Klaviyo | Email & SMS Marketing Automation for E-commerce

In the competitive world of e-commerce, building lasting customer relationships is the key to sustainable growth. Generic marketing blasts no longer cut it. Today’s customers expect personalized, timely, and relevant communication across all the channels they use. This is where many businesses struggle, juggling disconnected tools for email, SMS, and customer data, leading to fragmented experiences and missed revenue opportunities. Enter Klaviyo, the intelligent Marketing Automation platform designed from the ground up to solve this exact problem for e-commerce brands. Klaviyo unifies your customer data and marketing channels, empowering you to create exceptional experiences that turn one-time buyers into lifelong fans. This guide will provide a comprehensive overview of Klaviyo’s features, pricing, and unique advantages, showing you why it’s the go-to platform for over 140,000 forward-thinking brands worldwide.

Beyond the Inbox: Klaviyo’s Core Features for E-commerce Domination

Klaviyo is more than just an email service provider; it’s a complete growth engine for your online store. Its power lies in a core set of features that work in harmony to deliver highly personalized and automated marketing campaigns. By centralizing your data and communication tools, Klaviyo provides a holistic view of your customers, enabling you to engage them with the right message at the perfect moment.

Intelligent Marketing Automation That Works While You Sleep

The heart of Klaviyo is its best-in-class Marketing Automation. This isn’t about sending a simple welcome email; it’s about building sophisticated, multi-step “flows” that are triggered by specific customer behaviors. Imagine a customer adds a product to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase. Klaviyo can automatically trigger an abandoned cart flow: a perfectly timed email with an image of the item, followed by an SMS message a few hours later with a small discount to nudge them over the finish line. Other powerful pre-built flows include welcome series for new subscribers, browse abandonment reminders for window shoppers, post-purchase follow-ups to encourage reviews or cross-sells, and win-back campaigns for lapsed customers. You can customize these flows endlessly with splits, filters, and delays, ensuring every interaction is tailored to the customer’s journey. This level of automation not only saves you countless hours but also consistently recovers revenue that would otherwise be lost.

Unified Email & SMS Marketing for a Seamless Customer Journey

Klaviyo brings Email Marketing and SMS Marketing together under one roof, creating a powerful omnichannel experience. This integration is seamless and strategic. You can build campaigns that leverage both channels, for example, sending a promotional email and then targeting non-openers with a follow-up SMS. The platform’s intuitive drag-and-drop email editor makes it easy to create beautiful, on-brand emails, while robust A/B testing capabilities allow you to optimize everything from subject lines to send times. For SMS, you can engage in two-way conversations, send targeted promotions, and provide shipping updates directly to your customers’ phones—a channel with an average open rate of over 98%. By managing both email and SMS in Klaviyo, you gain a unified view of each customer’s engagement, preventing message fatigue and ensuring your communication strategy is cohesive and effective.

The Power of a Built-in Customer Data Platform (CDP)

What truly sets Klaviyo apart is its foundation as a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Before you can personalize, you need data, and Klaviyo excels at consolidating it. It integrates deeply with leading e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce, pulling in a rich stream of information in real-time. This includes purchase history, browsing behavior, items viewed, and custom properties. Every action a customer takes is added to their unified profile in Klaviyo. This creates a single source of truth that fuels hyper-targeted segmentation. You can create dynamic segments based on any combination of data points: “VIP customers who have spent over $500 and purchased in the last 30 days,” or “Subscribers who have viewed a specific product category but have not yet purchased.” This powerful segmentation ensures your E-commerce Marketing is always relevant, dramatically increasing engagement, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value.

Klaviyo Pricing: Flexible, Transparent, and Built for Growth

Klaviyo’s pricing is designed to scale with your business. Instead of locking you into expensive, rigid plans, it offers a flexible model based on your usage. This makes it accessible for startups while providing the power needed for enterprise-level brands.

The core pricing is divided into two main components:

1. Email: Priced based on the number of contacts in your account.
2. SMS: Priced on a per-message (credit) basis, allowing you to control costs.

A key advantage is the generous free plan, which is perfect for new businesses. It includes:

• Up to 250 contacts
• Up to 500 email sends per month
• Up to 150 free SMS/MMS credits per month
• Full access to email automation, segmentation, and reporting features.

This allows you to set up foundational flows like abandoned cart and welcome series and start generating revenue before ever paying a cent. As your contact list grows, the pricing scales transparently.

Here is a sample breakdown to illustrate the scaling model for the Email plan:

Note: Prices are estimates and subject to change. Please visit the official Klaviyo website for the most current pricing.

This pay-as-you-grow approach ensures that Klaviyo remains a cost-effective investment. The platform is designed to generate a significant return, with many businesses reporting that the revenue recovered from automated flows alone far exceeds the monthly cost.

How Klaviyo Stacks Up: A Comparison with Other Marketing Platforms

When evaluating marketing platforms, it’s crucial to look beyond surface-level features. Klaviyo’s e-commerce-centric design gives it a distinct edge over more generalized email service providers.

The key takeaway is that while other platforms can do Email Marketing, Klaviyo was built for E-commerce Marketing. Its entire architecture revolves around using deep customer data to drive revenue. Competitors often treat e-commerce data as an add-on, resulting in slower syncs and less granular segmentation capabilities. With Klaviyo, the Customer Data Platform isn’t an afterthought—it’s the engine. This allows for a level of personalization and automation that is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate on other platforms without stitching together multiple expensive tools. For businesses serious about leveraging their data to build customer relationships and maximize lifetime value, Klaviyo is the clear leader.

Your Quickstart Guide: Launching Your First Klaviyo Campaign

Getting started with Klaviyo is surprisingly straightforward, thanks to its seamless integrations and intuitive interface. Here’s a simple guide to get you up and running.

Step 1: Integrate Your Store and Install the Tracking Snippet

The first step is connecting Klaviyo to your e-commerce platform. For stores on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento, this is often a one-click process. Once integrated, Klaviyo will automatically start syncing your historical and real-time customer and order data. You will also be prompted to add the Klaviyo tracking snippet, known as Klaviyo.js, to your website’s theme. This powerful piece of code is what enables Klaviyo to track on-site behavior like “Viewed Product” and “Active on Site.”

<script type="text/javascript" async 
 src="https://static.klaviyo.com/klaviyo.js?company_id=YOUR_PUBLIC_API_KEY"></script>

Simply replace YOUR_PUBLIC_API_KEY with your unique key from your Klaviyo account settings. This snippet unlocks the deepest level of behavioral tracking.

Step 2: Activate Your First Automated Flow

Don’t wait to build your first automation. The Abandoned Cart flow is the highest-impact automation for any e-commerce store. Navigate to the “Flows” tab in Klaviyo, where you’ll find a library of pre-built templates. Select “Abandoned Cart,” customize the email content with your branding using the drag-and-drop editor, and set it live. Within minutes, you’ll have an automated system working 24/7 to recover potentially lost sales.

Step 3: Create and Send Your First Segmented Campaign

Once you have some data flowing in, you can move beyond automation to targeted campaigns. Go to the “Lists & Segments” tab and create a new segment. For example, build a segment of “First-Time Buyers” who purchased in the last 60 days. Then, navigate to “Campaigns,” create a new email, and send it exclusively to this segment with a special “thank you” offer for their next purchase. This targeted approach will yield far better results than a generic newsletter blast to your entire list.

Drive Your Growth with Smarter E-commerce Marketing

In today’s e-commerce landscape, owning your customer data and relationships is non-negotiable. Klaviyo provides the tools to do just that. By unifying your customer data, Email Marketing, and SMS Marketing into a single, intelligent platform, Klaviyo empowers you to move beyond generic campaigns and build a truly personalized marketing machine. Its powerful Marketing Automation capabilities save you time and generate revenue on autopilot, while its deep segmentation allows you to speak to every customer like an individual.

If you are ready to stop juggling disparate tools and start building a cohesive, data-driven marketing strategy that drives real growth, Klaviyo is the definitive solution.

Ready to see it in action? Visit www.klaviyo.com to explore the features and sign up for a free account today.