If you want to unlock the full power of Klaviyo, you need to understand profiles. Profiles are the heartbeat of the platform—the single source of truth where all your customer data, behavior, and history come together, and they power everything in Klaviyo, from targeted segments, to key flows, to your robust analytics. They’re not just records of email addresses. They’re dynamic, living databases that give you the visibility you need to spot new opportunities for engagement and send personalized, relevant, and high-converting messages at scale.
That’s because everything you know about your customers is stored in their profiles, such as their communication preferences, purchase history, product interests, or even their birthday and their favorite color if that’s something they shared with you.
In this guide, we’ll explore what Klaviyo profiles are, where they come from, what they contain, and how you can use them to drive smarter segmentation, automation, and personalization.
What Are Klaviyo Profiles?
At their core, Klaviyo profiles are unified customer records. Every profile represents a unique person in your ecosystem and contains information that you can use to create a more personalized and relevant experience that turn your subscribers into loyal customers. Together, your profiles constitute your virtual customer knowledge base.
Each profile contains:
- Their identifying details (email, phone number, subscription status).
- Their behavioral history (email opens, clicks, purchases, reviews).
- Their event data (everything they’ve done with your brand, across integrated platforms).
- Their custom properties (data points unique to your brand, like loyalty points or product preferences).
Unlike Shopify or other apps where data often lives in silos, Klaviyo pulls everything into one place. That means your Klaviyo profile is often the richest, most complete view you’ll ever have of a subscriber or customer.
Klaviyo’s pricing is based on both active profiles and email sends. The catch? Not every “active” profile is truly engaged with your brand. Some may be sitting in your account without opening emails, visiting your site, or making purchases. These disengaged profiles quietly inflate your costs while generating little to no revenue—essentially draining your budget without delivering value.
Types of Profiles in Your Klaviyo Account
When managing your Klaviyo account, it’s important to understand the different types of profiles and how they impact both compliance and costs.
1. Active Profiles (Marketable)
These are the profiles you can send marketing communications to. They fall into two categories:
- Subscribers (Explicit Consent): Customers who have directly opted in to receive marketing messages from your brand, such as signing up through a popup or checking the consent box at checkout.
- Profiles with Implied Consent (General Engagement): Customers who provided their email address during interactions like checkout but didn’t explicitly opt in. While this may qualify as consent in some regions, implied consent is not permitted everywhere and often comes with restrictions. Relying on it can expose your brand to compliance risks, especially under strict regulations like GDPR and CASL.
⚠️ Implication: Some e-commerce integrations automatically push both explicit and implied consent profiles into Klaviyo. If left unmanaged, this can inflate your list size, increase costs, and create compliance exposure.
✅ Solution: Use double opt-in where required, segment profiles by consent type, and apply consent management best practices to ensure you’re only marketing to people you’re legally allowed to.
2. Unreachable Profiles (Non-Marketable)
These profiles exist in your account but cannot be marketed to:
- Unsubscribed Profiles: Users who have opted out of receiving marketing messages.
- Suppressed Profiles: Users who have hard-bounced, marked your emails as spam, or otherwise been marked by Klaviyo as ineligible for marketing.
👉 Why This Matters:
Understanding the types of profiles in your Klaviyo account helps you stay compliant, control costs, and keep deliverability strong by only messaging the right people.
How Klaviyo Profiles Are Created
Profiles can enter your Klaviyo account from multiple sources, including:
- Signup forms: When someone joins through a popup, embedded, or landing page form.
- Shopify integration: When a customer places an order, Shopify syncs and creates their profile in Klaviyo.
- List uploads: When you manually import a list of subscribers or leads.
- App integrations: Tools like Gorgias (customer service), Recharge (subscriptions), or Yotpo (reviews) can create new profiles if they don’t already exist in Klaviyo.
- Loyalty programs: When someone signs up for your rewards program, Klaviyo generates a new profile if it’s their first time in the system.
Once a profile is created, every new activity, event, or property associated with that person gets logged and updated.
What Data Lives Inside a Klaviyo Profile?
A Klaviyo profile isn’t just a contact card. It’s a 360° view of a person’s relationship with your brand.
Here’s what you’ll find:
1. Event History (Metrics)
Every action a subscriber takes—called a metric or event—is logged. For example:
- Viewed product
- Submitted form
- Subscribed to email
- Placed an order
- Opened or clicked an email
Each event carries its own properties. For instance, an “Ordered Product” event will show what was purchased, the SKU, price, and order total.
2. Subscription & Engagement Status
You’ll see:
- Whether they’re subscribed to email and/or SMS.
- When and how they subscribed (form, integration, upload).
- Campaigns and flows they’ve received.
- Opens, clicks, bounces, and spam complaints.
3. Custom Properties
This is where Klaviyo shines. Custom properties in Klaviyo are user-defined data points that you can attach to a contact’s profile. Unlike standard fields such as name or email, custom properties let you store information that’s unique to your brand or your customers—giving you richer insights and enabling more personalized marketing.
These properties can capture anything from demographics and preferences to survey responses and even third-party data pulled in through integrations. By going beyond basic contact details, they become the foundation for advanced segmentation, personalization, and automation.
Examples of Custom Properties
- Demographic Information: Gender, birthday, age, or location.
- Customer Preferences: Choices around email frequency, product categories, content type, or communication channels.
- Behavioral Data: Interests like favorite product types, style preferences (e.g., “casual,” “formal,” “minimalist”), loyalty points or tier, or purchase behavior (prospect vs. repeat purchaser).
- Survey Responses: Answers collected from quizzes or forms to better understand needs and opinions.
- Third-Party Data: Imported details such as product ratings, reviews, or even pet information like breed or microchip ID.
- Source Information: Where a customer came from (e.g., a specific signup form, quiz, lead magnet or ad campaign), often tracked using the
$sourceproperty. - Shopify tags imported through integration.
How Custom Properties Are Used
- Segmentation
- Group customers by shared attributes for highly targeted campaigns (e.g., sending a skincare line promo to customers who selected “oily skin” in a quiz).
- Personalization
- Dynamically tailor subject lines, product recommendations, and offers to individual preferences (e.g., “Happy Birthday, Sarah—here’s 20% off your favorite category: Shoes!”).
- Automation
- Trigger flows or campaigns based on property values (e.g., send VIP rewards to loyalty members, birthday offers on the exact date, or replenishment reminders based on quiz answers).
✅ In short: Klaviyo custom properties transform generic profiles into deep customer insights, giving brands the tools to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
4. Demographic & Location Data
Profiles also capture IP-based data and checkout information like:
- City, state, country.
- Preferred language.
- Shipping address from orders.
This is especially powerful for regional campaigns or localized product launches.
Where to View Klaviyo Profiles
When you click on a user’s name in Klaviyo, you’re taken to their profile page—a central hub where you can view key custom details, subscription status, and consent information. This gives you quick access to the insights you need, right when you need them, to better understand and engage with each customer.
To view profiles in Klaviyo:
- Go to Audience → Profiles.
- Search or scroll to find a subscriber.
- Click on their profile to view full details.
Inside, you’ll see:
- Subscription status (email/SMS).
- Source of signup (specific form or integration).
- Coupons or discounts issued.
- Event history (all metrics they’ve triggered).
- Custom properties and tags.
- Engagement timeline (first active, last active, last updated).
This is your command center for understanding how each person interacts with your brand.
Why Klaviyo Profiles Are So Powerful
Profiles aren’t just data containers. They help you see your customers as individuals, and are the fuel for segmentation, automation, and personalization.
Here’s why they matter:
- Advanced Segmentation: Use profile data to build hyper-targeted segments (e.g., “prospects who signed up via quiz but haven’t purchased”).
- Personalized Flows: Add splits and conditional logic to flows (e.g., show different messaging to first-time buyers vs. repeat customers).
- Message Relevance: Avoid embarrassing mistakes, like sending “first-time discount” emails to loyal VIPs.
- Enriched Data: Profiles evolve over time with every action, integration, and property—making them smarter than siloed Shopify or app data.
Simply put: Klaviyo profiles let you talk to subscribers like individuals, not just inboxes.
Final Thought
Klaviyo profiles are the central nervous system of your email marketing. They pull together all your customer data into a single, unified record that grows richer with every interaction.
When you leverage profiles effectively, you can:
- Understand your audience deeply.
- Segment with surgical precision.
- Deliver personalized, relevant, and timely messages.
- Drive higher engagement, deliverability, and ultimately—sales.
If you’re serious about scaling your brand with Klaviyo, start by mastering profiles. Everything else builds on this foundation.
