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. If you’re using AI for marketing, keep 3 things in mind:

1. Transparent and customizable: You should always know what the AI is doing, and you should always be able to tweak it, override it, or turn it off. It’s your data, your brand, and your decisions. You should stay in control, every step of the way.
2. Built-in, not bolted on: AI should be embedded, not a separate interface or toolset you have to learn. That means back-end, agentic AI that generates smarter ideas, insights, and personalization with little to no prompting.
3. Ready to work with others: If you’re like most B2C marketers, you have way more than one platform in your tech stack. That means your AI needs to be 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 attributes make sure your AI is not only powerful, but also responsible, predictable, and aligned with your brand. It’s how you make sure AI is working for you, not the other way around.

In today’s unpredictable economy, B2C brands everywhere are experiencing a squeeze on their margins. But if you can use AI to plan and launch campaigns, generate content, respond to customers, and take action across the journey without prompting, it’s more than possible to get some of those margins back—even with less budget.

According to our state of B2C marketing report, marketers using AI are 46% more likely to exceed their goals in 2025 than those not using AI. Let’s dive deeper into exactly how AI can benefit your marketing program:

AI can save you time, make your resource allocation more efficient, and speed up your campaign execution. 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.

AI can impact marketing KPIs like 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 many of them 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 generate marketing strategies, campaigns, flows, and forms based on a brand’s website and customer data. It can also refine message timing, offers, subject lines, and more without manual set-up or constant oversight.

And given that marketing and customer service are deeply intertwined, AI in marketing also means serving customers better and more quickly with AI that answers questions and completes support tasks in ways that feel human and on brand.

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

Remember, 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 helps marketers: 

• Forecast next order date, customer lifetime value (CLV), and churn risk, then recommend specific marketing actions accordingly, like a re-engagement flow tailored to a churn-risk customer’s unique profile.
• Monitor the engagement and conversion patterns of your segments, flows, and campaigns and automatically make adjustments.
• Find the audiences who will respond well to specific product lines and marketing messages.
• 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.

For entrepreneurs and lean SMB teams that don’t know where to begin with marketing, AI can generate strategies based on a brand’s website and customer data. 

Whereas before AI was (and still is) useful for creating piecemeal campaigns, segments, and flows, agentic AI can now ingest brand elements and data to launch full strategies from scratch. 

With an AI marketing agent, brands can:

• Generate a complete marketing strategy. AI can auto-generate a custom plan based on your website, brand voice, industry benchmarks, and past performance—without so much as a brief.
• Create all marketing strategy components. AI can create fully designed, on-brand campaigns, flows, and sign-up forms. Just review them, then get them live in a single click.
• Nurture subscribers and customers. AI can launch new campaigns every month while optimizing always-on automations in the background.

Not every brand has access to a content strategist. This is where AI can step in and analyze your existing campaigns and automations, plus recommend next steps that are most likely to yield high engagement and conversions.

With AI, brands can scale their content by:

• Replicating top-performing strategies: Take what’s working and generate promotions, education, and automations that can build on what you know is most effective. 
• Launching seasonal content faster: Pull in the latest industry, competitive, market, and holiday trends to develop the most effective content for nurturing customers.
• Getting built-out suggestions: Launch faster with AI content suggestions that come with auto-generated messages and target audiences.
• Personalizing marketing for individuals, not just segments: Use AI and predictive analytics to determine the best content, creative, send times, product recommendations, and channels for individual people, not groups of people. 

Every Man Jack, a men’s grooming brand, uses predictive analytics to send campaigns to subscribers based on their unique 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.

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. It can help you 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, then getting the winning versions live
• Automatically suppressing sends to disengaged subscribers to protect your sender reputation
• Giving proactive recommendations on new touchpoints and more advanced flows
• Tracking trends and automatically refining targeting and messaging

Tata Harper, a pioneering plant-based skincare brand, used 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.

An AI marketing agent makes your team’s life easier. A customer-facing AI agent does that, too, while also improving the experience for your customers by:

• Learning your storefront: An AI customer agent is instantly trained on your storefront, policies, and help content, so it knows exactly how to respond to customer inquiries without a heavy set-up lift from your team.
• Driving more revenue: AI suggests personalized products based on each customer’s unique history, and even lets shoppers add to cart right in chat.
• Resolving issues across the journey: AI handles common pre- and post-purchase questions like order status, returns, and subscriptions, without getting your human support team involved.
• Handing off when it’s necessary: When it can’t solve the problem on its own, AI escalates to your human team with full context so nothing gets lost in translation—saving your team valuable time, and your customers from having to repeat themselves.

Since enabling an AI-powered customer agent, home fragrance brand Happy Wax has seen “a dramatic reduction in support tickets,” says Rachel Fagan, VP of marketing—an especially valuable result heading into BFCM, when inquiries tend to surge.

In just 90 days, Fagan reports that over half of conversations handled by the AI agent were fully resolved without any service team involvement. “Customers get instant answers, our team gains bandwidth for high-touch moments, and that’s setting us up for success this BFCM,” Fagan adds.

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.
• Combine customer data, brand data, and expert-led vetting to generate marketing strategies and tactics that are most likely to convert.
• 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:

• Developing smart marketing strategies based on data
• Launching fully written and designed business-critical campaigns and automations across channels like email, text messaging, and WhatsApp
• Personalizing marketing to the individual, not just the segment
• Automatically self-optimizing based on trends and performance
• Handling common customer support tasks to free up your human team for more complicated issues

This way, you can see results fast. Thinking about what increases your marketing campaign ROI can help you determine 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 test them against the results you were getting prior to implementing AI and the goals of each marketing deliverable they’re associated with. Don’t forget to run the test on a sample size that’s 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:

• Creating cohesive brand experiences across email, SMS, WhatsApp, push, and other channels
• Replicating top-performing promotional, educational, and product-centric campaigns
• Pulling in the latest industry, competitive, market, and holiday trends to nurture customers throughout the year
• Experimenting with customer-facing AI agents on the support side of your business

• Unify and clean your customer data before you implement the high-impact, low-effort use cases above.
• A/B test AI marketing projects and iterate on them over time.
• Maintain human review on AI-generated marketing deliverables and make adjustments when necessary.

• 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