Why Dollar Shave Club picked a CRM purpose-built for consumer brands

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Marketing Dive · Courtesy of Dollar Shave Club

Chris Kelly

Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 1:00 AM 4 min read

Grooming brand Dollar Shave Club, subscription-based DTC food brand Daily Harvest and business-wear brand Ministry of Supply are among those using Klaviyo’s new B2C CRM platform, which today (Feb. 20) is being launched more broadly. The offering hopes to meet the needs of consumer brands who are looking to cut across silos to drive personalization.

For Dollar Shave Club, a more integrated approach to data-driven marketing comes as the company — which recently made its first major marketing move after being acquired by Nexus Capital Management from Unilever — prepares for a market that is vastly different from the one it faced at its 2011 founding.

“The customer journey and the value prop was pretty simple [in 2011]. Now it's much more complex,” said Bill Hudak, vice president of DTC acquisition and retention at the brand. “You have to play the customer centricity and personalization game to win in 2025, and Klaviyo’s platform enables us to do it.”

Klaviyo bills its B2C CRM as a platform built for consumer brands — not business-to-business firms. The platform includes marketing, analytics and customer service functions, all powered by the Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP).

Klaviyo in 2024 saw 34% year-over-year growth, with CEO Andrew Bialecki attributing the company’s strong performance to its ability to bring together data, AI and analytics. For a martech company founded in 2012 that historically focused on email and SMS marketing, the launch of B2C CRM addresses a gap in the consumer-brand marketing landscape, said CMO Jamie Domenici.

“[Brands use] a very channel-first marketing strategy, and we've noticed those are really converging and becoming more of a smarter system of interaction with your customers,” the executive said. “B2C companies are talking to their customers across the entire lifecycle, and they need a better way to communicate with their customers.”

Connecting the dots

Klaviyo B2C CRM brings together a new analytics product that is powered by artificial intelligence (AI); expanded tools that help brands run, personalize and automate campaigns; and its Customer Hub, a shopper experiences product that seeks to bring together marketing and customer service. The CRM speaks to the many needs marketers face as consumers expect fast, seamless and personalized experiences.

“For brands to meet these demands, they need to engage innovative companies that help unify fragmented tech stacks in order to deliver cohesive, end-to-end experiences that bridge the gap between marketing, commerce, and customer service,” said Roger Beharry Lall, research director at IDC, in a statement. “Connecting these dots will enable brands to forge deeper customer relationships, drive loyalty, and boost revenue growth.”

In this case, the dots that need connecting are the millions of pieces of customer data that brands accumulate. The CRM offering includes more than 350 pre-built integrations that helps brands connect customer, purchase and behavioral data without complex set ups or data silos, and is built on top of KDP, the company’s data platform that stores customer event data, for free and forever.

“You're only as good as what you do with the data,” Domenici said. “[Marketers] have to manage like 17 tools and have two people, who don't have PhDs in data. Our mission is to build out the one-stop shop that makes it easier to drive personalization.”

Marketing — or project management?

Dollar Shave Club, the erstwhile direct-to-consumer disruptor, has seen impressive results after using Klaviyo’s B2C CRM for just a few months, including reducing cancellations by a third and increasing average order value for account holders by 12%. The ability of the platform to consolidate the company’s tech stack made it a “no brainer,” explained Hudak.

When the executive joined Dollar Shave Club in September 2024, he was impressed with what the company was doing with personalization and segmentation, but was concerned that the marketing team was spending too much time and too many resources bringing everything together.

“Are we doing marketing or project management over here?” he remembers asking.

Dollar Shave Club had already been using Klaviyo’s services. Turning on the CRM functionality was as simple as pushing a button, and a crucial recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) analysis was available “out of the box.” Since then, the company has used the platform’s data insights to improve its order notification and involuntary churn campaigns; a reactivation campaign using a built-in Meta audience integration generated a 2x return-on-ad-spend.

The one-stop-shop nature of Klaviyo’s B2C CRM compares favorably to most marketing stacks, Hudak explained, adding that Dollar Shave Club is just “scratching the surface” of making the most of the new platform.

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