klaviyo help

Klaviyo Help: What can you do when Klaviyo Support doesn’t answer

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Email newsletters and email automations are part of the most critical aspect of eCommerce stores’ overall marketing strategy. In fact, on average, about 21% of the revenue generated by the most successful merchants is linked to their email marketing campaigns.

As a result, some merchants could think that picking the email marketing app that everyone is raving about is the best call for their company. After all, Klaviyo has more features than most email marketing tools, and the granularity of the settings available can be the difference between success and failure. The klaviyo integration suite is also very comprehensive, allowing most stores to put this email app at the center of their strategy.

However, being able to edit campaigns and settings with such a high level of details means that a very high number of different settings are overloading their user interface, which eventually prevents the average merchant from setting up powerful marketing email campaigns.

Even worse, some merchants end up setting up email marketing series that trigger at the wrong time, send to the wrong subscribers, or include discounts that aren’t meant to be shared.

On top of that, the 2022 Klaviyo Strategy focuses a lot on SMS Marketing, a channel known for being one of the most expensive “per subscriber reached”.

Not everyone has the time to spend hours focusing on marketing, let alone becoming an email marketing expert, only to set up an email automation that doesn’t trigger when it is meant to.

This is when it’s time it’s time to call in the cavalry, and like every email app out there Klaviyo has its own in-house solution: The Klaviyo support section.

Klaviyo support header

 

In this article, we’ll review the 3 different type of Klaviyo support you can count on.
The Klaviyo support docs

The Klaviyo support docs

First off, there is the Klaviyo Help Center which includes a large variety of written material from campaigns and flows to analytics and compliance. Most of them can be covered in under 10 minutes. 

If you are new to Klaviyo, or to email marketing in general, the best section to visit is the “Getting started” section. This comprehensive guide is meant to guide merchants through the setup of their Klaviyo account and more precisely:

  • How to connect Klaviyo to your ecommerce store

  • How to create an email campaign

  • How to create a subscribers’ list

  • How to design a firm

  • How to automate a welcome series and an abandoned cart flow.

Klaviyo advertises this guide as taking roughly 29 minutes to read. Most merchants we worked with have shared with us that it took them about a week to understand it well enough to setup their email marketing.

If you are in for the long game, we strongly recommend getting certified with the Klaviyo Product certification. This section of their website acts as a Klaviyo training platform, through which merchants can go through courses from 20 minutes to 1.5 hours going through the different features that Klaviyo has to offer. Once again, the selection of guides is quite comprehensive, starting from the very simple Klaviyo tutorial to the advanced integrations and API key setup.

Klaviyo academy dashboard

 

Finally, if the answer to your question isn’t in Klaviyo’s onboarding guide, their case studies or their product certification bundle, you might want to check their community forums where real use case of their features are discussed. There is a lot of content in there so you’ll have to sharpen your search skills to find the needle in the haystack. On top of that, many of these conversations are now outdated, which means that the solutions offered by fellow merchants might not apply to your own case.

For up to date information, we strongly recommend entering your email address for product updates from Klaviyo in order to receive their latest newsletters, blog posts, webinars and docs.

Overall, all the resources stated above are great when your automations work correctly, but if you’ve used any email apps before, you’ll know that more often than not, the practice is not as smooth as the theory.

The Klaviyo support team

This is where Klaviyo’s support team comes into consideration. Klaviyo offers chat support from 9 am to 5 pm ET, Monday through Friday. The Klaviyo live chat support is only available for paid plan users which means that merchants using Klaviyo on the free plan cannot contact the support team through this channel. While merchants on the free plan cannot use the Klaviyo chat support, they’ll be able to contact Klaviyo via email.

It’s worth noting that there is no Klaviyo contact phone number available publicly.

Now, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: Klaviyo’s support is notoriously slow, which heavly contrasts with the high quality of their platform. It only takes a minute eyeballing their reviews on Shopify to discover that this is the main source of dissatisfaction from their users.

Klaviyo one star review ecommerce store
Klaviyo one star review iLevel Lab & delave denim co

Compiling together some recurring topics, most unhappy merchants using Klaviyo complain about having to deal with bots through the Klaviyo chat, blocking them from getting in touch with a real human. When a real human replies, it has been reported that some of them are not fully trained and only serve as a shield for their trained support team. These senior support team members are mostly replying through emails and used for important situation, or in other words, used when high MRR (monthly recurring revenue) clients need help.

When talking about it with our own clients, the correlation is clear: those who had more than 50k contacts in their subscribers’ list usually received a reply to their request within 2 days. ON the other hand, the ones who had fewer than 50k contacts had to wait up to a week to receive a reply via email.

To be fair, Klaviyo only has 500 team members, which is nothing compared to the 265,000+ merchants using their app. It’s only logical for their team to ask their new users for the number of subscribers that they have early on in order to prioritize the ones that they need to swoon.

Klaviyo asks for the number of contacts when signing up

On the other hand, it is also fair for merchants to expect a high level of service when paying for an email marketing app that is often at least as expensive as the cost of their ecommerce platform.

Merchants who do not fall into the “priority lead” category, and do not have the time to become email marketing experts through Klaviyo’s help doc have one other option: Outsourcing the setup of their email marketing campaigns to specialized email marketing agencies.

However, email marketing agencies can be tricky as, like other regular marketing agencies, their level of service, their pricing model and their expertise can vary greatly.

Over the next few lines, we’ll uncover if hiring an email marketing agency could be the solution you are looking for, and what are the elements that need to be pondered when picking one:

Email Marketing Agencies

Email Marketing agencies have one big advantage: They live and breathe email marketing. They know each email marketing automations that every merchant should have like the back of their hand, and they can recognise email marketing opportunities in every store type and product.

In terms of expertise, being able to rely on experts means that you will not have to go through a long trial and error cycle. There is an enormous difference between spending months learning an app + years using it in a mildly bad way and focusing on your core business while professionals make sure that you are making as much sales as possible while avoid GDPR compliance mistakes.

As long as you go for an agency that either has a dedicated email marketing department, or an agency that only focuses on email marketing, you can rest assured that you are in good hands. Avoid “one-size-fits-all” agencies that will make email marketing one item of their services only to upsell you on more SEO, Social Media and Facebook ads management services.

The agency that you pick should focus immediately on making sure that your subscribers’ list is clean and tidy. It should ensure that all the most important automations are correctly sending from your Klaviyo account, and that all of the emails within these automations are well designed to convert as much as possible.

Avoid agencies who focus right away on sending recurring newsletters on your behalf as the only goal here is to hook you up on a retainer plan, and not making sure that you are using your Klaviyo account to its full potential.

Typically a good email marketing agency will try to learn more about your brand and  its history. The discovery call should cover products that you sell the most and the ones you’d like to sell more of as well as the channels that have historically worked the best and the ones that have not. Ultimately, this call should lay out a plan starting with low hanging fruits, and finishing with highly targetted up-sell/cross-sell automations to set up the ultimate email marketing funnel.

Another element to take into account when searching for email marketing agencies is the expected time to set up all email marketing automations. Once again, some agencies will offer to set up 5 email designs per month, so the equivalent of an average welcome email automation, whereas others will make a point of setting everything up within the next 24 hours.

While some of these solutions can prove to be the right one for some merchants, the first one can end up being very costly, while the second one can lead to overly simplistic email automations. Respectable email marketing agencies will focus on your store for enough time while making sure that all your most important emails will be sending from the end of the week.

Finally, it is obviously important to cover the question of pricing. Again, offers vary greatly, from very expensive email designs that can cost $5000 for the setup of a welcome email series, abandoned cart email series, thank you email series, browse abandonment email series and win-back email series, to $1000 for the setup of the exact same flows.

Sadly, it is quite hard for merchants to shop around as most email marketing agencies hide their pricing behind a discovery call, which means that it is not possible to get an accurate quote before investing time on a call with a sales person. Thankfully, some marketing agencies start to wave goodbye this model and opt for a transparent pricing model, where merchants know right from the start what setup costs they should expect.

Conclusion

Overall, Klaviyo is an amazing email marketing app, almost too great for its own good. It’s popularity might be the cause of its own demise, with merchants unable to use it without becoming email marketing experts. It’s docs section is as comprehensive as it is a maze, and it’s support team can be really helpful if you are interesting enough, or alarmingly inexistant if you are not.

Book a free consultation Zoom call with us today to discuss your needs and how we can help.

 

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