Unifying data infrastructure

Personalizing at scale

Using templates

Optimizing with AI

Streamlining service

Analyzing performance

1. Gain complete customer visibility by unifying your data infrastructure

If your data is spread thin across several places, you’re not alone. According to our state of B2C marketing report, 60% of marketing teams have 6–15 tools in their tech stacks. 

Infrastructure matters. The more disparate your data, the harder it is to meet customers’ expectations that you understand who they are, what they like (and don’t like), and how they’ve interacted with your brand. 

A CRM houses the foundational data infrastructure that makes this level of customer recognition possible. It combines marketing automation, customer service, and data analytics in a single source of truth, powered by AI and a robust integrations ecosystem and accessible across teams.  

This level of integration has proven to create exceptional customer experiences. Our state of B2C marketing report shows that brands who have full alignment across marketing and customer service are 156% more likely to significantly exceed their marketing goals.

More specifically, here’s what you can expect from a unified data foundation: 

• Integrated customer experiences across the entire buyer’s journey: With centralized data, your whole team will know everything about a customer. Marketing knows someone just made a return, customer service knows what other products they’ve viewed online, and both teams can interact with the customer on an informed basis. 
• Real-time behavioral data: Use it to segment your customers based on real brand interactions, like browsing a certain product page, spending a certain amount, or showing deep interest in a product category. Then personalize your messages accordingly. 
• Channel affinity: Engage with customers on the channels AI predicts they prefer, when they’re most likely to engage, with content that performs best on that channel—whether that’s email, text messaging, mobile push, or WhatsApp.

2. Implement true 1:1 personalization at scale

According to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, 74% of consumers expect more personalized experiences from brands in 2025. But creating those experiences means more than using a customer’s first name or sending them a message in their time zone.

In 2025, B2C personalization looks like:

• Sending automated messages that respond to customer behaviors, then adapting follow-ups to future interactions
• Reaching customers on their preferred channels, when it’s most convenient for them
• Delivering customer service with full historical context about shoppers’ preferences and brand interactions

Let’s get into some examples of how you can use dynamic audience segments and automated messages to build 1:1 relationships at scale.

Set up dynamic audience segments through your CRM

Adopting an all-in-one CRM opens up tons of possibilities for personalized engagement. For example, when you connect your loyalty program software to your in-store point of sale, you can start sending offers specifically to loyalty program members who live within a certain radius of a new store opening.

A CRM automates this process through dynamic segmentation. Dynamic segments categorize customer profiles into distinct groups based on pre-defined rules you create. After the criteria is set, the segments populate automatically in real time as customer interactions happen.

With AI, you can even more easily create new segments using plain language, like “vegan Black Friday shoppers who frequently use my mobile app to browse X product category.”

Try segmenting your customers by:

• Behavioral data: customers who frequently browse a certain product category, customers who have recently shopped in-store, new website visitors, cart abandoners, mobile app users, etc.
• Geographic data: location, preferred store, etc.
• Predictive data: predicted next order date, predicted customer lifetime value, predicted churn risk, etc.
• Engagement data: customers who regularly reply to text messages, customers who have clicked on emails in the past 60 days, etc.
• Demographic data: age, household income, etc.

Family lifestyle brand minnow has created niche segments for one-time purchasers and long-time purchasers, and they use these segments to personalize their messaging. They also prioritize re-engaging lapsed subscribers with their newsletter and rarely email their whole list at once. This approach to segmentation helped drive a 126% YoY growth in campaign click rate.

Automate messages to drive more revenue with less effort

For lean teams that need to make a big impact with fewer resources, automations are a game-changer. It’s like another team member who drives revenue 24/7.

A CRM can automate marketing flows across channels like email, text messaging, mobile push, and WhatsApp, such as:

• Welcome series: Welcome new subscribers with a series of emails, texts, and/or mobile app messages that introduce them to your brand, provide an introductory offer, and gather more information about them so you can tailor future messages to who they are.
• Browse abandonment: Message shoppers after they view a product but don’t place anything in their cart. Add splits to the flow to get more specific, like those who have purchased before vs. haven’t, local customers vs. international, or those who have interacted with a particular product category.
• Abandoned cart: Follow up with shoppers who abandon their carts on the channels that are most likely to nudge them toward a sale. Get specific with offers by sending different messages to people who abandon high-value carts vs. low-value carts, for example. 
• Review and social proof requests: After a customer makes a purchase, automatically ask them for a review, timed to allow for product usage. Automate incentives for reviews submitted with photos or videos—these are valuable user-generated content (UGC) for future campaigns.
• Replenishment reminders: Nurture customers with reminders to re-order products they’re running low on, or send announcements for new versions of products they’ve ordered in the past.

Jewelry brand Maison Miru runs a sophisticated marketing operation with a small team. They use marketing automation to recapture revenue and work more efficiently with personalized browse abandonment flows, abandoned cart and check-out flows, back-in-stock flows, and post-purchase flows. The brand attributed a 2% revenue boost to their browse abandonment flow and a 4% revenue boost to abandoned cart and check-out flows, showing that these efforts not only save time but also generate real results.

3. Use templates to increase ROI

Message templates make it easier for marketing teams to move faster without relying on developers or designers. But take note: they still need to be customized to your brand.

Use the data from your CRM to customize each template with personalized product recommendations, contextual information, and subscriber-specific lifecycle context.

Use CRM templates to build out your:

• Emails: product announcements, exclusive offers, VIP incentives, etc.
• Text messages: welcome messages, flash sales, reservation reminders, etc.
• Sign-up forms: multi-step forms with email and text sign-up, site-wide announcements, mobile-specific pop-ups, etc.
• Flows: browse abandonment messages, customer win-back messages, abandoned cart reminders, welcome series, etc.

4. Optimize and test with AI

Every marketing dollar you spend counts extra when you’re a small business. With AI, you can test and refine every marketing campaign, automated flow, and customer segment—and make sure your time, effort, and spend go as far as they possibly can.

Here are a few ways an AI-powered CRM can help you optimize your marketing efforts:

• Time your messages according to when customers are most likely to engage with them. We’ve moved past overarching send time trends. Now, you can send messages according to when customers are most likely to engage with them based on past behavior.
• Reach customers on the channels they prefer. AI can analyze each customer’s engagement history, then automatically send marketing messages to them in order of the channels where they’re most likely to engage.
• Send the best version of an email or text to every customer. AI can search for patterns among individual subscribers and automatically send the best variant of a message to each recipient.
• Show sign-up forms when visitors are most likely to convert. Run AI-generated experiments to determine the best timing for sign-up forms and improve submission rates.
• Get alerts when there’s a drop in key metrics. Keep a close eye on your marketing performance and get automated alerts when flows aren’t triggered as often, deliverability rates drop, or messages aren’t being sent.
• Send messages when customers are most likely to make a purchase—or when they’re about to churn. Use predictive analytics to anticipate when customers will shop next or when they’re about to drop off, then reach out with a personalized offer.

Streetwear brand Jordan Craig, for example, uses AI to optimize email cadence at scale across their 40+ customer segments. They send daily emails two weeks before and after a customer’s AI-generated predicted date of next order, and these emails drive strong conversion rates.

5. Streamline customer support with self-service and AI

62% of consumers would prefer to shop with AI that remembers their purchase history over explaining their preferences to sales associates, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM forecast.

With a CRM, you can meet rising consumer expectations while making life easier on your team by implementing:

• A self-service customer hub: a signed-in account experience directly on your website where customers can manage orders and subscriptions, initiate returns, discover personalized product recommendations, find helpful resources, and get help when they need it
• An AI agent for customer service: a 24/7 AI assistant trained on your storefront that helps before and after the purchase—answering questions, recommending products, and resolving issues instantly, then escalating to a human agent when necessary
• An omnichannel helpdesk: a unified workspace across email, chat, SMS, and social, providing both AI and human agents with full customer context so they can solve customer problems faster from a single inbox

When your customer service, marketing, and data infrastructure all live under the same roof, your marketing and support teams have visibility into the same context, no matter what channel the customer uses to reach out—empowering them to solve customer problems not only faster, but also more proactively and empathetically.

6. Analyze performance with pre-built reports

Gathering the data is just step one. For small teams, the second step—pulling data reports—can be a huge time suck. Pre-built dashboards and reports, however, can save you hours each day or week.

To make sure you’re on track to meet (or exceed) your goals, measure how every marketing and customer service activity impacts your revenue by:

• Analyzing the entire customer journey: Track revenue using omnichannel, linear multi-touch attribution to see how each channel contributes to revenue, not just the first or last interactions customers have with your brand. Customer journeys are long and messy, and multi-touch attribution can give you the full view you need to make informed decisions about resources.
• Comparing benchmarks: Track your brand performance against your peers using personalized benchmarks that can give you a sense of where you stack up against competitors.
• Identifying high-value customer segments: Your best opportunities for future revenue sit within certain customer segments. Use dashboards and reports you can customize for your audience, so you know which segments are most likely to buy again, increase spend, and refer your brand to others.

For example, specialty coffee roaster Pablo & Rusty’s used RFM analysis to track size fluctuations among “At risk” and “Champion” audience segments in response to marketing initiatives. This allowed them to focus their email strategy on the customer segments and campaigns that were driving long-term loyalty, not just short-term conversions.

Set yourself up for success with a CRM built for small businesses

With a lean team, a CRM is even more important. Small business CRMs make it easy to turn every customer touchpoint into a growth opportunity, even when you’re lean on resources.

Klaviyo B2C CRM has all the marketing and customer service features small businesses need to grow, like:

• A built-in customer data platform
• Omnichannel marketing automation
• Pre-made templates that are easy to customize
• Connected customer service and marketing automation
• Advanced reporting that connects to revenue
• An easy-to-use platform designed for B2C brands