When it comes to eCommerce email marketing, there are two industry leaders that are often pitted against each other: Klaviyo vs Omnisend.

Without having too much background on either email service provider (ESP), how do you know when to choose one over the other? After all, this is a very important decision: not only are acquisition costs (mostly Facebook ads) rising but email is also shown to have the best ROI of any digital marketing channel, bringing in $36 for every $1 spent.

To get that kind of ROI from your own email marketing program, you’re probably going to want to get the best ESP—one that’s dedicated to eCommerce, bringing in sales, and creating loyal customers that really love your brand.

In today’s article, we’ll look at which of these ESPs will bring you the best results overall, in terms of features, pricing, support, and much more.

Popups and signup forms

Although this isn’t the first thing you’d consider when thinking about email marketing, list-building tools like popups, signup forms, landing pages, etc. are pretty important for a successful email marketing program.

That’s because you need an email list for your email marketing. Luckily, both Klaviyo and Omnisend offer a nice suite of list-building features that make it easy for you to collect subscribers.

Klaviyo and Omnisend both have multiple popups, such as immediate, exit-intent (that show up when visitors go to leave), announcement (that don’t ask for email addresses), sticky signup bars, and embedded forms. In addition, Omnisend also offers landing pages that you can use for special offers, product releases, popup shops, temporary campaigns, and more. It also has gamified forms like the Wheel of Fortune.

The email editors

Once you’ve got your email or SMS list, it’s time to start building campaigns. That’s where the email builder comes into play, as it serves as the core feature of your email marketing program.

Here, Omnisend and Klaviyo are pretty much on par with each other. They both offer drag-and-drop email builders that help you easily create beautiful emails quickly. The editors come with the standard options, such as images, text blocks, columns, buttons and more.

Both builders also offer the important feature that lets you quickly add your products directly into your emails without needing to leave the editor to do it.

However, there are some things that Omnisend’s email builder does differently. Primarily, there are a few more customization options, such as unique discount codes, and interactive features like gift boxes and scratch cards.

Channels

Omnisend and Klaviyo, although they’re ESPs, have more than just email as a channel that you can use for your marketing.

Klaviyo offers multiple channels to help merchants achieve their ecommerce marketing goals. These include email, SMS and Facebook retargeting.  With Facebook retargeting, you can create lookalike audiences within Facebook using segments of your existing customers.

That way, for example, you can create a segment of your absolute best customers then sync it with Facebook to find new audiences that have similar characteristics.

Omnisend has the same three channels as Klaviyo, but adds two more: web push notifications and Google Retargeting Sync. Google Retargeting functions the same way as Facebook Retargeting, allowing segments to be synced to the ad platforms to find lookalike audiences.

With more channels, you can reach your audience better.

Automation workflows

Automation helps you sell more products around the clock, whether you’re asleep or awake. It works by sending emails (or SMS, push notifications, etc.) whenever a contact performs an action or meets certain criteria.

They’re powerful, and they work, helping bring in a good amount of sales while only making up a small portion of messages sent.

Luckily, both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer up an easy-to-use but powerful automation workflow builder. This allows you to create simple or complex workflows for various triggers.

You can also use splits to add various paths to your automation workflows, as well as add different channels. This Omnisend does a bit better than Klaviyo, as you can add not only SMS to your workflows, but also push notifications.

One important distinction between these two ESPs, however, is in the way they trigger abandoned carts. With Klaviyo, abandoned carts are identified when a user gets to the checkout. Omnisend, on the other hand, uses cookie-based tracking to identify abandoned carts, allowing you to identify them earlier when they abandon the items they added to their carts.

Integrations

Both Omnisend and Klaviyo have one-click integrations with the top eCommerce platforms, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and even Wix.

Beyond that, they also have direct integrations with the top eCommerce tools, allowing you to quickly sync data between the tools, and more easily run your business.

These integrations include AfterShip, Typeform, Zapier, Yotpo, Gorgias, Loox, and more.

In total, Omnisend has more than 80 direct app integrations. Klaviyo, on the other hand, has more than 200 integrations, allowing merchants to connect with more eCommerce apps. While they both have the important integration covered, Klaviyo has a clear advantage here.

Segmentation

With segmentation, eCommerce merchants can send more targeted messages by creating subgroups, or segments, from their general contact list. This allows them to make special offers or communicate specific messages that are suited better for smaller audiences.

Fortunately, Klaviyo and Omnisend both have a pretty robust segmentation, making it easy to slice and dice your general contact list based on various aspects, including campaign activity, shopping behavior, or profile data.

You can create segments of your VIP customers and sync those up with Facebook Ads (on Omnisend and Klaviyo) or Google Ads (on Omnisend only) and create lookalike audiences based on those segments.

Pricing

This is where some of the major differences between the two platforms lie. Klaviyo recently notified its customers that it was raising prices (sometimes by a significant 50%). Whereas previously Omnisend was generally cheaper than Klaviyo, the price differences are much more stark now.

Omnisend and Klaviyo now have much more similar pricing structures, each with three plans:

1. A free plan
2. A standard plan (Standard for Omnisend, and Email for Klaviyo)
3. A premium plan (Pro for Omnisend, and Email and SMS for Klaviyo)

Because of their similar pricing structures, it’s easier now to compare the prices based on the email and SMS contact list sizes.

However, there are two important things to remember:

• While both Klaviyo and Omnisend offer SMS, Klaviyo limits their SMS to the UK, US, Australia and Canada. Omnisend has no such limits, allowing merchants to send text messages to all countries
• Omnisend gives CSMs (Customer Success Managers) to accounts paying at least $400/month, while Klaviyo raises the threshold to $2,000/month

Here’s a quick summary of pricing for Klaviyo and Omnisend based on various contact list sizes:

Support

Lastly, we’ll look at customer support. This is a crucial aspect, since your ability to frictionlessly use your ESP of choice can mean the difference between successful, profitable campaigns, or unsuccessful ones.

In this regard, we see another big difference between Klaviyo and Omnisend. Klaviyo’s support falls short, since they limit their hours and availability to their customers.

Klaviyo’s support hours are 6am-10pm on weekdays, and 10am-4pm on weekends. In the past, they shut down their live chat due to upgrades, and some customers mention that Klaviyo’s support often sends them to tutorials or other support articles.

Wrapping up the Klaviyo vs Omnisend analysis

At this point, you may have already understood what the result is here: you can’t lose by going with either Omnisend or Klaviyo.

Both of these ESPs have great email builders, strong automation and segmentation, loads of channels and eCommerce-focused features, great integrations, and much more. While they don’t have the exact same strengths in all features, they are relatively equally capable of helping you build great relationships with your customers and generate more sales.

To figure out which ESP will work best for your eCommerce business, you should register for their free plan and test it out with a smaller contact list. That way, you can see how they can best help your business.

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