Klaviyo vs Mailchimp – Which Is The Best Marketing App

Brands get $32 back for a dollar invested in email marketing, according to the 2023 State of Marketing Report from HubSpot. But for you to generate a 3,200% ROI for your ecommerce store, you need to invest in the tools that help you in the process. In this article, we help you compare Klaviyo vs Mailchimp, two of the most popular email marketing tools.

Klaviyo and Mailchimp are marketing automation tools. Both tools help marketers save time and be more effective. But they offer different feature sets and were created for different types of users.

In this article, we help you understand which one’s right for your marketing automation needs. And if you want to automate and streamline the majority of the processes in your ecommerce business, try MESA.

Main differences between Klaviyo vs Mailchimp

Klaviyo is tailor-made for ecommerce businesses, while Mailchimp is a general email marketing platform. For an ecommerce business, Klaviyo offers more value with Shopify integration, segmentation, and other advanced features.

Here are the main differences between Klaviyo vs Mailchimp:

• Pricing: Mailchimp is cheaper. Klaviyo is expensive but offers more value. Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo offer a free plan, but neither offers advanced features and chat support on the free plan.

• Segmentation capabilities: Klaviyo’s segmentation capabilities go far beyond Mailchimp’s. Unlike Klaviyo, Mailchimp doesn’t offer tags to define customers, a Facebook integration, or predictive analytics.

• Automation features: Klaviyo vs Mailchimp have a lot to offer here. But Klaviyo offers a lot more automation templates. Another factor to consider is that Mailchimp locks away most of its automation features behind paid plans.

• Reporting and analytics: Klaviyo has one of the most advanced analytics feature sets on the market. Mailchimp offers great automation options too, but Klaviyo’s features are hard to compete with.

• User-friendliness: Mailchimp is the clear winner here. That’s not to say Klaviyo is too complex, and it’s not worth your time learning.

• Integrations: Mailchimp offers more integrations because it’s a general email marketing tool. Klaviyo offers more in-depth integrations for ecommerce tools and platforms like Shopify.

Mailchimp is great if you need a general email marketing platform that doesn’t overwhelm you with advanced features. However, with Mailchimp, you’ll lose out on customization options and marketing via SMS.

Exploring Klaviyo

Star rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8)

Klaviyo is a powerful, AI-powered marketing platform for ecommerce owners. It helps you run personalized SMS marketing and email marketing campaigns.

You can personalize marketing material with more than just “Hi {first name}.” Klaviyo lets you insert dynamic blocks for product recommendations, shipment details, and cart content.

Klaviyo can help you accomplish a lot more than just running email campaigns.

For example, you can configure a Klaviyo workflow that tracks customers who add items to their cart and don’t checkout. You can retarget these customers with personalized messages or emails with cart content and related product recommendations.

Klaviyo’s advanced segmentation capabilities help you optimize marketing based on transactional and behavioral customer data pulled from your existing online store on Shopify.

For example, you can segment prospects and customers by product type, lifetime value, or shopping behavior.

Mailchimp offers basic segmentation. You can segment customers based on factors including age and campaign activity. But it doesn’t help target customers as specifically as Klaviyo.

You can also run predictive analytics to understand customer behavior and preferences with metrics like the average time between orders. This is a critical feature to consider because Mailchimp doesn’t offer predictive analytics.

Kalviyo Pricing:

• Free plan is available with 30-day email support.

• Paid plans are based on the number of contacts and SMS credits. You can start with $20 for email and $15 for SMS marketing. For 1000 contacts, you can estimate the pricing at $60/month for both email and SMS.

Exploring Mailchimp

Star rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6)

Mailchimp helps you capture leads through web forms and broadcast emails. At its core, Mailchimp is an email marketing software that sends automated emails.

Mailchimp also offers additional features like email templates, drag-and-drop email builder, A/B testing, multivariate testing, and email reporting. You’ll have to look at higher tier plans if you want to explore all the features of Mailchimp beyond the core email marketing platform.

The app includes ecommerce features. For example, Mailchimp users can build and publish simple landing pages for their email marketing campaigns. The problem? It can’t build complex ecommerce websites.

Mailchimp offers a library of automation workflows. While these are great for the price, Klaviyo’s workflow templates library is much larger. It also integrates with fewer apps than Klaviyo, so the customer data is less in-depth.

More importantly, most of these automation features are available on the free plan. The only automation feature free users get is a single-trigger workflow for a welcome email to new customers or order notification.

Mailchimp Pricing:

• Free Plan is available with 30-day email support.

• Paid Plans: Mailchimp for Shopify has three paid plans. Essentials, standard, and premium—starting at $13, $20, and $350 per month respectively.

Benefits of a great marketing app

Using a great marketing app that lets you automate processes adds value to your business in the following ways:

Streamline lead nurturing

Roughly 96% of website visitors are only there for preliminary research and aren’t ready to buy. But they may be at some point, and that’s why lead nurturing is critical.

Depending on the number of visitors you get, 96% can translate to a massive number of leads for ecommerce stores. Keeping tabs on those leads to nurture them should be the part of marketing strategy.

That’s where marketing automation tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp help. These tools allow you to send marketing material like emails and SMS at scale.

Personalize marketing

Personalization is no longer a differentiator. It’s the norm.

According to the 2023 State of Personalization Report, 56% of consumers say they’ll become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.

Using a marketing tool like Klaviyo or Mailchimp, ecommerce businesses can personalize marketing campaigns and retain customers.

For example, Klaviyo offers segmentation features that can help reach your customers via email and SMS. You can segment your audience by behavior or characteristics and send personalized emails.

Accurate reporting

Marketing automation software auto-generates reports that give you an overview of campaign performance.

These reports help identify friction points and other complications — are your leads dropping off during the email campaign? Or maybe the sales process needs some rethinking.

Klaviyo and Mailchimp both offer excellent reporting. But Klaviyo’s reports are more detailed — you can even see what your customers do in real-time.

Why automate marketing for ecommerce businesses?

Marketing automation offers the following benefits:

• Improve conversions: Marketing automation allows you to automate data collection. You can use this data to run personalized retargeting campaigns and analyze and optimize your strategy to improve conversions.

• Efficient processes: Automation helps free up your team’s time to work on the strategic side of things by automating mundane, repetitive tasks. It also helps get through your checklist faster by streamlining parts of the process like data collection and reporting.

• Improved testing: Marketing automation can help you automate A/B testing and other types of marketing tests. These tests tell you the most effective strategies so you can focus on them moving forward and increase your top line.

Do more with marketing without the work

When choosing an email marketing tool for your ecommerce store, it’s better to go with Klaviyo as it has grown within the Shopify ecosystem as a Shopify app. Klaviyo’s integration with other Shopify automation tools, like MESA can help ecommerce store operators reduce their time spent on repetitive tasks.

You can do even more by automating functions other than marketing using a tool like MESA. Getting started with MESA is easy. Just use one of its pre-built templates. Try MESA — 7-day trial included.