Klaviyo

Klaviyo is the gold standard in eCommerce email & SMS marketing for a reason. It serves as a central hub for all your customer data and is the foundational building block for a strong segmentation & CLV strategy. It's extremely powerful with lots of features to tailor your marketing to your specific business case. I've also been very pleased with Klaviyo's customer support and educational resources.

Let's face it — this isn't the cheapest email software out there. For small eComm companies that are just starting out, it likely isn't the best option. The price isn't justified unless you have a decent-sized list and traffic on your site. It's also complex so there's a little bit of a learning curve.

The Klaviyo application is very powerful, no doubt.

The UI for the automation flow filters are not intuitive and not well designed. Basic requirements for flows are unnecessarily difficult to implement.

When you contact Klaviyo support, staff gives information that contradicts their published documentation and often don't actually give the correct advice at all, resulting going around in circles trying to get issues resolved.

Klaviyo list management is also poor, and like some other platforms (seems to be a trend), Klaviyo gears the system towards pushing you to pay for more customer profiles than you actually need and then when you try to clean or remove profiles you have to go through manual processes, whereas Klaviyo could easily provide options to automate this, or at least NOT require manual CVS export/imports. I mean really Klaviyo it's 2022 people.

The Klaviyo visual builder is buggy, even in their "NEW" builder there were bugs with things as basic as applying link colour styles at a global level. Generally also poor UI for the visual builder.

Overall, it's almost like the Klaviyo designers tried to make the UI as clunky as possible, probably went to the same design school as the Mailchimp designers (which is equally terrible).

Ability to create more personalized emails based on how user is interacting with our website and purchase history. Great integrations with many eCommerce platforms.

If you are using a custom ecommerce platform with Java or .Net, there are no SDK's available for the integrations. The documentation for their REST API's is confusing. Ability to create and manage transactional email templates is clunky.

Klaviyo is the best Ecommerce email platform. It's the place for your lifetime value and segmentation strategy. And the customer service is second to none. It has so many features, and can do anything you need.

It's expensive, so if you're looking for something cheap, look elsewhere. Since it's also tiered, you should have a minimum number of subscribers and revenue per month to make it worth it.