When tools focus primarily on performance, they sometimes leave user experience behind. But it’s important to remember that marketing solutions are supposed to alleviate some of the burden, not add to it. Balancing between power and user experience is key to keeping customers happy over extended periods of time.
Omnisend and Klaviyo are two of the most popular ESP platforms in the market. You may be tempted to just use either one of them, but they each have their own pros and cons you need to be aware of before deciding.
How fast can you launch campaigns?
Everyone wants to be able to launch campaigns as fast as possible with minimal downtime trying to figure out how everything works. The good news is that both platforms allow you to send emails quickly with template libraries and drag-and-drop email builders.
There is one key difference, however, that may affect your choice between the two platforms: adding products from your store.
Also read: How to Leverage Email Integration for Business Productivity
Omnisend has a convenient product picker feature that allows you to search and add items from your store right in the email builder interface without any additional configurations. Once you find and select the product you want to sell, Omnisend automatically imports the product’s name, image, description, price, and purchase link. You can then customize the information, if needed, and move on to sending the campaign.
Image via Omnisend
If you don’t know which products to add, or have no time to think about it, you can also choose a product recommender block. There, you can choose between three main options: best sellers, most viewed products, or recently added items. Depending on which one you choose, Omnisend will show the respective products to the recipients once you launch the campaign.
Image via Omnisend
Klaviyo makes it a tad more complicated to add products to your email. First, you need to create a product feed, name it, select a catalog from which the items will be included, choose dynamic conditions, set fallback conditions, and select categories. That’s quite a lot of work as opposed to Omnisend’s product picker (or recommender) where you set everything up in a couple of clicks.
Image via Klaviyo
Once you get the hang of it, it’s likely easy to manage, but the time spent on adding products ultimately adds up. As such, for user experience and speed, we have to give this win to Omnisend since it provides the same level of power but takes half the time to get to the end result.
Automation flexibility
Automation is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. Sending newsletters for specific campaigns is useful, but setting up workflows that generate revenue or improve retention continuously without you logging in to the platform every day is the main goal.
Omnisend provides access to advanced automation capabilities without the excessively technical overhead. If you don’t want to build one from scratch, you can use a large library of templates to help you get live quicker. Once you pick the template, you get a complete automation logic done for you, send delays and marketing copy included, which you can then either customize or save and enable.
If you want to add SMS or push notifications to your workflows, you can. Omnisend allows you to send SMS messages all around the world while keeping the costs flexible and user-friendly.
Klaviyo also gives you the platform to create complex automations and has a library of pre-made templates for you to use. The main difference is that Klaviyo is more focused on automation depth, which is great for businesses needing niche automations that are hardly doable with most other ESPs. Most businesses, however, don’t need these specialized automation capabilities, so you need to think whether the higher price (Omnisend’s $16/mo vs. Klaviyo’s $20/mo) justifies the extent to which you plan to use the platform.
Also, Klaviyo has a major setback regarding SMS: it only supports 18 countries, you have to buy expensive blocks of SMS credits, and if unused, they don’t roll over to the next month.
Managing large contact lists
Once you get to the thousands, tens of thousands, or more subscribers, sending mass emails to everyone becomes an insufficient marketing strategy. At this point, you definitely need segmentation and personalization to make sure that the message you send is relevant to the person receiving it.
Both Klaviyo and Omnisend provide similar tools for segmentation, the only difference, once again, is depth, which is only realistically viable for businesses with extremely specific needs.
Both tools have an AI segmentation tool that’s driven by prompts. You can enter a prompt explaining what audience you want filtered, and the tool provides you with that segment in seconds. You don’t need to manually set filters like you used to, especially for simpler audiences.
If you need a more complex audience segment, you can still do it the old way by setting each filter yourself in the segmentation section. It takes some time, but it allows for more precision when it’s needed.
Since both tools are similar in terms of managing contacts, you need to think about the depth that you need and the price the tools come with. Omnisend generally provides standard-advanced features at a more affordable price and user-friendly interface, whereas Klaviyo provides standard-advanced-niche features that come with a higher price and a learning curve.
Also read: How to Effectively Grow Your Email List Without Using Popups
Feature accessibility
When you’re testing out platforms, feature accessibility could become the deciding factor. The tool that allows you to use its best features regardless of whether you’re a paying customer or not, is usually the one that’s more confident that these features could make you stay.
Sometimes people sign up for a paid plan to test a specific feature and find out it’s not what they expected it to be. That’s both wasted time and money, so it’s important that a platform allows you to see its full potential right from the start.
Klaviyo, unfortunately, restricts some of its features on the free or lower paid plans. You cannot use the AI features, except for the subject line generator, unless you pay. Customer support is also limited to 60 days of email support for free users, and there’s no option to use live chat support (it only unlocks with paid plans). In short, if you want to learn the platform, you need to sign up for a paid plan.
Omnisend, on the other hand, offers unrestricted features even on free plans, including AI tools and 24/7 email and live chat customer support. You can fully test the platform without spending a dime, and get help from human support in minutes if you get stuck. Additionally, Omnisend provides unique migration services for businesses switching to Omnisend. If, upon signing up, you become a $250/month (or more) customer, they move your contacts, segments, automations, templates, and more for free in up to 5 business days.
While the two platforms are quite similar when it comes to other capabilities, Omnisend is the all-around winner in terms of feature accessibility and support.
Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: Verdict
Both Omnisend and Klaviyo are excellent tools for ecommerce marketing. The choice comes down to your goals and needs. If you need niche segmentation and automations, Klaviyo is the only choice since it’s capable of creating extremely detailed audience segments and automation flows. These things do, however, come at a steep learning curve.
But if you need a tool that’s powerful without being clunky, choose Omnisend. It’s made with modern online businesses in mind, which means you’ll be able to build the automations that you need, and segment audiences in a way that’s more than sufficient for ecommerce stores. On top of that, you’ll get better customer support and even save budget money at the same time.