Customer.io vs. Iterable vs. Klaviyo

Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.

Incentivized

Iterable is great for delivering your email marketing activity. We've not yet added other channels (although may do soon), but others report that the cross-channel capability is strong. Iterable manages to find the sophistication to enable our ambitions, yet remain user friendly and manageable. We're on a journey from relying heavily on old-fashioned blast emails to automated CRM. Iterable has been a fantastic tool to help us along the way. I particularly enjoy the journey builder that we trigger in multiple ways, from custom events, to list schedules, and user actions.

Incentivized

Klaviyo is a must-have email marketing platform for any company using Shopify for their e-commerce websites. The best use case scenario is if all your purchases are coming from Shopify site and/or Shopify POS. However, if you use hybrid sales (e-commerce + sales reps), then Klaviyo can be leveraged only for your e-commerce customer segment. There is a workaround where you can manually upload the list of your offline customers to have a less personalized campaigns for them, and having ultra-personalized campaigns running for your e-comm segment. But note that this method will require governance from a team member who understands compliance and data architecture as it will require regular database clean up and understanding how exclusions work.

Incentivized

• Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
• Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
• We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
• Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
• Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
• Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
• We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.

Incentivized

• Customer Journey creation - the platform easily creates a visual path for the marketing team to curate messaging based around timing, channel, behavior as well as add split testing logic and exit criteria so we target only the audiences we want.
• Customer Success - one of the best teams I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I'm able to move so much quicker because they really create a helpful partnership.
• Audience segmentation, the platform is easy to work with even if you're a first time user, they do a great job of visually showing the logic and the and/or/none type rules.

Incentivized

• Very easy to setup Klaviyo with Bigcommerce for email & SMS capture, comes with templates that are simple to edit and publish.
• Very easy to set up Klaviyo with other 3rd party apps like Yotpo Reviews and Loyalty, giving you easy access to send emails based on loyalty points or asking for a review.
• Automated campaigns are a breeze! They come with preset templates to get started quick. Including a Welcome Series, Cart Abandonment Series, Lost Customer Series, and Browse Abandonment Series among others.
• The platform is easy to navigate and use without having to spend time learning from videos or help files, we were able to just jump right in and use it.
• Great features like targeting based on anything available in your data, including products purchased, loyalty standing, interactions, etc.

Incentivized

• Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
• Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
• Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.

• In-app channel, although it works, has some shortcomings in UI functionality or system backend logic, which suggests it is built on an email send-out architecture.
• Drag and drop editor has its own limitations - it isn't perfect. You can't create some basic designs.

Incentivized

• At times the platform isn't as intuitive as you would like. Take the time to be onboarded and play around in the platform to get the hang of things. Utilize Klaviyo's resources and attend their live training sessions to help navigate the platform and implement best practices they recommend.
• Can be pricey depending on company and email list.
• Customization is limited at times. The brand font we utilized on all branded content wasn't available through Klaviyo. Previously we would have to go through the back end to implement our branded font, import our font, or create content on another platform to utilize our font.

Incentivized

Its a robust platform that can serve complex business needs. Current and futures. It tries to adapt an newest trends and has good CS and CSM specialists.

Incentivized

Klaviyo is simply a great solution for e-com email marketing & customer relationship management:

1. User journey visibility: We can see our clients' customers on their individual user journeys (open email, site visits) to better understand and accommodate your customers.
2. Flow automation: Creating automated emails that follow up with new leads, those who abandoned carts, purchased.
3. Email design: So easy to use, and more friendly than some other visual builders that we've used.
4. Metrics visibility: We can see our clients' metrics very easily and adjust efforts accordingly.

Incentivized

Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.

Incentivized

Iterable very easy to learn and use. It's a great platform for both a new email marketer and a marketer that's been working in email for 20+ years.

Incentivized

The only reason why I did not give it a 10/10 is that it cannot distinguish purchases that came through subscription recharges instead of purchases that were driven directly by email sends. Other than that, the automation qualities, design features, and segmentation options make this an incredible email platform, and I am very happy with it

Incentivized

Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.

Incentivized

The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.

Incentivized

My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io

Incentivized

I've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.

Incentivized

Their support is always quick and we have recurring meetings with our advisor. they were great when we first started at walking us through the platform and helping us understand how to do the overall setup. They also have a wide variety of articles that cover must issues in a very clear manner that will get you out of a predicament really fast.

Incentivized

Don't cut corners, do it right the first time, if you take your time to build everything the way you want it then it will run itself. The platform will help you increase revenue as long as you use the tools it provides. Don't be scared to ask questions, the support team will help you get to the next level

Incentivized

Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.

Incentivized

I have previously used Dotdigital, and the way it compares to Iterable is through the reporting capabilities - Dotdigital reporting is, in my opinion, stronger; it provides real-time dashboards and the chance to generate reports for specific timeframes. I have previously used Dotdigital, and in my opinion, its reporting capabilities are stronger than Iterable's. Dotdigital offers real-time dashboards and the ability to generate reports for specific timeframes.

Incentivized

Klaviyo is leaps and bounds above Mailchimp. We just switched from MailChimp because we outgrew it. That is actually my recommended path to take while starting out. MailChimp had a free plan up to 5000 emails. Once we hit that, we switched and got an email marketing team and grew from there.

We've definitely tested scalability, and it's no line - it works. The process is pretty easy. Most of the times it goes off without a hitch. Any time we do encounter issues, our support team is quick to get on the job and very communicative as they work us through a successful launch.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
• Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
• Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.

Incentivized

• I do not have hard numbers, as I am not in the department that deals with those kinds of quantifications of impact. However, I do believe the use of Iterable has been a positive thing for us in providing more comprehensive data that is useful when dealing with customer tickets.

Incentivized

• Newsletter marketing has become a major form of sales
• The success we had in our first year forced us to shift priorities and add more resources to support newsletter marketing
• The price for using the service is a drop in the bucket compared to the attributed revenue earned from using the service

Incentivized