Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

Sept. 3, 2020

Useful with some powerful tools, but customer service is lacking a bit and not responsive and the platform can sometimes be klunky. For example, applying consistent colors, logos, fonts, etc. across different campaigns, emails, lists, preference pages, etc. is often very time consuming and hard to implement. Email flows seem to work well though.

July 12, 2020

I’m writing this review a week in. I actually think in the long-term this will be a good app for my store. But the on-boarding and customer service has been very disappointing. First, be aware that Klaviyo customer service is run by chat. I’ve had to enter the queue for that chat three times, the first two because I missed my moment to chat. The queues are upwards of 30-50 people long, which takes 30-45 minutes. And if you miss your window, you get back in line. It took me three hours in total to get a response. Second, while sales people were quick to respond in order to get a signup, they’ve all but ghosted since. For example, I emailed about my help-chat challenges and I heard nothing back. Third, they suggest you sign up for a paying account way too early. I HIGHLY recommend getting your customizations set up first. Klaviyo WILL start sending their own newsletter sub confirms, whether you’ve customized or not. All in all, I’d break it down like this: on-boarding and help desk 2/5; platform potential 4-4.5/5.

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.

Oct. 21, 2019

It's good, until it isn't. Our account was suspended today with no warning whatsoever - apparently sending to non engaged customers. It's been 8 hours and NO response from their customer service team. Totally unacceptable.

Oct. 1, 2019

The app itself seems to be doing what it should - and I think better than Mailchimp. This one has better features. But the costumer service has so far been really bad. I have contacted them for 2 weeks now and no reply. Is a bit frustrating to pay for a product, and ending up hirering people from outside to help you out...

Nov. 20, 2018

Its a robust app for sending email campaigns. I wouldnt call it simple to use though. Everything you have to start from scratch. My main negative with it is the price. We have a large database of 39000 subscribers and Klaviyo is charging us USD $600 a month for the app which I think is ridiculous. Once upon a time with traditional bricks and mortar stores, a database of 39000 was considered huge. But with ecommerce, you reach these kind of numbers in a much shorter period. The only reason I have stuck with Klaviyo is because you can create dynamic (always updating) audiences to use in Facebook advertising. ie. we can advertise to customers who have bought product X but not Y. Once other email apps have this feature Im afraid I will be abandoning ship. Sorry guys, but paying $600 a month for an email program is insane. You are being too greedy.

Oct. 11, 2017

I've been using Klaviyo for a few weeks now. Here are my thoughts. This app has potential to be awesome. It has very powerful tools that allow it to integrate with shopify and many other apps and should allow you to very specifically target customers based on event and other criteria. It should also allow you to track very closely what kind of emails are working and which are not. In actuality it is very cumbersome to set up and manage. The reporting doesn't seem to track all conversions so it's really hard to know what's working and what's not. The stats take a long time to update. I tried integrating it with JustUno and the integration works sometimes and doesn't work other times. It doesn't integrate with any of the apps that do live chat. Customer service is basically MIA. I haven't made up my mind whether to delete this app or not. I put a lot of work into setting up flows and list and it seems to have so much potential, but in actuality I was getting better results from a simple once a week generic email. The app is very expensive and if I can't get it worked out I will have to switch to something else.

Oct. 19, 2016

Great product, only they seemed to have stopped developing. Product hasn't had any new features lately, customer service is slow, but mainly the price is bothering me. Every extra 500 people in your account costs $25 a month extra... I first need to recoup my Klaviyo costs and then hope I can make some profit of the emails. I would have expected the costs to decrease relatively when getting more subscribers, but it's just linear. Great potential, weak execution.