How to improve customer experience strategy for higher CLV
Customer lifetime value is the tell-tale sign of brand health. Here’s how to improve it.
Summary: Innovative ideas to improve customer experience
Innovative customer experience strategies focus on personalization, seamless omnichannel interactions, and fostering emotional connections with customers.
Klaviyo’s insights reveal that 66% of consumers expect brands to make them feel valued, emphasizing the need for brands to treat customer service as a revenue driver, not a cost center. This guide helps you understand how to improve your CX without additional headcount.
A good customer experience isn’t just about solving customer problems. It’s about creating a memorable experience from the moment someone interacts with your brand, so they’ll keep coming back.
According to Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report, 66% of consumers expect the brands they shop with to make them feel valued and understood. The cost of failing to meet these expectations is high: a recent survey from Qualtrics found that a whopping $3.7 trillion in global sales is at risk due to bad customer experiences.
This is why it’s so important for brands to view customer service not as a cost center, but as a revenue driver. When teams work together, supported by shared customer data and insights, they create exceptional experiences that drive loyalty and growth.
Similarly, a disjointed customer journey erodes trust. With new multi-channel tools built specifically for B2C brands, marketers are well-positioned to build and implement more effective omnichannel experiences with a unified data platform.
“The brands I see do really well have created some level of community with their audience, and with their customers,” says Ben Zettler, founder of Zettler Digital.
That’s exactly what all B2C brands should strive for—a personalized customer experience that creates an emotional connection with your brand.
Customer experience strategy vs. customer journey mapping vs. lifecycle marketing
Customer experience is the overarching emotional connection customers have with your brand.
Customer experience strategy is how your brand delivers that experience through a variety of tactics.
Customer journey mapping is a technique that breaks down and analyzes all touchpoints from awareness to loyalty, such as ads and acquisitions, customer service, delivery and fulfillment, and more.
Lifecycle marketing is one component of customer journey mapping, typically managed by the marketing team. Lifecycle marketers make decisions to help move customers through their journey from engagement to purchase, and from purchase to loyalty.
You can think of these parts working together in a way that ladders up to customer experience:
These techniques are particularly important for B2C, where buyers are only loyal to 1–5 brands, according to Klaviyo’s aforementioned research. Any business hoping to compete in a crowded market has to deliver at every touchpoint, and every touchpoint needs to reflect how someone feels at that stage of their customer journey.
Think of it this way: you’re not going to treat a first-time buyer the same as a 10-year loyal customer, and you wouldn’t treat someone who just returned an item the same as someone who just left a 5-star review.
Today, experience is everything. But it’s hard to keep up if you don’t have the right tools.
Traditional customer experience strategy isn’t working for B2C brands
Traditional customer experience strategy was designed for long, slow B2B sales cycles. While a single B2B contract is usually worth 6–7 figures and can take months to close, B2C brands can process thousands or millions of transactions in the same timeframe—and the typical B2C purchase tops out at a few hundred dollars.
That means the customer experience tools designed for a B2B buyer’s journey don’t cut it for the fast, personalized buyer’s lifecycle on the B2C side.
When B2C brands fall short on a cohesive strategy, customers can feel it. According to Klaviyo’s aforementioned research, 33% of buyers report that inconsistent pricing and promotions on different channels is their biggest frustration with retail or ecommerce brands—a glaring mistake in the age of omnichannel experiences.
The bottom line is that a poor customer experience can impact customer lifetime value (CLV): the research also confirms that 20% of B2C buyers abandon a brand after a single negative experience.
To truly connect with customers, B2C brands need to unify their marketing and customer service data so they’re delivering the kind of customer experience people have come to expect.
8 steps to building an effective B2C customer experience strategy
1. Gather your cross-functional team
Teams need to work together to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Here’s who you’ll want to gather to tackle your strategy:
• Marketing: lifecycle marketing, owned marketing, social media marketing, advertising, customer marketing, etc.
• Customer service: agents or managers who can share customer feedback and sentiment
• Operations: people who handle automation or integrations that reach customers
• Data analysts: people who manage and translate the flow of behavioral data into actionable insights
• Frontline employees: people who interact with customers in physical stores
It takes a village to build a world-class customer experience, and you’ll need everyone’s perspective to get a complete view of the customer journey.
2. Set up your customer experience tech stack and align between teams
A B2C CRM, or business-to-consumer customer relationship management system, helps businesses manage their interactions with individual customers. Choose a CRM that:
• Unifies customer data into a single source of truth without data limits or silos
• Delivers 1:1 personalization across every touchpoint
• Houses analytics that drive predictive insights and advanced behavioral segmentation
• Scales without added complexity
• Includes mechanisms to gather customer feedback, from product reviews to surveys
To get the most out of your data, your B2C CRM should function as a home base for your entire team. Make sure the one you choose integrates with all your organization’s tools, and set up training for every team who needs to use it.
3. Start collecting the right data in a shared platform
Data collection enables personalization—arguably the most important part of customer experience strategy.
With enough data, you can segment customers based on their shared preferences and interactions with your brand. Here are a few examples of segmentation:
• Site visitors who are subscribed to your email list vs. SMS
• Site visitors from various acquisition sources
• Subscribers who abandon their carts
• Customers who only purchase when a promotion is active
• Customers who purchase frequently but are not subscribed to marketing
To start personalizing your customer experience, start by tracking the interactions a subscriber and/or customer has with your brand: website behavior, purchase history, customer service tickets, and product reviews on your site. Go a level deeper by running sentiment analysis on social media and external review sites to understand brand reputation on a broader scale.
The best brands also solicit feedback. Survey customers to find out why they buy and how they feel about their experiences. Conduct interviews for more in-depth insights, and run focus groups if you have the time and resources.
And make sure to include detractors in your outreach: 27% of buyers have returned to a business after a negative experience because they were asked for their suggestions.
4. Map out your customer journeys
Define your main audience segments, then map how each typically moves from discovery to purchase and loyalty. The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework is particularly useful, here:
• Identify a key job. This is the customer’s ultimate desired outcome. What are their goals, struggles, and results?
• Understand the context. These are the factors that influence a purchase decision. How did customers research the problem? What search terms did they use? What sources of information did they rely on?
• Define the forces. These are the emotional, social, and functional factors that motivate your customer to get their job done. How bad does the problem have to be before your customer seeks a solution? What is the cost of not solving it?
The way you approach customer journey mapping will differ depending on your industry. For example:
• An ecommerce brand may want to understand how their typical social media follower makes the decision to purchase for the first time.
• A restaurant might focus on how someone makes the decision to reserve a table for a special occasion—and what makes them come back after that event.
• A hotel could analyze everything that happens between booking a room and checking in, and what it might take for someone to download their app.
Use a tool like Figma or Miro to visualize each step, and use data from tools like Hotjar or Lucky Orange to understand granular touchpoints and conversions. These tools make it easier for brands to identify the inflection points that can improve conversion.
5. Weigh your priorities
Identify your biggest blockers and opportunities to improve your customer experience, then prioritize based on impact and required effort.
Easy to fix, high impact → Do these tasks first
• Ensure consistent pricing and promotions across all channels.
• Clean up email/SMS lists to improve deliverability and engagement.
• Add clear customer review sections to product pages.
• Optimize the mobile shopping experience.
• Set up abandoned cart email flows.
• Create FAQs for product pages.
Hard to fix, high impact → Plan these tasks next
• Level up your personalization strategy based on behavioral data.
• Create a tiered loyalty program with meaningful rewards.
• Set up an omnichannel customer service system.
Easy to fix, low impact → Do when you can
• Gather user-generated content and video testimonials.
• Improve order confirmation emails.
• Set up browse abandonment email flows.
Hard to fix, low impact → Save these for later
• Create a custom mobile app.
• Implement virtual AR/VR try-on features.
• Build custom analytics dashboards.
6. Set up an early warning system
Leading indicators—data that predicts future trends—are essential to track when making big strategic changes. The earlier you can detect a potential problem, the earlier you can mitigate potential losses. Essential indicators include:
• Churn rate: If this number goes up, something’s wrong. But to understand what to do next, dig deeper—are new customers not buying for the second time, or are VIP customers starting to churn? The details will determine your fix.
• Reviews and surveys: Analyze review sentiment and survey comments to identify what stands out to customers, good or bad, about your brand. AI tools can help parse this content.
• Engagement metrics: Click rates are more useful than open rates since they indicate whether you’ve piqued buyer interest. Understand which content drives action, when customers engage with your content, and where customers drop off. Klaviyo’s flow analytics tool can show you where exactly people stop engaging.
7. Craft personalized experiences that improve CLV
A customer’s first purchase is ideally just the start of a long-term relationship. To build more customer loyalty, brands need to create personalized omnichannel experiences at scale.
Here are some examples of ways to improve the customer experience when your data lives in one platform:
• Personalized website experiences for new visitors vs. subscribers who haven’t yet purchased vs. repeat buyers
• Personalized marketing outreach after negative or positive reviews
• Location-based product messaging, like promoting moisturizers during the winter in cold climates
• Lookalike audiences of your best customers targeted with third-party ads
See it in action: Balance Me, an award-winning skincare line, developed personalized email campaigns to drive first-time and repeat purchases by creating a series of email nurture campaigns specifically for people who are new to the brand and giving customers the option to receive an email notification when an item is back in stock.
They also started sending replenishment reminders and product-specific emails that teach customers how to improve their skincare routines with complementary products. Thanks to this kind of above-and-beyond personalization, the brand now attributes 56% of revenue to email—a high-ROI channel that sees lower cost of acquisition than paid ads.
8. Measure the impact of your customer experience
After you’ve implemented changes, you’ll need to measure their impact. Start by auditing your customer journey map and tracking results.
A great way to measure the customer journey is by looking at drop-off rates. Pay attention to how different channels, campaigns, and segments contribute to revenue at each phase of the customer journey.
But specifically, here are some customer experience metrics you’ll want to look at over time to understand how you’re doing:
• Customer satisfaction metrics: net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES)
• Customer behavior metrics: retention rate, churn rate, repeat purchase rate, CLV
• Customer support metrics: first response time, resolution time, ticket volume, etc.
To get the most out of this data, you’ll want to:
Combine qualitative feedback (e.g., reviews, surveys) with quantitative data.
• Track trends over time to see the long-term impact of your customer experience strategy.
• Compare customer experience metrics against industry benchmarks.
• Use A/B testing to improve your customer experience where you’ve identified any weak points.
Align your customer experience strategy with Klaviyo B2C CRM
Building customer relationships starts with unifying your data on a single platform. Klaviyo B2C CRM was designed to deliver personalized experiences at scale, so you can create memorable customer experiences by the thousands or millions.
Klaviyo is the only CRM built for B2C—and it gives you all the tools you need to connect, analyze, and engage customers at every stage of their journey with your brand.
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