Here's what AI says about retention marketing in 2026

Retention marketers will control replenishment, not just react to it. Instead of, it's been 30 days, send reorder reminder, you'll be running usage curve modeling, dynamic depletion timers, conditional reorder urgencies. And consumable brands run out of inventory with low repeat rate, then failure lands on the retention team. An email marketer is going to be more of a retention marketer, but not only just become a retention marketer, but be owned and challenged. And I guess measured based off of it.

People have started to slowly figure out SMS and they realize it's not the same as email. Email you could send more often, more frequently. SMS, not the case. ChatGPT is giving too much credit to what marketers are doing with SMS. People are using it that well. As marketers get better at SMS, they will have to use it for the use cases that you mentioned and be more strategic about it.

All right. Yo, yo, yo, Chase, what's up, man?

How's it going?

I'm good, man. It's, uh, it's almost the holidays here and, uh, depending on when you listen to this, we might already be through the holidays, but I'm excited about this pod because I think it's going to be Funny.

Heck yeah, I'm stoked and happy holidays to everyone.

Yeah, nerdy funny, I suppose, is what, what the answer is here. So, uh, we're talking about predictions, but we're not gonna make our own predictions because honestly we don't think for ourselves anymore and we let AI do it for us. So we're gonna let AI make the predictions and we're gonna talk about them and say, are these predictions that we believe in or are they ones that we should, uh, challenge ultimately?

So with that, 3, I like it, 2, 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.

What is up everyone? Welcome back to Send It, where we talk about everything and anything email marketing and SMS marketing for retention marketers in e-commerce email marketing. My name is Jimmy Kim. And I'm here with my co-host, Chase Diamond. All right, Chase, dude. So today I wanted— look, everyone's doing these pods, you seeing them right now, uh, 2026 predictions and, you know, all the things and bold things. And I was like, you know, let's be honest, we're, we're kind of dumb these days. And what we'll probably all do is go over to AI, probably ChatGPT, maybe check out Claude, maybe check out Gemini, whatever it might be, and type in, give me some predictions, because I feel like that's where we are in this world. So instead of doing it that way, I thought it'd be much more fun if I created a prompt and I sent it to chat and basically had chat give me a list of 10 things that we can talk about. And those 10 things are— we'll talk about are they positive, negative, do we think they're real, whatever they might be. So here's the prompt I used. I'll start here. Let me scroll back up here. So I wrote this prompt: you are an email marketer who focuses on retention marketing for e-commerce Brands. You do email and SMS. Someone asked— someone has asked you to, based on relevant information and recent trends, to forecast 10 predictions of what might happen and evolve in 2026 around retention marketing. Don't be afraid to take bold predictions. Ask based on data and historical patterns along with e-commerce trends, politics, and recent world changes. Got pretty deep on that prompt.

Wow. Yeah, that was a lot. All right.

But that's how I feel like in order to get stuff out of AI, like that's the way you have to prompt. So maybe that might have been just like a mini lesson for our listeners. here, but that's a typical prompt for me. That's a short one actually, Chase. Sometimes I get way deeper. Don't do this, don't do that, don't do— like, I think the thing that people don't realize with AI and something that I've been learning because I've been using it so much is like, the more boundaries you give it, the more specific you can get around things, the better that output is. And if you feel like you're getting these generic answers, it's because you're asking generic questions. If I say, Chase, is the sky blue? You could be like, well, it depends where you are, but sure, right? Like, that's, that's the answer. But if you said this, is the sky blue in Orange County at 12:02 PM in this place, standing northwest, looking at this angle? And it might say, actually, there's a cloud there, so it's actually white in that specific area.

I love it.

So there's a first lesson here, but let's jump into this, dude, because I think that these are interesting. So I'm going to start off, and you know, these are generally like pretty still basic, but I think they're very relevant, right? So—

Okay.

Let me, let me go back over here to this page here and look at this. All right. So the first thing that came out is that you'll be judged by cohort yield, not campaign revenue. And so what that's basically saying is like by 2026, smart brands stop asking how did this brand perform? They'll ask, how did April's new buyers behave 90 days later? So really looking at cohort analysis and something that I look at all the time in business, but what it's doing, and this is what Chad is saying, is the job is shifting from LTV curve-based shaping, second purchase window compression, and second-order velocity engineering. So basically, if you can't influence time to repeat, you can be seen as replaceable. That's the first— POV that it gave me. It's pretty deep actually. What are your thoughts, man?

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that. Honestly, I think that's gonna be over most people's heads. I don't think most people are doing that or thinking that in the first place. So I don't think people are doing the level 1 that you talked about, let alone, you know, you can't do level 1, you can't get to level 2. So I, I think that's, I think that's an interesting one. I think that's probably something that we should do probably a pod on because I think that's gonna be a lot to digest right here.

Yeah. And we did it. We talked about this in the course. There was an, I remember a specific section of the course on on Ecom Email Certified that we talked about this and how to break it down and how to look at it inside of your reporting. But the reality to your point is, yeah, like if you're not taking like a big zoom back, like the easy way I explain this is like you're basically saying instead of thinking about like your holistic, like how much revenue did I make this month? You're basically changing it to how did my campaigns perform 90 days ago or 60 days ago? And did it generate not only that first initial sale or that second repeat sale, but that next sale ultimately as well?

Yeah.

So did you line them up with success, basically. I think it's an interesting thought process. I do agree with you that no one, not very many people that I know in this market are thinking like this ultimately, but I thought it was really cool that Chad did. I definitely think about this stuff only because it's more of a SaaS metric if you think about it, and then it is an e-commerce metric or a subscription. So if you're a subscription company like BattlBox, for example, like 100%, they think about cohorts, LTV, and lifetime value more than they think about initial acquisition. So there's a little bit there. All right. So here's another one.

Interesting.

Number 2 is flow weight is going to be greater than campaign weight by a lot. Today, it's about 50/50 flows for campaigns. In 2026, they're predicting that you'll see a shift into flows at 80/20% in favor of flows. You'll be spending more time on conditional branching, suppression logic, offer liquidity, and inventory awareness triggers, and sending more campaigns will be seen as failure of automation. What do you think about that? That's basically saying we're seeing a future of AI more, right?

Yeah, I, I guess a clarification, cuz I haven't seen these, I don't know these answers. So is, is the answer saying, when they say flow weight, are they saying that you'll spend more of your time building out flows or more of your revenue will come from flows? Like what, what is the—

More of your revenue I think is coming. When they say flow weight, I think it means revenue.

Okay. So more revenue's gonna come from automations or flows in 2026 than campaigns.

Yep.

Look, I think it depends. I like the thought process. I don't think we're there though. And I think you're right. I think it talks about like leveraging more like predictive analytics and AI and machine learning, whatever you wanna call it. So I like that part of it, although I think a lot of it's dependent on the brand and obviously, right, I'm gonna expand on that 'cause I don't wanna leave it there. For example, take a company that has 100,000 or a million subscribers in their kind of Active campaign segment, dude, every time you press send, whether it's actually legit revenue or attribution, just based off the volume, I feel like campaign revenue always is gonna be pretty strong just because there's so many people receiving it. Whereas I think maybe if you have a smaller list size potentially, I think maybe you can have more attribution towards automations or flows because like they're just high intent. Like if you're sending it to 100 people or maybe even 1,000 people, and campaigns and you're not good at segmentation, maybe you just don't have enough people to drive clicks and whatever. However, with automations, because it's going to be laser-focused, that same group of 100 people or 1,000 people is going to probably perform better. So I think some of this is masked by big centers just because volume kind of solves some problems. What do you think?

Yeah, I agree with you. Fully agree with you. I think I don't agree that it's going to shift that much either. I could see a shift happening. Maybe it's not 50/50, 60/40. 60/40 maybe. As— yeah, I would almost say that as data and privacy layers are getting better and like the matching is getting better, they're doing a better job. Plus there's all these like third-party intent tools out there. Plus there's like this and that. And I mean, even, even the ESPs are tracking all the behavior and activity nowadays, right? So like you think about all that and I could see a little bit of shift. So I agree that it might shift a little bit, but I'm not sure that it would shift that much and dramatically.

Yeah. And it was, it was going from 50/50 to 80/20, I think you said. Yeah.

That's what they're predicting.

Yeah. Omnisend had a stat, right? I know I've talked about this before. You've talked about this before. Something about like, was it something like 30 or 40% of revenue came from flows, even though they were only like a fraction of the sends of campaigns?

Like what was that? 37% of revenue came from 3% of flows. I think that's what the data point was. 3% of email sends.

Got it. Which is, which is crazy. It shows people over-indexing on campaigns that probably not going to impact them.

Yeah. It just tells you that campaigns effectiveness is lost in many areas. I think that, you know, if you strip away the campaigns from Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all the major holidays, you strip all those away and go to your like daily sending, some of those revenues that are coming out of those are generally the lowest unless there's like an event happening. You know what I mean? So I can see how campaigns effectiveness is being lost because Urgency is not there anymore like the way it is. Even Black Friday, we discussed this before, like people want to have a special day. They don't want to always be on sale, but I get why people do what they do.

Yeah.

So anyways, let's go to number 3.

That was a good one.

SMS will be reserved for only 6 to 8 revenue-justified use cases. SMS will no longer be daily promos, broadcast offers because ROAS looks good, but instead it'll be more strategic and scarce. Cart recovery, back in stock with intent replenishment timers, high AOV drops, VIP early access. You'll be expected to defend SMS with margin math starting this year. So let me kick this one off. With that report with BFCM, I actually think that this is very much true because the way that they shared in that report with Omnisend as well, like email was spiky where SMS was Patchy, but consistent, meaning like things were happening at a lower volume. They weren't being blasted. They were being reacted to. So, you know, a launch, time expiring, cart abandons, you know, things like that. So I think that that shift is already happening because people are thinking about it. Thoughts? Hey, you guys want to stay connected with us? Guess what? We send a daily retention newsletter out that you should join right now. If you're not a part of it, it's at ecomemailmarketer.com. It's completely free. We send it to your inbox daily. We do breakdowns. We talk about the latest things. We talk about the latest tools out there. There's so much you can do. Plus we even talk about the pod, of course. So if you're enjoying the pod and you want to be here, you want to listen to us, you want more email and SMS retention marketing tips, tactics, tools, tricks, whatever it might be, head over to ecomemailmarketer.com. We probably have something free that we're giving away right now too on top of that. So go get that, download it, join our newsletter. We'll see you there.

Yeah, I agree. I think people have started to slowly figure out SMS and they realize it's It's not the same as email. Email you could send more often, more frequently and be okay. SMS, not the case. However, I don't think people are using SMS the way it described in terms of like using it daily or that often anyways. I think people—

You'd be surprised.

Pretty much are using it for the basic, right? I think maybe they have like a welcome, maybe an abandoned cart, and then outside that they're probably sending 1 or 2 texts a week maybe, right? So I think ChatGPT is giving too much credit to what marketers are doing with SMS. I don't think people are using it that well. But to your point, I agree with everything that you said that I think as marketers get better at SMS, they will have to use it for the use cases that you mentioned and be more strategic about it.

Yeah, I actually continue to always say it's kind of interesting that SMS and email are very similar in that a lot of ways. However, we seem to have defaulted to like the oldest way of marketing with SMS versus email where we've gotten pretty sophisticated. So.

Yep.

All right. That one's good. I agree. Let's go to 4. Deliverability will be a core skill job. And I think we'll both agree on this one because we already talked about this. But if you can't speak on domain reputation, frequency of compliant curves, engagement decay, warning logic, you won't be taken seriously as a senior retention operator. You'll be expected to prevent revenue loss you can't even see on dashboards. I think that we've already been saying this since last year, right?

Yeah, 100%. And I think the, the biggest thing to add is, uh, oh, A, obviously what it's saying basically is deliverability is going to be more of a core focus and it, it should already, but for a lot of people it isn't. And B, I think every single role within email will have to know deliverability at some point. Copywriters are gonna have to understand like how their copy influences the receiving and sending and algorithms from the ISPs, right? Yep.

Yep.

Like what words or what statements flag you know, them as spam or not. Designers are gonna have to understand, right? Like how they design and create images to be compliant and best practices. And they can't just be image only, right? And you need to have like kind of fallback text and all this different types of stuff behind the images. Marketers obviously first and foremost need to be the core driver of that. So I think every single role within email needs to be that. I think people are actually gonna need to start reporting on deliverability. I don't think many people report on deliverability today. I think most companies don't think about it, therefore they don't report on it. But I think they're gonna need to report on, they're gonna need to be in Yahoo and Google's kind of sender hubs and understanding that and looking at the ESP metrics and every single week and month making sure that the KPIs are improving there.

Yeah, it's a boring area that is hard to see and hard to trend and hard to track. And some of it is really weird. So yeah, you're right. Like it is just a core thing that they're gonna have to start learning a little bit more. And I think people are, again, going back to deliverability, going back to the things that changed recently in November or September. We have a pod on this that we talked about Gmail's changes, engagement-based changes, Yahoo's changes, like little changes continue to happen. I think it's just like at some level or another now you're starting to fight the next level of, are— not only am I getting delivered, but am I also getting attention? And right now we've always focused on the attention piece, but now you also have to focus on the, am I getting even delivered or showing up in the inbox? So. All right, let's go to number 5. I think this one's a good one. Segmentation will become predictive instead of descriptive. All right, so this is how it explains it. You won't build repeat buyers, VIP, and engaged last 30 days anymore. What you will build more likely will be likely to churn in 14 to 21 days, highly seasonal, profitable second-order candidates, offer-sensitive versus delay-intolerant Your values shift from sorting customers to forecasting behaviors. What do you think about that one?

That's interesting. I actually really like it.

Well, this is basically what, I mean, this is RFM and basically Nathan at Raytheon who recently, congrats to Nathan if he listens to this pod, that he just recently got acquired by Mailchimp. But like, this is kind of what he was working towards with data that he had.

Yeah. Yeah. No, 100%. I really like this one. I think it needs to move there. I don't think the reality is it's gonna move there by the end of 2026. I think the early adopters are going to start doing this and implementing this, but I think it's so hard to get people away from, well, this is the way we've always done it statement, right? We've always done 30-day engage. We've always done 90-day engage. What do you mean you want me to change? Right? So I think that we will see some of that shift because I think some of these new segments are gonna be better. And who knows if marketers are even gonna build them. I think the AI and the predictive analytics and those things are gonna be better.

Mm-hmm.

So there's probably, Actually no excuse for you not to do it. It's like you just need to make sure that you have the right setup in place to be able to allow the AI and the machine to optimize and do this. So I hope it gets there by the end of 2026, but I think it's going to be reserved for probably the 10 or 20% of people that do it, a.k.a. every listener of this pod.

Yeah, exactly. Well, dude, even when they say you won't build repeat buyers, VIP, and engage 30 days, I mean, I don't know that many brands that are segmenting even that deeply. A lot of them are just segmenting on that last one. You know, the engaged within the last 30 days or 90 days or whatever it might be. So you're right, like changing that habit's going to take a while. But also it comes down to list size too. I mean, you've got to have a pretty decent list size and an amount of data for this to even matter or to move the needle ultimately. If you've got 20, 30,000, 10,000, I mean, it might help if you've got a really, really strong connection with your audience, but chances are it probably won't actually move the needle too much.

All right.

Great. Let's go to number 6. Creative testing will shift from which design wins to which emotion wins. I love this one actually. Buttons, layouts, and GIFs plateau. What you'll actually A/B test in 2026 is anxiety versus excitement, scarcity versus reassurance, status versus savings, identity versus utility. Retention marketers become behavioral copy strategists, not email designers. That's a big one for the copywriters out there. What do you think, dude?

Yeah, for copywriters and designers, that's interesting. So essentially it's saying that like it's gonna move away from just creating things that you think subjectively are cool and more focused on the psychology of how the user actually interacts and feels and engages, right? Yeah, I do. I mean, imagine if that happens and I imagine it does happen with kind of a blend of leveraging AI and also humans, copywriters, designers, et cetera, I imagine things perform better, right? Like if you can tap into true psychological elements, things like FOMO, right? Or things like, right, like the fear of loss, right? Like all the different types of things that are like really deep in terms of psychology. And there's a lot of them, right? There's like different types of emotions around like anger.

Yeah.

Excitement, joy, like All those types of things. I imagine that like, that's only gonna do better, right? Like if you think about like TV shows too, right? How they start and end episodes, like where throughout the episodes they keep your attention. Like I imagine it being kind of something like that, right? Where you start using emails that connect to other emails to kind of build these different types of emotion in and out. And you use storytelling to get people really kind of hooked on a specific brand. I think that's cool. What do you think? Real quick, I have a 30-second message for you to tell you something that we've been working on. And I'm super excited about this, and you should be too. So what if I told you you could instantly search every single email that Allbirds, Parachute, or Sunday Edition ever sent? That's Imbooks with 2 Os dot AI. It's an AI-driven searchable database of over a million emails from the fastest-growing Shopify brands. Need a win-back sequence? Type it in. Want to see how the best brands handle abandoned cart? Type it in. It's there. Looking for a holiday promotion idea? Done. We've got you covered. No more endless Google searches or digging through your personal inbox, hoping you saved that one email and never being able to find it. With our platform, you can search, find, and execute campaigns way quicker. It's like having every single top brand's email strategy at your fingertips. Inbox.ai. Again, it's inbox with 2 O's. Stop guessing, start searching. Head on over to imbux.ai to check it out.

So I have kind of an interesting thought process on this because yes, I agree that that's going to win, but the way I get to why it's going to win is very different than you're thinking. So the way I think—

Okay, what do you think?

Is that everyone is out there using AI. I'm using AI, you're using AI, our marketer, our team, you know, most people are at this point. And I feel like people haven't gotten to that level with AI. And what happens is if you don't tell AI what you want out of it, it ultimately will spit out whatever generic happy-go-lucky version. I believe that a lot of people will sound the same next year in their words, basically. However, those who either A, hire a great copywriter or have a human in the loop of copy, or B, who learn how to prompt specifically and very focused, are going to be the ones that win. So I agree with the take in that overall what it's telling me is authentic is going to win next year because people are going to be tired of reading the same slop that exists in the market today.

Cool. Yeah, I like it.

Yeah.

So not calling out anybody. I'm actually rooting for you copywriters in this situation when I think about it. So, all right. Number 7, this one says preference centers become mandatory, not optional. 2026 brands No frequency control, no category preferences, no channel toggles, 100%. You will see hard throttling plus opt-out acceleration, which we saw in the data. You'll be measured with preference center adoption rates, selected frequency stability, and channel migration control, email to SMS and back and forth, basically. So what do you think about this? Because I think, you know, we can talk about it lightly, but in the background, we're working on something that is about preference centers because we believe that there is something interesting there and that it's an underutilized space. But I agree, like, I think that this makes sense because brands aren't doing a good job. A lot of unsubscribes still to this day. I hit unsubscribe, it takes me to a page and it says unsubscribed.

Yeah, dude, I, I think this was JimmyGPT. I don't think this was ChatGPT. This was setting up perfectly exactly the software that you want to build that will solve all of this. And I'm surprised it Doesn't exist, you know, today. Yeah, no, I'm with you, man. I think people need more control over the path that they want to take, especially when brands aren't doing best practices, but people do want like a discount from them but don't want all the other shenanigans. Or maybe people don't want all the shenanigans of a daily discount but do, for whatever reason, really vibe with the brand. So I think preference center and those types of things, um, makes, makes a lot of sense. And you do this today.

You can do this today on Omnisend and Klaviyo or wherever platform that you use. Most have some kind of preference center set up. So it's not like you can't even do that today.

Yeah, it's crazy that it's not being utilized and people just not know about it. Like, I don't understand.

I don't know. They just don't think about the unsubscribe. They're going to leave. They just want them to leave. I guess so.

Yeah. All right.

Number 8 is a hot take. I kind of love this one.

All right, hit me.

Another thing they gave me is you'll be forced to own profit, not just revenue. In 2020 to 2024 to 2025, marketers were like, look at this SMS ROAS, right? But in 2026, how much profit did retention actually— how much profit did your retention efforts actually keep? You'll be accountable for discount dependency, refund amplification for promos, margin leakage for stacked offers, and retention we blamed when volume goes up.

Wait, so marketers actually have to understand the business and KPIs that move it forward? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, basically that's what they're saying.

Wow, that's shocking. That is a hot take. It's so hot that I can't believe it's not a thing in 2025.

I think that this is actually very much the right way of thinking about it. Like, you know, the problem, Chase, often is the marketer, the email marketer, the SMS marketer, whatever it might be, They're so siloed off in their business, especially in the larger orgs, right? A larger brand that has 10, 12, 15 people on their brand side building on marketing. They'll have an email marketer or even copywriter. So they'll have like a copywriter, designer, and then the email marketer. And the email marketer will put the email together with the copy and the design and pick the segments and send it out. They only have like a handful of things to think about. They think about how did it do? Did it open, click, and how much revenue did it generate? But to what they just said here on, basically you have no accountability to those customers that you brought on and converted. Maybe you got, maybe you oversold them and they had a high refund rate and you're doing a bad job creating more refunds for the business. Could be, right? So that's an interesting one.

Interesting.

All right, hold on. Number 9 goes right into it. So let me read number 9 and then we can talk about both of these. Number 9 says retention marketers will control replenishment. Not just react to it. Instead of, oh, it's been 30 days, send reorder reminder, you'll be running usage curve modeling, dynamic depletion timers, conditional reorder urgencies. In consumable brands, run out of inventory with low repeat rate, then failure lands on the retention team. So basically they're saying the team, an email marketer is going to be, again, like we've said in the past, become more of a retention marketer, but not only just become a retention marketer, but be owned and challenged and— I guess measured based off of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like the problem too that most agencies and freelancers run into as well is like, if you think about like what you mentioned on the internal team side, like the email marketer typically is removed from, you know, finance and ops and some of the stuff on product. Agencies even more so, right? Like if you're just doing retention or email from a brand, oftentimes you're like on a need-to-know basis, you basically know like obviously like the brand guide and you probably know maybe the hero products and a couple other things, but for the most part, like you don't have the visibility into like what the margins are and whatnot. So I think like with all this too, like I think agencies, obviously, you know, this isn't anything crazy to say. I think agencies will need to be judged on these same lines. 'Cause I think a lot of this is talking more so about like in-house internal marketers for brands.

Sure.

I think agencies are gonna have to live and die by these same guidelines and rules and I think they need to get more involved and ask better questions, us included, right? Not just calling out other agencies, like my own agency included, right? Hey there, it's Chase here. I hope you're enjoying the pod, but I wanna get just 30 seconds of your time real quick to tell you about one of our sponsors who let us make this great podcast. So first I wanna start with a question for you. Do you ever find yourself staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration to strike? Your marketing campaigns don't have to suffer when your creativity runs dry. Omnisend has recently launched their most powerful AI update yet, and it is awesome. Its AI completely transforms how you can create and send your next marketing messages. And here's really what's incredible: their AI doesn't just write your emails, but it actually helps you write really compelling subject lines, preheader text that are geared to increase your open rates, and ultimately build customer segments in a heartbeat. And just whisper to the AI who you're targeting, and it's gonna figure out all the complex segmentation for you. That way you have no more guessing games. But hey, wait, it gets better. Their AI writer actually now proactively suggests improvements to your copy, and it's gonna adapt to your brand's unique voice and tone while following email marketing best practices. And their personalized product reminders analyzes your browsing behavior to serve up exactly what each of your customers wants and needs to see. And their campaign booster automatically resends emails to people who didn't open or engage with them, which helps lift revenue by an average of 13%. And now with over 150,000 very happy customers already dominating their markets using Omnisend's email, SMS, and push notifications. Plus they have 24/7 amazing that actually responds fast and is very helpful. You're joining a winning team. So stop wrestling with writer's block and start letting AI do the heavy lifting for you. Visit omnisend.com and experience the future of marketing automation. Let them know that Jimmy and I sent you. And now back to the pod.

Yeah, 100%. And, uh, number 10, I'm gonna go to 10 because I think it continues to tie on with it as I'm reading it. I hadn't read it, read it till I loaded it on here because I I wanted it to be a surprise for me too. It says your job security will be tied—

Got it.

Tied to number one number, percentage of revenue from returning customers. Not open rate, not CTR, not campaign revenue. What percentage of this total store revenue came from returning customer? That's what they're saying. If that grows, you get more power, budget, influence. If that shrinks, retention gets blamed. Dude, that's an interesting one because I've always felt that way about it. Like retention marketing is so interesting because, you know, for example, and I'm not here to pick on popups, for example, but popups get glorified. Welcome emails get glorified. But Chase, if someone opts in for a discount and makes a purchase on email 1 with that discount, did the email marketer really do anything?

Right. A lot of it's acquisition focused, right? A lot of it's—

It's supporting acquisition, but you are not the reason the market Made that dollar.

Correct. If someone leaves an abandoned cart, the likelihood that they were going to convert was already pretty high, right?

Yeah.

And then email just happened to be the one that got the credit.

Yeah. But same thing with an abandoned cart. If someone leaves a cart behind and you bring them back and get them to sell, is that really retention marketing or is that, is that more helping support the acquisition side consistently? You know what I mean? Like it gets gray there, but where retention marketing is good is like, Customer bought on day 1, on day 19, they ordered a second time. And that measurement is very specific of the percentages that that revenue is generating for the business. Because that's like the profit line ultimately, like the, the, the number of dollars that come into the business that are actually non-CAC or non-revenue tied ultimately.

Right. So we're talking about things like replenishment reminders, cross-sells and upsells, like those types of things, maybe even win-backs, right?

Yeah.

Things that actually Are focused on that repeat second purchase that, you know, would or maybe wouldn't have happened. I guess you could argue either way without that touchpoint of an email or an SMS, right?

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah.

You know, that's what I think.

Yeah. That's interesting. So it's interesting.

I thought that was really interesting and I want to end with, I want to end with this because I, you know how chat will ask you questions after you, you know, like give it a prompt and it gives you all of that and says, what can I do for you next? You know, that's what we all love about AI. And one of the options was, what does a retention marketer's job description look like for 2026? So I looked it up and I asked it to type it out, right? So basically based on that, it says primary responsibilities. Number 1, lifecycle revenue engineering. Design and optimize full funnel retention architectures from post-purchase, onboarding, replenishment, and win-back, and own the second order velocity, not conversions. That's crazy. That's really deep actually. Number 2, predictive segmentation and behavioral modeling. Build and manage churn risk segments. Offer sensitive versus delay tolerant buyers and likely to repeat. Shift segmentation to predictive. Okay. Number 3, automation first program design. So this is going back to it, right? And then number 4 was SMS profit governance. It says basically restrict SMS to Margin justify use cases only. It's kind of crazy. And then of course the copy was there, behavioral copy. And then basically at the end it says here, because it's just basically saying all this stuff, what you should know, but it's basically saying success in this role is returning customer revenue grows faster than acquisition. SMS volume decreases while SMS profit increases. Second order conversion window compresses. That means less time between the second purchase and deliverability remains stable. And discount reliance reduces.

Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting.

I mean, this is a great output actually.

Yeah. And I think for better or for worse, I think most marketers aren't built like this today, but I think it's something that can definitely be learned. And I think it's definitely something that like, as you leverage AI and as AIs get better and ESPs get better and some of these kind of third-party tangential tools get better, it's like, Your brain is just going to kind of reconfigure itself to think a little bit differently about this and, and leverage some of the tooling. Like, I think like this is a really cool use case of AI. It's not to replace people. It's not to replace your team. It's not to replace you. It's to make you be able to have superpowers essentially, right?

It's strategy basically for the once ever, everything Chat has basically thrown at me is bigger thinking, strategic thinking, which is what we all want. AI is supposed to do the grunt work for us, just like you said. But what we really want to do is start expanding our mind and being the, I don't know, like the, what do you call it? Like the mastermind ultimately of your system ultimately. And your focus and goal changes because your KPI is not so black and white anymore because in order to be strategic and, you know, whatever big words you want to use, you need to be sitting and hovering. You can't just be doing and being on the ground floor. That's where AI takes over and that's where it's good for.

Yeah, that's right. And I think with this too, I think as marketers develop this skillset and develop this playbook, companies are gonna have to pay more money. I think marketers become infinitely more valuable. And I think like, as you as a marketer get judged on this basis of needing to drive second purchase, repeat purchase and increase and all these things, like maybe even you start getting paid a commission or percentage of revenue or just frankly a larger salary. So I actually think this is a net positive for brands and talent.

Yeah.

Because brands are gonna make more money. They're going to be able to squeeze and extract customers. That sounds very, very bad, but like, you know what I mean? And I think marketers are going to be able to drive more money and therefore be able to ask for more dollars and cents.

Yep. That's it, man. So that's exactly how I'm thinking about it. And I think that chat came up with some pretty good predictions. And, you know, before we know it, there'll be other people who make predictions that are going to sound very similar to this, most likely. And let's be honest, It's just easier. So we did it this way. And I think that this was more fun because I don't agree with all of them, but this will be good when we go back next year and take a look at how well the chat do. Maybe we'll do an episode on that next year. How well did chat predict 2026 email, right? So this week we predicted with chat, we're going to go back and fact check it and see how it's doing. It's probably going to be pretty high, actually pretty right in many ways.

I like it.

All right, man. Well, with that being said, that is a wrap for today's episode. Chat predicts the top 10 things that are going to happen in 2026, retention marketing specifically in email and SMS marketing. With that being said, we'll kind of drop you one thing. We've got all this information, show notes and everything below. But if you haven't checked out inbooks.ai today yet, this is an inspirational tap into over a million plus. I think it might be even 2 million by the time this thing records and drops on the ground. Inspirational emails. You can sort, you can collect, you can listen. We've got a 7-day trial where you can view about 10,000 brands today. Go check that out. If you love it, then you can upgrade. It's very cheap right now with our launch special. So go check it out. With that being said, Chase, always good to see you. We'll chat next week.

Cheers.

See ya.

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.