Statista reports that as of June 2023, almost 47 percent of marketing decision-makers worldwide pinpointed email marketing as a successful strategy. If you are an eCommerce marketing manager , your email marketing setup requires eCommerce features like data integration and revenue reports. With these factors in mind, email marketing software such as Klaviyo or ActiveMarketing might be a good option. This guide will help you decide between ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo as the best solution to grow your eCommerce business.
What is Klaviyo? Klaviyo is a software company that provides marketing automation with an email platform that supports eCommerce campaigns. The company's main objective is to assist users in accessing, analyzing, and storing transactional and behavioral data. These data eventually benefit the email and advertising campaigns of their clients.
Many eCommerce brands worldwide use Klaviyo to create emails and texts that pay for themselves. Examples of such brands are Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.
What is ActiveCampaign? ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based solution dedicated to small- and medium-sized businesses in need of customer experience automation solutions. The company combines these three elements in providing high-quality services to its customers:
Marketing and sales automation Email marketing Customer relationship management (CRM) ActiveCampaign extends into customer support, making it a popular ActiveCampaign feature. Today, ActiveCampaign has integrated with over 900 applications, such as Salesforce and WordPress.
Pros and Cons of ActiveCampaign Pros
Exceptional sales and marketing automation capabilities User-friendly contact segmentation feature Detailed reports Wide range of third-party integrations and apps Free migration to ActiveCampaign if you're coming over from another provider Cons
No free plan Expensive eCommerce integrations are available only on the higher-tiered plans Users may experience a learning curve Pros and Cons of Klaviyo Pros
Easy-to-use email editor Pre-made templates Email benchmark data for industry peers Reliable customer support Cons
Smaller range of email templates Basic marketing automation features Only around 300 integrations are available. ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo: User's Review of Features And now the battle of features begins! Check out who will emerge as the best at the end of this blog.
Ease of Use & Editor ActiveCampaign's email editor is easy to use. They also added a new feature to save custom blocks for reuse in future emails. You can also add actions that trigger when your email recipient clicks an email image or link.
On the other hand, Klaviyo's navigation structure is clean, minimalist, and easy to navigate. Klaviyo's email editor is similar to ActiveCampaign's and packed with features. Among other options, there is a decent range of email content blocks. In addition, you can embed product blocks to display static and dynamic product recommendations in your emails.
ActiveCampaign has an equivalent product block feature. However, it is available only for eCommerce stores that run on Shopify or WooCommerce. Dynamic product recommendations personalized for each contact also aren't possible.
Winner: It's a tie! Both platforms offer easy-to-use email editors for ecommerce shop owners.
Sales and Marketing Automation Several pre-made templates are available for various email automation tasks, such as sending automated emails to users who abandoned their carts or following up with customers to buy again. These templates can be personalized with your email content, custom fields, and tags. Alternatively, you can create a new automation from scratch if you have a specific custom automation.
Each email marketing automation can include multiple triggers, and you can also perform split testing on automation to determine the most effective options. However, you must subscribe to a more expensive plan to access eCommerce automation features. If you want to automate lead scoring or implement other types of sales automation, you'll need the appropriate plan.
Klaviyo offers a similar feature called "flows," but they are not as extensive as ActiveCampaign's. Klaviyo has fewer flow templates available, and its automation actions are more limited. Additionally, each flow can only be triggered by one event.
Klaviyo lacks sales automation—its flows are solely for ecommerce email marketing.
Winner: With the comprehensive automation available, the winner for this round is undoubtedly ActiveCampaign!
Integrations & Apps Currently, Klaviyo provides over 300 integrations to link your email system with your ecommerce store and other popular apps among ecommerce businesses, such as Zoho CRM. Even if Klaviyo doesn't directly integrate with an app in your tech stack, you can use Zapier to connect them, given that your app is among the 5,000+ apps supported by Zapier.
In terms of sheer numbers, ActiveCampaign stands out, boasting seamless integration with over 910 apps. It also offers Zapier connectivity for third-party integrations, similar to Klaviyo, eliminating any significant advantage for Klaviyo in this area.
One drawback with ActiveCampaign's integrations is that you'll need to be on at least the higher-tiered Plus plan to access native deep-data integrations with platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and Square. Klaviyo, on the other hand, does not charge extra for ecommerce integration access.
Winner: ActiveCampaign because of its comprehensive built-in integrations.
Reporting ActiveCampaign offers comprehensive reporting capabilities, allowing you to track campaign statistics, automation, contacts, CRM, and ecommerce statistics. An exciting feature is the option to include or exclude Apple Privacy in your reports. This setting adjusts for cases where Apple devices automatically open emails on iOS 15 or later, potentially skewing open rate metrics.
Disabling Apple Privacy ensures your reports reflect only genuinely human-opened emails, providing more accurate figures, albeit based on fewer emails.
Klaviyo provides reports on metrics like email opens, clicks, and bounces and tracking store revenue earned per recipient. Like ActiveCampaign, it also offers Apple Privacy open tracking, but its reporting range is narrower.
To compare your campaigns against industry standards, Klaviyo offers a benchmark feature. After sending a certain number of emails, the platform displays benchmark data reflecting the performance of your industry peers.
Winner: ActiveCampaign wins for its more comprehensive range of reports.
Conclusion Judging from the comparison of features, ActiveCampaign emerged as the overall winner of our ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo review. But we can only say Klaviyo is worth using. The platform is a suitable option if you want to run a sophisticated eCommerce email marketing campaign while keeping to a smaller budget.
