Building a data foundation
Gathering and managing consent
Segmenting your audience
Using consistent branding
Automating the customer journey
Reaching people on preferred channels
Using AI to streamline operations
Incorporating customer service in marketing
Testing and optimizing
Measuring success

1. Build your foundation with unified customer data

Your business needs different tools to do different things. But when these tools don’t talk to each other, it’s nearly impossible to personalize your marketing automation efforts, leading to generic or irrelevant campaigns.

And when you do try to personalize these efforts, your team wastes precious time and effort manually stitching together spreadsheets and pulling insights from them.

60% of B2C marketing teams use 6–15 tools in their tech stack, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 state of B2C marketing report, so that time can really add up. It can also lead to disjointed customer experiences for customers.

When you integrate all your data into a B2C CRM with a built-in customer data platform (CDP), 100% of your customer data lives under one roof. That means data from your:

• Ecommerce site
• Brick-and-mortar stores
• Product and customer reviews
• Loyalty program
• Marketing channels
• Shipping and fulfillment tools
• Return management systems
• Customer service interactions

With unified customer profiles that store real-time information from all these sources, you can feed this data into automated flows and customer service conversations, personalizing the customer journey from start to finish. 

And by cross-referencing different data sources, you can find niche segments for automations, like customers who are VIPs in your loyalty program, those who bought recently, or subscribers who left positive reviews who live within a certain distance of a physical store.

2. Gather and track consent for subscribers across channels

As you use marketing automation to scale, you need to consider consent management and compliance beyond simple spreadsheets and manual updates. 

Use sign-up forms that connect to your CRM to allow visitors to subscribe for marketing updates, giving you consent to send marketing materials via email, text, mobile push notifications, or even WhatsApp. 

Follow these consent management best practices to build trust with customers and avoid deliverability issues:

• Confirm that your sign-up forms comply with data privacy laws like the GDPR. 
• Use double opt-in, which involves sending a confirmation message to verify that new subscribers want to receive messages from your brand.
• Include unsubscribe links in emails.
• Protect your subscribers’ information and maintain tight security over their personal data. 

3. Dynamically segment your audience for more personalized marketing at scale

According to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, 74% of consumers expect more brands to provide more personalized experiences in 2025. 

Marketing automation enables personalized messaging based on customer preferences and behavior, and one of the most scalable ways to personalize is by segmenting your audience into sub-groups you can target with more specific messaging and relevant offers. Research shows that even just demographic segmentation can increase conversion rates by 30%.

Segmentation can be manual—pulling lists manually based on certain criteria. Ideally, it’s dynamic, updating automatically based on behavior, triggers, or demographics. Most often, you’ll use segments for one-off campaigns, rather than flows (more on these later), but you can create segment-triggered flows to send automated messages when someone joins a segment.

Here are some different types of segmentation you can use, and examples of what you might send to those audiences:

• Share early access to seasonal promotions with customers who only purchase during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM).

• Re-send promotional emails to subscribers who have clicked a link in the past 72 hours or browsed your site, but haven’t placed an order.
• Send new versions of products to customers who purchased the original version within the past year.
• Message customers who left positive reviews when their favorite product comes out in a new color or style.
• Create special offers for VIPs who purchased at least twice in the past 6 months, spent 3x your average order value (AOV), and are subscribed to text messaging.

Western boot and apparel brand Tecovas took a targeted approach to promotions during BFCM, sending emails to a specific segment rather than the full list. They sent campaigns to customers who had clicked on emails about their upcoming sale, but hadn’t purchased yet. Then, they followed up with personalized abandonment flows.

Tecovas saw 30.5% YoY growth in email revenue during their BFCM sale, which was a major lift for the brand. “Treating our audiences as individuals and trying to get personalized messaging to them is a huge thing we learned from last year,” says Megan Edwards, email marketing manager at Tecovas.

4. Use a consistent brand voice and messaging across all automated touchpoints

A strong brand impacts customer perception and propensity to purchase. But when you’re automating your marketing, and using generative AI to craft content, you can easily fall into the trap of creating generic messaging that doesn’t capture your specific brand vibe, or having inconsistent messaging across channels. 

To lean into what makes your brand unique at scale, create a strong set of brand guidelines you can use across your content that outlines your:

• Brand voice: the tone or personality your brand conveys in written content and copy, like playful, whimsical, formal, or helpful
• Writing rules: style and formatting tips for written content and copy, like emoji usage, sentence length, and punctuation preferences
• Brand messaging: how you talk about certain products, core values, your mission, and your vision

You can also let AI generate your brand guidelines for you, then customize and adjust them until they feel true to your brand personality.

To maintain consistency and build trust with your audience, apply these brand guidelines to all marketing content, like:

• Website content, like pop-up forms, product descriptions, and your “about us” page
• Automated flows
• Email, text, and WhatsApp campaigns
• Social media ads
• Customer support conversations 

5. Move customers forward in their journey with your brand

Automation helps move customers along in their journey at every stage in the customer lifecycle by pulling in specific details about each person’s experience and supporting them exactly where they are.

Harvard research found that different types of products and services require different types of customer journeys to create lasting brand relationships. For example, morning coffee is part of a routine, so making tasks “incrementally easier and more predictable” and removing friction keeps customers engaged. To improve these journeys, brands need to focus on easy user experiences and consistent encounters.

A fitness brand, by contrast, might be a longer-term commitment, or what Harvard calls an “odyssey.” This type of brand needs to hone in on milestones over time, customer growth, and the ongoing journey, with variation to keep it interesting.

The Harvard research notes that designing successful customer journeys means identifying the type of relationship you want to have with customers, inviting customers to purchase at the right moment, and creating seamless experiences that make customers feel like they’re getting value from your brand.

Enter: flows, or marketing automations, that match your customer’s intent and their relationship with your brand.

Here are some ways to automate your marketing throughout the customer journey:

• Awareness: Create lookalike audiences that reflect your VIP customers’ traits and target them with ads across Instagram, TikTok, Google, Facebook, and Pinterest.
• Consideration: Share a welcome flow with messaging specific to where new subscribers signed up, like an in-store discount for those who signed up at a brick-and-mortar location and an ecommerce discount for those who signed up online.
• Conversion: Automatically follow up with subscribers who abandon their carts with thoughtful messages asking if they need help, finding out why they abandoned, or showcasing customer reviews related to what they were planning on buying.
• Post-purchase: Make the post-purchase experience seamless with automated shipping reminders, return information, and educational content to help recent customers get the most out of their purchase.
• Loyalty: Send out regular loyalty-triggered flows to subscribers reminding them to take advantage of their points, give out referrals, and earn more rewards.

If you want to save time building flows, consider using the dozens of ready-made flow templates that come out of the box with a B2C CRM. Or, explain what type of flow you want to create and let an AI flow builder do the work for you. 

When starting out with flows, we recommend setting up those that have the highest impact first. According to the latest Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks, welcome flows and abandoned cart flows drive the highest revenue per recipient (RPR).

Family-owned ice cream brand McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams, for example, welcomes new customers with Square-triggered thank-you messages that introduce them to the brand, and 7–10 days post-purchase, every in-person visitor gets invited to return or place a delivery order. McConnell’s Square POS revenue from Klaviyo flows jumped more than 8x YoY.

6. Reach people on their preferred channels

Just because you can easily automate marketing to customers on multiple channels at once doesn’t mean you should. Consumers are overloaded with marketing messages, noticing around 100 ads each day across channels. And not every marketing message is appropriate on every channel.  

The messages that cut through and resonate are those that reach people at just the right time, with a message that’s relevant to them and makes sense for the channel it’s on, using the channels customers are active on. 

When automating your marketing, strategically message your customers on the channels where they’ll most likely to respond at the optimal times, without overloading them, by:

• A/B testing send times across channels
• Using AI that analyzes historical customer data across email, text, WhatsApp, and push notifications to predict the channel where each customer is most likely to engage next
• Using the intelligence from your testing and AI insights to guide flows and build segments, or dynamically adjust channel strategy for campaigns
  
• Sending omnichannel flows and campaigns from the same platform and considering how many messages someone is receiving in a given time period

Health and wellness retailer Elite Supps brought all of their customer-facing marketing channels into one place and created an omnichannel loyalty program. They use customer data to share real-time cashback balances and expiration alerts through email, text, and mobile push notifications. By re-engaging customers across channels, they’ve incentivized repeat purchases. 

The team also identifies engaged customers based on app activity, then sends out relevant, timely text messages that have helped boost revenue from texts by 68%.

7. Use AI to streamline marketing automation operations 

McKinsey estimates that AI could lead to $4.4 trillion in increased global productivity annually, 75% of which they say would impact marketing and sales.

Marketing automation is all about working smarter, not harder, and AI can help marketers improve their operations by:

• Generating marketing strategies, campaigns, flows, forms, and on-brand content, and keeps improving results automatically—no prompting required.
• Providing 24/7 customer support across web, email, SMS, and WhatsApp by answering common customer questions, recommending products, adding to cart, updating orders, initiating returns, and escalating to a human agent when necessary with full context preserved (more on this next)
• Personalizing marketing content with the right message, product, time, and channel for each individual person, all powered by live behavior and purchase history

8. Incorporate customer service in marketing automation

According to our state of B2C marketing report, 55% of marketers track customer satisfaction scores to measure marketing performance, and 75% of marketers say that customer service takes up more than 10% of their job. But only 29% say their marketing and customer service teams are fully aligned and integrated.

The lines between marketing and customer service have fully blurred, but many teams don’t have the infrastructure to support these shared responsibilities. 

Think about where there are overlaps between the two departments, and adjust your marketing automations to take this into account by:

• Providing support teams with full marketing context, and vice versa, using a unified data foundation and shared customer profiles
• Triggering flows based on support conversations and data, like sending a follow-up discount after a support interaction is resolved
• Building segments based on service data, like those who have recently made a return or exchange, or based on favorites from your self-service customer hub
• Pausing marketing campaigns when service issues are active

9. Conduct ongoing testing and optimization

One of the most compelling aspects of marketing automation is the “set it and forget it” mentality. But if you “forget it” for too long, you may miss out on opportunities to improve and drive more revenue.

Conduct regular testing and optimize your automated marketing flows by A/B testing:

• Subject lines: Test personalization by including products someone ordered, a recipient’s name, or a reference to their location.
• Calls to action (CTAs): Test the design of the button, copy, placement, or number of CTAs.
• Images: Test different images in your messages, or try a GIF.
• Voice and tone: Test out different copy styles for different promotions or audiences.
• Offers: Try testing out a free shipping offer vs. faster shipping, or 10% off vs. a $10 off coupon.

You can also use AI to deliver the best variant of a message to each individual recipient.

Beauty brand Huda Beauty A/B tested showing vs. hiding different types of content in their emails. They found that longer emails with more product education, user-generated content, and founder storytelling performed better than emails pushing sales, and adjusted their marketing strategy accordingly. 

Now, they’ve created relationship-building automations, like category-specific post-purchase flows for lips, skin, and skincare products that include application techniques and complementary products. These changes contributed to 2x YoY growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue. 

10. Measure success and monitor marketing automation-related metrics

With marketing automation, you can reach customers across channels, segments, and lifecycle stages. The journey from initial introduction to your brand to purchase isn’t straightforward. 

To get a full picture of your marketing performance, and work smarter to keep tabs on your efforts:

• Use omnichannel, linear multi-touch attribution: This model assigns equal credit to all meaningful touchpoints, giving you full-funnel visibility into the most impactful channels and efforts.
• Set up auto monitors: Auto-monitors alert you if there’s a drop in the number of times a flow is triggered, a drop in the number of messages sent by a flow, and a drop in the deliverability rate of your email campaigns. 
• Analyze your peer group benchmarks: Automated benchmarks use AI to analyze anonymous data from a subset of your competitors, showing how your marketing and business performance stacks up in your industry.  

Transform your marketing automation with Klaviyo

Meeting every customer where they are requires a strong data foundation and powerful marketing automation tools. And today, any marketer can create sophisticated, personalized flows that deliver results.

Klaviyo B2C CRM is powered by a built-in CDP and AI that help brands drive revenue and loyalty, all from one place. Achieve faster growth with an intuitive, no-code platform that includes:

• 160+ customizable templates
• 60+ pre-built flows
• A conversational segment and flow builder
• Generative email and text messaging AI
• Omnichannel orchestration across email, text, mobile push, and WhatsApp
• Personalized experiences
• 400+ built-in integrations

Scale your business while keeping operations simple and customer relationships strong with Klaviyo.