Unifying customer data
Creating targeted segments
Building automated flows
Timing every message right
Prioritizing omnichannel experiences
Personalize customer support
Analyzing long-term engagement

1. Unify all your customer data in a single source of truth

People are active across tons of channels, and they expect brands to keep up without missing a beat. Data silos kill engagement efforts, since they only show a sliver of the customer’s interactions with your brand. 

For example, if a customer is in the process of returning a product because it didn’t meet their expectations, you wouldn’t want to follow up their purchase with a review request or up-sell.

Consolidate your marketing, loyalty, shipping, customer service, and point of sale software into a B2C CRM with a built-in customer data platform, and use pre-built integrations to automatically pull in customer activity data from every source and channel into unified customer profiles that update in real time.

When building out your customer data foundation across marketing and service, make sure you’re capturing the context of:

• Past experiences they’ve had with your brand
• Ongoing and recent activities
• Where they are in their journey with your brand
• How they feel about your brand

With access to up-to-date customer profiles, you can conduct proactive outreach, quickly address customers’ concerns (with full context), tap into customer data points to personalize every interaction, and improve your brand experience over time.

McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams, for example, had trouble engaging their customers because their data was so fragmented across sources. Now that they’ve integrated all of their customer data from their POS, online delivery, and ecommerce platforms into their CRM, they’re better able to follow customer journeys and better connect different touchpoints. 

Customer engagement strategy tip: A unified data foundation is crucial for AI-powered channel affinity, which predicts the most effective channel mix for each individual subscriber based on their past engagement. When your CRM stores these predictive insights in every profile, you can see at a glance whether you should lead with an email, a text, a push notification, or a WhatsApp message for greatest impact.

2. Create targeted segments based on engagement

Segmentation is one of the best ways to engage specific groups of customers, based on real-time activities and preferences. 

A B2C CRM with dynamic segmentation functionality empowers you to group your audience into smaller subsets based on things like:

• Demographics: age, income, parental status
• Behavior: engagement, website activity, product preferences, previous purchases
• Psychographic information: interests, values, lifestyles
• Geography: location, proximity to closest store
• AI-powered predictive analytics: date of next order, churn risk, channel affinity

Here are just a few examples of hyper-specific customer segments you can use to send more personalized marketing communications:

• Customers who have engaged with texts within the past 30 days and live within 30 miles of a store
• Mobile app users who have made recent purchases within a specific product category
• Subscribers whose first engagement preference is SMS and who typically purchase during sales

Customer engagement strategy tip: The last item above is an example of how incorporating AI-powered channel affinity into your segmentation strategy can improve your personalization efforts.

3. Build automated flows that respond to customer behavior

Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report found that 74% of consumers expect more personalization from brands in 2025. But personalization at scale isn’t easy, especially when you’re sending messages to thousands or even millions of customers.

If segmentation is the secret sauce for personalizing your campaigns, automated flows, like abandoned cart flows and your welcome series, are equally powerful. Because these messages are triggered by individual subscriber actions, it’s easy to personalize them and create the tailored brand experiences people have come to expect.

People are much more likely to buy from promotions that are tailored to their interests than sitewide sales that try to cater to everyone’s tastes in one message, and the data proves it. According to Klaviyo’s latest email marketing benchmarks, automated flows generate up to 30x more revenue per recipient (RPR) than traditional campaigns because they’re timely, targeted, and personalized. 

You might, for example, create a welcome flow based on which channel your subscriber signed up to receive marketing messages on. Then, you can follow up with a message that includes AI-powered product recommendations based on the new subscriber’s browsing history. 

Fashion brand DKNY wanted to improve engagement with their customers online. They sent emails often, but didn’t see the kind of engagement they wanted. Then, they started tailoring their automated welcome messaging by retail channel. If someone signs up in-store, they get an in-store-only discount in their welcome email. If they sign up online, they get an ecommerce discount code. Strategies like these helped DKNY reduce the number of emails they send while improving engagement.

Customer engagement strategy tip: Route customers down different paths in an automated flow based on their channel affinity. For example, if the subscriber’s top channel is email, set the logic to check a customer’s channel affinity and send them down a “Yes” path for email and a “No” path for SMS. For the “No” path, or after a time delay, send a follow-up text message. This way, you prioritize a specific channel without excluding others—creating a coordinated cross-channel experience.

4. Thoughtfully time every message

In addition to choosing the right channel and sending the right message, you need to reach out to your customers at the right time if you want to get them to act. 

According to Klaviyo’s 2025 omnichannel shopping survey, here’s when consumers say they prefer to receive different types of messages from brands (in order of preference):

Customer engagement strategy tip: Every customer is different, and this general information is just a starting point. To add some precision to your timing, use AI like Smart Send Time to target each customer when they’re most likely to engage. 

5. Prioritize omnichannel experiences throughout the brand journey

As you work to build your customer engagement strategy, consider how every message is reaching your audience based on where they are in their customer journey. 

Every time your customer engages with your brand, their connection with it strengthens. Also known as the customer lifecycle, the customer journey typically has 5 stages: 

1. Awareness: At this stage, a customer is first discovering and learning about your brand.
2. Consideration: The customer is considering purchasing from your brand, browsing, and comparing you with other brands.
3. Purchase: The customer has made the decision to buy from your brand and is actively purchasing through your website or physical store.
4. Retention: At this stage, you’re building on your relationship to encourage customers to make another purchase and further engage with your brand.
5. Advocacy: Over time, customers grow loyal to your brand, making repeat purchases, becoming a VIP, and recommending your brand to others.

Brands need to engage customers in different ways as they move through their journey—a long-time loyal customer may be turned off by content that assumes they know nothing about your brand, and someone just discovering you may be annoyed by too much pressure to buy.

Based on different journey stages, Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM forecast found variations in consumer preferences across channels (in order of preference): 

For outreach ideas you can use throughout the customer lifecycle, check out the chart below. This table summarizes what channels are most effective at each stage, segmentation ideas for each step of the customer journey, ideas for useful flows, and omnichannel campaigns that could help move customers along in their journey. 

While this list is by no means exhaustive, it’s a great place to start:

6. Provide fast, personalized customer support

According to Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report, 81% of consumers expect a response within 24 hours after reaching out about a negative experience with a brand, and 38% expect a response within just 4 hours.

Microsoft, meanwhile, reports that 90% of customers prefer to self-serve. And 62% of consumers would prefer to shop with AI that remembers their purchase history over explaining their preferences to sales associates, according to our BFCM forecast.

Meeting these expectations requires adopting a customer engagement strategy that places self-service and AI at the forefront, with offerings like:

• Self-service customer hub: a personalized destination where customers can manage orders, redeem offers, discover products, and get support—all in one place
• AI customer agent: a 24/7 AI assistant that’s trained on your storefront and customer data to answer questions, recommend products, and resolve issues instantly, across web chat, email, text messaging, and WhatsApp
• AI-powered helpdesk: brings AI and human agents into a unified workspace across email, chat, SMS, and social, providing full customer context for faster response times and more personalized interactions

When your customer engagement strategy lives in a B2C CRM, every action a customer takes via one of the above offerings feeds your marketing engine, powering smarter future segmentation, flows, and revenue-driving campaigns.

7. Analyze holistic, long-term customer engagement metrics

There are several metrics you can use to measure the success of your customer engagement marketing efforts. Analyzing them in relation to each other can give you a complete picture of your strategy outcomes, so you can either feel great knowing you nailed it or tweak your strategy for improvement. 

Lifetime value

LTV is an estimate of how much money a customer will spend with you over their lifetime. If your LTV improves after you expand your customer engagement efforts, you can reasonably conclude they’re paying off. 

Even more useful is calculating unique LTVs for customers who you’ve targeted with specific engagement strategies. If customers within certain segments have a higher LTV than those who don’t, for example, you know the targeted outreach has an impact. 

Net promoter score

Your net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand. This gives you a window into whether people feel positively about your brand, which can tell you whether your customer engagement efforts are cultivating the kind of relationship you want. Your NPS is calculated from customer answers to a one-question survey.

Churn rate

You can calculate your churn rate by dividing the number of customers you have lost over a set period of time by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that period. If a high rate of customers are churning, it may be a sign that you need to adjust your customer engagement strategy.

Bonus: omnichannel, linear multi-touch attribution

Marketing attribution determines which channels and messages are responsible for revenue. Technically it’s not a KPI like the others on this list, but it’s crucial for understanding which of your marketing efforts are driving real results for your business.

While the most common attribution approach is a single-touch model like first- or last-click, omnichannel linear multi-touch attribution considers how all messages and channels contribute to conversions, paid or owned. This approach to attribution better reflects the messy customer journey, while still allowing you to attribute the proper credit to your customer engagement strategy.

Most CRMs and marketing automation platforms produce marketing attribution reports for you. The best among them will make it easy to customize their attribution reports to the rhythms of your unique customer journey, which can look wildly different among brands. 

With email and SMS separated onto two different platforms, Australian footwear brand FRANKIE4 couldn’t track performance holistically. By consolidating their omnichannel data in a CRM, they gained real-time visibility into campaign and flow performance across email and text message marketing. Now, they can measure ROI on channel-specific marketing objectives.

Build better relationships with Klaviyo, the B2C CRM

True customer engagement strategy depends on a B2C CRM that tracks customer data across your organization and uses AI to develop personalized engagement approaches. More than that, it requires a CRM that provides these features in a way that meets the unique needs of B2C brands.

Outdoor brand Filson is a great example of a brand that’s developed a customer engagement strategy focused on creating better experiences for their shoppers, some of whom have 6-figure LTVs.

By centralizing customer data and marketing automation in Klaviyo B2C CRM, Filson has been able to collect customer preferences, connect their customer lifecycle to paid media and support data, and improve the overall customer experience for people who are subscribed to more than one channel. 

“Email and SMS are really where we make 1:1 digital connections with customers,” says Mike Swanson, retention marketing manager at Filson. “It’s essential to avoid messages that make our subscribers think, ‘Filson doesn’t know me.’”

As the B2C CRM, Klaviyo helps brands engage customers across marketing and service, then analyze results all in the same platform. And with a single, omnichannel platform, it’s easier to connect with consumers on the right channel at the right time to send the message that gets them excited to shop with you. 

Swanson puts it this way: “If we have all the data across systems in Klaviyo, and we know how people are interacting with the brand both positively and negatively, whether that’s through customer service or a retail store, we can create a seamless omnichannel experience that feels personalized—and drive more revenue.”