How to Design a CRM Operation Strategy That Delivers Results — Shopify × Klaviyo Edition

In this article, we explain how Shopify merchants can design a CRM operation strategy that drives real results.

When managed properly, CRM allows you to forecast revenue with confidence, making it one of the key workflows you should plan from the very beginning of building your Shopify store.

By reading this article, you will gain a clear understanding of what it takes to get results from CRM — whether you are just starting to build a Shopify store with CRM in mind, or you are already using Klaviyo or Omnisend but struggling to gain traction in your sales.

This article focuses on CRM operations. If you are looking for a step-by-step guide on setting up Klaviyo in Shopify from the ground up, please refer to the article below.

StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to help merchants achieve the kind of granular execution and high-volume campaign delivery that manual operations simply cannot match.
If you are facing challenges growing sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service introduction guide here

CRM Operations Without Clear Goals

When we ask Shopify merchants about their CRM challenges, we hear a wide range of concerns — email frequency, automated email scenario design, operational workload, and more.

However, one thing that is often overlooked is goal-setting for CRM. The right email frequency, target audience, and content all differ greatly depending on whether your email-driven revenue is ¥1 million or ¥5 million. Without defined goals, you cannot define how to run your CRM. Start by setting your goals.

Calculating the Gap Between Goals and Actuals

Even if your CRM goal is revenue, make sure to also set intermediate KPIs such as average order value and open rate. When setting goals, your current performance data serves as a useful baseline, so gather your actual metrics as well.

Once you have your actuals and goals in place, you can calculate the gap between them. Closing this gap becomes the foundation of your CRM growth strategy.

Trends to Consider When Designing CRM Operations

Before designing your CRM operations, take a moment to review some key trends in email marketing. For example:

• Increasing email frequency drives more traffic from email.
• Increasing email frequency also leads to more subscribers tuning out.
• Finer segmentation leads to more relevant emails and higher performance.
• Finer segmentation requires more time and effort to create each email.
• Once a subscriber opens an email, they are more likely to open the next one.
• Once a subscriber ignores an email, they are less likely to open the next one.

As you can see, every action comes with both benefits and drawbacks. The key insight here is that your CRM operations need to be designed so that the benefits consistently outweigh the drawbacks.

Beyond these general trends, your own store will have unique patterns around send timing, content types, and more. Designing your operational rules based on these store-specific insights is crucial to achieving results.

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How to Design Your CRM Operations

With your trend analysis in hand, design your CRM operations to close the gap between your goals and actuals. Structure your email program so that the combined output of all emails can reach the target values you set for each KPI.

Key decisions to make include: send timing and frequency, target audience, content, and delivery method (Manual vs. Auto). Make these decisions based on the trends you identified earlier.

Set KPIs for each email and build a monitoring process so you can continuously optimize. It is also helpful to define backup plans in advance for when performance drops — this enables your team to act quickly and make on-the-ground decisions without delays.

Tracking Methods

With Klaviyo or Omnisend, you can configure UTM parameters. By setting a unique UTM Campaign for each email, you can also track performance in Google Analytics. Since you cannot change UTM settings after an email has been sent, be sure to configure the default settings when setting up your Shopify store.

Metrics such as send volume and open count can only be tracked within Klaviyo or Omnisend, so be sure to check those platforms as well. In Klaviyo, you can set up custom reports to easily export the exact data you need.

You can also connect both Google Analytics and Klaviyo/Omnisend via API and send the data to a dashboard tool like Looker for unified monitoring. Centralizing your data makes it much easier to identify issues and take action quickly.

Monitoring the Gap Between Goals and Actuals

Once your tracking is set up and your CRM is running, start aggregating the goal-vs-actual gap and begin optimizing.

If revenue is your goal, simply looking at the revenue gap will not tell you what to do. Break revenue down into metrics like number of orders, average order value, conversion rate, sessions, clicks, and opens — then calculate the gap for each. This makes your action items much clearer.

Breaking metrics down further by email type — such as broadcast emails, abandoned cart emails, and post-purchase emails — will give you an even more specific picture of where to focus your efforts.

Understanding which products are being purchased via email and the attributes of the customers buying them will also be valuable input when planning your email content and offers.

Once you have identified your action items, update your CRM operations accordingly. Use your planning sheet to maintain a clear view of the overall program and ensure emails do not conflict with each other.

If you are not confident about a particular action, A/B testing is a great option. We have previously published an article on how to run A/B tests in Klaviyo — check it out for reference.

Integrating Klaviyo with Other Apps

When running CRM on Shopify, you will typically use apps like Klaviyo, Omnisend, or Dotdigital — and these tools can be integrated with other Shopify apps to unlock even more value.

For example, by integrating with a wishlist app like Wishlist Plus, you can send reminder emails and create customer segments based on wishlisted products to send targeted emails.

By listening to the Swym-pricedrop event — which fires when a wishlisted product goes on sale in Wishlist Plus — you can automatically send price drop notification emails for items customers have saved to their wishlist.

For more on how to use Wishlist Plus with Klaviyo, check out our dedicated article (How to Integrate the Wishlist Plus App with Klaviyo for List Building and CRM).

Integrating with quiz and survey apps like PersonalizeHero or Lantern allows you to automatically send personalized emails based on quiz answers or diagnostic results.

CRM segments can also be used as audience data for Google Ads and Meta Ads. This enables you to retarget non-purchasers with ads or build lookalike audiences based on your high-LTV customers.

Both Google and Meta integrations can be set up directly from within the Klaviyo dashboard (Google integration, Meta integration).

Integrating with an e-gift app like Anygift lets you send different emails to gift senders and gift recipients. This helps encourage gift recipients to make their first purchase, naturally accelerating customer acquisition.

Klaviyo and other CRM apps can be integrated with a wide variety of additional apps to dramatically increase their value. We encourage you to explore what is possible.

Executing Your CRM Strategy at Scale with StoreHero

StoreHero helps Shopify merchants who are struggling to grow sales by supporting the thorough execution of growth strategies.

For CRM specifically, we leverage our growth platform StoreHero to enable highly personalized execution — including email, LINE, and on-site product recommendations powered by customer purchase history, attributes, and product/SKU performance and inventory data. This level of granularity and campaign volume is simply not achievable through manual operations, and it is how we support our clients in achieving continuous, sustainable growth.

We are currently offering a free store diagnostic. If you have challenges with CRM or growth strategies in general, please feel free to contact us. Learn more about our free store diagnostic here

Summary

In this article, we walked through the full process of designing and operating CRM for Shopify — from strategy to execution. CRM is a channel that can generate reliable, predictable revenue. Running it without clear goals or defined rules means you will never fully realize its potential.

If you have already adopted Klaviyo or Omnisend but are not seeing the results you hoped for, try applying the approach outlined in this article to redesign your strategy and operations.

At StoreHero, we support growth across all channels — not just CRM. If you find yourself unable to complete the design, analysis, or implementation work on your own, reach out to us. Let's grow together.

StoreHero can support you from the very foundation of building a store that sells. Feel free to get in touch. =>View StoreHero's Service Introduction Guide