Klaviyo raises $1.5M to help ecommerce marketers send better emails

As discussed in our recent research report on email marketing tool providers, the email marketing space has rapidly transitioned from a few small-business or enterprise-focused ‘batch and blast’ vendors to a layered, confusing mess of hundreds of tools.

Klaviyo, an intelligent platform for email, is setting its sights on changing that — which requires rethinking the space entirely, bringing complex data integrations into one-click switches for marketers, not engineers, to set up and use.

Today, the vendor is announcing a  $1.5 million funding round from Accomplice and select angels, including David Cancel (chief product officer at Hubspot), Elias Torres (founded marketing automation platform, Performable, acquired by Hubspot) and TJ Mahoney. Klaviyo will use the funding to build on an already impressive list of third-party one-click data integrations and expand sales and marketing efforts.

We’ve observed Klaviyo’s high rate of growth — the third highest for all email tools in the month of June, in our recent research report, Marketing Technology Winners and Losers, by using data from 40 million websites. You can access the report for free on VB Insight.

While the report shows that immovable force MailChimp owns 40 percent market share (and is rapidly growing) by offering a simple, straight-forward toolset, companies like Klaviyo — which offer marketing automation and personalization features — are penetrating the market at an astonishing rate.

And it’s easy to see why. Klaviyo has created a dead simple email platform that marketers, not engineers, can set up, plug third-party data into, and use almost instantly. The company’s sweet spot right now is ecommerce, where it’s working with a range of online stores which send hundreds of emails a month to massive sites which send tens of millions of emails a month. By integrating ecommerce platforms, customer service platforms, and CRM and sales data, the company can build rich profiles on individual users to better understand the customer’s purchasing behaviors — and overall relationship — with the brand.

“We’ve made good progress on making Klaviyo the hub of customer data, but it’s only half the battle,” co-founder Ed Hallen told me in an interview. “Using that data effectively in emails is hard. Changing an email to show someone’s name is not personalization. Doing real personalization requires creating unique content for each person and no one’s built that yet. We can take the customer data we have and use the media and assets ecommerce stores already have to do true personalization.”

Taking disparate systems like email, ecommerce, and CRM and tying them together has typically been an engineering team’s task. Klaviyo is automating a huge amount of this work into a simple dashboard that marketers can set up and use. Ultimately, platforms like Klaviyo can be used to not only grow revenues from customers by giving marketers actionable data — but save businesses money with easy setup and integration, allowing marketing teams to more actively test and act on customer behaviors.