Klaviyo could easily provide options to automate this, or at least NOT require manual CVS export/imports. I mean really Klaviyo it's 2022 people.

The Klaviyo visual builder is buggy, even in their "NEW" builder there were bugs with things as basic as applying link colour styles at a global level. Generally also poor UI for the visual builder.

Overall, it's almost like the Klaviyo designers tried to make the UI as clunky as possible, probably went to the same design school as the Mailchimp designers (which is equally terrible).

Pros

I liked the ability to integrate designed emails from Figma. It results in some really high-quality looking marketing emails. The email flows are also very productive for us.

Cons

I wish we could integrate our SMS too. We had to use another service because of our industry (alcohol) and the integration of the two platforms has proved difficult.

Pros

Klaviyo does what it promises. It's an all-in-one solution for email, sms, customer data, and automations. Their software works better than the competitors at scale: they grow healthier lists which means more revenue long term.

Cons

The import from mailchimp was a bit of a hassle, and the sync between Klaviyo and Shopify has some unexpected issues that crop up, but that's likely due to our integration and not on the software stack itself. Pricing for SMS in Canada is very high, which may be prohibitive for some.