Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

Updating again! Klaviyo has a lot of great tools but is also missing some basic functionality that we need for our business. When we joined Klaviyo we were encouraged to use the platform for our order confirmations. While they do look better than the native Shopify confirmations, once an order confirmation is sent, there’s currently no way to update the information or resend the confirmation to a different email address. If a customer accidentally enters the wrong shipping address, email address, etc, the confirmation remains permanently tied to the original information. Klaviyo only captures the data once and does not appear to sync updated order information from Shopify afterward. This has created a lot of confusion and frustration for our customers because, for years, we've been able resend updated confirmations with corrected information. A very standard and important function for customer service. At this point, we’ll likely need to move our order confirmations back to shopify because customers understandably want receipts. Also disappointed with the pricing for SMS! It's quite steep and only seems to keep increasing year after year. It's becoming out of reach for a lot of small businesses.

The app is good, but it is very expensive, and they are always trying to scam more money out of you in sneaky little ways. It is designed to grow your bill over time. For example, unsubscribed and bounced emails are suppressed, but they often still sit in your total profile count unless you actively clean your database. It is very hard to mass-delete users.

SUPER EXPENSIVE STILL HAVE ONE STORE RUNNING KLAVIYO BUT IF YOURE DOING MULTIPLE ITLL SOON ADD UP

The platform is amazing -best out there .really happy with how it performs and ease of use . Love the courses . 5 stars BUT the support is lacking .very very slow, limited weekend response , no phone number. Urgent issues when you can’t get into your account -took days to get a response ...very stressful when your business is running through it to not be able to ring , or have any online chat . Fix this and you’ll get 5 stars

Support is terrible. 24/5 live chat is unmanned through out the week. Email support is extremely slow and keeps sending useless articles. The data is helpful. The only reason we stayed is because Omnisend doesn't have A/B test for emails

Decepción total. Tiempo, dinero y energía perdidos. Instalar Klaviyo ha sido una de las peores decisiones para mi tienda online. Primero, la app importó automáticamente más de 3.700 contactos sin mi consentimiento, lo que superó el límite gratuito y me quieren cobrar más de 80 € al mes solo por esos contactos que yo ni siquiera pedí importar. Estuve 5 días configurando el flujo de carrito abandonado, y aun así nunca funcionó correctamente. La interfaz no es nada intuitiva, y aunque todo estaba en español, los correos se enviaban en inglés, confundiendo a mis clientes. Peor aún: envía recordatorios de carrito abandonado a clientes que YA compraron, lo cual genera confusión y quejas. Algunos clientes incluso me enviaron capturas preguntando por qué reciben esos correos después de haber pagado. Hice varias pruebas con correos personales y números reales, y nunca me llegaron ni los emails ni los SMS, lo que demuestra que el flujo no está funcionando. En resumen: una vergüenza de aplicación, un fraude. Solo me ha hecho perder tiempo, dinero y energía. Ahora tendré que desinstalarla y volver a empezar con otra herramienta. No la recomiendo en absoluto.

it should be good but terrible, it is stuck at verifying my domain, and cannot contact the support

There is a learning curve to using this platform and the new rules with email have made that harder. The first time I used this app I thought it was great, but then my account was disabled and that caused me great frustration. I tried to reach out to someone and it wasn't easy, but a real person did connect with me. She explained what was going on with my account. Thank you for helping me out. Now, I think I'm back on track.

Klaviyo is good except one major disadvantage. I am very disappointed that it cannot generate "Buy X Get Y" type coupon code. This is a very very common type of discount code and it can also be generated in Shopify. However, if i generate in Shopify, then, i cannot set a limited time offer in the FLOW. I really hope Klaviyo can solve this issue in the very near future. Then, i will add the review stars back.

I have used several CMS apps, and Kalviyo is OKAY. It has its strong suits and it's week spots. There are a few things that are slightly annoying: You CAN NOT change transactional messaging. They put in all the information and that is it. Example: SMS message on their order ONLY send their order number. It is basically useless. They also DO NOT do abandoned cart. They say they do, but they do not. They do abandoned checkout, which they call abandoned cart. Those are just a few of the annoying things about Klaviyo. I would say they are a mediocre app. Better than most, but still far short of being a 5 star. 3 stars, possibly 3.5.

Klaviyo's UI is a bit more well-designed and usable than Mailchimp. We switched in order to be able to have more flexibility for what Klaviyo calls "flows" and Mailchimp called "automations". It's definitely not great though. There are lots of insane caveats. For example there's no way to click on a user and tell where they are in a flow. And there's no way to add more content to the end of a flow and just have it automatically go to everyone that should be sitting and waiting at the end for more. When we test our emails with mail-tester.com they almost always get flagged with Klaviyo having an IP address in one or more blacklists. Mailchimp never had that problem. Klaviyo also pointlessly requires a Captcha on every single login.

Shocked by the lack of onboarding, as this had been promised. I find the whole platform very slow and unresponsive to the point of unusable at times. The lack of 'support ticket ' system makes it impossible to manage help and issues. Nobody takes ownership of issues. Lack of outsourced specialists to code complex flows and Klavyio don't offer this as an extra. For a program that is part owned by Shopify and designed to work with it, I don't understand how it has such traction. Generally I am really disappointed. I will be looking for an alternative once I am further through my contract.

Tool is good but Klaviyo should solve the t-online.de delivery problem (bounce) finally! The problem has existed for ages and t-online addresses are common in Germany. With other providers, delivery to t-online addresses works!

A useful app, but the support is terrible, clueless. 24/7 support is a fib. If you have an issue leading into a weekend you are stranded until Monday US time, which for me in Australia meant 4-5 days from problem Friday morning (a computer glitch) to solution Tuesday morning. An apology is fine, but some compensation would have made this bitter pill easier to swallow.

I have been using Klaviyo for a month now and I like the concept behind it all however there have been several glitches that I have had to contact customer services about. When I have spoken to customer services, it has taken ages to get them to understand the problem and it has been very frustrating at times. I currently have a pretty significant problem that the technical team are looking at. I will continue to use it for the time being and hope the glitches don't affect my sales and reputation as they currently have been.

Pro: The integration with Shopify works well. Campaigns & Flows ease of design and analytics are good. Cons: 1. Pricing structure is way too high for business budgets. 2. Klaviyo recent redesign is not user friendly. Too many dropdowns to create a single report. The activity feed no longer shows the amount of data it did prior to their redesign. Shows maybe 50 activities. I had contacted support 2 months ago. I was told they had so many complaints that they were going to bring back the original activity feed. 3. Seems anytime an app redesigns it becomes less user friendly. Over thinking the process by programmers who are not business owners. This is common across many platforms.

It is unfortunate that they don't offer onboarding support to at least migrate and setup, after the demo call we were left with no help.

This is about day 90 of a switch from Mailchimp. While Klaviyo appears to have more long term potential and a more transparent (but more expensive) pricing structure, it also appears that some functionality is still in beta. For example, I continue to struggle with abandoned and add to cart flows triggering properly. We are a SMB and my sense is that this product may be best suited from larger firms with dedicated marketing teams. I will remain with them for now simply that the cost of switching back to the Chimp is high. Then again, it might just be me.

I want to know where I can find customer service help, it's been a month since I requested help via email and no one has replied to me.

All the "influencers" recommend this app over everything else but I don't know why. My biggest complain is the lack of integration with existing products in your store! I've done all the right things but when I look up certain products. Nothing comes up! Honestly I can't see any of my products with or without searching. I'm guessing it has to do with not paying for it? That's my assumption. Will update my score if that aspect changes.

The app is fine if you know how to use it. The support is just soso. They want to set up a meeting for easy questions which is totally unnecessary. Were on the premium version.

Useful with some powerful tools, but customer service is lacking a bit and not responsive and the platform can sometimes be klunky. For example, applying consistent colors, logos, fonts, etc. across different campaigns, emails, lists, preference pages, etc. is often very time consuming and hard to implement. Email flows seem to work well though.

I’m writing this review a week in. I actually think in the long-term this will be a good app for my store. But the on-boarding and customer service has been very disappointing. First, be aware that Klaviyo customer service is run by chat. I’ve had to enter the queue for that chat three times, the first two because I missed my moment to chat. The queues are upwards of 30-50 people long, which takes 30-45 minutes. And if you miss your window, you get back in line. It took me three hours in total to get a response. Second, while sales people were quick to respond in order to get a signup, they’ve all but ghosted since. For example, I emailed about my help-chat challenges and I heard nothing back. Third, they suggest you sign up for a paying account way too early. I HIGHLY recommend getting your customizations set up first. Klaviyo WILL start sending their own newsletter sub confirms, whether you’ve customized or not. All in all, I’d break it down like this: on-boarding and help desk 2/5; platform potential 4-4.5/5.

We luckily moved from Mailchimp months before they apparently cut ties with Shopify. This application is certainly a step up in many regards with clean and tight integration from Shopify, enabling you to easily filter down to highly optimized people on your list and the visible layout of your automations/flows is really helpful and intuitive. Having all of that integration available in your automations/flows is simply fantastic. Live chat is helpful too for minutely detailed questions that are not necessarily clear as to how certain definitional conditions may work. The drawbacks I have -- 2 minor and 1 major: MINOR: (1) If you are sending out a campaign and you want to send it to a particular audience, you cannot create the audience in the campaign conditions itself. You have to first go create the segment (or new list) and then go back to your campaigns and assign that newly created segment as the target of your email. In mailchimp, you could just create the definition of the person who met 'x' conditions in the campaign builder itself rather than having to leave it, go create a stagnant group/segment, and then return back to the campaigns to send the campaign to that new group/segment. Would think/hope that Klaviyo would've implemented this by now (been with them for a little over a year), as that seems to be a quite helpful method of streamlining things when sending a campaign. (2) You're limited on the # of test emails you can send. So, if you use glockapps, for example, to test if your emails are going to inboxes, you are limited to something like 100 test campaigns per day for the purposes of them limiting spam, I believe. It's prima facie understandable, but after a client has been with them for a certain amount of time and they see a reputable send rate/open rate/click rate, etc., it would be helpful to have this limit lifted so as to not handcuff the people who are actually attempting to send quality emails by testing them before sending to make sure they arrive in inboxes. MAJOR: We have had a LOT of people on our list email us about after clicking a link in an email, google gives them a warning that the site they're linking to might not be safe. Klaviyo adds a "trk" before the links in the URL when you click on links and seems to effectively re-direct to the actual link after it runs its tracking to provide you analytics (try it and see). This error seems to appear primarily (if not excusively) for gmail accounts, which is a large portion of emails on our list (and will probably increase in that direction). So, it's quite problematic for us. We've inquired multiple times and there has been no reasonable solution provided. This was the primary response from Klaviyo: "At this time, this is not something we can set-up for you but you would need to set-up a reverse proxy. That handles the SSL traffic and sends it over to us. Now you can also use a 3rd Party CDN to accomplish this, i.e. Cloudflare, Fastly, KeyCDN, Cloudfront, etc." Regardless if you keep the global tracking feature on or off when sending campaigns or flows, this "trk" feature shows up and creates this issue. This may not be a big issue for you (though I think it would for most), but it certainly is for us and remains unaddressed with no reasonable resolution for us to pursue (and seems like something we should not have to resolve on our end -- the above response is Greek to me). I can't believe we're the only ones experiencing this issue with our audience. Anyone else? Otherwise, a great product. Pax.

It's good, until it isn't. Our account was suspended today with no warning whatsoever - apparently sending to non engaged customers. It's been 8 hours and NO response from their customer service team. Totally unacceptable.

The app itself seems to be doing what it should - and I think better than Mailchimp. This one has better features. But the costumer service has so far been really bad. I have contacted them for 2 weeks now and no reply. Is a bit frustrating to pay for a product, and ending up hirering people from outside to help you out...

Its a robust app for sending email campaigns. I wouldnt call it simple to use though. Everything you have to start from scratch. My main negative with it is the price. We have a large database of 39000 subscribers and Klaviyo is charging us USD $600 a month for the app which I think is ridiculous. Once upon a time with traditional bricks and mortar stores, a database of 39000 was considered huge. But with ecommerce, you reach these kind of numbers in a much shorter period. The only reason I have stuck with Klaviyo is because you can create dynamic (always updating) audiences to use in Facebook advertising. ie. we can advertise to customers who have bought product X but not Y. Once other email apps have this feature Im afraid I will be abandoning ship. Sorry guys, but paying $600 a month for an email program is insane. You are being too greedy.

I've been using Klaviyo for a few weeks now. Here are my thoughts. This app has potential to be awesome. It has very powerful tools that allow it to integrate with shopify and many other apps and should allow you to very specifically target customers based on event and other criteria. It should also allow you to track very closely what kind of emails are working and which are not. In actuality it is very cumbersome to set up and manage. The reporting doesn't seem to track all conversions so it's really hard to know what's working and what's not. The stats take a long time to update. I tried integrating it with JustUno and the integration works sometimes and doesn't work other times. It doesn't integrate with any of the apps that do live chat. Customer service is basically MIA. I haven't made up my mind whether to delete this app or not. I put a lot of work into setting up flows and list and it seems to have so much potential, but in actuality I was getting better results from a simple once a week generic email. The app is very expensive and if I can't get it worked out I will have to switch to something else.

Great product, only they seemed to have stopped developing. Product hasn't had any new features lately, customer service is slow, but mainly the price is bothering me. Every extra 500 people in your account costs $25 a month extra... I first need to recoup my Klaviyo costs and then hope I can make some profit of the emails. I would have expected the costs to decrease relatively when getting more subscribers, but it's just linear. Great potential, weak execution.