Klaviyo Email Marketing Review 2023

Ecommerce marketers looking for a powerful solution for email marketing and SMS marketing will want to check out Klaviyo. It offers a sophisticated email marketing system that combines in-depth analytic tools with email templates to create beautiful, more effective email (and SMS) marketing campaigns. 

In this Klaviyo review we’ll explain what it offers, and how those tools can help digital marketers improve results. 

What is Klaviyo?

Founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, Klaviyo took on the challenge of solving a major problem in email marketing: how to use data to really personalize email marketing. Their approach to data, analytics and marketing was unique at the time and by tackling it effectively, the company has grown to more than 100,000 customers that use their email and SMS marketing platform. 

Klaviyo is a Customer Data Platform (CDP). CDPs allow businesses to pull in data from various channels to create a complete customer profile, then makes that data available to other applications. 

Klaviyo has been so successful that Shopify, a leading ecommerce platform, partnered with them, while naming them the recommended email solution partner for Shopify Plus, its plan for merchants with higher-volume sales. It was also named a top place to work on Glassdoor in 2022.

Klaviyo Features & Uses

At its heart, Klaviyo can help marketers create hyper-targeted campaigns for SMS and/or email marketing. 

It allows businesses to create very highly personalized customer profiles from a variety of data then predict lifetime value and behavior

With this information, your business can create email flows with automated email messages triggered by behaviors, dates or other data. (You can use Klaviyo for SMS campaigns.)

You can also create abandoned cart flows to help capture those potentially lost sales. 

You’ll be able to use a simple drop and drag interface to create these customized flows. Klaviyo emails can easily be created using a library of high-converting drop and drag templates. 

Finally, detailed analytics will help you make better decisions, and you can even compare benchmarks with other brands with similar types of businesses.

Build Customer Relationships

Klaviyo’s CDP is ultimately designed to build strong customer relationships that lead to high lifetime customer value. Building those relationships takes work, and Klaviyo’s tools are designed to try to save time and make it easier to deliver relevant offers. 

Integrations

Klaviyo plays well with lots of ecommerce platforms and other tools, and offers 300+ pre-built integrations, including:

• Shopify

• ShopifyPlus

• BigCommerce

• Magento Commerce 

• Woo Commerce

• Wix 

• SalesForce Commerce Cloud

• PrestaShop 

However, it’s not limited to those specific integrations. Developers can use Klaviyo’s scalable APIs to integrate with virtually any platform.

Forms and Personalizations

Use Klaviyo’s email form creator, which offers 50+ templates, to create great-looking branded forms. 

The journey starts with the ability to capture on-site data before the visitor fills out the form. You can choose to get creative by integrating data from surveys, loyalty programs, quiz platforms and more.

You can also use multi-step forms to gather more information from visitors while maintaining compliance with data regulations like GDPR and TCPA. 

Personalizing customer recommendations can help increase sales and Klaviyo makes it easy to recommend products based on a customer's prior purchase history. Pop-ups are also available.

Customer Profiles

Creating detailed customer profiles is key to personalized offers, and Klaviyo offers the ability to create very detailed customer profiles that can include many types of relevant data (compliant with privacy regulations). 

Businesses get a customer database that includes customers’ behavior and preferences. Businesses can see detailed individual profiles. We already mentioned that Klaviyo is a CDP, and it’s also a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. 

Because it is focused heavily on ecommerce stores, customer profiles include data that can be valuable to those businesses including: Total revenue and number of orders, coupon codes, purchases and engagements and more. 

Businesses that use Klaviyo can see what actions customers have taken and use predictive analytics to predict what they are likely to do in the future; when they will order next, for example, or how much they are likely to spend over time. 

Klaviyo also offers a Javascript snippet (with instructions on how to install it) to capture customer browsing behavior, which then becomes part of the customer profile. 

Analyze Customer Insights

Marketers are constantly looking for data that helps them make better advertising and marketing decisions, and Klaviyo offers a variety of tools to make that process easier, whether or not your team includes a data analyst. 

Segmentation

Segmentation tools are designed to make it easy for businesses to market to very specific segments of their audience at the right time. As customers interact with the business, segments are updated in real time. Klaviyo emphasizes that this feature is code-free which means you don’t have to be a developer to create and use it. 

Data Science

Klaviyo is designed to help marketers make smart use of data without having to employ a team of data scientists. Insights and analytics are designed to be user-friendly, updated in real-time and actionable. It uses machine learning to help marketers get better results. 

What does that mean? Using data collected about customers, Klaviyo can help marketers predict when they are likely to make another purchase (and how often they will purchase again, as well as how much they are likely to spend overall– or even when they are likely to leave, for example. 

Knowing this information is one thing, and using it is another. Klaviyo then helps businesses use that data to send targeted emails or SMS messages. 

Reporting

Businesses that use Klaviyo have access to detailed reports that include KPIs and other business metrics such as open rates by campaigns, revenue by month, and more. 

Benchmarks

Industry benchmarks can be helpful because they help businesses understand how their business performs when compared to their peers. As Klaviyo points out it can help your business set realistic goals and then track performance against peers. 

Personalize Communications To Enhance The User Experience

If you’ve ever bought something because a perfectly timed discount showed up in your email– or if you’ve ever unsubscribed from emails from a business because they seemed irrelevant– you understand why personalization is so important. Again, Klaviyo focuses on very personalized communications to build a deep customer relationship and ultimately increase sales. 

Automation 

Built-in automated A/B testing allows you to compare results from one campaign to another with a different element so you can find what works best for each segment. Try a different subject line, for example, or tweak the color or call to action in your email design. 

Social Advertising 

Many ecommerce brands succeed on social media platforms, so that marketing needs to integrate with email marketing and/or SMS. 

There are several ways to integrate your social media efforts into your marketing with Klaviyo. First, at the simplest level, you can easily add social icons for Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and more into your email marketing to amplify your social channels. 

Klaviyo also offers Facebook Advertising integration that allows you to create an ad strategy on any of Meta’s properties: Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. You can publish targeted ad campaigns and personalized messages. 

Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing continues to be a crucial part of ecommerce marketing, especially as privacy regulations, ad blockers and iOS changes have affected online tracking and advertising. 

Klaviyo helps marketers create effective email campaigns designed to meet specific goals and then makes it easy to track results and tweak future campaigns to improve. 

SMS

Text message marketing (SMS) has become an effective way for many ecommerce businesses to reach customers. While someone may let emails pile up, text messages grab attention immediately. 

Not only does Klaviyo offer tools for effective SMS marketing, you can also earn a SMS strategy certificate through its 7-part course. 

Klaviyo Pricing

So how much does all of this cost? Klaviyo is not the cheapest email marketing platform out there, but many brands find it worth the cost.

There is a limited free trial that provides email support for 60 days. With the free tier you can send 500 emails to up to 250 contacts and you’ll get 150 SMS credits. The trial is really a “try before you buy” opportunity, not designed for someone who wants a free email service provider.

As for ongoing pricing, you’ll enter a range of how many contacts you have on the Klaviyo pricing page to see pricing details. 

For example, for $45/month (at current pricing) covers

1,001 - 1,500 contacts

15,000 monthly email sends

Built-in CDP

150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits

Includes applicable SMS carrier fees

Email and chat support

For $60/month, you’d also get 1250 SMS/MMS credits per month. 

Prices go up as your list size increases, and can total $1000 or more per month. Of course, if it increases your sales substantially, that may be well worth it.

Overall, Klaviyo offers a solid marketing automation platform, with best in class email marketing and SMS tools. Its rich functionality and analytic tools can be valuable to ecommerce marketers who want to improve sales. Its comprehensive platform, combined with learning modules available through Klaviyo Academy, can help you create a winning SMS and email marketing strategy.