Klaviyo vs Yotpo

Hey @Murray Finlayson 

I work here at Klaviyo (you probably already knew that) but wanted to help get some eyes on your post from members who have experience with Yotpo. While I have some thoughts of my own, I think you are really looking for examples of actual use cases and not just another sales pitch. So with that, @retention @Omar @ebusiness pros @Kylie W @chelsgrove @Jessica eCommerce Badassery, do any of you have any thoughts of using Klaviyo over Yotpo or vice versa?

@stephen.trumble Thanks for the tag.

@Murray Finlayson - I haven’t used Yotpo in a long time. They were only reviews back then so I’ve never used their email platform, but...

Food for Thought:

I typically stay away from all-in-ones because in my experience when a development company or SaaS platform is trying to do all the things, they either do none of them well, their customer service suffers, or both. Note: this is purely a pre-conceived notion based on past experience and not specific to Yotpo

That said, I generally say the best email platform is the one you’ll use consistently. 

My go-to tech stack: 

• Klaviyo
• Stamped Reviews & Rewards (this combo lets you reward points for reviews. 

How I Use It:

• Integrate Stamped with Klaviyo to store current point balance and referral links as custom profile properties
• Use Klaviyo’s dynamic show/hide block feature to display customer’s current point value or invite them to join the program in every email
• Create a custom web feed to display stamped reviews. Documentation here
• Create a flow to let customers know when they have enough points for a reward (most reward platforms don’t do this)
  • Done with active on site trigger, filtered by minimum point balance and not sent more than once every 14-30 days. 
  • Using a segment triggered flow they’ll only ever receive that email 1 time

(Impatiently waiting for YEARS, hoping Klaviyo will give us the functionality to send a list or segment triggered flow more than once - is Klaviyo’s product team reading this?! 🤪)

Why I’m partial to Klaviyo

Other platforms I’ve tested just aren’t as good at:

• Dynamic show/hide blocks 
• Segmentation

I know, it’s not a definitive answer, but every business and its needs are different. 

Anytime I’m considering a tech switch I start with a non-negotiable requirements list. If I check all those boxes I move to the nice-to-haves

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the tag @stephen.trumble! And @Murray Finlayson - I’m glad to see you bring this discussion to the community from Slack. 

As a recap, this is the feedback I originally shared in Slack: 

I recently migrated a client from Yotpo reviews to Klaviyo reviews, and their team appreciates having their customer data consolidated in one place.

We’ve also found that it’s improved their email marketing overall, since customer reviews that are stored in Klaviyo are easier than ever for their marketing team to access, and incorporate into campaigns and flows. Notably, being able to download customer photos directly from Klaviyo is a big benefit.

Klaviyo’s definitely in the early phases still with their reviews product, but I’d encourage your client to consider the cost/ effort of migrating off Stamped, and then likely migrating again off Yotpo once Klaviyo’s released their upcoming reviews features that will make them much more competitive.

Imagine being able to dynamically insert a relevant customer review based on someone’s cart contents for an abandoned checkout email… that’s just the tip of what they’re working towards. 

Then Murray’s follow-up questions:

Can you please tell me why they chose to leave Yotpo to start with? Does Yotpo offer all the same flow options as Klaviyo, or are they primarily campaign focussed?

The fundamental reason why my client chose to leave Yotpo is they wanted their customer data to be more closely integrated. Leveraging reviews data alongside email and SMS data was important. It was also a long-term play to support the development of their team - make it easier for them to manage the marketing tech stack, so they’re not perpetually dependent on agency help.

I wasn’t personally managing their Yotpo account, so I’m not familiar with the specific email settings. However, Yotpo launched their own email/ SMS product in 2023, so I’d expect them to do their best to be competitive with Klaviyo.

That said - we’re discussing this in the Klaviyo community, and we both have an appreciation for how Klaviyo is a valuable marketing tool. It’s my personal perspective that when Klaviyo is at its best, it fundamentally functions as a rich customer database. So anytime I can decrease siloing of information, and better leverage a rich customer profile, I’ll favor that. Even if other tools have similar features, the database capacity of Klaviyo is uniquely valuable.

Having reviews, email, and SMS all powered by Klaviyo is advantageous for my client. For my other clients that have also migrated their reviews to Klaviyo, they appreciate a similar advantage.

I spoke with the reviews product team and @hansen last time I was in Boston - and the roadmap Hansen laid out in December is something I’m excited to tap into. He might be able to share more now about Klaviyo reviews vs. Yotpo reviews. 

Hope this helps!

Warmly,

Gabrielle 

@Murray Finlayson I’ll keep it short & sweet! For our smaller clients, we prefer Judge.Me because their free version is great for those clients (if they are on Yopto, we migrate them over to Judge.Me) for our larger clients we are beginning to use Klaviyo reviews to have all our data in one place like the others have mentioned - hoping Klaviyo reviews will come out with a bare bones version so we can get all of our clients on there!

Hi @Murray Finlayson seems you have alot of responses from some very knowledge Community Members :) 
Like Chelsea, I will keep mine short - we use Stemped.io for our clients. It works great and has some really good base features including a free plan, and then others you can grow into.
We also have a few clients on Loox (historically implementation), this too is OK and does the job well with some nice features on presentation onsite.

Admittedly I am yet to use Klaviyo Reviews, but we have a client who we are embarking on this journey with soon.

Kylie

@Kylie W @ebusiness pros @chelsgrove @Jessica eCommerce Badassery,

Thank you all for sharing your incredible insight with the broader community! I knew you would all have unique perspectives on using Klaviyo vs Yotpo. I truly appreciate your help with providing @Murray Finlayson an answer. Love to see this type of collaboration!

@Jessica eCommerce Badassery
Re your experience with Stamped.io, aside from the review sync issues we usually run into, the dashboard loading time is unbareable for us. We have been with stamped.io for 3-4 years and we cannot get the support we need and it really slows us down when the dashboard is that slow to load anything we need to work on. You don’t have that issue at all? We were all ready to migrate to Klaviyo Reviews because of this issues. 

@ssicaje I personally haven’t run into these issues and haven’t heard anything from my clients/students but in full transparency, I’m not working INSIDE people’s businesses much anymore so can’t speak to the day-to-day issues. 

If it’s hindering you that much and their support has tanked, then that is generally a good enough reason for me to make a platform switch. While Klaviyo’s review product isn’t as robust at the moment, based on the info @ebusiness pros shared above about the future of the functionality, that sounds pretty damn promising and it could convince me to recommend that instead. 

If the current Klaviyo reviews product meets your needs, I would take the leap. 

Otherwise you can check out some of the other platforms that were recommended such as Judge.me, Loox, or even Reviews.io. They’re all solid options depending on your unique needs. 

Not an eCommerce one, but I recently just made a platform switch in my business and just not having the issues taking up mental space has been a huge relief. 😁