BEST Ecommerce Email Marketing App (For Shopify)

If you're running a Shopify store, what email marketing action you choose on this end? Klaviyo, Brevo, or Shopify Messaging? What are the pros and cons of each? Which platform offers the best free plan? If you're trying to find the best e-commerce email marketing app, this video is for you. This video is sponsored by Omnisend. However, I researched all four platforms, made over $250,000 selling digital products online, and I'll give you my unbiased opinion to help you make the right choice. >> I got you, homie. >> Now, at the end of the video, I'll tell you which one I'll choose if I were to sell my own merch store today. >> [music] >> First, you might be asking, "Chris, why does he go to all this trouble without actually having a physical product to sell?" >> Well, selling digital products made me realize just how important the infrastructure behind the scenes is. As physical product margins are already razor-thin, as shipping platform fees, you kind of want the best bang for your buck, right? Especially when we're talking about customer touchpoints like the welcome sequence, the abandoned cart email, the receipts, and post-purchase flow, which actually drives 87% of all automated orders. And we really want to care about the entire user experience of someone buying something. You want your customers to buy again, not just once, and email marketing plays a huge role. Okay, so let's get into the comparison. First, let's talk about Shopify Messaging, living right inside Shopify admin. >> Nice. >> The pros. Works out of the box because it belongs to Shopify. There's no extra app, no integration, no setup required. It's free and simple on top of the subscription, of course. Every Shopify plan comes with 10,000 free emails per month, and only $1 for additional thousand more. Abandoned checkout emails are also free, so they don't count towards your 10K limit. And the cons. Automations are a bit basic. Start with check this, do this type of thing. But if you need conditional logic, behavioral targeting, or anything else predictive, I would look elsewhere. Not really a long-time solution. I found this agency helping other people set up their Shopify stores, and they recommend Shopify messaging is really for shops with fewer than 2,500 contacts, two to four campaigns per month, and really the to 12-month period of running a store. Then, there's Omnisend, built for e-commerce. The pros: great Shopify integration, pre-built automation templates, tracks things you care about like product views, events, orders, and product catalogs that are synced. Automation is a huge pro here, comes with a lot of pre-built journeys, conditional splits, AB testing, and behavioral-based segments for new, repeat, and VIP, at-risk, and churn buyers. Second, there's a multi-channel automation. That means you can send an email, wait, then a web push, wait, then a WhatsApp message, then wait, then an SMS directly inside the automation builder. Pretty cool that you can do this in one super clean workflow. On average, 76% of consumers own four or more connected devices in 2025, which means you want to meet your consumers where they are, and this workflow kind of matches that. Pricing is another thing I like. Not because it's cheap, but because feature parity-wise against Klaviyo, it has 90% of the features at a much lower cost. And also, just look at their pricing table side by side. Oh my god, it's night and day. The cons. So, what's the 10% of features Omnisend doesn't have when compared to Klaviyo? Predictive stuff for CLV and churn. Slightly fewer tracked Shopify event types, so you got to ask yourself, are you looking for the most advanced software on the market? >> I don't think you have the facilities for that, big man. >> SMS is an add-on, similar to all the platforms I'll be talking about. I don't love that in general, because pairing SMS with email, in Glock Canada, saw a 20x lift in revenue per message. Trust me, it's important. Lastly, we contact list base pricing. The more customers you have, the more expensive the tool. Next is Klaviyo, Shopify's cousin. >> What? >> Well, they did invest in them. The pros is the deepest Shopify integration. Klaviyo attracts 40 plus Shopify event types. It syncs your full product catalog for dynamic recommendation. And you can tell the advanced segmentation and all the predictive analytics sets it apart, in my opinion. You can create your own views, so you can figure out revenue attribution depending on the flow or the cohort analysis, just all that geeky stuff that you care about. Let's get into the cons. Based on the chatter on the internet, it has the steepest learning curve of all the platforms I'm talking about. It might have all the powerful segmentation and automation tools, but kind of sucks if I have to spend a week learning how to use it, then trying to teach someone else when I haven't had everything figured out yet. My disappointment is immeasurable. It's also really expensive. I don't know where to start, because just look at all these add-ons. Am I buying a house here? Let's say I have 20,000 contacts on the most basic plan. That's $370 per month. But when I do the basic add-ons, it's a gigantic $1,500, which means I'm paying $18,000 per year on email. Yeah, I don't know about that. Lastly, let's get into Brevo, previously known as Sendinblue. Pros, Brevo and Shopify messaging both charge based on per email sent, no matter the size of your contact list, a huge plus in my opinion. Say you're sending 100,000 emails a month, that would only set you back $99. That's pretty manageable. The free plan gives you 300 emails a day, which is good enough for small stores. Now the cons, if you're sending a lot of emails, even with a small list, oh, that's going to cost you. I send around 400,000 emails every 90 days, sometimes more, so I need at least their pro plan, which sets me back to about $500 a month. It's definitely the least Shopify-friendly options compared to Omnisend, Klaviyo, and Shopify messaging. Integrations are pretty basic, and Brevo has generic marketing automations rather than that deeply Shopify-specific [music] event tracking that the other platforms have. Cool. So those are the pros and cons of all four platforms. So which one is the best e-commerce email marketing app? And which one would I choose if I was to run my own physical merch store? Ultimately, my decision came down to these questions. How well does it actually integrate to Shopify? What other features I'll likely need? What's the cost of sending over 100,000 emails to my list of 20,000 subscribers on a regular basis? How easy would it be to get started? I run a creative business, very active with emails. I'm planning to have a store >> [music] >> that does limited drops and also a variety of products available year-round. So I would pick Omnisend. >> Boring. >> Disclosure, they are the sponsor of this video. But maybe you're saying, "Fine, Chris. That's your specific use case, but which one should I choose?" So I'm going to piss off a lot of people here when I say, "It depends." Like everything, it depends on your use case. If you're looking to start your Shopify store without sending more than 10,000 emails a month, go with Shopify Messaging. If you care about predictive analytics and you want the most powerful tool and you can pay for it, then go with Klaviyo. If you have a huge contact list but only plan to send a few emails throughout the year, maybe limited drops, go with Brevo. If you're looking for deep Shopify integration, powerful automation, and segmentation features, and a long-term solution for your e-commerce business, go with Omnisend. If you take anything away from this video, it's this. The tool should fit you, what stage your business is in, and what type of business you want to operate, not the other way around. The best tool is honestly subjective. >> So, that was a lie. >> So, why not try all four for free? Create your first email campaign. See what it feels like. Do you like the platform? Do you like the user experience? Do you like their community vibes? But, one thing's for sure, email marketing continues to be the highest ROI driving channel, leading the market with $36 to $45 return on every dollar spent. It's worth figuring this stuff out early. Thanks again for Omnisend for allowing me to do this comparison. Omnisend offers a five free day migration with up to 35% price drop. If you think about switching, you can scan the QR code on screen. Link is in the description and enter code rectangles for 30% off for the first three months. If you want to follow the journey of my future merch, >> [music] >> you can hit the big red button. But, until next time, bye. >> [music]