The shift happening in email and retention marketing

Anna Sophie Christensen, Head of Email Marketing & Retention at FABO and a Klaviyo Community Champion, describes a discipline in the middle of a meaningful shift. Klaviyo has grown well beyond its origins as an email-sending tool into a full data platform, but most users are still catching up. The gap between what the platform makes possible and what brands actually do with it is exactly where retention marketers can gain a meaningful edge.

Klaviyo’s quiet transformation

Klaviyo started as an ESP - a place to send emails. Over the past few years, that’s changed considerably. The platform now markets itself across SMS, segmentation, predictive analytics, AI-driven content, reviews, and on-site capture, positioning itself less as a messaging tool and more as a data operating system for ecommerce businesses.

Anna Sophie brings a practitioner’s view to that evolution. She works at FABO across the full depth of what a modern retention setup requires: flows, segmentation, lifecycle stages, zero-party data collection, trigger logic, and predictive analytics. That range gives her a clear view of how much most brands leave sitting on the table.

The retention opportunity is real and measurable. Litmus’s 2023 State of Email report puts email’s average return at $36 for every $1 spent - a figure that reflects well-targeted, behavior-informed programs rather than undifferentiated sends. The ceiling for email as a retention channel is high. The distance between that ceiling and where most programs operate is where Anna Sophie focuses her work.

The data platform gap most brands don’t see

The core observation Anna Sophie brings to this conversation is straightforward: Klaviyo is a data platform that most brands use as an email tool. The platform holds behavioral data, purchase signals, engagement history, and preference signals for every subscriber. For many users, that data accumulates as what she describes as “a massive unstructured mess.”

That gap carries real commercial consequences. Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer (2023) found that 73% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. A weekly campaign that treats the entire list identically doesn’t meet that bar, regardless of how polished the copy is.

Brands care about personalization in principle. The harder operational problem is that Klaviyo’s expanding product surface has grown faster than the average user’s mental model of what’s possible. When a tool keeps adding capabilities without users having a clear picture of the whole, the natural response is to stick with what already works. For most brands, that means sending emails. The deeper data capabilities stay in the background, unexplored.

Where structure turns into strategy

Anna Sophie’s argument is that structure is the prerequisite for everything else in retention marketing. Before lifecycle segmentation can work, before predictive sends make sense, before zero-party data flows generate value, the data already sitting in the platform has to be organized and connected to the sending layer.

This is where she locates the meaningful work: using the existing tools with more depth, before chasing new ones. When the data structure is in place and properly mapped to the email layer, she argues, the returns start to compound. Without it, every send is an educated guess dressed up in a template.

Epsilon’s Power of Me research found that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences. That figure sits behind every decision a retention marketer makes about whether to segment more granularly, trigger on behavior, or schedule based on lifecycle stage rather than calendar date.

For ecommerce teams that have layered additional data tools on top of their ESP - including behavioral capture from onsite activity and product-level signals through tools like Hello Retail’s Audience - connecting those signals to the email layer is increasingly the strategy itself, not a nice-to-have integration.

What the Klaviyo community is actually doing

The Klaviyo Champions program has shifted in character over time. Anna Sophie describes the current state as less about troubleshooting and more about expertise-sharing - a network of advanced practitioners helping other users move up the capability curve rather than just solve immediate problems.

The community’s practical role is to help brands reframe what Klaviyo is. Klaviyo is a data platform, she explains, with email marketing as one expression of that data layer rather than its whole purpose. That reframe changes what questions get asked. Instead of “how do I set up an abandoned-cart flow,” the more productive question becomes “how do I use the data I already have to make every flow smarter.”

Klaviyo’s connected product surface has grown to include more capabilities than most users have explored - segmentation depth, predictive signals, conditional content, and analytics tooling beyond the campaign send. Champions like Anna Sophie help bridge that gap, pointing users toward product combinations and data approaches that move them from basic to advanced.

Connecting the data layer to the retention layer

For brands running Hello Retail alongside Klaviyo, the integration angle is immediately relevant. Hello Retail’s Triggered Emails and Newsletter Content both operate on the same foundational logic Anna Sophie describes: behavioral signals captured on the storefront need to connect to the email layer in a structured, actionable way. Getting the data structure right is the prerequisite for both.

The data organization problem Anna Sophie identifies in Klaviyo appears across every martech stack that has grown faster than the team’s capacity to govern it. The answer is rarely more tools. It’s getting the structure right in the tools already in place - understanding what the platform holds, building the connective tissue between data sources, and letting that structure drive the sending logic.

That’s the shift Anna Sophie is pointing at: a more complete use of what retention teams already have access to, before reaching for new channels or new platforms.

Watch the full Conversations episode with Anna Sophie Christensen: Email marketing beyond the blast.