Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Which Automation Tool Would Give You a Higher ROI?

 

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach out to customers and prospects. That is why marketing automation tools have become a must-have for any marketers who want to stay competitive. These tools help them send out emails at the best time without annoying and overwhelming their receivers’ inboxes. These are particularly useful especially for small businesses since most of them have little money to invest in email marketing. 

And when it comes to automation software, there are two major players in the market: Klaviyo and Mailchimp. While both offer email automation and other useful features, there is only one that can be considered as the REAL WINNER. 

Which is which? Keep reading to find out. 

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: What’s the Difference?

Klaviyo is an email marketing platform that is designed to create, personalize, automate, and send emails with minimal effort. It also allows you to segment your contact list based on behavioral data (personal preferences, purchase history, and etc.) and data science to make email campaigns more effective and efficient. You can also set up email campaigns in minutes, integrate with your other existing marketing tools, manage email subscribers, and track metrics like open rates, click-throughs, email bounces, unsubscribes, and more. 

Read also: Mailchimp Review 2021: Is It Worth Your Time?

Mailchimp is also another popular email solution platform (ESP) used by marketers. It allows you to automate and send emails to your contact list. It is an easy-to-use and flexible tool that helps you build and automate your sales funnels, manage your sales, customer email lists, and build your entire email marketing strategy. 

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Features

Klaviyo and Mailchimp are both email marketing services that allow users to send out campaigns and newsletters. If you are considering switching from one service to the other, here is a comparison of their features. I’ve also included some key differences between them so you can see which one is better for your business. 

Segmentation

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp offer segmentation. They segment your contacts into smaller lists based on customers’ behavior and transaction history so you can send your campaign to your target audience easily and effectively. 

However, between the two, I find Klaviyo’s segmentation better. Unlike Mailchimp, it does not count the same subscribers when included in separate contact lists so your contact allowance would not be easily taken up. Also, it updates your contact list automatically allowing you to save your time doing manual checking. 

Flows and Automation

Automation is the feature that allows you to set up and manage your marketing. While flows are automated email sequences that you can create to send the right messages to the customers in a timely manner based on the trigger you include in it. Usually, these are welcome emails, thank you emails, greeting emails, abandoned cart emails, and etc. 

For Klaviyo, the majority of automation sequences of emails are available and do not need a third party. You can also choose from a vast number of templates and edit them according to your preference. You can also automate SMS so you can send personalized messages to your customers during your SMS marketing campaign. 

For Mailchimp, you can also set up and manage your marketing easily through its automation feature. But if you have a free plan, you need to have some third-party integrations for you to timely send the message to your customers. Advanced automation is only available if you subscribe to one of its paid plans.  

Personalization

Personalization is a feature that allows you to make emails that are more tailored-fit for your audience. In Klaviyo, you can use the following in personalizing your email campaigns and subject lines:

• Personalization Variables: Name, email addresses, etc.
• Custom Properties: Favorite color, birthday, etc.
• Account Variable: Organization’s name and addresses
• Event Variables

On the other hand, you can start personalizing your email campaign with Mailchimp by creating a subject line. They have personalization variables such as the recipient’s first name, last name, and email address. You can also activate the “Personalize the “To” field” and use the “Merge Tags” to make a more tailored-fit content.

Email and Newsletter Templates

Klaviyo and Mailchimp both have pre-built templates for emails and newsletters. They do not use large files for graphics and images that might affect your email deliverability rate. But do note that for Mailchimp, you can only access its templates if you subscribe to the Premium plan. Nonetheless, you can create your own template in Mailchimp from scratch, (just like in Klaviyo) using its drag-and-drop editor.

Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and analytics are both available for Klaviyo and Mailchimp. They both provide baseline success rate and basic data such as email metrics, open rate, unsubscribe rate. They also track the revenue of your campaign. However, you can get in-depth reporting for metrics such as active on site, bounce emails, clicked email, dropped email, marked email as spam, opened email, and received email in Klaviyo. 

Smart Sending

Mailchimp does not have Smart Sending. This is a game-changer feature offered by Klaviyo that allows you to limit your email sent to certain people in your contacts or exclude them from your email list for a given period of time. Through this, you can ensure that you are sending just the right amount of emails to your audience. 

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is predictive analytics that allows you to predict how many orders your customers will place in your store and when based on their transactional and behavioral data. Klaviyo and Mailchimp both have this feature. However, this is only available for Mailchimp Standard or Premium plans. You also need to connect your online store with Mailchimp and this should have enough eCommerce data to be able to have accurate predictions. 

Email Designer

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp use drag-and-drop editors to help you create personalized emails. You can have three columns in your templates 

However, you can create better emails in Klaviyo simply because you can have four columns as well as have a left and right bar to design your email templates. Plus it allows you to automatically optimize your emails for mobile viewing. 

For Mailchimp, you can only have three columns. But if you have a free account, you are only allowed to use one column. 

Landing Page

Klaviyo does not offer a landing page builder. Thus, you cannot create or build your landing pages on this platform. But you can use the subscribe pages which are somehow the same as the landing page. You can create a signup form for your subscribers so you can still onboard them on your contact list. 

Mailchimp has more than a hundred ready-made landing page templates that are all mobile responsive and professional looking. If you want to start from scratch, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to easily customize your landing page. 

Integrations

Klaviyo has strong integration with shopping websites like Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Commerce Cloud, Magento, WooCommerce, and even Facebook. So you can dynamically sync your list and segment them afterward so that your subscribers from these platforms can also receive your email campaigns. 

For Mailchimp, you can reach out to your customers and boost your sales since you can connect it with your other eCommerce platforms and web services such as Squarespace Commerce, Stripe, Shopware, Drupal, EZ Texting, and many more. It also has Shopify integration.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Pricing

You can use Klaviyo for free. Their free plan will already give you up to 250 contacts and you can send up to 500 emails per month. They will also give you email support in case you need technical assistance. But if you want to upgrade your plan, Klaviyo pricing currently starts at $20. With a paid subscription, you can unlock more features for automated emails, email templates, reporting, and one-click integration. You can also send unlimited emails. When you pay more, you can get more contacts as well. 

For marketing platform start-ups, Mailchimp offers a free plan up to 2,000 contacts with 1 audience included. You can also get marketing CRM, creative assistant, website builder, Mailchimp domain, as well as forms and landing pages. If you want to upgrade, they offer three paid plans with current pricing: Essential ($9.99 per month), Standard ($14.99 per month), and Premium ($299 per month).

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Customer Support

Klaviyo provides an excellent job in assisting their customers. As I mentioned above, they provide email support even if you are using their platform for free. If you have a paid plan, aside from email support, you can contact them through their live chat, from 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern time, from Monday to Friday. They also have a Community Forum that is available 24/7 for everyone. Aside from that, they have detailed resources uploaded on their website like training videos and getting started handbooks that are valuable especially for the new users. If things are a bit blurry for you, they have FAQs for Account Administration, Advertising, Analytics, Architecture & Data Model, Campaigns, Compliance, Custom Platforms & API, Email Deliverability, E-commerce Integrations, Flows, Guides, Lists & Segments, Other Data Integrations, People & Profiles, Signup Forms, SMS & Push Notifications, Templates, and Workshop & Events. 

Read also: Klaviyo: A Powerful ESP to Help You Automate Your Email Campaigns 

With Mailchimp, if you have a free plan, you can only get limited support. For the Essentials plan, you can get 24/7 email and live chat support. They do offer phone support however this is only available for the Premium plan. But you can access their resources uploaded on their websites. Added bonus because aside from English, resources are in Spanish, German, Portuguese, and French.

Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Pros and Cons

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp serve their purpose in allowing and helping you to automate and send emails to your subscribers. However, there is no “one-fits-all” tool. In this section, I provided a table to summarize each individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

Klaviyo

Mailchimp

Final Thought

In digital marketing, sending emails is a straightforward approach to reach out to your customers and engage with them. Email marketing has also become an essential technique to find new leads and build your brand without using a large amount of capital. However, in order to effectively do all these, you need a reliable tool that would help you automate, segment, and personalize your emails. This is the reason why Klaviyo and Mailchimp are among those ESPs that are dominating the market. They are both useful when it comes to automation, segmentation, and personalization. 

However, between these two, Klaviyo is the REAL WINNER and I highly recommend you to use this for your email marketing campaign because it includes all the necessary tools to build a successful marketing strategy. Even using a free plan with just 250 contacts, you can get a higher ROI because it offers a more comprehensive set of features than Mailchimp. You don’t need to have a paid plan to do multivariate and A/B testing. 

Aside from that, It has an advanced flow builder that segments your subscribers superbly, thus only the relevant emails would go to the right subscribers. The popup is also exceptional which helps you capture leads. It combines the power of AI and predictive analytics with an easy-to-use dashboard to help you engage with customers more effectively. Klaviyo’s API is also more powerful than Mailchimp’s. When you need assistance, Klaviyo has an excellent customer support team that is quick to respond and always happy to help.