Email marketing software is one of the most important tools you can acquire for your business, as they let you craft and send emails to keep your customers engaged with your brand. Without an email marketing tool, you’d find it very difficult or impossible to create and manage email campaigns for your business.
There are endless examples of email marketing software, and two well-known ones are MailChimp and Klaviyo. MailChimp is the most popular email marketing tool globally, with over 13 million users. Klaviyo is a less popular tool, serving over 70,000 users globally.
We want to see how MailChimp and Klaviyo fare against each other. We’ll compare them based on critical factors like features, performance, customer support, and pricing. After reading this review, you can see our previous MailChimp review for more details about the platform.
Features
MailChimp is a web-based, software-as-a-service platform that gives users the ability to send emails to as many addresses on their subscriber list. The platform provides many examples of email templates designed by professionals, and you can pick any template you like and customize it to fit your tastes – these templates help users send emails that look professional. If you wish, you can design your email format from scratch using MailChimp’s intuitive drag-and-drop form builder.
You can build a new email list with MailChimp or import an existing email list you have, or both. To build a new list, you can create forms with MailChimp and embed them on your website. Any website visitor can input their email address on the email form, and it’ll be automatically added to your MailChimp email list. To import an email list, download it as a CSV file and upload it to MailChimp – the platform will automatically extract all the email addresses from the list.
Klaviyo is a web-based, software-as-a-service platform just like MailChimp. It includes a collection of templates that you can customize to create emails that look professional, or you can use the platform’s drag-and-drop editor to create yours from scratch.
Klaviyo lets you send automated messages to your customers in response to specific actions, e.g., a welcome email whenever a customer subscribes to your newsletter. The platform also includes a full suite of features for marketing through SMS service just as you’d do with email. MailChimp offers SMS marketing tools but they aren’t as sophisticated as what you’d get with Klaviyo.
Performance
MailChimp is mainly a web-based tool but it also has mobile apps (iOS and Android) that allow users to manage their email campaigns on the go. These apps enable you to monitor and make changes to your email campaigns from places where it’s not comfortable to use a desktop or PC, e.g., during a commute.
One good thing about MailChimp is its user-friendly interface. The platform manages to pack many features into a simple interface that you'd likely find easy to navigate. The interface may be confusing to a new user, but you should get used to it with time.
Klaviyo is primarily a web-based tool. Unlike MailChimp, it doesn’t have a mobile app that lets you monitor your email and SMS campaigns on the go, which we consider a drawback.
Klaviyo also has an intuitive interface. It offers detailed reports and insights to help you measure the success of your campaigns. It also makes it easy to segment your subscriber list and market to each segment more effectively. Yet, MailChimp is the more user-friendly tool.
Support
MailChimp offers direct customer support through email, live chat, and telephone. But, telephone support is exclusive to users who pay for the most expensive plan, while the others have access to email and live chat support. As goodwill, MailChimp offers email support to free users for the first 30 days after signing up.
All users can access the MailChimp help center, which contains user guides and tutorials concerning all aspects of the platform. There's also an official marketplace where you can hire vetted MailChimp experts to help with your marketing efforts.
Klaviyo offers direct support through email and live chat. Email support is for free and paid accounts, while chat is for paid accounts only. There’s no phone support, which we consider a drawback for enterprise customers.
All users can access Klaviyo's help center, which provides a searchable database of information on all Klaviyo features and tips to help users maximize the platform. We like that Klaviyo offers email support to free users, unlike MailChimp which limits it to 30 days. However, we consider MailChimp the better tool in this category because it offers phone support while Klaviyo doesn’t.
Pricing
Both MailChimp and Klaviyo offer free versions of their platform that anyone can use but with limited features. For example, the free tiers of both platforms let you send a maximum of 500 emails each month.
MailChimp offers three premium plans; Essentials for $11 / £11 / AUD$16 per month, Standard for $17 / £17 / AUD$25 per month; and Premium for a high $299 / £299 / AUD$499 per month. Essentials supports 5,000 monthly emails to 50,000 subscribers, Standard supports 6,000 monthly emails to 100,000 subscribers, and Premium has no limits.
With Klaviyo, you can either pay for only email marketing features or both email and SMS marketing features under one bundle. Email starts at $20 / £20 / AUD$30 per month for 250 to 500 contacts, while Email and SMS starts at $35 / £35 / AUD$55 per month for the same number of contacts. The price increases according to the number of contacts you have. For example, Email for 1,500 to 2,500 contacts costs $60 / £60 / AUD$90 per month, while Email and SMS for the same number of contacts costs $75 / £75 / AUD$110 per month.
MailChimp is the more economical tool because of its flat pricing structure as opposed to Klaviyo’s scaled pricing structure.
Verdict
MailChimp and Klaviyo are both effective marketing tools. MailChimp has a focus on email marketing, while Klaviyo has a focus on both email and SMS marketing. It’s better to go with MailChimp if you want a tool exclusively for email marketing. But, if you want to handle your email and SMS marketing work from a single platform, Klaviyo is the better choice.
