With over 13 years’ experience in the email marketing industry (including nine years working for a Martech platform) our Managing Director, Phill Manson is well placed to run down the strengths and weaknesses of various platforms available.
It’s fair to say that Mailchimp has been around for a long time and will continue to be a leader in the space following the acquisition by Intuit at the end of 2021. It has however been a rocky road for one of the market leaders.
First off a falling out with Shopify that lasted two years and resulted with Mailchimp disappearing from the Shopify App Store (Anyone who in the meantime had to use a third party Shop-Sync app to connect the two systems will know how frustrating that was).
Over the last four years Klaviyo has burst onto the UK market further cementing it’s value in the market place. Few business can boast of the level of investment they have had from the open market in the last few years.
An Email Marketing AuditÂ
Our discovery audit process allows you to benchmark existing email marketing performance and identify opportunities for enhancements to your customer lifecycle journey through data and understanding – to reach the right customer at the right time with targeted and personalised messages.
At PAASE, we can evaluate every email service provider and provide a thorough analysis. Our discovery audit is a great way to identify gaps in your email marketing, and growth opportunities and to measure ongoing improvement. From quick fixes to huge opportunities, PAASE will supply honest feedback that will help you increase your email marketing revenue.
The platform update data in real time from customer profiles, transactions, browsing history, support tickets, website events and text messages. The eCommerce CRM provides each contact with a record to centralise customer data and allow merchants to really understand a contacts behaviour and actions. Merchants can take advantage of the lightning-fast segmentation Klaviyo offers and utilise Klaviyo’s predictive analytics to create better more effective experiences for prospects, leads and customers.
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Klaviyo have pre-built flows and triggers that easily plan out the buyer’s journey. The automations are designed to send triggered emails if the customer fits specific criteria. Merchants can benefit from Klaviyo’s browse abandonment, post-purchase, product review, welcome series, cart abandonment and more.
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Klaviyo’s data science features artificial intelligence to help eCommerce businesses grow faster. Predictive analytics can identify and predict consumer purchases, calculate customer churn, calculate CLV amongst other things.
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Segmenting customers based on their engagements and behaviours allows the merchant to send targeted emails to the right people at the right time.
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Klaviyo’s reporting helps the merchant to capture and analyse key metrics. The reporting and eCommerce analytic tools can exhibit revenue from campaigns, open rates, clicks, bounce rates, dropped emails current & past performance, unsubscribes, mapping and more.
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Much like Klaviyo, Mailchimp keeps all contacts in a centralise location. The difference being, Mailchimp lets the merchant create tags for contacts and lists whereas Klaviyo allows you to label campaigns, lists, flows and segments with tags.
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Segmented contacts re based on data collected, like geographic location. Likewise, target users are based on behaviour from engagement behaviour with campaigns, app or website. Mailchimp offers advanced segmentation helping the merchant to add nested conditions combining data.
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Similarities are evident with the ESP’s. Mailchimp automate abandoned cart emails, product recommendations, order notifications and retargeted emails, welcome flows and behavioural based automations.
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Mailchimp provide reports in one place making it easily accessible to see all marketing campaigns, this makes it easier to benchmark other campaigns and view growth, engagement and revenue.
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Klaviyo pros
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• Flows that allow for multiple decision trees
• NB testing
• Greater control in the configuration under the hood
• Integrate SMS within flows to create multi-channel activity
• Email template builder
• Simple API migration process from Mailchimp to Klaviyo
• Shopify integration
• Easy to use and customisable pop-ups
• Greater control of the automations (eg. ensuring that individuals can’t be in multiple flows at the same time)
• Klaviyo supports placeholder URLs and variable sequences for dynamic images, which can be used to personalise images to each recipient
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Klaviyo cons
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• The reporting suite works well for campaign reporting but is limited for data analysis
• Costs can scale quickly as your database grows
• Pre-built flows are ok but do need optimisation
• With greater flexibility comes the need for better setup and control mechanisms to ensure that the database is optimised
Mailchimp pros
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• Slightly lower cost of entry but lower feature set
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Mailchimp cons
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• Limited reporting for automated activity (all time rather then user defined selections)
• Linear flow structure rather than decision tree
• Generic configuration with limited control Segmentation tool is challenging to use and limited in depth
• Shopify integration no longer available for new downloads
Klaviyo has been coined as ‘like Mailchimp for ecommerce…on steroids’ and rightly so. Klaviyo offers a lot more for ecommerce business when it comes to email optimisation with a strong importance on the customer. Klaviyo offers seamless integration with Shopify and SMS marketing, these integrations do not need a third-party application allowing the user to directly collate and store customer data from their website putting them head of Shopify.
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If you would like to check out Klaviyo and even set up your account then follow this link; Signup – Klaviyo.
