Before you read this blog, I want to note that I don’t want this article to be taken as a biased view against other SMS providers, as it’s not my intention to do so. I intend to provide you (the reader) with the data and facts I uncover within Klaviyo accounts on a daily basis. The views below are based on my own data analysis within Klaviyo accounts I work in and the issues I often encounter in large enterprise accounts. Here we go.
Why do I recommend using Klaviyo SMS over other SMS providers? The answer is simple. DATA, DATA, DATA!
I could scream this from the rooftop all day long if I had to and I feel I need to after seeing so much misinformed information and opinions floating around the industry at the moment. So much so to the point that this image sums up how I feel about the situation 😂
Most Klaviyo users and digital marketers don’t realise that having your SMS setup outside of Klaviyo will negatively affect your entire owned marketing revenue. Here’s why.
When a Klaviyo-based email customer chooses to use another SMS provider, the ‘cookie’ of that SMS click is owned by the SMS provider. This means that Klaviyo won’t have visibility of that customer's site activity. Therefore, as an unknown profile in Klaviyo, you immediately lose the ability to track events that trigger significant revenue-producing flows. To explain further, here are two examples of my profiles from two different Klaviyo accounts. One uses Klaviyo SMS to send their campaigns & the other does not.
Store 1 Profile Data |
Store 2 Profile Data |
| You will see straight after I've clicked their SMS campaign that the Klaviyo account that uses Klaviyo SMS is able to track my entire onsite web activity. It's able to track the pages I'm viewing, the products I'm checking out, and what items I'm adding to my cart. | You will see straight after I've clicked their SMS campaign that the Klaviyo account that does not use Klaviyo SMS is unable to track my entire onsite web activity. It can't pick up the pages I'm viewing, the products I've looked at or the items I've added to the cart during this session. |
In this second example, you'll see the difference in the volume of these metrics within the 1 Klaviyo account that has a snowball effect over 11 months.
If you look closely between the months, you’ll see that there is a substantial difference in these metric volumes between months.
So you might be wondering, what significant revenue-producing flows does this data impact? Well, it really impacts everything within your account, but to break it down into the core flows, it impacts the following:
- Your Klaviyo-based opt-in forms and the specific flows they trigger
- Lead Source Opt-in & Welcome flow
- Abandoned Cart Reached Checkout flow
- Abandoned Cart Added to Cart flow
- Browse Abandonment flow
- Back in Stock flow
- Price Drop flow
- Active on Site flow(s)
As you can see from the above flow screenshots & examples, for the clients we work with, it would affect those flows primarily within their accounts.
In addition to the onsite ‘cookie’ data that you lose, there’s a wealth of other profile data & implementation of strategies that you lose along with it, which essentially causes a cascading effect of lost opportunity and revenue across your entire owned email, SMS & Push notification marketing channels.
To help explain this in further context and as an example, I want you to think about the following scenario.
You’re the owner of a DTC brand that’s looking to reduce its paid customer acquisition costs and scale your brand profitably:
Scenario |
| You have 120,000 Klaviyo email subscribers. |
| 36,000 of those are engaged profiles within your 90-day engaged segment. |
| You have an Abandoned Cart Added To Cart & Browse Abandonment flow setup in your Klaviyo account. |
| Of those 120,000 Klaviyo email subscribers, you have a healthy SMS consent list of 75,000 profiles. |
| You’re not using Klaviyo SMS and are using another provider. |
| You only have a Browse Abandonment flow setup in your SMS account & not an Added to Cart flow. |
| You have a ‘good’ average SMS click rate of 10.9% per campaign. (An average between Klaviyo’s ‘Good’ SMS Click Rate benchmarks). |
| You send 4 SMS campaigns to your entire SMS list each month. |
Now, here’s the technical reality.
When you send your SMS campaigns from Klaviyo, Klaviyo has the ability to ‘cookie’ that profile, tracking all website activity and documenting it within your customer's Klaviyo profile. Not only does this data increase your flow volume of sends across your account, but it also accurately builds on your engaged profile segments (which are crucial for email deliverability and sending campaigns) and widens your recipient pool to more engaged profiles.
Now, back to our example scenario. You’re the owner of a DTC brand that’s looking to reduce its paid customer acquisition costs and scale your brand profitably.
Given the technical reality of what data you’re losing, here’s the breakdown of the lost revenue opportunity you’re losing from not using Klaviyo SMS:
Scenario |
Outcome |
| You have 120,000 Klaviyo email subscribers. |
You’ve replaced your Klaviyo forms with your SMS providers’ forms, and your Klaviyo account has now lost the ability to track 75,000 known profiles through SMS campaigns & automation clicks. You've also impacted your entire Klaviyo email marketing strategy, with every future new email subscriber coming through your opt-in forms now missing crucial on-site activity data. |
|
36,000 of those are engaged profiles within your 90-day engaged segment. |
You’ve lost a minimum of adding 8,175 profiles to your engaged 90-day engaged segment based on only 1 campaign sent out of your month's total of 4. |
|
You have an Abandoned Cart Added To Cart & Browse Abandonment flow setup in your Klaviyo account. |
You’ve lost the ability to send a targeted Abandoned Cart Added to Cart SMS & Email or Browse Abandonment Email to those who don’t engage with your SMS to each user that clicks through your SMS campaigns. We’ve determined that 8,175 profiles are the minimum lost from 1 campaign sent out of your month’s total of 4. |
| Of those 120,000 Klaviyo email subscribers, you have a healthy SMS consent list of 75,000 profiles. | You want to send a campaign to everyone who has shown interest by viewing collections, product pages, adding those items to the cart, or clicking email or SMS campaigns relating to a specific collection. The data of your 75,000 consented SMS profiles are within your SMS providers’ account, and for the last year of campaigns you’ve sent (at a total of 4 per month), you’ve lost the ability to ‘cookie’ those profiles with every SMS campaign you’ve sent. Your segment pool of potential ‘shown interest’ profiles is decreased for your campaign because you can’t track those events within their Klaviyo profiles. |
|
You’re not using Klaviyo SMS and are using another provider. |
The ‘cookie’ of your SMS clicks is owned by the SMS provider. This means that Klaviyo won’t have visibility of that customer's site activity. Therefore, as an unknown profile in Klaviyo, you immediately lose the ability to track events that trigger significant revenue-producing flows. |
|
You only have a Browse Abandonment flow setup in your SMS account & not an Added to Cart flow. |
You can send a Browse Abandonment SMS. Still, you’ve now lost the ability to send an Added To Cart SMS or Email to those who clicked ‘Add To Cart’ on your website and didn’t reach the checkout to add in their email. |
|
You have a ‘good’ average SMS click rate of 10.9% per campaign. (An average between Klaviyo’s ‘Good’ SMS Click Rate benchmarks). |
As the ‘cookie’ of your SMS clicks is owned by the SMS provider. This means that Klaviyo won’t have visibility of that customer's site activity. Therefore, as an unknown profile in Klaviyo, you immediately lose the ability to track events that trigger significant revenue-producing flows, such as,
|
|
You send 4 SMS campaigns to your entire SMS list each month.
|
Of the 4 campaigns you send every month, you blast your entire SMS list of 75,000 people. As you don’t readily have the data to determine engagement by their owned “preferred” channel, you realise you're spending more money sending SMS to everyone on your list. As of those 75,000 people, 40% of them engage with your emails too. |
Now, does the above example sound like an intelligent decision for a DTC brand that’s looking to reduce its paid customer acquisition costs and scale its brand profitably?! In my professional opinion, no - it does not. Not when considering the cascading effect this data loss has on the entirety of its Klaviyo account(s).
Regarding the price component between platforms, it’s important to note that when Klaviyo SMS is also used strategically within your flows and campaigns, it can significantly decrease your SMS costs. One of my long-term client's recent audits has shown savings of over 50% on flows and campaigns when Klaviyo SMS is used strategically in conjunction with well-thought-out engagement segmentation.
What should you do to make a better-informed decision about your Klaviyo account, and what SMS provider you should be using?
| Step 1. | Stop comparing the price per send of SMS and start understanding and comparing, what’s the lost opportunity to generate more revenue from Klaviyo SMS & Email within your account. |
| Step 2. | Write a list of all the tracking that you have within your account and Klaviyo web tracking scripts on your store. |
| Step 3. |
Encourage your internal email marketing and broader digital marketing team to understand how Klaviyo tracking works. There are three key ways Klaviyo will identify a site visitor for onsite tracking:
The goal of having more known Klaviyo browsers in your account should be a top priority within your internal marketing strategy. You should be aiming to have as many profiles as possible coming through Klaviyo ONLY opt-in forms (above any others) and profiles clicking through Klaviyo SMS & Emails within your account. |
| Step 4. |
Test all of your tracking to ensure that the following general and basic web tracking is working within your account.
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| Step 5. |
Review the below comprehensive tracking I personally use and install in my client's accounts and work with a dev to install the following:
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| Step 6. |
Use this comprehensive tracking to build more thorough and strategic flows within your account. Flows that cover the above comprehensive tracking and include SMS components with conditional splits that distinguish whether a recipient consents to receive SMS or not. This strategy alone will save enterprise accounts tens of thousands of dollars per annum in SMS spend in their account. |
| Step 7. |
Create more thorough SMS engagement-based segments within your account. If someone has been on your SMS list and hasn’t clicked your SMS campaigns or been active on your site in the last 365+ days, for example, then isolate these profiles within segments such as ‘SMS unengaged past 365+ days’ and don't include them in your SMS campaign sends. |
| Step 8. |
Ensure you’re being proactive with reducing your SMS character count and written copy as much as possible. Remove emojis (these make up 70 characters in 1 send of a total 160 character count) and keep your copy as short, sharp and ‘CLICKABLE’ as possible. I personally never write SMS campaign copy anywhere else but in Klaviyo. Even if it takes me up to an hour to rejig the copy for campaigns, I will try to reduce the character count of the message I'm writing in every way possible. Doing this simple task for accounts might take me an hour to complete, but it will save the brand thousands in SMS sending credits and reduce their SMS campaign cost by half. Another hack is to ensure your SMS campaigns and flows have a line break before your UNSUBSCRIBE link. Too many times, I’ve gone to tap an SMS campaign I’ve been sent and accidentally pressed the unsubscribe link in the process. |
| Step 9. |
Review all the other apps you use and how they could impact your known 'Klaviyo' browsers. Apps that replace your Klaviyo opt-in forms will significantly reduce your account's known 'Klaviyo' browsers. Even apps such as 'TapCart' will reduce the amount of known 'Klaviyo' browsers in your account. Opt for sending your iOS push notifications from Klaviyo instead of TapCart to increase the volume of event-triggered metrics within your account. |
Final thoughts from me
I have clients constantly telling me stories such as “XYZ told me I shouldn’t be using Klaviyo SMS because it’s too expensive” - or my personal favourite, “I’m in this group, and this brand said because X is better.”
The problem with these stories is that the people telling them don’t know or understand the advanced functionality of Klaviyo. They don’t understand the lost opportunity to generate more owned marketing revenue.
And sadly, it’s something that they’re more than likely spending more dollars acquiring these customers back via retargeting ads if you dove deep enough into their data and looked at it.
So the next time you hear someone say, “don’t use Klaviyo; use this instead”, please question them on the *technical facts to determine if they even know the difference between platforms in terms of loss of data. Ask them, “have you done any data analysis between Klaviyo accounts?”
There’s not enough technical information out there online for people to clearly understand and learn about the cons of using SMS outside of Klaviyo. I hope this blog post and information on data loss helps you understand a side of Klaviyo SMS that no one is really talking about.
In closing, remember, “without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
Bryn 👋🏼