Introduction
Klaviyo’s positioning as a B2C CRM can be confusing for B2B marketers. In essence, Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform and customer data hub that excels for online sales models. This guide will walk you through how Klaviyo works for B2B use cases, its key features (and recent updates), real-world scenarios, and how it compares to other platforms like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Brevo. By the end, you should have a clear idea if Klaviyo fits your growth strategy.
Data integration and e-commerce focus
From the ground up, Klaviyo was built for e-commerce. It plugs in directly to popular online store platforms (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc.), pulling in customer and order data automatically. Every purchase, page view, and cart event can feed into Klaviyo’s database in real time. This is a double-edged sword for B2B firms. If your business has an online ordering system or a product catalogue, Klaviyo will feel like a natural fit, giving you a unified customer profile with purchase history and website behaviour.
Custom objects and attributes
It even supports custom data properties and custom objects (a new 2025 feature) that let you store bespoke info like account IDs or contract dates for more tailored campaigns. However, if your company doesn’t transact online at all, you’ll find Klaviyo’s e-commerce-centric data model less immediately useful. (In such cases, you’d likely capture leads via forms and might not utilise the deep revenue tracking that Klaviyo offers.)
Segmentation and personalisation
Klaviyo enables granular segmentation of your audience based on virtually any data point. You can segment contacts by attributes (job title, industry, lifetime value, etc.), by past actions (opened emails, purchased X product), or by predicted behaviours. In fact, Klaviyo includes built-in predictive analytics that can estimate metrics like a customer’s lifetime value or churn risk. This is quite handy for prioritising outreach.
Segment-based content and campaigns
Using these segments, you can personalise content in emails or SMS: for example, inserting a client’s specific product recommendations or dynamically changing a message for wholesale buyers versus retail consumers. Recent updates have introduced segment-based content in Klaviyo’s new Customer Hub, allowing you to show different website content blocks to different segments of visitors. For B2B marketers, this means you can maintain separate messaging streams for, say, small business customers and enterprise clients in a single Klaviyo account. The caveat is that Klaviyo’s segmentation uses fixed properties and events (it doesn’t use free-form tags like some systems), so you’ll want to plan your data schema accordingly. Still, most find its segmentation flexibility more than sufficient for advanced targeting.
Multi-channel campaigns and omnichannel features
One of Klaviyo’s strengths is reaching customers on multiple channels from one platform. Email marketing is the core channel (with robust templates and a drag-and-drop editor), but Klaviyo also offers SMS messaging, and as of 2025 it has added native support for WhatsApp and RCS messaging. This means you can engage prospects on their phones with rich multimedia messages or WhatsApp broadcasts, all orchestrated alongside emails.
Campaign builder and channel affinity AI
Klaviyo’s new Omnichannel Campaign Builder provides a visual canvas to plan and automate campaigns across email, SMS, push notifications, and WhatsApp together. For instance, a campaign could automatically send an email series to warm up a lead, follow up with an SMS reminder, and then a WhatsApp message if they haven’t responded, all timed and triggered from one workflow.
Additionally, Klaviyo includes in-app notifications (for your website or app) and integrates with ad platforms, so you can coordinate messaging beyond just email. A particularly smart addition is Klaviyo’s Channel Affinity AI, which analyses each contact’s engagement patterns to determine the best channel and time to reach them. For example, it might tell you that a certain segment responds better on WhatsApp in the evening, versus email in the morning. This is great for optimising B2B outreach if your contacts have varied communication preferences.
Keep in mind that not every channel will be relevant for every B2B case. Many B2B marketing strategies still revolve around email and perhaps LinkedIn or phone calls, which Klaviyo doesn’t cover. But if SMS, WhatsApp or push notifications have a role in your customer communications (for example, sending order updates to wholesale buyers), Klaviyo has you covered on those fronts.
Automation and AI-driven workflows
Automation is where Klaviyo delivers a lot of value, especially with the latest enhancements. You can build automated flows (visual workflows) for common sequences like welcome series, lead nurturing, post-purchase follow-ups, re-engagement campaigns, and more. The interface for building these flows is quite intuitive: you set a trigger (e.g. “Lead form submitted” or “Contact added to X list”) and then drag in actions (send email, send SMS), time delays, and conditional splits based on contact properties.
AI assistants and smart features
Klaviyo has been expanding its AI capabilities in automation too. There’s a new Campaign Planner (introduced mid-2025) where you can input a campaign goal and Klaviyo will suggest a multi-touch plan (content ideas, timing and channel mix). They’ve also rolled out an AI Copy Assistant in the email editor that can draft email text or subject lines for you: handy if you’re stuck writing copy. Moreover, Klaviyo’s system automatically monitors your campaign performance and can alert you to anomalies (via an AI "auto-monitor") such as a sudden drop in open rates.
All these intelligent touches are aimed at saving marketers time. It’s worth noting that platforms like ActiveCampaign still lead in sheer automation depth (e.g. ActiveCampaign lets you set multiple triggers and has more complex logic options). Klaviyo’s automation is powerful but sticks to a straightforward, e-commerce oriented playbook out of the box. The good news is that for most marketing teams, especially coming from simpler tools or manual processes, Klaviyo’s automation strikes the right balance of ease and sophistication.
Analytics and reporting
When it comes to measuring results, Klaviyo provides a solid range of reports and dashboards. It automatically tracks revenue attribution for your campaigns and flows: so if a marketing email led to a sale on your store, Klaviyo will show that revenue in the campaign report. This is excellent for e-commerce ROI tracking, and for B2B if you’re integrating with a CRM or at least tracking form submissions as conversions, you can still get a sense of how campaigns drive pipeline activity.
Custom reports and dashboards
Klaviyo offers benchmarking where you can compare your email performance to industry peers of similar size. It also has custom reporting where you can build segments and see metrics like open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and even create custom metrics (for example, track how many leads book a demo after a certain email). In early 2025 Klaviyo introduced new analytics dashboards, including a dedicated marketing performance dashboard, a customer lifetime value dashboard, and the ability to create your own reports. These are quite user-friendly and don’t require a data analyst to interpret.
That said, if you need very advanced analytics or a full BI solution, you may still export Klaviyo data to another tool. Klaviyo’s attribution is very email/SMS-centric: it might not capture a complex multi-touch B2B deal journey that involves sales calls and LinkedIn touches. In those cases, you’d rely on your CRM’s reporting. But for what it does (digital campaign analytics), Klaviyo gives most marketers more than enough insight to iterate and improve.
Integrations and tech stack compatibility
In a B2B environment, no tool lives in isolation. Klaviyo has over 300 pre-built integrations that allow it to sync data with other systems. For example, Klaviyo can integrate with popular CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot: though the depth of these integrations can be limited. The Salesforce CRM integration, for instance, primarily logs a "Became Lead" event in Klaviyo when a new lead is created in Salesforce. This is useful for kicking off nurture emails in Klaviyo, but it doesn’t pull in the full CRM dataset.
Many B2B teams using Klaviyo will maintain Salesforce or HubSpot as their primary CRM and use Klaviyo alongside it for marketing emails. On the flip side, Klaviyo’s integration with e-commerce platforms (Shopify, Magento, etc.) is extremely deep, and it also connects with payment processors, webinar tools, loyalty apps and more. It has an open API and works with Zapier, meaning you can connect it to pretty much anything with a bit of effort. If you use a custom ERP or database for your product or customer info, you can export that to Klaviyo via API so that all your data lives in one place.
B2B use cases and examples
Hybrid B2B and B2C brands
Companies that sell directly to consumers as well as wholesale to other businesses can use Klaviyo to manage both audiences. You might have one set of welcome and promotional flows for retail customers, and another set (with different content and frequency) for your B2B buyers. The fashion retailer Paul Smith is a great example: they unified their retail and showroom (B2B) marketing on Klaviyo, which enabled wholesale buyers to receive tailored product updates and promotions.
Wholesale e-commerce operations
If your B2B business runs an online store for clients (e.g. a manufacturer with a Shopify Plus portal for distributors), Klaviyo can power all your communications. You can send back-in-stock alerts, new product announcements, and order follow-ups via automated flows. Because Klaviyo will track each client’s browsing and order history, you can also segment by metrics like total spend or product interests, much like a B2C retailer would.
Software, SaaS, and info-product businesses
Many SaaS companies and online course creators use e-commerce tools (like Stripe, Shopify, or WooCommerce) to handle billing or checkout for subscriptions and courses. Klaviyo can integrate with these systems to trigger onboarding emails, upsell offers, and engagement campaigns. For instance, if someone purchases a software licence through your site, Klaviyo can immediately send a personalised onboarding sequence and later prompt them with renewal reminders or cross-sell emails for additional modules.
Traditional B2B with long sales cycles
If your marketing is more about nurturing leads over months (rather than driving immediate web sales), Klaviyo can still be useful but will play a slightly different role. You might use Klaviyo to automate your email drip campaigns, send webinar invites, distribute content like case studies, and keep track of engagement signals (email opens, link clicks). However, you’ll likely rely on a separate CRM to track the non-digital touches (calls, meetings) in the sales cycle. Klaviyo won’t manage your pipeline, but it can integrate to send alerts or segment leads by CRM status (e.g. stage or score) if connected properly. In short, it can handle the "marketing" half of B2B marketing and sales.
