How to Migrate From HubSpot to Klaviyo Without Losing the Customer Relationship

Direct answer: Migrating from HubSpot to Klaviyo means rebuilding your automation logic around purchase behavior instead of lifecycle stage, and Sticky Digital recommends deciding upfront which platform owns the contact record before any workflow gets rebuilt. Brands that keep both systems running in parallel without that decision end up with duplicate sends, conflicting suppression logic, and a customer getting two different emails from two different systems on the same day. The brands that get this right treat the migration as a chance to separate sales-stage automation, which HubSpot still does well, from ecommerce lifecycle marketing, which is exactly what Klaviyo is for.

Sticky Digital's Perspective

HubSpot shows up in our migration conversations more often than people expect, and it's rarely because the brand chose it for ecommerce. Most of the time, a brand started on HubSpot's free or starter CRM tier for sales pipeline management, added email marketing because it was already in the platform, and grew a full customer base inside a tool designed around deals and lifecycle stages rather than purchase behavior.

That works fine until the brand needs real ecommerce segmentation. HubSpot's contact model is built around a lead-to-customer funnel: subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity, customer. Those stages describe a B2B sales process. They don't describe what a repeat customer is doing three months after their first order, which is the exact question a retention program needs answered.

What Breaks When You Move From HubSpot to Klaviyo

The lifecycle stage problem is the first thing to solve, and it's bigger than it sounds. Every workflow you've built in HubSpot likely references lifecycle stage or a custom deal property somewhere in its enrollment logic. None of that maps to Klaviyo, because Klaviyo doesn't have a lifecycle stage property at all. It has purchase events, product view events, and custom metrics you define from your ecommerce platform directly. A workflow built around "if lifecycle stage equals customer" has to be entirely rethought as "if placed order equals true," and that's a different kind of segmentation logic, not a field rename.

Custom properties are the second landmine, same as any platform move, but HubSpot's version is trickier because HubSpot properties are often shared between sales and marketing teams. A property like "last contacted by sales rep" has no equivalent in Klaviyo and shouldn't, since Klaviyo isn't a CRM. Someone has to go through every custom property HubSpot has and decide: does this matter for ecommerce lifecycle marketing, or was this only ever useful for the sales team? Migrating everything by default just recreates CRM clutter inside a tool that doesn't need it.

Deal-based automations are the third issue, and they're the ones brands forget about until a customer complains. If your HubSpot workflows send different content based on deal stage or deal amount, none of that logic exists in Klaviyo's flow builder. Those workflows need a genuinely different foundation: order value, product category, and purchase count from Shopify or your ecommerce platform, not a deal pipeline that was built for one-time B2B sales conversations.

The Dual-System Trap

Running Both Platforms Feels Safer. It Usually Isn't.

The instinct during a HubSpot migration is to keep HubSpot running for sales and CRM while Klaviyo takes over email, which sounds reasonable and often is, right up until nobody decides which system owns the actual contact record. When both platforms independently manage suppression, unsubscribes, and consent, a customer can unsubscribe in Klaviyo and still get a sales sequence email from HubSpot a week later, or opt out of a HubSpot list and still receive a Klaviyo flow because the suppression sync was never built to be bidirectional.

Decide Ownership Before You Decide Workflows

The fix isn't complicated, but it has to happen before the rebuild starts, not after. Pick one platform as the source of truth for marketing consent and suppression, almost always Klaviyo if the goal is ecommerce retention, and build a one-way sync from HubSpot for CRM and sales data only. HubSpot keeps doing what it's actually good at: deal tracking, sales rep workflows, account management. Klaviyo owns every customer-facing lifecycle send. Brands that skip this decision are the ones we see six months later running two competing versions of the same customer relationship.

Deliverability and the First 30 Days

The domain warmup conversation matters here just as much as it does with any other platform switch, arguably more, because HubSpot brands often have lower sending volume than pure ecommerce brands and haven't built the sending reputation that regular high-frequency Klaviyo sends require. Start your first Klaviyo campaigns with your most recently engaged customers, expand over 10 to 14 days, and resist the urge to send your full list on day one just because migrating felt like a milestone worth announcing to everyone at once.

This is also the point where SMS often enters the conversation for the first time, since HubSpot's SMS capabilities are limited compared to what Klaviyo offers natively. If SMS is new, it needs its own TCPA-compliant opt-in flow built from scratch. HubSpot contact records, even ones with a phone number on file, do not carry SMS marketing consent, and assuming otherwise is a compliance problem waiting to surface.

Sequencing the Migration

Phase One: Decide Ownership, Then Connect the Data

Before any workflow moves, get the ownership decision made and get Klaviyo connected directly to your ecommerce platform, not to HubSpot as an intermediary. The behavioral data that makes Klaviyo worth the switch comes from Shopify or your storefront, not from HubSpot's CRM fields, so that connection needs to be live before segmentation work starts.

Phase Two: Rebuild Around Purchase Behavior, Not Lifecycle Stage

Welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and post-purchase flows get rebuilt first, using order and product data as the trigger logic instead of any HubSpot lifecycle property. This is usually the phase where a brand realizes how much of their previous automation was really just a sales nurture sequence wearing a retention costume.

Phase Three: Sunset the Overlap

Once Klaviyo is handling every customer-facing send reliably, formally sunset the overlapping HubSpot marketing workflows rather than letting them run dormant. Dormant workflows have a way of reactivating during a HubSpot update or a permissions change, and a customer getting a stray automated email from a system you thought you'd already retired is a bad look that's entirely avoidable. For a deeper look at how flow ownership should work across a full retention stack, see our retention marketing services overview.

Reporting Looks Different, and That Trips People Up

HubSpot's reporting is built around funnel conversion: how many leads became MQLs, how many MQLs became opportunities, how many opportunities closed. None of that framework exists in Klaviyo, and brands migrating over often go looking for a lifecycle funnel report that Klaviyo simply doesn't have, because it isn't asking the same question. Klaviyo reports on revenue per recipient, flow-level conversion, and channel attribution back to actual orders, which is a more useful question for a retention program but a genuinely different report to learn how to read.

This matters most for whoever is used to presenting HubSpot's funnel numbers to leadership. The conversation shifts from "how many contacts moved to customer stage" to "how much revenue did this flow generate and what's the trend over the last 90 days." Both are legitimate ways to measure a program. They're not interchangeable, and trying to force Klaviyo's data into a HubSpot-shaped report usually means building something clunky that doesn't reflect what either platform is actually good at showing.

Attribution windows are the other quiet difference. HubSpot's default attribution models were built for long B2B sales cycles, sometimes tracking touchpoints over 90 days or more before a deal closes. Klaviyo's attribution windows are built around ecommerce purchase behavior, which tends to be measured in a much shorter window since most purchase decisions happen faster than a B2B sales cycle. Comparing performance across the two platforms without adjusting for that difference will make Klaviyo look worse than it is, simply because the measurement window doesn't match the actual customer behavior it's trying to capture.

The Team Has to Relearn the Job, Not Just the Tool

Whoever owned email inside HubSpot was often thinking like a demand gen marketer: nurture the lead, move the deal, hit the pipeline number. Klaviyo asks a different question entirely: what does this specific customer's purchase history suggest they need next? That's not a software skill gap. It's a mindset shift, and it's the part of a migration that training documentation alone rarely fixes.

Give the person who owns email a real onboarding into how Klaviyo's segmentation and flow logic actually work, not just a walkthrough of where the buttons are. The brands that struggle for the first quarter after a HubSpot migration usually aren't struggling with the software. They're still trying to run a lead-nurture playbook inside a tool built for something else, and the platform gets blamed for a strategy mismatch that has nothing to do with the platform.

Why DIY Migrations Fail

The specific failure mode we see most with HubSpot migrations isn't a bad data export. It's dual-system drift: the brand migrates email into Klaviyo but never formally decides which platform owns the contact record, so both systems keep managing consent and suppression independently. Nobody notices for months because most sends still go out fine. Then a customer replies to support asking why they got two conflicting promotions in the same week, or an audit turns up a segment of contacts who unsubscribed in one system but are still actively receiving email from the other. By the time that surfaces, untangling it costs far more than making the ownership call upfront would have.

This happens because the migration gets split between two teams that rarely talk to each other day to day. The sales ops person handling the HubSpot side isn't thinking about email suppression logic, and the marketing person building in Klaviyo doesn't have visibility into what HubSpot workflows are still quietly running in the background. Neither side is wrong. Nobody owns the seam between the two systems, and that's exactly where the problem lives.

How Sticky Digital Handles a HubSpot Migration

We start by mapping every HubSpot workflow and custom property to determine what's actually ecommerce-relevant versus what only ever served the sales team, and we make the platform ownership decision explicit and documented before a single flow gets rebuilt. We connect Klaviyo directly to the ecommerce platform first, so segmentation is built on real purchase behavior instead of recreated lifecycle stages. Every core flow gets rebuilt from scratch using Klaviyo's native triggers, not translated line by line from a HubSpot workflow that was solving a different problem.

We build the domain warmup on a fixed schedule and stand up SMS as its own compliant channel if it's new to the brand. And we formally sunset the overlapping HubSpot marketing automations rather than leaving them dormant, with a documented handoff of what HubSpot still owns going forward. Brands that want a team that's handled this exact overlap before tend to avoid the six-month period of two systems quietly fighting each other.

FAQ

Can I keep using HubSpot for sales while running Klaviyo for email?

Yes, and for most brands that's the right setup. The key is deciding which platform owns marketing consent and suppression before building anything, so the two systems don't independently manage the same customer relationship in conflicting ways.

Do HubSpot lifecycle stages transfer into Klaviyo?

No. Klaviyo doesn't have a lifecycle stage property, since it's built around purchase and browse behavior rather than a sales funnel. Any workflow logic based on lifecycle stage needs to be rebuilt around actual order and product data instead.

What happens to my HubSpot workflows during the migration?

They should be audited to determine which are genuinely ecommerce-relevant and which only ever served sales operations, then formally sunset once Klaviyo is handling the equivalent customer-facing sends reliably. Leaving them dormant instead of retiring them properly is how duplicate sends happen later.

Does HubSpot's SMS consent transfer to Klaviyo?

No. A phone number on a HubSpot contact record does not carry SMS marketing consent. Any SMS program needs its own TCPA-compliant opt-in flow built independently, regardless of what contact data already exists.

What's the biggest risk in a HubSpot to Klaviyo migration?

Running both platforms indefinitely without deciding which one owns the contact record. That dual-system drift is what leads to conflicting suppression logic and customers receiving contradictory automated messages from two systems that were never told to talk to each other.

Brands ready to make that ownership call and rebuild it properly can start here.

Article By: Mariel Kilroy, Co-Founder, Sticky Digital

Mariel Kilroy is the Co-Founder of Sticky Digital, a retention marketing agency specializing in email, SMS, loyalty, and subscription growth for DTC brands.