Klaviyo vs Mailchimp

Klaviyo is one of the best email marketing tools for e-commerce stores, especially if you want to build out things like different sales sequences, upsells, or abandoned cart flows.

Klaviyo gives you templates that are based on best practices from across the e-commerce space, which is why they tend to perform well. When speaking to friends in the e-commerce space, they all said they use Klavyio, it’s pretty much become the default tool e-commerce stores rely on.

While Klaviyo started as only email marketing flows, they now call themselves a B2C CRM where your customer data, messaging, and automation all live in one place. That’s what allows you to personalize flows based on real behavior (e.g. you can email someone if they added a product to their cart and didn't check out, or send them an email sequence if they haven't re-purchased in the past 60 days. Klaviyo also seems to be better than Shopify for A/B testing these flows.).

You're probably exploring tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot (Marketing Hub), Kit, Loops, and even Postmark, and you're probably banging your head against the wall because you're overwhelmed with options and not quite sure of the actual differences.

You're probable checking "does it integrate with my CRM?" and the most confusing bit of it all is that what you think integrating with your CRM and what the marketing sites list as integrating are two totally separate things.

Mailchimp is the 800lb gorilla in the space—has been around the longest, has the most "integrations" out of the box, but as they've grabbed more and more of the market, they've had to expand their product offering to generate more revenue. Even expanding to offering websites, stores, and appointment booking (only to get worse with their recent acquisition by Intuit—how do you become a $100bn email sending company? You don't, you expand to everything but the kitchen sink):

The sheer number of options and products available is overwhelming

So dive into Mailchimp and you'll be introduced to what feels like 20 different areas to accomplish basic things (even just on the sending email front)—sending email shouldn't be so complicated.

They also focus heavily on "beautiful email templates that match your brand", well the open-rates and click-through of highly templated/branded emails have fallen off a cliff in recent years. Would you believe that with so much automated emails, people actually prefer receiving emails that feel like they were sent by a human? Big shocker, right? 😅

We highly recommend checking out a more simple tool like Loops to build out and manage your marketing emails (it's what we use for our newsletter).