According to Klaviyo’s 2026 Match Day Ready Report, only 16% of marketing teams can go from “idea” to “live” in under 2 hours. But with “vibe marketing,” what used to take weeks to build can be ready in minutes.
That kind of speed helps startups compete with bigger brands that have higher budgets and more resources.
Vibe marketing is when you collaborate with an AI marketing agent to instantly create on-brand content and analyze your existing content to suggest areas for improvement. You start with the outcome and define the goals, and AI does the heavy lifting, including segmentation, copy and design, channel orchestration, and timing.
Once you’re happy with the content, you review and approve. After launching campaigns and flows, you can chat with your AI marketing agent to find out what’s performing well, and where you can make adjustments.
Startups have a real opportunity to use vibe marketing to get ahead of their competitors and engage captive audiences. It can turn a scrappy team of one into a full marketing team, complete with creatives, strategists, analysts, and lifecycle marketers.
Here are 6 ways to use vibe marketing to move faster and hit the right note with your customers.
1. Generate content at scale within brand guardrails
When you’re growing a startup, you need to build out your marketing content for the first time, usually with a small team and limited budget.
The 2026 CMO Survey from Duke University, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association reports that B2C product businesses typically spend around 13.8% of their budget and 12% of their revenue on marketing. That might be even lower for startups.
Before you generate your core flows and initial campaigns, start by defining your brand strategy and guidelines. Use a structure and format that’s easy for an AI marketing agent to understand, like HTML or markdown files.
Here’s what to include in your brand strategy:
- Your marketing goals
- A definition of your target audience
- Your brand guidelines, like voice and tone, colors, fonts, and images
- Product and lifestyle photography
- Your brand guardrails, like compliance and discounting rules
- FAQs about your brand and products
Once you’ve created that documentation, upload it to your AI marketing agent for context to draw from when it’s creating campaigns and flows across email, text messaging, WhatsApp, and push notifications.
2. Build or adjust your welcome flow
Your welcome flow is your first opportunity to introduce new subscribers to your brand, your story, and what you have to offer. According to Klaviyo’s 2026 Omnichannel Benchmark Report:
- Welcome email flows see, on average, a 6.5% click rate and $5.75 in revenue per recipient (RPR).
- Welcome text message flows see, on average, a 10% click rate and $3.33 in RPR.
Using AI to build a welcome flow from scratch
If you haven’t created one yet, here are 3 examples of prompts you could use with your AI marketing agent to create a welcome flow for your startup:
- Goal: Convert new email subscribers into first-time buyers within their first week. Start with a warm intro to the brand and our story, deliver the 10% off code we promised at sign-up, then follow up two days later with our bestsellers and a few customer reviews. Hold the last email if someone already places an order.
- Goal: Drive a first purchase by matching new subscribers who enter both an email address and a phone number to the product line they showed interest in. Create a welcome flow that splits based on what someone browsed before signing up. If they looked at skincare, lead with our skincare line and a routine guide. If they browsed haircare, do the same for hair. Anyone with no browsing history gets a general bestsellers intro. Keep it to 3 emails and 2 text messages over 5 days.
- Goal: Move new SMS subscribers from sign-up to first order before the welcome discount expires. The first text message welcomes them and sets expectations for what we'll send. The second one (after 24 hours) shares the discount and free-shipping threshold. The third one (after 3 days) adds urgency with a reminder that the offer expires soon.
Using AI to optimize your existing welcome flow
If you already have a welcome flow, use your AI marketing agent to audit your flow, surface trends, and come up with new ideas based on what’s driving engagement or revenue. Ask questions like:
- How should we update the time between messages to reduce drop-off?
- Which message is performing best, and should we move it up to be the first message?
- Where in the flow are most first purchases happening, and how do we get more people to that point sooner?
3. Jump on cultural moments, holidays, or trends
Participating in a cultural conversation or viral trend can get your growing business in front of large, highly engaged audiences. According to our Match Day Ready Report, 37% of brands say cultural moment activations outperform their routine calendar marketing.
Use social listening to keep a finger on the pulse of your industry. Look out for trending topics on the social media platforms where your audience is active, and regularly read industry publications. You could even try creating an AI agent or skill to surface trending topics or conversations in your industry.
Then, prompt your AI marketing agent to incorporate the trending topic or holiday into your brand marketing in an authentic way. Here are some examples of how a startup could create a cultural moment or holiday activation using vibe marketing:
The trend, moment, or holiday | The vibe marketing opportunity |
A team from the town your brand was founded in wins a major sporting event. | Create and promote a curated collection of your products in the team’s colors via email and text message, celebrating the win. |
A celebrity mentions your brand on social media. | Share the post to your own social media pages, and in an email, text message, and push notification with copy like “[Celebrity]-approved.” |
Memorial Day is coming, and it’s going to hit record-high temperatures in a few hotspots within your audience. | Send weather-specific messaging to customers in the areas that will see record-breaking temperatures. |
4. Quickly build coordinated omnichannel promotions
According to Klaviyo’s 2026 future of consumer marketing research, 82% of consumers shop across multiple channels. To keep up and reach them, you need omnichannel marketing activations. But those can be a stretch for small teams.
With vibe marketing, your AI marketing agent not only generates content for different channels, like email, text messages, WhatsApp, and push notifications. It also tells you how to play to the strengths of each channel.
Here are a few prompts you can use to build out omnichannel promotions, with channel-specific guidelines:
- New product launch: Build an omnichannel promotion for our [product] launch this Friday. Create an email with a hero announcement and waitlist incentive, a text message teaser to send the morning of launch, and a push notification for app users who have recently browsed the category. Recommend send timing for each channel and which audience segment fits best per channel.
- VIP early access: Create a VIP messages sequence hyping early access to our upcoming Labor Day sale. Build a 3-part sequence across email, texting, and WhatsApp: one message that announces the perk, another that gives a sneak peek of what’s coming, and another that goes out when the sale actually opens. Tell me the ideal delay between each touch.
- Cart abandonment recovery: Design an abandoned cart reminder flow. Start with an email with product details, then a follow-up text message with urgency for high-intent shoppers, and a push notification for app users. Recommend how to sequence the channels over 48 hours.
After you’ve launched these omnichannel campaigns and flows, you can chat with your AI marketing agent to optimize them by changing which channels you’re using, updating the content and sequencing, or adjusting the timing.
5. Report on marketing performance and find new opportunities to optimize
Research from the American Marketing Association found that two of the largest competency gaps for marketers as of 2025 are data/analytics and proving ROI. At startups, that may be compounded by having limited time.
If you use an AI marketing agent that’s part of your CRM, it not only has access to your marketing performance data. It’s also grounded in aggregate data from thousands of other brands, giving you more insights into what’s working and why.
Rather than having to manually pull reports or interpret dashboards to understand how your content is driving revenue, you can chat with your AI marketing agent like you would chat with a data analyst or marketing strategist. Here are some ideas for how to ask your AI agent to help you report on your marketing and find opportunities to improve:
- Channel performance comparison: Compare the performance of my email, text message, and push campaigns over the last 90 days. Show me revenue per channel, engagement rates, and which channel is driving the most repeat purchases. Where am I underinvesting?
- Subject line and creative performance: What are some patterns among my best-performing emails and text messages compared to the worst? Look at subject lines, messaging, offers, and send timing, then tell me what to test to improve click rates and revenue per recipient.
- Flow analysis: Which of my flows are generating the most revenue per recipient, and which are underperforming? Break it down by flow type, and suggest which ones to optimize first.
6. Test out different marketing messages with your audience
As a startup, you’re still figuring out your product positioning and messaging. But it influences your marketing and sales when you can connect with your audience using the right language. “An effective brand resonates with consumers,” said Harvard Business School professor Jill Avery. “It powers their purchasing decisions and reflects who they are and what they stand for.”
The best marketing messaging for your brand may be:
- Mission-driven: focused on your values, like how you use organic materials or are women-owned
- Founder-driven: highlights your founder’s story
- Results-driven: showcases experiences from real people
Use vibe marketing to test out different messaging or analyze your existing messaging to see what’s landing with your audience. For example:
If your goal is… | …try this prompt |
Experimenting with voice and tone, like going from “fun and exciting” to “motivational and bold” | Update our browse abandonment flow with a motivational and bold tone, using darker colors from our brand palette and strong, action-oriented language. |
Adjusting your positioning based on audience personas like younger audience segments | Create a new segmented campaign for our Gen Z audience, focusing on the results of our products and bringing in relevant UGC that speaks to these outcomes. |
Identifying top-performing content based on messaging | Find our best-performing emails and text messages, analyze the subject lines and messaging, and suggest new messaging based on your analysis. |
Grow your startup and reach new audiences with vibe marketing
Whether your startup is challenged by time, resources, expertise, or ideas, vibe marketing can help get your brand off the ground and start driving revenue fast. An AI marketing agent can serve as another member of your small team, taking part in strategy and creating marketing activations that would have otherwise taken you weeks.
Composer is the AI marketing agent built inside Klaviyo B2C CRM. It’s powered by your data to create, launch, and improve marketing across every channel by:
- Building ready-to-send cross-channel campaigns
- Generating content within your specific brand voice and rules
- Giving you full strategic control with a human-in-the-loop approach
- Refining your vision through natural conversation
- Providing proactive performance recommendations to improve your marketing
Turn your ideas into marketing activations with Klavyo Composer. Join the bet
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