What is Klaviyo? Features, Pricing | How to get started with it?

Are you someone who is running an ecommerce business or willing to launch your online store where you can sell products all services to your audience? 

And, looking for a tool that can elevate your business to the next level then, one of the best tools I would like to suggest is Klaviyo. 

If you are wondering— What is Klaviyo? What does it do? How can this tool help you grow your business ? Don’t worry. 

In this article I will be sharing, all basic to advanced details about Klaviyo— 

• Its features and benefits 
• How can you get started with it
• And, some tips for effective email campaigns

What is Klaviyo? — An Overview:

Klaviyo is a marketing automation software specifically designed to cater the unique needs of E-commerce businesses, speeding up their marketing process while maintaining healthy and engaging relations with their customers. 

Founded in 2012 Klaviyo has become one of the most popular tools in the E-commerce industry with over 143000+ active users worldwide.

Those who’ve integrated Klaviyo into their business have experienced a significant boost in their revenue. You might be shocked to hear that all brands that have used Klaviyo have collectively generated over $100B+ in revenue.

The way it simplifies and automates the process of marketing is very effective from an e-commerce perspective. 

It offers various ways to be in touch with customers such as sending Email, SMS and Mobile Push notifications.

This feature is very useful to notify customers about —new product launches, upcoming sales and discounts or just to engage casually to enhance overall relations and retain them for a long time. This is what every e-commerce brand needs. 

For every business having a good relationship with customers is key to success. For that, understanding customers’ needs and providing them with the best product is a must. And, this is where Klaviyo comes in.

Besides automating your marketing processes it also helps in understanding customers at a deeper level by assisting in collecting customer data, managing it and use it effectively. 

This data can be used to create personalized email campaigns, flows and segmentation so you can offer the most relevant product and service to your customers.

Its advanced tools will help you track each step of customers on your website —their purchasing history, their search history, and their abandoned cart list and so on.

If you’re running an e-commerce store on Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce etc. and still have not used Klaviyo, then you’re missing out something great.

You can easily integrate Klaviyo with your e-commerce site and avail all of its features.

Key Features of Klaviyo : In short

After looking at the features that it offers, I can surely say that they have covered almost everything that any e-commerce store owner would like to integrate into their business.

Recently, they announced the Generative AI feature, and now users can leverage the power of AI in creating content for their email campaigns.

The user only has to describe what type of email they want and that’s it.
It’s generative AI will craft the most relevant emails while saving a lot of time and increasing productivity.

If you feel daunting while crafting compelling emails or have doubts about whether your email copies will convert or sink, then this AI feature can be a game changer for you.

Besides collecting customer data, it also helps in tracking the real-time behavior of visitors, so you can easily plan highly relevant personalized marketing campaigns for a very specific group of people based on their latest activities.

What Klaviyo has to offer ;

What I Like/dislike about Klaviyo?

Here is what I would like to share.

Likes,

• Definitely, all its features are astounding and worth paying for. 
• Easy to use Interface
• Customer support is great. 
• Easy integration with various e-commerce platforms. 
• API support
• Value for money, especially if you’re using it for e-commerce needs. 
• Powered by AI and Predictive analysis. 
• Personalized Benchmark; with this you can compare your business performance with similar businesses, gives you a great way to figure out the areas wherever you can work better.

Dislikes,

• Their pricing model is slightly expensive and complex, sounding unfavourable for small e-commerce businesses, individuals, or those who’ve just started. 
• Secondly, I feel that they should extend their free plan limit from 250 subscribers to at least 1000. By doing this, it will become easier to perform A/B testing from all angles. 
• There is no option to change the triggers of flows once they are activated. If you want to update the trigger of any particular flow which is already activated, Then, firstly, you will have to create a clone of that flow, and then you can change its trigger. 
• SMS marketing is only limited to few Countries.

Who is Klaviyo For?

Actually it totally depends on, What’s the main goal behind your marketing campaigns?

If your primary objective is to generate more revenue and sales from e-commerce perspective then it’s fine to go with it.

However if your prime motive is to share your thoughts or want promote your own products and services with your audience through e-mail it would be good to check out other option.

While Klaviyo is primarily designed to help e-commerce businesses, others can also leverage its benefits. 

Whether you are running a small business, a blog, a SAAS company, or are an influencer or any type of content creator who wants to communicate with an audience or keep them engaged, Klaviyo can help you.

If you are not into the eCommerce business but rather a small influencer or a content creator,

who just wants to use email marketing to be in touch with your audience and promote your products or services, then I wouldn’t recommend Klaviyo. 

As I mentioned above, it is highly focused on the e-commerce industry, and it can be costly from an individual or small business perspective.

Instead, there are lots of other email marketing platforms available, like Mailchimp and an Active Campaign, Converkit, which are much cheaper and also reliable. 

Klaviyo Pricing details

Their pricing structure depends on two factors

• No.of Contact 
• What marketing channel do you want; Only Email Or Email and SMS both? 

If you only want to use their email marketing feature then this is how it will cost—

For more details about how their pricing mechanism works, I recommend you to visit their pricing page. 

If we compare its pricing with other email marketing software like Active Campaign or Mailchimp, then it’s surely expensive,

but the advanced features and tools that it offers justify its price, especially when we are dealing with e-commerce marketing needs. 

Like, the level of segmentation it offers is far ahead as compared to other ESPs. 

If you want to track your customers’ every action on your website so you can offer the most personalised services to them, then I don’t think, there is any other tool better than this. 

Why trust me? You can try and taste it out for free. It offers a free plan for up to 250 subscribers. When your subscriber list starts growing, you will have to go for their paid plans. 

How to get started with Klaviyo?

I’m not going to get into much detail, but I’ll try to cover important steps that will help you in completing your onboarding.

So let’s directly jump into it

The first step begins with Creating your account. For that visit their official website and click on the signup button located at the top of the page. 

Enter your email and password for signing up. After you submit your email, verification link will be sent to your gmail inbox just head there and verify your account. 

Additionally, you will also ask to fill up your business details like, 

• Company Name 
• Company Website 
• Phone Number

Once you’re done with this. 

You can now select your E-Commerce platform that you are using such as…..

In this example, we will go with shopify -as one of the most trusted and widely used ecomm. platform. 

If you are using any other ecomm. platform; select that and the remaining process is fairly the same.

As we have selected Shopify here, for connecting it with Klaviyo, open your Shopify store’s home page in a new tab copy its URL and paste it into Klaviyo. And, Click on the continue button. 

Then after, you will be redirected to shopify backend where you will need to install the klaviyo app for your store. Simply  click on the install option on the top right. 

This will initiate the integration process

After that a new window will appear where you will be prompted to add sender information.

• Sender Name
• Sender Email

You can add your brand/company name, email address here to sound more professional. And, in case if you do not have any store  then,  you can add your name and personal email as the sender info. 

And then click on continue

Next they will ask your goal behind using their tool and how you want to reach your subscribers.

Whether you would like to use email marketing or SMS marketing or both, you can choose accordingly. 

That’s it. Your Klaviyo account is now being successfully connected with your shopify store. 

Now, you can start playing with its dashboard. 

Before you begin with its email marketing service — What you need to do is,  explore all of their features and functionality.

For that, I highly recommend you go through their guides and youTube tutorials as well. This will give you a clear view about what to do next. 

Till then, let me share with you two most important functionalities, which are… 

• List
• Segments

What is a list? 

In simple terms, it includes all the profiles/people who’ve subscribed to your email list. You can also call it as subscribers list. 

What are segments? 

When you are dividing/categorising/ grouping your subscribers into various subsets, based on different factors or characteristics such as their gender, age, country or their hobbies, that’s segmentation or classification, in simple words. 

Segmentation is highly beneficial when you want to target the specific group of people from the entire list of subscribers; basically segments are a more defined version of the list. 

For that navigate over to the link and segment section on your dashboard. And then, choose list creation option. Then it’s time to assign a name to your first list and and after you set its name,

click on create list option. 

That’s all your first list is being created.

Now it’s time to add contacts to the list so you can send promotional or nurturing e-mail to them. 

But the question is how can you add contact ? Where you will get those lucrative subscribers from? 

For adding  contact to your new list you will get to see three options available. 

If you want to add a signup form on your website so that visitors can join your email list then this option has lots of Pre build customisable form template. 

You can simply customise any template in a way you want so it purely reflects your brand image.

You can change the entire theme, logo, colours, welcome message and so on, of the form.

Or, you can also create a full sign up form completely from scratch using their drag and drop feature. Its up to you.

And for adding a subscribe page the process is more likely similar; you can just avail their predefined templates and drag and drop builder. 

If you have the contact list database that you would like to import it in klaviyo  then, you can do it in two ways;

 First, copy and paste  — a good option only if you have a small number of subscribers. 

In case, if your list is very long then uploading a .CSV file is the best suitable option to go for. 

But be sure to check out klaviyos user guide on how to migrate contact lists from other ESP’s , so you won’t fall into any technical or legal issues. 

Now when your list is set and has a decent number of subscribers then it’s time to create, plan and initiate your email campaigns and flows. 

What to look for in a marketing automation tool?

Are you looking forward to using this advanced software but still have some confusion about whether it would be a good fit for your business needs or not? 

Then let me help you make a clear decision so you won’t regret it later.

Before making any final decisions, just ask yourself three questions:

1. What does an e-commerce business need prominently so they can execute their marketing strategies effectively while ensuring excellent ROI?

2. What are the specific requirements of your business that the software needs to fulfil? 

3. Does your business need these advanced features, or can it be sustained on other tools MailChimpchimp? 

However, If you don’t know, what to look for in a marketing automation tool, so you can choose the right one according to your needs.

Then, here are some key essentials you must keep in mind before landing on any tool, especially from an e-commerce point of view. 

The list is still on but these are the key essential you should never ignore while selecting any marketing automation tool for your business

Tips for Effective Email Campaigns

In my opinion, there is no any definite trick or strategies that will lead you to success Instead, marketing game is all about;

 Planning —  Implementation — Tracking Performance — Optimising it accordingly

And it is like never ending process. 

But there are always some basic steps which can help you in having a strong foundation. Let me just share some tips which you can keep in mind while planning your campaign. 

In last, it’s not about what tool you’re using; It’s about How effectively you’re using the tool.

Final Thought

After going through this tool and doing some research, I’ve found this tool reliable and value for money.

There are only two things that I would like to mention here:

Pricing Model

There is no doubt that you’re getting what you’re paying and even more.

However, what I feel is, this pricing model may not be favourable for small retailers or individuals who do not have the marketing and budgeting expertise needed to be in a profitable zone.

The second downside is that SMS marketing is only limited to a few countries. I hope they will expand it in the future. 

In short, if budget isn’t your problem, I don’t think there is any tool that comes closer to this in terms of features and functionality, especially for e-commerce needs.

FAQ