Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: Which Tool Is More Intuitive for Lean Teams?

Intro

Choosing an email marketing tool requires understanding specific platform capabilities and business needs. Lean marketing teams often need software that balances performance power with an accessible user experience.

Omnisend and Klaviyo are two popular email marketing solutions for modern online ecommerce stores. Both of them provide extensive marketing features for online stores, but they come at different depth levels and learning curves.

The main key takeaway is this: Omnisend is powerful without being clunky, whereas Klaviyo provides niche depth at the cost of a steep learning curve.

Setup and launch times

Setting up an email marketing platform quickly helps teams launch campaigns with minimal downtime. You can set up accounts on Omnisend and Klaviyo rather quickly; it only consists of a few key steps and a few questions about your business, some of which you can skip. Also, you don’t need to enter any credit card details if using the free plan.

Both platforms connect directly to major ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and more. They give you the option to immediately connect your store in the registration interface, although the efficiency of that may depend on your ecommerce platform.

Once you’re done with the installation and integration, you’ll need to set up the sender authentication records, namely the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC codes. You can find these records in the “Domain” section on both platforms. Once you’ve located them, you need to open your hosting platform and copy-paste the records in respective fields. It usually takes a few minutes, and if you’re not sure where to find the fields on your hosting site, you can contact their customer support to help you.

After all that is done, you can begin sending campaigns and enabling automations to communicate with your audience.

Importing brand assets

Maintaining a consistent brand identity requires accurate logos, colors, and fonts across all marketing emails. Gathering all the logo variations and hex codes, however, can become a burden if you’re not an organized person.

Omnisend includes a Brand Assets feature that does all the heavy lifting for you. Once you connect your store, it automatically scans your website and gets your logo, colors, and fonts. Since all of that happens in the backend automatically, you don’t need to do anything to run this scan or otherwise activate it. All you need to do is go to “Brand Assets” and click “Import my Brand Assets”. Once that’s done, all your email templates will match your brand design.

Image via Omnisend

Klaviyo also allows you to upload your brand assets, but it’s not as convenient as with Omnisend. You’ll need to find your logo folder, write down all your hex codes, and gather your font information. Then, you can use the “Images & brand” interface to add everything by hand. If you don’t have a brand design document prepared, it will take some time for you to set up your brand assets.

Image via Klaviyo

Creating campaigns

Both platforms allow users to send emails quickly using extensive template libraries and drag-and-drop email builders.

Omnisend has a massive library of email templates for different seasonal and themed options. You can find a template for nearly every holiday or occasion. Then, you can either send it as is, or customize the copy and design to reflect your brand better.

If you want to add products to your campaign, Omnisend has a powerful Product Picker block you can use. Once you add it to your email, a sidebar appears where you can search for products in your store right from the email builder. After you find the product, you just click “Add” and it appears in your email with its name, image, description, price, and purchase link.

Image via Omnisend

If you don’t want to choose the products to add, you can also leverage the Product Recommender block which automatically adds the products to your campaign based on the condition you set. You can choose between best-selling products, most viewed products, and recently added items. You won’t see them immediately in your builder, but your recipients will once the campaign goes live.

Image via Omnisend

Klaviyo also has a huge library of templates to choose from, so you’ll be fine using either platform in terms of templates. When it comes to adding products, however, Klaviyo requires users to create a separate product feed before adding items to emails. You must name the feed, select a catalog, choose dynamic conditions, set fallback conditions, and select product categories. This process takes more time compared to using Omnisend’s Product Picker.

Image via Klaviyo

Klaviyo does, however, provide more options for dynamically shown products. Instead of having 3 options, you get 8. It’s up to you to decide whether that’s better or not, considering that more options do not always equal better results. You might specifically be interested in the AI-driven condition where you show customers products they may also like, but that could easily be a hard miss.

Image via Klaviyo

In short, creating campaigns is quite similar on both platforms, but Omnisend makes the process more convenient and intuitive.

Building automations

Automations are arguably the core function of every email marketing platform, as it drives a large part of revenue without needing your continuous input.

Omnisend provides pre-built automation workflows covering essential actions like abandoned cart recovery, welcome sequences, post-purchase follow-ups, and more. You can launch these flows either immediately or you can use the templates as a base and customize them to your preferences.

To make the automations more personalized, you can use the AI segment builder that creates an audience in seconds based on a prompt. Then, you can set up your automations to target that specific audience and send them personalized messages.

It allows you to create highly tailored segments and campaigns to increase retention and revenue flow.

Klaviyo provides advanced behavioral data and predictive analytics for deep subscriber segmentation. It allows you to build highly customized automation flows using complex conditional rules and branching paths, which makes Klaviyo effective for teams wanting extremely granular control over specific customer data points.

Mastering these advanced features, however, requires more time and extensive platform training, so it’s important for you to define the level of depth that you need. Roughly 95% of online businesses don’t need such niche and complex capabilities, that’s why most ESPs don’t offer them.

For most businesses, regardless of size, Omnisend provides the same power in a more intuitive interface. It doesn’t overwhelm you with features that you won’t use, and it comes at more affordable pricing plans than Klaviyo.

Migration support

Moving from one marketing platform to another often requires significant time and financial resources. Not only that, it comes with risks of losing your data if you decide to take it upon yourself.

Omnisend offers a free Kickstart service for users migrating from other email marketing platforms. They dedicated an in-house specialist who will handle the entire transition process for users who sign up for a $250 or higher monthly plan. The specialist will transfer your contacts, recreate automations, move segments, templates, and more. The entire process takes 3-5 business days and requires no manual input from the store owner. Omnisend completely removes the technical barrier to switching platforms.

Klaviyo gives you access to their documentation so you can successfully migrate your data yourself. If you don’t want to do it on your own, you’ll need to hire expensive agency partners to handle your Klaviyo migration process.

Omnisend vs. Klaviyo: Verdict

Both Omnisend and Klaviyo offer excellent solutions for modern ecommerce stores. Klaviyo provides deep segmentation and predictive analytics for marketers who want detailed behavioral reporting, whereas Omnisend focuses on performance, speed, and user experience.

Businesses of any size can rely on Omnisend to manage complex campaigns and extensive subscriber lists effectively. It comes with more than enough power to support a vast majority of online businesses, but at a fraction of the learning curve and price.

If you do need niche segmentation and automation capabilities that Klaviyo offers, then Omnisend won’t be able to fill those shoes, but you should also be prepared for two things:

• Investing time to master the platform since it has a steep learning curve.
• Working with data scientists to interpret all the information and turn it into actionable insights.

For most other cases, Omnisend is the better way to go.