Ready to take your online store to the next level? You’ve probably considered using email marketing to achieve this—if you haven’t already!
Email marketing is a powerful strategy for boosting conversions, revenue, and repeat business for your store.
The best part? It’s not only cost-effective but also easy to set up, especially since most of your store’s emails can be automated based on customer behavior.
Of course, some email marketing platforms are better suited to your business needs than others. For example, platforms that offer direct integrations, allow you to send triggered emails (like abandoned cart campaigns), and give you access to your store data directly from your email marketing tool.
So, what are the best email marketing tools? In this article, we’ll compare the newly introduced Shopify Email and Klaviyo.
Shopify introduced its own email marketing app in November 2019, offering it free with all plans.
With this new addition to Shopify’s marketing toolkit, many are curious about how it stacks up against existing autoresponders.
Since Shopify Email is still in beta, there isn’t much information on its stability.
However, we do know that Shopify Email lets you:
Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform designed to help online businesses create meaningful connections with their customers.
Klaviyo offers a wide range of services, from personalized messaging and social advertising to system integration, all aimed at helping eCommerce businesses grow and succeed.
As an email service provider (ESP) tailored for online stores, Klaviyo provides powerful features that go beyond just sending emails—they help you drive sales.
If you’re also interested in reaching your customers through SMS, Klaviyo has an SMS platform that seamlessly integrates with your email campaigns for even better results.
When it comes to email marketing software, we highly recommend Klaviyo. But will our opinion hold up when we compare Shopify Email vs. Klaviyo?
Let’s compare Shopify Email and Klaviyo based on the following factors:
| Name | Up to 1,000 contacts | Up to 5,000 contacts | Up to 25,000 contacts |
| Klaviyo | $30 | $100 | $400 |
| Mailchimp | $52 | $79 | $230 |
| ActiveCampaign | $49 | $135 | $319 |
| Omnisend | $20 | $60 | $240 |
| Drip | $29 | $89 | $369 |
| Convertkit | $29 | $79 | $199 |
Klaviyo’s pricing adapts as your business grows.
According to our research, Klaviyo offers some of the most transparent pricing in the market. For more details, check out our article on Klaviyo pricing.
Shopify Email allows you to send up to 2,500 emails per month for free. If you exceed that limit, you’ll be charged $1 for every additional 1,000 emails sent.
Klaviyo claims to offer even greater access to Shopify data than Shopify Email.
When setting up your Klaviyo account, you receive built-in segment suggestions.
Shopify, on the other hand, automatically categorizes customers based on predefined criteria such as:
It’s unclear if Shopify plans to integrate social media into its segmentation, but it seems unlikely given the current setup.
Both Klaviyo and Shopify Email offer pre-built content blocks that allow users to easily drag and drop elements into their emails. Klaviyo integrates directly with Shopify, enabling products to be synced and added into emails with one click. In Shopify Email, the integration is seamless since it is built into Shopify’s dashboard, allowing quick access to the store catalog.
One key advantage of Klaviyo is the ability to add dynamic product feeds to email campaigns. This means different customers can see different products based on specific conditions, while Shopify Email limits dynamic products to automated campaigns, like abandoned cart emails. For newsletters or promotions, all recipients will see the same products in Shopify Email.
Klaviyo offers both pre-built templates and blank “basic layouts” that users can customize. Templates can be reused and saved for future use. Shopify Email, on the other hand, provides 46 pre-built templates that automatically incorporate your store’s branding elements (colors, fonts, and logos), simplifying the design process.
While Klaviyo requires manual input of branding elements, Shopify Email automates this step, making it quicker for businesses to launch campaigns.
Both platforms are starting to incorporate AI tools into their email builders. These AI tools can assist in generating email content, such as subject lines or email copy. Klaviyo’s AI can analyze previous campaigns and offer suggestions based on top-performing subject lines, but it is limited to English. Shopify Email AI supports multiple languages, including English, German, Spanish, French, and others, making it more versatile for international businesses.
Klaviyo provides email and chat support for 60 days on its free plan and offers better overall support for paid users. On paid plans, response times are typically around 2 hours, and the answers are generally helpful. Shopify Email provides support for all users, but the quality of support has reportedly declined over time. In recent experiences, Shopify support agents have struggled with basic email marketing concepts, leading to less satisfactory customer service compared to earlier years.
Klaviyo has A/B testing features built into the platform, enabling users to test different versions of their email campaigns to optimize performance. Shopify Email lacks built-in A/B testing, requiring users to manually randomize segments to conduct tests or rely on third-party apps.
Klaviyo includes CRM features that allow businesses to build detailed customer profiles based on purchase history, email engagement, and browsing behavior. Shopify Email doesn’t have a built-in CRM, meaning businesses must integrate external CRM tools like HubSpot or Pipedrive.
Klaviyo offers SMS campaign functionality directly within the platform, allowing businesses to run SMS campaigns alongside email campaigns. Shopify Email doesn’t have native SMS marketing features, requiring users to integrate an app from Shopify’s app store to add this capability.
Klaviyo provides customizable sign-up forms that can be targeted based on user behavior, location, or device. These forms can easily be embedded into Shopify stores. Shopify Email’s sign-up forms are more basic, allowing for static forms to be added through the theme editor. For more advanced features like pop-ups or multi-step forms, businesses need to use third-party apps.
Klaviyo offers basic analytics that cover:
They plan to enhance their analytics to include customer and SKU-level insights.
Shopify provides more comprehensive statistics since they have a complete overview of your site’s activities. Their analytics go beyond email opens and click-through rates to include details like products added to the cart and purchases made by email recipients.
Klaviyo uses a small piece of code embedded in your website to track visitors and send personalized campaigns based on their actions.
Since Shopify has direct access to your site and all its visitors, they can also gather data on customer behavior based on their actions on your website.
Klaviyo allows you to create emails with dynamic drag-and-drop blocks for:
You can even hide dynamic blocks based on the recipient’s characteristics.
Shopify also offers dynamic building blocks for creating emails, focusing on promoting your products, collections, and sales. However, it’s unclear if these blocks can be customized based on recipient characteristics at this time.
It’s important to remember that Shopify’s primary focus is on building websites, not email newsletters.
As mentioned earlier, Shopify’s email builder offers limited customization options. The available templates are basic, and the customization features (such as fonts, content blocks, and button styles) don’t allow much room for creativity.
However, when comparing Shopify Email to Klaviyo, Shopify tends to be more user-friendly for beginners.
Klaviyo, on the other hand, offers time-saving features with its one-click integrations, robust automation, and easy-to-use segmentation tools, which can help you maximize revenue.
If you’re considering using Klaviyo instead of Shopify Email for your email marketing, you might wonder how to integrate it with your Shopify store.
The process is straightforward: just add the Shopify integration to your Klaviyo account.
This integration allows you to:
With this integration, you can:
Follow these steps to connect your Shopify store with Klaviyo:
Once the integration is complete, you can use Shopify data, like customer behavior and purchase history, to send automated emails through Klaviyo.
This data enables you to perfectly time your emails, tailor content to customer preferences, and track customer interactions on your store. With Klaviyo’s Shopify Integration, you’ll have access to Klaviyo’s top features, ensuring a smooth and effective email marketing flow.
Giles Thomas
CEOOptimize your Shopify conversion rates. 5 lesson course, learn 51 ecommerce best practices to get more visitors to buy.
