Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

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.

L'application est vraiment complexe à utiliser, trop d'infos, on n'y comprends rien. Je ne sais même pas annuler mon abonnement facilement. Concernant les mails, le design est très limité!

Love being able to automate and setup flows, integrate with so many other apps, and do the marketing heavy lifting!

I am a beginner user but the interface is easy enough for me to understand and they have help resource pages with instructions. I like how it is easy to set up emails with drag and drop components. It's also nice that it syncs into my product listing so I can pull from there to put products into emails.

Even after disconnecting this app, they still bill me. Their instructions for cancelling my account was really hard.

Klaviyo is what's up. Provides you with sensitive data on your customers, especially data about who the sales referrer is! Top stars for Klaviyo.

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.

Klaviyo does an excellent job on guiding my business to achieve its destination toward success. A clear and precise explanation through it's tutoring simplicity reveals the quality of expertise it offers to VIP Communities.

terrible app, i also unsubscribed and continue receiving emails from them, very frustrating :( grrrrr

Clearly some great features on this app but I have found it really painful to get going with. Very irritating "compliance review" meant my account was blocked as soon as I tried to send first emails. Customers have had to wait days for Thank You emails for their orders. Have had to upgrade immediately to disable double opt in and even that is proving difficult to do. Finding it complicated to do basic tasks like send one off emails. Has got my stress levels up - I hope it's worth persevering with!