Klaviyo is the strongest ecommerce email platform in the market, and also the most expensive on most comparisons. Teams usually leave for one reason: the bill grows with profiles stored rather than emails sent, and a list that swells through seasonal campaigns takes the cost with it.
Is migrating the right call?
Good reasons to leave: you are billed per profile for people you rarely email; your flows are simpler than the platform you are paying for; you want transactional email on the same bill.
Weaker reasons: you run deep ecommerce automation on a large Shopify stack. Klaviyo’s product data model and integration library are genuinely best-in-class, and giving them up to save money is often a bad trade.
The detail is in Klaviyo alternatives.
What moves, and what does not
Moves cleanly: contacts and custom fields, tags and segment data, unsubscribes and bounces, and campaign history as an export.
Has to be rebuilt: automations and templates. No platform imports another’s workflow logic, and editor markup does not port. For most accounts that is a few hours of work and a useful cull of flows nobody has opened in a year.
The order that protects your deliverability
- Export contacts with consent data — signup source, timestamp and opt-in method, not just addresses. Several jurisdictions require you to hold these.
- Export unsubscribes, bounces and complaints separately. This is the step people skip, and it causes the real damage.
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the new sender and verify before sending anything. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained.
- Import contacts, then suppressions immediately — before any campaign goes out.
- Rebuild your core automations. Welcome series first. Copy is in our template library.
- Warm up if you send meaningful volume. Start with your most engaged segment and ramp. See how to warm up an email domain.
- Run both accounts in parallel for two to four weeks.
- Cancel only after a full billing cycle of clean sending.
The mistake that does real damage
Emailing people who had already unsubscribed on Klaviyo.
Suppression lists sit separately from the main contact export on almost every platform, so a straight contact import loses them. Everyone who opted out then receives a campaign they explicitly refused — and those people hit the spam button rather than unsubscribing again. A complaint spike on a brand-new sending domain with no reputation history is close to the worst possible start.
It also breaches consent rules in most jurisdictions. See email marketing rules by country and email list cleaning.
How long it takes
A small list with two or three automations: an afternoon of setup, then two to four weeks of parallel running. A larger account with complex flows: a week of setup, then four to six weeks of warm-up and parallel running.
Setup is rarely the bottleneck. Rushing the warm-up is how migrations fail.
Migrating to Bluey Email specifically
If you send more than 100,000 emails a month, our team does the migration for you — contacts, suppressions, templates and automations rebuilt on your behalf. You approve the flows before anything sends.
Below 100,000 a month we guide you through it, with a real person answering questions rather than a documentation link. That threshold is worth stating plainly rather than implying everyone gets a done-for-you service.
On billing, Bluey charges on emails sent, not profiles stored, so a list that grows faster than your send volume stops inflating the invoice. Worth being straight about the trade: Bluey has four native integrations against Klaviyo’s several hundred, so a deep ecommerce stack may be better served staying.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my subscribers?
No. Contacts export cleanly as CSV with custom fields intact. What you must also export is the suppression list, which sits separately.
Can I move my automations?
Not automatically. No platform imports another’s workflow logic, so flows are rebuilt.
Will my deliverability drop?
Temporarily, if you move significant volume without warming up. Ramp gradually from your engaged contacts and the dip is brief.
Should I cancel Klaviyo immediately?
No. Run both for two to four weeks. One extra month’s subscription removes nearly all the risk.
Weighing it up? Bluey Email vs Klaviyo covers the differences, Klaviyo alternatives covers the field, and Mailchimp vs Klaviyo compares the two incumbents.
Start free — 500 emails a month, no card required, so you can build and test before moving anything.