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Segmentation is key to a strong email campaign – it allows you to divide your master list into categories to which you can send specific marketing material. And, as you can see from the above chart, it works. Over a third – 39% – of survey respondents say segmentation leads to higher open rates, with a similar number believing that segmenting leads to more relevant emails.

Both Klaviyo and MailChimp offer segmentation.

And both are pretty similar in what they offer. You’ll receive suggestions on how to segment your list based on the data supplied by your customers when they enter into your email client. Those suggestions can even take into account past purchases, with MailChimp even throwing in a touch of predictive analytics by offering segment suggestions based on predicted demographics.

But it’s Klaviyo that comes out on top – just barely – because of one very useful feature. Whenever you create a segment in Klaviyo, you can instruct the tool to add to that segment based on pre-defined rules. For instance, you may have an email flow for a specific product, with a customer showing interest in that product serving as a trigger to pull them into that flow. It’s this slightly more robust segmentation that also makes Klaviyo such a great choice for e-commerce stores.

Score

Klaviyo – 2

MailChimp – 1

A/B testing (sometimes referred to as split testing) is a pretty simple concept. You create multiple versions of the same email – each with a small tweak such as a change to coloring or formatting – and craft a campaign in which those email variations get sent to equal numbers of customers. Then, you measure the results – the email that gets the most conversions is the one you should use all of the time.

Through this, you create an iterative process for boiling your various email ideas down into the one email that works best. And yet, as you can see from the above chart, only 60% of businesses use A/B testing.

Yours should be one of them, and both Klaviyo and MailChimp can make that happen.

And there’s little to separate the two.

Klaviyo gets an early edge because it allows you to run A/B tests with up to seven emails as standard, compared to MailChimp’s three. But MailChimp makes it a little easier to run these campaigns. You can create them from scratch in MailChimp, whereas Klaviyo forces you to create separate email campaigns before linking them to an A/B test. Beyond that, both allow you to make multiple tweaks – including subject lines, copy, and branding – so the winner really depends on what you need most: more emails or a more user-friendly way of creating your tests. We’ll call this one a tie seeing as personal preference plays a large part in your choice.

Score

Klaviyo – 4

MailChimp – 2

If you’re not tracking your email marketing campaigns, how could you possibly know whether they’re working or not?

Thankfully, being left in the dark isn’t a problem you’ll have with either MailChimp or Klaviyo. Both offer in-depth dashboards that cover basic analytics, such as open rates, deliverable rates, and conversion rates. You can also pull reports from both – usually at the click of a mouse button – to use in presentations.

But we think MailChimp takes the win in this category.

While it doesn’t have the industry benchmarking that Klaviyo offers – which is very useful for stacking your campaigns up against your competitors – it features in-built Google Analytics integration. That means you can track more than just what happens with your emails. You can see how many people click your links and what they do on your website or landing pages, as well as receive much more accurate conversion rate estimates.

Score

Klaviyo – 4

MailChimp – 3

It’s very easy to pick a winner in this category:

MailChimp has a landing page builder and Klaviyo doesn’t, making the former the obvious victor. The question you may be left asking is why you would need this type of tool in the first place. It all comes down to your email marketing campaigns – you may want to use them to send prospects to specific pages related to products or services that go into more depth than what you have on your main site. MailChimp lets you build campaign-specific landing pages to enable that.

But it’s not the best website builder in the world.

You’re limited to a handful of templates and you’re not going to unleash a masterpiece of web design onto the world using MailChimp. But if you need something quick, clean, and attractive to direct your email recipients to, you could do a lot worse. Or, in Klaviyo’s case, not have the option to do it at all.

Score

Klaviyo – 5

MailChimp – 4

As well as Klaviyo does on the integration side of things, it falls down a little with customer support. To raise any query, you first have to sign into the Klaviyo support page, through which you receive access to a knowledge resource and an online support request system. There’s no phone support and no live chat, meaning you’re in for a wait if you can’t find a solution to your problem in the knowledge center.

MailChimp isn’t perfect on the support front, either.

It gates its support behind its paid tiers – though free users get email support for their first 30 days – and you don’t get phone support unless you sign up for the Premium package. However, 24/7 online chat is available at the most basic paid tier, meaning you can speak to somebody in real time if you have an issue.

MailChimp takes this one fairly easily.

Score

Klaviyo – 6

MailChimp – 6

So, we come to our final category – pricing. Your budget is naturally going to play a huge role in your choice of email marketing platform, with your decision coming down to something you may not expect:

The number of people on your list.

Klaviyo Pricing

Klaviyo’s pricing is simple: you pay a starting price of $20 per month for email marketing, with an additional $15 per month if you want to throw SMS marketing into the mix. However, that pricing structure works on a scale. The more people you have on your list, the more you’ll pay per month, culminating in a $2,300 monthly fee if you have between 200,001 and 250,000 people on your list.

Any higher than that and you have to go down the custom enterprise pricing route.