Email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels for engaging with customers and driving sales. Two of the most popular email service providers are Klaviyo and Mailchimp, but it can be challenging to determine which platform is right for your business. This comprehensive review compares the features, ease of use, deliverability, integrations, ecommerce functionality, pricing models and ideal users of Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp to help you decide which solution is better equipped to meet your email marketing goals in 2023 and beyond.
Overview and Key Differences Between Klaviyo and Mailchimp
Klaviyo is a newer, fast-growing platform launched in 2012 that focuses exclusively on email marketing and behavioral SMS capabilities designed for online businesses. Klaviyo utilizes customer data and behavior to allow for highly customizable and automated email workflows targeted to each subscriber’s actions.
Mailchimp, founded in 2001, has expanded over the past two decades to become an all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses, with tools for email, landing pages, CRM, marketing automation, social media and basic ecommerce. Mailchimp is best for beginners or companies needing an integrated suite for general marketing needs beyond just email.
| Klaviyo | Mailchimp | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Email marketing & SMS | Integrated marketing platform |
| Ideal customer | Ecommerce brands | Small business owners, bloggers, creatives |
| Key strength | Advanced email personalization | Ease of use for beginners |
| Pricing | Pay-as-you-go based on subscribers | Tiered monthly plans |
| Learning curve | Steeper for new email marketers | Very simple for new users |
| Ecommerce features | Robust built-in native functionality | Add-on required |
These core differences make each platform better suited for certain use cases that we will analyze in this complete guide comparing every aspect of Klaviyo against Mailchimp.
Features Comparison
Klaviyo and Mailchimp take different approaches when it comes to features for crafting and managing email marketing campaigns.
Email Campaigns
Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp provide professional templates, drag and drop editors, and automation for emails. However, Klaviyo has the most flexibility for customizing templates or building emails from scratch to match your brand identity.
Klaviyo also enables more personalized email content using variable tags connected to customer data in your CRM or commerce platform. For scheduled email sends, Mailchimp has an edge with calendar functionality right inside the editor.
When it comes to integration with CRM platforms like Shopify or Salesforce, Klaviyo has slightly more seamless direct integrations to pull in subscriber data. Mailchimp may require a third-party connector app in some cases.
Landing Pages
Mailchimp includes beautiful templates for basic landing pages that are easy for novices to customize in a drag-and-drop editor without coding skills.
Klaviyo also offers a good selection of templates for landing pages and popups, with more granular personalization and custom CSS capability for advanced users. Both platforms integrate forms well with their email services, but Mailchimp makes it simpler to create opt-in forms from scratch.
Forms
Embedded forms, popups and compatibility with popular web builders is robust across both Klaviyo and Mailchimp email marketing platforms.
They each connect directly to tools like Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace. Klaviyo stands out with easier integration directly into your shopping cart or checkout pages for ecommerce-focused lead generation scenarios.
Segmentation and Targeting
When it comes to segmentation, Mailchimp provides simple tagging options to manually group contacts. However, one of Klaviyo’s biggest strengths is dynamic lists that automatically update based on real-time user behavior ? things like email engagement, page views, abandoned cart status, and more. This allows for hyper-personalized email outreach based on each subscriber’s actions.
Both platforms allow A/B testing email content and designs to optimize open and click through rates. Klaviyo includes easy native A/B testing while Mailchimp requires a third-party extension. For testing subject lines, Klaviyo allows wider variation while Mailchimp caps A/B subject line testing to a single change of up to 30 characters at a time.
Analytics and Reporting
Robust analytics and reporting on email campaign performance over time is available in both Klaviyo and Mailchimp, including metrics for opens, clicks, unsubscribes, spam complaints.
Klaviyo stands out with its ?Trend? reporting features that show how metrics for a single campaign perform against your historical email program averages. This allows better benchmarking to know when a campaign over or underperforms typical emails.
Shopping Carts and Ecommerce
For shopping cart functionality, one of Klaviyo’s biggest differentiators is its deep native integration with ecommerce platforms, allowing you to track buyer behavior across website visits and send targeted emails based on cart abandonment, repeat purchases, order confirmations, and more.
Mailchimp requires a third party app to connect its email services to most online stores like Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce. The level of email personalization for customer lifecycle outreach is also more limited compared to Klaviyo’s offering optimized for digital commerce companies.
Ease of Use
For small business owners and beginners just starting email marketing, Mailchimp provides one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use platforms available today. The visual drag-and-drop editor simplifies building campaigns, popups, and landing pages without touching code. Automations can also be configured through click-based visual workflows without advanced technical capability.
Klaviyo is aimed at more experienced email marketers working for growing ecommerce brands. While Klaviyo isn’t overly complex, unlocking its most sophisticated capabilities in segmentation and behavioral automations requires deeper knowledge of email best practices compared to Mailchimp. Implementing Klaviyo also benefits from developers or technically savvy marketers to handle advanced integration and customization.
Businesses focused purely on simplified email newsletters or less frequent broadcasting would be better served by Mailchimp. However, the hands-on tailoring that Klaviyo facilitates can yield better email performance and revenue impact for organizations selling online once properly implemented.
Email Deliverability Rates
Deliverability refers to whether your outgoing emails land in subscriber inboxes or get marked as spam. Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp utilize deliverability best practices like sender authentication, infrastructure monitoring, inbox testing partners and ISP relationship building.
Over many years, Mailchimp has maintained strong deliverability and sender reputation with major ISPs by virtue of its scale and tenure in the email marketing industry. Its domain and IP addresses are widely recognized. Klaviyo ? as a younger company ? is less proven on deliverability at the same level of Mailchimp, but has gained significant traction improving inbox placement and performance for modern, ecommerce email programs despite its relative newcomer status.
Head-to-head comparisons of exact inbox rates are difficult to assess. However, in real-world testing, Klaviyo appears on par with Mailchimp in terms of email deliverability, and continuing to ramp up ongoing efforts for optimizing sender domains. For mission-critical broadcast emails from large enterprises, Mailchimp remains the legacy leader. But Klaviyo deliverability is reliable enough for virtually all customer lifecycle messaging for online brands.
Integrations
When it comes to CRM platform integration, Klaviyo connects directly with a robust lineup including:
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Zoho
- And more
For each platform, Klaviyo automatically pulls in customer profile data and activity feeds to sync with email workflows.
Mailchimp also partners with all major CRM systems either through native integration or add-on apps and Zapier hooks. However, some automations may be more limited compared to Klaviyo unless using their premium CRM solution Mailchimp Engage.
On the commerce side, Klaviyo seamlessly embeds into all leading ecommerce platforms:
- Shopify
- Magento
- WooCommerce
- BigCommerce
This allows two-way sharing of customer order data to fuel behavioral email targeting. Mailchimp can connect to online stores via third-party apps, but typically at added cost and not as deeply ingrained capabilities.
Ecommerce Features
We’ve touched on ecommerce functionality in areas like CRM integration and shopping cart capability already. To recap the key distinctions:
Klaviyo has native, embedded support for all major online store platforms, allowing it to track buyers across platforms and trigger automated emails based on granular shopping behavior. Things like:
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Post-purchase follow ups
- Re-engaging dormant customers
- Win-back emails for defectors
- Recommendation emails based on purchase history
- Review follow up messages
Mailchimp focuses more on one-to-many broadcast email newsletters rather than hyper-targeted outreach. While Mailchimp supplies basic shopping cart integration through third-party apps, Klaviyo provides the most robust set of email personalization tools purpose-built for dynamically engaging customers across the ecommerce journey.
For online merchants that depend heavily on email marketing to drive repeat purchases, lifetime value and overall revenue growth, Klaviyo is the clear industry leader on productized functionality.
Pricing
Klaviyo and Mailchimp take very different approaches to pricing structure and cost.
| Plan | Klaviyo | Mailchimp |
|---|---|---|
| Free Plan | No free option | Free plan for up to 2,000 contacts |
| Paid Plans | Pay-as-you-go based on number of contacts | Tiered monthly plans based on number of contacts (<5000, 5000-10,000, 10,000-50,000, etc) |
| Cost per month | Starts around $17/month + $10 per 10k contacts | Free under 2k contacts, then from $9.99 up to $699/month |
| Overage charges | No caps or overages beyond base rate | Can accrue overage fees if go over contact allotments |
| Minimum contract | Month to month | Monthly, discounts for annual |
| Scales with business | Yes, pay only for volume you need | Must upgrade pricing tier manually to next bracket as grow |
A few key points stand out:
- Klaviyo doesn’t offer a free plan. Lowest entry is around $15-20/month for most small businesses.
- Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 contacts. The platform pays for itself as your audience scales.
- Klaviyo charges a flat base rate plus volume fees based on contacts, allowing incrementally growing on same plan.
- Mailchimp requires upgrading to the next pricing package tier as your list gets larger.
- At scale under 100k email subscribers, Klaviyo becomes more cost efficient than Mailchimp packages.
- For large lists above 50-100k contacts, Mailchimp enterprise custom pricing may be more cost effective.
Businesses forecasting rapid subscriber growth are likely better served by Klaviyo’s pay-as-you-go model with no artificial size caps. Mailchimp can become cost prohibitive at mid-tier list sizes in the tens of thousands requiring sudden tier jumps to avoid overages.
Ideal Users
Given the capabilities and focus of Klaviyo vs Mailchimp outlined thus far, ideal customer profiles emerge:
Klaviyo is better suited for:
- High-volume email programs with personalized messaging
- Transactional/lifecycle email needs (e.g. ecommerce stores)
- Technically advanced users
- Marketers without list size caps needing incremental pricing
Mailchimp is better for:
- Small email lists under 10-15k contacts
- Beginner email marketers
- Basic promotional newsletters
- Tight budget constraints
The complexity of your email marketing program typically determines whether Klaviyo or Mailchimp proves the better fit.
Advanced ecommerce merchants with large audiences benefit more from Klaviyo’s robust targeting/segmentation matched with scalable cost model.
Simpler email newsletters for small businesses operate just fine on Mailchimp, especially when first getting started.
Verdict
While Mailchimp serves as an easy general marketing platform for beginners, Klaviyo provides the industry’s most sophisticated email personalization capabilities purpose-built for high-volume ecommerce and performance marketing success.
Once you learn its more advanced features, Klaviyo drives superior revenue impact for online businesses selling products or services given greater flexibility to target and convert customers based on real-time behaviors across touchpoints.