Which email marketing platform is the best for your business, Omnisend Vs Klaviyo ?
The answer all depends on your specific needs. In this blog post, I'll break down each email provider, and outline some pros and cons to see which might be best for your company.
First, keep in mind that Ecommerce is a large, growing market that’s predicted to earn more than $7 trillion worldwide by 2025.
For many in the ecommerce world, this is no big news. Even after removing such giants as Amazon and Walmart, ecommerce sales are set to continue its meteoric rise.
An important part of that success comes from email marketing, which has consistently shown to bring in $36 for every dollar spent—a much better ROI than any other marketing channel.
But when it comes to the two leading email marketing platforms that are dedicated to ecommerce—Omnisend vs Klaviyo—which one is the winner?
That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today. We’ll give you a full feature-by-feature breakdown, including pricing, customer support, email editors, automation, SMS, popups, and so much more.
Klaviyo vs Omnisend: Which Is Better?
Although Klaviyo and Omnisend are similar software, there are distinctive dissimilarities between them. These variations may drive one of these platforms more fitting for your business over the other.
So, to assist you select which most prominent solution is the most suitable for you, we’re going to compare Klaviyo and Omnisend against the following factors:
Klaviyo was developed with eCommerce in mind, and its in-depth integrations establish that this is indeed the case. However, overall, Klaviyo is the more costly choice.
Omnisend is a good choice if you want access to more advanced features and want to dig deep into data analytics at an affordable price. Its workflow, segmentation, and reporting tools are awesome.
List-building with gamification forms
Let’s start at the beginning of the funnel. In order to really succeed at email & SMS marketing, you’ll need to have a list of contacts that you can message.
Luckily, most email marketing programs, including Klaviyo and Omnisend, have list-building features incorporated into their platforms. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty details then to see how they compare.
For Klaviyo, you have the option to use various popups, including:
Immediate popups: these show up immediately after a visitor enters the website
Exit-intent popups: these show up when a visitor signals they want to leave the website
Targeted popups: these appear only on specific URLs
Announcements: these show information only, and don’t require any email or SMS input
This covers quite a lot of the use cases that you’ll be experiencing.
Omnisend covers the same ground as Klaviyo, with exit-intent, announcement, targeting and immediate popups. However, it does go further with gamification forms, like its Wheel of Fortune popup.
This turns the usual email or SMS list building into a fun experience for visitors. They get to spin the wheel to win a certain prize, and to enter they only need to give their email address.
Besides that, Omnisend also offers Landing Pages, which will allow ecommerce merchants to create a single landing page targeted towards a specific campaign, event, or product.
Comparing the email builders
The platform’s email builder is the cornerstone of their entire offering. Once you’ve started creating your email or SMS contact list, you’ll want to have an email builder that is easy to use and loaded with enough functionality to create the exact emails you’d like.
Fortunately, both Omnisend and Klaviyo fit the bill here. Both offer an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder with standard functions like customizable text, images, columns, and buttons.
Omnisend’s email builder
Klaviyo’s email editor
They both also offer a feature that lets you add products from your store directly into the email editor, without having to leave the email editor.
However, Omnisend does check a few more boxes than Klaviyo. Omnisend has extra ecommerce-friendly features, like the interactive gift boxes or scratch cards that help engagement, as well as discount codes that are unique to each recipient.
SMS marketing
While not explicitly part of “email marketing,” SMS marketing is nonetheless gaining more popularity and being included in many email marketing platform offerings.
The good news is that both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer SMS marketing as part of their core features.
You can decide to use it or not, and for both you can top up your SMS credits whenever you see that you need more. They both also offer free SMS credits in their free plans (but more on that in the pricing section further below).
However, Omnisend and Klaviyo differ in SMS country offerings. First of all, Klaviyo only offers SMS marketing for contacts that live in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. This means that on Klaviyo you wouldn’t be able to send text messages to recipients outside of those locations.
Omnisend, on the other hand, has no country restrictions—essentially, you can send text messages to any recipient in any country on the planet. Of course, sending SMS to the Christmas Islands will be about 20x more expensive than sending to US contacts.
Segmentation
Segmentation is pretty important to ensure that you aren’t talking to all of your contacts in the same way, at the same time, about the same thing.
Different audiences require different messaging, and segmentation allows you to slice and dice your audiences so that you can send them hyper targeted messages.
Omnisend and Klaviyo both cover this ground very well. They both have robust, powerful segmentation capabilities that let you create any segments you want by using the contact’s shopping behavior, profile data, or campaign activity.
Besides using segmentation for your email and SMS marketing campaigns, you can also upload these segments to Facebook Custom Audiences to create lookalike audiences for your Facebook ads.
Omnisend goes further, allowing you to upload segments to Google Ads for the same purpose, although Klaviyo offers this through a third party.
klaviyo Segmentation (1)
omnisend Segmentation (1)
Automation
The ability to set-it-and-forget-it for your emails or SMS is really powerful, helping ecommerce merchants generate sales at any hour of the day.
Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer automation workflows that will allow you to set a variety of triggers, message splits, and much more.
Klaviyo’s automation workflow editor (1)
Omnisend offers a slightly different experience, but if you’re familiar with Klaviyo’s, you’ll be able to use Omnisend’s pretty easily.
Omnisend’s automation workflow editor (1)
There are a few differences, however. Omnisend offers the ability to not only add email to automations, but also SMS and push notifications. This means that you’d be able to send a series of welcome emails in the same workflow to recipients email, SMS or web push.
Omnisend also tracks abandoned carts for Shopify stores using cookie-based tracking, allowing them to identify shoppers when they’ve added products to their cart, while Klaviyo identifies shoppers at checkout.
Reporting and analytics
It’s important that merchants understand how their campaigns and automations are performing so that they can continually improve and update as needed.
However, while good reporting and analytics will tell you what’s happened with your various campaigns and automations, the very best reports and analytics will give you insights to help you better understand your audiences. That way, you can begin to create better campaigns that will help you sell more and grow your brand.
Omnisend and Klaviyo deliver on the latter, providing powerful insights into where customers are in their journeys, and even suggestions on how to move them further down the funnel.
Omnisend’s reporting includes:
Sales dashboard: this helps you to easily keep track of all the sales that Omnisend is driving to your business
Performance reports: you get campaign and automation reports that show engagement statistics, sales and more
Advanced reporting: this feature, available only for paid plans, gives you aggregated performance metrics and the ability to see channel-level results, the best performers, and more
Omnisend’s sales dashboard (1)
Omnisend’s reporting also includes cookieless tracking, a custom attribution window, cross-channel tracking, audience growth trends, Live view, etc..
Klaviyo has much of the same types of offerings, but they go even more in-depth since they’ve begun leaning heavily on customer data.
Klaviyo now offers their customers the ability to use predictive analytics that aims to:
Show when someone will buy next
Predict the high-ticket spenders and the CLV (customer lifetime value) for specific customers
Identify customers’ probability of churn
Find out the optimal time to send emails for better opens and clicks
Klaviyo’s predictive CLV (1)
As you can see, their reporting and analytics aims to remove a lot of the guesswork that marketers would normally be involved in, when trying to gain insights from various reports.
Customer support
In terms of ecommerce, customer support is very important since it can literally make or break your campaigns, thereby impacting your bottom line.
If you run into an issue in the days or weeks leading up to the busiest shopping period of the entire year, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, then it’s going to be crucial that you get the help you need to resolve the issue quickly.
But great support isn’t just reactionary—many email marketing platforms have Customer Success Managers (CSMs) that aim to proactively help merchants find ways to improve their email marketing performance.
In this regard, there is unfortunately a wide rift between Klaviyo and Omnisend. Klaviyo has a wide host of positive aspects, but sadly their customer support isn’t one of them.
Klaviyo’s customer support limits their hours to 6am-10pm on weekdays, and 10am-4pm on weekends At one point, Klaviyo shut down its live chat for at least a week in order to upgrade their systems, leaving only email as an alternative communication channel.
When customers are able to get through to their support, they’re often pointed towards their tutorials. Beyond that, their CMSs are limited to customers that pay at least $2,000/month, and customers report being able to meet them only twice per quarter.
That is a far cry from Omnisend’s support.
Recently, Omnisend won Bronze in the Stevie Award, which is one of the world’s premier business awards. They do not have limits on working hours—instead, they respond 24/7, every day of the year.
On Shopify, Omnisend has more than 4,000 five-star reviews, with most praising their customer support.
Lastly, their CSM threshold is much lower at $400/month minimum, and they meet regularly with their customers.
Pricing
Lastly, we’ll look at the pricing for both of these email marketing platforms. It’s important to look at pricing last, not first, because you need to ensure first of all that the platforms meet your minimum requirements in terms of features and services.
Right off the bat, it’s important to mention that Klaviyo recently announced pricing increases. While Omnisend used to be slightly cheaper than Klaviyo for certain contact list sizes, they are now consistently cheaper.
Overall, both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer three easy-to-understand plans:
- Free: both of these are free for up to 250 contacts and both offer free SMS credits
- Standard: on Omnisend, it’s called Standard, while Klaviyo calls it Email
- Premium: on Omnisend, this is called Pro, while Klaviyo calls it Email and SMS
Omnisend Pricing
Klaviyo Pricing
Below, we’ll look at what the price differences are between these two email service providers, but there are two important things to keep in mind:
- Omnisend provides global SMS, while Klaviyo limits their SMS to only four countries
- Omnisend provides a dedicated CSM for any plan paying at least $400/month. For Klaviyo, brands need to pay at least $2,000/month.
Here, I’ve checked the prices of both Omnisend and Klaviyo based on the size of their email contact list. Because they have a slightly different way to calculate SMS credits, I’ve also kept the SMS credits equal for both so that we can more accurately see the pricing differences.
As is obvious, Omnisend is cheaper than Klaviyo for the same contact list size and SMS allowances. One significant contributing factor is that Omnisend offers unlimited emails for its Pro plan, while Klaviyo caps it at 10x the contact list size.
Similarly, Omnisend’s SMS is also cheaper, providing more for the same price.
Final thoughts on Omnisend vs Klaviyo
We’ll keep it simple and straightforward here: you really can’t go wrong with either of these email marketing platforms.
Both omnisend and klaviyo are industry leaders in helping with your ecommerce-focused email and SMS marketing, and as we saw today, they have a lot of relative strengths in various feature categories.
They both also offer strong integrations on the most popular ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix and more.
They have really strong automation, their list-building features are top notch, powerful segmentation and reporting, and they make it easy for anyone to create and send beautiful email campaigns to help build stronger connections with customers and grow their business.
The best advice we can give at the moment is to recommend you jump on their free plan and test out their features with a small portion of your contacts. That way, you can see which one is easier for you to create campaigns, use automation and segmentation, understand the reporting insights, and really help you boost your business.
In Brief, the most suitable option for you will rely on the requirements and priorities of your business. Personally receommed omnisend.