Exploring the Significant Performance Gap: Klaviyo vs. Bloomreach Engagement in Abandonment Email Automations
Discover why there is a significant difference in incremental revenue generated by abandonment email automations sent through Klaviyo compared to Bloomreach Engagement.
About the Author:
Co-founder of Datacop, agency that fulfils marketing operation roles in large eCommerce companies such as OluKai, Melin, Roark, Visual Comfort and Company, Dedoles and others.
In October 2024, Safari held approximately 45% of the U.S. mobile browser market share (Source).
This statistic is crucial for email marketers in the U.S. (or any market where Safari usage is high) because it can significantly influence the performance of your abandonment campaigns, such as cart and browse recovery.
In this article, we will explain why this is the case and what steps you can take to address it.
Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)
Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is a privacy feature developed by Apple to enhance user privacy by limiting cross-site tracking. It achieves this by blocking third-party cookies and imposing expiration limits on first-party cookies and other web storage mechanisms.
One of the most notable updates to ITP came with the introduction of ITP 2.1 in 2019. This version limited the lifespan of first-party cookies created via JavaScript to just seven days. As a result, cookies set by a website's own domain would automatically expire if the user did not return to the site within that timeframe.
Why is this significant?
Suppose you are using Klaviyo to manage your email automation for abandonment, such as a cart or browse abandonment emails.
Consider the following scenario:
Day 1: A visitor arrives at your website using the Safari browser. They subscribe to the company’s newsletter but do not add any items to their cart or make a purchase before leaving the site.
Day 8: The same visitor returns to the website, adds a product to their cart, and then abandons the session. Will they receive a cart abandonment email from Klaviyo?
The answer is no. This is because the visitor’s identity, stored as a JavaScript cookie in Safari, is wiped after seven days from their last interaction with the site. As a result, when they return on Day 8, Klaviyo sees them as a new visitor who has not visited the website before. For Klaviyo to recognize them again, the visitor would need to re-enter their email address somewhere on the website.
How do we know this? This information is clearly outlined in Klaviyo's documentation, where they openly speak about this limitation.
How is Bloomreach Engagement Different?
Without delving too deeply into technical details, Bloomreach has developed a solution to this problem called a Custom Tracking Domain (CTD). For those interested in the technical specifics, you can find more information in their documentation.
What truly matters, however, is the impact of this feature. Referring back to our earlier example, even if a subscriber returns to the website more than seven days after their last identification with an email address, Bloomreach Engagement can still recognize them under the same cookie. This means that the subscriber can be targeted with cart or browse abandonment emails even if they abandon their cart more than seven days after their last email identification.
We personally conducted tests on four different Bloomreach Engagement projects that had a CTD in place. In each case, the system successfully retained the same cookie for me as a visitor when accessing the website via Safari eight days apart. Below is a screenshot from one of these projects, showing that two visits that are eight days apart, were still recorded under the same user profile:
If there's one key takeaway from this article, it’s this:
Bloomreach Engagement can send significantly more cart and browse abandonment emails thanks to its superior identity resolution features—capabilities that Klaviyo simply does not have.
How Significant is the Impact on Performance?
Due to the limitations we've discussed with Klaviyo, startups are emerging specifically to address this issue. One notable example is Aimerce, which offers an effective solution for eCommerce businesses using Shopify and Klaviyo. With their robust identity resolution capabilities, Aimerce enables Klaviyo to send abandonment email campaigns to subscribers whom Klaviyo alone would not be able to retarget.
Aimerce reports that after implementing their solution, businesses experience revenue increases of 10-40% from these email campaigns, which are often a major driver of overall revenue. That is a massive difference.
Final Thoughts
I was surprised to discover that Klaviyo, a specialized platform for email and SMS marketing, lacks an out-of-the-box feature for robust identity resolution. This limitation greatly reduces the incremental revenue generated by abandonment email campaigns sent through Klaviyo.
In contrast, Bloomreach Engagement, which integrates five typically standalone platforms (including email) into one cohesive package, offers this feature as a built-in solution. This means businesses don’t need to invest in additional software to maximize the effectiveness of their email abandonment campaigns.
Typically, one might expect that a company specializing in a single area, such as email marketing, would provide a more robust solution compared to a broader platform. However, in this case, that assumption does not hold true.
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