CRM teams sit on email marketing data that most paid media agencies never see. Purchase history, segment behavior, engagement patterns, LTV by acquisition source. This data would make paid campaigns significantly more targeted. But it rarely makes it into the media brief.

The gap isn't intentional. It's structural. CRM teams and paid media teams use different tools, report to different people, and rarely sync on what they know. This guide covers how to bridge that gap: what data to pull from Klaviyo, how to package it for an agency, and which pieces actually change how campaigns get planned.

Why paid media teams need your email marketing data

A paid media agency working without CRM data is running on demographics and interest targeting. They know roughly who to reach but not who's actually valuable once acquired.

Your Klaviyo account knows things they don't:

Which acquisition sources produce customers who buy again vs. customers who buy once and disappear
Which products correlate with high lifetime value when purchased first
When in the year your existing customers are most likely to buy (and when they're not)
Which segments of your list are already active and should be excluded from acquisition spend

Without this information, agencies optimize for cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition metrics that don't account for customer quality. You end up acquiring a lot of people who spend once and never return, paying for customers who generate less revenue than they cost.

Sharing CRM data with your agency changes the conversation from 'who clicks cheapest' to 'who buys most over time.'

The four data exports that move the needle

1. LTV by acquisition source

Pull your customers, group them by first acquisition source (UTM campaign or medium), and calculate their 12-month revenue. If you're tracking UTMs consistently, this is a straightforward export from Klaviyo's profile data or from Shopify with a basic filter.

What this tells your agency: which channels produce customers worth keeping. A channel with a 30 EUR CAC and a 120 EUR 12-month LTV is a very different business case than one with a 25 EUR CAC and a 60 EUR LTV. Most agencies don't have visibility into this and default to optimizing for the lower CAC.

2. First-purchase product analysis

Look at your customers' first order and calculate what percentage of each product's first-purchase buyers make a second purchase within 90 days. This is often the most actionable data you can give a media team.

If 60% of customers who buy Product A make a second purchase, and only 15% of Product B buyers do, your agency should be running acquisition ads for Product A. Full stop. The creative, the offer, and the budget allocation should all reflect this. Most brands have this data and never share it.

3. Suppression list (active subscribers)

Export your active subscriber list monthly (profiles who have engaged in the last 90 days) and upload it to Meta and Google as an exclusion audience. This single step removes wasted spend on people you already have a direct channel to reach. Meta's Custom Audiences and Google's Customer Match both accept email lists directly.

In practice, most brands that implement this see a 5-15% improvement in paid media efficiency within 30 days. If your list is over 50,000 profiles, the savings are meaningful.

4. Seasonality data

Pull your email engagement metrics by month for the last 12-24 months. When are open rates highest? When do purchase rates peak? When does list growth accelerate?

This should directly inform your paid media calendar. If your audience is most engaged and most likely to buy in September and October, that's when you should be scaling acquisition spend. Running your heaviest acquisition campaigns in March when engagement is flat means you're paying to acquire people into a low-engagement period. The timing matters as much as the targeting.

How to package it for an agency

Agencies won't dig through your Klaviyo account. The data needs to come to them in a format they can use immediately. A one-page briefing document works better than a raw export.

Format that works:

Top 3 acquisition sources ranked by 12-month LTV (not CAC)
Top 3 first-purchase products ranked by repeat purchase rate
Seasonality chart: engagement and purchase rate by month
Suppression list: current active subscribers (update monthly)
Audience note: segments to exclude from all acquisition campaigns (existing buyers, recent purchasers)

Keep it to one page. If the agency needs more detail, they'll ask. The goal is to change how they set up campaigns, not to send them a data dump they'll never read.

Setting up the feedback loop

The real value isn't a one-time data handoff. It's a monthly sync where both teams share what they're seeing.

From the CRM side: which email topics are driving the most clicks and purchases this month? Which segments are growing or shrinking? What offers are resonating?

From the paid side: which creative angles are getting the best engagement? What audiences are performing better than expected? Where is CPM rising and why?

These conversations produce better campaigns than either team could plan alone. Content that resonates in email frequently translates to ad creative that works. Audience signals from paid campaigns often predict which email segments will engage next. The brands that have broken down the wall between CRM and paid media consistently outperform those that keep the two teams separate.

A monthly 30-minute sync is enough to get most of the benefit. The data briefing document gives the meeting structure.

What to send your agency this week

If you want to start immediately, here's the minimum viable version:

Export your active subscriber list from Klaviyo (Profiles > filter by last engagement date) and upload to Meta and Google as exclusion audiences
Pull your orders by product and calculate which products have the highest second-purchase rates. Share the top 3 with your agency.
Add a standing monthly task: refresh the suppression list and send updated LTV-by-source data to your agency contact

This takes about two hours to set up. It's the kind of CRM-to-paid handoff that most brands talk about but never actually implement.

For a more systematic approach, Klaviyo's reporting documentation covers how to set up custom reports that make this data extraction repeatable.

The suppression list in detail: why most brands get this wrong

The suppression list export is the fastest win available, but most brands implement it incorrectly or not at all. Here are the three mistakes worth avoiding.

Mistake one: uploading the full list instead of the active list. Your full Klaviyo subscriber list includes everyone who has ever signed up, including people who haven't engaged in two years. Uploading this as an exclusion audience removes too many people. Instead, export profiles who have opened or clicked in the last 90 days. These are the people you already have an active relationship with. Everyone else may still be worth targeting through paid.

Mistake two: uploading once and forgetting it. Lists go stale. New people subscribe. Old subscribers lapse. Your exclusion audience needs to be refreshed monthly to stay accurate. Build this into your CRM calendar as a standing monthly task. It takes about 15 minutes.

Mistake three: only uploading to one platform. If you're running acquisition across Meta and Google, both need the exclusion list. Some brands upload to Meta but forget Google, which means they're paying to re-acquire existing subscribers through search. Set up a checklist: every time you refresh the list, upload to all active acquisition platforms.

When implemented correctly, suppression-based exclusions typically improve paid media efficiency by 5-15% within 30 days. On a media budget of 10,000 EUR per month, that's 500-1,500 EUR recovered without changing targeting, creative, or bidding strategy.

Building a lookalike audience from your best customers

Your Champions segment (recent buyers, high frequency, high spend) is your best seed audience for lookalike targeting. Meta's Lookalike Audiences and Google's Similar Segments both use seed audiences to find new people who share behavioral characteristics with your best customers.

Most brands use their full email list as the seed, which includes everyone from Champions to lapsed customers who signed up three years ago. The signal quality is poor because the seed audience is too heterogeneous.

A better approach: export your top 500-2,000 customers by lifetime value and use this as the seed. You want the seed to be large enough for the platform to find patterns (minimum 500 for Meta, ideally 1,000+) but focused enough to represent a specific type of customer.

Refresh this seed audience quarterly as your customer base evolves. New high-value customers should be included. Customers who were Champions last year but have since lapsed should be removed from the seed (though they may still be worth targeting for reactivation through separate campaigns).

A real example: what changed when a brand started sharing CRM data

A fashion accessories brand I worked with had been running paid acquisition on Meta for two years. Their agency was hitting good CPM and CPC numbers. Revenue from paid was solid. But their blended CAC was gradually increasing and they couldn't figure out why.

We pulled their Klaviyo data and found that their two top-performing ad creatives were driving traffic that bought once at a discount and almost never returned. The products featured in those ads had a 90-day repeat purchase rate of 8%. Meanwhile, a product category they had barely advertised had a 90-day repeat purchase rate of 47%.

They shared this data with their agency. Within 60 days, the agency had shifted 40% of the budget toward the high-repeat-purchase product category. CPA went up slightly. But 12-month LTV of paid-acquired customers increased by 34%.

The agency wasn't doing anything wrong before. They were optimizing for the metrics they had access to. The CRM data gave them a metric that actually mattered: customer quality, not just customer volume.

That's the gap this handoff closes. Paid media teams optimize for what they can measure. Giving them access to your email marketing data expands what they can measure.

💡 SPARKCRM generates weekly CRM summaries that include segment performance, top-performing flows, and audience health data in a format designed to share directly with agency partners. Request a free audit at sparkcrm.cc to see what your account data looks like packaged for a media team.