Pick a Shopify loyalty app on budget and feature fit: Smile.io or Growave to start cheap, LoyaltyLion or Rivo once you want VIP tiers, Yotpo or Okendo if you'd rather bundle loyalty with reviews you already run. Every one of them will sync points, tiers, and referral activity into Klaviyo. None of them will write the emails that use that data. That's the part this guide covers that the app roundups don't.
Which Shopify loyalty app should you pick?
Start from what you're actually trying to do, not the longest feature list.
- Launching your first program on a tight budget: Smile.io Essential ($15/mo, 500 orders, 1 integration) or Growave Entry ($15/mo, 500 orders, loyalty + referrals + reviews + wishlist in one app).
- You want VIP tiers and more control: LoyaltyLion Classic ($199/mo, 500 orders, branded loyalty page, pre-built earning rules, Klaviyo integration) or Rivo Scale ($49+/mo, 200 to 2,500 orders, up to 250,000 loyalty participants).
- You already run a reviews app and want one bill: Yotpo (free plan, paid plans from $199/mo, bundles loyalty with reviews and SMS) or Okendo (priced by monthly order volume, bundles loyalty with reviews and surveys, roughly 30% cheaper than buying the products separately).
What do these apps actually cost?
Pricing moves fast in this category, so here's what's live on each app's own pricing page right now, not what a roundup from last year says.
Smile.io. Free up to 200 orders/month. Essential $15/mo (500 orders, 1 integration). Standard $79/mo (1,000 orders, 2 integrations, subscription and gift card rewards). Growth $199/mo (2,500 orders, unlimited integrations, VIP program). Smile Plus $999/mo billed annually (7,500 orders, migration support). Enterprise is custom, aimed at retailers doing $40M+ a year.
LoyaltyLion. Free for stores under roughly 400 orders/month. Classic $199/mo (500 orders, branded loyalty page, Klaviyo integration). Advanced and Plus are custom-quoted, scaling to 4,000+ and 10,000+ orders, and add VIP tiers, multi-location POS support, and "advanced Klaviyo event integration" with conditional flow logic.
Rivo. Scale $49+/mo (200 to 2,500 orders, up to 250,000 loyalty participants). Plus $499/mo (unlimited orders and participants, white-glove onboarding). Custom plans for Shopify Plus brands that want cashback, accounts, and memberships bundled in.
Growave. Entry $15/mo (500 orders). Growth $199/mo (1,500 orders, VIP tiers, store credit, Instagram UGC). Plus $499/mo (3,000 orders, checkout extensions, B2B points). Unlimited $999/mo (no order cap).
Yotpo. Free plan available. Paid Loyalty & Referrals plans start at $199/mo, but exact tiers aren't public; you check pricing through an order-volume slider or talk to sales. Bundling Loyalty & Referrals with Yotpo's Reviews & UGC product costs less than buying both separately.
Okendo. No public per-tier pricing for Loyalty alone. Pricing is based on monthly order volume across five bands (0 to 200, up to 10,001+), and Okendo pushes you toward its Platform or Retain bundles that combine loyalty with reviews and surveys for roughly 30% less than standalone.
What won't any of these apps do for you?
Write the emails. Every one of the six apps above will track who earned points, who hit a new tier, and who has a reward sitting unused. Most of them will hand that data to Klaviyo as an event or a profile property. None of them will write the subject line, design the layout, or decide what a "you just hit VIP Gold" email should actually say so it doesn't read like a system notification.
That's a real gap, because loyalty emails are some of the easiest wins in a Shopify store's inbox: the customer already did something (bought, referred, hit a milestone), so you're not cold-pitching, you're confirming something good just happened to them. Most stores either skip these emails entirely or send Klaviyo's bare default template with no real copy behind it.
How does a loyalty app actually trigger a Klaviyo email?
Smile.io's Klaviyo integration sends eight distinct events that can each trigger their own flow: Birthday Reward Issued, Points Earned on Order, Points Redeemed, Points Expiring, Referral Started, Referral Completed, Reward Expiring, and VIP Tier Achieved. It also syncs five profile properties to each customer: Points Balance, Referral URL, VIP Tier Name, VIP Tier ID, and Member State. LoyaltyLion's Klaviyo integration works the same way in principle, syncing loyalty activity as events your flows can key off.
Once that event exists in Klaviyo, you're building a standard metric-triggered flow. A profile qualifies to enter "as soon as they meet the trigger action." Two filter types do the real work:
- Trigger filters look at the data on the incoming event itself, like the point value of a "Points Earned" event, and only get checked the moment someone enters.
- Profile filters look at who the person is or what they've done before, and someone who fails one at entry simply doesn't get in.
For repeatable events like points earned, set re-entry criteria in the flow trigger so people don't get the same email every time they earn a single point. Klaviyo gives you three options: enter only once, re-enter whenever they re-qualify, or re-enter after a minimum time period. For a "points earned" flow, re-entering after a minimum time period (say, once every 30 days) keeps it from turning into noise; for "VIP Tier Achieved," enter-only-once per tier is usually right, since hitting Gold twice isn't news.
What should a points-earned or VIP-tier email actually say?
A paste-ready structure for the four events worth building flows around first:
1. Points Earned on Order
Send: immediately, re-entry allowed after 30 days
Subject: "You just earned [X] points"
Body: confirm the order that earned it, show new points balance,
show what the next reward tier costs, one link to redeem or browse
2. Reward Unlocked / Points Redeemed
Send: immediately, enter only once per redemption
Subject: "Your reward is ready"
Body: name the specific reward, how to use it, expiration date
if there is one, no upsell, this email is a receipt not a pitch
3. VIP Tier Achieved
Send: immediately, enter only once per tier
Subject: "Welcome to [Tier Name]"
Body: name what changed (perks, discount rate, early access),
one concrete example of the new perk in action, skip the confetti copy
4. Birthday Reward Issued
Send: on the trigger date, enter only once per year
Subject: a specific perk, not "Happy Birthday"
Body: the reward and its expiration date, nothing else competing
for attention
Keep each one short. These are confirmation emails, not campaigns: the reader already did the thing that earned the message, so the job is to tell them clearly what happened and what to do next, not to re-sell them on the loyalty program.
Where loyalty fits with everything else you're sending
Loyalty emails are a layer on top of flows most stores build first. If you don't have abandoned cart and welcome flows live yet, build those before a loyalty program; a loyalty app is tracking repeat-customer behavior you don't have much of yet otherwise. For the broader set of Klaviyo integrations worth adding to a Shopify store beyond loyalty, including reviews, quizzes, and subscriptions, see the best Klaviyo add-ons for Shopify stores. And if the bottleneck is writing all four of these emails (plus everything else Klaviyo needs) on top of running the store, that's the production problem JetFlow vs. Klaviyo's own templates walks through.