Profiles API overview

Before you begin

Check out our general API overview to make sure you’re ready to get started with specific endpoints.

You can use our Profiles API to create unique experiences based on profile data. A profile represents a person’s contact stored in your Klaviyo account. There are two types of profiles captured in Klaviyo which can be accessed via the Profiles API:

• Active profiles

  Profiles that can be messaged via email or SMS. For example, a profile that has subscribed to marketing updates via sign-up form.

• Suppressed profiles

  Profiles that cannot receive emails, even if they have provided consent. Learn more about suppressed email profiles.

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Note that active profiles also include profiles representing customers who have not opted-in to marketing updates - for example, a profile that has provided an email for order confirmation and tracking purposes. Learn about collecting consent and best practices.

Use cases

Here are some example use cases supported by the Profiles API:

• Create a profile with a set of profile attributes, and if it already exists, update the existing profile.
• Add custom fields to profiles that can be used for segmentation, flows, and template personalization.
• Retrieve profile data, consent status, and predictive analytics.
• Subscribe/unsubscribe profiles to email and/or SMS marketing.
• Suppress/unsuppress profiles for email marketing.

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Note that you can delete profiles with our Data Privacy API.

Data model

Profile identifiers

Profile identifiers are important for fetching profiles and merging shared data associated with a profile. A profile must have at least 1 profile identifier:

• email (recommended for use as the primary identifier)

  The profile’s valid email address (must be <= 100 characters). We recommend using regex for email validation.

• phone_number

  The profile’s phone number (must be a valid E.164 number, e.g., +15005550006). We recommend using a library like libphonenumber to ensure numbers are valid and properly formatted prior to sending.

• external_id

  A unique identifier to associate Klaviyo profiles with profiles in an external system. Usually set via integrations or API.

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Note that external_id is not involved in profile merging, so its use can lead to duplicate profiles. This identifier should only be used if you are aware of its impact on profile duplication.

Additional attributes

A profile can contain additional personal information, including:

• first_name and last_name

  The profile’s first and last names.

• organization and title

  The profile’s organization and their job title.

• image

  The profile image’s URL.

• location

  An object containing location-related information.

  • address1 and address2

    First and second lines of the profile’s street address.

  • city, country, region, and zip

    Fields for the profile’s city, country, region (e.g., state), and zip code.

  • latitude and longitude

    The profile’s latitude and longitude coordinates.

  • timezone

    The profile’s timezone name. Names from the IANA Time Zone Database are recommended.

  • ip

    The profile’s IP address.

A profile also has a properties object for storing custom properties, such as a birthday field collected via form to use in a date property-triggered flow.

Additional fields

When you make a Get Profile(s) request, there are additional fields that are not returned by default in the response. You might want to access subscription data to filter out profiles that have been suppressed for a particular reason and/or from a specific list. Use additional fields as a query parameter if you’d like to retrieve subscription data and/or predictive analytics that can help you monitor your business’s performance.

Subscription data

It’s best practice to collect consent from profiles to subscribe them to email and SMS marketing (e.g., via sign-up forms). When subscriptions-related data is collected (such as consent or list suppressions) it is stored in a profile’s subscriptions object. You must use ?additional-fields[profile]=subscriptions as a query parameter to include this data in your response. The subscriptions object should look like the example object shown below:

 "subscriptions": {
    "email": {
         "marketing": {
             "can_receive_email_marketing": true,
             "consent": "SUBSCRIBED",
             "consent_timestamp": "2023-02-21T20:07:38+00:00",
             "last_updated": "2023-02-21T20:07:38+00:00",
             "method": "PREFERENCE_PAGE",
             "method_detail": "mydomain.com/signup",
             "custom_method_detail": "marketing drive",
             "double_optin": "True",
             "suppression": [
              {
                "reason": "HARD_BOUNCE",
                "timestamp": "2023-02-21T20:07:38+00:00"
              }
             ],
             "list_suppressions": [
              {
               "list_id": "Y6nRLr",
               "reason": "USER_SUPPRESSED",
               "timestamp": "2023-02-21T20:07:38+00:00"
              }
            ]
          }
        },
    "sms": {
      "marketing": {
          "can_receive_sms_marketing": true,
          "consent": "SUBSCRIBED",
          "consent_timestamp": "2023-02-21T20:07:38+00:00",
          "method": "TEXT",
          "method_detail": "JOIN",
          "last_updated": "2023-02-21T20:07:38+00:00"
        }
     }
},

Note that the subscriptions object contains email and sms objects, for email and sms marketing data respectively. In addition to consent information, the email object includes suppression-related data with reasons for suppression, timestamps, and any lists a profile may be suppressed from.

In the following example request to Get Profiles, the subscriptions object is included as an additional field. This object is useful for fetching suppression data, such as the exact time (within a given timeframe) a list or overall marketing suppression took place (see Available subscriptions filters):

curl --get 'https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/' \
--data-urlencode 'additional-fields[profile]=subscriptions' \
--header 'Authorization: Klaviyo-API-Key your-private-api-key' \
--header 'revision: 2023-12-15'

Fetching suppressed profiles

You may want to retrieve profiles that have recently been suppressed from marketing. To fetch suppressed profiles, your request to Get Profiles should look a little like the request below:

curl --get 'https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/' \
--data-urlencode 'additional-fields[profile]=subscriptions' \
--data-urlencode 'filter=greater-than(subscriptions.email.marketing.suppression.timestamp,2023-12-05T00:00:00Z)' \
--header 'Authorization: Klaviyo-API-Key your-private-api-key' \
--header 'revision: 2023-12-15'

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Note that you do not need to include the subscriptions object in your response to filter profiles by suppression fields.

Fetching suppressed profiles from a list

The following Get Profiles request fetches any profiles who were recently suppressed from a specific list:

curl --get 'https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/' \
--data-urlencode 'additional-fields[profile]=subscriptions' \
--data-urlencode 'filter=and(equals(subscriptions.email.marketing.list_suppressions.list_id,"LIST_ID"),greater-than(subscriptions.email.marketing.list_suppressions.timestamp,2023-12-05T00:00:00Z))' \
--header 'Authorization: Klaviyo-API-Key your-private-api-key' \
--header 'revision: 2023-12-15'

Suppression data filters

You can apply the following filters to fetch profiles by suppression data including suppression reason, timestamp, and list ID. For example, you can fetch excluded profiles by list suppression and time of suppression with the following query:
?filter=greater-than(subscriptions.email.marketing.list_suppressions.timestamp,YYYY-MM-DD),equals(subscriptions.email.marketing.list_suppressions.list_id,"LIST_ID").

Predictive analytics

You can also retrieve predictive analytics with the additional fields query parameter (?additional-fields[profile]=predictive_analytics). Note that there are some conditions your account must meet in order for predictive analytics to be calculated. If your account is eligible for predictive analytics, the above query should return a predictive_analytics object like the example object below:

"predictive_analytics": {
    “historic_clv”: 93.87,
    “predicted_clv”: 27.24,
    “total_clv”: 121.11,
    “historic_number_of_orders”: 2,
    “predicted_number_of_orders”: 0.54,
    “average_days_between_orders”: 189,
    “average_order_value”: 46.94,
    “churn_probability”: 0.89,
    “expected_date_of_next_order”: "2022-11-08T00:00:00"
  }
},

Create Profile

To create a profile, you’ll need at least one profile identifier. Your request payload for Create Profile should be formatted like the example below:

{
    "data": {
        "type": "profile",
        "attributes": {
            "email": "[email protected]",
            "first_name": "Sarah",
            "last_name": "Mason"
        },
        "properties": {
            "birthday": "1989-12-13T00:00:00Z"
        }
    }
}

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When creating a profile, note that if you use a phone number as a profile identifier and you haven’t set up SMS in your Klaviyo account, you’ll need to include at least one other identifier (email or external_id) for the API call to work.

Bulk Profile Import API

Our Profiles API has support for creating and updating profiles via Spawn Bulk Profile Import Job. To learn more, see our Bulk Profile Import API guide.

Get Profile(s)

When making a Get Profile or Get Profiles request, here’s an example of how a profile should look in your response:

{
    "type": "profile",
    "id": "01H260JDT1NJVY1EF61ET64Z7F",
    "attributes": {
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "first_name": "Henry",
        "last_name": "Downing",
        "created": "2023-06-05T14:49:54+00:00",
        "updated": "2023-07-17T14:36:25+00:00",
        "last_event_date": "2023-06-05T14:49:56+00:00",
        "location": {
            "address1": "225 Franklin St",
            "address2": "6th floor",
            "city": "Boston",
            ...
        },
        "properties": {
            "FavoriteColors": ["blue","yellow"],
            ...
        }
    },
    "relationships": {
        "lists": {
            "links": {
                "self": "https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/01H260JDT1NJVY1EF61ET64Z7F/relationships/lists/",
                "related": "https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/01H260JDT1NJVY1EF61ET64Z7F/lists/"
            }
        },
        "segments": {
            "links": {
                "self": "https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/01H260JDT1NJVY1EF61ET64Z7F/relationships/segments/",
                "related": "https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/01H260JDT1NJVY1EF61ET64Z7F/segments/"
            }
        }
    },
    "links": {
        "self": "https://a.klaviyo.com/api/profiles/01H260JDT1NJVY1EF61ET64Z7F/"
    }
},

Note that the updated field represents the last time any profile property has been changed, including changes to a profile's timestamps like last_event_date (a timestamp representing when a profile was last active).

Querying profiles

Querying profiles with the Profiles API is useful for monitoring valuable information like the time a profile has last been updated, collected email and SMS consent, and average order value. Check out the supported query parameters below and test them out with our latest Postman collection. Note that support for given operators and fields is endpoint-specific. Review the API reference documentation for more information on allowed fields and query operators.

Next steps

Using your Klaviyo test account and Postman, try out the following:

• Create profiles with Create Profile and Spawn Bulk Profile Import Job.
• Use a filter on Get Profiles to retrieve a profile with a given identifier, e.g., email. Use the profile’s ID to update its custom properties with Update Profile.
• Subscribe profiles to an existing list in your test account.
• Retrieve subscriptions data from a call to Get Profiles with the additional-fields query parameter.
• Try out some of the query parameters above to customize your response.

Additional resources

• Collecting email and SMS consent via API
• Use Klaviyo’s Bulk Profile Import API
• Understanding identity resolution in Klaviyo
• Understanding profiles in Klaviyo