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Klaviyo vs.
Mailchimp
We're going to compare Mailchimp with the second most popular email marketing tool - Constant Contact. By the end, you'll be able to see if what Constant Contact offers is enough for you to make it your email service provider.
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Top 1% Global Leader Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2023
Top 1% Digital Agency in United States
Ranked by UpCity 2022
Fastest-Growing Companies in the USA
4 Years in a Row
Top 1% Best Digital Marketing Award
Ranked by Expertise 2023
#2 Global Award Winner
Ranked by MASHABLE
Top 1% Award of Excellence Winner
Years 2020, 2021, 2022
500+ 5-Star Reviews in Google
Ranked by Our Customers
Top 1000 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2022
#1 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Business Journal
Top Rated SEO Agency
Ranked by SEO Blog 2023
Top Ecommerce Development Company
Ranked by Selected Firms
Top Web Development Agency
Ranked by Design Rush
Should You Become Part of the Klaviyo Community or Go with the World's Most Popular Email Marketing Platform?
Klaviyo may not be the first name on every business owner’s lips when it comes to choosing an email marketing tool. That’s demonstrated by its rather low market share:
Less than 1% of companies use Klaviyo to help with their email marketing strategy, which begs the question of why you’d even consider looking at it at all. After all, the many Klaviyo competitors – the subject of this comparison, MailChimp, being one of them – swallow up far more of the market.
So why even consider Klaviyo?
The simple answer is that – despite its low market share – Klaviyo has become the email marketing tool of choice for ecommerce platforms because it’s specifically built for online stores. That makes it a competitor, albeit a somewhat underappreciated one, and means the tool is worth comparing to the industry’s giant – MailChimp.
So, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
In this comparison, you’re going to discover which of the two tools is best for your business, with a particular focus on the ecommerce marketing strengths that make Klaviyo stand out.
Is Email Marketing Worth Doing In This Day and Age?
Before we start digging into any comparisons, you might have a question. Is email marketing even worth doing in the 2020s? There are so many more tools for building customer relationships, including your socials and even your company website, which can make email marketing tools seem a little passe.
After all, they’ve been around since the late 1990s – almost as long as commercially available internet itself – so surely email marketing must be an outdated art form by now?
That’s not the case:
Rather than thinking of email as “old hat,” think of it as “tried and tested.” As an ROI driver, it may be the most effective digital marketing strategy you have available. Just check out the above chart – email can drive up to $40 in revenue for every dollar you spend, as long as you do it well. That’s a long way ahead of search engine optimization – $22.24 for every dollar spent – and internet ads.
The takeaway is simple – email marketing campaigns work.
And they work especially well when you have the right tool for your business on your side, which is where this comparison begins.
What Is Klaviyo?
Klaviyo – like most email marketing tools today – advertises itself as an “all-in-one” marketing platform. In reality, that means it’s a platform for sending emails and SMS messages, as well as being a CDP – a customer data platform.
But where it really stands out is its usefulness for ecommerce businesses. By combining plenty of integrations – including the all-important Shopify – with some of the most advanced list segmentation tools around, Klaviyo has carved out a niche for itself as the email marketing automation platform of choice for those who run an online business.
What Is MailChimp?
Where Klaviyo appeals primarily to a niche online selling audience – despite its utility for many types of small businesses – MailChimp is the behemoth of the email marketing platform world. That’s demonstrated by its sheer market share:
Numbers vary wildly – some organizations suggest that MailChimp owns over 50% of the email marketing segment – but we figure it’s only fair to use Enlyft’s data here seeing as we used it for Klaviyo. So, MailChimp has a 7.42% market share, which is more than seven times that of Klaviyo, and it’s achieved that by being a very complete tool that has done a great job of adapting to the times. Generative AI is the latest addition to the MailChimp feature suite, but that’s far from what makes the platform so popular – it’s simply the go-to name for many in the email marketing world.
Klaviyo vs. MailChimp - Comparing Each Marketing Automation Platform
In the blue corner, we have Klaviyo. The scrappy underdog has been building a reputation in the email marketing space, but it faces a big step up in competition here. That’s because in the red corner stands MailChimp – perhaps the biggest and the best of the many Klaviyo alternatives out there.
Which comes out on top?
We’re going to find an answer by stacking the two tools up against one another over 11 categories to help you figure out which can help you improve business performance.
Email Campaigns
The bread and butter of both MailChimp and Klaviyo lies in their email campaigns. And there’s little to differentiate between the two in terms of the types of emails you can send. All offer you the ability to send the following types of emails:
Transactional Emails
These emails focus on transactions people make with your business, meaning they cover things like order confirmations and shipping updates. MailChimp is a little smoother with these emails – you can send them from the platform with no fuss – whereas Klaviyo requires you to speak to a customer service rep.
Product Retargeting Campaigns and Recommendations
You have a product to sell. You want to use emails to sell that product. Both Klaviyo and MailChimp enable that, as you can send recommendations – based on information held about your customers within your email marketing tool – and even create retargeting campaigns to hit lapsed customers or those who’ve shown an interest in a product without buying.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Think of abandoned cart emails as little web push notifications that serve as reminders to possible clients that they’ve left an item in your site’s shopping cart without buying it. Both platforms allow you to do it – ideal for sending reminders and even little offers to push a customer past the finish line.
Nurturing Email Flows
Where the above four types of emails are reactionary – something happens and the email gets sent – email flows are pre-planned collections of emails sent to customers at specific times. They can still be reactionary. For instance, you could have a welcome flow that includes an introductory email before segueing into emails with offers. But you’ll make heavier use of list segments here.
There’s very little to choose between Klaviyo and MailChimp here. They both offer dozens of templates for your emails – which you can tweak with a drag-and-drop editor – and both allow you to add your own branding. We’re calling this one a dead heat.
Score
Klaviyo – 1
MailChimp – 1
List Segmentation
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
SMS Marketing
Your customers love to receive SMS messages. At least 64% of them say that you should contact them via text more often, with 75% saying they want you to use SMS to send them information about personalized offers and discounts.
Think of SMS as a companion to email marketing.
And, as a companion, it’s only natural that both Klaviyo and MailChimp allow you to build SMS campaigns. The difference is that Klaviyo lets you build these campaigns – albeit in a limited capacity – within its free tier. Without paying a dollar, you can send up to 150 text messages per month, with the only cost being carrier fees. MailChimp doesn’t do that – it gates its SMS functionalities behind its paid tiers.
Beyond that, both utilize a credit system that allows you to send more SMS texts than you get as part of the monthly cost of using the platform. But thanks to giving you a few extra for free each month, Klaviyo is building up a small lead over MailChimp.
Score
Klaviyo – 3
MailChimp – 1
A/B Testing
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
Analytics and Reporting
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
Marketing Automation Features
Marketing automation is big business today – companies want to get rid of costly manual processes across the board – but it’s not as widely implemented as you might think. That’s highlighted by Startup Bonsai, which points out that 33% of companies that aren’t using some form of automation avoid it because they lack the expertise required, while 24% say they don’t have the data to pull it off.
The expertise problem isn’t an issue with MailChimp and Klaviyo.
Both make it easier for you to create automated email flows, which can be triggered by customer behavior or simply the segments into which you place your customers. You essentially follow a “wizard” in each, using the step-by-step instructions provided to set up your email flow.
But Klaviyo is just a little bit better.
Its use of conditional splits – which allow you to send different emails within the same flow depending on customer behavior – and integration of SMS into your flows makes it stand out. This adaptability is also another reason why Klaviyo is so beloved by ecommerce stores. It provides more options (and more flexibility), allowing you to better personalize the emails you send within an automated flow.
Score
Klaviyo – 5
MailChimp – 3
Building Landing Pages
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
Deliverability
An email marketing campaign isn’t going to do much for your ecommerce store if the emails you’re sending go straight into the recipient’s spam folder.
Enter deliverability – a percentage measurement of how many emails land in an inbox versus spam purgatory.
This is a difficult category for comparison as there appear to be no stats for Klaviyo’s deliverability rate. We can see MailChimp’s from the above chart created by Email Tool Tester – 92.6% – and can also see it ranks third among all of the tools tested by the company. But Klaviyo isn’t on that list. The closest stat we have is the 99.9% delivery rate Klaviyo claims – as repeated by Twilio – which isn’t a full test.
So, MailChimp takes this category by default.
Score
Klaviyo – 5
MailChimp – 5
Integrations
The scores are tied with three categories left.
This is clearly a close-run comparison, as is the comparison of integrations between the two email marketing platforms. Klaviyo claims to offer over 300 integrations compared to MailChimp’s 250, giving it an early edge. What’s more, Klaviyo’s focus on ecommerce helps it pull further ahead – you can integrate the platform with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and practically any other ecommerce site-building tool on the market.
MailChimp has similar ecommerce integrations, though they’re not as smooth. Shopify integration, for instance, requires you to sync your contact list with your Shopify store inside your Shopify content management system.
However, the real clincher here is simple:
Klaviyo/MailChimp integration.
Klaviyo allows you to integrate your MailChimp account into its platform. That means you can easily transfer MailChimp contacts over with a few clicks of a mouse, which is a feature that doesn’t work the other way around.
Score
Klaviyo – 6
MailChimp – 5
Customer Support
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
Pricing
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.
MailChimp Pricing
MailChimp‘s pricing works on a similar contacts-based system as Klaviyo’s. However, it offers three tiers, the Standard tier being the closest equivalent to Klaviyo’s Email tier. You can pay a little less per month for the Essentials tier, but it’s the Premium tier that stands out:
It costs $350 per month for as few as 500 contacts.
That might make it seem like Klayvio takes the pricing category, but that isn’t the case. Bump MailChimp up to 200,000 contacts and you’re only left with the Premium tier at a cost of $1,600 per month – $700 less than Klaviyo. Combine that with MailChimp’s more versatile pricing options and you have a clear winner.
Score
Klaviyo – 6
MailChimp – 7
Klaviyo vs. MailChimp - Which Email Marketing Service Comes Out On Top?
Wow! That was closer than we anticipated it being when we started writing this article, with MailChimp barely coming out on top by virtue of having a more flexible and – when you list scales – a cheaper pricing model.
But it’s not the outright best in all categories.
Klaviyo is still a better choice for ecommerce store owners, not least thanks to its suite of integrations, and its better segmentation options give you more choices when creating your campaigns. MailChimp fires back with its pricing, superior customer support, and confirmed high rate of deliverability, but it’s a close contest that’s going to come down to what you need more from your emailing platform.
Trust NEWMEDIA to Help You Get the Most Out of Your Email Marketing Efforts
Having an email marketing platform and getting the most out of it – putting you in the region of the 40:1 ROI mentioned earlier – are two very different things. You need content. Expertise. Landing pages. All of the elements of an online marketing campaign that transform your emails into must-opens for your customers.
That’s where NEWMEDIA comes in.
The Ultimate Marketing Agency
We’re helping businesses take control of their email marketing and grow their audience, their brand, and their sales. With our help, your brand can tap into the channel’s incredible ROI with tailored campaigns that complement your existing marketing strategies.
Experience You Can Trust
Over more than 25 years, we’ve helped brands – big and small – generate a combined $3.6 billion in revenue through our online expertise. And we’re ready to work with you, too.
Always Ready
You’ll get the benefit of our industry expertise not only in crafting the ideal email marketing strategy for your existing audience, but in growing your subscriber base for even more reach. When combined with social media marketing, SEO and PPC, an effective email campaign strategy can really complete your omnichannel marketing campaign.
Interested?
Get in touch – we have offices across the United States – to discover how NEWMEDIA can help you design a profit-driving email campaign using Klaviyo or MailChimp.