Acquiring new customers

Launching marketing faster

Delivering one-to-one experiences

Offering conversational support

Preventing churn

1. Acquire new customers more efficiently

According to our state of retail marketing report, 1 in 5 retail brands are currently spending $251–$500 to acquire each customer. And only 1% are seeing lower acquisition costs paired with higher customer lifetime value. The current approach just isn’t sustainable.

Using AI can help retail brands break into new markets and nurture long-term customer relationships by enabling teams to do more with fewer resources. In fact, a Gartner survey shows that high-performing marketing organisations that use generative AI are 1.3x more likely to overachieve year-on-year growth margins and either meet or exceed objectives for customer acquisition.

Here’s how AI can help retail brands attract new customers while keeping CACs low:

• Auto-generate custom, on-brand sign-up forms. With just your website URL, an AI marketing agent can automatically generate a tailored, expert-led marketing plan, including essential sign-up forms for various channels—no brief or prompting required.
• Optimise sign-up form timing. Use AI to run an optimisation test to find the best display time for your forms. The test tries out different variations of display timing until it finds the highest-converting option, then automatically sets the winner live.

AI for retail in action: Luxury blanket maker Saranoni used AI to identify the best-performing placements and timing for pop-up forms across their homepage and category pages. One winning variant delivered a 14% increase in form submission rates. This helped the team work out what was most effective for their brand specifically, rather than relying on general best practices.

2. Launch marketing campaigns and automations more quickly

The problem isn’t that brands aren’t trying hard enough to launch campaigns quickly. It’s that manual processes can’t keep up with the demands of modern retail, and marketing teams have to work more efficiently to hit their goals and reach customers and prospects. And if you go too slowly, by the time you finish building one campaign, market conditions have already shifted.

Automating marketing campaigns with AI frees up your team from performing repetitive tasks, so that you can focus on strategy instead of execution. AI has also smoothed out marketing processes, increasing efficiency while maintaining quality, according to a research study on the impact of AI on marketing strategies.

Here’s how retail brands can launch content faster with AI:

• Quickly build complex flows for smarter automated marketing. Explain what you want an automated flow to do, including triggers, time delays, content, channels, and conditional splits, and AI will build the automation for you.
• Use generative AI to speed up content creation. Generative AI tools can make it easier to create talking points, brainstorm subject lines, test different styles and tones, and streamline the email and text message creation process.
• Edit creative for different campaigns or seasons. An AI photo editor empowers you to use simple prompts to update your brand images, such as swapping out colours, products, or campaign stars.
• Auto-generate custom marketing campaigns and flows.In addition to creating custom sign-up forms based solely on your website URL, an AI marketing agent can generate on-brand emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, push notifications, and flows.

AI for retail in action: Svenfish, an ecommerce shop that specialises in fresh seafood, uses AI to keep their email marketing relevant, creating top-performing subject line copy on demand. So far, Svenfish has made 82% of year-to-date ecommerce revenue with emails that used at least one AI feature

3. Deliver one-to-one experiences for every customer

Generic, one-size-fits-all marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. Today’s shoppers expect brands to understand their preferences, anticipate what they need, and deliver relevant experiences everywhere they interact with your retail brand.

In fact, 74% of consumers expect more personalised experiences from brands in 2025, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report. But personalisation at scale has historically been difficult without significant resources.

That’s where AI comes in. It analyses how customers behave, predicts what they want, and automatically tailors experiences for thousands (or millions) of customers at the same time. In a recent SurveyMonkey report, 73% of marketers said that AI contributes to creating personalised customer experiences.

Here are a few ways AI is easing the pressure on teams to deliver exceptional personalisation to their customers:

• Quickly build complex customer segments for more targeted campaigns. Describe a segment using plain language, and AI will create a segment for you—subscribers who have viewed a product but not made a recent purchase, for example, or everyone who lives within 100 miles of Boston, Massachusetts.
• Personalise send times for each subscriber.AI can analyse when each individual subscriber typically opens marketing messages, then schedule delivery for maximum engagement.
• Reach customers where they’re most likely to engage. Use AI to analyse each customer’s historical behaviour patterns and predict which channels they’re most likely to engage with, then message them there first.
• Create personalised product feeds. Use AI-powered product feeds across marketing channels to help understand what your customers might want next by analysing their past behaviour.
• Send the most relevant email or text campaign to each subscriber. In a personalised A/B test, AI can determine the winning variation for each individual subscriber, then send it to them. After each test, you can use the data to optimise future campaigns.

AI for retail in action: Drinkware brand Corkcicle uses AI-powered channel affinity to reach customers where they’re most engaged. Now, the team’s most efficient segment is customers who have engaged in the last 90 days and who prefer email. “Channel affinity allows us to be efficient and targeted and has delivered great results,” says ecommerce marketing specialist Erica Olsen.

4. Offer conversational shopping and support 24/7/365

Klaviyo’s AI shopping index found that 81% of consumers have used AI tools for shopping in the past 3 months. But while AI is becoming a regular part of a buyer’s shopping journey, it still needs to provide value.

The survey research behind the index also shows that 75% of consumers have abandoned an online purchase because they couldn’t find immediate answers to product questions. That means three-quarters of potential sales are slipping away because customers can’t get answers fast enough. Maybe they want to know if a dress comes in petite sizes, whether a product is in stock at their local bricks-and-mortar store, or when their order will arrive.

Before AI, a customer service agent had to answer these questions. If a representative wasn’t available, the sale was lost. AI customer agents solve this problem by providing instant, accurate responses around the clock.

Klaviyo’s AI consumer shopping survey also found that 40% of consumers feel that AI shopping assistants would improve their perception of a brand. They see it as a sign that you’re keeping up with technology trends. And PwC research shows that more than half (54%) of companies using AI agents have improved their customer experience.

Here are a few ways retail brands can use AI for conversational shopping and support:

• Offer conversational shopping assistance. Unlike generic chatbots, an AI customer agent that is trained on your product catalogue, FAQs, brand guidelines, and customer data can have conversations that feel personal and genuinely helpful.
• Resolve common questions for faster response times.An AI customer agent can quickly pull up information on returns policies, brand history, and different products to speed up the shopping process and cut down on customer support enquiries.
• Let customers add items to their basket directly from the chat.With an AI customer agent, customers can go from asking questions to adding items to their basket with one click.
• Automate pre- and post-purchase service.An AI customer agent can handle post-purchase tasks automatically, such as tracking orders, initiating returns, or updating subscriptions. This frees up your customer service team to focus on more complex issues that genuinely require human interaction.
• Support customers on any channel. No matter where customers reach out for help before, during, or after a purchase, both AI and human agents can respond with full context when they use an AI-powered helpdesk that brings together all your customer conversations across channels, complete with comprehensive, always-on customer data.

AI for retail in action: When natural fragrance brand Happy Wax implemented an AI customer agent, over 50% of the conversations it handled were fully resolved without any service team involvement. Customers received instant answers, and the team had more time for high-touch interactions, setting them up for success during busy periods like BFCM.

5. Prevent churn and drive retention with predictive analytics

Many retailers focus heavily on acquisition while overlooking retention opportunities. Successful retail brands will focus on building systems that turn one-off buyers into loyal, high-value customers beyond the initial purchase.

The tricky part is that churn usually happens silently. Customers won’t announce they’re leaving; they’ll just stop engaging. By the time you notice, it’s too late. But with predictive analytics, you can look at how trends, patterns, and relationships in your data might play out in the future and identify likely scenarios.

Research from the Journal of Life and Social Sciences found that AI-driven insights lead to “dramatically more accurate targeting, lower churn rates, and greater lifetime value.” These three outcomes are exactly what retail brands need to succeed in a high-CAC environment.

Here’s how retail brands use predictive analytics to retain customers and get ahead of churn:

• Proactively identify at-risk customers. AI analyses engagement patterns, purchase frequency, and other signals to predict which customers might be drifting away, and how likely they are to churn. With this information, you can send offers or re-engagement campaigns before you lose someone to a competitor.
• Reach out to VIPs with personalised recommendations. Your highest-value customers deserve special attention. You can identify VIPs based on predicted lifetime value or average order value, then trigger personalised outreach such as special offers, early access to new products, or recommendations based on their buying history.
• Encourage repeat purchases using anticipated next order dates. Understand when and what products customers return to buy, and send out automated marketing efforts with tailored recommendations when they’re most likely to purchase.

AI for retail in action: Men’s personal care brand Every Man Jack used predictive analytics to determine the best times to send replenishment reminders: slightly before or after each customer’s uniquely predicted next order date. They also run campaigns to a segment of customers with high predicted LTVs, who make the most purchases.

Move your retail brand forward with K:AI (Klaviyo AI)

Retailers that start building their AI foundations now are setting themselves up for a major advantage in the future.

K:AI (Klaviyo AI) powers built-in agents that use your real-time customer data in Klaviyo B2C CRM to plan and launch marketing, personalise every send, and resolve customer requests—all on one platform, with humans in the loop:

• K:AI Marketing Agent: Generate marketing plans, campaigns, flows, sign-up forms and on-brand content, and improve results automatically—no briefs or prompting required.
• K:AI Customer Agent: Launch your brand’s own 24/7 personalised AI assistant that can recommend products, convert customers, and resolve questions across web, email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
• Additional personalisation features: Use features such as AI-powered channel affinity, predictive analytics, and personalised product recommendations to create tailored experiences for every shopper.

Customers expect more, competition keeps intensifying, and acquiring new customers continues to get more expensive. K:AI builds launch-ready campaigns, answers customer questions 24/7, and helps you sell more by personalising every interaction.