Customer relationship management software was built for sales teams managing corporate accounts. Brands selling to hundreds of thousands of people at £30 a time ran on a patchwork instead: an email tool, a help desk, a loyalty app, a subscription portal and a spreadsheet. When Klaviyo declared its product ‘the only CRM built for B2C’ in February 2025, it said consumer brands were juggling ’16+ disconnected tools’.
Eighteen months on, the consolidation shows in Klaviyo’s latest results. It now has over 205,000 paying customers, and the number paying more than $50,000 a year grew 36% in twelve months against about 16% for the customer base as a whole, which suggests the larger brands are moving fastest. In August, weeks after a thousand marketers filled its London conference, Klaviyo told investors that The Body Shop had taken its email, WhatsApp and analytics from the UK into five more European markets.
Buying the system is not the same as running it
YOCTO, a retention agency and Klaviyo Elite partner working with subscription and DTC brands, whose founder sits on Klaviyo’s Partner Advisory Council, sees a gap between buying the system and using it. Most brands still treat it as a mailing list: every customer receives every campaign, the cancellation page belongs to another vendor, and the numbers that decide whether a customer is worth keeping sit in a spreadsheet.
‘A CRM is only a CRM if it changes who gets what,’ says George Kapernaros, YOCTO’s founder. ‘Once the system knows a customer bought thirty days ago, or is halfway through a subscription, the right email is obvious. Most brands are paying for that knowledge and leaving it unused.’At one consumer health brand whose retention programme YOCTO runs, emails sent are down 5% so far this quarter against the same stretch of last quarter, and the revenue Klaviyo attributes to its messages is up 63%. Campaigns that earned nothing fell from nearly fifty to a handful. The promotion that brought in the most went only to people who had not bought in thirty days, excluded active subscribers, and showed its discount code inside the email and nowhere else. On the same call, Klaviyo’s finance chief said automated flows earn ten times the revenue per message of static campaigns.
Where the returns come from
The largest returns arrive when service and marketing stop being separate departments. Zaymo, which makes interactive email software, reported in a case study that a collagen brand working with YOCTO added over £700,000 in annual upgrade revenue by letting subscribers move to a larger bundle with one tap, seven days before renewal, without leaving the email.
‘The brands that will own the next few years treat the customer relationship as one system with one owner,’ Kapernaros says. ‘The software has caught up. The scarce part is strong strategy.