If you signed up for Mailchimp, you were probably looking for a tool that helps you pull in your audience data, marketing channels, and insights together in one place. This platform is great for what it does, but if your business has experienced recent growth, Mailchimp isn’t necessarily scalable, nor does it offer some of the more robust features other tools, such as Klaviyo, can provide.
Intrigued? You should be! Let’s look at eight reasons why we think it’s worth making the switch from Mailchimp to Klaviyo!
The Mailchimp and Klaviyo dashboards are very much alike, and you can easily check out your profits from your email marketing campaigns with either tool. However, there are some key differences between the two:
If money is important to you, switching to Klaviyo will give you greater insights into your revenue right on your dashboard, allowing you to see which campaigns are producing for you and which may be falling flat.
Klaviyo and Mailchimp’s campaign builders are very close and offer many of the same elements. Both consist of blocks, which you can drag and drop to manipulate the appearance and flow of your campaigns easily. However, the way product blocks work is distinguishable between the two platforms.
On Klaviyo, you can either use the product feed or choose an item from your store. If you choose to select the blended approach, it will generate recommendations based on a combination of the ordered product and viewed product metrics. This option also considers both the customers’ prior purchase history and the history of products they like to view.
If you’re using Mailchimp, your choices are limited. You can only show popular products and specific categories, collections, and tags.
Klaviyo was first-to-market, meaning it was the first company to integrate its email service provider harmoniously with eCommerce platforms such as Shopify. Klaviyo brings real-time sales, order data, customer information, and customer events (like add-to-cart and product views) into the platform, allowing emails to be synchronously sent and segmented based on real customer information and events. It was a total game changer!
Both platforms offer user-friendly reporting tools. However, if you want to see in-depth comparisons between automated emails and campaigns, you have to spend more money and upgrade to a PRO account.
With Klaviyo, in-depth comparison reports are a regular feature that doesn’t require any additional payment. Klaviyo also lets you personalize your report views and save as many different Klaviyo views as your heart desires.
Klaviyo created an easy-to-use and dynamic automation builder. You can drag and drop an action or filter directly into the flow builder, visually experiencing what the automation will look like when it’s live.
With Mailchimp, you don’t have a visual builder; instead, you can add emails (not actions) because it’s more logic-based.
Klaviyo also features a “Browse Abandonment” trigger, which isn’t available through Mailchimp. It’s an email for people who looked at your product but didn’t buy it or add it to their carts. After this trigger, an email goes to the shopper and displays the products they viewed but didn’t purchase. This option is different from “Abandon Cart” and is treated as another opportunity to grab future customers who were browsing products versus someone who added them to their cart. Browsing on a site is more likely than someone who abandons their cart, therefore allowing marketers to get a deeper segment of customers.
Mailchimp’s segmentation is list-based. All you get with this platform are “Groups” and “Segments,” so you can put customers into buckets like “New Subscribers” or “Recent Purchases,” but there’s no deep dive or specific behavior tracking.
Klaviyo, on the contrary, takes segmentation very seriously. From the moment you’re signed up, you’ll see a range of potential lists you can create using contacts you import from your email lists. Of course, these are just suggestions. You also can segment your emails by behaviors or transactions, which takes information from Shopify and other CRMs. You might also choose to segment your customers based on events, such as when people make their first purchases.
If you’re feeling ambitious, you can dive super deep with your segmentation, creating a segment for people who viewed a certain pair of shoes four times in the previous seven days from your store or people with the name “Cindy” who bought T-shirts from you last Thursday. Since Klaviyo has an integration with Facebook audience targeting, you can go deep with your customization and personalization options.
Mailchimp opt-in forms are list-based. If you’re trying to build a new form, you’ll need to make a new list first.
On the other hand, Klaviyo opt-in forms are flexible and can do whatever you want them to. There’s no limit to the number of forms you can build, and you can point one form to each list or all forms to one list — however you want or need to set up your forms works just fine for this platform. Klaviyo also offers advanced pop-up strategies like optimizing your forms for mobile devices, using a multi-step form, and offering tiered discounts to different customer groups.
Klaviyo uses a subscriber-based model, meaning you’ll only be paying for active subscribers. They also offer an SMS service as a separate add-on cost. Depending on the number of subscribers you have with a free plan, they also won’t charge you until you start sending. This is great for new clients looking to start SMS marketing and will help grow their list.
Mailchimp is list-based. For example, if you have six lists in Mailchimp, and one contact (let’s say firstname@lmnop.com) is on all six lists, you’ll have to pay six times for that same subscriber.
Set up a time to talk to our digital marketing experts here at Zero Gravity Marketing. Our team is happy to discuss the pros and cons of different digital marketing solutions, including Mailchimp and Klaviyo. We look forward to hearing from you soon!