Mailchimp vs. Klaviyo for e-commerce and retail marketing

Mailchimp and Klaviyo provide high-quality digital marketing services to e-commerce businesses. Both offer sophisticated digital marketing functions like automation, segmentation, and reporting, and both serve businesses with online retail stores.

In some cases, you’ll get more detailed information and advanced automation capabilities with Klaviyo.

Mailchimp has been working with small businesses for 20 years with the goal of making quality marketing tools accessible to growing companies. We know that small businesses sometimes don’t have the time or resources to manage multiple marketing platforms, so we’ve built an all-in-one Marketing Platform that has everything in one place.

Mailchimp provides you with more than 240 integrations including ShopSync, which lets you sync information in your Shopify store to Mailchimp, including customers, orders, and products. We also offer seven marketing channels, including email marketing (with dynamic content capabilities), social media posts, ads on Facebook and Instagram, Google remarketing ads, customizable pop-up forms, postcards, and websites (with custom domain capabilities).

Here’s a breakdown of what each platform offers to subscribers of comparable plans, and at what price point.

Mailchimp vs Klaviyo at a glance

Ready to learn more? Let’s take a closer look at how Mailchimp’s marketing tools compare to the tools offered by Klaviyo.

Customer data analytics

The more useful information you have about your customers, the better you can understand how to craft and optimize your next marketing campaign.

Basic analytics

Klaviyo provides a detailed profile for each one of your customers. In that profile, you’ll find a complete picture of the customer, including their purchase history and past interactions with your content. Klaviyo also provides projections of each customer’s expected lifetime value and their possible next order date.

Mailchimp has some similar functionality—and allows you to aggregate that data. Every Mailchimp user, including those with free plans, gets access to an easy-to-navigate customer relationship manager (CRM) where you can view your audience data. You'll be able to sort information by customer and view an in-depth profile that details their purchase and engagement history, as with Klaviyo, or look at your overall behavioral and demographic trends. The Mailchimp Marketing CRM also includes clickable statistics and suggestions for how to use your data going forward.

Predictive analytics

Like Klaviyo, Mailchimp also provides businesses with advanced predictive analytics. If your account is on our Standard plan or Premium plan, you can visit your audience dashboard to learn whether a customer has a low, medium, or high estimated lifetime value.

Mailchimp also empowers you to act on those predictive analytics right away. In the same field where you can view a customer’s predicted lifetime value, you’ll also find the option to target that person with a relevant marketing campaign. Send “thank you” messages to your high-value customers and “we miss you” to the ones who are likely to drop out.

With Mailchimp, you can even use Instagram, Facebook and Google ads to target new prospective customers. Those ads connect to your audience database and the rest of your integrated multichannel campaigns, so when people sign up, you can start communicating with them right away.

Audience segmentation

Personalized audience segmentation is one of the most important uses of information in marketing today.

Looking at the impact of segmented campaigns, it’s clear why Klaviyo and Mailchimp both offer tools to help you use this strategy.

Klaviyo lets you segment by buyer behavior or circumstances—whether a person has viewed a previous ad, bought a product, or subscribed to a list, for instance. You can exclude or combine conditions and apply your segmentation to any of the five platforms that Klaviyo serves: email, SMS text messages, phone push notifications, Facebook, or Instagram.

Mailchimp does this, but on seven marketing channels and with more ways to segment. With Mailchimp, you can segment not only by behavior and buyer-stage characteristics but also by location, interests, and more. We can even predict the demographics of your contacts, so you can refine your marketing strategy and create more effective campaigns.

New to segmentation? We offer a selection of pre-built segments based on campaign activity, purchase history, and more, making it easy to send targeted campaigns to contacts who have something in common.

Personalized emails

In today’s digital marketing landscape, success means being able to deliver different types of personalized email messages based on the interests of your audiences. Mailchimp and Klaviyo both offer several types of personalization.

Product recommendations

Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp can use segmentation information to provide personalized recommendations on your product pages, as long as your e-commerce store is supported by the platform. (Remember that Mailchimp has dozens more integrations than Klaviyo.)

With Mailchimp, you can offer 10 recommendations at once—compared to 9 with Klaviyo—and you can take advantage of special product recommendation models for repeat or seasonal buyers.

Automations

Mailchimp assists in keeping you connected to your customers, efficiently and effectively, by giving you powerful marketing automation tools at your fingertips. Mailchimp users have access to pre-built automations such as welcome messages and birthday messages in addition to event or behavior-based automations such as abandoned cart emails and product retargeting & product recommendations. These automations help to ensure that your customers receive the right message at the right time.

Klaviyo offers e-commerce marketing automation tools similar to the ones above by Mailchimp, but at a higher cost for the same number of contacts. For example, Mailchimp offers single-step and multi-step automations at $99/month for 10,000 contacts on the Standard Plan, while it will cost $150/month for the same number of contacts with a Klaviyo plan.

Abandoned cart messages and retargeting ads

A person who visits your website or leaves items in their online shopping cart might be your next paying customer, but first, you’ll need to bring them back to your store. That’s where retargeting ads and abandoned cart messages can help.

Klaviyo lets you send retargeting ads through Facebook or Instagram only. Mailchimp offers three options: Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

Both platforms have you covered with abandoned cart functionality, but again, Mailchimp gives you more options.

With Klaviyo, you can send abandoned cart emails that go out whenever someone doesn’t complete the checkout process. With Mailchimp, you’re not limited to just emails—you also have the option to send out physical postcards, too.

Transactional emails

You can send transactional emails like order confirmations and shipping notifications with either Klaviyo or Mailchimp.

Mailchimp makes it easy to create order notifications when you connect your store. And, if you have web development experience, our Transactional Email add-on (formerly Mandrill) can help you send fast, personalized transactional email via API or SMTP. New users can send up to 500 free demo emails to their verified domain.

If you’d like to send transactional emails with Klaviyo, you’ll need to contact their customer service department for an internal review of the email to verify that it is transactional vs. marketing email. That can add time and more steps to the process. If you need to send a transactional email for anything other than an order, shipment, or account creation notification, you may need web development experience as you need to use their API to set-up the custom trigger metric.

Why should you use Mailchimp's e-commerce and retail marketing tools?

For years, the marketing world has believed that it can take an average of 7 touchpoints for a prospect to convert into a customer. More recently, however, some experts are saying that the number might be much higher—sometimes more than 20 for something as small as a candy bar, according to Google, and as many as hundreds for consumers who do a lot of research.

Given the importance of having more touchpoints, it’s helpful to have tools that allow you to connect with customers across many different channels. Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform makes it easier for you to reach shoppers where they are, and our mobile app lets you stay up to date with how your campaigns are performing, even while you’re on the go.

Klaviyo’s new user setup guides you through the components you need to market your business, but you might not be ready for that step if you don’t already have a website or an e-commerce store. Mailchimp’s new user registration doesn’t ask for a website or e-commerce account; we’ll meet you where you are and let you grow your business at your own pace.

Website building tools

Klaviyo assumes you’re an established business that’s already selling your stuff online. You do have a few options for new page content, including customized signup forms and subscribe pages, but Klaviyo expects you to have a store in place.

With Mailchimp, you can start with just a personal email address. We make it easy to buy a domain directly through us, and then give you the tools you need—like our free drag-and-drop site builder—to turn it into a website. (To use Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop site builder for free, your domain should be hosted by Mailchimp.)

If you’re not quite ready for a full e-commerce store or website but you’re looking for a simple solution to start selling online, our shoppable landing pages—powered by our Square integration—can help you create a complete shopping experience for your customers. And since Mailchimp gives you unlimited landing pages, you can have as many shoppable (or non-shoppable) pages as you'd like.

Connections with e-commerce platforms

If you already have an online store, you can connect it to Mailchimp and start using your customer purchase data to improve your marketing. We integrate with major e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and BigCommerce, and our ShopSync integration makes it easy to sync your Shopify data to Mailchimp, too.

With ShopSync, you can sync all of your Shopify store data directly with Mailchimp—including your customers, orders, and products—and then use it to personalize your marketing and create a seamless customer experience.

Klaviyo offers similar convenient options for you to connect an existing online store, and they also have direct integrations with the major e-commerce platforms, including Shopify.

Customer support

Mailchimp and Klaviyo both offer a number of different support options for users. Klaviyo provides email support to folks on a free plan and live chat support to people with a paid plan. They also offer a collection of articles, videos, and online tutorials on their website, but these self-serve materials are only available in English at this time.

All paid Mailchimp users get 24/7 chat and email support in English and Spanish. And if you upgrade to our Premium plan, you’ll get access to phone support, too. We also offer a wide selection of guides and tutorials, including step-by-step articles in English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, each focused on a different Mailchimp feature.

Our customer support team has a 92% customer satisfaction rating and won 4 Gold Stevie Awards in 2020 in the Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories. Plus, they do a lot more than just problem-solving. They focus on finding solutions and helping folks reach the next level in their growth with advice on tooling optimization, email personalization, audience insights, and more.

How to choose the best marketing solution for your business

If you’re looking to expand your business and marketing efforts, you have plenty of digital solutions to choose from.

With Klaviyo, you can get email marketing, SMS text marketing, phone push notifications, and social media functionality. If you want more marketing channels for less money (if you have more than 250 contacts), Mailchimp may be the way to go.

Mailchimp’s tiered price points make professional marketing features accessible to businesses of all sizes, even those just starting out. The features and integrations you get with Mailchimp will scale with you, taking you to the next level no matter how big you grow. Klaviyo offers tiered pricing, too, but is currently more expensive on a per-contact basis once you get above 250 contacts.

Ready to grow your audience—and your revenue? Sign up today and test our marketing platform out for yourself.

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