Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

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.

If you just want to send out the occasional email newsletter, there are less expensive alternatives out there. If you want to send automated emails based on all sorts of scenarios, then this is the app for you. It can be pricy if you have a big email list to import, but the amount of things you can do with this program is endless. Do you want to send an email to all customers who purchased X product after 30 days? It can be done. Abandoned cart emails, waking up dormant customers, it's all there. Being able to include personalized product recommendations in all your emails is a big plus as well.
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Simple to use, great content, and very efficient and convenient with my Shopify store! The only thing I wish they would add is an "undo" button while building templates. Other than that, it's great!

I do love using this app. I have converted over from mailchimp and Klaviyo offers a lot more than mailchimp. I'm still working my way around the app but i like it so far. And the best part is that it integrates with almost everything.

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.

The app is good and has many different conditions and triggers, but Klaviyo has a massive room for improvement compared to other email marketing companies.

Cons: however, the biggest disadvantage is that they do not have an option that could allow using template inflows, you basically have to create everything from scratch by yourself.

Pros: as I said it has many different triggers and rules that you can set up.

We recently started using Klaviyo and are really happy with it! It's very easy to use and looks great! We tested out a few other email marketing providers for eCommerce and found Klaviyo to be the easiest to use - some other well-known ones were very glitchy!

So far I'm loving it. At first when seeing other people use it, it was confusing. But after getting the chance to slow down and taking the time to learn it for myself, it's not too bad after all and you do get the flexibility to add in your own graphics, gifs, etc. to really make it your own without having to use the basic outlines that's provided. Additionally, everything is just seamless, simple, and straight to the point. Also, I love creating the flows and triggers, too. That really helps. The only thing I wish is that more fonts were implemented aside from your basic helvetica, character spacing, and such. That would help a ton. But, otherwise, that's about it.

I've been using Klaviyo for over a year and have to say it's definitely the best for eCommerce. It's also the most expensive, but worth the price if you can afford it.

easy to create emails, over the top data analytics, and great customer service. I love the platform. Highly recommend it.