Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

The platform is amazing -best out there .really happy with how it performs and ease of use . Love the courses . 5 stars

BUT the support is lacking .very very slow, limited weekend response , no phone number. Urgent issues when you can’t get into your account -took days to get a response ...very stressful when your business is running through it to not be able to ring , or have any online chat . Fix this and you’ll get 5 stars ⭐️

it should be good but terrible, it is stuck at verifying my domain, and cannot contact the support

UPDATE: Several people from the Klaviyo team has reached out to me after posting this review. I have had a meeting with someone from the UX team, and they have promised to prioritise this feature for Q4 2022. I have also given some additional feedback regarding the email builder, and hope it will work better soon :)

I'll update my score as soon as it has been implemented

Original review:

Klaviyo awesome for its segmenting, automation and data capabilities, but the editor is far below what one can expect from an expensive enterprise tool like this. It can do practically anything in terms of segmentation and so on.

More specifically, there is no way to add the compare at price in the native product blocks. The field is easily accessible through Shopify's API. I consider it to be basic functionality for any tool like this, and I first suggested they need to add it when we signed up 8 months ago. Then a few more times after that. Even dragging myself through the consistent 30minutes+ waiting time in the chat.

There are great people working there. The sales person we signed with is probably the best seller I have ever encountered in my entire professional life. The onboarding guy we got was lovely and competent as well. Yet... my only option to make them fix this very simple and critical thing, seems to be to rattle the cage as hard as I can from all directions.

Displaying a price without a reference point is practically pointless when running a sale to get rid of excess inventory. "Awesome gloves, $40" gives zero incentive to click a product in a newsletter compared to "Awesome gloves, $40 (down from $95)".

We made the switch mainly to reduce mental friction of sending more and better newsletters and flows, as well as better segmenting. But this tiny and seemingly insignificant lack of feature makes it all in vain. Fix it.

There is a learning curve to using this platform and the new rules with email have made that harder.

The first time I used this app I thought it was great, but then my account was disabled and that caused me great frustration. I tried to reach out to someone and it wasn't easy, but a real person did connect with me. She explained what was going on with my account. Thank you for helping me out.

Now, I think I'm back on track.

Excellent app for the last 2 years but this business of limiting emails hinders the performance of growing stores. They just don't seem to get it you will be resending your emails to the same people who only engage but never buy. After 10+ years of doing this, you need to hit the fresh inbound emails more frequently. I am leaning towards moving on if this hinders my business growth. It seems there are better options now than from 2+ years ago being on Shopify.

Its a robust app for sending email campaigns. I wouldnt call it simple to use though. Everything you have to start from scratch.

My main negative with it is the price. We have a large database of 39000 subscribers and Klaviyo is charging us USD $600 a month for the app which I think is ridiculous.

Once upon a time with traditional bricks and mortar stores, a database of 39000 was considered huge. But with ecommerce, you reach these kind of numbers in a much shorter period.
The only reason I have stuck with Klaviyo is because you can create dynamic (always updating) audiences to use in Facebook advertising.
ie. we can advertise to customers who have bought product X but not Y.

Once other email apps have this feature Im afraid I will be abandoning ship.
Sorry guys, but paying $600 a month for an email program is insane. You are being too greedy.

Klaviyo is good except one major disadvantage. I am very disappointed that it cannot generate "Buy X Get Y" type coupon code. This is a very very common type of discount code and it can also be generated in Shopify. However, if i generate in Shopify, then, i cannot set a limited time offer in the FLOW.

I really hope Klaviyo can solve this issue in the very near future. Then, i will add the review stars back.

We luckily moved from Mailchimp months before they apparently cut ties with Shopify.

This application is certainly a step up in many regards with clean and tight integration from Shopify, enabling you to easily filter down to highly optimized people on your list and the visible layout of your automations/flows is really helpful and intuitive. Having all of that integration available in your automations/flows is simply fantastic.

Live chat is helpful too for minutely detailed questions that are not necessarily clear as to how certain definitional conditions may work.

The drawbacks I have -- 2 minor and 1 major:

MINOR:
(1) If you are sending out a campaign and you want to send it to a particular audience, you cannot create the audience in the campaign conditions itself. You have to first go create the segment (or new list) and then go back to your campaigns and assign that newly created segment as the target of your email. In mailchimp, you could just create the definition of the person who met 'x' conditions in the campaign builder itself rather than having to leave it, go create a stagnant group/segment, and then return back to the campaigns to send the campaign to that new group/segment. Would think/hope that Klaviyo would've implemented this by now (been with them for a little over a year), as that seems to be a quite helpful method of streamlining things when sending a campaign.

(2) You're limited on the # of test emails you can send. So, if you use glockapps, for example, to test if your emails are going to inboxes, you are limited to something like 100 test campaigns per day for the purposes of them limiting spam, I believe. It's prima facie understandable, but after a client has been with them for a certain amount of time and they see a reputable send rate/open rate/click rate, etc., it would be helpful to have this limit lifted so as to not handcuff the people who are actually attempting to send quality emails by testing them before sending to make sure they arrive in inboxes.

MAJOR:
We have had a LOT of people on our list email us about after clicking a link in an email, google gives them a warning that the site they're linking to might not be safe. Klaviyo adds a "trk" before the links in the URL when you click on links and seems to effectively re-direct to the actual link after it runs its tracking to provide you analytics (try it and see).

This error seems to appear primarily (if not excusively) for gmail accounts, which is a large portion of emails on our list (and will probably increase in that direction). So, it's quite problematic for us. We've inquired multiple times and there has been no reasonable solution provided. This was the primary response from Klaviyo:

"At this time, this is not something we can set-up for you but you would need to set-up a reverse proxy. That handles the SSL traffic and sends it over to us. Now you can also use a 3rd Party CDN to accomplish this, i.e. Cloudflare, Fastly, KeyCDN, Cloudfront, etc."

Regardless if you keep the global tracking feature on or off when sending campaigns or flows, this "trk" feature shows up and creates this issue. This may not be a big issue for you (though I think it would for most), but it certainly is for us and remains unaddressed with no reasonable resolution for us to pursue (and seems like something we should not have to resolve on our end -- the above response is Greek to me).

I can't believe we're the only ones experiencing this issue with our audience. Anyone else?

Otherwise, a great product.

Pax.

It's good, until it isn't. Our account was suspended today with no warning whatsoever - apparently sending to non engaged customers. It's been 8 hours and NO response from their customer service team. Totally unacceptable.

Klaviyo's UI is a bit more well-designed and usable than Mailchimp. We switched in order to be able to have more flexibility for what Klaviyo calls "flows" and Mailchimp called "automations".

It's definitely not great though. There are lots of insane caveats. For example there's no way to click on a user and tell where they are in a flow. And there's no way to add more content to the end of a flow and just have it automatically go to everyone that should be sitting and waiting at the end for more.

When we test our emails with mail-tester.com they almost always get flagged with Klaviyo having an IP address in one or more blacklists. Mailchimp never had that problem.

Klaviyo also pointlessly requires a Captcha on every single login.