Catholic Productions review for Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

Dec. 9, 2019

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.