Establishing data
Customizing templates
Creating core automations
Personalizing with AI
Building for omnichannel
Measuring ROI
Avoiding mistakes

1. Establish your customer data foundation without tech support

When customer data and marketing automation are siloed, it’s impossible to personalize messages. This is because your data capture mechanism is operating separately from how you communicate with customers—so every time they act and generate data, you can’t use that data to inform your messages. 

Consolidating your customer data and marketing automation software accomplishes several things: it gives you a 360-degree view of your customer, and it unlocks automated messaging triggered by customer interactions. These experiences matter—74% of consumers expect more personalized interactions in 2025, according to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report. 

For startups, unified data also means efficiency. When information is spread across platforms, startups waste hours stitching it together to create a good experience for the customer. A single source of truth is the foundation you need to automate these processes.

To start, make sure your CRM can gather data from all touchpoints into unified customer profiles. With integrations, centralize data from your ecommerce store, website forms, customer support platform, shipping provider, social media, and more. Prioritize collecting two types of data:

1. Zero-party data: what customers willingly share through sign-up forms, quizzes, surveys, etc.
2. First-party data: what you observe, like browsing activity, purchase history, email clicks, or support requests

Meal subscription brand Daily Harvest was struggling with a fragmented tech stack that was slowing them down every time they wanted to send emails or add new coupons to their old system.

When they consolidated several ecommerce tools—a customer data platform, a reviews platform, and an email marketing platform—into a B2C CRM, they saved 50+ developer hours monthly and cut tech costs by 18%. Now, the team can automatically gather reviews and tap into customer data to create segments for marketing, saving time and improving the customer experience.

Today, just two marketers run Daily Harvest’s entire email program, building segments and campaigns without writing a line of code.

2. Set up marketing automations quickly with pre-built templates

One shortcut to seeing results with marketing automation: flow templates. 

Flows are messages that are triggered automatically after certain interactions happen or when certain criteria are met. As a startup, you should never need to set these up from scratch. When you’re optimizing for speed, think:

• Pre-built templates you can customize in minutes
• Universal content blocks that apply to all marketing automations, like compliance messaging
• Core marketing automations like your welcome series, post-purchase messages, and abandoned cart reminders (more on these next)

Start with a multi-channel flow template. These come with triggers, delays, and recommended messages already mapped out. From there, make them your own by:

• Adjusting timing: Shorten delays for time-sensitive reminders (like abandoned carts) or space out messages for nurturing relationships.
• Responding to behaviors: Add conditional splits that send different messages depending on whether customers bought or engaged.
• Reaching customers where they engage: Use AI to send messages on preferred channels, based on past engagement data and preferences.
• Personalizing with customer data: Recommend products and tailor offers to behavior and stated preferences, so each message feels personalized.

For example, a pre-built cart recovery flow might start with an email reminder followed by another email two days later. But you could customize your flow to start with a text message instead for shoppers who have opted into SMS. For high-value customers only, you might include a discount to increase conversions, without breaking the bank by offering discounts to everyone.

3. Create the core marketing automations every startup needs

Marketing automations, or flows, generate revenue around the clock. That’s because they’re messages triggered by behavior or preferences rather than messages you push out manually after audience analysis. 

Flows are how startups can remain competitive amidst rising consumer expectations. The less you need to hit “send,” the better—flows operate in the background, freeing up small marketing teams with few resources to invest in large-scale, omnichannel campaigns that can generate more customer data. 

Here’s where to start with flows:

• Welcome series: Use a welcome flow to introduce your brand to new subscribers, showcase top products, and nudge shoppers toward that first order. Add a founder story or a limited-time discount to make the message more memorable.
• Cart and browse abandonment: According to the Baymard Institute, about 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Set up abandonment flows to recover that lost revenue with timely reminders to shoppers who browsed and left your site or abandoned their carts.
• Post-purchase follow-up: Confirm orders, share shipping updates, and keep the conversation going with tips or product recommendations in your post-purchase flows. 
• Win-back flows: Win-back flows re-engage lapsed buyers with updates, new arrivals, or incentives. 
• Review requests: Reviews build social proof and help shoppers make purchase decisions. Automating review requests generates more reviews when they’re automatically timed to product use.

Together, these flows cover the full customer lifecycle: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. This makes it easy to stay ahead of customers 24/7 without a major lift from your small team.

4. Personalize marketing automations with AI and predictive analytics

Basic flows cover the essentials, but AI and predictive analytics multiply their impact. For your startup, that can mean more revenue per send, stronger retention, and less manual work. 

Here’s how you can use AI and predictive analytics to step up your marketing automation:

• Get a marketing strategy in minutes. AI can auto-generate a custom, expert-informed marketing plan based on your website—no brief required.
• Launch with a single click. AI can write and design on-brand critical campaigns, flows, and sign-up forms. All they need is a review and they’re ready to go live.
• Optimize continuously, on autopilot. AI can track trends, run tests, and automatically refine your targeting and messaging, making it effortless to create cohesive customer experiences.
• Support your customers without human involvement. An AI customer agent can provide 24/7, brand-trained assistance, answering product questions, making recommendations, updating orders and returns, and escalating to a human with full context when necessary.
• Personalize more proactively. With predictive analytics, you can proactively send personalized recommendations based on predicted next order date, lifetime value (LTV), churn risk, and more. This generates revenue by reminding a high-value customer to reorder before they run out, for example, or giving a first-time buyer a reason to come back. 

Fresh seafood brand Svenfish used predictive analytics to craft offers for disengaged customers who hadn’t bought for 3+ months and customers whose forecasted LTV was more than $200. With AI, the brand was also able to create top-performing subject line copy on demand. 

“You don’t want to waste time, especially at a small business, where we’re all wearing multiple hats,” says Sreevats R., product manager at Svenfish. In a single quarter, the brand attributed 82% of ecommerce revenue to emails they used AI to create. 

5. Build omnichannel marketing automations without the complexity

Most brands start their marketing automation efforts with email, and that’s smart. But today’s customers don’t just live in their inbox. They browse on mobile, shop in apps, and presume brands will meet them wherever they are. 

The right marketing automation platform makes omnichannel marketing manageable without added resources. When the same flow builder powers email, SMS, push, WhatsApp, and more, it’s easier to:

• Start simple. Launch your first flows on email, then layer text messaging or push notifications in a single flow template.
• Let AI choose the channel. Predict where each customer is most likely to engage and set marketing automations so they route according to real behavior.
• Stay consistent. Centralized templates and customer data profiles keep messaging aligned across touchpoints, so you can create a cohesive customer experience no matter how many channels someone is interacting with.
• Switch channels based on behavior. If an email goes unopened, follow up with a text. If a push notification gets a tap but no purchase, let a cart recovery email close the loop.

Online nursery Fast Growing Trees put this into practice when they created hybrid email-and-text flows celebrating a customer’s first purchase, pulling in a photo of the plant they bought and encouraging them to buy again. 

By optimizing flows and personalizing with customer data, Fast Growing Trees saw a 35% increase in revenue per text message and a 33.7% increase in SMS placed order rates. 

6. Measure and prove ROI to investors and stakeholders

When you’re operating within thin margins or reporting to investors, proof matters as much as performance. You need the numbers to show where growth came from and why it’s sustainable—and automation makes it easier to access the data you need to do it.

Here’s how you can best use automated reporting to prove ROI:

• Show where revenue really comes from, across the full customer journey. Unlike first- or last-click models that over-credit a single channel, omnichannel, linear multi-touch attribution distributes credit across every touchpoint, so you can see how all messages contributed to a sale. The benefit is twofold: you’ll quickly spot weak points in your automation strategy, and also give executives a more credible, data-backed view of marketing ROI.
• Make a case for future marketing initiatives. Immediate revenue matters, but stakeholders want to see sustainable growth. Automatically calculate LTV, repeat purchase rate, and retention cohorts, showing both historic and predicted value. When you can show sustainable growth with more accurate forecasting, you’re in a much better position to ask for more resources to generate more revenue.
• Benchmark against peers. Results are stronger when measured in context. Use your CRM’s benchmarks to compare your click, conversion, and unsubscribe rates to brands of similar size and industry. If you’re outperforming, highlight it. If you’re underperforming, you have the information you need to improve. Either way, benchmarks reassure stakeholders you’re measuring against the market, not guessing.
• Practice investor-friendly reporting. Show results in metrics stakeholders care about: LTV, customer acquisition costs (CAC), return on ad spend (ROAS), and revenue from automated flows. These show how growth ties directly to profitability. Also, highlight efficiency gains—for example, when flows recover sales you’d normally buy with ads, your blended cost per acquisition (CPA) drops. Similarly, post-purchase flows that drive repeat orders improve retention and raise LTV without increasing CAC.

7. Avoid common startup marketing automation mistakes

Marketing automation saves time and builds consistency, but it can backfire if you don’t set it up thoughtfully. Avoid these common marketing automation mistakes to hit the ground running more effectively from day one:

• Waiting too long to automate: Many startups delay marketing automation until they’ve scaled, but even with 100 subscribers you should already have a welcome series and an abandoned cart flow running. Early customers are often your most valuable, and nurturing them pays off in repeat purchases and referrals.
• Setting it and forgetting it: Once your marketing automations are live, don’t set and forget. Discounts expire, templates drift off-brand, and messaging goes stale. Assign ownership of key flows and schedule regular reviews so your automations keep working hard for you.
• Not personalizing your automations: Marketing automation loses impact when every message feels the same. Customers notice when marketing feels generic or purely transactional. Strong flows weave in personal touches, like referencing past purchases or following up on feedback from reviews.
• Forgetting about mobile: According to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, most purchases happen on phones. To reach customers where they actually shop and engage, build marketing automations that include mobile-first channels, like texts for abandoned cart reminders, push notifications for app users, or WhatsApp updates for time-sensitive offers.

Add Klaviyo B2C CRM to your startup team

Startups can’t afford to waste time. Every campaign delay, every manual list pull, every missed follow-up slows momentum. Marketing automation solves that problem—not by replacing your team, but by multiplying what your small team can accomplish.

With Klaviyo, the only CRM built for B2C brands, you don’t have to trade speed for sophistication. Pre-built flows and self-serve tools help you launch quickly, while unified data and advanced reporting options set you up to scale effectively. 

As your startup grows, every new subscriber, purchase, or interaction feeds into a single system that keeps getting smarter.