In a bold move to deepen its marketing intelligence stack and empower brands with richer customer insights, Klaviyo has announced its acquisition of Gatsby, a social marketing platform known for enabling brands to track, engage, and analyze influencer and customer activity across Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms.
The acquisition signals Klaviyo’s strategic push beyond traditional owned data sources — like email, SMS, and ecommerce behavior — into the fast-moving world of social signals, giving marketers a new way to bridge engagement data from the social layer into first-party customer profiles.
Bringing Social Signals into the CDP
Klaviyo, best known for its unified customer data and marketing automation platform, has long empowered ecommerce brands to act on behavioral and transactional insights. By acquiring Gatsby, the company adds a critical missing piece: real-time influencer and customer social engagement data, directly tied to individual customer records.
This integration enables brands to:
- Identify which customers are also micro-influencers or brand advocates.
- Attribute social media engagement and user-generated content (UGC) to specific customer profiles.
- Automate personalized marketing based on social activity — such as posting about a product, tagging the brand, or reaching engagement milestones.
- Track influencer ROI more effectively through unified reporting dashboards.
This opens the door to “social-aware automation” — campaigns and journeys that adjust based on what customers are doing on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, not just what they’re buying or clicking on.
Expanding the First-Party Data Universe
As third-party cookies continue to vanish and privacy regulations tighten, first-party data has become marketing’s most valuable currency. With this acquisition, Klaviyo aims to expand the definition of first-party data by bringing in user-consented social engagement signals.
By connecting social behaviors with other data points like purchase history, site behavior, and email interactions, brands can build richer, more dynamic customer profiles. This fusion enhances personalization, segmentation, and predictive analytics — especially in industries like beauty, fashion, and lifestyle, where social proof is a critical conversion driver.
Influencer Marketing Meets Lifecycle Automation
Gatsby has built its reputation as a platform that allows ecommerce brands to identify micro-influencers among their customers, track their social mentions, and run loyalty or referral campaigns based on social engagement. With this functionality now embedded into Klaviyo’s lifecycle marketing engine, the potential becomes exponential.
Marketers will be able to:
- Automatically invite high-LTV customers with strong social followings into influencer programs.
- Trigger VIP flows for customers who reach certain social engagement thresholds.
- Track how social virality correlates with revenue spikes or product demand.
- Nurture influencers just like any other customer segment, using flows that feel personal and responsive.
The convergence of influencer marketing and CRM data unlocks more meaningful, measurable, and manageable influencer programs — at scale.
A Signal of Klaviyo’s Broader Vision
This move continues Klaviyo’s broader evolution from an email/SMS tool into a full-fledged customer data and marketing intelligence platform. With recent integrations into POS systems, ecommerce platforms, and now social marketing tools, the company is betting on a future where all signals — not just transactional — feed into unified, actionable customer understanding.
Rather than seeing social as a separate channel or silo, Klaviyo’s acquisition of Gatsby reflects a new philosophy: treating social engagement as core customer behavior, on par with clicks and conversions.
A New Frontier for Data-Driven Creators and Brands
The acquisition also marks a turning point for brands and creators. For creators and influencers, it may pave the way for more transparent, automated brand partnerships and recognition. For brands, it means smarter decisions about which creators to work with, what kind of UGC is performing, and how social sentiment impacts lifetime value.
As ecommerce and social commerce continue to merge, the brands that can blend social signals into their core customer engagement strategies will lead the next wave of personalized, community-driven growth.
About This Story
This article is part of Martech’s coverage of major acquisitions, platform integrations, and strategic shifts shaping the future of customer experience and marketing technology.