Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing tool with useful segmentation options, highly varied templates, and impressive reporting for burgeoning e-commerce-focused companies. Experienced email marketers will find the software relatively easy to use, though its depth and automation quirks may present a challenge to newcomers. Nonetheless, Klaviyo is a worthwhile business investment and a good middle ground between the more expansive email marketing services offered by Editors' Choice winner HubSpot Marketing and the all-in-one marketing solutions you get with fellow Editors' Choice Mailchimp.
How Much Does Klaviyo Cost?
Klaviyo offers three pricing tiers. You can explore the Free plan, which caps your total contact/subscriber list to 250, with a max email send cap of 500. This tier also features Klaviyo's branding on all emails and newsletters you send, which can be removed by upgrading to a paid plan. The Free plan only offers email support and no live chat.
Paid subscription plans are priced based on the size of your contact list, and they bump your monthly emails to 10X your total contact number. In other words, if you have 1,000 contacts, you can send 10,000 emails per month, which includes automated emails and newsletters. The basic Email tier starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts, and it comes with live chat and email support. From there, pricing scales depending on your contacts. For example, 50,000 contacts bumps the Email tier subscription to $790 per month.
In addition to email, many businesses also want to reach people using SMS messaging. Klaviyo's Free and Email plans each give you 150 free SMS credits, but that low number will only be suitable for highly targeted marketing. If you need more credits, you must upgrade to the Email and SMS plan, which starts at $35 per month for up to 500 contacts.
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We mentioned SMS "credits" earlier because Klaviyo's SMS pricing differs slightly from its email pricing. You can either pay for SMS messages with credits, which are included in your base plan, or pay in cash for overages. The amount you pay depends on the phone number to which you're sending the SMS message.
Although messages to US numbers are cheap—one SMS credit or one penny per message—messages to New Zealand, for example, cost 10 credits or 10 cents. The base Email and SMS plan bumps your SMS credits to 1,250. You can add more SMS credits to your plan as needed, but that also increases the cost. The final price is determined by the number of contacts and SMS credits you want. This pricing structure means Klaviyo is cheaper than comparative services such as HubSpot Marketing and Mailchimp.
Klaviyo lacks annual discounts, so you don't save money over the long haul. GetResponse, on the other hand, has considerable discounts and non-profit options. Likewise, Brevo's rates, which are solely based on monthly email sends, are a potentially cheaper alternative.
Is Klaviyo Easy to Use?
Being a commerce-focused platform, Klaviyo offers a robust selection of integrations and features, but it comes with a few drawbacks. Most notably, Klaviyo takes some time to learn. The company provides a multitude of online resources to help you learn the ropes, with helpful links on every dashboard page.
It can take a considerable amount of time to understand the tool's depth and breadth, making it more suitable for businesses that already have some professional marketing experience. If a steep learning curve sounds daunting, you should investigate options that are simpler and easier to learn, such as Campaign Monitor.
Klaviyo's Email Builder
Klaviyo has similar email creation tools as other email marketing software, with a drag-and-drop editor, A/B testing, and many templates. As a result, emails and newsletters are a cinch to make. You can use the drag-and-drop builder, a text-only builder, or code the newsletter yourself. It's easy to swap between different creation stages or change the template.
As mentioned, there are hundreds of predesigned templates that you can customize to your liking. The themes include birthdays, holiday sales and deals, outreach, post-purchase, product stock notifications, and welcome templates. This means you can dive right in and craft a fantastic-looking email without much effort.
Lists and Segmentation
Of course, Klaviyo also lets you sort, list, and segment contacts to narrow the scope of your campaigns to suit your audience. This feature is commonplace among email marketing tools, but Klaviyo offers surprisingly sophisticated segmentation options. They're packed full of metrics and definitions that produce impressively specific and granular segment specifications.
You can define segments based on recipients' actions, their proximity to a location, and other factors. You can further refine the segment based on whether they opened an email or SMS, if the newsletter failed to deliver, if they marked your email as spam, or if they subscribed to a list. Additional integration with Shopify lets you view metrics based on canceled orders, fulfilled orders, and whether the customer started checkout or not.
You can specify the number of times said metrics have taken place during a specific time window. You can even tack on additional definitions. There are hundreds of options and near-limitless segment variations. This puts it at a level with Mailchimp's Premium tier advanced segmentation, which is similarly robust, though notably costlier than Klaviyo's offerings.
Automation and Flows
Klaviyo has an easy-to-use builder that you use to create trigger-based email automations, which Klaviyo calls flows. This highly visual system provides an expansive branching framework that lets you create filters at every split. These include a contact clicking a link in your email, submitting a form, or subscribing to a list, for example. Even better, the automation builder displays analytics for each of your sent emails, which is excellent data to have on hand as you construct a flow. Klaviyo's heavily visual system and clear-cut presentation make creating automations incredibly easy and uncomplicated.
That said, you cannot change the starting trigger in a flow once you've selected it. There is a workaround that requires you to clone the flow and select a new trigger. The downside is that the analytics associated with the original flow are not preserved in the cloned flow. This means you must save the original flow, too, if that data is valuable. This somewhat obtuse system is unique to Klaviyo, as many email automation builders we've encountered let you go back and change triggers as you edit the flow.
On the other hand, Klaviyo offers a flow library with dozens of templates to choose from, so you don't necessarily need to build one from scratch every single time. Flows include various abandoned cart reminders, customer win-backs, post-purchase flows, returning customers, and welcome templates.
Excellent Reporting Tools
Reporting and analytics are Klaviyo's strongest and most valuable assets. The service offers standard metrics, such as bounce rates, click rates, and email open rates, but also more nuanced details once you start digging around and customizing the reports. You can focus reports to see how much revenue your messages are generating, gauge customer engagement, or check customer purchase trends. You can create these custom reports from scratch or choose one of several preset report types. Examples include email engagement based on city or country, engagement by campaign, or engagement by flow.
Much like automation, the reporting tools are well-worded and visual, so nothing feels confusing or abstract. The entire reporting tool is highly informative and also highly accessible.
Support and Live Chat
Klaviyo has middling support services. It lacks phone technical support, but you can get the sales team on the horn between 9 a.m.–5 p.m. EST. If you need help, your options vary by your tier.
Klaviyo's Free plan gives you 60 days of email support. This is serviceable, though limited. You can expect a response to your inquiries within a day or so. With Klaviyo's paid plans, you receive help via another support option: live chat. It isn't available 24/7, which would be ideal. Instead, you can reach support techs 24 hours a day, but only from Monday through Friday.
A Worthwhile Email Marketing Asset
Klaviyo is a feature-rich marketing automation service with some exceptional features that help it stand out among its competitors. It offers robust segmentation options, templates for every situation, and excellent reporting tools. What's more, Klaviyo has specialized solutions for the retail, wellness, and restaurant industries. That said, Klaviyo is expansive enough that it takes some time to learn. The lack of subscription discounts is a bummer, as are a few automation annoyances, but they can be overlooked when considering the big picture.
Overall, Klaviyo is a strong platform for small and midsize businesses needing sales-focused email marketing, and it doesn't cost as much as Editors' Choice winner HubSpot Marketing Hub. HubSpot's advantage is that it lets you manage multiple clients and accounts with greater ease than Klaviyo. Mailchimp, meanwhile, is another Editors' Choice we recommend if you're looking for a general-purpose email marketing tool and don't need to dive into reports and analytics.
Klaviyo is an email marketing service with especially strong reporting tools for small and midsize businesses.
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