The Lean Marketer’s Guide to Klaviyo Customer Profile Management at Scale

If you’ve ever opened a Klaviyo profile and found five email addresses, a birthday from 1997, and a phone number that hasn’t been active since flip phones were cool, you’re not alone.

With over 1,000 Klaviyo campaigns under their belt, our experts at Mavlers can tell. 

For lean marketing teams, managing customer profiles in Klaviyo can feel like cleaning up after a party you didn’t host. Data is duplicated, half-complete, or just plain wrong. However at scale, these messy profiles aren’t just annoying, they become a drag on your segmentation, automation, and performance. 

Not to mention the inflated costs caused by profiles that bring zero value to your business, or the risks of poor Klaviyo data hygiene creeping into your most important journeys.

A 2025 study highlights that relying on outdated assumptions for customer profiling raises the likelihood of service failures, as these profiles no longer reflect current customer needs. 

This guide is for marketers who don’t have a dedicated ops team or fancy integrations running in the background. Just you, your campaigns, and a growing pile of profiles that need wrangling. 

We’ll show you practical, scalable ways to maintain clean data in Klaviyo at scale. Let’s dig in. 

How to Clean Customer Data in Klaviyo

How to Manage Klaviyo Profiles without A Tech Team

6 Klaviyo Profile Management Best Practices

Looking for Scalable Klaviyo Data Hygiene Solutions?

How to Clean Customer Data in Klaviyo

You can clean customer data in Klaviyo by actively managing your profiles and suppressing those who have demonstrated a long, sustained period of inactivity. This process, known as active profile management, involves identifying and suppressing profiles that are not actively generating revenue. 

It’s a different concept than list cleaning, which is the practice of excluding unengaged subscribers from your regular campaign sends to maintain good deliverability. List cleaning typically focuses on shorter timeframes, while active profile management looks at a much longer, sustained period of inactivity.

To do this, you can:

• Create a segment for inactive customer profiles using a set of conditions that identify those who have never engaged with your emails, website, or made a purchase over an extended period. This is a foundational step in Klaviyo profile segmentation hygiene.
  
• Run a sunset flow as a last-ditch attempt to re-engage the profiles in this segment.

• Bulk suppress the identified profiles in the segment who don’t respond to the sunset flow.

Source: Klaviyo Help

This process ensures you are not paying for profiles that are unlikely to contribute to your business, while also maintaining a clean and efficient email list. And it’s a vital part of your Klaviyo data hygiene practices.

How to Manage Klaviyo Profiles without A Tech Team

You can manage Klaviyo profiles without needing developers for most standard tasks, such as: 

• Manual profile editing: You can update, merge, delete, and suppress individual profiles directly inside the Klaviyo dashboard. Suppressing or deleting customer profiles is also a point-and-click process from the profile’s page.
  
• Bulk operations: You can add properties or even modify existing ones for multiple users at once by preparing a CSV file and uploading it through the platform’s import contacts tool. In the same way, bulk suppression of profile properties can also be done via CSV upload. This is one easy method of Klaviyo data cleanup without developers.

While not exclusive to Klaviyo, you can collect new profile data or let users update their own properties via forms or preference centers, with all responses stored as profile properties. 

While this kind of non-technical Klaviyo data management is absolutely achievable, you must keep in mind that you do need someone to actively monitor the data and make decisions.

When Extra Hands are Needed

Early on, when your customer base is small, managing it yourself might be feasible. As you grow, you may need to offload some of that cognitive load because of:

• Monitoring and Strategy: A person needs to regularly review the inactive segment and decide on the best course of action. This includes determining if a sunset flow is necessary, what the content of that flow should be, and when to perform the bulk suppression. The goal is to maximize cost savings without negatively impacting revenue.

• Ongoing Maintenance: This isn’t a one-time task. Profiles are usually constantly being added to your account, and engagement levels are always changing. The person responsible for profile management needs to have a recurring schedule to clean the list, perhaps once a quarter or right before a new billing cycle.

Now it’s another question whether you need a dedicated “team.” But yes, you’re going to need a helping hand over time.

And whether it’s you or someone else taking it on, the key is to consistently maintain clean data in Klaviyo at scale.

To Automate Klaviyo Profile Clean-ups

If you are managing large contact lists, API-based suppression systems offer scalable, automated control over who receives emails. Instead of relying only on engagement metrics, they let developers create custom rules based on data like purchases, support history, or external sources. These systems enforce suppression automatically and log every action for compliance.

Source: Klaviyo

Webhooks enable real-time suppression triggered by specific events, such as someone entering a segment. When paired with Flows, this creates a hands-off approach to list hygiene.

Implementation requires careful setup involving error handling, rate limits, and backups. But once set up, it becomes a smart way to approach Klaviyo data cleanup without developers on an ongoing basis from then on. 

6 Klaviyo Profile Management Best Practices

As your list grows, it’s easy to lose track of which profiles are still worth keeping. Without regular upkeep, you could end up paying for contacts who never engage, skewing your performance metrics and inflating your bill. Here 6 best practices for Klaviyo customer profile management: 

1. Create a segment to identify truly inactive profiles. Use a combination of conditions such as “never opened an email,” “never visited the site,” and “never placed an order” over a long, sustained period.
   
2. Before suppressing customer profiles, run them through a sunset flow to re-engage them.
   
3. Proactively and consistently suppress profiles that have completed the sunset flow without re-engaging.
   
4. While Klaviyo allows you to delete profiles, it’s best to suppress them instead. Why? While suppression makes them unbillable and ineligible for emails, it keeps their historical data in your account for valuable insights later.
   
5. Don’t confuse regular “list cleaning” for deliverability (excluding unengaged contacts from campaign sends over shorter timeframes) with the long-term strategic goal of active profile management (suppressing permanently inactive profiles). Both are part of a larger Klaviyo data hygiene strategy.
   
6. Finally, keep an eye on your active profile count relative to your Klaviyo billing plan. Regularly managing your profiles prevents automatic plan upgrades and helps you control your marketing budget. 

It’s about staying intentional with your data. 

Accordingly, it’s a necessary investment in upkeep that pays off in the form of deliverability, performance, and growth.

Looking for Scalable Klaviyo Data Hygiene Solutions?

If you run an e-commerce business and want to get the most out of Klaviyo while boosting your ROI, book a free 30-minute call with one of our Klaviyo experts today!

At scale, Klaviyo profile management isn’t just about cleanliness. It’s about clarity. The clearer your data, the sharper your segments, the smarter your automations, and the leaner your costs. Whether it’s Klaviyo contact list cleanup or automation strategy, you don’t always need a tech team to get this right.

You just need systems, discipline, and the willingness to treat profile hygiene as a growth lever, not a chore.

Whether you’re manually tidying up rows in a CSV or exploring API automations, the goal remains the same: fewer ghost profiles, more signal, and campaigns that land with purpose. 

So with the right habits, you can confidently clean customer profiles in Klaviyo.