Klaviyo vs. MailChimp: Features, Pros & Cons

Many successful online businesses today leverage eCommerce marketing tools to grow their brand and achieve their business goals. Choosing a tool to invest your time and hard-earned money in can be a tough decision, so we're here to help you evaluate Klaviyo vs. MailChimp.

Klaviyo vs. MailChimp

Whether your goal is to grow your eCommerce store, establish more meaningful relationships with customers or automate your marketing efforts, both Klaviyo and MailChimp are great eCommerce marketing tools to help you get the job done.

In this blog, we're diving into the features, pros and cons of both Klaviyo vs. MailChimp to help you determine the best eCommerce tool for your business's needs.

Klaviyo Features

No matter the size of your B2B or B2C eCommerce business, Klaviyo can help your store grow. Store all of your customer data in one place, and deliver customized experiences through email and other owned channels.

This tool makes it easy for eCommerce merchants to grow their contact lists, personalize user experiences and communicate more effectively with customers. To help you evaluate Klaviyo vs. MailChimp, check out some important Klaviyo features below.

Real-Time Customer Data

Klaviyo's native integrations help you pull in unlimited data from your eCommerce platform with no hidden fees. If you're using a custom platform that isn't in Klaviyo's integration directory, Klaviyo makes it easy for you to create direct integrations with other platforms.

The eCommerce CRM provides each contact with a record to centralize customer data and help merchants see and understand a contact's behavior and actions. Take advantage of this customer data and Klaviyo's predictive analytics to create a more personalized experience for prospects, leads and customers.

Data Science

Klaviyo's data science features are designed to help eCommerce businesses grow faster. This artificial intelligence technology helps to:

• Predict a customer's next purchase date
• Determine the total amount of future spending
• See the number of upcoming purchases
• Determine the probability of customer churn
• Calculate customer lifetime value
• See average time between orders
• Predict a contact's gender

Segmentation

With Klaviyo, segment your contact list to send targeted, relevant emails based on customers' unique engagements and behavior. These lists update automatically so that you don't waste time manually updating lists.

Target users with special events and generate better results by leveraging a contact's website activity to send behavior-based emails. Combine and exclude segments for more extensive targeting.

Automation

With Klaviyo, easily plan out the buyer's journey from beginning to end to design your ideal customer experience. Leverage Klaviyo's email automation to send triggered emails based on specific criteria to accelerate users through the buyer's journey − this can help you improve your abandoned cart email strategy and re-engage lost customers.

Klaviyo's A/B testing capabilities help merchants test various subject lines, types of content and different times to increase performance and drive engagement. Klaviyo leverages behavioral data, customer data and integrated data to personalize emails based on customer lifetime value, lifecycle stage, brand loyalty and more. To learn more about implementing email automation with Klaviyo, check out our 

Reporting

Klaviyo's reporting and eCommerce analytics tools help merchants analyze metrics beyond open rates and clicks. See how much revenue your campaigns have driven, compare current and past performance, see trends in events and more.

Klaviyo Pros

No Hidden Costs

When evaluating MailChimp vs. Klaviyo, we found that Klaviyo's pricing is higher, but it gives you more for your money. There are zero hidden fees − meaning no additional charges after investing in the tool.

Here are some valuable assets included at no extra cost in a Klaviyo monthly subscription that are not included in a MailChimp subscription:

• Unique coupon codes
• Back in stock automation
• Advanced pop-ups
• Segmentation
• Multi-variate testing
• Zapier integration

Tight Integration With Shopify

Did you know that Shopify merchants earn $85 for every $1 spent on Klaviyo? Klaviyo seamlessly integrates with Shopify to merge valuable data to help grow your eCommerce store. Plus, it's a valuable tool to help Shopify stores increase online conversions with targeted email and social media marketing.

Reach Customers On Any Channel

Klaviyo helps eCommerce stores reach and engage with prospects, leads and customers on a variety of channels. Email, web, in-app or social, Klaviyo is available to help you funnel users through the buyer's journey no matter where they are.

We recommend leveraging Klaviyo when preparing for Black Friday and the holiday season as this tool enables companies to leverage these owned marketing channels − allowing for maximized sales.

Onboarding Support

Klaviyo dedicates a Customer Success Manager to customers with over 125,000 contacts at no extra cost. This person is here to help offer onboarding support, strategic advice and more to help merchants grow their store quicker.

Klaviyo Cons

Higher Cost

Though Klaviyo comes at a higher cost than MailChimp, customers face zero hidden fees and pay only for the email contacts and SMS messages they need. It's free to create an account, import and sync data and customize templates and emails.

Klaviyo customers can send up to 250 contacts a maximum of 500 emails for free. Once you hit 251 contacts, a monthly subscription is required. To help you compare MailChimp vs. Klaviyo plans, let's take a look at a subscription with 10,000 contacts:

• Klaviyo: $150/month
• MailChimp: $99/month.

Here are some bonuses that a 10,000-contact Klaviyo subscription offers that MailChimp does not:

• Unlimited monthly email sends (MailChimp limits this to 120,000)
• SMS text messages
• Phone push notifications
• Future spend and churn probability
• Segment reports
• Smart Send Time

MailChimp Features

Manage Audience Data With Tags

Just like Klaviyo, MailChimp keeps all of your contacts' data in a centralized location. Both tools offer tags to help businesses gain valuable insights about their audience. MailChimp lets you create tags for your contacts and lists, while Klaviyo lets you label campaigns, lists, flows and segments with tags.

Segmentation

With MailChimp, segment contacts based on data collected, like location or signup source. Target users based on their behavior, like whether they engaged with a marketing campaign, website or app.

MailChimp's pre-built segments are based on campaign activity, purchase history and more and are available to help you get started reaching contacts with similarities. Advanced segmentation lets you add nested conditions to combine data and create more thorough segments. 

Automation

MailChimp's Customer Journey builder helps eCommerce merchants start a conversation with customers and keep it going automatically. MailChimp offers welcome automation (to follow up with a new subscriber), date-based automation (to reach out to people on a certain date), behavior-based automations (based on app interaction) and RSS to email automation.

Like Klaviyo, use MailChimp to automate abandoned cart emails, product recommendations, order notifications and retargeting emails. MailChimp leverages customer engagement, interaction and more to send personalized and relevant automated emails.

Reporting

MailChimp makes it easy to access all marketing campaigns − like emails, automations and social ads − in one place. View growth, engagement and revenue reports to better understand your audience's behavior.

Industry benchmarks are included in email reports to help merchants compare important email metrics, like open rate, clicks and unsubscribe rates, to their competition. Similar to Klaviyo, MailChimp tracks how much revenue a campaign has driven and whether a customer made a purchase after opening the campaign.

MailChimp Pros

More Integrations

If the number of integrations is the deciding factor for whether to leverage Klaviyo vs. MailChimp, then MailChimp takes the cake. It has over 250 integrations (Klaviyo has 100+), which isn't surprising considering the popularity of the platform.

Though this number is exceptional, it misses one of the most important integrations: Shopify. This integration is no longer available, which means Shopify merchants should reconsider other email marketing automation tools.

Lower Price

When comparing the cost of Klaviyo vs. MailChimp, it's important to consider the features of each tool. Though MailChimp costs less than Klaviyo, MailChimp focuses on building emails. There's some automation functionality within the tool as well, but MailChimp's main focus is on building beautiful emails to send to contacts.

Klaviyo, on the other hand, uses data science and artificial intelligence to calculate the probability of churn, total amount of future spending and number of upcoming purchases. Like MailChimp, Klaviyo focuses on building beautiful emails, but Klaviyo's automation and segmentation features make it the optimal tool.

Plus, a MailChimp subscription comes with hidden fees post-purchase, so you may need to spend more money for additional features. Klaviyo is transparent about these (lack of) fees prior to purchase, letting businesses know up front that there are no hidden fees.

MailChimp Cons

Shopify Integration Is No Longer Available For New Downloads

eCommerce stores running on Shopify can no longer seamlessly integrate with MailChimp. Rather, they'll need to use a third-party provider to connect their Shopify store to their MailChimp account. 

The integration is still available for stores that are still using it, but it is unavailable for other businesses who have never used the integration in the past. Disconnecting a MailChimp account from a Shopify store can disrupt campaigns with product recommendations and isn't fun to deal with.

Limited Automation Options

MailChimp's narrow focus on email marketing impedes on the tool's automation capabilities. Less robust than Klaviyo, MailChimp offers basic email automation, like abandoned cart and retargeting.

Klaviyo, though, allows eCommerce merchants to set up automated triggered emails based on customer behavior, like whether they engaged with a promotion or viewed your site.

Conclusion

When evaluating Klaviyo vs. MailChimp, it's important to consider the features, pros and cons to ensure the tool aligns with your eCommerce needs. While we recommend Klaviyo for many of our clients, we understand that businesses have varying needs. What may work extremely well for one business may not work as well for another business.

We encourage evaluating the variety of eCommerce marketing tools out there before making a final decision. If you need help or have any questions when evaluating MailChimp vs. Klaviyo for your eCommerce needs, don't be afraid to reach out.

For other reviews and comparisons, check out the rest of our blogs including "Our Favorite Enterprise eCommerce Solutions" which covers the pros and cons of using Shopify vs BigCommerce.

Our team is here to help answer any questions you may have. Just fill out the form below with any questions or concerns, and a member of our team will be in touch soon!