How to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend: The ultimate guide 2026

If you’ve been contemplating migrating from Klaviyo to Omnisend, it’s likely that you have established the cost savings (circa 35% per month) compared the platform’s features, and discussed with your team the pros and cons associated with a switch to Omnisend.

This guide is focussed on helping you understand what the process of switching involves, so the actual steps to be taken to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend without a hitch and without the stress. The guide will make it clear what Omnisend’s migration team will handle for you, what they won’t and how to implement the migration in a manner that keeps your sender reputation intact with zero downtime on your email activity.

We’ve managed the switch from Klaviyo to Omnisend many times and this framework is a culmination of what delivers a successful migration. The framework adopts a step by step phased approach that is designed to ensure your email activity continues as normal throughout the switch and that the migration process is smooth, accurate and stress free.

Why Migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend?

Most of the eCommerce teams we have worked with decide to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend for a combination of these 5 criteria: 

1. Cost – Omnisend’s pricing comes in lower than Klaviyo’s at comparable list sizes. Omnisend also has a pay-per-send model, which has benefits for business models that are acquisition-heavy and finally they offer seasonal businesses the opportunity to switch to lower plans during off season without penalty. 
2. Simplicity – Klaviyo is attempting to provide a solution that meets the needs of a fledgling Shopify store through to multi million dollar enterprises, this approach has resulted in Klaviyo becoming increasingly difficult to use and bloated with features of no value to small and mid size stores. Omnisend has remained focussed on delivering a solution that meets the needs of small – medium size stores with all the features you need and none that you don’t.
3. Pre-built ecommerce workflows – Omnisend provides templated automations for the key flows that deliver the lion’s share of sales – Welcome,  abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back –  plus their email editor is super easy to use with AI features that deliver significant value.
4. Support – Omnisend’s support team is available 24/7 globally and responds in minutes rather than hours. This level of support is included in all Plans.
5. Partners – Omnisend has a network of Agency and Freelance Partners who are on hand to help. These partners are not locked into Omnisend. Where Klaviyo partners are locked into achieving tier levels through maximising billings from clients, Omnisend chooses to have no lock-ins, building loyalty from their partners based on exceptional service and product evolution as opposed to financial gain.

Is Omnisend’s migration service worth considering?

The Omnisend Migration service is absolutely an option worth considering.

Omnisend offers a migration service from Klaviyo called Kickstart that’s free for paid plans. The service is extremely helpful, removing significant friction from the migration process. That said it’s not a totally outsourced solution, and stores who treat it as one tend to hit issues mid-project. 

What does the Omnisend migration service include?

Based on a real migration, here’s what Omnisend’s team handled within their 5 day timeframe:

• Contact migration: All contacts, properties, tags, and engagement stats are synced from Klaviyo automatically.
• All your workflows rebuilt: This generally includes a welcome series, abandoned checkout, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, back in stock and re-purchase workflows. It’s important to note here that templates were not included in this rebuild, only the workflow logic.
• 1 master email template: Brand styling, header, footer. Individual flow and campaign templates are not part of the scope.
• All segments that can be rematched in Omnisend: Any segment that you have in Klaviyo that can be rematched in Omnisend will be migrated, in our case this included engaged subscribers, suppression lists, and a seven behavioral segments.
• Up to 5 sign-up forms or popups rebuilt: Our highest-converting popups got rebuilt, needing only minor tweaks. 
• Domain Warm-up – If you’ve got a verified custom domain and 5,000+ contacts, Omnisend will build a personalized warm-up plan from your real engagement data – adjusted in real time and applied as a recommended audience right in the campaign builder

What the migration service does not include.

To avoid any mid-project surprises be aware of these elements that are not included in the Omnisend Migration service:

• Re-create email templates beyond the master. Every individual flow email and campaign template needs to be designed and built by your team or your preferred partner. This task is significantly eased if you have your templates residing in Figma or Adobe, as you’ll be able to rebuild using the components created in those platforms.
• QA the workflows and forms after building them. Your team will be responsible for quality assurance testing the forms and workflows.
• SMS Set up. Sender registration, compliance, test sends, and go-live will need to be managed by your team..
• Third-party integrations. If you are using any visitor tracking tools, CDPs, review platforms or custom webhooks, the set up of these will be your team’s responsibility.
• Migration of historical campaign performance or revenue attribution. Post migration you’ll have no access to this reporting. We create a document of screen shots of campaigns as we use these for performance benchmarking and a data source in our future planning. 
• Account strategy. Your team will be responsible for deciding which flows to migrate, which A/B split tests are to be carried over, and how your segments are structured.
• Domain authentication, billing setup. This responsibility lies with your team, though Omnisend will guide you through the process.
• Manage your domain warm-up. A critical piece in the migration which should be managed by a dedicated resource from your internal team or preferred agency partner.

What’s the optimum approach for a stress free migration?

The Omnisend Kickstart migration service is certainly worth including in your migration plan, it’s just not the whole solution to your migration. The kick start service removes some of the strain and friction of the migration but you’ll need to have a plan where your team or agency partner works in tandem with Omnisend to cover all the tasks involved in a migration. 

From our experience the Omnisend Migration service handles about 60% of the migration workload with the other 40% being handled by your team or agency partner. 

Go live using a two-phased approach

This is the most important section in this guide, and it’s the one most stores tend to get wrong. Once you are deep into the migration process you’ll be keen to have it completed, but it’s imperative that you are patient and the one action you must take for a successful migration is to not plan to switch automations and campaigns from Klaviyo to Omnisend on the same day.

Avoid deliverability issues by adopting a two phased approach

When you commence sending emails from a new provider, you’re sending from a  domain that has no reputation with inbox providers. Even if your root domain has years of history, the subdomain that Omnisend will use for sending your emails is effectively new. Inbox providers – Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo monitor how this new domain behaves for several weeks before deciding whether to deliver to inbox or spam. 

If you commence mailing from your new domain in Omnisend from Day 1 at the levels you were mailing in your last month with Klaviyo you’re hitting the inbox providers with a barrage of unfamiliar mail. The net result of this will be that your bounce rates will increase, complaint rates will rise, and your domain reputation will get rated before you’ve had a chance to build any credibility. Recovering from this can take months. 

The solution is to warm up the new domain slowly, we cover this slow but sure approach below.

Commence your domain warm up with Automations 

Automations are sent to contacts who have recently engaged with your store and taken an action – subscribed to email, abandoned a cart or made a purchase. These contacts are high-intent, and have a high propensity to open and engage with your email. Inbox providers capture these positive engagement signals which then reward you by adding your sending domain to their trusted list.

Campaigns, by contrast, go to larger less engaged lists of contacts, sometimes including subscribers who haven’t opened an email in months. We recommend sending campaigns after you’ve built up some credibility through your automations.

We recommend a two-phased approach

Month 1 – Automations live on Omnisend. Pop-up forms, welcome series, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and any other triggered flows go live on Omnisend. All the corresponding automations in Klaviyo are paused. 

Continue to send campaigns from Klaviyo during this first month. The new sending domain is warming up on high-engagement traffic, whilst your campaign cadence stays uninterrupted. During this stage you may be able to adjust down your Klaviyo billing.

Month 2 – Campaigns live on Omnisend. Following 30 days of your automations running on Omnisend you can now migrate your campaigns over to Omnisend and commence sending. Once you have sent 5 campaigns with no issues it’s time to cancel your Klaviyo account. Alternatively, if you have over 5,000 contacts and a custom domain, Omnisend’s platform features an automated domain warm-up assistant to automatically build this audience allocation for you. Speak with your Omnisend migration team to establish if this is an option for you.

What to monitor during the sending domain Warm-Up

Key Metrics – Open rates, click rates, bounce rates, spam complaint rates – monitor daily for the first two weeks, then weekly.

Inbox placement – use a seed list service or a tool like GlockApps

Domain reputation – use Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS

This two-phase approach costs you about a month of dual-platform subscriptions. It protects your sender reputation and overall ROI from email.  

Klaviyo to Omnisend migration timeline 

Here’s what an actual migration we recently completed looked like end-to-end:

Weeks 1-3: Build phase

• Week 1: Store integration, sender domain verification, contact list cleaning, contact migration commences, segment migration, and form migration begins.
• Week 2: Workflow migration – The Omnisend migration team rebuilds your flows while our design team rebuilds the templates within each flow. Configuration of your SMS parameters begins.
• Week 3: QA on workflows and forms, third-party integrations (visitor tracking, webhooks), final SMS testing.

End of Week 3: Phase 1 Go-Live – Automations

• Audience sync is verified, segments are cross checked, reporting is verified, billing plan is confirmed.
• Omnisend flows and triggers are set live.
• All Klaviyo automations are paused
• Klaviyo campaigns continue to run.
• Klaviyo account maybe downgraded to save on costs

Month 1 after go-live: Warm-up period

• Automations live on Omnisend
• Campaigns continue to be sent from Klaviyo
• Daily deliverability monitoring for two weeks, then weekly
• Build upcoming campaigns  in Omnisend in parallel with those built in Klaviyo

Month 2: Phase 2 Go-Live – Campaigns

• Commence scheduling campaigns in Omnisend
• Pause all Klaviyo campaigns
• Cancel Klaviyo after a safe overlap & data exports

End-to-end, the process takes two months: three weeks of build, four weeks of warm-up, then campaign platform switch over a week.

This timeline can be compressed without compromising the outcome. The key areas where time can be saved are across the re build of your email templates and warming up your domain, which we conservatively allow 4 weeks for, though this can occur within 7 days if managed carefully.

If you’re planning a migration and want experienced support, contact us and we’ll walk through your setup together and establish a clear timeline for your specific migration.

Preparation – Pre-migration checklist

Prior to commencing any of the migration work use this checklist to have everything in place to ensure a smooth migration to Omnisend.

Capture your Klaviyo setup. Create a document that captures your Klaviyo set up and performance metrics for each element.

Identify the flows you wish to migrate from Omnisend to Klaviyo. You’ll probably have archived flows and paused flows that won’t make this list.

Export historical campaign data this will be useful for benchmarking your post-migration performance.

Pinpoint all the  integrations connected to Klaviyo. Visitor tracking, CDPs, review platforms, helpdesk tools and custom webhooks.

Appoint a leader for the project and then have them assign deliverables to the team across the key areas of Q&A, Domain Set Up, Template design and Build, SMS set up, deliverability monitoring and Omnisend Account Set up.

Map out a two phased migration timeline with each deadline signed off by the appropriate team member.

The step-by-step Klaviyo to Omnisend migration process

Step 1: Set Up Your Omnisend Account & Connect Your Store

First, create an Omnisend account and connect your e-commerce platform (e.g., Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce) to sync basic customer, order, and product data. Secondly, complete your brand setup, and verify your sending domain (DNS, DKIM, SPF). Domain authentication is your responsibility and critical to a successful migration.

Step 2: Contact Migration & List Cleaning

We strongly recommend that you clean your Klaviyo lists prior to migrating them. As part of this cleaning be sure to suppress unengaged contacts, remove duplicates, and fix any formatting issues. Migrating a clean list is significantly easier than cleaning up after the fact. 

Once your lists are clean, the Omnisend migration tool will automatically sync contacts, properties, tags, and engagement statistics. We strongly recommend that you spot-check consent status and subscription preferences after the sync – this is the data that you should double check and then check again for accuracy.

Step 3: Migrate your segments

Identify all your segments that can be matched in Omnisend, the Omnisend migration team will be on hand to help with this. Once you have identified these, the Omnisend team will manage the migration of them from Klaviyo to Omnisend. Any segments that cannot be matched will need to be re-created in Omnisend’s segment builder. 

Step 4: Migrate your master template

Omnisend rebuilds one master template – this includes your branded header, footer, and base styling. All your emails within your automations and campaigns will need to be rebuilt in Omnisend, with this master template being a good starting point for these.

Step 5: Migrate your workflows

The Omnisend team will rebuild all your workflows that you have identified as wanting to be brought over from Klaviyo. Once these are built a thorough Q&A on these is required to ensure all is as it should be. 

Step 6: Migrate your forms and popups

The Omnisend team will rebuild up to five forms – these tends to be your most effective popups

Step 7: SMS Configuration

Configure sender info, register for compliance (TCPA, GDPR depending on your geography), and run end-to-end test sends. Coordinate go-live timing with your email automations so SMS steps in flows trigger correctly from day one.

Step 8: Third-Party integrations

Reconnect everything that you have hooked into  Klaviyo: visitor tracking platforms, CDPs, review tools, helpdesk systems, custom webhooks. Ensure that you verify the correct data is being passed before go-live, not after.

A Final Word

Migrating to Omnisend from Klaviyo is more involved than frequently advised, though with good planning and the allocation of the appropriate resources and time it can be a smooth friction free process.

Omnisend’s migration service is a great place to start but it does not work in isolation, so ensure you work out who is responsible for what, before you commence.

A successful migration is one where the Omnisend migration team collaborates closely with your internal team and your preferred agency, this ensures the appropriate expertise is delegated to the relevant deliverables.

We have mapped the two phased approach above to take 2 months, the migration can certainly be completed faster than this, we have completed it within 4 weeks, where every migration needs to be scheduled relative to the store size and complexity being migrated.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does migration typically take?

Most Klaviyo to Omnisend migrations complete within 4 weeks. This includes a 2 week build and then a 2 week sender domain warm up. Complex migrations with custom objects or millions of records may take longer. 

Will I lose my email history?

Historical performance data remains in Klaviyo. If you see value in the performance data residing in Klaviyo be sure to export this as part of the migration process.

Can I run both platforms simultaneously?

Yes, this will ensure your migration is smooth and stress free:).  

Does Omnisend support my ecommerce platform?

Omnisend has direct integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and several others. Check Omnisend’s integrations page for details.

What happens to my deliverability reputation?

Your root domain reputation is unaffected, but the sending subdomain Omnisend uses is new. The two-phase warm-up exists specifically to build that subdomain’s reputation cleanly. 

Is the Kickstart service really free?

Yes, for paid plans. But as we have outlined within the guide the Kickstart service only delivers 60% of the tasks that you’ll need to complete for a successful migration.

Why can’t I migrate within the 5 days Omnisend promotes?

You can. Though you probably shouldn’t. Sending all your Automations and Campaigns from a brand-new domain on day 1 is the fastest way to land in spam folders. Plus, if you have a suite of Automations you are going to need time to re-create the emails for these within Omnisend, to do this well takes time. 

If you’re planning a migration and want experienced support, contact us and we’ll walk through your setup together.