With all the heavy compliance regulations and so many options on the market, making strategic decisions about your marketing technology stack can be overwhelming. Your MarTech stack’s efficiency and effectiveness can contribute to your business’s bottom line. Finding the stack that best fits your business’s unique requirements takes time. We created this guide to help you make an informed decision that will drive revenue.
The Source helps you choose, implement, and optimize marketing efforts effectively. We focus on sustainable revenue growth for your business by understanding and monetizing your customer data. We help customers select technology that meets industry standards and aligns with your revenue goals and customer needs.
We’ve guided many companies through regulated industries with digital marketing solutions. Let’s start by explaining why Klaviyo is better than Alpine IQ.
Klaviyo vs Alpine IQ
Klaviyo and Alpine IQ are two popular platforms that cananbis companies use. They help businesses grow by creating customer relationships with targeted email and loyalty campaigns. Choose Klaviyo or Alpine IQ based on your business’s needs, goals, and regulatory environment. Both platforms offer unique advantages:
- Klaviyo excels at automation, segmentation, and personalization. It is ideal for businesses aiming to deepen customer relationships.
- Alpine IQ provides essential compliance features for businesses in regulated sectors, such as cannabis.
Klaviyo is the creme de la creme for ecommerce companies. They’ve always focused on businesses across various industries that seek advanced segmentation and automation capabilities for data-driven email marketing. Now, they’re expanding their native integrations in the cannabis industry, bringing traditional ecommerce powers to cannabis retailers. Remember that due to carrier restrictions, SMS campaigns aren’t permitted on Klaviyo’s platform.
Alpine IQ focuses on retail and e-commerce in cannabis and beer. Their expertise lies in SMS and loyalty. Businesses should evaluate the strengths and differences of both platforms to find the best MarTech solution. Decision-makers should evaluate key features, integrations, and more.
At The Source Marketing Group, we choose Klaviyo over Alpine IQ. Klaviyo integrates seamlessly with your website, e-commerce platform, and POS. We found that Alpine IQ’s performance does not match the company’s claims.
The Alpine IQ Breakdown
Alpine IQ is a specialized marketing tool built for cannabis and now expanding into other industries. Alpine IQ is supposed to work with the sales systems many cannabis stores use, to make it easier to manage customer information and stock. This integration is essential for accurate marketing, sales forecasting, and inventory control. However, often times the data from one system to another does not match, causing issues with communicating to customers, matching up loyalty points, and more.
Alpine IQ offers marketing tools specifically designed for the cannabis sector, including SMS and email campaigns. These tools allow segmentation based on customer preferences, purchase history, and other data crucial for personalized marketing in a highly competitive market. However, the email builder is much more cumbersome than traditional email service providers and you have to pay for gender segmentation (to target male vs female).
Alpine IQ’s Loyalty Program
Alpine IQ offers loyalty and rewards programs for dispensaries and breweries. The programs enhance customer loyalty with rewards, personalized offers, and engagement strategies. These efforts help build a strong brand community. For example, you can set up reward customers for repeat purchases, referrals, and other actions.
In theory, Alpine IQ will allow your business to manage loyalty and ensure compliance in customer engagement, allowing for targeted loyalty strategies. It helps you automate customer communication and nurture leads at different stages of the customers’ journey. It is designed to provide a comprehensive solution for cannabis businesses, but it has many disadvantages.
Alpine IQ Cons
In a market where customer trust and brand reputation are paramount, Alpine IQ’s tools for managing customer loyalty and retention should help you build your brand and drive more sales. Yet, our clients’ experience with the platform could have been better. While the theory of the integrations are well-suited to address the unique challenges of highly regulated industries, they overlook simple things.
Thus, Alpine IQ requires specialized knowledge and time, so you must pay an expert to manage it. The onboarding could be more supportive as well. Support sometimes gives wrong information about email best practices. For example, a support rep advised that they can opt people into an email without permission. This action violates GDPR, CASL, and other sending laws and best practices.
Alpine IQ’s unconventional naming conventions frustrate users. They differ from industry standards. In Alpine IQ, “macro” means dynamic content, and “recipes” refers to templates. Alpine IQ also runs co-marketing campaigns, which means other brands can access your customer data through their database.
Our clients still have delivery issues although Alpine IQ’s websites claim top-notch deliverability with new IP warming, spam monitoring, and email optimization. Their integrations sometimes pull in incorrect data that doesn’t help your brand make intelligent campaign decisions. Due to its complexity, API development is still required for customized and full-fledged results.
And Alpine IQ charges an extra $50 a month to do gender segmentation. Alpine IQ offers custom enterprise pricing for large businesses. And it is competitively priced but is more expensive than Klaviyo at the starter plan level. Brands usually pay over $900-$1200 per store with Alpine IQ. You can do the same for $230 a month with other tech (with the same list size). If your dispensary or brewery is paying over $20k a year and churning customers, it is time to migrate away from Alpine IQ and optimize your tech stack.
The Source Insider Information: While every company has a unique experience, The Source has had clients return to other providers like Springbig for loyalty and Happy Cabbage for SMS because they could not integrate Alpine IQ properly with Blaze. The loyalty points in Alpine IQ didn’t match in Blaze, so Blaze said one amount, and Alpine IQ said another.
The Klaviyo Breakdown
While Klaviyo is not initially designed for the cannabis industry, it is designed for ecommerce. It offers compliance tools necessary for any business engaged in email marketing. These include age verification prompts (which can integrate into signup forms) and consent management features, which companies need to maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Klaviyo’s superior email automation capabilities allow companies to use highly precise targeting and personalization to recoup more sales and navigate compliance. Since legal changes can impact your marketing strategy, Klayivo’s deep integrations with e-commerce platforms allow you to adapt swiftly to stay compliant.
The detailed feedback from the analytics allows companies to optimize for performance and compliance continuously. Its flexibility in building an optimized tech stack makes it our top choice for our clients. It’s a powerful platform for driving targeted, compliant, and effective marketing campaigns.
Klaviyo Case Studies
The case study shows how customized marketing boosts customer engagement and subscription services.
Goodrays, a premium CBD brand, utilized Klaviyo’s email marketing strategies to achieve a 40% repurchase rate. They improved customer retention and drove sales in a regulated industry by focusing on email nurture and replenishment flows. Klaviyo’s personalized customer journeys and one-click reordering make up 69% of the brand’s email revenue.
Pinter, a homebrewing kit brand, used Klaviyo’s email marketing tools. They achieved a 58% conversion rate for their beer subscription service. With a focus on personalized customer journeys, Pinter saw 36% of its revenue attributed to email and SMS campaigns. Their email marketing efforts contributed 48.8% of revenue from flows, with an impressive 86% open rate for their welcome flow. This case study demonstrates the effectiveness of tailored marketing strategies in enhancing customer engagement and boosting subscription services.
The Source Bold Prediction: Alpine IQ could disappear in four years. Once cannabis reschedules, companies will not find the offer strong enough to appeal to them due to its expense and complexity. Since Klaviyo outperforms and delivers better returns, it will dominate the market.
Klaviyo’s Features
Klaviyo integrates with tools like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. The data syncs in real-time for personalized email marketing, so companies can create highly detailed segments based on demographic details, browsing behavior, and engagement levels. Klaviyo’s “flows” feature creates multi-step workflows with conditional logic for targeted segments. It supports triggers from actions like email opens, clicks, and purchases. Automated campaigns include welcome series, win-back, and browse abandonment flows. Klaviyo offers advanced segmentation by attributes like email client, location, and purchase history. Segments update dynamically based on set criteria.
Klaviyo’s deliverability team monitors sending infrastructure and reputation to ensure emails reach the inbox. They provide deliverability consulting. They work with major ISPs to uphold the sender’s reputation. Klaviyo also allows you to send from custom IP addresses to segment email traffic.
Strategic Advantage
Choosing Klaviyo for your cannabis business can be a strategic advantage. Klaviyo’s segmentation can enable highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns, increasing conversion rates and customer loyalty.
Klaviyo’s features meet various marketing needs. They include lead nurturing and customer re-engagement. These features offer advanced segmentation at no extra cost. And Klayivo is making an effort to build out integrations in the cannabis industry. So far, they have integrated with Dutchie (POS) and Sticky Cards (Loyalty). You can pair Klaviyo with Headset.io to create even more robust segments and know who the churn risk is.
Klayivo provides analytics and reporting to measure your marketing campaigns. You can track their effectiveness instantly. These insights can guide strategic decisions for your cannabis business. They help optimize marketing efforts for better ROI. These predictive analysis tools identify behavioral trends and suggest what actions to take. You can analyze campaign performance, customer value, and attribution modeling.
What Differentiates Klaviyo’s Capabilities?
For cannabis businesses navigating the complex digital marketing landscape, having access to professional support and a community of users can be invaluable. The platform offers the Klaviyo Academy for business owners and savvy marketers. It also provides extensive online support and community forums. Klaviyo offers a gallery with many free, professionally designed templates. The templates cover welcome series, promotions, announcements, newsletters, and more. You can customize colors, fonts, and images directly within Klaviyo. They also offer A/B testing for subject lines and content.
Klaviyo’s pricing is more affordable, with three pricing tiers: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. They provide volume discounts for growing contact databases, positioning it as an affordable Email Service Provider (ESP) with competitive per-contact rates.
Your choice between Klaviyo and a cannabis-specific platform depends on your business needs, marketing strategy, and the cannabis industry’s regulations. Cannabis businesses can use Klaviyo’s automation platform to efficiently educate and inform their audience. This tool helps nurture leads and share updates, promotions, and product information.
The Source Insider information: Our client’s repeat business, customer lifetime value, and contribution margin all hit record highs. They achieved this growth by using Klaviyo, with the margin increasing by 300% year over year.
Conclusion
Klaviyo offers advanced email marketing features and boasts superior analytics and a user-friendly interface, offering more customization. Alpine IQ might seem better for cannabis businesses because of its industry-specific tools. However, its automation is lackluster, the user interface is hard to navigate, and the support team lacks basic email knowledge to help clients succeed. Plus, the platform has done nothing at all to help push the industry forward.
Are you ready to elevate your email marketing strategy but need help determining which platform is right for you?
Schedule a call with The Source if you want cost-effective outsourcing to a Marketing team. We specialize in top-of-the-line WordPress websites, email marketing, and automations. Our focus is on creating marketing technology solutions for your business that generate revenue. We will tailor these to meet your business goals and compliance needs.
Bonus: Affiliate Links
As part of our commitment to providing value, use our affiliate links below to explore their offerings further. You’ll be taking a step towards optimizing your email marketing and customer loyalty strategy:
- Explore Klaviyo: Click here to learn more about Klaviyo and its features.
- Discover Sticky Cards: Click here to see how Sticky Cards can transform your customer loyalty program.
About the Company
The Source Marketing Group helps businesses grow in complicated and highly regulated markets. We use the latest marketing technologies, like email marketing and websites, to increase revenue. But why should you trust our guidance when selecting a marketing platform like Klaviyo over Alpine IQ? The answer lies in our proven track record.
Our team has 50 years of combined experience and has conducted consultations for over 65 companies. We’ve improved a client’s email delivery by 24%, added 1,000 contacts to a client’s email list, multiplied web traffic by 10x, and boosted monthly in-person visits by 30%. At the heart of our approach, we evaluate all your MarTech to ensure we identify the right solutions for businesses to reach their target audience while effectively adhering to legal constraints.