Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses to centralize and use every piece of their customer data. With Klaviyo, businesses can combine customer data with more than 350 native integrations to automate personalized email and SMS communications that make customers feel seen. From mom-and-pop shops to established companies, Klaviyo states businesses like Dermalogica, Living Proof, Solo Stove, Citizen Watches, and more than 143,000 other paying users leverage their platform…
$20
per month
Marin Software (discontinued)
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Marin Software is a cloud-based cross-channel advertising campaign management platform which integrates many tools and functions, and it is the name of the company in San Francisco that issues the software. Marin touts cross-display (including mobile-optimized) advertisement retargeting, social marketing management, and many other tools to manage complex marketing and paid-advertising (PPC) efforts.
A free trial of this extensive platform is available. Marin Software maintains a client list…
N/A
Pricing
Klaviyo
Marin Software (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Klaviyo
Marin Software (discontinued)
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Paid plans start at $20/month and include:
251 - 500 contacts
5,000 monthly email sends
150 SMS/MMS sending credits
Applicable SMS carrier fees
Mobile push notifications (free beta)
Email and chat support
Additional contacts, email and text sending credits, and service plans available to meet the needs of any size business.
View all of our pricing and estimate your total cost of ownership at klaviyo.com/pricing
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.
It's well suited when you have to integrate it with another data source, like an FTP for example. The dimensions you can assign to campaigns or ad group levels help for easier performance management and reporting. What makes it difficult is that everytime you need to update anything on the account, you can't use the publisher but have to do it through Marin. This makes the whole process very time consuming and causes more mistakes. Also if you have paused anything on the publisher and you don't remember to sync marin after, all changes on the publisher will get lost if you make new changes on marin
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.
Marin is a self-serve platform. You can tailor your campaigns per your preference/convenience/needs. You can customize your view, see % changes, create custom columns depending on your Key Performance Indicators, and set any sort of dimensions and labels that will help you filter for your campaigns on a daily basis.
Bidding and changes to destination URLs can be done through mass edits within the UI, without having to upload bulk-sheets. You push any changes from Marin to the Engines, and can also pull in your changes from Bing/AdWords engines by syncing your campaigns as well. The system will not publish anything you do not manually post until Midnight PST. You can copy paste straight from your excel bulksheet into the uploading tool (or upload the document through unicode text).
The Administrative log keeps track of all changes, and keeps users (through their logins) accountable for any edits. This way, you can filter for your name, and find the edits that you made, just to double check your work, or to make sure you are publishing the correct changes. There is a keyword- group- and campaign-level history/settings log, where you can see the name of the user who created, edited, published, paused, activated, deleted, etc. any item.
You can set up alerts that will help you manage accounts: anything from active campaigns with 0 ad copy, to finding keywords in low ad positions.
If you push duplicate keywords, the system will reject them, keeping our accounts from getting clouded due to human error. There is no need to download existing keywords or groups and use their keyword or group IDs to make any edits--instead, editing is a breeze because the system detects the new changes automatically. The only need for IDs is when making edits to creative.
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.
Support. They are addressing this currently, and things seem to have improved lately, but we were experiencing long delays in getting support tickets addressed.
New Google Shopping campaigns will not even show in the tool. Old PLA campaigns are fine however.
Random missing data. Typically this happens after an update, but we've seen data missing in various clients. Usually logging a support ticket and having Marin Support rerun a backend process resolves the issue.
Klaviyo is simply a great solution for e-com email marketing & customer relationship management:
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.
Flow automation: Creating automated emails that follow up with new leads, those who abandoned carts, purchased.
Email design: So easy to use, and more friendly than some other visual builders that we've used.
Metrics visibility: We can see our clients' metrics very easily and adjust efforts accordingly.
I've used Marin Software now at three separate companies where I evaluated the platform along with several other internal partners. In each case, we did make the decision to renew based on our positive experience with the app and the customer support we received at the Enterprise level. Especially when we had complex integration questions or faced the change to Google's enhanced campaigns - Marin worked closely with us to make the transition seamless.
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
Marin Software's usability is bar none in the paid search world. All that said, I think Marin Software only appears superior because all the tools in the space provide extremely subpar support. Kenshoo is so complex that I don’t know think half the people that work there know how to use it.
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.
The times that I have had to contact Marin support, they have been very helpful. When I spoke with them on the phone, they walked me through the process to be able to resolve the issue that I had, The gentleman walked me through all the steps and easily helped me resolve the issue that I had.
Interactive helpful videos, summaries, and quizzes help a user learn the platform in demo-mode. The only challenge was that once you clicked certain buttons per instructions, you couldn't necessarily go back to retake notes without redoing the entire module.
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
As I said previously I would just highly recommend everyone being hands on during implementation to make sure everyone knows how to use the product. Marin Software does an excellent job with training and answering questions so this is not a significant insight however it makes the process easier in the long run
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.
Marin is a must have for any enterprise-level PPC account. The time savings from task automation and the very sophisticated bidding platform can help any advertiser or agency effectively scale any account. In both AdWords and Bing, the bulk editing and automated bidding features are less reliable and prone to error. The interfaces are also unnecessarily complicated and outdated. While Google Analytics is a great tool, there are no features that tie true revenue data into these interfaces, limiting the amount you can really optimize around ROI.
It has definitely increased employee efficiency because we run on Yahoo Gemini, Bing, and Google. If we had to optimize/report per engine, it would take hours and hours each week.
I think it's made optimizations less of a daunting task in my daily routine. I've been able to pinpoint where our ROI suffers and work from there in a matter of minutes.
The customer service has gotten better and could still be improved. Our Marin rep used to be horrible at returning messages but once he got support, we were able to implement a ton more pixels and betas.
