Klaviyo vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Klaviyo performs exceptionally well as a newsletter service, helping our tabletop gaming company educate customers, retailers, distributors, media, and press on our product offerings and events. It has significantly boosted sales by allowing us to provide targeted and engaging content. Klaviyo’s robust data reporting allows us to track newsletter attribution to Shopify sales, offering invaluable insights. Customer service is fantastic, always helpful and responsive. However, recurring bugs and glitches—such as issues with font size, color, text block sizes changing on their own, or text disappearing entirely and forcing you to restart a section—can be very frustrating, impacting the smoothness of the user experience. The gains far outweigh the downsides.

Incentivized

At least for us, what we noticed is the best use case is that it replaces the use of cloud teams, which has a more complex platform to navigate; since we are already using Salesforce, it was just more straightforward to allow the teams to continue to do that as opposed to giving them a new system. This also works for us because they are both selling the same product in different ways. Any team collaboration is where this product shines.

Incentivized

• I have Integrated Klaviyo with my Website and with salesforce which works simultaneously. This integration is happened very easily as In klaviyo we have flows through which we can do automations and set webhook integration with no code activity.
• Klaviyo helps me to measure the success of email campaigns.
• Klaviyo helps me to automate the manual tasks with the helps Flows in it which is very easy to use as it has a very easy to understand user interface and no coding reuired.

Incentivized

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

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

• Automation studio is very hard to use. We need to create a Data extension with all required fields before we can run SQL. So it takes a lot of time.
• Query Studio is much easier to use but it often gives an error while running the same SQL in Automation Studio works fine.
• We were not able to set up SMS messages as SFMC is not supporting MMS which is a big problem.

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

We are happy with Pardot. It has made our jobs easier and installed some reporting functions that have increased our ROI with the company. We have worked hard to set-up the functions in Pardot and it has taken time, but paid off.

It's a decent platform with a user friendly interface, however it massively misses trust due to unsecured systems and support from customer service; support is a massive problem if you run a company and have a problem with the service that you can't fix. On the other side of the line, in our experience, there is no support or understanding which we haven't encountered with any other company we have done business online in the last decade.

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

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

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.

Incentivized

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

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

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

We used Mailchimp to start out, and it is great for a small customer base but as our customer base grew we needed more power and Klaviyo had it. Including so many different automated flows and integrations to other apps and a/b testing and more. I would still recommend Mailchimp if you have less than 5,000 contacts but anything over that you need Klaviyo.

Incentivized

We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for lead management, generating reports, tracking customer and dealer information, inputting orders, and more. I prefer HubSpot for email marketing and automation because it is easier to use and the emails are designed much better. We currently use Salesforce and HubSpot, and we are very happy to have both, as they have different pros/cons.

Incentivized

Salesforce Marketing Cloud does a great job at what it is designed to do. There are several SaaS products in the Marketing Automation arena and SFMC is one of the top providers. There are several things it does well, such as email marketing and automation, leads generation/segmentation/qualification, and reporting/analytics. There are a few areas of improvement when it comes to the product and they surround legacy systems and architecture, outdated UI/UX, as well as targeting data in the activity logs for reporting and segmentation.

Incentivized

• we have grown our revenue significantly without increasing our spend. This is critical.
• retention rate has gone up tremendously with specific campaigns and audience targeting
• would love to personalize more but we are a small team and struggle to do as much as we could. It would be great to have an account manager who could make account based recommendations

Incentivized

• We have been able to create mature lead generation opportunities using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in conjunction with CRM.
• We have had to spend much more in technical support
• We have been able to save on costs of daily maintenance emails through automation.

Incentivized