The ultimate guide to AI for B2C marketing

The operational efficiencies that AI enhances the most are time savings, resource allocation, and campaign execution speed. By automating manual, routine tasks and conducting tests and experiments quickly, marketers using AI have more time to spend on the work that matters most: strategy, creative, and execution.

Some of the marketing KPIs that AI can impact are conversion rates, average order value, and ROI. By powering hyper-personalization, always-on optimization, and smarter targeting, AI helps brands send the right message to the right people at the right time, no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Since data is the lifeblood of AI, AI naturally helps B2C brands make data-driven decisions. This leads to far less guesswork and much faster strategic pivots, giving marketers a competitive advantage in their vertical.

According to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, 74% of consumers expect more brands to provide more personalized experiences in 2025—and they feel especially valued when they receive personalized discounts or offers that match their preferences. AI can provide this kind of personalization in a snap, boosting customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

Today, AI can analyze data, create content, and optimize campaigns for you. According to our state of B2C marketing research, B2C marketing teams are currently using AI for:

1. Email marketing optimization: 50%
2. Chatbots and AI-driven customer service: 49%
3. Content creation and automation: 47%
4. Predictive analytics and customer insights: 44%
5. Personalization and customer segmentation: 43%

Here’s a closer look at a few of the top ways B2C marketing teams are using AI right now:

Your data is only as valuable as the insights you can pull from it. Fortunately, AI can analyze your data to predict customer behavior, identify customer trends, and conduct competitive analysis. 

AI-powered predictive analytics helps marketers: 

• Forecast next order date, customer lifetime value (CLV), and churn risk.
• Predict the demographics of a customer and the product they’re likely to purchase next just based on their behavior.
• Monitor the engagement and conversion patterns of your segments, flows, and campaigns and automatically make adjustments.
• Pinpoint the audiences that will respond well to specific product lines.
• Read all the customer reviews and feedback for each of your products and interpret their sentiment.

• Compare your brand’s performance against anonymized industry benchmarks by metric, vertical, and marketing channel.
• Recommend optimizations in real time. 

Today’s AI goes far beyond traditional analytics. Instead of just identifying past trends, AI can suggest what to do next. For example:

• Use AI to not just predict churn, but to recommend a specific re-engagement flow tailored to that customer’s unique profile.
• Use AI to show a trend, but then also suggest new content ideas or campaign approaches based on that trend.

AI will never replace copywriters, but it can help copywriters craft high-performing creative much faster.

AI writing tools can:

• Write multiple variations of subject lines and email body copy based on audience, tone, and campaign goals.
• Design an entire email based on a single prompt you enter, saving you tons of time.
• Craft promotional and transactional texts and even suggest replies to specific customer texts.
• Personalize messaging at scale.

With Klaviyo, your AI tools all live within one platform, letting you integrate AI directly into your work, so you don’t have to copy and paste between two tools, use AI that’s vetted and approved (so you don’t risk getting inaccurate results from a rogue AI tool), and have access to an AI that has learned your unique brand voice and grammatical style.

AI can adjust your flows and campaigns based on real-time customer behavior, so it’s continuously working to improve your email and SMS programs. You can get the absolute most out of your marketing budget by:

• Automatically A/B testing subject lines, creative, and send times and sending the best version of an email to your subscribers
• Automatically running multivariate tests on your sign-up forms’ timing, design, and incentives
• Automatically suppressing sends to disengaged subscribers to protect your sender reputation

AI is only as effective as the data it’s built on—but equally important is how that AI behaves once it’s part of your workflow. At Klaviyo, we’ve built our AI systems around 3 core principles designed to earn your trust and deliver real value:

1. Transparent and controllable: You’ll always know what our AI is doing—and more importantly, you can tweak it, override it, or turn it off. It’s your data, your brand, and your decisions. Klaviyo AI is never a black box. You stay in control, every step of the way.
2. Built-in, not bolted on: Klaviyo AI is embedded across the platform—not a separate interface or toolset you have to learn. That means smarter automation, segmentation, and personalization are integrated directly into your day-to-day workflows.
3. Ready to work with others: We know you use more than one platform. Klaviyo AI is designed to fit into your broader tech stack and evolve alongside it—not create a walled garden.

When your data is centralized in a CRM with a built-in CDP, these principles ensure your AI tools are not only powerful, but also responsible, predictable, and aligned with your brand. It’s how we make AI work for marketers, not the other way around.

AI can create dynamic segments that automatically update based on people’s purchase behavior, website activity, email and SMS engagement, form submissions, and the product reviews they leave.

You can also use AI as a starting point to build new segments and help you further refine them through historical data, real-time behavior, and predictive analytics.

Luxury home goods brand Saranoni uses Klaviyo AI to automatically create zip code-based segments for location-specific messaging. They use Segments AI to generate segments from a text prompt, saving upwards of 10 minutes per segment.

It can be challenging (and time consuming) to create automated flows for SMS and email, from building out the structure, to identifying who they go out to, to monitoring ongoing performance.

Flows AI uses conversational prompting to quickly build out exactly what you’re looking for and design the sequence in minutes. For example, you can ask for:

• “An abandoned cart VIP email flow”
• “A multi-channel product recommendation flow”
• “A multi-channel browse abandonment flow”

Then, AI can use real-time behavioral data, predictive analytics, and feedback loops to ensure the messages triggered in all your flows go out to the right person, at the right moment, and for the right reason. If you have a CDP, AI can see each of your customers’ interactions across all channels and adjust these flows to avoid over-messaging anybody.

Finally, you can use AI-powered auto-monitoring to watch for any significant changes in key metrics, so you can truly set it and forget it without worry.

Water filter brand Lifestraw uses Flows AI to build out new, integration-triggered Klaviyo flows, like subscription confirmation flows. After inputting a simple sentence about the flow, “Flows AI just built the flow structure for me,” says Eugenia Martin, head of DTC sales at Lifestraw—and it saved her 40 minutes of work, she estimates. “That was pretty amazing.”

As we mentioned earlier, AI can automatically generate email and SMS content and replies to customer reviews. It can even help you write product descriptions and social media content.

Proozy, a B2C brand that offers deep discounts on pro-caliber sports apparel and athletic gear, uses Klaviyo AI to save time and energy writing subject lines for their 7 daily segmented email campaigns and copy for their 1–2 daily SMS messages.

Using AI-generated subject lines and SMS messages, the Proozy team saves 5 minutes per subject line and 10 minutes per SMS message—which adds up to about 45 minutes of time savings per day. Klaviyo’s SMS AI offers 3 unique copy options per prompt, so Proozy keeps their SMS copy fresh, even when their content isn’t.

With AI-powered personalization, you can create the ultimate customer experience by:

• Sending individual product recommendations based on past purchase behavior and current website activity
• Dynamically tailoring campaigns to subscribers based on what will perform best for them
• Using predictive analytics like next order date, CLV, and churn risk to personalize offers based on what they’re most likely to do next

The Willow Tree Boutique, a women’s clothing boutique with multiple storefronts, an online shop, and a free mobile live-selling app, used Klaviyo’s predictive analytics to tap in to their purchase history data. They started sending campaigns to new segments like customers whose AI-predicted next purchase date was in the last or next 30 days, or those who tend to purchase every 60 days.

The team also used predictive analytics segments to highlight luxury items to bigger spenders—customers with a predicted CLV over $500, or an average order value over $150. It worked: in their first 6 months using predictive analytics, email campaign revenue grew 53.1% HoH.

AI can help you build up your reputation while improving the customer experience. With automated, customized review follow-up and two-way SMS communication, marketing and service teams can:

• Respond to customer reviews.
• Generate customer review headlines.
• Handle questions about discounts, sizing, and shipping timelines by auto-responding to texts.

Customer expectations for speed, accuracy, and personalization are higher than ever—and AI can help your service team rise to the challenge. With Klaviyo’s AI Shopping Agent, your brand experience becomes more contextual across the entire customer journey.

By leveraging all your customer data in real time, Klaviyo’s Shopping Agent can:

• Personalize every response based on purchase history, browsing behavior, and engagement patterns—ensuring each customer feels known and valued.
• Automate pre-sales and post-purchase interactions, so customers get answers to questions about sizing, shipping, subscriptions, returns, and more without waiting for a human to respond.
• Accelerate ticket resolution by detecting high-priority issues or VIP customers and routing them to live agents when human support is needed.
• Empower your support team with AI copilots that surface suggested replies and next-best actions directly within the service workflow—reducing resolution time and improving consistency.

What makes Klaviyo different? Our agentic AI isn’t a disconnected chatbot—it’s built into the same platform that powers your marketing, so your brand voice and customer data stay unified across every touchpoint.

As AI continues to evolve from assistance to autonomy, Klaviyo’s goal is simple: to help your brand deliver helpful, human, and proactive service—at scale.

As we mentioned earlier, predictive analytics can forecast things like CLV, churn risk, and when a customer is likely to place their next order. With access to real-time analytics, you can send smarter messages to reach audiences when they’re most likely to open them.

Every Man Jack, a men’s grooming brand, uses Klaviyo’s predictive analytics to send campaigns to subscribers based on their predicted next order date, predicted lifetime value, and more. 12.4% of the brand’s Klaviyo-attributed revenue came from predictive analytics segments in just 90 days.

“I trust and value Klaviyo AI because it saves me time, it helps me leverage our customer data to personalize our email timing and strategies, and most importantly, I maintain complete control over how and when it’s used,” says Troy Petrunoff, senior retention marketing manager at Every Man Jack.

Autonomous AI, also known as self-optimizing AI, runs on autopilot, creating tailored experiences for each individual customer. It continuously learns, adapts, and refines strategies for the best outcomes—in a fraction of the time.

Here are a few ways self-optimizing AI can improve your marketing:

• Reputation repair: Automatically suppress unengaged contacts to improve deliverability and engagement.
• Auto monitoring: Get alerts if there are drops in key metrics, like the number of times a flow is triggered, the number of messages sent in a flow, or deliverability rates.
• A/B testing: Automatically find the winning subject line, offer, CTA, send time, and more for your content.
• Personalized campaigns: Use AI to search for patterns among the test recipients who interact with each variation, then send the rest of the recipients their most likely preferred variation after the test is over. 
• Forms display optimization: Show web forms at the time when visitors are most likely to engage and sign up.
• Smart Send Time: Time emails based on when your audience is most likely to open and click them.

Tata Harper, a pioneering plant-based skincare brand, used Klaviyo AI to test 20 variations on placement and timing across their desktop and mobile sign-up pop-ups, all AI-generated based on their brand’s performance data. Before, the process was manual, and the team could only test 2 variations at a time.

In the 30 days after the winning versions went live, submissions for both forms jumped 65%+ from the 30 days prior to testing.

To identify the AI-ready tools in your current marketing stack, make sure they:

• Collect first- and zero-party data.
• Integrate natively with the key platforms in your marketing stack.
• Use data to personalize, optimize, and automate at scale.

Then, flag the tools that need a more AI-ready substitute. You’ll replace them in the next step.

Just like the AI-ready tools already in your current marketing stack, you want your new AI marketing tools to:

• Leverage first and zero-party data.
• Integrate natively with the key platforms in your stack.
• Use data to personalize, optimize, and automate at scale.

To assess which use cases you should use AI for, prioritize the ones that drive the most conversions and retention but require the lowest amount of technical set-up, such as:

• Generating subject lines and copy
• Building segments
• Optimizing forms display
• Smart A/B testing
• Smart send times

This way, you can see results fast. Think about ways to increase the ROI of marketing campaigns to pinpoint the AI use cases that will have the highest impact for your brand.

Once you implement your high-impact, low-lift AI use cases, make sure to A/B test them against the results you were getting prior to implementing AI and the goals of each campaign they’re associated with. Don’t forget to run the test on a sample size that is big enough to achieve statistical significance.

After you analyze the results of your A/B tests and iterate your AI use cases, consider scaling your AI marketing efforts by:

• Implementing AI in your SMS if you started out with email, or vice versa
• Building flows and segments based on predictive analytics
• Experimenting with AI sales agents and service copilots on the support side of your business

You don’t just need AI assistance. You need AI to act. Look for ways to use agentic AI, like Klaviyo’s Shopping Agent, which goes beyond automation to execute tasks across the customer lifecycle on your behalf.

The key to unlocking this capability? Klaviyo Customer Hub. Customer Hub is the centralized relationship layer in Klaviyo’s B2C CRM. It unifies real-time behavioral data, past purchases, preferences, and service history into a single, actionable customer profile. This unified view powers agentic AI tools like Klaviyo’s Shopping Agent, enabling AI to scale your efforts without sacrificing personalization.

With Customer Hub as your foundation, you can:

• Activate Shopping Agent to answer customer questions in real time, recommend products, and even take action—like managing returns or subscriptions—autonomously.
• Deliver contextual, seamless support by blending marketing and service data into every interaction.
• Make smarter AI decisions by giving agents access to every signal—across channels, campaigns, and customer service moments.

Agentic AI isn’t a future feature—it’s here. And with Customer Hub, you can start scaling human-like experiences across every touchpoint today.

• Unify and clean your customer data before you implement the high-impact, low-effort use cases we mentioned above.
• A/B test AI marketing projects and iterate on them over time.
• Manually double-check all your A/B tests and have actual people make adjustments to them regularly.

• Over-relying on AI, without manual fact-checking and testing
• Using poor-quality data
• Poor integration between systems
• Ignoring ethical considerations
• Using AI to tap into customer data in an intrusive or exploitative way