Klaviyo: A Modern Alternative to Mailchimp

klaviyo for email marketing

Running a business online involves keeping track of a plethora of emails, and successful eCommerce shop owners need to have a user-friendly platform for managing their marketing and other emails. Choosing the right email marketing platform is a key aspect of keeping your customers in the loop about your promotions, new products, and everything else that is happening at your business. Although there are several email marketing platforms available, Klaviyo offers versatility, a selection of features, and a user-friendly interface, making it a top choice among eCommerce business owners across a variety of industries.

What Is Klaviyo?

Klaviyo is a comprehensive email marketing platform that allows both large and small businesses to efficiently manage marketing emails, communication related to online orders, and a variety of other types of data for both current and potential future customers. The platform partners with Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and several other major eCommerce platforms to help brands build meaningful relationships with customers by flawlessly integrating email services with other elements of online sales.

Klaviyo offers three distinct categories filled with helpful features that eCommerce shop owners can use to build relationships with customers, learn about trends related to their sales, and adjust their current procedures to better fit the evolving needs of their growing business.

Listen

Listening to what interests your customers and what they want their eCommerce shopping experience to look like shows them that you care about introducing them to products that will make their lives better, not just making your next sale. Klaviyo’s integrations, profiles, forms, and personalization features make it easier for eCommerce shop owners to build relationships that turn happy customers into repeat customers.

Analyze

Analyzing the ins and outs of the sales you are making is a must to truly understand how your eCommerce business is doing. Klaviyo’s segmentation, data science, reporting, and benchmarks features break down data about your sales and customers into several specific categories to help eCommerce shop owners increase their awareness of a variety of factors that impact their business.

Act

Savvy eCommerce shop owners respond to the information they learn about their customers and their data to improve their businesses. Klaviyo’s automation, social advertising, campaigns, and SMS features are helpful tools eCommerce business owners can use to adjust how they run their businesses and communicate with customers to keep up with the changing nature of online sales.

What Is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is another email marketing platform that is a bit older than Klaviyo and offers fewer cutting-edge features that certain small businesses can use to accomplish basic eCommerce tasks. Its audience management, creative tools, marketing automation, and insights and analytics features can provide a starting point for businesses that are just getting started with online sales, but many established eCommerce shop owners prefer Klaviyo’s wider range of services. Mailchimp focuses more on emails themselves than the place that email has in running a modern eCommerce shop.

fingers on laptop sending email

Pros and Cons of Klaviyo

For most eCommerce businesses, Klaviyo offers more positive aspects than negative elements.

Pros of Klaviyo

  • Wide variety of features to suit every type of business
  • Strong analytics reporting
  • Able to automate several types of emails
  • User-friendly form generation
  • Strong integration with eCommerce platforms

Cons of Klaviyo

  • More expensive than Mailchimp
  • Some advanced features can take time to learn

Pros and Cons of Mailchimp

Although Mailchimp can be a good fit for certain business owners, most find that the platform’s drawbacks outweigh its selling points in comparison to Klaviyo.

Pros of Mailchimp

  • Most features are available for free
  • Strong analytics reporting
  • Simple interface that can be ideal for basic use

Cons of Mailchimp

  • Fewer categories of features than Klaviyo
  • Limited ability to automate emails
  • Subscriptions are expensive if they are used
  • More outdated than Klaviyo

Types of Businesses Best Served by Klaviyo

Klaviyo’s versatility and wide range of features make it a good fit for nearly any eCommerce business. It is a particularly strong option for medium and large businesses that rely on their email marketing platform’s ability to meet the heavier demands of managing larger amounts of data, as well as any business that prioritizes having the ability to analyze several categories of in-depth data and use that information to improve their branding, daily operations, and interactions with customers. Klaviyo’s commitment to continuing to evolve as the eCommerce landscape evolves also makes it an attractive choice for innovative business owners that prioritize staying in the loop about the latest trends and integrating them into their businesses.

Types of Businesses Best Served by Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s limited ability to keep up with the needs of large companies means that it is generally better suited for small businesses. Because the platform does not offer scalability, it tends to be unable to meet the sophisticated needs of larger businesses. Mailchimp can work well for businesses that are less focused on sales and need an email management platform specifically for handling emails, rather than integrating emails with Shopify or another eCommerce platform, as many of these business owners prefer to choose a simpler program over paying more for features they do not need.

Choose Klaviyo for All Your Email Marketing Needs

Although every eCommerce business is unique, most owners will find that Klaviyo’s wide range of features make the platform better able to meet their needs than Mailchimp. Klaviyo was built for modern eCommerce, while Mailchimp was designed for the primitive online shopping of two decades ago and hasn’t quite reached the limit of what is possible for online businesses today.

Over 10,000 eCommerce businesses have switched from Mailchimp to Klaviyo within the last two years, and these companies have seen an average revenue increase of 46 percent since changing email marketing companies. Klaviyo has even designed a built-in integration with Mailchimp that makes migrating your contacts and other data to Klaviyo and connecting to your eCommerce platform simple.

At Future Holidays, we are passionate about keeping our clients in the loop about the best digital tools available to eCommerce business owners. Having a quality email marketing system is a must when it comes to keeping your communication with your customer base organized, and Klaviyo works perfectly with all major eCommerce platforms. Our experts can assist with migrating your email marketing to a new platform, as well as with creating quality marketing emails your recipients will actually open, engaging with your audience on social media, and designing a website your customers will love. Contact us today to learn more about our services or to take the first step toward switching to Klaviyo!