Acquiring new customers

Launching marketing faster

Delivering 1:1 experiences

Offering conversational support

Preventing churn

1. Acquire new customers more efficiently

According to our state of retail marketing report, 1 in 5 retail brands are currently spending $251–$500 to acquire every customer. And only 1% are seeing lower acquisition costs paired with higher customer lifetime value. The current approach just isn’t sustainable.

Using AI can help retail brands break into new markets and nurture long-term customer relationships by enabling teams to do more with less resources. In fact, a Gartner survey shows that high-performing marketing organizations that use generative AI are 1.3x more likely to overachieve YoY growth margins and either meet or exceed objectives for customer acquisition.

Here’s how AI can help retail brands bring in new customers while keeping CACs low:

• Auto-generate custom, on-brand sign-up forms. With just your website URL, an AI marketing agent can auto-generate a custom, expert-driven marketing plan, including critical sign-up forms for various channels—no brief or prompting required.
• Optimize sign-up form timing. Use AI to run an optimization test to find the best display time for your forms. The test tries out different variations on display timing until it finds the highest-converting option, then sets the winner live automatically.

AI for retail in action: Luxury blanket maker Saranoni used AI to identify top-performing placements and timing for pop-up forms across their homepage and category pages. One winning variant drove a 14% lift in form submission rates. This helped the team figure out what worked best for their brand specifically, rather than relying on general best practices.

2. Launch marketing campaigns and automations, faster

The problem isn’t that brands aren’t trying hard enough to launch campaigns quickly. It’s that manual processes can’t keep up with the demands of modern retail, and marketing teams have to work more efficiently to hit their goals and reach customers and prospects. And if you go too slowly, by the time you finish building one campaign, market conditions have already shifted.

Automating marketing campaigns with AI frees up your team from performing repetitive tasks, so that you can focus on strategy instead of execution. AI has also smoothed out marketing processes, increasing efficiency while maintaining quality, according to a research study on the impact of AI on marketing strategies.

Here’s how retail brands can launch content faster with AI:

• Quickly build complex flows for smarter automated marketing. Explain what you want an automated flow to do, including triggers, time delays, content, channels, and conditional splits, and AI will build out the automation. 
• Use generative AI to speed up content creation. Generative AI tools can make it easier to create talking points, brainstorm subject lines, test different styles and tones, and streamline the email and text message creation process.
• Edit creative for different campaigns or seasons. An AI photo editor empowers you to use simple prompts to update your brand images, like swapping out colors, products, or campaign stars.
• Auto-generate custom marketing campaigns and flows. In addition to creating custom sign-up forms based on just your website URL, an AI marketing agent can generate on-brand emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, push notifications, and flows.   

AI for retail in action:Svenfish, an ecommerce shop that specializes in fresh seafood, uses AI to keep their email marketing relevant, creating top-performing subject line copy on demand. So far, Svenfish has made 82% of YTD ecommerce revenue with emails that leveraged at least one AI feature.

3. Deliver 1:1 experiences for every customer

Generic one-size-fits-all marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. Today’s shoppers expect brands to understand their preferences, predict what they need, and deliver relevant experiences everywhere they interact with your retail brand.

In fact, 74% of consumers expect more personalized experiences from brands in 2025, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report. But personalization at scale has historically been difficult without significant resources.

That’s where AI comes in. It analyzes how customers behave, predicts what they want, and automatically tailors experiences for thousands (or millions) of customers at the same time. In a recent SurveyMonkey report, 73% of marketers said that AI contributes to creating personalized customer experiences.

Here are a few ways AI is taking the pressure off teams to deliver exceptional personalization to their customers: 

• Quickly build complex customer segments for more targeted campaigns. Describe a segment using plain language, and AI will create a segment for you—subscribers who have viewed a product but not made a recent purchase, for example, or everyone who lives within 100 miles of Boston, Massachusetts.
• Personalize send times for each subscriber. AI can analyze when each individual subscriber typically opens marketing messages, then schedule delivery for maximum engagement.
• Reach customers where they’re most likely to engage. Use AI to analyze each customer’s historical behavior patterns and predict which channels they’re most likely to engage with, then message them there first.
• Create personalized product feeds. Use AI-powered product feeds across marketing channels to help understand what your customers might want next by analyzing their past behavior. 
• Send the most relevant email or text campaign to each subscriber. In a personalized A/B test, AI can determine the winning variation for each individual subscriber, then send it to them. After each test, you can use the data to optimize future campaigns.

AI for retail in action: Drinkware brand Corkcicle uses AI-powered channel affinity to reach customers where they’re most engaged. Now, the team’s most efficient segment is customers who have engaged in the last 90 days who prefer email. “Channel affinity allows us to be efficient and targeted and has provided great results,” says ecommerce marketing specialist Erica Olsen.

4. Offer conversational shopping and support 24/7/365

Klaviyo’s AI shopping index found that 81% of consumers have used AI tools for shopping in the past 3 months. But while AI is becoming a regular part of a buyer’s shopping journey, it still needs to provide value.  

The survey research behind the index also shows that 75% of consumers have abandoned an online purchase because they couldn’t find immediate answers to product questions. That means three-quarters of potential sales are slipping away because customers can’t get answers fast enough. Maybe they want to know if a dress comes in petite sizes, whether a product is in stock at their local brick-and-mortar store, or when their order will arrive.

Before AI, a customer service agent needed to answer these questions. If a representative wasn’t available, then they lost the sale. AI customer agents solve this problem by providing instant, accurate responses around the clock. 

Klaviyo’s AI consumer shopping survey also found that 40% of consumers feel that AI shopping assistants would improve their perception of a brand. They see it as a sign that you’re keeping up with technology trends. And PwC research shows that more than half (54%) of companies using AI agents have improved their customer experience. 

Here are a few ways retail brands can use AI for conversational shopping and support:

• Offer conversational shopping assistance. Unlike generic chatbots, an AI customer agent that is trained on your product catalog, FAQs, brand guidelines, and customer data can have conversations that feel personal and genuinely helpful. 
• Resolve common questions for faster response times. An AI customer agent can quickly pull up information on return policies, brand history, and different products to speed up the shopping process and cut down on customer support inquiries.
• Let customers add items to their cart right from the chat. With an AI customer agent, customers can go from asking questions to adding items to their cart with one click. 
• Automate pre- and post-purchase service. An AI customer agent can handle post-purchase tasks automatically, like tracking orders, initiating returns, or updating subscriptions. This frees up your customer service team to tackle the more complex issues that actually require human interaction.
• Support customers on any channel. No matter where customers reach out for help before, during, or after a purchase, both AI and human agents can answer with full context when they use an AI-powered helpdesk that brings together all your customer conversations across channels, complete with all-time customer data.

AI for retail in action: When natural fragrance brand Happy Wax implemented an AI customer agent, over 50% of the conversations it handled were fully resolved without any service team involvement. Customers got instant answers, and the team had more time for high-touch interactions, setting them up for success during busy seasons like BFCM.

5. Prevent churn and drive retention with predictive analytics

Many retailers focus heavily on acquisition while overlooking retention opportunities. Successful retail brands will focus on building systems that turn one-time buyers into loyal, high-value customers beyond the initial purchase.

The tricky part is that churn usually happens silently. Customers won’t announce they’re leaving, they’ll just stop engaging. By the time you notice, it’s too late. But with predictive analytics, you can look out for how trends, patterns, and relationships in your data can play out in the future and determine likely scenarios.

Research from the Journal of Life and Social Sciences found that AI-driven insights lead to “dramatically more accurate targeting, lower churn rates, and bigger lifetime value.” These 3 outcomes are exactly what retail brands need to succeed in a high-CAC environment.

Here’s how retail brands use predictive analytics to retain customers and get ahead of churn:

• Proactively identify at-risk customers. AI analyzes engagement patterns, purchase frequency, and other signals to predict which customers might be drifting away, and how likely they are to churn. When you have this information, you can send out offers or re-engagement campaigns before you lose someone to a competitor.
• Reach out to VIPs with personalized recommendations. Your highest-value customers deserve special attention. You can identify VIPs based on predicted lifetime value or average order value, then trigger personalized outreach like special offers, early access to new products, or recommendations based on their buying history.
• Encourage repeat purchases using anticipated next order dates. Understand when and what products customers return to buy, and send out automated marketing efforts with tailored recommendations when they’re most likely to purchase.

AI for retail in action: Men’s personal care brand Every Man Jack used predictive analytics to determine the best times to send replenishment flows: slightly before or after each customer’s unique predicted next order date. They also send campaigns to a segment of customers with high predicted LTVs, who make the most purchases.

Move your retail brand forward with K:AI (Klaviyo AI)

The retailers that start building their AI foundation now are setting themselves up for a major advantage down the road.

K:AI (Klaviyo AI) powers built-in agents that use your real-time customer data in Klaviyo B2C CRM to plan and launch marketing, personalize every send, and resolve customer requests—on one platform, with humans in the loop:

• K:AI Marketing Agent: Generate marketing plans, campaigns, flows, sign-up forms, and on-brand content, and improve results automatically—no briefs or prompting required.
• K:AI Customer Agent: Launch your brand’s own 24/7 personalized AI assistant that can recommend products, convert customers, and resolve questions across web, email, SMS, and WhatsApp. 
• Additional personalization features: Use features like AI-powered channel affinity, predictive analytics, and personalized product recommendations to create individualized experiences for every shopper.

Customers expect more, competition keeps intensifying, and acquiring new customers continues to get more expensive. K:AI builds launch-ready campaigns, answers customer questions 24/7, and helps you sell more by personalizing every interaction.