Running an online store isn’t only about listing new products or managing inventories. It’s also about building customer relationships. Email is a pretty powerful marketing tool that helps you nurture your relationship with your customers. Consider its ROI: for each dollar spent, your average return is $42 – more or less.
Email marketing is powerful for all kinds of businesses but it isn’t the silver bullet in any way. To get to an average ROI of $42, you need a solid strategy as well as email automation software.
Klaviyo is an email marketing provider. Like other email providers, it will help you create and manage your campaigns. It also has a drag-and-drop email builder, templates gallery, and automation tools. But unlike others, it’s a valuable tool for ecommerce and less a standalone email marketing provider.
Established in 2012, it has over 200 employees and is headquartered in Boston, US. While it started as an email automation tool, it now also has features such as push notification, social advertising, and SMS.
Pros and cons of Klaviyo
As a cloud-based email automation provider, Klaviyo gives you tools so that you can create, automate, manage and optimise your campaigns. You can send autoresponders, segment your customers, and set up email flows according to your segmentation.
Pros
- Free forever plan
- Powerful segmentation
- Reporting including A/B testing
Cons
- You need deeper pockets
- Even with advanced features, it doesn’t offer extras as compared to competitors to justify the pricing
- If a contact in your list has installed an ad blocker in their browser, a click on the link in an email will not be opened but blocked
Who is Klaviyo for?
Klaviyo is a good fit for online retailers. It tracks your site so that you can figuratively listen for cues from your visitors, subscribers, and customers and turn that information into relevant messages for your audience. You can track how much money each email campaign makes.
You can see it’s clearly geared towards merchants as it has tight integrations with the most widely used shopping carts such as Magento, Bigcommerce, WooCommerce, or Shopify and has pre-built workflows for
- Abandoned cart
- Post-purchase follow up emails
- Personalised product recommendations
- Order out for delivery
- Segmentation based on ecommerce related factors
Don’t worry if these terms go over your head. Klaviyo is a tool for advanced ecommerce marketing automation. It comes with a ton of advanced tools and functionalities. This is a boon if you’re a seasoned pro and know your way around advanced tools.
But if you’re just looking to set up some autoresponders or are new to email marketing, then Klaviyo’s more a bane and you’d be probably happier elsewhere (check out the other email marketing providers, such as Aweber).
Klaviyo user interface
Klaviyo is most useful if it’s integrated with a shopping cart. It then reduces your time spent on chicken between tabs in your browser. All the advanced features and tools mean it might take some time to get used to it, particularly for people who’re not (yet) experienced in email marketing.
That being said, even with all the advanced features, the user interface is uncluttered and there’s nothing hidden behind endless submenus or cryptic icons.
Campaigns
You usually send out a campaign to get your subscribers to take an action, be it clicking on a link, buying a product. It’s anything you want. Besides email campaigns, you can also create SMS campaigns. For this review, I’m only going to look at email campaigns.
Creating an email campaign is a simple 3 step process
- Define your recipients
- Add content
- Review
For your content, you can choose to use
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Text only
- HTML
You’ll find the template gallery when you use the drag-and-drop editor. If you’ve integrated Klaviyo with your ecommerce platform, it will pull product recommendations into your emails which saves you a lot of tedium and time.
Sign up forms
Unlike some marketing automation providers, Klaviyo only lets you create signup forms but not landing pages.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
Since Klaviyo pulls in information from your site, you don’t need multiple tools to collect, store and analyse customer data. You have all the data from your customer and subscribers in Klaviyo. The data points of your audience are
- What did they look at
- What did they react to
- What are they buying
- And more
These data points help you segment your contacts. You can define multi-dimensional rules for your automation.
Automation
As Klaviyo is focused on ecommerce, it comes with some pre-built workflows. These triggers are based on real-time customer behaviour.
With the help of its visual workflow editor, you can build automation with conditional steps, waiting periods… in short workflows as complex as you can imagine.
Klaviyo integrations
The integration with various shopping carts is already mentioned. Other integrations are for
- Shipping
- CRM
- Payments
- And more
Klaviyo reporting
Reporting is central to Klaviyo, which is why its dashboard gives you options to view your numbers or today, the last 7 days, the last 30 days, the last 90 days, and the last year. You can also customise the analytics dashboard to get a better insight into what’s going on.
This way, you can see how many people clicked a link and viewed a product after a campaign. You can see how many sales you made from a campaign. It gives you the data you need so you can optimise your marketing.
A/B testing
This also means you can split test your campaigns. You can split test your campaigns based on the unsubscribe or bounce rate. This will give you insight into what headlines or email designs your audience finds engaging and help you adjust your campaigns.
Support
When you’re working on a campaign, you can always hit the support link in the top navigation. This brings you to its support centre, where you can search for your topic or choose to
- Ask the community
- Mail to support
- Chat with support
Pricing
Since Klaviyo offers both email and SMS automation, the pricing is based on how many contacts you have and how often you want to reach out to them. It has a calculator that gives you an estimate.
Is Klaviyo right for you?
Klaviyo clearly is concentrating on online retailers with some pretty advanced features. With its tight integration with ecommerce platforms, it will make your marketing life easier, although you’d need deeper pockets.
Just know that its comprehensive feature set may be a tad intimidating for some, particularly this not knee-deep int email marketing.
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Original post here: Klaviyo review – marketing automation for merchants
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