What is customer intelligence?

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Customer intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing, and acting on data about your customers to better understand their behaviors, preferences, and needs. 

Customer intelligence helps brands turn raw customer data into memorable, personalized experiences. For B2C marketers, especially in ecommerce, retail, and wellness, customer intelligence is essential for improving audience targeting, increasing conversions, and building long-term loyalty.

Why customer intelligence matters 

Consumers expect brands to remember their preferences and send them offers based on real interactions. Customer intelligence is how brands can meet these expectations—by helping them send the right message to the right person at the right time. 

For example, customer intelligence can empower you to identify high-value customers and send them VIP rewards, or spot lapsed customers and trigger win-back offers based on previous browsing behavior.

Customer intelligence makes this possible by:

• Centralizing customer data and interactions across marketing and service
• Predicting behavior using AI trained on real-time data
• Driving personalization across every message, campaign, and channel

Customer intelligence shifts brands from generic, reactive marketing to personalized, proactive experiences throughout the entire customer journey. Ultimately, this can lead to higher ROI, increased customer lifetime value (LTV), and more efficient segmentation and targeting.

The benefits of customer intelligence for B2C marketers

Customer intelligence is how B2C marketers get to know each of their customers. With a deep understanding of who each customer is, what they care about, and how they behave across channels, marketers can create experiences that feel personal and reciprocal.

Here are a few benefits of customer intelligence: 

• A deeper understanding of your audience: Build rich customer profiles with data from browsing behavior, purchase history, product interests, support conversations, and more.
• More accurate targeting and segmentation: Create audience segments that change in real time based on brand interactions and predictive signals like churn risk or LTV.
• Smarter message orchestration: Use AI to automatically determine the best content, channel, and send time for every recipient.
• Improved marketing performance: Reach customers when and where they’re most likely to engage, increasing conversions while reducing fatigue and spend.

What data powers customer intelligence?

At the heart of customer intelligence is customer data—specifically, the kind that helps you understand who your customers are, what they care about, and how they behave. 

For B2C marketers, tapping into that intelligence means going beyond surface-level metrics to understand what people want and need from your brand. But the goal isn’t just to track behavior—it’s to build a living, breathing profile of each individual so you can help them solve their problems and meet their desires.

Customer intelligence draws from multiple types of zero- and first-party data, including:

• Behavioral: browsing history, email and SMS engagement, cart abandonment, other on-site activity
• Transactional: purchase history, order frequency, average order value, loyalty tier
• Demographic: location, language, age
• Preference-based: product interests, lifestyle factors, support interactions

Combining these data points creates a full view of each customer. With a B2C CRM like Klaviyo, all this data is centralized in one unified profile, giving you a complete, real-time understanding of your audience.

How B2C brands use customer intelligence

Customer intelligence is the backbone of many high-performing marketing strategies that help B2C brands reach more customers and drive more sales. Here are some of the most effective ways to use customer intelligence:

1. Segmentation and targeting

Customer intelligence is how marketers can move beyond broad audience blasts and toward hyper-personalization. 

Rather than relying on guesswork or static lists, brands can segment audiences dynamically based on real-time behaviors, preferences, and predictive signals. This is how you can tailor campaigns to people’s actual interests and intent. Some examples include:

• VIP customers (high spenders)
• People who are likely to churn
• People who browsed but didn’t buy
• People who bought recently
• People in close proximity to a physical location
• People who are close to running out of product

With this level of targeting, you can send highly relevant messages that resonate and convert, without over-messaging customers.

2. Personalized content and recommendations

Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s expected. Customer intelligence means detailed information about your customers, which you’ll need for true personalization. Here are a few ways this comes to life:

• Recommend products based on past browsing.
• Show personalized pop-up window offers based on on-site behavior.
• Send replenishment reminders based on predicted date of next purchase.
• Use location data to tailor in-store promotions or events.
• Send offers based on quiz results.

These personalized touches show customers that you’re paying attention, and they often lead to stronger engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

3. Real-time triggers

Speed matters in marketing, and customer intelligence is how brands can act in real time. By detecting behaviors as they happen, you can trigger automated flows that reach people at the perfect moment. 

These timely messages meet customers when they’re most engaged, increasing the likelihood of conversion. With real-time customer intelligence, you can trigger messages like:

• Abandoned cart flows
• Browse abandonment flows
• Welcome series
• Order confirmations and shipping notifications
• Win-back messages
• Replenishment reminders

Because these messages are behavior-driven and immediate, they feel less like marketing and more like helpful nudges. And according to Klaviyo’s latest benchmark report, compared to campaigns, automated flows generate more engagement at every stage of the funnel, all the way to placing an order. Abandoned cart flows, for example, generate $3.07 per recipient on average, and welcome flows generate $2.35.

The role of AI and automation in customer intelligence

AI and automation are what make customer intelligence truly scalable. They transform mountains of data into timely, personalized action, helping marketers respond to customer needs in the moment, not after the fact. 

For example, AI can help marketers:

• Predict churn or next order date. By combining historical data with predictive analytics, marketers can proactively reach customers before they disengage.
• Create thoughtful segments faster. When a customer takes an action, like abandoning a cart or browsing a product, their profile should reflect that action and update which segment they belong to in real time. 
• Optimize send time and channel per customer. AI can use historical and engagement data to send the right message through a customer’s preferred channel at the right time.

Marketers also rely on AI to:

• Score customers by recency of purchase, frequency of purchases, and monetary value (called RFM analysis).
• Recommend top products for each individual.
• Scale campaign testing with automated A/B tests.

Together, AI and automation turn customer intelligence into a real-time engine for smarter, more personalized marketing.

How Klaviyo delivers customer intelligence

For B2C brands, customer intelligence isn’t just about collecting data—it’s about transforming that data into action. 

Klaviyo B2C CRM is purpose-built to help brands do exactly that. Through centralized customer data, 350+ integrations, and marketing automation, Klaviyo helps marketers understand their customers more deeply, predict behavior, and respond with relevance.

Klaviyo’s customer intelligence is powered by:

• Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP): Klaviyo is a real-time customer database built from 350+ integrations, unifying data across marketing, service, and commerce.
• Embedded AI and predictive analytics: Tools like churn prediction, product interest scoring, and channel affinity create personalized brand experiences at scale.
• Unified customer profiles: Every customer interaction—from on-site activity to customer support conversations—is captured in a single, continuously updated view.
• Adaptive marketing automation: Campaigns and flows adapt in real time based on behavior, so marketers can create personal, relevant experiences without constant manual effort.

With Klaviyo, you don’t just know who your customers are. You know how to engage them in a way that drives loyalty, satisfaction, and revenue.