The Dinosaur
Mailchimp has been around for a loooong time. It’s a great starter solution. A sort of one size fits all, email marketing software that serves many industries and markets including eCommerce.
If you’re looking for something fast and easy to set up, then Mailchimp is it.
This is a great solution if you’re just getting started with email marketing and want to dig in quickly.
Klaviyo on the other hand will take much longer to set up, understand and implement…
You’re probably wondering why bother with Klaviyo at all, right?
The thing is that Mailchimp isn’t built specifically for eCommerce and the benefits plateau pretty quickly.
Integration
For starters, Mailchimp doesn’t work with Shopify anymore after their spat so you’d need to install a workaround solution to get the two working together.
Even before the spat, Mailchimp wasn’t collecting much very useful data from Shopify about prospects and customers, and thereby limited the usefulness of Mailchimp generally. I think the reason why a lot of people were using Mailchimp was just because it’s been the one that’s been around the longest and the default option that comes to mind when people think “email marketing.”
Klaviyo was built very much with Shopify in mind and this allows building up a comprehensive data about eCommerce customers and using that information to build a sophisticated user journey.
Generalist Approach
The cost of the one size fits all approach is that Mailchimp uses a list centric approach to the customer list, which is the same approach as many generalist email service providers such as Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and Aweber. Klaviyo, on the other hand, uses a profile centric approach and then you build your list dynamically (segments) based on the properties of the profile.
Further, Klaviyo has been built specifically for eCommerce users which means that it’s built software that’s dedicated to helping store owners achieve the things that matter to them and they’ve been expertise, best practices, documentation and a customer support team that’s relevant to that.
To put this in numbers, in 2018 Klaviyo released over 60 new features specific for eCommerce. That’s the benefit of focusing on one thing. You become really good at it.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to maximise the value of your Shopify email marketing, it’s a good idea to invest the time and effort to learn Klaviyo over something that’s easy to set up as the benefits will pay off in higher customer lifetime values.
You can start playing around with Klaviyo for Free here.