Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

Poor support. Never heard anything back from them. Plans are super expensive. Paid over 250$ a month and support can't even reply to you!

Overall the software works, but it's such a hassle to set-up and use, a very unfriendly layout. Analytics is overly complicated too.

Klaviyo is full of bugs. For instance, their default email preferences update does not display the current selections of the user. When I reported this to customer support, they insisted that this was not a bug at all but rather an enhancement request. Insane! I then discovered on my own that Klaviyo allows you to create your own email preferences page, but as they explicitly say, they offer no support for it, you are on your own. After struggling on my own I got it working, only to then realize that this page is only HTTP and insecure. So I spent a day figuring out some clever workarounds to solve this but then another bug has now crashed this feature completely. I am stuck waiting until tomorrow when customer support chat is available again to fix this. Email support autoreply tells me to expect to wait 48 hours. This is just one of at least half a dozen bugs I've encountered, each of which cost me days of work to find workarounds on my own. Customer support chat can go four days in a row without being available due to maintenance overlapping with the weekend. FOUR DAYS!!! When customer support chat is down for maintenance, there is no prior warning or current alert when you try to use it. It is just greyed out for no apparent reason. When this first happened to me, I wasted an hour trying to figure that out before giving up and switching to email support. The only reason I don't totally regret picking Klaviyo is I suppose other platforms could be worse or have their own set of issues. If you like frustration, you will love Klaviyo.

UPDATE: I am leaving at 2 stars because when Klaviyo works, it does the trick. But I am back to spending days getting their preferences pages working. After 18 months, it spontaneously broke and I am back to this nightmare. Klaviyo support has given up solving their bug and has asked me to use Cloudflare community postings for help in solving this.

The app seems to be amazing and it has everything I need, but.......Unfortunately, I am not impressed by the level of customer service for new customers with under 500 emails. Its free to use BUT it takes at least 24 hours to receive any help. They rely mostly on training videos and FAQs, but if you need immediate help, this is not the app for you. I don't understand why they don't offer the same level of support for growing business. How do you expect to retain them?

Overall it appears to integrate with Shopify just fine, however, I am disappointed that Klaviyo doesn't have an app to manage direct SMS communication or at least see SMS metrics + SMS Conversations on the go via an Android or iPhone app. Why let us port in a toll-free 888 number if we can only use a desktop web browser to manage SMS conversations? Please make an app, even if lightweight, to manage SMS messages on the go so I don't have to look at 20 emails to manage messages, and get MORE email as I respond to customer messages via SMS. My primary support is through SMS, and Klaviyo does not currently appear to be SMS-friendly for SMS Chat support. This review would be 5-star if I can manage my SMS customer support on the go. Not sure if I really wish to do the LOA to port another number to Klaviyo and maybe just stick with SimpleTexting.com instead for my SMS Customer Support. Search my store name on Google. Using Shopify chat features instead of Klavyio for now. PS if Shopify adds the ability to port in numbers for SMS Chat support, I'm dropping SimpleTexting and Klaviyo immediately. On an ending positive note, email templates are pretty nice, but I'm very disappointed with the lack of SMS chat features.

UPDATE: Klaviyo is completely down. Even the main site is not responding.
UNACCEPTABLE!

SO FAR UNIMPRESSED! The system has serious performance issues. All day long no statistics are being returned and the whole system to me seems like its timed out big time. I was once a paying customer and returned but things are not the way they used to be.

Also, dont expect any kind of support from these people on a FREE TRIAL account. You will be lucky if you get a reply and when you do nothing gets resolved. Instead they ignore your email until you do.

What kind of business practice is this? Either you want trail / free accounts to signup or you dont? Take your pick.

1) System issues (since i signed back up)
2) Lousy support (no resolutions)

I know i know, as stated they dont support trial / free accounts. HINT: well maybe you should, thats where your future $$$$ is coming from.

I got an automatically generated email from Klaviyo asking me to write a review because they would "We really, really appreciate it." So here it is.

As I have just gone live, and have not yet sent out a newsletter, I cannot speak yet as to the effectiveness of using their tools. Time will tell.

I can, however, relate the frustration I have experienced in setting things up. Their default templates are, how can I say this... ugly. Very ugly indeed. So I needed to customize them before their emails become one of the faces of my business. This has been enormously tedious.

First off, visually, the template system they are using is pretty limiting. So it took a some experimentation before I could make the emails look like anything I'd want to send. The problem is, is that you cannot save edited "blocks" to a library to use in other emails. Changes have to be made over and over and over. This gets really tedious. When you first set up the account you go through a Setup Wizard in which you configure the base look. One can re-take the Wizard to change the base look, but any template you've changed will not be updated. So I recommend that you do not make any changes to individual templates but go back through the Setup Wizard to make changes. I wish I had realized that before it was too late.

There are 7 Shopify Notifications for which they generate the HTML to replace in Shopify. However, Shopify has 9 customer-facing notifications. So it is left up to you to cobble together the remaining two -- Customer Account Activation & Refund Notification. I asked about that and their response was that they chose the most popular Shopify Notifications. Seems like they could have extended it by 2.

There are also 5 default email forms, which are used to handle subscribes / unsubscribes, etc. If you have customized your design, those also have to be changed accordingly.

There are the "flows" emails. Abandoned Cart 1 & 2, Customer Winback 1 & 2, New Customer Thank you, Repeat Customer Thank you, and Product Review / Cross Sell. So that's 7 templates to be edited to match, provided you are customizing your email look and feel outside of the Wizard. Again, if they provided the option of saving customized blocks to a library, this would be no problem.

And then there is the newsletter template(s) which is why I signed up in the first place. It too has to be edited, and where I started.

I'm finding the available product-feed "block" styles to be limiting. First off, it is limited to 3 rows. At my store, I keep 8 products in the "New Arrivals" collection, which are displayed in 2 rows of 4 columns on my homepage. So I cannot show 8 items in the email. In their newsletter template I am displaying 3 rows x 2 columns = 6 products. I could display 9 items -- 3 rows x 3 columns, but I only have 8 products. I'll have to find out how it handles the blank product slot.

I just sent myself a preview of the "New Product Arrivals" newsletter. Yesterday I added two new products and removed the two oldest products from that Custom Collection. However, the email sent to me does not show the newest products and does show the old products I removed yesterday. This could be a deal-breaker as it MUST show the newest products. Right?!

The product feed block does not offer customization of the content -- title and image only. I'd love to have a description. Yes, I could use the "Story Box" template, but that requires lots of hand editing. Not good for automating a "new arrivals newsletter" email.

Be careful about editing. The only option is to save. There are no buttons to cancel or discard changes. I found that the only way to abandon changes was to hit the browser's back button.

A lot of what I'm seeing seems well thought-out, however, the provided tools to customize (and re-customize) the look and feel is very limited and, for me, has caused hours of tedious work.

I am phasing Klaviyo out of my stores because it significantly slows them down, hurting SEO, and cancelation requires an email, the address for which they do not share on their site.

As much as they try to make it sound easy...Klaviyo is not easy unless you are an EXPERT. I am not. Support will not provide support unless you pay them. Their videos are not helpful to me. Seems to me that they would assist as much as possible to get you to the level of meeting the must pay. If it were my business with a free level that required payment once a store reached a certain level, I would bust my butt to help that store get to that level.

Constantly disconnects - have had to redo my entire account about 5 times now. However - when it works, it works.

Great email service, very easy to use, and is one if not the best I believe for automation and flows however their customer service needs to be looked at. For a company of this size and the price there asking, live chat should be available to paying customers 24/7 to include customers outside the US. I hope someone from management can view this review and take it into consideration