As your eCommerce business grows, the tools you use to manage it have to be able to grow along with it. Sure, using your personal contacts list to manage customers might work in the first year, but what happens when 100 customers turn into 200, and 200 turn into 1,000?
Email is a key element of a successful eCommerce business because of all the ways it fits into different parts of the sales funnel, so it's important that you have access to reliable marketing and transactional email software that scales as you grow.
With this in mind, we'll be comparing two of the most widely used email platforms for eCommerce — Mailchimp and Klaviyo. Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo are trusted by millions of customers, including high-profile brands. Klaviyo boasts eCommerce clients such as Chubbies and Custom Ink, while Mailchimp touts near-decade long partnerships with New Belgium Brewery, Vimeo, and TED.
Here, we'll break down these two platforms on a range of key features to show the places where they're different — and how that difference may make one the natural choice for your eCommerce store over the other.
Mailchimp's plans are more affordable overall than Klaviyo's. For example, a basic Mailchimp subscription with 10,000 contacts will cost around $99 per month, while the same plan costs $150/per month with Klaviyo.
The real price will depend on which features you plan to use, however. With Klaviyo, your monthly price includes every feature. Mailchimp's includes the key features you'd expect to use, but if you're using your lists in a more specialized way, you may have to pay extra for some functions or upgrade your account completely.
Klaviyo allows you to segment based on customer behavior and unique interests. Klaviyo lists update automatically as you choose the level of personalization you want, which can make sending segmented messages more efficient.
With Mailchimp, segmentation options primarily come from two places:
The two are comparable when it comes to targeting certain groups within a larger list, but behavioral segmentations are more intuitive with Klaviyo. When working in Mailchimp, you may find yourself doing more manual work with tagged lists.
Klaviyo also wins out when it comes to automation. Both platforms allow business owners to set up intuitive campaigns with both marketing and transactional email functionality, but Klaviyo has a larger number of options overall.
Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp integrate with some of the largest eCommerce platforms, serving millions of eCommerce businesses every year, but there's a key difference. In 2019, Mailchimp announced that it would no longer support new integrations with Shopify, the largest eCommerce solution in the United States. This means that if you're looking for an email platform that will integrate with your Shopify store, Mailchimp is out of the race.
Mailchimp is also focused serving a broader range of businesses in every industry, while Klaviyo specializes more in eCommerce.
Mailchimp is regarded as one of the easiest tools to start using with no prior training. The email builder is very user-friendly and the navigation makes a lot of sense.
Klaviyo puts more features in front of the user to start. This makes it more of a challenge to learn up-front, but the initial investment pays off down the road, as you'll have more granular control over your campaigns.
Klaviyo boasts a data science dashboard that allows you to access the industry's most robust customer analytics, including churn rate forecasting and purchase data predictions, all calculated based on engagement and customer behavior.
Mailchimp offers a pretty strong cross-section of reporting and engagement metrics, including data that's easy to use instantly in new campaigns, but the breadth of options that Klaviyo offers stands out.
Both Klaviyo and Mailchimp offer a level of contact that you'd expect to get from modern providers of a technology service — 24/7 chat and email support. On the other hand, neither company makes it easy to pick up the phone and talk to a real customer service agent. Klaviyo doesn't offer phone support at all, while Mailchimp makes it available only to customers using its premium subscription plan.
While both Klaviyo and MailChimp are powerful tools for reaching business contacts, Klaviyo's list of features more neatly matches the needs of eCommerce businesses, giving it the edge when you're looking for a platform to support your online store.
Stamped.io integrates seamlessly with Klaviyo. Reviews can make a huge difference when it comes to choosing your products over your competitors. Stamped.io offers highly customizable options to add product reviews and user-generated content to your eCommerce site and product pages to build credibility for your brand and add value to everything you sell.