Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Which is Right for You in 2023?
With a range of email marketing automation tools available for businesses to choose from, it is important to separate the mediocre from the exceptional.
Mailchimp is an established email marketing platform that’s been on the market since 2001, while Klaviyo has only emerged relatively recently (when I say relatively, I mean 2012).
We will focus a lot on customization options in general, and specifically for eCommerce, as Klaviyo is a very strong recent contender for small and mid-size Shopify, Woocommerce and other eCommerce business owners.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, is a more affordable platform that is generally easier to set up, at the expense of customization options.
So let’s get started with our review of Klaviyo vs Mailchimp.
Table of contents
- Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Best Features
- Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Segmentation
- Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: A/B Testing
- Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Reviews
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Overview
Let’s discuss Klaviyo first.
As a marketing automation platform, Klaviyo brings plenty of useful tools to the table. From advanced personalization for maximizing repeat sales and order values to customizable email templates, the platform comes with a range of purpose-built features for e-commerce store owners.
If you run an e-commerce business, Klaviyo could work well for you.
Now let’s dive into Mailchimp a little bit.
If you’ve been browsing through the various email platforms on the market, you’ve likely come across Mailchimp. As a popular email marketing platform, Mailchimp includes a range of useful features that are designed to support marketers in their efforts to produce high-value email content for subscribers. Mailchimp can fully integrate with the rest of your technology stack.
Both Mailchimp and Klaviyo are powerful email marketing tools with automation features, multivariate testing and a wide range analytics for customer data that’s crucial for helping small businesses understand their audience.
So what are their main differences?
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Pricing
So let’s address the elephant in the room from the start: how much would it cost your business to use either Klaviyo or Mailchimp as your email marketing software of choice? Both platforms base their pricing on the amount of contacts you have, but let’s examine more closely.
Klaviyo’s pricing plans
Klaviyo’s pricing structure is extremely straightforward. With a limit of 500 monthly email sends and 250 email contacts, you can get started with Klaviyo for free.
Their paid email marketing plan doesn’t feature restrictions on the platform’s usability, and the plan allots a monthly limit of sent emails equal to 10x of max amount of contacts for the plan, essentially allowing you to send 10 emails per month to each of your subscribers.
A good option for starters is their $45/month plan – which enables you to add up to 1,500 contacts and send 15,000 monthly emails. The plan also includes 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits.
Additional monthly SMS/MMS credits can be purchased in bulk during plan selection, depending on your needs.
Mailchimp’s pricing plans
Mailchimp’s pricing structure is much more complicated than Klaviyo’s. Their free plan offers twice as much volume as Klaviyo’s (500 contacts and 1000 email sends), but almost all additional features are missing. In their Essentials plan, they are charging only $26.50 for 1,500 contacts and 15,000 email sends.
Unfortunately, that plan is missing several of Mailchimp’s key features, such as Multivariate Testing, Advanced Segmentation, Campaign Manager and Comparative Reporting, so it might not be the best option for niches and industries where segmentation and analytics are a big priority.
So for 1,500 contacts you would need to pay either $60/month for the Standard plan, or $350/month for the Premium plan.
It’s also worth noting that Mailchimp offers the first month free of charge to its users.
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Best Features
Both platforms have their own target audiences and ideal ways of application, with Mailchimp focusing more on ease of use, drag and drop functionality and providing an easy email marketing strategy with pre built templates and a quick learning curve, while Klaviyo specializes more in delivering performance and segmentation specifically for ecommerce businesses, and was created for satisfying ecommerce stores more specific analytics and business needs.
Best features of Klaviyo
Klaviyo helps marketing teams use event data to craft personalized emails that convert. For instance, you can track event data such as products viewed, items ordered, and abandoned carts. This is ideal for ecommerce marketers looking to develop hyper-personalized campaigns. Klaviyo is well-equipped to support behavior-based email automation.
As an ecommerce platform, Klaviyo integrates with all the tools you use to power your cart, payments, and order automation workflow. Klaviyo is well-suited to the needs of both small businesses and large organizations. Whether you want to send emails to 250 contacts or 2,500 contacts, Klaviyo offers a scalable solution for ecommerce operations of all sizes.
Best features of Mailchimp
On the other hand, Mailchimp comes with a variety of marketing CRM tools – enabling you to connect all of your existing data to the platform. To make contact management easy, Mailchimp offers ready-made segments. The quick-to-navigate audience dashboard allows you to recognize patterns in your data and make informed decisions on how to move forward with your email campaigns.
Mailchimp is quite affordable for those who just want to test the waters. With Mailchimp’s free plan, marketers can leverage all the standard features that you would expect from an email marketing platform.
If you are looking to take your email campaigns to the next level and fully engage your email subscribers, Mailchimp’s paid plans include unique email templates, behavioral targeting, and A/B testing tools to optimize campaign performance. Mailchimp also boasts an impressive number of integrations with many popular sales and CRM solutions.
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Segmentation
Segmentation can make or break an email marketing campaign. Klaviyo seems to be the clear winner here, at least for eCommerce, and let’s examine why that’s the case and how you can use segmentation to your advantage, improving your campaigns’ efficiency.
Klaviyo’s segmentation
Klaviyo, being an advanced eCommerce marketing tool, has lots of segmentation options built into its email marketing app functionality. With Klaviyo, you can segment your audience based on factors like real-time behavior and historical data, an ability that many other apps do not provide.
At the same time, Klaviyo features built-in predictions about possible future behavior, so you can take bets and educated guesses on what your customers would like the most, based on what you think they will do and prefer in the future.
A specific eCommerce thing with Klaviyo is that you can import any data from your store through the use of APIs, and use that to segment your audience further.
So if you have data on people’s sales patterns, product or brand preference, and many other relevant things, you can implement them in your email marketing campaigns to achieve much greater customization, leading to better open rates, click rates and eventual revenue.
Mailchimp’s segmentation
Email subscribers are organized in lists, which is a standard practice used by Mailchimp. It has the standard options for targeting specific audiences using email marketing platforms.
MailChimp’s strengths are not in personalization or labeling, tagging because it was built for bulk email marketing.
If you take the time to set up your lists properly, MailChimp has the potential to provide your subscribers a sense of individualization. But it’s important to understand Mailchimp’s inherent purpose as a bulk email marketing tool, and not try too hard to find the segmentation options and setups that simply aren’t there.
Simply put, Mailchimp is not your top choice if segmentation is of great importance for you. The priority of the app is ease of use and campaign setup.
If genuine segmentation is a priority for your business and you want to ensure that each subscriber receives emails that are truly useful, relevant, and engaging, you should search elsewhere for an email marketing app.
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: A/B Testing
Here the competition gets more interesting, because Mailchimp actually can beat a lot of other email marketing tools when A/B testing approach is discussed. Despite being a mass marketing tool, the chimp offers several options for advanced A/B testing. At the same time, Klaviyo, being a thorough eCommerce email marketing tool, also has a lot of options for creators. So let’s dive in and see who has the better A/B testing of the two.
Klaviyo’s A/B Testing Approach
Klaviyo allows you to A/B test for three main things. If you want to know what works best for your audience, you can quickly test multiple subject lines, message content, and send times with Klaviyo’s A/B testing option for campaigns. What’s nice about Klaviyo, that a lot of other platforms don’t allow you to set up, is choosing the test size. For instance, another email marketing platform would just give you the option to set up the test parameters, but you don’t choose what percentage of your subscribers get the test emails, it is preset by the platform (e.g. 15%, 15%, and 70%). With Klaviyo, you can set it up the way you prefer.
Then you can also choose the winning metric, by which you will determine what’s the final version of an email that will get sent. Apart from the standard options (open rate and click rate), Klaviyo also allows for the functionality of choosing the winner by Placed Order Rate – the email which brought in the highest amount of orders in the online store will be deemed the A/B test winner.
A/B Testing in Mailchimp
As indicated before, Mailchimp offers a wide variety of options for doing A/B tests, which is surprising but very nice to see. You can test not only the subject line, but also the sender’s name, the time of day, and the body text of an email before actually sending it. As a result, it provides a wide range of customization options.
In addition, Mailchimp uses a sophisticated method to determine the winner of the test. It allows you to customize the parameters by which the winning email is determined and can do so on its own based on metrics such as open and click rates.
Even though it wasn’t built with e-commerce in mind, it does provide some eCommerce integration in this regard as well. The testing system in Mailchimp can be very nice for eCommerce business owners because the platform can also select a winner based on total revenue from the email if you have an online store integrated with the platform.
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Reviews
As of the writing date, Klaviyo has 4.7 out of 5 stars and 324 reviews on Capterra.
Here are some notable examples of specific user experiences.
“I would highly recommend Klaviyo to any e-commerce business looking to improve its email marketing efforts. It’s a powerful, user-friendly platform that can help you drive sales and grow your business.”
“Klavyio’s integration with almost any product in the market is one of its best features. This allows users to integrate Klaviyo into their existing workflows and systems seamlessly. Klaviyo’s wide range of integrations makes it a versatile tool that can be used in many different ways.”
Click here to read more reviews.
As of the writing date, Mailchimp has 4.5 out of 5 stars and 15,840 reviews on Capterra.
Read what the users say about the platform.
“One of my favorite things in Mailchimp is undoubtedly customer support. Very fast and really helpful. Even if the application is very complex, they can definitely find a fast and effective solution for you. Also, they are very polite. I wish the interface improvements of the application were made as soon as possible, so we did not need so much customer support.”
“Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that offers a variety of features, including user-friendly templates, automation capabilities, detailed analytics, and integration with multiple platforms. It is a cost-effective solution for small businesses and individuals to send targeted, professional-looking emails to their audience.”
Click here to read more reviews.
Klaviyo vs Mailchimp: Which One Should You Choose?
To get a final answer to this question, you must consider the specific type and needs of your business.
Who would benefit more from Klaviyo
If you’re a ecommerce store then Klaviyo is definitely the better fit for you. Its advanced customization features, immensely stronger segmentation and access to a variety of tools for even the smallest size plans makes it an easy choice if you’re in a niche that will see huge improvements of targeting and personalization.
In addition, if you want to run a marketing campaign that leverages both email and SMS communication, Klaviyo is a no-brainer. This platform can ensure your communication is consistent across both marketing channels and offers the tools to streamline the entire process.
Klaviyo would be much more preferable over Mailchimp for users that need to create highly specific targeted campaigns, as there are several reports of Mailchimp former users saying that as their business scales, they found the functionality of the platform wasn’t enough to handle their needs, so they made the switch to a more customizable platform like Klaviyo.
Who would benefit more from Mailchimp
More customization and personalization is not always better, as it will require a more significant time investment and a bigger learning curve for you to create these delicate marketing campaigns.
If you already have an email list that you have no idea how to segment, and you feel that targeting by location, demographics and other specific parameters will not bring you the reward that’s worth the effort, you might enjoy working with Mailchimp more.
It’s quite easy to use, and the drag and drop functionality along with a bunch of preloaded templates makes it easy for you to quickly create good-looking email newsletters to keep in touch with your consumer base. Plus, if you’re a small store and you don’t need any of the advanced functionality, the basic plan from Mailchimp will turn out to be much cheaper for you.
But these aren’t the only options on the market. If personalization, segmentation and A/B testing are cornerstone features for your email marketing campaign, and you’re not looking to keep overpaying for a brand every month, I highly invite you to explore the features that DirectIQ offers to small and mid-size businesses in need of a personal touch to their email marketing efforts.
What are DirectIQ best features?
DirectIQ is well-equipped to meet the needs of marketers. This email marketing platform comes jam-packed with all the necessary tools to support effective email campaigns. Whether you are a small business or a large organization,
DirectIQ is ready to power your ambitious campaigns.
You can choose from our responsive email templates for modern campaigns to get started. Premium features are not missing: Inbox Preview, Spam Doctor, Landing pages, Social Sharing, allowing you to have a cutting-edge email marketing tech at your hands.
DirectIQ’s platform comes with a drag-and-drop email editor designed to streamline the process of email creation. You can select from an eclectic mix of responsive email templates that are compatible with smartphones and tablets. DirectIQ provides everything needed to hit the ground running.
The platform offers in-depth email marketing metrics to help track performance.
Drag-and-drop editor for quickly crafting campaigns
With the support of the drag-and-drop email designer, you can effortlessly build stunning email templates at the click of a button. The whole process is seamless.
If you are in the business of developing high-converting email sequences, you need DirectIQ in your corner. This platform will equip you with everything you need to unleash the potential of email marketing.
Nobody uses HTML to code engaging email marketing campaigns from scratch any more. An effective drag-and-drop email designer can accelerate your email marketing efforts and enable you to produce usable templates that are ready for action.
Spending countless hours coding HTML email templates is a thing of the past. Our drag-and-drop editor makes everything easier.
Split-test campaign strategies with ease
With the tools to split-test different campaign strategies, you can unlock the potential of your email campaigns and optimize around pivotal performance metrics, including open rates and click-through rates.
When you have access to the right solutions, you have the freedom to experiment with email campaigns and push your creativity as a marketer further.
Every effective email marketing automation platform enables you to split-test different variables in your emails. Many teams split-test subject lines to uncover the best open-rate formula.
By split-testing different versions of your emails with DirectIQ, your marketing team will have the necessary data to determine which strategies are most effective with your audience.
Responsive email templates for modern campaigns
Even though many marketing teams have the skills and expertise to build their campaigns from the ground up, they enjoy using responsive email templates on DirectIQ to kickstart the creative process and get things off the ground.
When you require some creative inspiration and need to establish a clear direction for a campaign, we have an exciting mix of email templates.
Responsive email templates ensure the content is displayed correctly, no matter what device the recipient is using. For instance, responsive email templates will guarantee the email content looks incredible on both mobile and tablet devices, alongside standard desktop viewing.
If you are creating media-rich email content, having access to responsive templates is essential.
From real-time predictive analytics to advanced A/B testing options, DirectIQ provides a more well-rounded set of features than Mailchimp.
With that said, Mailchimp offers some unique features, including the ability to create custom sign-up forms for landing pages. Although, as an all-encompassing marketing platform, DirectIQ’s capabilities are more expansive.
When it comes to online chat support, DirectIQ is unrivaled.
As we mentioned, 24/7 customer support for Mailchimp is only available to those on paid plans. DirectIQ also comes with social media integrations to support intelligent email marketing.
Whether you are sending 500 emails or 10,000, DirectIQ offers the tools to unify your marketing efforts and launch scalable campaigns.
If you are looking for a platform that will grow with your business, DirectIQ is the way to go. With its wide range of features and integrations, DirectIQ provides everything you need to launch sophisticated email marketing campaigns.
It’s a game-changer for small businesses and enterprises alike. Marketers simply cannot get enough of DirectIQ.
You name it, we’ve got it. From customizable templates to advanced reporting, DirectIQ covers all bases. If you need a platform that will take your marketing to the next level, look no further than DirectIQ.
This platform can single-handedly unlock the possibilities of email marketing for your business and enable you to hit key marketing goals and objectives.
DirectIQ Reviews
As of the writing date, DirectIQ has 4.9 out of 5 stars and 21 reviews on Capterra.
“I’ve been really happy with this email marketing service, and I really like the Spam Doctor feature. It essentially offers a diagnostic report, detailing which email clients (e.g. yahoo, Gmail etc.) will analyze my messages as spam, and why…
So that I can go back and change my emails around using the advice that there reports offer. This way, I can make sure that I don’t waste time sending out emails that will never make it to my clients and potential clients… The Mailbox preview is also pretty cool, somehow it shows you how your email will look on each and every device that email can be accessed from.
For example, I can see how it compares when opened on my iPad vs. my iPhone… Another example, I can see how it will look on Microsoft Outlook (which I use at work), vs. yahoo mail which I use at home. It’s a really nice and useful feature to have. Also, great support team at DirectIQ too, very responsive, caring, and ready to help 🙂”
Click here to read more reviews.
What is DirectIQ’s pricing structure?
Marketers can begin using DirectIQ for free.
That’s right, there’s no price tag attached. Teams can add up to 250 contacts and send up to 1,000 emails per month without getting billed.
As your ambitions grow, you can scale up your campaigns easily and choose from highly flexible per-month pricing. DirectIQ is unrivaled in its commitment to offering bang for your buck.
Klaviyo Vs Mailchimp Vs DirectIQ (Which Is Best?)
If you are searching for the best email marketing automation platform, DirectIQ is packed with all the tools and features you need to hit the ground running. With the support of DirectIQ, you can enhance the potential of your email campaigns and make rapid progress.
Are you ready to get started? Sign up to DirectIQ for free today!
Adrian is a specialist in researching and implementing email marketing for businesses of all sizes. He’s particularly knowledgeable and focused on the niches and nuances of eCommerce email marketing, and he chose to work with DirectIQ as he knows that segmentation can make or break a successful email marketing campaign.
