Klaviyo has launched Klaviyo Social Marketing, a product designed to connect social media engagement with customer relationship marketing.
The launch adds a social-focused tool to Klaviyo's broader business-to-consumer customer relationship management platform, as brands try to turn followers and interactions on third-party platforms into direct customer contacts.
Social media has become a major source of customer engagement for consumer brands, but much of that activity remains separate from the systems companies use for email, text messaging and other direct marketing. Comments, direct messages, mentions, creator partnerships and user-generated content often sit outside the core customer records used by marketing teams.
The new product lets brands automatically respond to social interactions and collect consent for email, SMS and WhatsApp communications. It also brings social engagement data into customer profiles and stores owned and user-generated content in a central library for reuse across marketing channels.
Marketers can use the data gathered through those interactions to build audience segments, run targeted campaigns and automate outreach based on customer behaviour on social platforms.
Why it matters
The launch comes as social commerce expands and brands reassess their reliance on audiences built on platforms they do not control. Klaviyo cited forecasts that social commerce could become an $8.5 trillion market by 2030.
For many retail and consumer businesses, the challenge is not attracting attention on social platforms but turning that attention into direct, lasting customer relationships. Email databases, text subscribers, and consent-based messaging channels typically give brands more control over how they communicate with shoppers than social platform algorithms do.
Jamie Domenici outlined Klaviyo's rationale for the launch.
"For years, social has been one of the richest sources of customer insight, yet it has largely existed outside the systems brands use to build customer relationships. The future of marketing isn't about treating social as a separate channel. It's about making it part of a unified, omnichannel marketing strategy. By connecting social engagement to the rest of the customer journey, we're helping brands turn social interactions into lasting customer relationships," said Jamie Domenici, Chief Marketing Officer, Klaviyo.
Customer example
Klaviyo cited Australian swimwear brand Kulani Kinis as an early user of the product. The brand has used the software to connect social engagement data with its broader customer strategy.
Kulani Kinis has grown its global ambassador programme to more than 130,000 members, five times larger than before, according to Klaviyo. Over the past year, the brand has also collected more than 4,800 user-generated social posts tagging it.
Jemma Sears described how the system fits into the brand's broader marketing set-up.
"For a long time, organic social was on an island while the rest of our marketing stack worked together. Klaviyo Social Marketing changed that by helping us connect social and eCommerce data, giving us a more complete view of our customers and making it easier to deliver more relevant experiences across channels. As we've scaled our brand ambassador program, that visibility has helped us better understand what content resonates and where our community is most engaged," said Sears.
Wider platform
The social marketing product is part of Klaviyo's effort to broaden its customer relationship management offering beyond core email marketing tools. Klaviyo positions its platform as a system that combines customer data, marketing, service, analytics and artificial intelligence for consumer brands.
In practice, adding social data could provide marketers with another source of first-party and zero-party information at a time when many businesses are trying to reduce their dependence on third-party tracking and improve the quality of their customer records. Data collected from social interactions can then be used alongside purchase history, messaging activity and website behaviour.
The product is generally available to users. Klaviyo says it serves more than 196,000 paying customers and has more than 350 integrations with other software tools.
The launch reflects a broader shift in marketing technology as vendors try to bring more customer activity into a single system rather than treating social, commerce and direct messaging as separate functions.