Bird & Blend Tea Co.’s omnichannel CRM strategy is a useful reminder for ecommerce marketers: email, SMS, and WhatsApp only become more valuable when they operate from the same customer view. The UK tea retailer reported a 46% year-over-year increase in Klaviyo-attributed revenue in 2025, but the more transferable lesson is how it used customer behavior to replace broad promotions with more relevant journeys.
The figures come from a Klaviyo customer video featuring CRM Lead Chloe Counter and a subsequent Klaviyo case study. As with any vendor-published case study, marketers should treat attribution metrics as directional rather than proof that one platform alone caused every sale. Still, the operating model behind the results is highly relevant to brands trying to connect store, ecommerce, loyalty, subscription, and messaging data.
The real problem was fragmented customer context
Before its CRM overhaul, Bird & Blend faced a familiar scaling problem: useful customer signals existed, but in different systems. A person could shop in-store, buy online, subscribe to a tea box, redeem a loyalty reward, or show enthusiasm for matcha—without those actions forming one usable picture for the marketing team.
That fragmentation has practical consequences. If a brand cannot identify the difference between a first-time online shopper, a frequent store visitor, and a lapsed subscriber, it tends to default to the same discount-led campaign for everyone. That can generate short-term revenue, but it also trains customers to wait for promotions and makes marketing feel generic.
Bird & Blend’s approach was to centralize data from Shopify, Shopify POS, ReCharge, and Yotpo in Klaviyo. That matters because a unified profile can turn raw events into decisions: recommend matcha to a known matcha buyer, acknowledge an in-store purchase before sending a product reminder, or avoid treating a loyal subscription customer like a new prospect.
The company now operates across ecommerce and 30 physical stores, making that customer unification especially important. Retailers with both digital and physical touchpoints do not need more dashboards; they need a shared system that can recognize the same person and trigger the next best message.
What Bird & Blend’s omnichannel CRM strategy got right
The headline result is the 46% year-over-year increase in Klaviyo-attributed revenue. But its channel metrics reveal a more interesting pattern: the brand used each channel as part of one coordinated relationship rather than as a standalone blast mechanism.
Bird & Blend reported gaining more than 5,000 WhatsApp subscribers in its first month after launch and nearly 20,000 within six months. It also reported 269% period-over-period growth in Klaviyo-attributed SMS revenue in the second half of 2025. The later case study adds that SMS revenue per recipient rose 16% period-over-period over the most recent three months measured.
The playbook behind those results can be broken into four principles:
- Connect customer signals before building campaigns. Purchase history, store visits, loyalty activity, subscription status, and product interests should inform targeting.
- Give channels distinct jobs. Email can carry richer educational content and storytelling; SMS can support timely updates; WhatsApp can enable more interactive, conversational experiences.
- Use behavior to determine timing. A replenishment prompt, back-in-stock alert, post-purchase education sequence, or win-back journey should follow customer actions rather than an arbitrary campaign calendar.
- Build for retention, not only conversion. The point is not just to squeeze another purchase from a customer; it is to make the next interaction useful enough to earn continued attention.
Counter describes the shift as moving away from broad promotional email toward story-led customer journeys. That is a particularly strong fit for a category like tea, where discovery, ritual, flavor preferences, gifting, and seasonal launches create many reasons to communicate beyond price.
Why adding WhatsApp is not the strategy
It is tempting to read the case study as a simple argument for launching WhatsApp. That would miss the point. WhatsApp subscription growth is encouraging, but an extra channel can easily become an extra source of noise if it is not connected to preference data, purchase behavior, message frequency controls, and clear consent records.
Klaviyo’s current WhatsApp product positions the channel alongside email, SMS, push, and customer-service interactions, with real-time profile updates and cross-channel flows. In practice, that means a marketer should ask a more useful question than “Should we send this on WhatsApp?”: “Which channel is most appropriate for this customer and this moment?”
For example, an email may be best for a detailed guide to preparing matcha; a text may fit a time-sensitive delivery deadline; and WhatsApp may work well for an interactive product recommendation or a reminder that encourages a reply. The message should not be copied and pasted across all three.
There is also a compliance requirement behind this restraint. In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office says electronic marketing rules apply broadly to email, text, social direct messages, and similar stored electronic messages. Brands generally need specific consent or must meet the conditions for a soft opt-in when marketing to individuals, and every program needs an easy route to opt out.
How ecommerce teams can apply the model
Brands do not need Bird & Blend’s scale or its exact tech stack to adopt the core principles. Start by mapping the events that genuinely change what a customer should receive next, then make those events available to the CRM platform.
A practical first version might include:
- A welcome journey based on declared interests. Ask what customers want—such as gifting ideas, wellness blends, matcha, or seasonal releases—and use the answer immediately.
- A post-purchase education flow. Help customers get value from what they bought before asking them to buy again. This lowers buyer’s remorse and opens the door to relevant cross-sells.
- A replenishment or subscription-aware journey. Suppress prompts when a subscriber has already received a product and vary timing by likely consumption cycle.
- A hybrid-customer flow. Recognize store and online activity together. A store purchase should inform ecommerce recommendations, not disappear into a separate database.
- A lapsed-customer journey that does not lead with a discount. Start with a new release, useful content, or an interest-based recommendation. Reserve incentives for customers who need one.
Measurement also needs discipline. Track channel revenue, but compare it with revenue per recipient, repeat-purchase behavior, unsubscribe rates, and incremental lift where possible. If WhatsApp drives clicks but accelerates opt-outs, or SMS produces revenue only through constant discounts, the program may be borrowing from future customer value.
The next opportunity: smarter segmentation and automation
Bird & Blend says its next focus is using automated journeys and more advanced segmentation to deepen engagement and retention, including among its growing in-store communities. That is the logical next step: once customer data is connected, the advantage comes from acting on it consistently rather than manually selecting segments for every campaign.
The strongest segmentation is not demographic decoration. It is a practical expression of customer intent: product affinities, purchase cadence, store versus online behavior, loyalty status, subscription activity, engagement level, and sensitivity to promotions. Those signals let a brand reduce irrelevant messages while making its useful messages more timely.
AI can help marketers generate copy variations, analyze cohorts, and surface likely product affinities, but it cannot fix incomplete identity resolution or weak consent practices. The foundation remains clean data, sensible event definitions, channel-specific creative, and a clear customer-value exchange.
The bottom line
Bird & Blend’s omnichannel CRM strategy did not succeed because it sent more messages. It succeeded because the brand connected previously separate customer signals, used those signals to make messaging more relevant, and treated SMS and WhatsApp as complements to email rather than replacements for it.
For founders and retention teams, the takeaway is straightforward: build one view of the customer first, define what each channel is for, and automate the moments where relevance is genuinely useful. Revenue attribution may be the headline, but stronger customer relationships—and fewer generic campaigns—are the more durable win.