We just completed one of the biggest operational changes Smart Marketer has made in years.
We migrated our email program from Klaviyo to Omnisend.
This move was more than a year in the making, which is a little embarrassing because we had already helped other ecommerce businesses make the same migration. We knew what the process looked like. We understood the potential savings. We had a strong relationship with the Omnisend team.
We still kept finding reasons not to do it ourselves. Smart Marketer has been using Klaviyo for more than a decade. The account had hundreds of thousands of contacts, years of lead magnets and course launches, and roughly 350 automations sitting inside it. Not all of those automations were active. That was part of the problem. Moving platforms meant someone had to open all the closets and figure out what was worth bringing with us.
After putting that off for about a year, we finally made the move. Our migration took a month, our account is dramatically cleaner, and our initial monthly platform cost dropped from approximately $1,260 to $680. Campaign engagement held steady. Flow engagement more than doubled. And while the savings helped justify the decision, the thing I may be most excited about is not the price.
It is that Omnisend’s MCP connection gives AI tools access to the live context of your account and allows them to take action inside it. That could fundamentally change how quickly marketers move from spotting an opportunity to doing something about it.
I’ll come back to that, because it deserves more than a footnote.
A necessary disclosure before we get into the results
Smart Marketer is an Omnisend partner.
We do receive a commission when someone moves to Omnisend through our partnership. But we’re running a real partnership on this, collaborating on client outcomes and building educational content.
I want to put that directly on the table. I also want to be clear that this is not a platform we are recommending from the sidelines. We moved Smart Marketer onto Omnisend. We have moved our ecommerce brands onto it. We’ve launched ecommerce brands with it. And the reality is there are businesses who should stay with Klaviyo. Just like there are businesses for whom Omnisend is likely a much better economic and operational fit.
The point of this article is to show you what happened in our account so you can make a more informed decision about your own.
Why we considered leaving Klaviyo
Klaviyo is still a good email platform. It has strong ecommerce functionality, a large integration ecosystem, and sophisticated features for large organizations with complicated data and reporting needs.
But from where I sit, Klaviyo’s direction has been moving steadily toward larger enterprise businesses. Those businesses need more complexity, and they are usually willing to pay for it. That does not necessarily make the platform a better value for a performance-focused ecommerce company that is nowhere near $100 million in annual revenue.
But it does drive costs up for everybody.
Smart Marketer is a higher-volume sender. Which is what we find works best regardless of industry. This means sending 15+ campaigns per month broadly, and more with thoughtful segmentation, a strong promotional calendar, and content worth sending.
When each additional send increases your technology costs, the platform starts quietly discouraging the strategy we would otherwise recommend. Omnisend’s pricing model felt more aligned with how we believe retention marketing should work. Its focus on ecommerce businesses also felt closer to the companies we teach and support every day.
Then there was their MCP, the Model Context Protocol that unlocks big ideas.
Most email platforms are adding AI features. Omnisend has set up a way for the AI tool you already use to connect directly to your account, understand what is happening, and, uniquely, to help execute changes. That made the decision feel like more than a cost-cutting exercise. It felt like a bet on where retention marketing is headed.
The real reason we waited a year
The answer is not very sophisticated.
Our account was complex and full of historical data we were scared to let go.
Smart Marketer is different from most of the ecommerce businesses we work with. We are a legacy education company with more than a decade of products, promotions, courses, opt-ins, events, and customer journeys layered on top of one another.
Before the migration, there were roughly 350 flows inside our Klaviyo account. Some were live. Some were paused. They all had interesting data. But it was data sitting on a shelf, much like my old clarinet. Not doing much good if you don’t take it out once in a while. There were also hundreds of thousands of contacts with years of segmentation history.
Migrating meant answering questions we had successfully avoided:
- Which automations still served a real purpose?
- Which audiences did we still need?
- Which historical contacts should we continue mailing?
- Which pieces of the account existed because they were useful?
- Which existed simply because nobody wanted to be the person who deleted them?
A platform migration is not inherently strategic. You can copy every bad decision from one account into another and call the project complete.
We did not want to do that.
We wanted to use the migration as an opportunity to simplify the program, which meant the biggest job was not moving our data. It was deciding what deserved to move.
Our migration took one month
Omnisend can accomplish a five-day migration process for a typical business. Based on another ecommerce migration we completed, I think that promise is realistic for a more conventional account. Omnisend’s migration team can transfer contacts, templates, automations, and other key assets while taking a large portion of the work off your internal team.
Smart Marketer was not a typical migration.
Ours took approximately one month because we chose to own much more of the process internally (the polite way to say we micromanaged it). We wanted people who understood the history of the business to evaluate what we had built and decide what was still relevant.
That is how we went from roughly 350 historical flows to 42 that we chose to keep. 42 flows still means Smart Marketer is more complicated than most ecommerce accounts by half. We support different products, post-purchase experiences, evergreen opt-ins, and longer educational journeys.
But now we understand what is there. That alone made the project worthwhile.
For a standard ecommerce store with welcome, abandonment, post-purchase, cross-sell, and winback automations, five days feels achievable, especially with Omnisend doing most of the heavy lifting.
For a complicated legacy business, I would get experienced support. I say that as someone who helped migrate Digital Marketer to a new email platform in 2016. I have done this the hard way before. When an account contains years of overlapping products, segments, automations, and internal logic, trying to figure it out as you migrate can make you tear your hair out.
Do not pay an agency merely to copy and paste everything. Pay someone to help determine what the new account should look like.
The biggest adjustment was contact organization
The largest internal change for our team was moving away from the exact list-and-segment structure we were accustomed to using in Klaviyo. Omnisend relies more heavily on tags as part of its contact-management system. Tags can be used to identify contacts, create dynamic segments, and trigger automations.
It was not a dealbreaker. It is not causing major issues now.
It was simply the part of the migration that required the most adjustment in how our team thought about organizing the account. Omnisend helped make the transition easier, but you should still map this carefully before migrating. Decide which distinctions between contacts actually need to be preserved and how those distinctions should be represented in the new system.
Again, this is where the cleanup matters. You probably do not need a perfect recreation of every audience somebody built seven years ago.
The part of the migration we could not afford to get wrong
Once the account was organized and our core automations were in place, the next job was warming our new sending infrastructure.
We were a new sender inside Omnisend, even though Smart Marketer had been sending email for years. We needed to establish the reputation of the new IP and introduce our domain through a new sending environment without immediately exposing the entire database. That meant starting with our most engaged contacts and expanding gradually.
We focused heavily on clicks because open-rate data is much less dependable than it used to be. A real click gives us a clearer indication that someone is actively engaging with the email. Throughout the warming process, our emails maintained a unique click rate of at least 2.8%. That continued even when we expanded to contacts who had engaged within the previous 120 days.
We did not migrate the database on Friday and send to everyone on Monday. That restraint matters.
A good warming campaign helps you establish your new sending infrastructure, but it also does something broader. It forces you to send genuinely useful content and learn what your audience still responds to.
That information should not disappear when the warming period ends. The question is not simply, “How do I get through these ten days?” The better question is, “What did we send that earned a 3%, 4%, or 5% click rate, and how do we build more of that into our regular program?”
We have a separate breakdown of the process in our article about the “Gmail Slap” and email warming.
What happened during our first 30 days
We checked the account approximately 30 days after the migration to see whether we had created any obvious performance problems.
Here is where things stood.
Campaign unique click rate: approximately 1.4%
Our campaign click rate stayed relatively flat.
That may not sound exciting, but flat was a good outcome in context.
The comparison period included one of the stronger parts of Smart Marketer’s annual calendar. June and July are typically slower for us because business owners travel, promotions slow down, and we launch fewer major initiatives. Maintaining approximately a 1.4% unique click rate through the transition and into a slower seasonal period made us comfortable that the move had not damaged campaign engagement.
For consistency, we excluded sends to fewer than 1,000 contacts on both platforms. Those small, high-value segment sends can produce unusually high click rates and distort the broader comparison.
Flow unique click rate: 3.3% to more than 7%
Our flow click rate more than doubled.
It increased from 3.3% in Klaviyo to more than 7% during the first 30 days in Omnisend. I expect that number to settle as more volume moves through the automations. It could normalize closer to 6% or 6.5%.
Even with that caveat, it is a very strong start. We did not move platforms expecting a software switch to magically fix our marketing. The cleanup, rebuilding, and renewed attention from our team all contributed to the improvement.
That is still part of the value.
A migration gave us a reason to put fresh eyes on automations that had been running in the background for years.
Sending volume: approximately the same
We did not achieve these results by suddenly sending much more email.
Our send volume has remained approximately the same before and after the migration. That is important because I do not want to imply that the cost savings came from changing our strategy or reducing communication with the audience.
We are sending at roughly the same volume on a less expensive platform.
Initial monthly cost: approximately $1,260 to $680
Smart Marketer is on a plan supporting approximately 100,000 contacts. Klaviyo had been billing us about $1,260 per month. Our Omnisend cost for each of the first three months is approximately $680.
That is a reduction of around $580 per month during the introductory period, or nearly 46%.
We still need to evaluate the permanent run rate after the initial three months, so I do not want to present the introductory price as our forever cost.
But the immediate savings are significant.
When the economics become especially compelling
Omnisend will not have the same financial impact for every business.
If you send five campaigns per month, you may save money, but you are not taking full advantage of the pricing model. If you send 15 to 25 campaigns per month, use real segmentation, and support the program with active automations, the difference becomes much more meaningful.
This is especially true if your current software costs are causing you to hesitate before sending. You should not send a bad email simply because sending is inexpensive. You also should not suppress a good strategy because the platform charges make every additional campaign feel painful.
I recently analyzed the costs for an eight-figure ecommerce brand we are planning to move. Its annual channel-technology budget could fall from a little more than $50,000 to approximately $26,000 while supporting the same contact volume.
That deserves its own case study once the move is complete.
We have already seen the impact with a more conventional ecommerce business. Our SafeSleeve Omnisend case study goes deeper into what happened during that migration and the results that followed.
There is another side to this. If you only email your list a few times per month, your first problem may not be platform cost. Your first problem may be that you are not using the audience you worked so hard to build. I see this constantly during audits. A brand is disappointed with the revenue coming from email, but it barely sends anything outside of a sale or product launch.
Migrating will not solve that by itself. You need a strategy that gives people reasons to hear from you.
The bigger opportunity: MCP closes the gap between insight and action
This is the part of the move I think people may underestimate.
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. In practical terms, it allows an AI workspace such as ChatGPT or Claude to connect to another system and work with the information and tools available there. Omnisend’s MCP connection lets an AI tool work with live information from your account. You can ask questions about campaigns, automations, subscribers, segments, and performance without exporting a report or pasting data into a separate conversation.
That alone is useful.
Most marketing reports are static. They tell you what happened, and then an experienced marketer has to figure out what questions to ask next.
Why did this campaign outperform?
Was it the offer, audience, product, format, or timing?
Which customer group has stopped engaging?
Are we missing a post-purchase opportunity for a high-volume first purchase?
Which products are commonly bought together but are not reflected in our cross-sell automations?
A static dashboard may contain enough information to answer those questions. It does not necessarily make the answers easy to find. With MCP, you can ask the first question, inspect the answer, and keep digging.
But what makes Omnisend’s implementation especially interesting is that it is not limited to reading the account. As of July 2026, Omnisend says its MCP tools can create campaigns, manage segments, and perform full automation management. That includes creating, editing, enabling, and disabling automations, plus working with the automation blocks available in its interface.
That changes the workflow.
You can potentially:
- Ask which customer groups are receiving less communication than the rest of the database.
- Identify a valuable audience that lacks an appropriate follow-up.
- Create the segment.
- Draft a campaign or build the relevant automation.
- Review the work.
- Put it into action.
The advantage is not that AI suddenly knows more about email marketing than a strong strategist. The advantage is that it can combine the strategist’s questions with the live history of the specific account, then reduce the distance between identifying an opportunity and acting on it.
That is where I see the fast-mover advantage. Most brands will use AI to write subject lines faster.
More advanced teams will use it to understand what is actually happening inside their business and make improvements based on that information. The brands that develop those workflows early will learn faster. They will ask better questions, test more ideas, and surface opportunities that are currently buried inside reports nobody has time to explore.
There are still reasons to be careful.
You need capable AI models. You need review and approval processes. You should not give a tool broad instructions and blindly publish whatever it creates. But the ability to move from analysis into action inside the same conversation is a meaningful step forward.
It was not the original reason we started working with Omnisend. It has become one of the biggest reasons I am excited about where the platform is going.
Should you migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend?
Not necessarily. You should not migrate because we did.
You should consider it if:
- You are a medium- or high-volume email sender.
- Your software bill is restricting the amount of useful communication you send.
- You want to reduce the cost of your email and SMS technology.
- You do not need highly specialized enterprise functionality.
- You are willing to use the migration as an opportunity to clean up your account.
- You want to experiment with AI that can analyze and take action against live account data.
You may be better off staying where you are if:
- You are happy with your current platform and its cost.
- You depend on a specific Klaviyo feature or integration.
- Your program sends very little email and does not yet have a clear content strategy.
- You are approaching Black Friday, a major launch, or another critical sales period without enough time to migrate and warm properly (budget at least 3 weeks).
Timing matters. Do not begin this project immediately before the most important promotion of your year.
Leave enough room to transfer the account, validate your data, test the automations, warm the new sending infrastructure, and fix anything that does not work as expected.
The migration was easier than the year we spent avoiding it
Smart Marketer’s account was genuinely complicated.
The migration still turned out to be less painful than we had built it up to be. It took a month. It required meaningful internal work. We needed to make decisions about years of accumulated history.
But we came out of the process with 42 flows we understand instead of 350 we were afraid to touch. Our campaign click rate held steady during a slower period. Our flow click rate increased from 3.3% to more than 7%. Our send volume stayed approximately the same. Our initial monthly platform cost dropped from roughly $1,260 to $680.
And we now have access to a connection between AI and our email account that does more than summarize a dashboard. It can help us investigate, decide, and execute. That last part may ultimately matter more than the immediate savings.
