When it comes to customer marketing, most businesses optimize for sends. They send more when engagement drops, add urgency when customers go quiet and measure loyalty by how much someone spent last quarter. But the brands that keep customers coming back know when to pause and when to personalize — and how to measure loyalty beyond spend.
WooCommerce and Klaviyo looked at how customer marketing has been evolving through 2026, taking stock of what ecommerce data and signals look like today. They also asked leading ecommerce brands like Sephora and Fanatics to share valuable insights into their customer marketing priorities. The results are a webinar and playbook full of actionable insights to improve your marketing based on what the most successful brands are doing. Below are a few highlights.
1. They respond to what customers do, not who they are
Your typical demographic breakdown will tell you which customers are 35-to-44-year-old women in the Midwest. But it can't tell you which customer looked at the same jacket twice this week and is one well-timed email away from adding it to their cart.
High-retention brands have shifted from broad demographic targeting to behavioral signals that show shopper intent in real time. Some of those tactics look like:
- A customer who views a product twice in seven days gets a personalized follow-up with social proof rather than a generic cart abandonment flow.
- A customer with a history of consistent product reorders gets a proactive reminder to restock before they start looking elsewhere.
- A customer who purchased products during previous sales gets a cart recovery email that leads with a discount offer.
Leaning into behavioral signals yields promising results. The top 10% of abandoned-cart flows deliver a 12% click rate and roughly 7% order rate — not because they're more elaborate, but because each message reflects something specific about that customer.
For example, after migrating to WooCommerce and integrating with Klaviyo, Smile Brilliant captured more than 150 custom profile properties and rebuilt their flows around behavior and referral signals rather than purchase history alone. Automation-driven revenue grew 47% year over year.
2. They treat restraint as a retention strategy
Most marketing teams are wired to respond to declining engagement by doing more: more sends, more flows and more urgency. High-retention brands do the opposite: they build systems that know when to pause.
That instinct is backed by the numbers. Klaviyo-WooCommerce research found 62% of consumers will pay more to purchase from a brand they trust, and nearly 8 in 10 say they'd walk away from one they suspected of mishandling their data. Trust is eroded by issues like receiving a promotional email that lands while a fulfillment issue is still open, a product recommendation for something the customer already bought, or a re-engagement flow that arrives in the middle of a dispute. Each one is small on its own. Together they read as a brand that isn't paying attention.
The key is building timing controls and suppression logic directly into your automation. Pause campaigns when data shows an unresolved order issue. Reduce send frequency automatically when engagement declines instead of increasing pressure.
Treat the decision not to send as a deliberate act of brand communication, not a gap in the calendar. It's counterintuitive, but restraint is often the highest-ROI move in the stack.
3. They measure loyalty in signals, not just spend
Ninety percent of consumers belong to at least one loyalty program. However, only a small fraction of them say their program actually inspires them to make repeat purchases.
Programs that define loyalty purely by spend miss the customers who are demonstrating intent in other ways: leaving reviews, referring friends, visiting the site repeatedly before committing, or sharing user-generated content. Those behaviors are leading indicators of long-term value.
The foundation underpinning all three
None of this holds up without clean, connected data. Duplicate profiles, stale consent records and outdated segments degrade every one of the above and it happens slowly enough that most teams don't notice right away. Quarterly data audits help maintain these systems and ensure accurate data drives your retention strategy.
The modern customer marketing webinar and playbook from WooCommerce and Klaviyo cover the complete framework behind all three retention levers: data architecture, behavioral automation, loyalty program designand measurement. Check out the webinar and playbook.
