I was invited to K:SYD 2026 to check out their product releases
Klaviyo’s product serves B2C brands, but Klaviyo itself sells to businesses, not consumers, so I learned a lot from how they approach their product launches
My top insights from the new Sugar high! report, a collab between Klaviyo and James Hurman covering the relationship between discounting and company growth
Surprise! I’m back so soon thanks to Klaviyo sponsoring this issue 🤩Klaviyo, the autonomous CRM built for B2C brands, brings customers together each year at K:SYD to share ideas and learn from the best in customer experience.
You know I’m a B2B gal through and through, so I took notes of all the bits that most applied to us and I’m going to take you through them!
One of the major product announcements was launching early access to Klaviyo Social, a slate of tools specific for engaging with customers on social channels.
The cool thing to me is that this answers a question I don’t think we’ve seen many B2B brands tackle: How can you drive customers from interacting with you on social to being a contact in your CRM?
Sure, we’ve seen “click the link to get your PDF” campaigns, but really the goal there is to drive downloads of a report you’ve invested into, without setting up a nurture for that cohort of people.
Where Klaviyo is taking it to the next level is using agents to conversationally engage with customers on social channels, gathering context about what they’re interested in, and then converting them into CRM contacts (with permission to email them!) with all of that context converted over.
No more raging at the sales person who created a contact and didn’t tag which products they’re interested in…
Here’s an example of what that looks like:
The brand posts on social with a “comment X for more” caption (where more could be a piece of content, a link, a discount/offer, etc.)
A prospect sees this and leaves the comment
The K:Social agent opens a DM with that prospect, provides them the advertised benefit, and asks proactive follow up questions to find out information like which product category they’re most interested in, what’s relevant to them, and of course consent to add them to the marketing list
The agent then creates the CRM contact, complete with the demographic information collected in the chat (e.g. birthday or gender) and product interest
The agent also links the contact with their social account, including follower count so you can start building out an influencer list of genuine customers who love the product
In addition to social, Klaviyo is also adding WhatsApp as a channel. Long time Mehketeers know I think it’s an under-used channel, especially WhatsApp Communities.
How could you implement this? It’s a really simple thought experiment, how could you design your posts to drive conversation in DMs, with yourself? We already know that personal accounts perform a lot better than company accounts, and social selling has proven how effective it is. Bring these two things together, maybe starting with your founder/CEO’s account if you’re already managing their posts, is a quick way to start and test ideas.
No one really loves their CRM right?
But people in the crowd were cheering for the updates Klaviyo were announcing, and I totally get why. They’re so simple but so obvious!
When your CRM is also connected to your customer support tools (in this case, Customer Agent and Customer Hub, which are both part of K:Service,) they talk to each other in really smart ways.
For example, if a customer has an open support ticket — for a refund, complaint, or dispute — then they’re automatically paused from receiving marketing emails. That way they’re not receiving requests to give a five star review for an item that arrived broken.
Simple, but huge impact for customer experience.
What can B2B take from this? Take some time to consider your unenroll and exclusion criteria for certain lifecycle stages. For example, if a contract is out for signing, maybe don’t send that new offer with a free upgrade via email blast.
Also! Check out my video breaking down my favourite features.
Speaking of lifecycle stages (what a segue, I didn’t even plan that one,) B2B could learn a lot from B2C in how broken down this gets. There’s a reference I’ve made a few times across several Mehdeeka issues to the lifecycle stages used by realestate.com.au (or Domain, I can’t remember, and I never got a copy of the presentation) where the first lifecycle stage is “daydreaming of one day owning a home.”
While people might not be daydreaming of your streamlined, out-of-the-box solution for turning big data into actionable insights, there’s more than just lead, MQL, SQL, SAO, closed won/lost, and renewal.
In particular with the lead stage, there’s the one before that which is anonymouse site visitor or someone who’s seen your socials but not followed. Consider breaking your absolute highest ToFU content into two lifecycle stages: problem aware and problem unaware.
Klaviyo announced Composer, an AI for building out whole marketing flows, complete with assets (e.g. email), personalisation elements, and multi-branch flows that respond to the customer’s interactions (i.e., if they open the email, follow up with this.)
It’s a genuinely impressive product for delving into the different purposes and goals of customer lifecycle stages, so much so that the person I was sitting next to (a complete stranger to me) literally said “I’m so excited for this.”
I love all things pricing, so I was most excited for James Hurman’s talk on discounts and unveiling the insights from the Sugar high! report. Here’s my fave bits:
The overall takeaway is that discounting products leads to short term sales spikes, but long term it doesn’t do much. When looking at which companies are growing the most, they’re the ones who don’t discount often!
47% of consumers are now categorised as value seekers and 62% of them say they’ll defer purchases until a discount, they’ve been trained by retailers to wait for a sale
AI is being used to search the internet for discounts, it’s able to search further and faster than humans, so people are finding deals they wouldn’t have otherwise found, reinforcing that they’re hunting for deals and not paying full price
Download the Sugar high! report
Carla Penn-Kahn shared in the accompanying panel that compared to the global average, Australia has low levels of trust in AI but relatively high levels of trust in brands. Her advice for brands using AI was to be transparent around your use of it and make sure you’re consistent in your brand as the thing for people to anchor on.
How to think about this for B2B: Discounting isn’t very popular in B2B because it doesn’t usually convince companies past a certain size to speed up their internal approval processes. But one thing we can take from B2C is the range of incentives such as gift with purchase. Add in a freebie when contracts are signed, whether that’s an upgrade to your product, an extra month free of charge from the subscription, or a box of merch as part of onboarding!
To round us out, here’s a love letter to all the details that the Klaviyo team put into the K:SYD event! Having run Generate Summit for 3 years now, I never thought I’d become this detail oriented towards the flourishes that make an event truly “wow”:
The bathrooms had baskets of all your emergency essentials which is already amazing, but all the products they chose had red branding to match Klaviyo’s colour scheme, that’s next level
Likewise, the decorations were all on brand. I really wanted to take one of the flower bunches home but I didn’t stay till the very end of the event 😅
From a presentation perspective, every product presentation started by repeating Klaviyo’s core slide around “what is Klaviyo” making every talk cohesive, clear, and consistent in narrative
From an attendee perspective, there were very thoughtful touches such as a snack table to access at any point (including fruit from Harris Farm and chocolates from Koko Black, both Klaviyo customers!) and charging areas with every cable type on offer
I put together a video of the day so you can see all of these details in action!
And the nicest touch of all was how much Klaviyo was putting their customers front and centre rather than taking the spotlight for themselves. As mentioned, all of the snacks were provided by customers, and 90% of the merch was actually their customers’ products too! Everyone was given a Klaviyo tote bag, and then it was filled with Klaviyo customer products. Everything from Who Gives A Crap toilet paper (I am a customer, here’s my referral code for 27% off lol) to HiSmile toothpaste, T2 tea tins, Budgy Smuggler caps, and honestly more than I can remember.
Both for letting me crash your event and for all the inspo I got from the day! If you want to see more of the announcements from the day, check out their recap blog.
Till next time,
Kayla
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