Klaviyo Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

Klaviyo excels in email marketing automation, segmentation, and analytics, making it a top choice for businesses. However, its learning curve can be steep. Discover more in our full Klaviyo review.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for Klaviyo

The 9.4/10 score reflects Klaviyo’s robust feature set and superior performance across critical areas such as automation, personalization, and integration.

While its pricing may be on the higher side, the depth and effectiveness of its tools make it a worthwhile investment for many e-commerce businesses seeking to enhance their marketing efforts.

The expensive pricing for smaller businesses and the limited access to email support on the free plan prevent it from receiving a higher overall score.

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans	8.5
Marketing Automation Capabilities	9.5
Email Builder	9
Personalization & Customization	9.5
Campaign Performance Tracking	9.5
User Interface and User Experience	8.5
Integrations and Compatibility	9
Customer Support	9
SMB Guide Rating	9.4

In this review of Klaviyo, I’ve followed SMB Guide’s detailed criteria for evaluating the marketing automation software.

Pricing & Plans

There are no clearly divided Klaviyo plan tiers. Instead, you’re charged based on your account’s number of active monthly profiles.

This makes it a cost effective option for small businesses, but as you grow, your bills will too. At a certain list size, other platforms may become more cost effective.

Price

• $0-$2,315/month depending on active profiles. Fees start at 251 profiles. Once you hit 250,001, you’ll need to speak to a sales team member for customized pricing.

Features

• Starting at 500 monthly email sends
• 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits
• Includes applicable SMS carrier fees
• Email support for the first 60 days
• Some plans also include mobile push notifications

Plans scale up based on your active profile volume, with additional fees based on the monthly SMS/MMS credits. 

Who it’s for: Anyone who wants to take advantage of email marketing and SMS or MMS marketing.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

Klaviyo makes it possible to manage complex marketing workflows with branching logic and conditional actions. The visual workflow builder makes building intricate automation sequences that can adapt based on various conditions and behaviors easier.

Trigger options include:

• User Behavior Triggers: Actions such as website visits, product views, and cart abandonment.
• Time-Based Triggers: Scheduled events like post-purchase follow-ups, birthday, or anniversary emails.
• External Event Triggers: Integrations with other platforms or systems that can trigger actions based on external events, like CRM updates or inventory changes.

You can use Klaviyo to automate marketing via SMS/MMS, too, so people can choose to receive email and mobile notifications.

You can use a variety of personalization options in automated workflows based on user attributes and behaviors, but I cover those later in this review.

I tested this feature with the built-in welcome email flow that Klaviyo offers to walk you through how to use the flow builder.

But, you can start from a blank slate and customize it to meet your needs.

You can even use AI to customize your messaging.

Email Builder

When you create a campaign, you’re given the option to use a drag-and-drop editor, plain text email, or custom-coded HTML email for full control.

There are a lot of templates available, with plenty of filters to help you narrow it down. For the purpose of this review, I looked at the options available in the “Spring” category.

They had four options – a preview sale, a product launch, a sale, and one in French. That said, while the templates are high-quality and look good, the variety is somewhat limited compared to some competitors.

The templates are designed with best practices in mind, ensuring effective layouts and engaging visuals.

When I clicked on the template, I could preview it on desktop and mobile, so if you don’t like what it looks like, you can keep clicking through templates until you find something you want to customize further.

Once you choose the template, you can change the images, colors, and text.

You can make the necessary changes and then preview and test them before saving them to use in your campaign. You can see what it looks like on a desktop or mobile device the entire time.

The email editor is user-friendly. It’s easy to customize layouts and elements. Adding images, text blogs, buttons, and so on to create a personalized email only took me a few minutes.

The editor is highly flexible, and I could adjust styles, fonts, and colors to match a brand identity.

Personalization & Customization

Klaviyo supports dynamic content insertion based on various recipient attributes, behaviors, or segmentation criteria. You can use relevant personalization tags to add things like name, organization name, birthday, favorite color, etc.

Any fields you create on your subscription form and the recipient fills out, you can use to personalize their experience. You can use custom tags to reference custom properties, which is any data you collect about your contacts other than special Klaviyo properties and events.

Event variables are used based on a customer’s behavior, so they can only be used in metric-triggered flow messages, such as:

• Abandoned cart
• Post-purchase
• Product review
• Browse abandonment
• Winback
• Add to cart

It’s easy to add these because all you have to do is add a text box in the template then click the “Add personalization” button. From there, you can go through the list of variables based on what you want to add and where, and the system will handle it for you.

You can also segment your audience based on criteria like:

• Demographic information
• Browsing behavior
• Purchase history
• Engagement levels
• And more.

Campaign Performance Tracking

Klaviyo tracks numerous factors in the platform, including:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates
• Return on investment (ROI)

I don’t have screenshots because I didn’t actually send any emails during my test, but there are also real-time reporting dashboards so you can get an up-to-the-minute view of your campaign performance.

This way, you can monitor KPIs as campaigns unfold to quickly spot trends, adjust strategies, and optimize on the fly.

You can set and track specific campaign goals within Klaviyo, such as lead or revenue generation. You can create custom objectives and benchmarks so you can clearly measure success and optimize your efforts.

A/B testing is built in to campaign emails, so you don’t need a separate platform. You’ll need to create the first version of your email and save the content.

Then, at the bottom, click “Create A/B Test” to automatically create a second copy of your campaign and go to the A/B campaign page. 

From there, you’ll add a variation name that describes what variable you want to test. Do not test more than one variable at a time to keep things consistent so you can know what influenced the results.

For example, if you want to test the subject line, do not change button colors too.

User Interface & User Experience

Onboarding was simple, and when I finished filling out the form, I was given the option to choose a live demo.

I just had to answer a few questions about my business, such as my industry, the goal of the website, the platform I use, my business address, and whether I wanted email only, SMS only, or both.

Setting up the account is guided step-by-step with time estimates, but you can dismiss the guide if you feel comfortable.

You can expect connecting your business platforms to send behavior-triggered email to take about 30 minutes, turning on website tracking and setting up your email subscriber list to take about 5 minutes, and importing your contacts to take about 10 minutes.

You’ll spend a few minutes building your brand library and invite your team if desired. After set up, you can move to growing your audience. You’ll spend about 10 minutes creating your sign-up form, and then around 15 minutes creating your welcome email flow.

If you want to, you can move into recovering lost sales with an abandoned cart flow (about 15 minutes) and a browse abandonment flow (another 15 minutes or so.)

It could easily be overwhelming for someone who’s never worked with an email marketing platform. But, for me, because I’ve worked with multiple platforms before, I found it fairly straightforward.

There are a lot of options to choose from and learn to navigate through.

Integrations and Compatibility

Klaviyo is well known for its wide variety of integrations. It integrates with several popular CRM platforms, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM.

It also integrates with e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), and WooCommerce. Connecting Klaviyo with your ecommerce platform ensures you get real-time syncs of customer data, purchase history, and behavioral data for optimized marketing strategies and campaigns.

It integrates with Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and various other platforms for shipping and inventory, customer loyalty programs, and social proof. 

APIs are available to help you if you need to hire a developer to build a custom integration to support your workflow.

Mobile apps are available from Klaviyo Inc, for both Android and iOS, but they appear to be focused on ticketing and event attendance, rather than the marketing automation platform itself.

Mobile apps aren’t advertised on their website.

Customer Support

Klaviyo offers multiple customer support channels, including: 

• Live Chat
• Email
• Knowledge Base/Help Center

Live chat provides the fastest response. Phone support is not available, and email support is only available for 60 days for people on free plans. 

There’s also the Academy, Klaviyo Community (user forums), and interactive live training to help you.

Klaviyo — Unique Features

Klaviyo offers predictive analytics with AI machine learning algorithms to forecast user behavior. It can predict the likelihood of a purchase or churn.

Using these insights, you can create targeted campaigns aimed at retaining customers or driving conversions for more strategic efforts.

What the Experts Say About Klaviyo

• Capterra rating: 4.6/5 (430 reviews)
• G2 rating: 4.6/5 (1033 reviews)
• Shopify App Store rating: 4.5/5 (2,290+ votes)

Great online support! Friendly, helpful, always have solutions and screen grab images/pictures to help you through the problem solving or solution. We’ve been using Klaviyo for 2 years now and new updates, Reviews feature and SMS features are terrific. We also love the Flows/Segmentation of the Database and more…well done Klaviyo keep up the good work for small businesses in eCommerce and helping us.

Silvermaple Boutique – Verified Shopify user

I love Klaviyo, so simple and so intuitive. With a little practice it is set up in no time. Once you have your templates, each week is easy to just produce your content and send to your hearts content. We’ve seen a much needed up turn in sales. The cost is around about 10% of the turnover each month so we are more than happy with that return. It keeps us fresh in our customers minds and ensures just that little bit of loyalty when the time comes.

Barefoot Junkie – Verified Shopify user

Klaviyo Alternatives

Not convinced Klaviyo is the solution you’re looking for?

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses and beginners seeking an all-in-one marketing platform with a user-friendly interface.

Klaviyo is best suited for e-commerce businesses and more experienced marketers who require advanced segmentation, automation, and integration capabilities.

Both offer email marketing, automation, and personalization. Mailchimp pricing starts at $20/month after a 30-day trial for up to 500 contacts and 6,000 emails each month.

For up to 500 contacts and 5,000 monthly emails, you’ll pay $20 at Klaviyo, but can add SMS marketing for an additional $15 a month if you need more than 150 SMS/MMS credits. Both also offer a wide range of third-party integrations.  

Mailchimp is better for businesses that need basic automation and data analytics.

Start your free trial of Mailchimp

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign provides a comprehensive suite of marketing automation tools suitable for a wide range of businesses. It’s particularly strong in CRM and customer experience automation.

It’s an ideal option for those looking for a versatile platform that integrates with various apps and services. Klaviyo offers similar features, with a more targeted focus on e-commerce.

Pricing starts at $49/month after a one-month free trial, for 1,000 contacts with ActiveCampaign. Klaviyo is slightly more affordable for up to 1,000 contacts, with $30/month for email only and $45/month for email and SMS marketing.

Start your free trial of ActiveCampaign

HubSpot Marketing Automation

HubSpot Marketing Automation software is a versatile, all-in-one inbound marketing platform suitable for businesses looking to manage their entire marketing strategy in one place.

It provides a broad range of marketing tools along with a CRM. Klaviyo, on the other hand, specializes in advanced email and SMS marketing for e-commerce, with integrations and powerful automation features tailored to online retailers.

Pricing for Marketing Hub Professional starts at $800 a month for three seats, with additional seats available for $45/month/seat. That price includes 2,000 marketing contacts.

For 2,000 active profiles on Klaviyo, you’d pay $60/month for up to 2,500 active profiles and $75/month with SMS marketing added. That means Klaviyo is the far more affordable platform, but you’d still need to pay for a CRM, since that’s included in HubSpot Marketing Hub.

Try HubSpot Marketing Automation software for free

Other options: Best Klaviyo alternatives

Getting Started with Klaviyo

Klaviyo stands out as a premier email and SMS marketing solution for e-businesses. Its advanced automation, detailed segmentation, and deep integrations with popular e-commerce platforms make it a powerful tool for driving customer engagement and growth.

Ready to enhance your e-commerce marketing strategy? Get started with Klaviyo today.

FAQs

Related reading:

• Klaviyo vs. ActiveCampaign
• Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp
• Klaviyo vs. HubSpot