Email Personalization at Scale: Automating Without Losing The Human Touch - EP6

Sending a birthday email saying, hey, happy birthday, Chase, here's a special 20% off gift to celebrate with us. That feels really good to feel more than an anonymous name or an email. Personalization is going to help you not have as many people churn out.

What are the things that someone is doing on your website or within your emails, and how can you leverage that to send a personalized email?

If someone buys a winter coat, for example, you might send an email featuring accessories that match that winter coat. So that to me is like dynamic personalization. You You can even take it one step further, which is segmentation-based personalization.

Or dude, maybe if someone isn't opening the email, then you're firing off the SMS. Someone is engaging with the SMS, this person is more likely to click an SMS. Let's start sending them more SMS messages.

Now also, you can actually go too far the other way. Chase, I know you've seen it all. So gimme 5 mistakes that you've seen that— 1,000 subscribers, Chase.

Insane, man. I'm so excited. Here's to the next 1,000, huh?

I know, it was so fast. We had that video go off on segmentation that we had just take off and had extreme listenership. And it's been pretty cool to watch seeing a video actually take off. And I know you're no newcomer to viral things, but it's cool when you see it on YouTube because I think you and I are the same. We're still all learning it right now.

Yeah, I'm such a YouTube noob. So it could be 1,000, it could be 10,000. I'm super excited.

Yeah. And we talk about that. I think what's interesting on YouTube is that I've been watching a lot of YouTube and their personalization engine's pretty dang good on that little thing. And I think what I think is really interesting is it's not just personalization to what you watched. I swear they're like taking all the information from your inbox and all these different things that you do doing because it's just too good and too right often. And I think this is exciting because I think it's a real challenger to TikTok.

And on that note, it kind of summarizes what we're talking about today. We're going to talk about how to get creepy personal like YouTube before email.

Let's talk about it in 3, 2, 1.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah. You know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah.

What is up everyone? Welcome to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing in e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host Chase Diamond. Yo Chase, first things first, let's give a big shout out to our sponsor here for this pod. Our sponsor is Appbrew. For brands that are scaling, a great way to add retention and loyalty is to launch a mobile app on your store. Appbrew can help you drive conversions, Pros for performance-driven mobile apps. Go check them out at appbrew.com and let them know that we sent you. All right, Chase. Well, look, dude, I've got a lot of things on today's agenda, but I want to start off as always before we even share the agenda on something hot off the press. Can I share it with you?

Yeah, hit me. What is it?

All right. So, you know, Cox Cable?

Yeah.

Okay. So Cox Cable is not really big except when people get the internet, everybody gets a Cox email. And surprisingly, a lot of people still take that email and use it. I don't know. Do you use your internet provider's email that they give you?

No, I didn't even know I got one.

Well, they do. If you—

who are you on?

Like AT&T or something like that?

I couldn't even tell you. That's how bad it is. I don't even know what I use.

Well, they do give you one and Cox gives you one. Well, the big news with it, and it's not really big news, but it's positive news in my opinion, but Cox has decided to take their emails and move it over through Yahoo emails. Now, why I think this is really cool is that Yahoo is way easier to inbox than Cox, its old spam filters were. So this is actually an improvement for email marketers. Should be easier to start delivering an inbox to the Cox That's interesting.

I know we didn't prepare for this. What would you guess? Like, how many people do you think are using Cox emails? Is that low millions, would you imagine?

Yeah, I'm sure there's still— look, you know, like, you know, when people go, well, why don't you use Google? Why do you use Bing? Or why do you use this? You know what I mean? Like, Microsoft Bing is a highly used product because it comes pre-installed on a computer. If you think about Cox, first time someone's buying internet, often they might be buying internet and they mean like, hey, I need an email. Oh, here's this one for free that my provider is giving me at cox.com or whatever, and I'm going to start using it. So I would still say probably in the millions. I wouldn't be surprised. At least anytime you sign up for Cox, you have an email address that is given to you.

How about that?

Yeah, makes sense. So a couple million people that could potentially be receiving emails in the inbox better.

As a marketer, we'll take it. And it'll be easy. Well, it's not— it's just better, but it's also easier. The interface probably got better too, but I think it's just easier on email marketers out there because Cox has been a little bit of a challenge sometimes.

All right, we'll take what we can get, huh?

Yeah, exactly. A little win for the email marketers out there today. So, all right, let's jump into today's agenda, Chase. I've got a lot on the agenda. I've got 4 hot topics today I wrote down. So first, we're going to talk about personalization, man. And the topic of today's pod is— and you know, this might change a little bit, but we've called it Personalization at Scale: How to Automate Without Losing the Human Touch. Now, that's the fancy way of saying it for the Google and YouTube algorithms. But the reality is personalization has been a word that's been used and abused in this market in the worst ways. It's kind of like AI or cloud or any of these other words that people been using. But the reality is personalization is not actually that complicated. In fact, I think a lot of times when people talk about personalization, we think about pipe dreams of things that we wish we could do because that is like the human behavior as a marketer to want to do that. But the reality is I want to spend the time today on this pod breaking it down and talking about what it is. And we're going to go down like the 7 ways of you can do personalization. Then we're going to talk about why it matters. I think that's important because why? Let's talk about some tactics on how to use it and then we'll talk mistakes because that's always a good way to wrap it up.

All right.

Does that sound good? Yeah, let's run it. All right.

Well, Chase, I'm going to have you kick it off with the most basic elements of personalization. You kick it off, you'll do like basics and a couple, and I'll jump in and do a couple along the way. All right.

So 2 that come to mind. So number one is quite frankly the basics. So any kind of name and contact info, right? So someone's first name, right, is typically the go-to. That's the most popular. So including that within the subject line, within the kind of the intro of hello so-and-so, right? Hey Jimmy. Hello Chase. Using that within an email or an SMS is typically the kind of the common go-to, right? So it could be Hey Jimmy, I got a great deal for you today. Or Jimmy, Black Friday, Cyber Monday's here. Go shop now, right? Just leveraging basic things we kind of have and collect about you. That's the first. Taking it one step further would be some kind of behavioral personalization. And this is kind of the next layer that goes above and beyond just first name and better to do, right? I think, hey, first name is the bare bones. That's the bare minimum you have to do. And that doesn't even cut it anymore. So personalization based off customer's behavior. So things like their browsing history, Things like their email activity and things like kind of their purchase behavior. So what are the things that someone is doing on your website or within your text messages or within your emails? And how can you leverage that to send a personalized email? So for example, if someone views a specific product multiple times but doesn't buy, you need to be sending them emails and text messages reminding them about the item. And after a certain amount of time, if they're still not buying, you need to serve them a discount. So combining steps 1 and 2, hey Jimmy, are you still interested in these running shoes? If so, here's 10% off your next order. So that was the first name plus the things we know about you. So those are kind of my first 2. Do you have anything to add or what are you kind of thinking about?

Yeah, I've got different ones to think about because when you think about personalization, I love that you broke down the simple ones that are very important to understand and we'll talk about them a little bit more. But I start thinking about data and how to leverage data to be able to offer people different things. So it gives me 2 ideas that comes into mind. So the first thing is, and I don't know how much you know about this, Chase, but like, you know, when you can set up like if-else statements inside of your emails, so people are matching different content pieces and that's what dynamic content ultimately is, right? So I start with the dynamic content field, which is like dynamic fields to display personalized content depending on the customer's data. I'm talking about things like recommendations, special offers, content based on like previous and past experiences. So like if someone buys a winter coat, for example, Chase, right? You might send an email featuring accessories that match that winter coat. So that to me is like dynamic personalization. But I think you can even take it one step further, which is like segmentation-based personalization. And I'm talking about using like purchase frequency, lifetime value, engagement levels, or, you know, relevance of any data that you really have and you can set up like if-else statements. So I set up a block, for example, on my ESP and I say, hey, if they're spending more than $100, I wanna show 'em these products. But if I'm showing less than $100, display this product. And that personalized segmentation-based personalization is a really quick way to kind of segment out and send one email, but ultimately have that little snippet change automatically based on the data. So you're not really spending the time building the segment up front, but you're letting the segmentation do itself its own like justice basically by doing it in real time. Those are 2 that I like when I think about data. What about you, Chase? What else did I spark in your mind?

Nice. Yeah. And I think like 4 that we've mentioned so far, they're all building blocks, right? So leveraging kind of behaviors, some of the segmentation type stuff, you know, what we know about them lends us to being able to recommend kind of personal product recommendations. Each person should receive recommendations that are unique and specific to them, right? So we know what people have done on the site. As I mentioned before, we know what they're doing within email and SMS. Start sending them, you know, products that are matched to the things that you know about them. So, you know, if you're a skincare brand and you notice someone's reading on the blog maybe, or someone's looking at in their cart or what someone's purchased in the past, you might say, hey, these new serums that we have are going to be a great fit for you. And they're going to be like, oh my gosh, like, how do they know that? Right? And it's going to be not necessarily a creepy thing. It's going to be an appreciation thing where like, oh wow, I actually am looking for serums. This makes it easy. I don't have to make a decision on what to buy. They've literally served it up on a platter of what serum I need to get based off what they know about me. This is fantastic. And that's what I miss about like Meta. Like Meta has not gotten as great. Meta used to be so creepy to the point like they knew what I wanted before I even knew that I wanted it. And it used to lead me to buying the products or the services for my friends, family, myself that I was talking about and thinking about and browsing about, but I couldn't decide on. I missed that part. So bringing that to email, I think it's like the last standing channel, email and SMS, to be able to do these things.

And we have the data, Chase. I mean, like TikTok or YouTube being able to create this personalization engine for us, they don't have that much more data than we do. We have the same things. We have the clicks, we have the opens, we have the website visits. You have the date of the purchase and history. Like, there's so much data available right now. It's just an act of being able to do it. And I think this is like that thing I said in the beginning, like a lot of people wish the technology was easier to do. And this limitation has always been for like the bigger companies because they can afford the bigger, more expensive things. And later on, we'll talk about tools of AI that's solving this. But like, there's definitely tools that are thinking about this right now.

Yeah, 100%. And then one last one I have is like also too, like depending on like the lifecycle and kind of the stage in which a customer's at or a prospect's at, I don't think a lot of people think about that, right? Whether someone's like, you know, hot off the press and kind of, or fresh, or someone's like really warmed up. And this kind of goes back to of like the RFM stuff, like what you know about people, where they're at, what they have done versus what they haven't done, right? So being able to service new subscribers, first-time buyers, frequent buyers, previous customers that aren't buying, right? So new subs, right, are going to receive a welcome series while inactive subs might get something like a win-back campaign or some kind of enticing offer to bring them back. So just being able to serve content to each person based off of what we know about them, but also to like how warm or lukewarm or cold they are to us and our brand and our company.

No, I like that one. All right. I got one last one for you because I don't think we've mentioned it yet. But event-based personalization. I'm talking about special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, or loyalty program milestones that are triggered, right? So sending a birthday SMS saying, hey, happy birthday, Chase. Here's a special 20% off gift to celebrate with us. That feels real and that feels nice, right? I mean, that's a really strong personalization I think people don't do enough of.

Heck yeah. Totally agree.

All right, let's jump into it. So we've broken down the 7. We kind of went through the different types of personalization. So we had the basic, we had the behavioral, we had dynamic content, segmentation-based content, personalized product recommendations. Personalized based on lifecycle stage, and then of course event personalization. Now let's talk about the why behind this, because I think it's important to understand why personalization is so important. And to me, it's very simple. It tells you that it's helping your customers feel understood and valued. I think that is really the core of the message. But let's talk about the output. Let's go through like 4 of them. We'll just back and forth a couple ideas of why you think personalization is a good idea.

Yeah, I think first and foremost, it's higher engagement rates, right? You're going to have higher opens and higher clicks, which is ultimately going to lead to a lot more revenue. Right? So when an email is more personalized and you're leveraging things within the subject line and the preview text based off names and behavior and purchasing behavior and all these different types of things, people are going to feel like the email is for them. So they're going to open it at a higher rate than they otherwise would. And when they do that, more people looking at your emails and therefore you have a higher chance of increasing your click-through rates. So by doing that, you've set yourself up to have all of these things, including better deliverability. If people are engaging and wanting to receive your emails and opening your emails and interacting, those are signals to the ISPs that maybe we should start serving these emails more often than not to the primary inbox. You know, maybe they're in the promotions, but the higher engagement rates through all these things we're talking about is a huge one.

Well, the one that I think about is customer loyalty, really. Just like having a mobile app when you might have one from like Appbrew, for example, that's true personalization because they're going to take that data and they're going to help build a relationship. When it comes to personalization and email, I think personalization helps build relationships. Just like if you were in a store and you're walking around and a sales rep recognized you and said, hey, last time you were here about that jacket, I've got a pair of pants that would look really good with that. That feels really good to feel more than an anonymous name or an email or even a dollar sign. So feeling a little bit unique and feeling like you're actually someone a little bit special beyond just an email address or a phone number or dollars is really a good way to make someone really loyal and also hopefully make a repeat purchase. What else do you think?

Yeah, 100%. And building on like that in-person kind of retail handheld experience, like, dude, you gotta imagine like that in-person experience, the conversion rate there is way higher than it is online, right? Because the personalization, the warmth, the familiarity, kind of the know, like, and trust. But if we leverage personalization correctly online, we also can also have higher conversion rates, right? So by sending emails and SMS messages that are more personal and more specific and more, you know, tailored, unique, you know, inherently, we're going to have higher conversion rates. We talked about before, more opens, more clicks, you know, better customer loyalty. The obvious one, right, is going to have way higher conversion rates. People are going to want to buy from you because it's more relevant. You know, you're top of mind, you're hitting on pain points that they're probably facing. You're turning the needs into kind of the necessities in this time. You know, you're having the FOMO and the urgency and kind of the inherent things associated with that. So you're going to have way higher conversion rates.

That makes a lot of sense. And that actually also kind of takes into the thought process of attrition or churn, right? Having good personalized engagement and personalized campaigns is going to help you not have as many people churn out because they're going to be interested in wanting to hear from you. They feel like you are talking to them, you're connecting with them ultimately, and you're also being aware. I think that when a person feels valued, you, they have a harder time saying no or see you later. And I think that that's something that you find when you have good personalization. All right. This is great, man. I feel like we're going through a lot of good stuff here. So we've talked about what, why. Now let's talk about what you can do. Like, let's talk about tactics ultimately, because I think that people are like, all right, I've heard you guys. Like, I understand personalization. I know I'm getting clear picture of what it really means. And it's not this big bloated word, but what it is. But let's go into some different tactics. I'll let you kick it off. I'm sure you've got a couple.

Cool. Yeah, let's start with basically number one of how to implement the theory that we're talking about into application. So number one is it's as simple as using dynamic and contextual content for personalization. So what does that mean? It's essentially leveraging the attributes that we know about people, turning them into dynamic fields, and being able to leverage that within an email for each person. So breaking that down, right? So dynamic field or kind of an attribute could be someone's name, the products that they viewed, the products that they purchased in the past. I'm a big fan of like tagging people based off their kind of awareness, their stage, their customer lifecycle, what they've done, what they're clicking on, right? And kind of turning those into categories. So you can know someone's interested in, you know, if it's a dog company, the food or the toys or the water bowls or whatever they're— the medicine, the supplements for the dogs, right? So by leveraging those dynamic fields, we can now make the email feel more personal above and beyond just first name, but also for referencing things that people left behind in their cart. Things that they made a past purchase of. So now we basically want to use this within an email and leverage, you know, personal product recommendations based off of all the things that we know. And you are going to need some kind of tools, and you're going to need some kind of tech to do this. But leveraging the right kind of personalization product recommendation engine is super important for leveraging all of these fields. Does that make sense?

Yeah, dude, I love that. You know, one of the things about tagging that I think people don't talk enough about And, you know, we're, we're, you know, you and I, we're in like a little bit of everything. We've got an account at Beehive, at SendLane, at Klaviyo, at Omnisend. I mean, we're a little bit everywhere with using different tools and everyone's got their different methodology. But the one thing that I will say that I've noticed myself carrying across every platform is I find a way to dynamically tag people through different actions and behaviors, though it might be from what list, if they opted into one certain thing, if they did an action. Like, to me, the more information I have, it's just information storing on the user. So that I can send a more personalized action. Like, for example, if I'm like with my Commerce Roundtable and I'm selling tickets, I've got everyone tagged down by brand, SaaS, or agency because each one of those deserves a different type of email when I'm going to send an email out inviting them to conference, right? And I think that these little things, though not important today, it's important that when you can have a clear identifier of data that you can import and put into your system, though it might be as simple as like they came from a certain website or they've made a certain purchase, all that information just adds up and it makes it so much easier to do segmentation later on.

Yeah. And kind of going on that example. So Commerce Roundtable, right, is an in-person event. So essentially, right, you have the 3 groups of people. And to your point, right, like for the brands, you're going to talk about how they can connect with other brands and how they can get the latest tactics from the practitioners, the people in the weeds spending and making the most amount of money, right? That's what attracts the brands. And then when you get the brands there, the agencies and the SaaS folks are inherently wanting to be there. So you can say, hey, agencies, SaaS folks, we have 300 of the best brands coming. You're going to want to be there to network and kind of wine and dine and learn with and kind of network with them, right? So when you speak to the different groups, kind of the way they want to be spoken to and you get them excited where you see kind of like the light bulb in their eyes kind of click, that's super important. That's what personalization does. So building upon that, the next one I want to talk about is behavioral triggers. And this is kind of for automations. This could be for campaigns, but a lot of times it's for automations. So this would be setting up kind of flows or automations based off specific customer actions. So if someone views a product, they're going to get the browse abandonment flow. If someone, you know, abandons their cart, they're going to get the abandonment of the cart flow, right? We're going to show them the item or the items that they were looking at, or that they left behind. And we're going to maybe even include product recommendations specifically of customers and testimonials around those products or around that collection, and just stack the social proof. Potentially, we're going to leverage different types of things like offers within these emails as people get further along. And we realized maybe they have a chance of going colder, or maybe they're just waiting for a discount, right? So by leveraging these different types of automations based off of kind of this triggered segments and these actions that we know about people, we can serve them content that's very timely and very, very relevant to what they did, or what they didn't end up doing type of a thing.

No, I like that, man. That's— I mean, I think that people forget that simple action of behavior-triggered campaigns or automations, those are 100% personalizations, because they're doing it based on what the user is doing on the other end. It's your job to take as much of that information and much of data that you have and And start targeting down, which leads me to the 2 that I think about when we're thinking about tactics in the market. So number one tactic for me on personalization is, well, it's RFM, man. It's going right back to the segmentation, Chase. If you think about it, all that data, all that information, what are you doing? You're driving out personalization based around how many times they bought, my VIP customers, my prospects, my high value, my low churn risk. Like all of those are really me building out personalization. So my segmentation is always going to be a tip for personalizations for relevant messaging. I think that's hands down a very The second one, I think I'm going to go ahead and take off your second point and say, let's take it one step deeper. So you said, oh, the behavior of like a product view or cart abandoned. But for me, when I think about it, it's more than just that because it can be a product view, for example, Chase. But what about the if-else? What about setting up those lifecycle adjustments? So they looked at a product. If this is their first time they've looked at that product, then let's send them this email. But if it's the second time or third time they've done it, let's send them this email. Or if it's the first time they've purchased or never purchased, let's be more targeted. More aggressive of following up on this certain product. But if they're not, maybe we need to show more broad topics of more broad products that we might have. So to me, personalized journeys are really important because, dude, to me, the automation's so important because your goal— and this is the only time you're ever going to get a little bit more granular— but your goal there is to kind of drive down based around any data you have to try to create that more personalized experience for them through those flows. So does that make sense what I'm saying, Chase?

Yeah, for sure. And that got me thinking, like, for example, I think one underutilized kind of automation or journey type of a thing, a flow for companies that sell things that are topical or kind of consumables is basically a replenishment flow. I don't think a lot of brands are leveraging these where it's super personal, right? You're going to be talking to the specific item or the items that people need to re-up on. You know, if it's a multivitamin, right, maybe you hit people at the 3-week, 3.5-week Mark reminding them that it's time to purchase. And based off some of the stuff you're talking about, like kind of the if-then or the if-else statements, you know, if someone hasn't bought from you a second time, they should receive the replenishment flow. However, if someone has bought from you a second time, instead of receiving the replenishment flow, if you're a subscription company, push them to a subscription. Tell them, don't ever have to worry about receiving your product on time. Subscribe and save, you know, to the multivitamin. So I just think that like all of these ideas could be built around each other. And the more of these automations and the more of these personalizations and the more of the segmentation that you're doing, the better and kind of more rounded your entire automation and kind of campaign and email channel, SMS channel are. Or dude, maybe if someone isn't opening the email, then you're firing off the SMS, right? And someone is engaging with the SMS. Maybe you start tagging saying this person is more likely to click an SMS. Let's start sending them more SMS messages. So there's this entire web that you could build out, but it starts with kind of these building blocks that we're talking about.

This web you're talking about, and I tweet about this pretty often or post about it on X pretty often these days. But also you need to be careful of the mistakes because the reality is you can actually go too far the other way. And I see this all the time, Chase, where it's like they've got like 6 people out of their 100,000 people that have gone through this very specific little corner of the flow because, well, they've made it a little bit too microscopic.

Yeah.

Granular. Yeah, granular is a good word. I like that one. So let's talk about mistakes, Chase. I know you've seen it all. So in your agency life and working as a marketer, give me 5 mistakes that you've seen that you think would probably kill the game because I think it's pretty Yeah, number one, I'd say over-personalization that feels intrusive.

So there's an automation that I think I popularized— I don't want to give myself too much credit, but I think I popularized it— called the site abandonment one. And essentially, if someone's on your list, they come back to your website, they didn't view a specific product, right? Being able to basically send them a message that tries to get them back— if that's done incorrectly, that can be really, really creepy. It could basically be like, oh, this person's tracking me even though I didn't do anything other than visit a website. So you want to do that the right way, maybe lead into some comedy and help people kind of further along the Or else it feels creepy and it feels weird and it feels like you have too much information on them. And maybe you're like kind of the CIA or something, right? It feels weird. You don't want to be the CIA in email. Number 2 is relying solely on first name without adding value. So I think like, but we've talked about this, you know, and I think a lot of people talk about this, right? Like back in the day, if you used to leverage someone's first name, it used to work because it was new and it was exciting and whatnot. Now it's just, it's non-negotiable. Everyone and anyone does it. You have to move beyond just the first name because sure, like I'm on your list, you know my name, great. But what else do you know about me, right? Right?

I think it's weird if you don't even have a first name now. I think that's almost like a standard now.

100%. Yes, first name is non-negotiable, but it's not the end-all be-all. The next one I have, mistake number 3, is sending irrelevant recommendations due to outdated segmentation. So on the flip side of being too intrusive, if you're not being specific enough, if you're not giving specific tailored content recommendations and product recommendations to people, then you're doing yourself a disservice. You're being too broad, you're being too general, and you're really not being I like that one just because people forget.

They set and forget, man. It's like the number one fallacy of most marketers. They want to move on and move forward. But the reality is you've got to continue working on it constantly.

100%. And then I guess one or two more. One that I thought of is like over-segmentation. So you kind of talked about in the beginning, like if you just have too many parameters and too many segments and too many criteria, then you might end up with a list of— I think you mentioned 6 people, right? It's just like, there's just no point. They're not going to make money. It's not worth your time and effort. So make sure that you do a few levers and kind of a few layers of segmentation, but don't segment so much that you peeled the entire onion, right? I think peel a few layers off of the onion. Don't peel it down to its core, or else it's like, what are you working with, right? You don't have a whole lot to work with. Did you have any other that I missed?

I think the only thing that you can think about when you get personalization is don't get like too robotic. I think that there's tone and analogy that comes into it. People try to make it all like, hello, I've noticed you are from Wisconsin and you've purchased cheese. Like, that sounds robotic and fake. And I think that people try to use personalization where they're trying to make it so ad-lib so it fits to all the different things they have, but ultimately that doesn't come out right because it also looks really generic or made by AI ultimately. What do you think about that one?

Yeah, I agree with that. I think a lot of bad cold emails do this, right? They'll make your warm emails feel cold, right? Where I know people have scraped me off of YouTube and they're like, hey, Chase Diamond slash email marketer guru, right? Or like whatever they say, they're just pulling my entire like YouTube title name and then they're saying all these things like, I liked your video, and then they'll put the title of the video and they have like episode 4 Or, you know, this, this, and that. And they'll go, you'll pull like 1 or 2 things from the description. It's like, I know you didn't read or watch my video. You just literally scraped something off my YouTube and you're sending this email and it has no personality. It has no reason for me to take an action.

No, 100%. And you, dude, that's the future, right? That's AI potentially. Let's talk about AI because I think this is really exciting because I think that personalization has been really hard to achieve because it's really hard at a data and execution and operation layer. And I think that AI is really starting to change how product personalizations can be worked on scale by analyzing like both browsing behavior and purchasing behavior and every other data point that's available, and they can throw it into a big LLM and they can spit things out. What do you think about it? Have you started to think about this too?

Yeah, for sure. And I know we're kind of saying AI, and I think some of this predictive analytics, right? But we're just using kind of AI for simple terms.

But yeah, it's machine learning. I mean, at the end of the day, I think when you say AI for the general public, like, that encompasses all of this. For us nerds, we're like, that's not AI, that's just machine learning. Like, that's just Yeah.

So for the nerds that are listening, we're kind of talking about all of these things under the umbrella of AI. But I think by leveraging all of these tools and these recommendation engines that a lot of the ESPs are building in-house, or there's third-party tools that are kind of building these to do one-off or specific things, whether it's creating an email with AI, or it's creating videos for your customers with AI, and you just record like the video once, all of those types of things are really cool. Just like being able to create really recommendations for your customers, leveraging data that you have, and you have way more data than you realize, right? You know, when you integrate with Shopify or WooCommerce or BigCommerce, Magento, whatever you're using, plus the ESP, plus you're feeding in other kinds of social data or interactions, and you're kind of doing some cool stuff to basically elevate the data that you have through different types of third-party tools that you can layer in that give you additional attributes, basically allowing you to enrich your data. There's just so much stuff that you have on it. And the best way to do it, the best way to analyze it is through some of this machine learning and AI being able to serve people content when maybe they're most likely to buy based off the purchase behavior that they have, or being able to serve people content based off the times in the past that they bought, right? A lot of people coming up are gonna be buying from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you want to look back on the previous year and leverage the data that you have on the previous customers you have. Obviously, for any net new customers, you don't have that historical data. But I think leveraging the historical data with some of these tools and some of of this practice that we're talking about is just like a gold mine waiting to be extracted.

No doubt, Chase. And I know there's a lot of cool tools in the market that I've seen. I mean, you look at some of the tools that I've seen, obviously the big ESPs and the SMS companies are all building their own versions of AI, which are more like practical use than they are more of that futuristic thing. But there are some cool companies out there building some cool things. Let's think of a company like that company Ripple.ai building email builders, which has been pretty cool. You and I both played with that one before. What other ones have you seen in the market, man?

Yeah, Ripple is really cool. I like those guys. For building emails and whatnot. There's one that we know and like called Maverick. It's around basically creating like really customized videos with AI that make it seem like it's for Chase or for Jimmy or for whoever. That's a really cool one, being able to put like kind of the face to it, being able to humanize the brand but leveraging AI to do it at scale. Because look, you're not going to go record 1,000 videos for your 1,000 customers. It would just take too long, be too inefficient, you'd be exhausted. But if you can you could make 1 or 2 or 3 videos that then could leverage to then go to 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 people. And that's really cool, right? Especially things like post-purchase. If someone makes a purchase from you, being able to leverage AI to make a video saying thank you, or maybe even leveraging AI to write a handwritten note to say thank you to Jimmy or whoever it might be. That's really cool. What else you got? What are other cool tools you've seen?

Um, I know there's another one that I can't remember. It starts with an M. It's not Maverick, but there's another one out there that does like image personalization where it's taking data and personalizing an image inside of the email. I've seen it out there. I can't remember. It's like a purple color. I'm trying to remember it off top of my head. Oh, I do have one other one, which is really good. Wait, wait. I just thought about that guy, Lou. Do you know Lou Minster or something like that?

Yeah. Yeah. Lou's a great guy. Grid and Pull.

Well, that's an AI one too. That's really cool. And I wanted to mention them. So that's a good one. But I do have one other one I know of, Nacelle. Do you know those guys? They've been in the space for a while. Yeah.

I feel like they've been picking up steam lately. I feel like they're doing a really nice job.

Yeah. Well, they've got a tool coming out in personalization called Genesis. And I know that I've been invited to go take a look at it. So kind of excited to go look at what they're working on over there.

Toss me some keys to that. I want to check it out too. I know they're doing some really cool stuff.

Yeah, that's cool, man. Well, dude, this has been another great pod, man. Like, talk about just some really hard-hitting, just straight-in-your-face facts that we're doing. How'd you feel about it?

Oh, I loved it, man. I'm super fired up to get some feedback on this and makes me excited to record the next one that we're going to do.

Yeah, well, let's end this thing up and say, and that's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the pod, please make sure you subscribe, follow, leave us a rating on your favorite podcast listening platform. You can find our and follow our show on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, TikTok. As you heard in the beginning of this pod, we are growing, working on our YouTube presence because we believe that this long-form media on YouTube is kind of the future of how we look at YouTube, and that's why we've been pushing on that side. So if you enjoyed this and you like it, come check us on YouTube. We do share cool things there pretty often. Secondly, if you want to connect with us, there's 2 ways. So first off, join our newsletter. It's ecomemailmarketer.com. We drop newsletters and only about retention marketing each and week. Check out the show notes for the link for that. And then secondly, you can follow us on social. Chase, where can we find you?

Find me everywhere. It's Chase Diamond, no A in Diamond. Find me on whatever platform you use. Very cool.

And you can find me on X and LinkedIn. I just ordered an X hat, by the way. I don't know if you saw that Elon dropped a store for X recently.

That's sick. No, I didn't see that, but I can't wait to see it.

Yeah, I just ordered one, so I'm going to wear one of their hats because I much respect it. All right, next This week we're going to talk about something a little controversial. Zero-party, first-party, third-party. What do you do with this data? Because I think a lot of people out there in the market ultimately know about these. People talk about it. You know, all the SaaS companies are spouting out information, but no one really knows how to use them. And we know we have our friends over at all these different third-party tools, but I think that people struggle to either find that right playbook or make it work. So let's talk about it. Let's dissect it. Let's give people some playbooks that they can use to Anything else to add to that?

No, we'll see you next week. Can't wait. All right.

Awesome, dude. Well, thanks for being on the pod as always, Chase. We'll see you guys all next week.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah. You know you gotta send it. Yeah. You know you gotta send it. Yeah. You know you gotta send it.