Klaviyo

Klaviyo is intuitive and flexible while still being powerful. Segmentation is best in class and allows us to build highly targeted, scalable programs without excessive complexity or workarounds. Reporting is easy to access and interpret, the email builder is efficient and user-friendly, overall UI makes it easy for day-to-day execution and more advanced use cases. Compared to other ESPs, klaviyo strikes a rare balance between usability and depth. It enables teams to move quickly, iterate often, and manage sophisticated lifecycle programs with the right team to enable it.

There are a lot of built in, out of the box, solutions for Shopify that make it an amazing time/performance saver.

We can target previous audiences that haven't transacted or have previously and bring them back into the funnel and move them down toward a conversion. It's become a strong and key component of our Go To Market strategy.

The lack of true high-level orchestration and oversight view. There's no clear way to understand whether we're over-emailing customers, where flows overlap, whether metrics (such as cross-sell dates) represent meaningful portions of the audience or only small, skewed segments, or where gaps and redundancies exist in the overall experience. When you bring this up to Klaviyo, they say, it's working as designed but that's the issue, it's not designed with context in mind. While individual campaigns and flows are easy to manage, the platform lacks a true 1000 ft view to assess message pressure, sequencing, and experience quality across the lifecycle. This level of orchestration and interpretation is critical for mature programs. Another challenge is SMS cost efficiency. SMS CPMs are quite high, making it expensive to scale always-on lifecycle programs. While performance can be strong, the cost structure limits testing, segmentation, and expansion compared to other platforms or channels. Additionally, Klaviyo falls short in its approach to compliance. As an industry leader, i would expect compliance to be explicit and built into the product rather than advisory. Today, gray areas exist where Klaviyo users lack sufficient data or guidance to confidently determine compliance, yet liability remains on the Klaviyo user. Stronger guardrails, clear enforcement, and proactive compliance design in the tool would significantly improve trust and usability.

Once you move past its built-in support for Shopify, it can be challenging to implement anything custom.

I don't really have any dislikes with regards to Klaviyo's service or product offerings, but if I had to pick one I would have to say it's SMS, however that's due to the behavior of our average demographic and how they see SMS as an annoyance more than a welcomed communication. There might be room to change that at some point, but it would likely be a whole new demographic we would want to prospect and grow.