When it comes to choosing the right software platform to build your online business, Klaviyo and Zoho are two popular options with powerful features for email marketing, e-commerce, analytics, and more. Selecting the platform that best fits your business needs and budget is crucial – the wrong choice can hamper your ability to effectively engage customers, process sales, and make data-driven decisions.
In this comprehensive Klaviyo vs Zoho comparison guide, we evaluate the two email marketing platforms across key criteria like market popularity, ease of use, customization options, built-in capabilities, third-party integrations, speed and reliability, customer support, pricing, and overall reputation.
Our goal is to provide unbiased insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each platform so you can determine which solution will provide the best foundation as you grow your online business. Let’s dive into how Klaviyo and Zoho stack up.
1. Understanding the Basics
Klaviyo was founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. It quickly became one of the most popular email marketing and automation platforms. Klaviyo is currently used by over 100,000 businesses and has over $2.5 billion in funding.
Zoho entered the email marketing automation space in 2017 when it acquired email marketing provider Freshworks. Zoho is a large multinational company that offers a suite of business software. While Zoho doesn’t advertise user numbers, it’s safe to assume at least tens of thousands rely on its solutions. Zoho has an established reputation for affordable and capable software-as-a-service products.
Both platforms have strong market positioning. Klaviyo is solely focused on owned marketing channels like email and SMS. Zoho has a wider range encompassing both owned and paid channels.
In terms of community support, Klaviyo has an official Facebook group with over 37,000 members. Zoho also has community forums like the Zoho One Facebook group, but they are integrated into the product rather than on external networks.
Overall, Klaviyo and Zoho are both well-established players in their respective categories. Klaviyo leads in email marketing while Zoho leads in operational software suites.
2. Features and Functionality
Automation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers a visual drag-and-drop workflow builder to create multi-step automation flows triggered by customer actions. You can send automated welcome series, cart abandonment sequences, conversion flows, and more.
Advanced segmentation lets you target groups based on detailed behavioral, transactional, and profile data. For example, target customers who visited specific pages but did not purchase.
Scheduled and always-on event-driven campaigns react to real-time user activity. You can set up time-based delivery cadences or send instant response automation when someone completes key actions.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns provides an automation rule builder to set up triggers and multiple follow-up emails. It lacks the visual workflows of Klaviyo but covers the basics.
The segmentation focuses more on static user attributes versus dynamic behavioral data. Simple scheduling and delivery rules can be created but more complex multi-step scenarios may require a developer.
While functional for typical email marketing needs, Zoho Campaigns trails Klaviyo considerably in progressive web applications focused on customized user experiences. Klaviyo simply has more mature engineering on modern automation.
Winner: Klaviyo
The winner of the Klaviyo Zoho CRM comparison for marketing automation capabilities is Klaviyo. Its visual workflow builder, versatile segmentation options, and real-time messaging orchestration provide much more advanced options compared to Zoho Campaigns. Marketers can create truly personalized and contextual customer experiences with Klaviyo versus just bulk email marketing through Zoho.
Email Templates
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers a wide variety of professionally designed email templates specialized to help you send targeted email campaigns. For example, marketers can choose from beautiful pre-made templates for welcome series to onboard new subscribers, promotional templates for campaigns and sales, templates for announcements and newsletters, and more.
No matter what type of email you need to create, Klaviyo likely has an elegant template to fit that use case.
Equally valuable is that these templates come mobile-optimized by default, a crucial feature when the majority of emails are opened on mobile devices nowadays. The templates carry responsive design so the layout and styling adapt seamlessly to small smartphone screens. This prevents frustrating experiences for recipients trying to read desktop-centric templates on their mobile devices.
Speaking of recipient experiences, another neat element within Klaviyo is how the template editor loads fake test data so marketers can visually preview how the templates will render for customers. You can scroll through and confirm all design components, text formatting, CTAs, and images are displaying properly.
When it comes time to customize the template, Klaviyo offers a solid balance of both drag-and-drop simplicity for easy structural changes coupled with old-school HTML/CSS editing for fuller control. Less technical users can utilize the intuitive editor to quickly update text blocks, swap images, adjust button shapes/sizes, and adapt layout through dragging and dropping of modules.
More advanced coders have the option to tweak HTML and CSS directly as well. This dual-editing approach makes customization accessible for users at different skill levels.
Zoho Campaigns
Shifting focus to Zoho Campaigns, the story around email templates is less inspiring. The provided templates feel basic and dated in their visual styling, not reflecting current modern designs and best practices.
The marketing automation platform also lack mobile responsiveness out-of-the-box, requiring significant overhaul to optimize for smaller screens. Considering the majority of opens happen on smartphones, this omission hampers effective engagement.
The Zoho template editing experience also trails behind Klaviyo’s functionality. While technically possible to make basic text and image changes, even these simple updates feel clunky and unintuitive. There is no drag-and-drop modular flexibility for swift layout changes either. The editor assumes a basic proficiency in HTML/CSS as the primary customization method instead.
On the plus side, Zoho does accommodate uploading fully custom email templates designed externally. But that requires front-end developers to build from scratch using preferred frameworks. Klaviyo better balances turnkey templates and DIY customization for a wider range of marketer skills and resources.
Winner: Klaviyo
The winner for email templates is Klaviyo thanks to its large gallery of professional mobile-ready templates that load test data for previews. Editing functions strike a good balance between drag-and-drop simplicity and HTML flexibility. Zoho’s template options feel basic and outdated by comparison.
Segmentation
Klaviyo
When it comes to segmentation, Klaviyo provides marketers with an advanced suite of tools to group users and contacts based on multifaceted criteria. Segmentation can leverage any attribute imaginable, from static profile data like demographics and preferences to dynamic behavioral events like page visits, downloads, form submissions, transactions, and more.
The segmentation engine lets you combine any data types using boolean logic to laser focus on extremely targeted cohorts.
For example, suppose you wanted to create a segment targeting website visitors who recently viewed specific product pages but did not add those items to their cart. With Klaviyo, you could easily build segments to identify users who visited a defined list of URLs in the past 30 days AND did NOT trigger the “Added to Cart” event in that timeframe.
As new users browse and exhibit that behavior of visiting without buying, they automatically qualify for the segment going forward.
Klaviyo also empowers marketers with real-time event-based segments that instantly group contacts upon hitting key interactions. So the moment someone clicks your email fills out a form, makes a purchase, etc, they are added to dynamic segments for those behaviors.
This enables timely and relevant transactional automation when engagement is highest. For instance, you can send order confirmations or special promotions immediately following a purchase while the experience is fresh.
Zoho Campaigns
In contrast to Klaviyo’s versatile segmentation toolkit, Zoho Campaigns leans heavily on basic grouping solely based on profile attributes and generic email activity such as opens or clicks. While functional on a surface level, this lacks the dynamic behavioral intelligence that Klaviyo provides around on-site interactions and customer lifecycle movement.
Combining criteria is also rather limited in Zoho and confined to primitive AND/OR logical relationships. Building a more sophisticated segment with nested conditional logic is not readily supported.
And since segmentation relies primarily on static data, there is no concept of real-time dynamic grouping when users meet changing criteria. The refresh happens only at scheduled intervals rather than continuous updates.
In summary, Klaviyo simply offers much more advanced and powerful segmentation capabilities for creating targeted subgroups and taking action on them via personalized messaging. Zoho Campaigns trails in flexibility and automation around truly customized cohorts.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the clear winner for its advanced behavioral segmentation powered by flexible boolean logic. Marketers can define highly targeted segments that update in real time based on granular on-site interactions and customer relationship management data. Zoho Campaigns trails significantly when it comes to dynamic personalized grouping.
Analytics
Klaviyo
Klaviyo stands out for its powerful analytics capabilities tracking both website and email campaigns, and offering marketers a unified reporting dashboard to optimize efforts across channels. Robust data visualizations provide an overview of key benchmarks while letting you drill down into granular layers for deeper understanding.
For email specifically, Klaviyo delivers comprehensive reports going beyond standard aggregate statistics to showcase how messages are performing for targeted customer segments over custom time ranges. You gain perspective on open rates, click rates, conversion rates, revenue, and more while applying filters to analyze factors like location, device, user persona, campaign objectives, and so on.
Klaviyo also auto-tracks website interactions thanks to tight integration with platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and others. This brings yet another dimension to track customer behavior data into the fold ranging from page views to downloads to product reviews and more. Slice and dice web analytics together with email data for complete intelligence.
In terms of exploring all that customer data, Klaviyo truly shines with diverse visualization options to highlight key trends.
Take your pick from summary charts, graphs, tables, heat maps, and much more. Save custom reporting dashboards tailored to your goals and share broadly across your organization so everyone has access to insights. For technical users, leverage the developer API to build advanced analytics applications as needed.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns takes a predictable yet limited approach to email analytics, providing an adequate dashboard for assessing campaign-specific open, click, and conversion rates over time. Marketers can track delivery metrics also to monitor sender reputation and spam test scores. The tool allows you to export raw data to Excel for additional number crunching or graphic visualizations through that channel.
But out-of-the-box, Zoho lacks compelling interactive charts to spotlight performance, instead relying primarily on tables and basic bars/columns. Comparisons between different campaigns have to be done manually also based on reviewing separate reports. Unified analytics tying together email, website, and other marketing data points does not exist either, constraining optimization to channel-specific views.
On the plus side, Zoho Campaigns covers the basics well for general email reporting needs. But those needing robust omnichannel analytics with dynamic visual drill-downs will require supplementary tools to achieve that. Klaviyo solves both email and web analytics beautifully in one platform.
Winner: Klaviyo
The winner for analytics is Klaviyo for providing robust and unified insights across email and website channels, as well as greater flexibility in reporting customization via APIs. Zoho Campaigns narrowly focuses on core email metrics without broader omnichannel perspectives or visualization compared to Klaviyo.
Unique Features
Klaviyo
One of Klaviyo’s standout capabilities is personalized messaging at scale across multiple channels. Use merge tags to insert subscriber names, transaction history, behavior, preferences, and other data points in individualized email and SMS content.
Klaviyo also features built-in A/B testing tools to experiment with subject lines, content formatting, send times, and more while seeing the impact on metrics like open rate and conversion rate. Continually refine campaigns through an optimization mindset.
Additionally, Klaviyo integrates directly with many e-commerce platforms through turnkey apps to track important events like abandoned carts. This powers automation encouraging customers to complete purchases and enabling transactional messaging capabilities.
Zoho Campaigns
Unique Zoho features focus more on advanced lead routing, territory management, and sales force automation capabilities suited for CRM-driven teams with field reps, account assignments, and the like.
However, Zoho lacks the breadth of multichannel and experimentation features that Klaviyo provides for lower-touch e-commerce transactional messaging typical of smaller online stores. However, the CRM elements can add value for product companies managing more complex sales cycles and accounts payable processes across departments.
Winner: Klaviyo
The winner for unique innovations goes to Klaviyo for its proven mix of robust personalization, built-in testing capabilities across channels and platforms, and tight e-commerce integrations. These features better serve the direct-to-consumer messaging needs of most small businesses versus Zoho’s specialty in enterprise sales force management.
3. Ease of Use
Klaviyo
Klaviyo provides an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface for building emails, landing pages, and automation. The visual workflow builder makes complex multi-step sequences very straightforward to set up.
Most common tasks like importing contacts, creating segments, and sending broadcasts take just a few clicks thanks to simplified menus and forms. Those new to email marketing can get started quickly.
The platform offers built-in tutorials and an online knowledge base to pick up skills. But even advanced operations like custom metrics and REST API integrations maintain usability via detailed documentation.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns follows a more traditional email editor format leading to a slightly steeper learning curve around automation rules, contact management, and broadcast creation.
While seasoned users will catch on quickly, beginners face a more challenging onboarding lacking drag-and-drop visuals to piece together workflows, landing pages, etc.
Zoho mitigates this with an extensive help center, forums, and partner integrators to assist customers. But overall Klaviyo achieves faster time to value especially for novices.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins for superior ease of use thanks to the intuitive drag-and-drop builder for emails, landing pages, and automation. Marketers of all skill levels can swiftly pick up concepts and launch campaigns with less training needed compared to Zoho’s options.
4. Email Deliverability
Klaviyo
Klaviyo has robust email deliverability features and consistently maintains industry-leading inbox placement rates above 99% across ISPs.
Proactive sender monitoring, adaptive sending patterns based on traffic, and automatic list cleansing help avoid spam filters. Granular analytics provide visibility on deferral rates by domain and mailbox provider.
For advanced users, Klaviyo offers custom metadata tagging, A/B testing of content factors, and dynamic sender profiling based on customer segmentation to maximize deliverability.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns focuses more on core database hygiene and abuse handling prevention tactics like list validation, bounce processing, complaints monitoring, and basic re-engagement to sustain deliverability.
Testing and optimization capabilities around improving placements in problem ISP environments receive less emphasis compared to Klaviyo. But again, Zoho satisfies fundamentals well.
Winner: Klaviyo
The winner for maximizing email deliverability goes to Klaviyo based on the proven combination of preventative best practices, precision analytics identifying issues pockets, and advanced targeting strategies personalized at the mailbox provider level. Zoho trails on progressive testing options to combat evolving spam filters.
Klaviyo simply has more mature capabilities for optimizing inbox placement tailored to an organization’s specific customer base and traffic patterns. This becomes a significant differentiator for companies sending high volumes of transactional or sales emails where reputation impact matters greatly.
5. Customer Support and Community
Klaviyo
When it comes to supporting customers, Klaviyo pulls out all the stops through multiple avenues including email, live chat, phone support, and robust self-serve content via guides, forums, and video tutorials. Users have no shortage of official assistance channels to get questions answered or issues resolved.
Complementing official support, Klaviyo also fosters a thriving online community called the Klaviyo Mastermind group on Facebook, consisting of over 50,000 members at the time of writing. This environment enables customers and partners to exchange ideas, showcase creations, and receive crowd-sourced troubleshooting across their marketing campaigns built atop Klaviyo.
With active involvement from Klaviyo staff as community moderators combined with the sheer scale of marketers present, the Mastermind group offers stellar peer-based learning opportunities beyond one-to-one customer service interactions alone.
Together these official and community support avenues make Klaviyo a well-rounded platform in terms of nurturing customers throughout the user journey with education, inspiration, and help anytime roadblocks arise.
Zoho Campaigns
Over in the Zoho ecosystem, customer support also covers common touchpoints like email/documentation and active user forums albeit on their community site rather than external channels like Facebook groups. Phone and live chat require upgrading to premium-tier pricing plans, so core support remains relegated to asynchronous email exchanges and self-service content.
This follows a more traditional approach, albeit less interactive compared to Klaviyo’s community immersion and multi-channel real-time assistance capabilities open to all pricing tiers.
Zoho does enable customers to engage dedicated training partners for personalized guidance tailored to specific business needs. But that demands an additional budget while Klaviyo bakes continuous learning into the platform experience itself via online events, built-in tutorials, motivational emails, and more.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins for overall customer support experience thanks to multiple options spanning email, chat, phone paired, and community channels for assistance. The sheer scale of the Klaviyo Mastermind Facebook group also enables excellent peer learning.
Zoho relies more on documentation with email support only and consultant partners versus interactive avenues – a difference to weigh for hands-on users.
6. Integrations
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers a robust integration marketplace with over 250 pre-built apps to connect other marketing, sales, and operational systems. Popular platforms like Shopify, Square, HubSpot, and Salesforce integrate seamlessly.
The platform also provides developer APIs/SDKs to build custom connections or enhance data flows to unique systems. Documentation and sandboxes facilitate this for technical teams.
Transactional data synchronization works especially well given Klaviyo’s ecommerce specialization. Event tracking and updated customer profiles are reflected in real time across integrated tools.
Zoho Campaigns
Given its roots as an operational software provider, Zoho integrates tightly across its suite covering CRM, email marketing, help desk, document management, HR tools, and more.
For third-party platforms, Zoho Connect offers some pre-built integrations with the ability to customize HTTP APIs or use adapters for common SaaS platforms. Available options lag behind specialized players like Klaviyo though.
As more of an enterprise-focused jack-of-all-trades, Zoho can potentially replace multiple standalone tools for some businesses. But specialized needs fare better leveraging Klaviyo.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins for its targeted set of 250+ specialized integrations purpose-built to unite digital marketing and e-commerce ecosystems. Connecting platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and other popular stacks proves seamless.
Zoho takes more of an “our way” approach prioritizing its toolset versus playing nicely with specialized best-of-breeds – a distinction for companies not bought into the Zoho ecosystem.
7. Pricing
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers a free trial and then a flat monthly fee starting at $45/month based on the number of contacts, emails sent, and platform usage.
On average, Klaviyo costs around $1 per month per 1,000 contacts making it viable for most small or medium-sized businesses. Volume discounts apply for higher tiers.
No long-term contracts exist so customers maintain flexibility while not facing abrupt price jumps when upgrading features. Overall, excellent value given the platform maturity on core email and SMS marketing automation.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns has a simple pricing model. There’s a forever-free plan and 2 premium plans:
- Standard – $3/month for up to 1,000 contacts and an unlimited number of emails.
- Professional – $4.50/month, up to 5,000 contacts, and advanced segmentation.
The Standard plan includes basic features like emails, automation, and reports. The premium plan adds more contacts, sequences, custom domains, and premium features.
Zoho Campaigns charges an affordable price and offers volume discounts if you pay annually. There is also a free plan for up to 2,000 emails per month. This greatly helps businesses of all sizes that are on a tight budget. Overall, Zoho Campaigns provides strong value with competitive pricing.
Winner: Klaviyo
Klaviyo wins for transparent no-commitment pricing that reasonably scales with usage and contacts volume. By contrast, Zoho Campaigns follows opaque enterprise sales tactics pushing customers to higher tiers for advanced functionality. Hidden fees abound.
Unless part of a bigger Zoho purchase, Klaviyo simply offers better-understood value for typical marketing automation needs rather than sophisticated requirements of large enterprises. Transparent pricing proves a key advantage here.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Klaviyo
Klaviyo earns strong user reviews across industry research sites like G2Crowd (4.6/5 stars) and Capterra (4.5/5 stars) complimenting both platform power plus ease of adoption even for non-technical users.
Users praise Klaviyo’s automation and customization abilities, particularly around advanced email and SMS personalization powered by integrated data flows. Intuitive drag-and-drop builder also wins consistent kudos.
Constructive feedback covers occasional dashboard slowdowns within large complex accounts and instances of short delays implementing the latest platform features compared to the swift agile release pace.
But in total, Klaviyo enjoys an industry-wide reputation as a premier email marketing platform balancing usability and customization for diverse needs.
See Klaviyo’s reviews on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius.
Zoho Campaigns
Looking at Zoho Campaigns specifically, reviews average around 4.0/5 stars on sites like Capterra, highlighting core strengths with campaign scheduling, basic automation, and bulk email delivery volume.
However, some repeated downsides surface around upsells that require unlocking desired functionality which optimizes Zoho revenue over customer empowerment. Difficulty visualizing campaign performance also earns critique.
Interestingly, reviews praise Zoho’s broader software suite integration while concluding Campaigns itself operates better as a supplement integrated with other tools rather than a standalone powerhouse solution compared to niche leaders like Klaviyo.
Winner: Klaviyo
When weighing direct peer insights, Klaviyo decisively pulls ahead of Zoho Campaigns for delivering email marketing excellence across metrics like automation, personalization, analytics, and usability. Simplified pricing also proves advantageous.
By comparison, Zoho earns mixed reactions as a component within a suite sale but less favorable assessments as the sole email engine, especially for sophisticated needs. Ultimately Klaviyo’s specialization shines brighter.
9. FAQ’s
Klaviyo FAQs
- What types of emails can I send to Klaviyo?
Klaviyo supports all types of email including newsletters, promotional, transactional, automated campaigns, push notifications, SMS messages, Facebook Messenger, and more. Robust deliverability features maximize inbox placement across all major ISPs. - Does Klaviyo offer e-commerce features?
Yes, Klaviyo specializes in advanced e-commerce capabilities like abandoned cart recovery, personalized product recommendations, customer re-engagement workflows, and more. Integrations with platforms like Shopify streamline implementation. - Is Klaviyo easy to use for beginners?
With an intuitive drag-and-drop builder for emails, landing pages, and multi-channel automation, Klaviyo earns praise for usability and rapid campaign creation without the technical skills required in most cases. Onboarding guides accelerate launch. - What kind of analytics does Klaviyo provide?
Comprehensive email and website analytics offer engagement segmentation, campaign performance reporting, customized dashboards, and predictive modeling powered by machine learning algorithms underneath. - Does Klaviyo require long-term contracts?
No long-term commitments exist. Monthly pricing adjusts fluidly based on contact volume and platform usage without forcing contract renewals. Customers maintain flexibility to change plans or cancel anytime.
Zoho Campaigns FAQs
- What types of email do Zoho Campaigns support?
Zoho delivers typical email newsletter and promotion capabilities, drip campaigns, and basic transactional capabilities. Complex triggers based on e-commerce events require more custom development. - How does Zoho Campaigns integrate with other Zoho tools?
Tight predefined integration exists connecting Campaigns to Zoho’s broader CRM, sales, and operations platforms. However, third-party connections rely on API building or lightweight pre-built connectors. - Are Zoho Campaigns designed more for marketing generalists or specialists?
Generalists willing to learn the toolset can leverage Zoho Campaigns for typical email needs. However, specialty application power users will find limitations unless custom-coding integrations with other systems. - Do Zoho Campaigns offer real-time behavioral messaging features?
Segmentation and messaging remain largely batch-based processes according to fixed schedules. Event-triggered instant automation based on web or mobile activity requires integration with external platforms.
Final Thoughts
Choose Klaviyo if…
Klaviyo works best for e-commerce brands, direct-to-consumer startups, and companies selling products or services online via owned channels like email and SMS messaging.
The platform empowers marketers to nurture customers through targeted behavioral automation personalized to individual buying journeys. Intuitive drag-and-drop builder also makes complex multi-channel campaigns simple for non-technical users.
If, however, you feel like this platform isn’t the best choice for you, I recommend reading up on some Klaviyo alternatives to find the ideal one.
Choose Zoho Campaigns if…
Zoho Campaigns is the best fit for businesses that want to automate high-volume batch email delivery for newsletters, promotions, and drip campaigns that also utilize other Zoho tools across sales, marketing, and operations.
The integrated ecosystem can provide a unified software stack despite limitations with campaigns themselves compared to niche leaders. Companies already bought into Zoho CRM or other modules gain an advantage here.
Choosing the right email marketing and automation platform proves foundational to long-term revenue growth and customer loyalty. We urge readers to carefully weigh priorities around features, budget, use case fit, and skill level when deciding between tools like Klaviyo and Zoho Campaigns. Please ask any outstanding questions in the comments – happy to help guide the best solution decisions!