Klaviyo: E‑mailmarketing & sms

Unbelievably non intuitive. Wouldn't text me for previewing the SMS email. Also, the form just simply wouldn't go onto my website. It didn't show up for me, would show up randomly for others, and the preview, and the final design on the website were completely different

Pretty disappointed with the app. It's outdated, clunky, and has one of the worst UI and UX I've ever seen, as well as overly complicated even for simple tasks. The app needs a COMPLETE overhaul. There's nothing to save or improve in the interface. the UI/UX needs a complete redoing.
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And I say this as a professional in marketing for over 20 years who is not just a beginner, and who's not easily discouraged by complex interfaces. This is not complex, it's simply broken for the most part. Feels like I'm using an app developed in 1996 when Microsoft Windows was barely taking a foothold.
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Yes, the app is fairly strong, it excels in segmentation, flow triggers, and flow charts - it does the extra 5% mile that other apps don't do, although other apps are pretty much there anyway. So, is that 5% overly complicated extra mile really necessary? Yes, if you're a corporate brand selling in 100+ countries, having 1000+ customer segments, and you don't mind overcomlpicating your life with counterintuitive clicks, day in day out. But other than that, the app is simply not effective for 90% of the jobs you have to do.
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- The email editor is almost impossible to use, and it's impossible to create consistent email designs (and no, this is not just a matter of different email clients rendering the email in different ways).
- Simple tasks that should take a few clicks end up taking hours and hours of configurations and checks and rechecks: it just makes you go mad after a while.
- Having the highest price on the market (in this email marketign field) for being self-proclaimed as "the best" in the niche... is simply not justified.
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Considering that, as a business owner, you will probably spend 80% of your time in the marketing app, you may want to avoid apps that make you pull your hair out.
By all means, please go ahead and try it, before you decide on a different solution, just so you take an informed decision. This is not a decision you have to take lightly.
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Oh, by the way, if you have a database of subscribers in Shopify, none will be marked as subscribed in Klaviyo. You have to literally rebuild your entire database of customers, and ask them again to consent to your marketing (most of which will never do on a second time despite placing an order with you previously and accepting to be subscribed in that moment when they actually desired the product from you, when their subscribtion intent was highest). This is mad. Klaviyo's explanation: it's just the privacy / consent / GDPR policy, and we don't want to assume responsibility for anything because God forbids, you may be faking the consent in Shopify, so we don't trust the Shopify consent, we need a separate consent just for Klaviyo.
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Also, the customer service is pretty much non-existent, other than emails over 24 hours where the customer service simply points you to some basic help articles in their knowledge base.
And, God fobids you need actual help with anything: for the most part they'll say it's not their job and that you need to hire a professional instead.
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I say this with a heavy heart because I had high hopes from this app, and I didn't want to leave this review knowing that there are some real people behind working on it, but things had to be said. Whoever is in charge of leading the direction, it's leading it in the wrong direction, and dragging the entire team with them.

UPDATE... My review below still stands. Kalviyo seems to have gotten eveen worse, they bill you such a high amount for the users you have, and then a very high threshold of emails to send to hit that amount, basically forcing you to constantly spam your users just to hit the threshold. Feels like so much money is being burnt here. Really crazy how much they have increased the price over the years, with no changes at all to the service. Their SMS is also awful, so incredibly over priced, and very misleading on the charges. I hope they make adjustments to this platform to make it better for their users, Seems like all they care about is jacking up the price before their IPO on wallstreet. Its a shame.

It's a great app for the most part, but it's very unsettling how much they have increased the price and made no changes to justify that.
Its VERY difficult to gauge how much your monthly bill will be, as they always tack on new charges. i have noticed the wait times drastically increase for customer support over the years as well.
It usually takes them a very long time to help and all they do is send you long confusing articles I really wish they didn't basically double the price.

I hate the Klaviyo app. I was forced to switch over to it when I hired an email marketing team last year and I wish I never left Omnisend. Klaviyo requires you to be an expert on their platform in order to be able to use it. I've been trying to modify a basic ORDER CONFIRMATION email, I just need it to show the variants of the products ordered, the prices, shipping, tax and total.. but it's so difficult to do!!! It shouldn't be so difficult to make a basic order confirmation email show the items ordered and the total paid... I will be leaving Klaviyo as soon as I can figure out how to migrate all my existing flows to a better platform.

There is zero customer support from this app on the free plan, not even email. I know many aps will limit support on free plans (e.g. you don't get live support), which is fair enough. However, you can't even reach anyone by email if you have a problem without upgrading to a paid plan.

We are a new and growing business so where we can we are using lower cost or free plans to begin with, but will of course upgrade as appropriate as we grow. But if this is how Klaviyo approach customer support, why would I upgrade to a paid plan.

To be fair, for what I am currently using for at least, the app works well and is fairly user friendly once you get used to it.

es muy molesto que al desinstalar la aplicación, te deje residuos, que luego con un programador debas de eliminar del codigo de tu pagina web. muy mal por eso.

Really good concept, but I personally found difficult to use, expensive and not very good in terms of emailing, all in all.. I would find an alternative!

They used to have great live chat support during business hours, and although they still "say" they do, and advertise it - THEY DON'T. I've tried multiple times on multiple days to get help through their chat support, and it just takes to you a form, to submit a ticket, and then they get back to you 2, 3 or 4 days later. This comes after they raised their prices. This seems to be a trend. This comes from a business owner that's been using Klaviyo for about 4 years now. The app is buggy, there's been no major updates or improvements over the years, and the cost goes up. They're ripe for a competitor to come in and provide better customer service, and a better UI experience at a lower cost.

Beware of the money grab that is bot accounts created by Klaviyo. They somehow bypass shopifys reCAPTCHA feature and Klaviyos own form requirements for new account setups.

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.