How to choose the right marketing channels for your business

The most effective marketing strategies pan out when brands reach customers with the right message at the right time on the channels they prefer.

74% of consumers expect more personalized experiences from brands in 2025, according to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report. But with so many ways to reach your audience, figuring out where to invest your time and budget can feel overwhelming.

Without a clear strategy, brands can fall into the “batch and blast” trap, pushing out messages across every channel while risking customer fatigue, wasted spend, and low ROI.

The good news is that there are advanced tools and analytics that can make it easier to reach customers where they spend most of their time.

Let’s break down how to choose the right marketing channels for your business—and how new AI solutions can make it easier to build 1:1 relationships at scale.

What’s the most effective channel for B2C marketing?

To answer that question, we’ll focus on channels that communicate directly with customers, like email, text messaging, in-app messages, and push notifications. These channels use zero- and first-party data to connect your brand to customers who have opted in and want to hear from you.

Unlike social or search, marketing channels like email, text messaging, and WhatsApp put you in control of how and when you engage customers, without relying on third-party algorithms. This way, you can personalize every interaction using high-quality data you’ve collected yourself and can feel confident in.

And because most of these channels are inherently mobile-first, they reach customers where they already shop: 53% of retail and ecommerce consumers report primarily making purchases on mobile, according to our future of consumer marketing report.

Email, SMS, or mobile app: which marketing channel is right for you?

Let’s start with a quick point of clarification: there is no one marketing channel you can invest in at the expense of all the rest. An omnichannel strategy involves realizing the customer journey is a non-linear one, people bounce from one channel to the next with ease, and what works for one buyer may be the antithesis for another.

That said, every channel has its strengths and weaknesses, depending on what and how you’re trying to communicate with customers. While there’s overlap between each marketing channel, here are a few guidelines that can help you choose the right ones for your audience and your purpose:

Use email for detailed, scalable messages

Email remains one of the most effective and cost-efficient tools in a marketer’s toolkit, ideal for delivering detailed, personalized content at scale. It’s easy to set up and offers the flexibility to include branding, visuals, long-form storytelling, and links that drive action.

Klaviyo’s latest email marketing benchmarks reveal that, on average, email campaigns generate a 37.93% open rate, 1.29% click rate, and $0.10 in revenue per recipient (RPR). For flows, those numbers jump to an average 48.57% open rate, 4.67% click rate, and $1.69 RPR.

“Whether it’s revenue, retention, customer experience, customer engagement—all of those can be solved with email marketing,” says Connie Cen, founder and owner of Rocketeer Media.

On the other hand, email marketing is not always ideal for time-sensitive messages, as crowded inboxes and variable open times can delay or prevent customers from seeing important updates.

Key use cases for email marketing include:

• Detailed promotions: sitewide sales, seasonal promotions, product launches with features that benefit from more context
• Behavior-based automations: welcome series, abandoned cart and browse recovery, cross- and up-sells, win-back messages
• Transactions: order and shipping confirmations, delivery updates, account notifications
• Relationship-building content: newsletters, birthday offers, post-purchase education, loyalty rewards

Bidet brand Tushy uses data alongside human creativity to run a scalable, on-brand email program. By using AI to optimize email send times, A/B testing to determine preferred CTAs and button colors, and segment-level reporting to learn what creative resonates at each stage, the team fine-tunes messaging that feels personal and drives stronger engagement and revenue.

Use text message marketing to drive urgency and speed up time to purchase

Text message marketing is great for last-minute promotions and urgent updates.

According to Klaviyo’s latest SMS benchmarks, text messages drive an average 5.76% click rate, 0.1% placed order rate, and $0.11 in RPR. But more importantly, SMS speeds up time to purchase: according to a global survey of 8,000+ consumers, 65% of people who made an SMS-influenced purchase in the last year said they ended up buying earlier because of the text message.

Rich Communication Services (RCS), now supported by both Android and iOS, takes text messaging a step further with interactive content like images, videos, GIFs, CTA buttons, and carousels (while automatically falling back to SMS or MMS to maintain full reach).

While text message marketing is great for speed and visibility, it comes with limitations like character count restrictions, per-message costs, and strict compliance requirements.

Key use cases for text message marketing include:

• Time-sensitive CTAs: flash sales, low-stock alerts, last chance reminders
• Short, high-impact reminders: abandoned cart nudges, price-drop alerts, back-in-stock messages
• Exclusive access: VIP offers, loyalty rewards, limited-edition drops
• Quick engagement: short surveys, event reminders
• Transactions: real-time shipping and delivery updates

When fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff consolidated text messaging, email, and sign-up forms under one roof, their goal was to reduce complexity for their team and better coordinate their email and SMS sends. With an omnichannel marketing platform, the team could simplify and optimize their whole funnel.

In the first 70 days with a consolidated marketing stack, the team saw a 23% YoY increase in SMS revenue. “If a person doesn’t click an SMS, we can follow up with an email, which we wouldn’t have been able to do with our former stack,” says Jonathan Guez, CTO of Sunrise Brands, who runs ecommerce operations for Rebecca Minkoff.

Use in-app messages and push notifications to engage people in real time

More than 50% of online sales happened on mobile in the first half of 2024, according to Adobe Analytics. And Klaviyo’s 2025 omnichannel shopping survey found that, across several categories, at least 85% of consumers have made a purchase from a mobile push notification in the last 3 months.

Mobile app marketing, which includes push notifications and in-app messages, optimizes the mobile shopping experience for a brand’s most loyal customers. With interactive formats and contextual targeting, this channel boosts engagement and allows for timely communication.

Push notifications reach high-intent shoppers who have downloaded your app and opted in. That means they’re great for delivering short, personalized alerts such as:

• Time-sensitive CTAs: flash sales, low-stock alerts, back-in-stock alerts
• Behavior-based automations: abandoned cart reminders, browse abandonment, post-purchase follow-up
• Personalized engagement: birthday or milestone messages, loyalty rewards
• Real-time transactions: shipping and delivery updates, live event and appointment reminders, subscription renewals

Unlike push notifications, in-app messaging doesn’t require users to opt in to notifications on their home screen. Instead, you can target messages when someone is already using your app. This makes it an excellent channel for communicating more detailed, context-specific information such as:

• Promotions: coupon codes, limited-time offers, back-in-stock alerts
• Onboarding and education: app feature walkthroughs, opt-in prompts
• Feedback and insights: post-purchase follow-up, single-question surveys, quick polls
• Behavior-based automations: abandoned cart recovery, cross- and up-sells, subscription renewals
• Re-engagement and retention: loyalty rewards for returning users

Gym+Coffee, an athleisure clothing brand, created omnichannel, segmented customer journeys to drive brand loyalty. Ahead of Black Friday, the team shared daily urgency messages via mobile app push notifications to keep their releases fresh over the selling period. This strategy drove a 571% YoY increase in mobile push revenue.

Identify the best channels for each subscriber in your audience

Benchmarks and best practices are a great starting point, but they don’t tell you where and when your customers are most likely to engage. To really connect at the right moment, you need smart tools that help you reach each individual person on the channels they actually use.

With an all-in-one B2C CRM with built-in AI, brands can get a holistic view of their customers’ online behavior and purchase decisions and:

• Create segments of customers who recently engaged via text, email, or mobile app.
• Build flows that target customers on specific channels to prevent over-communication and drive more engagement.
• Use channel affinity to predict the best channel sequence for each individual subscriber.
• Use omnichannel marketing automation to coordinate and personalize customer engagement across email, text messaging, mobile apps, and even in-store channels.

“Channel affinity has really helped us reduce over-messaging and create opportunities to do more brand-building in extensive flows,” says Luke Styles, CRM manager at Lorna Jane. “I can send prominent communications in the most relevant way for every subscriber in our key flows. It’s faster because it’s less manual, and it’s also allowed us to space out additional content in various formats.”

Choose the best marketing channel mix for your strategy

Sending the right messages on the right channel for the right moment can help you make the most of each message and prevent customer burnout.

Klaviyo B2C CRM makes it easy to tailor your strategy and understand how each channel is working to generate revenue. Unlike traditional marketing platforms, Klaviyo unifies omnichannel engagement, real-time customer data, and AI to deliver truly personalized experiences.

With unified customer profiles that inform email, text messages, push notifications, in-app messaging, and WhatsApp (coming soon), Klaviyo helps brands speak to individual customers where they’re most likely to engage.