📈 The CRM Shift: Why We’re Rebuilding How We Talk to Customers

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Let’s be real: scaling a DTC brand used to be simpler.

If you had product-market fit and could run a killer Meta funnel with a strong offer, you could brute-force your way to 8 figures.

That’s how we grew Obvi in the early days. We got really good at acquisition. Great ads, smooth funnels, and aggressive testing took us a long way.

But now we fear that old growth engine isn’t enough.

CAC is up. Buyers are spread across TikTok, Amazon, retail shelves, email, SMS, and even ChatGPT. Attribution is fuzzy. Margins are tighter. 

That’s we think the future of DTC growth will be defined by how well you manage customer relationships across channels. So we’re building our systems backward from that.

Today’s newsletter is all about the CRM shift. Not as a tool, but as a mindset.

On the Menu:

⏰ Obvi’s Wake-Up Call
🧭 Mapping The New Customer Maze
🪚 How We're Rebuilding Our Customer Experience Infrastructure

Note: this newsletter was made in collaboration with Klaviyo and their Beginner’s Guide to B2C CRM.

It’s a clear breakdown on how customer systems need to evolve to match the new buyer journey. 

👉 Check out the full guide here

⏰ Obvi’s Wake-Up Call

We crossed $100M in lifetime sales, with $40M in 2024. But the view of our customers was still obscure, fractured, and difficult to piece together. 

Because of that, everyone on the team had a different view of the customer. That increased the risk of:

• Duplicate messages

• Missed upsell moments

• Irrelevant offers

• And churn we didn’t see coming

We were great at marketing. But managing relationships across all of our different cohorts at scale was becoming impossible. 

So we started digging. 

What signals were we missing? What should we have known (and acted on) earlier?

That’s when it became clear: our stack wasn’t merely inefficient. It was silently costing us money, retention, and trust.

And we’re not alone:

• 66% of marketers are juggling 16+ tools

• 1 in 5 consumers will stop buying after a single bad experience

• 74% of consumers expect personalized experiences in 2025

Customer relationship management isn’t a nice-to-have feature for us at this stage. It’s becoming a survival tool.

🧭 Mapping the New Customer Maze

One mindset shift we’ve had to make → 

Stop thinking of acquisition and retention as separate functions. They’re gradients of the same customer journey.

If we only optimize for CAC and front-end conversion, we’ll miss the bigger picture. 

What we’re starting to ask now:

• WHO are our ads attracting?

• WHAT cohorts are they bringing in?

• HOW do these customers behave?

• WHY do they buy, come back, or drop off?

Retention starts before the first purchase. But to influence that, we need more than ROAS and contribution margin. We need visibility into lifecycle value, starting from the first click. 

Here’s what DTC looked like a few years ago:

Meta ad → Click to site → Add to cart → Abandon → Abcart flow → Purchase → Thank-you email

Now?

• Discover on TikTok

• Research on site

• See on Amazon

• Retargeted on Meta 

• Engaged flow via SMS

• Etc. etc.

It’s not really a funnel anymore. It’s more like a maze. But it could be a flywheel.

Trying to manage all of this with a duct-taped series of tools and a bloated tech stack is a major challenge for brands these days. 

That included us until recently.

We realized scalable personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s what separates the winners from the discount addicts.

And 1:1 personalization doesn’t work without a clean, connected view of the customer. Not just what they bought, but:

• What they almost bought

• What channels they engage on and when

• What messages resonate

• How often they order

• How they interact with support

• How much they will spend in the future

When you see all of that in one place, you stop guessing. You start really marketing.

🛠️ We’re rebuilding how we manage customer relationships—and Klaviyo is the platform we’re betting on.

If you’re serious about turning one-time buyers into lifelong customers
 → start here

🪚 How We're Rebuilding Our Customer Relationship Management Infrastructure

We didn’t start with a grand replatforming plan. We started with pain points.

Here are a few key changes we’ve been making:

1. Using AI-powered analytics to market smarter
Instead of building flows and hoping they resonate, we’re starting to use AI to help us test message variants, match them to the right channels, and estimate next purchase timing based on predicted behavior.

It’s helping us:

• Refine creative based on channel-level performance

• Personalize offers by segment without manual setup

• Predict next-best send moments. Not just on gut, but data

This lines up with a key theme in Klaviyo’s B2C CRM guide: your data isn’t just for sending emails, it’s for understanding your customers, tailoring your messaging, and future-proofing relationships.

2. Smarter segmentation

We moved beyond basic filters and built behavioral profiles, including:

• First-time buyers

• Serial discounters/return risks

• Loyalists and VIPs

• Gift buyers

• Silent churn risks

Flows are no longer one-size-fits-all. They match intent, timing, and value.

Klaviyo has helped us reframe this. Instead of static segments, we’re now thinking in terms of evolving behaviors that reflect real purchase cycles and needs. They match intent, timing, and value.

3. Behavior-based outreach

We looked at reorder behavior by SKU. If most collagen buyers reorder at 26 days, we suppress reminders until day 27+ to avoid being annoying. 

Instead of guessing, we:

• Let patterns guide outreach windows

• Test message type + channel based on lag

4. Embracing a unified customer view

This is our North Star: one profile that shows the full picture. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re making progress toward a shared dashboard that shows:

• Purchase behavior

• Engagement history

• Support interactions

• Review data

Klaviyo’s beginner’s guide helped clarify what this can unlock: better timing, smarter offers, stronger relationships.

🧠 If we were building a CRM strategy from scratch today, we’d start with:

• A unified tool for lifecycle + support + data

• AI-powered smart segmentation logic based on actual engagement

• Triggered flows tied to data, not guesses

• A suppression list powered by customer service issues

• Predicted next purchase date

When everyone on the team sees the same customer context across the entire customer journey, you make better decisions and market smarter.

🧰 🔧 Our Starter Stack for Smarter CRM

🔹 Klaviyo — More than email/SMS. We’re exploring their CDP and AI flows for send-time optimization, churn risk suppression, and behavior-based journeys. Learn more here →

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