Marketing an ecommerce business these days is hard. People are constantly bombarded with generic messages, leading to inbox fatigue and missed opportunities for meaningful engagement, making it hard to grab attention and get clicks.
This is why standing out with highly personalized, smart, and efficient marketing strategies is so important. Marketers who aren’t carefully optimizing and personalizing the customer experience for their store’s shoppers are falling to the wayside, while those who are leveraging the right tools and strategies are shooting ahead.
Thankfully, Klaviyo is here to help make marketing automation easier. Klaviyo is a cutting-edge growth marketing platform engineered specifically for online businesses. It functions as the central nervous system for customer data and communications, consolidating information from every touchpoint across a business's tech stack.
In this article, we’ll explain what exactly makes Klaviyo so special and break down our ecommerce agency’s favourite features for ecommerce marketing and overall growth.
What is Klaviyo?
In a nutshell, Klaviyo is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that aims to help ecommerce brands send highly personalized messages to their customers via email and SMS campaigns.
It acts as a customer data platform with 350+ integrations to unify your tech stack and automate marketing efforts. Klaviyo consolidates your ecommerce data (store platform, support tools, CRM, etc.) so you can easily engage customers with targeted, data-driven campaigns across both email and text messages.
When first-party data is as important as it is today, leveraging your store’s customer data is vital to your ecommerce store's success. Klaviyo helps you do just that by creating hyper-personalized email and SMS marketing campaigns that drive sales and create loyal customers for life.
Top Klaviyo Features for Ecommerce Businesses
With a focus on owned channels and automation, Klaviyo comes with a massive feature set to help you build and maintain customer relationships. Here are some of our agency’s top features for ecommerce marketing success.
Unified Data & Integrations
When properly set up, Klaviyo can easily act as your business’s central hub, pulling in data from all kinds of other specialized tools and integrating with even more. This enables you to make data-driven decisions and trigger activities in your other tools based on what you set up within Klaviyo.
Links to Specialized Ecommerce Tools
If it’s an ecommerce-related tool, app or SaaS service, chances are that you can link it to your Klaviyo account. Loyalty programs, subscription tools, fulfillment services, personalization, post-purchase surveys, helpdesks, POS, and more can all be connected to Klaviyo so that you can access their data from inside the app.
This allows you to build automations and set up triggers based on your customers’ activities with these other tools, giving you tons of opportunities to leverage various information and data points in your marketing efforts.
Gorgias Integration
While we mentioned over 350 integrations available with Klaviyo, we especially love how Klaviyo and Gorgias work together to sync your SMS and email marketing campaigns with your Gorgias helpdesk data.
Connecting these tools enables you to set up some useful automations, like automatically pausing campaigns for customers with open Gorgias tickets, creating Gorgias tickets for negative Klaviyo reviews, and rerouting SMS replies with keywords like “help” or “info” to Gorgias as tickets for your customer support team to review and resolve.
API for Custom Workflows
If your business needs more than a simple integration, Klaviyo also offers APIs for custom workflows and bespoke tech stacks to ensure that you can get whatever additional functionality you need to get your business set up and ready to go.
Among the APIs available to developers are an Accounts API, a Campaigns API, a Catalogs API, a Client API, and more. With these, you can create almost any custom workflow or automation you can think of.
For example, if you want to ensure compliance with local privacy and “right to be forgotten” laws, you could use the Data Privacy API to request that a profile in Klaviyo be deleted when a customer profile is deleted in another one of your systems.
Klaviyo’s AI-Powered Features
It's no secret that we at Blue Badger are huge fans of AI-powered tools that help us ensure our team works as efficiently as possible. That’s why we love how Klaviyo has integrated AI into its feature set. Here’s how Klaviyo can help boost customer loyalty and engagement with AI.
AI-Generated Email and SMS Content
Klaviyo offers Email AI to paying users, enabling them to generate almost anything they can dream up for their Klaviyo emails. This capability encompasses generating subject lines, email layouts, body copy, text blocks, spacers, image blocks, buttons, and more–all created with plain-language prompts.
Now, you don’t need to be a designer or a good writer to create Klaviyo email marketing campaigns that convert potential customers. Just type out your vision for the email and choose your favourite of the three results the AI will generate for you. Then you can manually tweak your winning design to fine-tune it and schedule it or send it to your contact list in minutes.
Want to customize your emails further? Klaviyo’s product recommendation engine can automatically suggest items to customers based on their browsing and purchase history. Just drag in a product block that dynamically fills with items each customer will most likely be interested in, all powered by Klaviyo’s data science and AI.
Similar to email, Klaviyo SMS capabilities are also AI-powered. When selecting a campaign type for a new SMS campaign, you can click the SMS assistant button to type out what you want to get out of your text message(s) in natural language to generate as many copy ideas as you wish.
AI-Assisted Smart Segmentation
Klaviyo’s segment builder also has some AI capabilities sprinkled on it to help you create segments in plain language. For example, you can prompt the AI to “create a segment of people who viewed a product but haven’t made a purchase in the last 30 days” and watch as the tool quickly pulls together a list of contacts for you to target.
No more thinking through a series of “ifs,” “ands,” or “ors,” and scrolling through drop-downs of conditions to find one that meets your goals. Just type what you need, and the tool will create it for you.
Create Winning Automations/Flows
Klaviyo is well known for its automated email and SMS flow capabilities, and now, with the addition of AI, they're even better. Now, you can type out what you aim to accomplish with your flow with details about your goal, triggers, actions, delay, and logic in plain language and watch as Klaviyo builds the automation right in front of you.
Once the flow structure is built, insert your emails and text messages (which, as mentioned above, can also be AI-generated), hit “save,” and you’re good to go!
Automated Campaign Analysis & Optimization
Klaviyo AI doesn’t just help with generating things like copy and flows; it can also analyze data and optimize your campaigns. It can help you determine the best time to send a campaign, guide your email sending frequency, and even manage A/B tests.
For example, Klaviyo’s AI can automatically choose the winning version in an A/B test and send it to the remaining subscribers, ensuring your audience gets the best-performing content with less manual review. This allows marketers to be much more agile than before; now, they can optimize their campaigns based on actual data without digging through graphs and spreadsheets.
Recently, Klaviyo added reputation repair capabilities that can automatically exclude unengaged profiles to increase deliverability. Their other new feature, auto-monitoring, can be set up to alert you if key metrics drop–all AI-powered.
Benchmarking & Analytics
How does your email open rate or SMS click rate stack up against similar brands? Klaviyo’s built-in Benchmarks tab gives you exactly that insight. It directly compares your Klaviyo account and around a hundred similar accounts in your industry or vertical. Unlike generic benchmark reports, these are personalized to your business, comparing metrics like open rate, conversion rate, list growth, etc., with “peer” companies of similar size and sector.
This means the benchmark data is actually meaningful. You can spot where you’re excelling or lagging. For example, maybe your email open rate is above peer average, but your click rate is below. Knowing this information can help you refine your strategy to improve.
Another helpful analytics feature is Klaviyo’s ability to break down campaign results by audience segment. Instead of looking at an email’s overall performance in aggregate, you can compare how different segments responded. Klaviyo allows you to analyze campaigns by segment with an Audience Breakdown view. For example, you might want to send the same promotion to your VIP customers and to new subscribers, then see which group had higher engagement or revenue.
This segmented analysis shows which type of content is best for each audience, letting you fine-tune content and targeting. We find this incredibly useful for optimization. You might learn that your repeat customers prefer one style of messaging, while prospects engage more with another, and adjust future campaigns accordingly.
Multi-Channel Messaging
One major reason Klaviyo stands out in ecommerce marketing is its integrated email and SMS platform. Instead of juggling separate tools, you can manage all your customer messaging in one place.
This unified approach ensures your branding and voice stay consistent across channels and simplifies your workflow. You can set up automated flows that coordinate emails and texts together–for example, sending a follow-up text to customers who didn’t open your email or an SMS shipping update after a purchase confirmation email.
Klaviyo’s platform also helps you follow SMS/email best practices automatically. For example, the Smart Sending feature can prevent over-messaging by skipping sends to people who recently received a message, so you don’t accidentally bombard your subscribers.
To make your SMS outreach more professional, Klaviyo supports Virtual Contact Cards (VCC), which let your text messages come from a branded contact name instead of an unknown phone number.
Lastly, Klaviyo also supports mobile push notifications as another channel. You can embed push messages into your Klaviyo flows to reach customers in-app or via a web browser. Push can be very effective because there are no spam folders, so deliverability is nearly 100%.
Advertising Integrations
Klaviyo’s long list of integrations really shines when it comes to advertising. The platform makes it so easy to connect tools, create segments, and export them, so you can seriously improve your ad performance.
Consider Meta: first, you can sync segments or lists from Klaviyo to Facebook Ads Manager. For example, export your most engaged email subscribers as a Facebook Custom Audience, then use Meta’s tools to create Lookalike Audiences of new people who resemble your best customers.
This means your Facebook and Instagram ads target users who are more likely to buy. The integration also works the other way: if you run Lead Ads on Facebook or Instagram to capture emails, those new leads can flow straight into a Klaviyo email list.
Likewise, Klaviyo’s Google Ads integration opens up powerful retargeting and targeting opportunities. Linking Klaviyo to your Google Ads account allows Klaviyo to push segments into Google for use in Search, Display, or YouTube campaigns. Simply put, you can use Klaviyo’s first-party data to create highly relevant audiences for your Google Ads.
Conclusion
Klaviyo isn’t simply another email marketing tool. Used to its full potential, it can be the heart of your entire ecommerce marketing strategy. With a suite of features built specifically for online retailers, Klaviyo gives small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses the tools they need to punch above their weight: AI-driven insights, easy integrations, automated flows, and true multichannel messaging.
At Blue Badger, we’ve worked with dozens of tools, but when it comes to driving ROI through email and SMS marketing, Klaviyo is the platform we recommend the most to our clients. As a Klaviyo partner agency, we have the skills and experience you need to get started and make the most of this platform. Get in touch with us today to learn more.
