How to use Klaviyo to build a brand voice people actually trust

7 ideas for using segmentation, AI, reviews, and SMS in Klaviyo to build up your brand voice, not loose it.

Have you noticed how much marketing sounds the same lately? Same 3 adjectives. Same “here’s what’s new” structure. Same slightly-too-polished tone. It’s not your imagination. As AI-generated content gets cheaper and easier to produce, the brands that stand out are the ones being deliberate about where a real human voice shows up, and where it doesn’t.

Dermalogica is a good example of what that looks like in practice. The brand still uses automated tools for testing, optimization, and audience segmentation, but they made a hard rule around imagery: no AI-generated visuals, ever. As Courtney Lear Wallace, head of ecommerce at Dermologica, puts it: “We’ve made a conscious decision that these visuals will not be AI-generated. Our brand serves real people, and we believe it’s important to showcase real faces and genuine human connections.”

It’s a decision about which parts of the brand are non-negotiable. You can make the same decision in your own marketing. Here are a few practical ways to use Klaviyo to get more personal without getting creepy, use AI without letting it flatten your voice, and create more moments where customers feel like there’s an actual person behind the brand.

What makes a brand feel human, and why is it harder to fake right now?

Customers can tell. Klaviyo’s own 2026 AI Consumer Trends Report found people notice AI in two main ways: when a response comes back too fast (50% say this), and when it sounds too formal or robotic (49%).

And the cost of getting caught isn’t neutral. That same report found consumers who noticed visible AI-generated marketing were 4 times more likely to say it made them trust the brand less (31%) than more (7%). That doesn’t mean avoid AI. It means the “human” part of your marketing needs to be a decision, not a default.

Dermalogica’s rule about imagery is one version of that decision. Yours might be that certain campaigns start with something written by a person. Or that your highest-volume flows get a human review. Or that SMS remains a place where customers can actually talk back.

Before you do anything else, ask: Which parts of our customer experience should feel like there’s a real person on the other side?

Find the language that sounds unmistakably like you

Before asking AI, or even another copywriter, to reproduce your brand voice, make sure you can explain what that voice actually is. You don’t necessarily need a 30-page brand guide to do that.

Pull together:

• 3 of your top-performing campaigns
• 5 customer reviews
• 5 social comments or replies
• 3 messages written by your founder or team that felt especially natural

Now look for patterns. What phrases keep showing up? Are you funny? Direct? Nerdy? Opinionated? Educational? Do customers describe your products differently than you do? Sort what you find into two short lists.

We sound like: Specific. Playful. Candid. Slightly obsessive about ingredients. Like the person who knows way too much about this category and wants to tell you about it.

We don’t sound like: “Elevate your” “Unlock” “Game-changing” Overly polished. Corporate. Like we swallowed a marketing dictionary.

Use segmentation to get specific without getting creepy

Segments are one of the easiest ways to make marketing feel more relevant without pretending you personally know each customer. But there’s a real line here. The more specific your personalization gets, the more it can tip from “this brand gets me” into “this brand is watching me.” A segment built on purchase history feels thoughtful. A message that references something a customer didn’t knowingly tell you can feel invasive.

A useful gut check before you go live with a new segment: Would the customer be flattered you noticed, or unsettled you knew?

If you’re not sure, that’s usually your answer. Instead of simply adding more personalization tokens, try creating messages around behaviors that tell you something useful about what a customer probably wants.

3 segments to try

1. Your new regulars

Build a segment of customers who have ordered two or more times within a recent period. Instead of immediately pushing purchase #3, acknowledge that they’re becoming a regular. Introduce them to something existing customers should know: a loyalty benefit, product category, community, subscription option, or even a behind-the-scenes story.

2. Your category loyalists

Find customers who repeatedly purchase from the same product category. Rather than sending them the same generic campaigns, test product education, launches, recommendations, or stories specifically related to what they’ve demonstrated an interest in.

3. Your almost-VIPs

Identify customers approaching whatever VIP means to your business, whether that’s based on spend, order count, engagement, or another signal. Instead of waiting until they officially cross the threshold, surprise them early with access, recognition, a perk, or a personal-feeling thank-you.

The principle behind all three is the same: Personalize around what someone’s behavior tells you they want, rather than how much data you have about them.

Audit your flows for the sentences that could come from anyone

Here’s another quick exercise. Open 5 of your highest-volume flows in Klaviyo. For each one, look for:

• One sentence that could have come from any brand
• One sentence that sounds unmistakably like your brand
• One place where you could acknowledge what the customer is actually experiencing
• One marketing cliché you could delete
• One place where a real person, customer quote, review, or story could replace brand copy

You don’t have to rewrite each flow. Start by replacing the most generic sentence in each one. If your abandoned cart email says: “Looks like you left something behind.” Ask what your brand would actually say in that moment.

If your welcome flow says: “We’re so excited to have you here.” Ask what a person at your company would genuinely want a new customer to know.

5 small changes like that can do more for your voice than rewriting an entire lifecycle program.

Let AI scale your voice. Don’t let it write your voice.

This is the part where a lot of brands get nervous, and it’s worth being precise about what Klaviyo’s AI actually does here. Composer, Klaviyo’s AI marketing agent, can draft campaign and flow copy trained on your existing brand guidelines and past performance, and that voice profile carries across email, SMS, and RCS.

It works best as a drafting tool you still finish by hand. Klaviyo’s own positioning is explicit about this: the point of brand voice AI isn’t to replace your voice. It’s to scale it. Nothing publishes without a human reviewing and approving it first. In practice, that means Composer is strongest when your existing copy already sounds like you, and weakest when you’re hoping it’ll invent a voice from scratch.

“There's a difference between asking AI to write your story and asking it to adapt your story. We always do the second. The core idea for our Father's Day campaign came from us, AI just helped spin up channel-specific versions so it stayed cohesive across email, social, and beyond, without ever losing the personal thread that made it feel real.”

– Adam Hutton, senior manager of global ecommerce and marketplaces at Benchmade, put it well:

That’s the useful line to hold onto.

Try the 1-to-3 method

Rather than opening an AI tool with “write me a campaign,” try this process:

1. Start with one human idea.
Write the campaign concept, product story, customer insight, founder note, joke, opinion, or observation yourself.

2. Make sure the interesting part already exists.
AI shouldn’t have to invent the reason someone should care.

3. Give that source material to Composer.

4. Use AI to adapt it.
Expand that one idea into executions for email, SMS, RCS, or different audiences.

5. Compare the output to your original.

Ask: What did AI remove that made the original sound like us?

Put that part back. Humans create the interesting part. AI helps you distribute it.

Make reviews and user-generated content (UGC) do double duty as proof

Community isn’t just an engagement tactic. It’s evidence. A glowing review or a customer’s own photo does something a brand’s copy can’t: it proves someone besides you believes what you’re saying.

Compass Coffee leaned into this directly. After bringing reviews into Klaviyo and offering a small discount for photo reviews, they saw a 70.5% jump in total reviews and 3.7 times more photo submissions in a single quarter. Those photos and quotes became usable, honest marketing content that a brand voice alone couldn’t manufacture.

If you’re not already doing this, Klaviyo lets you drop a review quote block directly into sign-up forms and emails, which is a simple way to put a real customer’s words in front of someone before the brand has to make another claim. But don’t just find your 5-star reviews and paste them everywhere.

Match the customer proof to the question someone is probably asking at that moment.

For example:

Someone abandoning their cart probably needs different reassurance than someone making their fifth purchase. The right review at the right moment can answer that question better than another paragraph of copy from your brand ever could.

One caveat worth knowing: UGC collected through Klaviyo’s Social Content Library currently can’t be exported, so plan on using it inside Klaviyo rather than pulling it elsewhere.

Use SMS as a listening channel

Two-way SMS is one of the clearest opportunities to remind customers that there’s a real person behind your marketing. Klaviyo’s SMS Conversations tab lets a real person see incoming replies and respond directly, but that only matters if you give people a reason to reply.

Most SMS programs are designed almost entirely around pushing something out: “20% off ends tonight. Shop now.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But occasionally try using SMS in the other direction.

Ask: “Quick question: what almost stopped you from ordering from us the first time?”

Or: “Which would you rather see us launch next: A or B? Reply and tell us.”

After purchase: “What made you choose [product]?”

Those answers can give you customer language for campaigns, reveal objections you haven’t addressed, inspire content, and tell you things your dashboard can’t. And when someone gives you an interesting answer, have a real person reply.

Note that SMS Conversations isn’t available on alphanumeric sender IDs, so check how your program is configured before building a strategy around two-way conversation.

Create one moment automation can’t manufacture

Some interactions don’t need to become an automated flow. In fact, sometimes being inefficient is part of what makes an interaction memorable. Try deliberately creating one unscalable customer moment each month.

You could:

• Have your founder personally reply to 10 customer responses
• Send an unexpected thank-you to highly engaged customers without including an offer
• Ask recent buyers what they wish they had known before purchasing
• Let customers vote on an upcoming product, campaign theme, or content topic
• Feature one customer’s story in a campaign
• Ask your most engaged non-purchasers what’s holding them back
• Take the most interesting SMS reply of the week and have someone on your team continue the conversation personally

Klaviyo can still help you identify who should receive that attention. The difference is that you’re using automation to find the moments worth making human, rather than trying to automate the human interaction itself.

Keep it human as you grow

This is where most brands lose the plot. More channels, more automations, and more team members make consistency harder, even for brands that still really care about that.

Consolidation can help. Corkcicle brought email, SMS, and reviews into Klaviyo and saw a 93% jump in quarter-over-quarter flow revenue afterward.

Part of the payoff isn’t just efficiency. It’s one team seeing more of the customer relationship in one place instead of guessing at tone across 5 disconnected tools. None of this requires choosing between efficient and human. It requires deciding, on purpose, which parts of your brand a customer should feel a real person behind.

Try this in your Klaviyo account today

Give yourself 30 minutes.

1. Open one of your highest-volume flows.
2. Find the sentence that sounds most like “marketing.”
3. Rewrite it the way someone on your team would actually say it.
4. Replace one brand claim with customer proof.
5. Identify one audience that deserves a more specific message.
6. Choose one customer interaction this month that you won’t completely automate.

You don’t have to make your entire marketing program more human overnight. Start with one message. Then one audience. Then one interaction.