Getting started with Klaviyo's CDP

You will learn

Learn more about using Klaviyo’s customer data platform (CDP) to gather robust customer insights across all your marketing initiatives. Klaviyo CDP enables more advanced data management, manipulation, and analysis. It also provides actionable strategies to employ across each of your individual audiences and your business as a whole.

Before you begin 

Klaviyo CDP is separate from the email and profile plans, and you must have both to access the CDP functionality. Head to our billing guide to learn more about this plan or get started if you are a new customer.

Klaviyo’s CDP is built on the same infrastructure as Klaviyo’s marketing application, and it allows you to more effectively manage and activate data, run advanced reporting and predictive modeling, and sync data in Klaviyo with other systems at scale.

What is a CDP? 

A customer data platform (CDP) is a system that collects and unifies data from multiple sources at scale, and makes it available for manipulation and distribution to other analytics, insights, marketing automation, and ad platforms.

Klaviyo’s CDP is a fully integrated customer data platform that enables more effective management and activation of your data. Klaviyo’s CDP provides tools to enrich and transform data, run more advanced reporting and predictive modeling, and sync data from Klaviyo to other outside systems.

Purchasing the CDP

Klaviyo CDP is not included in Klaviyo’s standard marketing application, and a CDP subscription is required to access the associated functionality.

New Klaviyo customers

If you are a new customer, you can purchase Klaviyo’s CDP, along with an email or SMS plan. Learn more about Klaviyo plans and CDP.

Existing Klaviyo customers

To purchase Klaviyo CDP:

1. Navigate to your account in the bottom left corner and select Billing.
2. On the Create your plan tab select Current plan to proceed to checkout, where you'll see the option to add the Klaviyo CDP to your current plan. 
3. Select CDP on the checkout page and enter the number of profiles you need for your plan. 

Billing

Since Klaviyo CDP allows you to better understand all customers (not just the ones you send to), the plans are based on total profiles in your account. The overall total profile count is the total number of profiles associated with your Klaviyo account, regardless of their marketing status and channel (this includes email, SMS, and push profiles today). Any profile that is being stored and tracked in Klaviyo will be represented in this count.

Note that it is best practice to retain all your profile data with Klaviyo CDP, and suppress rather than delete inactive profiles. This allows the CDP to leverage all your customer data when creating predictions, and provide more reliable reports and insights.

Additionally, deleted profiles can enter your Klaviyo account again as a new profile through engagement with your brand, and trigger unwanted marketing automations. Similarly, email addresses that may get added by a bot as part of a list bombing attack can be added again, potentially harming your deliverability.

Intelligence vs. data management 

The features available as part of Klaviyo’s CDP are split into 2 groups:

• Intelligence
  The Intelligence components of Klaviyo’s CDP allow you to leverage Klaviyo for your reporting needs beyond marketing channel performance, focusing on strategic audience and business intelligence.
  

• Data management
  The Data management components of Klaviyo’s CDP allow you to manipulate and transform your data to make it more actionable, with better functionality to support getting data in and out of Klaviyo.

Interface

After purchasing the Klaviyo CDP, you’ll see the navigation menu in Klaviyo update with an additional item called CDP.

Within the CDP item in Klaviyo navigation, you’ll see the following tabs to access the new features:

• Intelligence
• Data management

Intelligence features

Funnel analysis report

The funnel analysis report provides the ability to see where customers may be dropping off in their journey with your brand. The report allows you to set up and analyze the specific steps of a customer’s marketing journey and the number of customers who reach each step. 

For example, you may create an analysis that starts with customers who Placed Order, then Fulfilled Order, and finally Refunded Order, as shown below. 

Within this analysis, you can review a breakdown of the number and percentage of customers who reached each step and see where you can optimize your marketing efforts.

RFM analysis report

The recency, frequency, and monetary values (RFM) report provides deep customer insights based on purchasing behaviors and automatically categorizes these behaviors and customers into groupings (e.g. Loyal customers). 

These groupings enable you to analyze customer behavioral patterns over time and identify areas where you can optimize your marketing strategies. 

For those customers who may be at risk, you can also use these insights to drive winback campaigns and reduce churn.

Customizable CLV (CCLV) report

The customer lifetime value (CLV) report predicts your customers’ expected purchases and behaviors over time. This report details your customers' current buying habits across each of your marketing channels and functions (campaigns, flows, forms, and segments), and then models potential future purchases based on this data. 

These insights provide opportunities for you to cross-sell and up-sell upcoming purchases, as well as how to best personalize the customer buying experience, including around key times of year and events that matter to certain customers. Examples of some of this report’s features are shown below.

Audience performance report

By assessing the performance of your individual segments, the audience performance report lets you quickly spot segments that are performing successfully and unsuccessfully. The report provides detailed information on:

• Each of your segments
• Their overall success per channel
• Their total conversions or revenue

From here, you can use these insights to tailor marketing efforts toward underperforming segments. Examples of some of this report’s features are shown below.

Custom metrics 

By default, Klaviyo provides metrics that track your business’s performance and measure success (e.g., a Placed Order event). However, there may be instances where you need to create custom metrics to more accurately capture how your business runs. For example, your Placed Order events include recurring subscriptions by default, and you’d like to review only orders placed through your ecommerce website.

The custom metrics feature in Klaviyo allows you to configure your own events for more accurate reporting and events that better represent your business operations.

Some example of common use cases for custom metrics include:

Separating retail and ecommerce events (Shopify or other custom integrations)
With Shopify and some custom integrations, physical retail (POS) and e-commerce orders will come through as a single event (e.g., Shopify Placed Order event).

However, if you would like to separate these out to see the efficacy of each individual event type, you can set up a custom metric like the example below. Here, the point of sale (POS) is not being included in the Placed Order event and combined with other ecommerce data.

Removing recurring subscription events with Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce
As noted above, standard Shopify integrations, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce will include subscriptions in Placed Order events automatically. This means that they are calculating both ecommerce and subscription orders together. In the example below, by using does not equal, you can isolate and review Placed Order metrics that do not include subscription orders.

Custom monitors 

With custom monitors, you can configure alerts to quickly identify and resolve issues around key metrics and objects in Klaviyo (i.e., segments and flows). 

There are 3 types of custom monitors you can set up in Klaviyo: 

• Single flow monitor
  A flow to monitor key performance metrics for and receive alerts about. 
• Single metric monitor
  An event to monitor and receive alerts about. 
• Single segment monitor
  A segment to monitor and receive alerts about.

Catalog insights 

The product analysis dashboard in Klaviyo CDP allows you better understand customer behaviors related to specific product purchases, and craft marketing to match these pathways. 

You can review insights around how, what, and when products in your catalog are driving orders, and align products at the right time in the customer journey.

Some methods you can strategically use product analysis insights include: 

• Adjust post-purchase flow timing
  Set up a flow triggered off of a purchase event and add a wait step based on insights from the Repeat purchase timing card.

• Adjust post-purchase flow content
  Set up a flow triggered off of a purchase event to promote a product recommendation from insights in the Products bought in the next order card.

• Automate recommended bundles/co-purchases
  Set up a flow triggered off of an abandoned cart event with a reminder to purchase and a product recommendation from Products bought in the same cart card.

• Inform your merchandising strategy
  Identify the best products to promote together or in succession in campaigns based on Products bought in the next order or Products bought in same cart cards.

Data management features

Data warehouse sync

The data warehouse syncing feature allows you to sync profile and event data to third-party data warehouses at a regular cadence, allowing you to store and analyze key information about your customers outside of Klaviyo. 

Klaviyo supports connections with the following data warehouses:

• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon S3
• Google BigQuery
• Microsoft Azure 
• Snowflake

Webhooks

Webhooks in Klaviyo enable you to build webhook-based applications in external systems based on events that are captured in Klaviyo. They can pass information or “call” other applications, tools, and servers via HTTP POST requests to notify your external systems that an event has occurred. 

Webhooks available with CDP support message-related events like Unsubscribed, Received email, or Clicked email. You can also set up webhooks without the limitations of being in a flow.

Data transformation

The data transformation tool in Klaviyo enables you to transform profile properties in Klaviyo without the need for development. 

You can Format, Standardize, or Merge your profile property values with this tool, allowing you to make your data more useful and for more accurate segmentation and personalization.

With the Format transformation method, you can update profile property values’ formatting.

With the Standardization method you can set rules to automatically replace specific profile property values. 

With the Merge transformation method, you can merge multiple custom profile properties into 1 property.

Code

Code enables you to execute custom functions in response to events captured in Klaviyo. You can write your own Javascript or Python code in the editor, and they are then executed directly in the platform.

With Code, you can send data to your external systems without having to set up a public HTTP endpoint to receive webhooks, and build custom functionality that is triggered in response to an event’s occurrence. You can also access many popular prebuilt modules to facilitate creating custom solutions.

APIs

Group membership API

Klaviyo’s group membership API enables you to personalize dynamic web experiences and recommendations in real time based on segment and list membership. 

The group membership API can be leveraged with a website personalization tool to create and test different experiences on your store. 

Outcome 

Klaviyo CDP enables you to have one source of truth for your marketing and helps you optimize each marketing channel and customer interaction at scale.

With Klaviyo CDP, you can achieve: 

• Increased customer lifetime value
  With higher retention rates and decreased acquisition costs, you can better understand your customer base to target and personalize your audience more effectively.
• Overall cost savings
  Save money with fewer resources, fewer tools, and a decreased need for custom development with 1 platform for your CDP and marketing communications.
• Faster and independent execution
  Faster access to data and insights gives more ownership to marketers who need to execute without an IT team.
• Data accuracy
  Maintain more consistent and accurate data with seamless interaction between all tools in your tech stack.

Additional resources

Understand how Klaviyo billing works

Learn about Klaviyo's CDP