Change is hard—Klaviyo x WooCommerce email marketing isn’t

Getting ready for a big move, quitting your job, breaking up—there’s just no creative way to say it.

Change is hard. Period.

It’s also necessary.

We move because we need more space, better schools, air conditioning. We quit because we need more money, more opportunities for advancement, a more supportive manager. We break up because of compatibility, because the feeling’s gone, because most relationships are not meant to last forever.

We’ve all stayed when we know we should leave. No shame. (For real.) But the stakes are a little bit higher for your WooCommerce business than they are in your personal life. So, speaking of relationships, how’s yours with your brand’s email service provider (ESP)?

In an ideal world, your ESP should integrate seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack, unifying your data to give you the full story on every customer that visits your WooCommerce store—what makes them click, what makes them bounce, and what makes them buy.

It should allow you to use those insights to send automatic SMS updates and email communications that make customers feel seen, not targeted.

And it should reveal what works and what doesn’t, uncovering trends that help you acquire and retain new customers while inspiring existing customers to buy again.

If that doesn’t sound like your ecommerce email marketing platform, or you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to go in a new direction, trust your instincts. And trust us.

Klaviyo, a unified customer platform for email and SMS marketing, gives your WooCommerce brand direct ownership of your consumer data and interactions—so you can talk to every customer like you know them, and grow your business on your own terms.

This doesn’t have to be scary. It doesn’t even have to be hard. Let us walk you through the ESP migration process, every step of the way.

3 signs it might be time to switch ESPs

Pupford, a DTC brand that offers training packages and other products to empower customers to create healthier, happier relationships with their dogs, was on Mailchimp for a year before marketing manager Devin Stagg and founder Michael Que Steele decided to switch to Klaviyo.

“What we liked about Mailchimp was the simplicity,” Stagg recalls. “I had a lot of experience with Mailchimp, so it was something we knew—something we were comfortable with.”

But Pupford’s marketing efforts “run heavy on email overall, and very heavy on email flows in particular,” Stagg explains—and on Mailchimp, from a segmentation and flows perspective, “we found ourselves limited.”

Since launching in 2018, Pupford has significantly expanded its product offerings to include not only both free and premium online training packages, but also tools that enhance the training experience—treats, chews, toys, harnesses, 30-foot leads, and more. But it all started with Pupford’s most popular package to date: 30 Day Perfect Pup, a free online training course featuring an ebook, videos, and daily tips from celebrity dog trainer Zak George.

“When people sign up for that course, we’re giving them 30 days of free tips, articles, product recommendations—just sending out a wealth of content,” Stagg says. “As we were trying to do any type of branch logic or conditional logic around that, we were finding it just wasn’t working the way we wanted it to in Mailchimp.”

Ultimately, Stagg says, “We felt like we were leaving money on the table.”

Sound familiar? Lacking crucial features and not seeing returns on your time, energy, or financial investment are just two of several red flags that might be telling you it’s time to switch email marketing service providers.

Neil Harner is the founder and CEO of Inverse Paradox, a digital agency that builds, manages, and evolves custom WordPress and WooCommerce solutions, with a focus on ecommerce websites. With a team of verified “WooExperts” serving its customer base of wholesalers, manufacturers, retailers, and DTC brands, Inverse Paradox specializes primarily in assisting their clients with integrations and migrations.

Here, Harner cites a few common signs that you might be ready to switch WooCommerce email marketing platforms:

1. Your ESP isn’t built for ecommerce

According to Harner, many of the ecommerce businesses his team has helped migrate over to Klaviyo were previously using marketing software that wasn’t built specifically for the ecommerce industry.

Pupford’s not alone: “A lot of times people switch because it becomes apparent to them that they are missing a feature,” Harner explains. “If they’re using a platform that’s not well suited for ecommerce, they may be missing a key ability to segment, create more robust emails with real catalog data, or create the marketing automations they really need.”

Maybe your ESP’s segmentation capabilities aren’t as sophisticated as you need them to be. Or maybe your WooCommerce email marketing platform handles attribution in a way that muddies your understanding of which channels or activities are most impactful in terms of generating revenue for your business.

Without naming any names, Harner says he’s worked with a variety of ESPs or newsletter-focused platforms which “suck for ecommerce.” The trigger to switch, then, could be “realizing you’re missing something desirable that you believe will make a difference in your ongoing marketing efforts,” Harner says.

As Inverse Paradox works with a client to advance their digital presence through their email marketing efforts and website, “we often have to have conversations about, ‘OK, are we capturing the right data out of the website and bringing that into the email marketing platform?’” Harner explains. “A lot of times, especially if the client is on some other system where ecommerce isn’t the primary focus, it makes sense for them to migrate to a system like Klaviyo.”

It’s not that it’s always Klaviyo or nothing. But “the minute our clients are serious about email marketing, have a decent-sized list, and are showing revenue generated by those emails, then that’s where the Klaviyo recommendation comes in,” Harner says. “If I look at what a client’s doing with their email and there’s real opportunity there, I’m going to try to level them up to Klaviyo.”

2. Your integrations keep breaking

Speaking of data: Harner has worked with plenty of ESPs that are “pretty good” in terms of their email marketing capabilities, but it doesn’t matter because “their integrations are terrible.”

Of one platform he used to work with, Harner recalls, “That thing was always breaking.”

Why? Because the company “didn’t invest in building a real WooCommerce integration,” Harner explains. “They had this integration that sat outside of WordPress and jumped into your WordPress database to retrieve the data using something like a migration service. They worked with a third party to basically map data directly into their own database.”

Over the years, Harner has seen several platforms offer WooCommerce plug-ins, “but either the plug-ins that are built to integrate are managed by third-party agencies, or it’s somebody in the open-source community,” he explains—and that means “you don’t really know what you’re going to get, or there might be bugs.”

In general, connecting add-on software to an ecommerce store can be time-consuming and require a lot of external help, which diverts time and resources from other aspects of scaling your business. If the integration is complex and breaks data workflow, marketing falters—and you lose revenue.

Not so with the Klaviyo + WooCommerce email marketing plug-in.

“I appreciate that Klaviyo built their own integration and that it’s well built for WooCommerce,” Harner says. “The fact that Klaviyo has their own integration and takes responsibility over their integration is really important because it shows they have investment in the platform. That, to me, is huge.”

And it’s not just the WooCommerce integration that makes Klaviyo an ideal match for WooCommerce users—it’s also the other 220+ pre-built data integrations that sync both historical and real-time data from any number of solutions across a tech stack, from WooCommerce order information, SKUs, and customer phone numbers to subscriptions, payments, reviews, and loyalty programs.

Stagg confirms that in his experience, it’s “a lot simpler to get data from other places into Klaviyo and be able to leverage that data—from Typeform, from WooCommerce, from wherever else we have data. That just wasn’t as simple of a process in Mailchimp, and it was really limiting us.”

3. You’re not seeing the results you want to see

Often, when the Inverse Paradox team analyzes a client’s email marketing strategy over time, “if we’re seeing a downward trend in open rates, click-through rates or conversions, that might initiate the migration conversation,” Harner explains.

Metrics, Harner believes, “are generally a strategy problem and less likely a platform problem. But because that opens the door to a conversation, usually when you start peeling back the onion, you find all these other opportunities.”

Switching WooCommerce email marketing tools can be appealing for online businesses that are craving a clean slate strategically, because hitting reset with a new platform “can be a lot easier than trying to shift your mindset in your existing platform,” Harner points out. “I think some folks are so resistant to change that if you need to change your strategy with existing tools, that can be a tough ask. You may be inclined to fall back to your comfort zone.”

A new ESP, by contrast, can act as a “forcing mechanism” for reimagining the big picture, Harner says. He puts it this way: “You can’t really fall back since you’re also learning about this entirely new tool in tandem.”

“Migrating systems can be very cathartic,” Harner adds. “It forces you to re-evaluate everything you’ve been doing that you’ve gotten comfortable with, and then that generally leads to higher success.”

For WooCommerce brands on Klaviyo, that success looks something like 32x average ROI—and a 22% average increase in ecommerce revenue within just one year after making the switch, according to internal Klaviyo data.

Why WooCommerce users should switch to Klaviyo—today

Klaviyo integrates with all kinds of ecommerce platforms, but WooCommerce and Klaviyo are a particularly strong match—both technically and philosophically.

Just ask OCEANSAPART, the first non-competitive activewear brand. OCEANSAPART began as a start-up in 2018 and is now one of the 8K+ WooCommerce brands that currently uses Klaviyo.

Like Pupford, OCEANSAPART started out on Mailchimp. They switched to Klaviyo at the beginning of 2020, right before the pandemic. But OCEANSAPART has been with WooCommerce “since the beginning,” says Tom Christopher Trautenberg, CRM manager.

Trautenberg especially appreciates the flexible pricing model of WooCommerce, which allows companies to grow with the tool. Since its origins as a German market less than five years ago, OCEANSAPART has opened four more ecommerce stores in Italy, Spain, Poland, and France.

Many merchants are faithful to WooCommerce because it allows them to customize virtually every element of their online store. Unlike other ecommerce platforms where “you’re essentially renting a website, not owning a website,” Harner says, WooCommerce merchants are not beholden to restrictive terms and conditions.

Harner sums up open-source ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Magento this way: “If you can dream it, you can build it.” And that’s exciting—but it also means “you need a more custom set-up” for the rest of your tech, Trautenberg cautions.

Because Klaviyo’s open-source API offers a similar level of flexibility as WooCommerce, it’s an ideal choice for WooCommerce merchants like OCEANSAPART that are excited about using a fully customizable marketing solution—something that aligns well with what Harner calls the “DIY culture” of WordPress and WooCommerce.

How to integrate WooCommerce with Klaviyo

Integrating WooCommerce with Klaviyo is the first step in the migration process. And if you’re switching ESPs because of problems with data integration, Klaviyo’s in-house WooCommerce integration will come as a welcome relief.

Start to finish, the Klaviyo + WooCommerce integration process contains 4 simple steps:

1. Install the Klaviyo plug-in in your WooCommerce store.
2. Enable the WooCommerce integration in Klaviyo using the Klaviyo installation wizard.
3. Test the integration with a dummy check-out.
4. Troubleshoot any issues you’re having.

Yes, you read that right. That’s really it. All the historical data from your WooCommerce store integrates with Klaviyo in just a few clicks. Average installation time for the integration set-up fluctuates, of course, but Ed Carter, WooCommerce product manager at Klaviyo, has seen it take as little as 3-5 minutes. Week over week, the lowest median time to install is 11 minutes, Carter adds.

Stagg calls Pupford’s initial WooCommerce + Klaviyo integration experience “seamless”; Harner calls it “a turnkey start-up.” (“That’s my favorite part about working with Klaviyo,” Harner adds—“they just make it so easy.”)

Once it’s up and running, Klaviyo also makes it easy for CRM teams to turn WooCommerce metrics into new ideas for segmentation and automation, Trautenberg says.

But more on that later. Next up: the ESP migration process.

Switching to Klaviyo on WooCommerce: fast, easy, and worth it

Now that your WooCommerce store is integrated with Klaviyo, it’s time to migrate all your data from your old ESP.

How to migrate to Klaviyo from another ESP

As with the WooCommerce integration, Klaviyo offers one-click integrations with many email marketing platforms. But unlike the Klaviyo + WooCommerce plug-in, these ESP integrations are meant for one-time use to make the migration process as smooth as possible.

If you’re switching from an ESP like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, Klaviyo should fully replace your current platform.

See your old ESP listed below? Follow the links to find a step-by-step resource from Klaviyo that walks you through migration process:

• How to migrate from Mailchimp
• How to migrate from Bronto
• How to migrate from Constant Contact
• How to migrate from Campaign Monitor
• How to migrate from HubSpot
• How to migrate from Listrak
• How to migrate from Sailthru
• How to migrate from Salesforce Marketing Cloud

More generally, migrating from another ESP to Klaviyo, once you’ve integrated your ecommerce platform, involves 7 key steps:

1. Swap out embedded simple sign-up forms.
2. Redirect integrated subscriber forms.
3. Sync subscribers at check-out.
4. Import current bounces and unsubscribes.
5. Migrate current auto-responders.
6. Migrate saved email templates.
7. Add existing subscribers to Klaviyo. (Note that in most cases, Klaviyo’s one-click ESP integrations will do this automatically. If not, you can still easily import or copy and paste your subscribers into Klaviyo.)

A few best practices to keep in mind: Remember to import all the data you want to save, and test your lists to ensure subscribers aren’t still being added to lists in your old WooCommerce email marketing platform.

And always, always clean your lists before importing them. “We always talk to the client about garbage in, garbage out,” Harner says. “Why are you investing in an email list that you say is 30K people, when for more than X period of time only 10K people have opened?”

That can be an “awkward discussion,” Harner admits, because “people take pride in their numbers.” But it comes down to quality over quantity: Almost immediately after cleaning their lists, businesses tend to see lower bounce rates and higher delivery rates because “they went through that exercise of moving what matters,” Harner points out.

If you’re switching ESPs at a time when you’ve got unengaged subscribers on your list, Harner suggests “pruning it a little bit so that way it’s a healthy list. That’ll also manage your investment, and then we can rebuild from there.”

The Klaviyo migration process for WooCommerce users: “way easier than we were expecting”

Inverse Paradox has worked with WooCommerce merchants like Amope, F-Factor, Piper Classics, and many others on Klaviyo integrations and migrations. Between setting up the Klaviyo + WooCommerce plug-in and completing the data migration from a client’s old ESP, the process usually takes 30-45 minutes, according to Harner.

“It’s almost like second nature hooking it up,” Harner says. “It takes no time at all. It’s a very smooth process.”

If the client wants “additional opt-in touchpoints throughout the digital experience,” Harner says, “we might need to write some custom functions.” That’s where a developer might come in—but even that only takes another hour or so.

When Pupford migrated to Klaviyo, there were no developers on staff. It was basically Stagg and Steele coordinating all of the company’s marketing efforts—making speed and ease of use critical parts of the equation.

Klaviyo’s one-click Mailchimp integration for migrating lists and contacts, referenced above, “made the process way easier than we were expecting,” Stagg recalls. “I was anticipating a lot more work.”

The task that took the longest, Stagg says, was rebuilding all the flows that had previously existed in Mailchimp. “We had a lot of flows, and there was a lot to them,” he points out. “When you’ve got 30+ emails in some flows, that piece just takes some time. But once I was able to build templates within Klaviyo, it made that process a lot quicker.”

Brands that need to reproduce advanced segments, complex flows, and super-involved custom workflows might require a few extra weeks to get completely situated. “But that’s not a challenge of Klaviyo,” Harner clarifies. “That’s going to be a challenge with any migration—making sure you’re planning it out right and accounting for recreation, because in that scenario, you’re re-doing work.”

A more standard set-up—customizing email templates to a brand and implementing basic welcome email series, pop-up modals, and cart abandonment flows—tends to take Harner about another hour after the initial integration and data migration.

Then, Stagg says, “you’re also making sure it’s all happening correctly—you’re tweaking segmentations, you’re making changes here and there.”

The whole process of dotting i’s and crossing t’s—“going through the account, going through all the settings, making sure the DMS settings are all set up right, all the stuff you’re supposed to do to get Klaviyo set up to send emails,” Harner says—might take another hour or two.

For most brands, the entire migration process shouldn’t take more than a single workday, Harner confirms—and usually takes much less. “You’re installing a plug-in, you’re hitting a few buttons, checking a few checkboxes, and hitting save inside your WooCommerce settings,” he shrugs. “You don’t need to be a developer. It’s very, very, very easy, even if you don’t have an agency involved.”

After the switch to Klaviyo: do less, sell more

Since Pupford switched from Mailchimp to Klaviyo in summer 2019, “it’s been a much better experience for us,” Stagg says. “Being able to leverage the data we already had into our email marketing, we’ve definitely seen payouts and returns.”

Klaviyo’s powerful segmentation capabilities and intuitive approach to branch and conditional logic, Stagg says, “has allowed us to increase revenue without having to increase our workload a lot.”

Harner, who calls Klaviyo’s sign-up and pop-up form builder “beautiful and perfect” and “really, really on point,” keeps in touch with clients after migrating them to Klaviyo and frequently hears customer feedback along the lines of “This is so much easier, and we’re seeing better results,” he says.

One client in particular had over-invested in an expensive platform that was difficult for the brand’s marketing team to use. “With Klaviyo, it was like, ‘less money, more emails, ease of use,’” Harner says. “That’s huge, because we’re usually not dealing with web developers—we’re dealing with people who are marketing-centric. Making sure things are easy to use is really important.”

Trautenberg, similarly, sees Klaviyo as an easy-to-use email tool. “The flow process is easy to understand, and the whole interface, especially the email builder itself, makes it very easy for people without HTML experience to work on this,” he says.

“With Mailchimp it was like, ‘Ugh, this is a nightmare—do I even want to try this? Is it even worth it?’” Stagg adds. By contrast, “Klaviyo does a lot of the heavy lifting for us.”

Here are a few of the specific ways Klaviyo helps WooCommerce merchants take the guesswork out of increasing revenue.

Why WooCommerce users need a unified platform for data and marketing

In Klaviyo, customer data from WooCommerce such as specific products viewed, products left behind, transactions, browsing history, and even predicted behaviors are all synthesized in a detailed activity feed. Klaviyo’s architecture offers the flexibility to store all the data you need, regardless of volume, with no restrictions on fields or custom properties.

OCEANSAPART: customer behavior informs long-term marketing strategy

For Trautenberg and the rest of the OCEANSAPART CRM team, that amount of data and flexibility translates to “more complete customer profiles” and a “better understanding of how each customer behaves,” he says.

“We don’t generalize, here,” Trautenberg adds. “We work all of that data into our strategy for the frequency and intensity of our campaigns, and we also integrate it into our planning and development for the upcoming months.”

Trautenberg sums it up this way: “Klaviyo supports us in creating a strategy for using first-party data and understanding the value of the customer—what they need, what they wish, and how we can use this in our marketing mix to grow as a company.”

Pupford: Typeform-informed flows drive 7% order rates

For Pupford, the single greatest challenge Klaviyo has solved is unifying all the brand’s data in one place, Stagg says: “Being able to see all our data in one place matters because it helps us get an accurate snapshot of a customer.”

For example, “it helps us understand, OK, not only is this someone who has done XYZ behavior on our site, but they’ve also done XYZ behavior on our form,” Stagg explains. “If all of that was in its own silo, it would be hard to get the full picture.”

While Pupford also makes use of Klaviyo’s integrations with Facebook Advertising and HelpScout, the brand relies most heavily on Klaviyo’s Typeform integration to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale.

The integration “allows us to cater content and product offerings to specific customers,” Stagg explains. “Ultimately, it means consumers get emails that are more relevant to their needs and challenges.”

With the ability to trigger flows based on survey results from Typeform, Pupford reports flows with up to 7% order rates over a 90-day period—gains that “are only possible because of the Typeform integration” in Klaviyo, Stagg says.

And Pupford’s segment-based flows don’t stop there. For a business model that revolves around education, hyper-personalized marketing is crucial for converting prospects into customers.

“That’s kind of the gift and curse of offering a lot of free content—you do get people who are just searching for free stuff,” Stagg points out. “Getting those people into some re-engagement flows in Klaviyo is definitely part of our strategy for turning leads into buyers.”

If a Pupford beginner completes the free Perfect Pup course but hasn’t made a purchase, for example, they’re placed into a different flow than someone who has spent money with Pupford since starting the free course.

And since all of that customer data lives in the same place in Klaviyo, “I can say, look, this person hasn’t purchased, but they filled out this entire 20-question Typeform—the intent is higher than someone who hasn’t,” Stagg explains. “We can then leverage that to talk to them differently than we might talk to someone who has visited the website but never filled out a survey.”

Stagg, who notes that Pupford recently made the “easy choice” to add SMS messaging to their Klaviyo account for exactly this reason, sums it up nicely: “Having all of our data together makes it easier to make informed decisions.”

How WooCommerce merchants use Klaviyo to test and improve

In addition to unifying your data and streamlining your email and text message marketing efforts, Klaviyo also provides you with the tools you need to understand what’s working—and what’s not.

Unlike many email marketing platforms, which only show total revenue but don’t delineate how specific marketing efforts contribute to your bottom line, Klaviyo shows you exactly how much money you make from each ecommerce email marketing campaign.

In Klaviyo, you can use both pre-built and custom reporting to answer the marketing questions that matter most and go beyond vanity metrics to understand what’s driving sales. With peer benchmarks based on real-time data from 100K+ brands, you can compare campaign performance to companies like yours that are doing it right—and even get recommendations for how to improve, so you can focus your efforts where it really counts.

Klaviyo’s predictive analytics, meanwhile, helps you forecast customer lifetime value to their churn risk, customer’s next order date, spending potential, and probable demographics.

Trautenberg, for example, says OCEANSAPART uses Klaviyo’s AI-powered personalized product recommendations in browse abandonment flows in order to tailor reminder messages to the categories customers have already shown interest in.

For a recent replenishment/win-back email flow for stagnant buyers, Stagg ran an A/B test for delivery intervals based on Klaviyo’s predictive analytics for upcoming purchase timing. After running the split test, he found that the emails sent at a day interval based around the predicted order rate achieved a 15% higher open rate than the guessed email sending interval.

The experiment also led to a 60% increase in order rate—a “massive win” for Pupford, Stagg says, “based strictly on the predictive analytics found in Klaviyo.”

WooCommerce + Klaviyo: support when you need it most

Stagg, Trautenberg, and Harner have all been as impressed with the Klaviyo customer service experience as they are with Klaviyo’s drag-and-drop templates for email design, precise segmentation functionality, and email marketing automation capabilities.

“I think Klaviyo’s customer service and support team is really excellent,” Harner says. “To me as an agency, that’s one of the biggest things I look at when I think about who I want to partner with and who I offer to my clients. My clients need assistance, and if there’s an issue with something that’s gonna drive revenue, they should be able to get support pretty quickly.”

Klaviyo delivers. Here’s one example: Early on in Pupford’s migration, Stagg noticed that a few customers were receiving abandoned cart emails after already receiving an order confirmation email for the product the abandoned cart email said they left behind.

It turned out to be a timing issue with the way Pupford’s flows were set up. “If someone started adding items to their cart, and then 5 minutes later the data sync happened, it might not show us that they had already checked out,” Stagg explains.

Working with Pupford’s onboarding specialist at Klaviyo, Stagg was able to “tidy that up,” he says, by adjusting the trigger window from 30 minutes to 70 and implementing a few extra filters within the email flows.

Trautenberg, meanwhile, appreciates the self-guided resources, workshops, and live trainings available through the Klaviyo help center, community forum, and Klaviyo Academy, like this strategy session on collecting data and personalizing your messaging.

“I really liked that we could actively participate in this workshop, and that the examples were very clear,” Trautenberg explains. “If there’s a topic you’re not familiar with, you can talk about it together. It’s very hands-on and very practical, and the human interaction makes it much more fun and really motivates you to work on the project.”

Overall, Trautenberg says, “I feel very much supported by Klaviyo.”

How to get the most out of switching ESPs

According to internal Klaviyo data, the main reasons businesses don’t switch ESPs—even when red flags abound—is because they don’t have time to switch, they’re worried it won’t be worth the ROI, or they’re afraid the new platform will be hard to use.

But “better for your business” doesn’t have to mean “more expensive” or “more difficult.” “I think the minute people hear that something’s more robust, that it’s got more features, in their head that translates to ‘harder,’” Harner points out. “That’s not true with Klaviyo. They’ve done a really good job making things easy.”

Remember, too, that any tool has the potential to help you grow your business—as long as you hold it right. “Too many people think the tool they’re using is a magic wand,” Harner points out. “To get your ROI on a premium platform like Klaviyo, email needs to be a core part of your strategy—with consistency. These things don’t just happen. It takes effort to create routine.”

“A lot of people look at switching to a different ESP, or any software, and they want to just be able to plug it in and start seeing a return,” Stagg agrees. “You have to give it some time, and you have to use it right.”

Don’t let that scare you away, though. “It does take a bit of time to make a switch, but it can be confusing or complicated to learn any new platform,” Stagg points out. “Having smarter data in your ESP and being able to personalize and segment more efficiently is going to give you a return way beyond the time you put into it.”

With Klaviyo, Stagg says, “when you put in the effort in the beginning, you’re not going to have to do as much heavy lifting compared to what you’d have to do on other ESPs.”

“At least for me, on Mailchimp, it was stuff I was having to do constantly and over and over and over again, feeling like I was hitting a wall of, ‘I can’t accomplish this because I technically cannot even do this,’” Stagg adds. “Switching to Klaviyo, those options were all opened up.”