Klaviyo CDP: The smarter, easier CDP built for faster results.

Profile photo of author Anthony DelPizzo
Anthony DelPizzo
11 min read
Platform
August 18, 2023

Adopt the smarter stack and consolidate data and analytics in the same platform as your marketing.

In the fast-paced world of modern marketing, data is king. Brands are constantly seeking ways to harness their customer data to drive growth, improve personalization, and enhance their overall customer experience. Enter Klaviyo CDP, a revolutionary customer data platform that’s extending the power of Klaviyo and reinventing the modern tech stack. 

But before we dive into Klaviyo’s new product, it’s important to define CDP – as the term means something slightly different to everyone you ask. We think it’s time to add clarity in the market on what a CDP is (and should be)

A system that collects, unifies, and stores data from multiple sources at scale and makes it available for manipulation and distribution to systems of insight (CRM, analytics systems, etc.) and engagement (marketing automation, advertising platforms, etc.). [source: Klaviyo] 

CDPs came into existence in 2013 because brands struggled to deliver personalized experiences at scale due to the lack of a strong customer data foundation that legacy marketing solutions couldn’t provide. But unfortunately, legacy CDPs aren’t built to meet the needs of scaling brands.

Wait, doesn’t Klaviyo already do this today?

We’re not starting from scratch, we’ve been delivering CDP capabilities for years. We’re already a market leader in the CDP category on G2.

Since day 1, Klaviyo’s core differentiating factor has been the way we store and democratize access to data, allowing over 130,000 brands to flexibly ingest, unify, store, segment, and activate high volumes of data —profiles, fields, events, & custom properties — without pre-defined schemas, custom development, or data scientists.

We’ve built core CDP capabilities that are already differentiated:

  • Ingest data from any source, any length of time, and any format, without pre-defining metric schemas.
    • Over 300 pre-built integrations: Hundreds (and growing!) of pre-built connections to platforms, apps, and more allow you to capture the data you need to generate a full view of the customer, ensuring data consolidation and faster time-to-value.
    • Open, flexible APIs: Build any custom integration with Klaviyo’s flexible and extensible APIs.
    • Onsite web tracking: Add a quick snippet of JavaScript to any page on your website and instantly start capturing granular customer browsing behavior.
    • Robust SDKs: Track app behaviors on iOS and Android through our SDKs
    • SFTP import: Ingest flat files at scale and connect with legacy systems
  • Unify with identity resolution
    • 360-view unified customer profiles: A live detailed activity feed of everything your customer does across your entire tech stack and channels, including predicted behaviors – all available real-time for segmentation, automation, and dynamic personalization.
    • Deterministic identity resolution
      • Deterministic profile merging: Klaviyo resolves customer identities through a proactive check that merges two separate profiles when an action occurs linking an email address, phone number, or device ID (iOS) together — including merging data from cross-device tracking. This allows you to effectively manage omnichannel customer data.
      • Identity capture: Automatically cookies and identifies users that click through your email or submit a Klaviyo form, allowing you to capture your customer’s every engagement with you.
      • Anonymous visitor activity backfill: Track anonymous browsing activity onsite, stored locally on the browser, and then push it all into Klaviyo if/when that visitor becomes identified, allowing you to enrich customer profiles with historical data.
  • Segment with unlimited flexibility, updating in real time
    • All-time look-back segmentation flexibility: Use all of your historical data in segmentation without limitations or additional charges.
    • Powerful yet intuitive drag-and-drop segment builder: Go beyond basic targeting to segment products purchased in specific time frames using historical data, website browsing behavior, order value, and ‌an unlimited number of custom attributes. No SQL required.
  • Activate data in and out of Klaviyo
    • Native multi-channel orchestration – Orchestrate robust email, SMS, push, reviews, onsite form automation from one platform.
    • Outbound audience sharing — Push dynamic segments to paid advertising networks, social advertising, & more in real time to create lookalike audiences, retarget existing audiences, or exclude customers from your ads.
    • Webhooks in flows:  As a step in an automation, transfer data in real time to automate actions on any other platform — allowing you to leverage the full potential of your tech stack.
    • Marketing performance reporting: Analyze your data using custom and predefined reports to determine the impact of marketing efforts one-off and overtime.

Today, we are expanding on these to offer a purpose-built CDP product that we’ll continue to invest in.

Why? Because there are still unsolved challenges around customer data.

Tech stacks are growing in complexity and redundancy, and data is still disconnected.   

Brands today find themselves grappling with a tangled web of technologies that are very expensive, inefficient, and often highly redundant, with the same data living in many different places. It’s become the norm for scaling brands to use a data warehouse to store data, an ETL tool to move data, a traditional CDP to segment customers, a marketing automation platform to deliver personalized campaigns, and an analytics tool to report on performance. Managing all of these tools to achieve daily business outcomes — like driving revenue and marketing engagement — is both demanding and costly. 

Each tool requires distinct skill sets, and potentially even different teams manage them due to the technical expertise required, resulting in prolonged processes for transferring insights from one tool to another, involving IT tickets or cross-functional requests. The integration and upkeep of these tools are a major headache – if you have to make one change, you have to make multiple development changes. Expanding use cases requires more resources to actually achieve each use case, adding more tools requires more development — everything continuously adds up. And while all of these tools serve important functions, there is substantial overlap in their capabilities, especially as tools continue to evolve. 

Justin Ragsdale, VP of business development and corporate strategy at full-service digital agency IM Digital, says, “There’s the cost you’re paying for licenses on these different platforms. But then there’s also the cost of becoming an expert on different platforms, the cost of managing the integrations between the platforms, and the cost of manually extracting data and insights and plugging them into other platforms.”

The worst part? As a result of this complicated “frankenstack”, data remains disconnected. 58% of martech leaders lack a robust customer data foundation — resulting in data silos, escalating maintenance costs, and challenges in utilizing data for personalization at scale.

CDPs were built to help solve these pains, but instead, they’re contributing. They’re too difficult to use and they lack actionability. 

Traditional CDPs were designed to centralize customer data and prepare it to be useful for marketing and analysis. The problem with this? That data is only useful somewhere else. These CDPs lack storage and activation capabilities, compelling users to rely on other solutions like marketing automation platforms, analytics tools, and data warehouses to drive value with their data. This lack of actionability poses a dilemma, causing brands to focus more on managing tools than strategic customer engagement.

Compounding the issue, legacy CDPs are expensive and difficult to use and implement — requiring massive amounts of development resources to get up-and-running and see value. Most CDPs require many months of implementation at six-figure costs—not including ongoing support costs, or the cost of the team required to manage the platform given its technical complexity. While some CDPs claim marketer-friendliness, they often require steep technical expertise, creating challenges for marketers who need to act quickly and execute on their own. Any change to a data source, any new attribute you want to segment on, or any new property you want to transform, all typically require sprints to plan and implement through a data engineer. 

The consequence? Data, analytics, and marketing components continue to be scattered across multiple tools, constraining marketing teams to maintain a constant presence of development, IT, or engineering resources.

By addressing these twin challenges—escalating complexity within tech stacks and the misalignment of CDPs with intended benefits—brands can pave the way for streamlined operations, efficient data utilization, and more effective customer engagement.

“The fewer tools we have to analyze and action the data, the better. Jumping between systems means that we end up with static data and static lists that aren’t good for long-term actions.”
Rich Cowell, VP Digital Strategy & Operations, Citizen Watch America

Introducing Klaviyo CDP, built to simplify your tech stack and drive efficiencies across your business 

Klaviyo CDP addresses these challenges head-on, offering a comprehensive suite of user-friendly tools for Klaviyo customers to more effectively manage, analyze, and activate their data at scale. A vertically integrated solution, Klaviyo CDP allows you to consolidate multiple layers of your tech stack under one unified platform, resulting in a cohesive customer experience, enhanced operational efficiency, and lower total cost of ownership through decreased spend on software and custom development. 

Klaviyo CDP consists of two components — data and intelligence — each with their own sets of functionality. 

Data

While Klaviyo historically can ingest data from any source, unify it under single customer profiles through identity resolution, and store that data in a highly usable way, the Klaviyo CDP allows for more advanced data unification, transformation, and activation, allowing you to leverage Klaviyo as the ultimate source of truth for their customer data. Data features include :

  • Data transformation: Convert profile data from one format to another, without the need for code, hosting, or IT involvement, allowing you to improve data accuracy and segment more effectively. 
  • Group membership API: Leverage segment and list membership data in Klaviyo to create dynamic personalized web experiences for each visitor to enhance the onsite customer experience and maximize conversions. 
  • Webhooks: Save time and maximize data consistency by exporting event data to any other system in your tech stack, at scale and in real time.
  • Data warehouse syncing: Sync profile and event data  at a regular cadence through pre-built connectors to third-party warehouses to enhance data consistency across your business and speed time-to-value. 

Intelligence

While Klaviyo can show how owned marketing channels (i.e. email, SMS, push) are performing through various reporting tools, Klaviyo CDP expands reporting capabilities beyond marketing-centric insights. You can delve into audience-level and business-level performance analysis, utilizing tools like funnel analysis, RFM modeling, customized lifetime value (LTV), and audience performance comparisons. This enables the creation of insights-driven personas and opens doors for optimization and re-engagement. Intelligence features include:

  • Funnel analysis: Investigate breaks in the customer funnel and identify opportunities to improve conversions by analyzing different stages in the customer journey. 
  • RFM analysis: Group customers based on purchase recency, frequency, and monetary value to create more strategic segments and gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviors. 
  • Audience performance reporting: Compare audience segments based on size, change over time, and conversions by channel, for any date range, to address negative trends and identify top segments faster. 
  • Customizable customer lifetime value (CLV): Enhance customer lifetime value forecasting by customizing the prediction window, allowing you to better personalize & segment customers. 

What you can expect from Klaviyo CDP

  • Better customer experience across every touchpoint and more revenue from marketing: With new channels to personalize like your website, a deeper understanding of the customer base and improved targeting, you can increase customer lifetime value and retention rates, while lowering acquisition costs. 
  • More consistent & accurate data: Klaviyo CDP ensures seamless data flow across the entire tech stack, enhancing the quality and reliability of insights, and establishing a true source of customer truth. 
  • Faster time-to-value: Gain faster access to data and insights, enabling quicker decision-making and execution without relying on IT.
  • Lower total cost of ownership: Klaviyo CDP’s comprehensive features eliminate the need for multiple tools and custom development, resulting in significant cost savings. 
A consolidated tech stack with Klaviyo is going to allow multiple efficiencies in my company. I’m going to be able to create extra bandwidth with my employees and I’m going to be able to touch my end users a lot easier.
TJ Ferrara, Co-founder, Bubs Naturals

Unrivaled differentiation to drive sustainable growth 

What sets Klaviyo CDP apart is its user-friendly approach, consistent with Klaviyo’s current marketer-friendly UI. Unlike other CDPs that require months of complex implementation, Klaviyo CDP can be up and running in minutes, democratizing access to valuable insights. All of this enables you to move faster, while freeing up resources across your business (IT, development, etc.). 

Its vertically integrated nature eliminates the need to shuffle data between different systems, allowing you to seamlessly transform insights into action with Klaviyo’s best-in-class intelligent marketing automation platform. In the past, some Klaviyo customers invested in separate CDP and analytics tools to manage and analyze customer data. Now, these customers can access more advanced functionality at a lower total cost of ownership. 

And because the CDP is built atop of Klaviyo’s unique OLAP + OLTP composite data store, you have the unique ability to store unaggregated, lifetime event data for all of their customers. That means a true 360-view of your customer’s lifetime history with your brand – with each piece of granular data available for real-time personalization, segmentation, and analysis — to drive faster growth and increased retention. No other CDP can provide fast access to historical data in one platform.

Getting started 

With minimal implementation required, getting started is a breeze — Klaviyo customers can get set up in minutes. Request a demo today to connect with a CDP specialist. 

Anthony DelPizzo
Anthony DelPizzo
Senior product marketing manager
Anthony DelPizzo is a senior product marketing manager at Klaviyo, where he helps bring new products to market. He strives to drive customer adoption and engagement through various marketing and enablement tactics. Anthony loves diving deep into data to solve problems and to create better experiences for customers. Outside of marketing, Anthony is a lover of live music, natural wine, and classical film (early 2000s rom-coms).

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