What is Klaviyo's position in relation to Braze, Iterable, and Customer.io for omnichannel ecommerce?

In the omnichannel world, there are the online channels people engage with, and then there are the offline or other channels they use and want  to bring that data back into their online marketing or CRM for easy access. 

One of the ways Klaviyo solved for that early on was having a very easy-to-use API to get that data in. If a merchant was using some other app and wanted to be able to bring it into Klaviyo and use it with their other communications, it was really easy for them to do so.

Even very early on in Klaviyo's growth, many other platforms would be offering such integrations because ecommerce merchants wanted it and saw it as a prerequisite to using these other platforms. You’d see every form builder in the world and every system that was trying to collect customer data at a point of sale system pushing data back to Klaviyo so that people could use it there. Then came the other online channels, like SMS and website chat, which became really good as well. They’d integrate offline channels too, like direct mail (sending postcards, catalogs, and so on) or live events, or in-store data for brands that operated their own retail channel. Merchants were linking their POS data into Klaviyo so they had a full representation of the customer’s journey.  

When I think about who’s pushing the hardest on omnichannel ecommerce, it's very often people who have really high AOVs. Their products are just expensive, which means they have to get somebody really comfortable and educated about the product. It often takes a couple of different engagements and interactions to, for example, get somebody ready to buy a bed or new outdoor furniture. To make that happen, brands needed to get all these touchpoints from across disparate systems into one place to know when a customer has had those key touchpoints and when they can start the real sales push.

With regard to the Brazes and Iterables of the world, for at least the core ecommerce use cases, Klaviyo ended up being extremely competitive because the differentiation there was really about the strength and quality of integrations. and whether they integrated with the right platforms for what you were trying to build. Then, they could send that data out to the platforms that they wanted to see it in. One of the examples there is some of the ecommerce brands that were launching mobile apps. 

All their data might be centralized in a system like Braze, Iterable, or Klaviyo One, but then they want to push it out into their own mobile app where they have access and can enable customer engagement there. So, push notifications, recording the data from that app, and pushing it back into CRM became really important. There’s a real fight at the top of the market for those kinds of furniture merchants and folks like that. Klaviyo just launched their own CDP, recognizing the need to have a clear and distinct offering there. 

On the channel specific side too, it’s also a really interesting fight. The best way to differentiate there is to have a product that goes deeper and better than anybody else. You need to think of all the use cases that people have in this area, and support them better, more completely, and more functionally than anybody else. That’s key to that competition.

That's also where the SMS battle becomes really interesting because there are several providers there that all have excellent products, but they need to demonstrate the use cases that people have that generate the most value and show why those are unique to them versus the other platforms. 

All three platforms, then, are plunging into conversational texting right now—across Klaviyo, Attentive, and Postscript—enabling one-on-one conversations while helping customers manage them at scale because there may be thousands of people trying to do this at one time.

It’s not so much the collecting of text messages and responding that’s difficult. They're thinking about questions like: How do you manage that process when you might have dozens or hundreds of people that want to talk to you through those platforms? How do you staff that? How do you build automatic responses that are functional but don’t feel like you're talking to a bot?

That's one of the areas where Klaviyo has a pretty strong offering because the merchants are already using it, are super familiar and comfortable with it, and all their data is already in it. That’s their greatest lever against platforms like Attentive and Postscript, where they may have built a product that's very specifically focused on a great SMS experience, but it lacks the customer history or journey. They’ll need to offer access to data from other apps to customize or profile those conversations better.