Klaviyo Is the CRM for the Retail Store of the Future
Klaviyo is expanding beyond its roots in email and SMS marketing, positioning itself as the CRM built for B2C. Its platform aims to build better omnichannel orchestration, AI-driven automation, and connected shopping experiences that are designed to span the entire customer lifecycle – from first purchase to repeat engagement and post-sales support. Data fragmentation remains one of the biggest barriers to consistent customer experiences across all channels. Retail and e-commerce organizations in particular are under pressure to meet rising consumer expectations, but many still rely on disconnected tech stacks that are slow to keep up with these expectations. Klaviyo aims to address this challenge by unifying the data behind the customer journey, including in-store visits, across both digital and physical touchpoints.
Klaviyo reports that its platform can interpret real-time customer behavior, personalize at scale, and connect interactions across channels into a unified view. These capabilities are typically associated with enterprise platforms, but Klaviyo cites adoption by large companies like Ministry of Supply and Dollar Shave Club as evidence that it can deliver similar value with less complexity than found in the traditional enterprise CRM stack.
“A growing trend in retail IT is adopting AI without first aligning it to customer outcomes,” says Donnafay MacDonald, Info-Tech’s Retail Industry Research Director. She emphasized that “success depends on grounding investments in clear business objectives. This enables connected, personalized experiences, which is an area where vendors like Klaviyo may be able to accelerate results.”
Real Personalization, Real Context
Klaviyo reports that its one-to-one personalization now spans web, email, SMS, mobile apps, and WhatsApp. The platform enables segmentation and audience syncing to ad platforms like Meta, TikTok, and Google Ads. This gives teams the ability to run meaningful experiments faster and build journeys that react to real behavior.
Performance benchmarks also stand out. Klaviyo cites high resolution rates on customer support flows, strong product recommendation acceptance, and scalability to millions of profiles without a steep infrastructure curve (or the associated cost).
Unifying Marketing and Service
Klaviyo extends personalization beyond marketing into customer service. Its unified Klaviyo Data Platform equips service agents in its Helpdesk offering with full customer context, including purchase history, customer lifetime value, and loyalty status, enabling individually tailored, timely responses. For example, brands can trigger messages with winback offers following negative support experiences or critical product reviews, creating a path to improve sentiment and reengage customers.
Customer Hub uses the same data foundation to personalize onsite interactions, presenting recently viewed items, product recommendations, and order details in an embedded service console that supports both shopping and self-service. Customer Agent connects transactional messages such as order confirmations and shipping updates with two-way, AI-assisted replies, allowing customers to respond directly and receive immediate, context-aware assistance.
Together, these components create a connected system that unifies marketing, commerce, and service around a single, data informed view of the customer.
The Brick-and-Mortar Store Is Part of the Journey
Klaviyo demonstrates that it can extend the experience of a personalized customer journey into all channels, including the physical store. Through geofencing, the platform can detect when a known high-value customer is nearby and trigger context-aware offers, such as sending a free item redemption as an incentive to walk into a store. This connects online and offline activity in a way that traditional CRM tools rarely do well.
Channel affinity is also key. Klaviyo enables companies to understand where each customer prefers to interact, using a scoring system to ensure the right message is sent through the best channel for each individual.
A Strategic Fit for High-Volume Retailers
Klaviyo is best suited for retailers with high-volume, repeatable processes and a need for short time to value from their CRM and marketing automation stack. The platform offers a native Shopify integration and supports a broad app ecosystem that includes solutions for popups, loyalty, A/B testing, SMS commerce, and more.
For high-velocity retailers, Klaviyo’s ERP integrations are limited. It relies on APIs and middleware solutions to sync data across sales and operations, which would require investment in integration development. That makes Klaviyo less appropriate for those buyers that are looking for a full enterprise-grade ERP integration.
For larger enterprises, especially those used to Salesforce or Adobe ecosystems, Klaviyo may feel lightweight. But that is not necessarily a downside. For many teams, lower complexity and faster time to value are precisely what they need, and these benefits can be useful for single workflows or value streams. In fact, for larger enterprises, that is exactly where we would recommend implementing Klaviyo (even with your existing legacy tech in place).
Limitations and Considerations
Klaviyo is not recommended for highly regulated industries like financial services or healthcare. As for now, its compliance support is limited compared to legacy enterprise platforms such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.
Klaviyo uses usage-based pricing, and anyone planning to employ SMS heavily should take caution. This could introduce volatility in pricing and risk damaging the customer relationship. We also caution brands against overly zealous communication practices and recommend following Klaviyo’s guidance on the ideal number of touchpoints. Contracts should include clear expectations around scaling thresholds and integration SLAs.
Our Take
Klaviyo positions itself as enterprise-ready, assuming orgnizations take a deliberate approach to adoption. For teams moving away from monolithic CRM platforms or standalone customer data platforms, a practical starting point is a marketing or engagement channel underperforming due to limitations in the current stack. From there, Klaviyo’s ability to support a seamless, data-driven customer lifecycle can extend into the post-sales experience through Customer Hub and Customer Agent.
This lifecycle approach lays a solid foundation for customer engagement. Without a platform like Klaviyo, it is difficult for marketers to deliver truly personalized messaging that reflects both brand tone and customer journey stage. This is not about sending more messages. It is about sending the right message at the right time, with consistency and intelligence.
Klaviyo’s pricing comes in well below enterprise platforms due to its usage-based model, though additional integrations and APIs with an ERP may introduce additional costs.
The bigger takeaway: Klaviyo is not trying to win through feature parity. It is betting on usability, relevance, and execution. In a crowded field where everyone touts AI capabilities, Klaviyo’s strength is its ability to connect marketing and service, linking every transaction back to a shared customer profile. This positions it as a serious contender for retailers building the store of the future.