These guys claim to have unlocked email personalization

Most brands might not be big enough to have personalization. You've got to at least be doing a little bit of volume. You can't have a 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 person list and do any kind of level of personalization because it's not going to really move the needle either.

Even if you have the data, it doesn't necessarily mean you have the structure or the bandwidth necessarily to maintain it. And that goes for both agency and in-house teams.

It's very interesting and something we're also chasing. And I think a lot of people are chasing in the space is how do you tailor the content, not just the products that are being shown, which is important and you want people to convert, but you want them to also resonate really well with the package that's 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 going on, everyone? Welcome back to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS. My name is Jimmy Kim, and I am here today. With 2 incredible guests here today. They're actually the same as far as what they do. They're the founding partners of Applo Agency and also co-founders of a company called Allen. And today we're going to jump right into talking about personalization. You know, personalization is one of those words that we've all heard used. It's kind of a buzzword in a lot of ways. And I think a lot of the things that are happening today in the market are finally getting us closer to the real output of what personalization could be and so forth. But first, I want to go ahead and bring in the guests on so I can introduce everyone to you guys. And then we'll jump into talking really deeply about what modern personalization looks like, including just really digging into what this, you know, why it's been historically hard, some of the learnings, and then we'll jump into some of the ways that you can start getting into personalization this year. So first of all, I'm going to introduce Liam first. Liam, welcome to the show. Thanks, Jimmy.

Yeah, thanks, Jimmy. Thanks for having us. Really looking forward to it. Been watching the pod for quite a while, so love what you guys do and happy to be on.

Very cool. And Jacob, welcome to the pod, dude.

Thanks, Jimmy. Super excited to be on.

All right, very cool. Well, let's start first, man. Like, before we get into anything, you know, you guys have both been in D2C, e-commerce, email, SMS for quite some time. Let's start with Liam, man. Like, how did this start for you, man? How do you end up walking in and deciding that you want to get into this space?

Yeah, so it's kind of a funny situation. Like, I think a lot of people, when you ask that question, they kind of realize that, oh, you know, we just kind of ended up here through a bunch of a chain of events. But with us specifically, we have— Jacob and I both have a pretty similar background here. But we essentially were contracting for some brands in the space, doing some work on the retention side. So email and SMS primarily is what we really got into initially, a bit over 8 years ago or so, almost 9 years ago in the D2C space. So quite a while ago. Essentially got in on that front, contracting, managing email and SMS for some DTC brands. Eventually, Jacob, myself, and our other partner Dylan formed Applo, which is our agency. So that's the space that we've been in for quite some time. Initially started as a retention-focused agency there on the email and SMS side. Very shortly after that, branched off into offering more on the paid media and also finance side. So that's a big angle that we took initially was really ingraining ourselves in the actual kind of growth discussions of the brands that we work with. So not just being a retention partner, but also being a partner on acquisition, of course, but then actually more importantly, it was really understanding the economics of their business and then actually strategizing growth across the board on all channels. And that's really kind of how our journey in D2C progressed until recently when we also started Allen, which is a tool that built internally at AppFlow, also a self-service tool for brands to use. And that's, again, we'll probably get into more as we talk to personalization, but that's really the journey on our end. So Um, you know, uh, Jacob and Dylan, 2 of my best friends from growing up as well. So we have a really great thing going on. It's, uh, fantastic working with each other on a daily basis. But, um, that's the, that's the SparkNotes summary of kind of how we got into the space. I don't know if, Jacob, you have anything you wanna add there, but, um, go for it if you do.

Yeah, I mean, I, I met Liam when we were like 8 or 9 years old at competitive swimming.

So like, that's a long time ago.

Go back a long time.

You guys are lifelong friends.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, exactly.

You guys are in Canada?

Yeah.

Yeah, Canada.

Yeah.

What part of Canada?

I'm in Ottawa and then Jacob, Montreal.

Montreal.

Got it. And then Joel's in Toronto actually.

Yes.

Got it. So you guys are hitting all parts of Canada. Very cool, man.

Yeah.

And I mean, most, most of our— sorry, Jimmy, just to toss that out. Most of our— so our team, our team of 33 are based primarily in Canada, but most of our experience and clients over time that we've worked with have been in the US. So about 90% of the brands. that we've worked with have really been down where you, down where you are down there in the US. So a lot of experience in that market and that's primarily, you know, the biggest market from a DTC standpoint too. So we've had most of our experience.

Yeah, I've heard Canada's got crazy rules when it comes to, I know, especially up in Montreal and like stuff, you've gotta write things in like English and in French at the same time or else you can get fined apparently.

Yeah, there's a lot of language rules. It is, it is quite hard to keep up with all of them, but Quebec is definitely quite strict on the French-English side. Totally.

Yeah, I heard that from a brand recently, like maybe a year or two ago it was, and they were telling me that they needed a tool that could actually translate it and do it because they wanted to operate in Montreal. So very cool. Well, you guys have been in the market or the industry for 8, 9 years now at this point. And you guys, I started this pod and we talked about personalization, right? And I think that personalization has been like the golden mecca, the unicorn, something that everyone's been chasing over the years. How have you guys seen this evolve? Like, what do you guys see? Because you guys are working with, you know, a lot of clients. So I think you said maybe 100 clients or so at this point. And so you guys have probably experienced a lot of this stuff. Like, let's talk about personalization.

What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, so we've worked with over 150 brands to date on the agency side. But I think personalization is really interesting because you think of like, what is personalization? Personalization can be the name that's being shown in an email. It can be the content. Or it can even be like the entire journey that a customer is being served and the orchestration of all components within that. So there's layers to personalization. And to your point, Jimmy, earlier, it can be kind of a buzzword. You can say personalization, and that can, again, mean the entire orchestration of the journey from the paid media, the ad, to the landing page, to the email, to then whatever PDP they go to, to the offer, to the discount that's being presented. Or it can be as kind of restrained as the name being shown in whatever they're opening on the email side.

Sure.

But I think what we've seen just being in this space for quite some time is personalization has been talked about constantly. And I think it's something that every tool, every platform is working towards because it's only logical that if you can actually use all of the data points that you have on a customer and their interaction across site and different content, you in theory should be able to personalize a journey for them that has a much better chance at not only converting them, but also making them actually enjoy the process of whatever it is they're doing within your ecosystem. So I think we've seen every single tool, every platform really push towards personalization over the past handful of years, whether that be on the email side, the SMS side, what have you. And it's a constant battle to just be more and more personalized. I don't think, Jacob, you probably have more insight on the technical side and ways that you can go into that, but that's, I'd say, something that we've seen.

Yeah. Jacob, what do you think here?

I think Liam's right. I think it is a spectrum of where Like how advanced is your personalization strategy? I don't think a lot of brands are struggling necessarily with getting like the name right in the subject line. Exactly. Like that's been capable, like that capability is not necessarily new at all. I think the bigger challenge is that there's not really a big difference in terms of the content that, for example, Lee might receive or you, Jimmy, might receive. It's pretty much, if you think about how email's done now, static content that's going to 100,000, 200,000, 500,000 people, everyone's getting the exact same thing. And Even if you're A/B testing that content, you might be testing like one variation here, or you might be like choosing to kind of have a different subject and preview. But like, that's not really how we look at personalization and truly understanding what is a personalized or tailored like experience for that customer. So we think about it more on like the customer journey side and figuring out like what are the right pieces of content to show people or the right product to show people. Whereas I think up to this point, personalization as a buzzword has been like, Well, we're going to find a way to work in like this attribute that we know about you that like your name is this or that you purchased this product before inside of like some sort of like dynamic piece. But the copy is going to be very generic or like the hero text you'll see, it's going to be all very generic. So I think that's kind of where personalization from an AI standpoint right now, we have a lot of opportunity. And I think that's what the industry is going to start to lean into a lot more.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's interesting about personalization is that like, you know, as I've been in this industry for so long, You know, you're right. Like when we first started the idea of like initially the idea was like, oh man, like I really want to make, you know, Liam and Jacob have personalized emails that feel like they're for them. So we started off by doing the first name thing, right? And everyone kind of said and agreed that that was personalization. And later on we figured out real fast it wasn't. And then you start using the product data and the purchase data you have and that still doesn't do it. And I think that where we've gotten as far as, in my opinion, is really like segmentation right now, right? Like at least you can start segmenting a group of people that kind of look alike in some way or fashion, and you can have a better communication to them.

Yeah.

But it has been incredibly hard to find a way to truly do that. And, you know, technically, if you think about a flow or you think about a triggered event, you are technically personalizing that email down to, hey, they just abandoned a cart. Here's their cart. Here's the email that's to them. But even to that point, I'm sure you guys will, as you guys have settled already, like, it's still not driving that personalized feeling that people want, right? Like the idea behind personalization has always been, how do I get that email over to Jacob that is totally different than the one that Liam is getting, for example, because this is where they are in that customer journey. And I think that's something that people have talked about a lot. And I think that it has been a buzzword and something that people are trying to figure out.

Yes.

And you're right, with the modern tools that are out there these days, that's really what it comes down to. Let's start on your client side a little bit on the agency side. I mean, you guys get clients in and I'm sure they ask about this, right? All right, stop. I know you're enjoying this pod, but I've got just 30 seconds of your time real quick because I have a question for you. Is it just me or has everyone's tools gotten way more expensive lately? And SMS is where one of those tool prices continues to sneak up on you. You'd think, cool, it's just a few cents a send, but once you're sending like a real list, bill really adds up because I've run brands and I've been on the ESP side. So I know what the pricing models work and how it's really priced, but SMS can look simple on the surface. And then once you get starting to send some volume, the bill starts looking a bit different. That's one of the reasons why I really like what Omnisend is doing right now. They just rolled out SMS pricing update and guess what? They lowered the prices starting at just $0.007 per SMS, depending on the country and the volume, of course, but you're already sending email and SMS together and having it all in one platform. That matters a lot. You can build automations where email and SMS works together instead of treating them like completely separate channels. And secondly, Omnisend has been investing in AI. They launched their brand new MCP that connects Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude. So you can ask questions, pull insights, check performance, move faster without digging through any dashboards. So if SMS is a real part of your growth strategy or you've been meaning to make it one, go check out Omnisend. Head to omnisend.com/sendit to get started. And now back to the show. 100%.

I would also add, Jimmy, just one thing before Liam jumps in is like, you're also thinking about the customer who you haven't acquired yet or the subscriber who hasn't subscribed yet and figuring out what would the best content be for that person.

Sure.

And I think that a lot of times there isn't really a system in place for doing these kind of like, let's say personalized learnings. And I think segmentation, like we absolutely have the data, we absolutely have the tooling, but we've seen like through audits and through working with a lot of brands, hundreds of these accounts and it's like, Even if you have the data, it doesn't necessarily mean you have the structure or the bandwidth necessarily to maintain it. And that goes for both agency and in-house teams.

Yeah.

Because there's so much logic that you have to maintain and so much static logic that if you wanna be truly like personalized, like you're either doing a lot of testing on like very niche kind of branching logic, or to your point, very niche segmentation. But then even at like a massive scale, you're still not able to do this any single person or any single team. Tens of thousands of times per month. So I think that's also where the unlock from AI comes, where it's like there are a lot of capabilities that if the data is structured properly and if the testing layer is there, you can really supercharge these learnings with the tooling that's now available that just 5 years ago wasn't.

Yeah.

So I think there's also like a huge profound shift happening in how personalized you can get, but you do need to do that through some sort of like rigid framework or like some robust testing framework. Otherwise, you sort of run into like, I have so much data, but I don't actually know what to do with that data.

Yeah.

And one thing too, to build off what Jacob said and what you said before, Jimmy, like, I think the whole personalization piece, one of the most important parts in all of that, obviously, like what products they browse, this and that, that stuff is incredibly important, but also how you package that, the actual content, the copy and the imagery that's being used. Like if you think of any sort of material that you respond to as a consumer, Oftentimes ads that really get your attention are something that's like speaking to you in some way. It's something that's like hitting on something that you are either thinking, something that you affiliate with, whatever it may be. And if you think of like the journey on the paid media side and how people really approach that is specifically nowadays with more broad targeting, like creative does the targeting, that kind of approach, you're building these different kind of buckets of creative that go after different demographics and personas and they speak very differently to these different buckets. Once you get them in your ecosystem, you can obviously tag all of that and build out tons of branches. But that kind of personalization from that standpoint almost gets lost in the retention ecosystem. And then right now, to Jacob's point, there's no real clear way to actually apply the learnings of what does each individual person actually engage with from a content perspective based off of, again, what they might have come in on from an angle or a demographic perspective on acquisition. So I think that's also where like a breakdown is right now. In the D2C space is you have this whole like creative does the targeting on paid media, which is great. But then once you get those people in your ecosystem, that kind of breaks down and you start putting people down general flows or general campaign cadences that have content that's speaking more generally to the segment you're sending to. But within that segment, if you're sending to a 30-day engaged, you might have 20 different demographics and personas that you're actually sending to. They just so happen to have engaged in a certain amount of time recently. So That's where I think it's very interesting and something we're also chasing. And I think a lot of people are chasing in the space is how do you tailor the content, not just the products that are being shown, which is important and you want people to convert, but you want them to also resonate really well with the package that that's coming in. So I'll just add that as well.

And one thing we see a ton of, it's one of my least favorite things inside of an abandoned cart flow is like, oh, you viewed this item. And it's like, that's so— you're just using generic filler words because you don't have the ability to actually personalize that piece. So I think that there's also like a lot of opportunity where like if you know the product that someone viewed or the product that someone started checkout with and you wanna exclude products that they maybe bought in the past, like you can actually come up with very tailored copy where it's like, the shirt you're looking at is almost sold out, grab it here. You know what I mean? And then if the next person abandoned is a pair of pants, it's like, the pants you have, you know what I mean? Like, so all of a sudden you can actually tailor that copy. So I would say like, and that's in more recovery style flows, but I would say that like, There's that opportunity as well on the campaign side where like you're not just sending one generic block to basically everybody, but everyone's getting a slightly different version because this person actually viewed this collection, this person viewed that collection.

That makes sense. And, you know, I think you pointed out a really big point here in the conversation that was really important that I'm sure marketers are all thinking about is like trying to design as many emails for the number of personas that you have. Let's just say, and you guys nailed it already, like let's just say you could have a list of 100,000 and you could easily identify 20, 30, 40 personas that you could make up, right?

Yeah.

And it's crazy how that comes into place. And in true personalization, all 20, 30, 40 of those personas would need a separate different email all the way from the copy to the images, to all the things, even the messaging in order to be more effective. And to your point, if you look at all the other places, we've kind of seen a version of this somewhere else. Like if you think about Meta ads, for example, they're doing a better job with it. But it's not just that, easily like landing pages, you know, So a journey that I always thought about that I don't think has been solved either has been like onsite personalization, which is another one, right? Like when you visit the page to show that personalized experience, I think we see them right now with like some quizzes. Like if you take a quiz, a survey, and, you know, 15-question survey or something, they might personalize your page for you, display something for you, but it's hard. And I think that's always been like the fundamental problem is technology has been the barrier. I think the thought is there, and this is what I'm getting to is like, Yeah. I think that we've all had the right thought. Like we really want to create this personalization. And when you look at like the other side, getting away from D2C, you go to like B2B and I find it interesting in B2B, they try to do it by putting these long snippets of like they are a women's clothing company. So it's like, hey Liam, I saw you run a women's clothing company and you have blah, blah, blah tool. And it's really just the same thing as a first name syntax or a tag syntax and they're just inputting it into the email. Yeah. And they're trying to make it flow and sound better. And I think that until maybe the last year or two, it just wasn't possible. And the brands that are winning, and then there's also the other side of it. Like most brands also, and this is probably a little bit of a hot take too, is like most brands might not be big enough to have personalization. You've got to at least be doing a little bit of volume. You can't have a 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 person list and do any kind of level of personalization because it's not going to really move the needle either. So the time versus effort has been a challenge too.

Especially the thing I might push back on there, Jimmy, is I totally agree. But like, if you're manually making all of that, 100% is not worth your time if you have a list that small. But if you have something that can like actually learn on kind of an individual level, what is the person engaging with and how do we actually build content that is more engaging for that individual recipient, then in theory you can basically do like personalization on any level as long as the actual barrier and labor involved in doing it is not extensive and not a waste of your time for the amount of juice that'll be squeezed out of it. So I fully agree on that side, but I think there is room for personalization down to an incredibly small list as long as you can actually efficiently build content for those people and learn on an individual basis over time. But again, the barrier is labor, which has been the case until very recently.

Yeah.

And even on our end, we've been in the email space for a long time. We built tons and tons of emails, managed lots of email programs, and Labor constraints always been very real. Like that's always been something where a lot of agencies bill off of like output of creative and things of that nature, which has really been kind of a way to bill on the agency side because again, labor has been the constraint. But I think that's changing too, which makes the landscape moving forward very interesting in terms of again, just like that labor constraint on producing emails that are personalized, producing content that's personalized, and producing more. So I'm sure you see it too, Jimmy, with You know, you're the email guy, so I'm sure you sit on that side and see where it's heading too. But it's interesting. Oh yeah, very interesting time.

There is a lot more email tool activity that's happening today than ever, I would say. There's a lot of shiny object syndrome definitely being thrown out there. I mean, God, the amount of email builders where you're like AI-generated email builders that I've seen in the last probably couple months here are actually a lot. Like there's a lot, but to your point here, It's not actually solving a problem that is happening in the market, like generating an email, right? I think that, you know, over the last next 6 months or whatever, generating email gets easier and easier. There's no doubt about it. I get that and so forth. And, you know, generating some basic strategy and being able to optimize that, that's great. But I don't think that any of that is moving the needle forward. It's just personally removing barriers of people, basically, to your point.

100%.

Designer, build my email for, you know, 3 hours, or my AI can build it in 15 minutes. That's great. Like time savings, definitely a thing, but like it's not moving the needle forward.

It's such a—

it's not helping.

Yeah, it's not helping anything. And so it's the same feedback I give all these guys is like, great, like cool, I could do this with Claude. Like why do I need your tool to do this? And they tell you all it hooks up to your MCP and your yada yada. And I said, so you can do that on Claude too. What's the big deal, right? Like there's, you're not really solving a real problem.

You're—

But you guys—

Yeah.

Yeah. But you guys have come up with something really interesting. And this is why I have you guys on the pod is like, I think you guys are doing something just very different than I've heard in the market. And it kind of makes sense because it's backed by what we call the direct-to-consumer's largest spend right now, right? If you're a direct-to-consumer brand, where does everyone spend all their time, money, and effort right now? Meta, right? And they're working on top of the funnel because everyone loves the new shiny product. What does Meta do? When I go into an ad now, I don't build ads uniquely in each and every place. I upload 5, 7, 10, 15 different images. I give it some headlines and copy that I do. And then Meta does this thing where it's like jumbling it all up and it's like, we'll display this best based on the user and we'll do this for you. And I'm like—

You're totally right.

Huh?

You know, and I saw that and then, you know, I only learned this earlier this year because I'm not a paid ads guy, but I just jumped in Earlier this year and I learned this. And then when I talked to you guys about what you guys are working on within your agency and your software side of things right now, this is where it comes into. So tell us how this idea came into place. Like how did the world of Allen start?

Well, you make— so one thing I want to come back on, you made such a good point, Jimmy. It's like if you can build, let's say you have 100,000 people on your list and you can build 100,000 different emails with some sort of vibe-coded tool that generates an email for you. You're functionally not solving anything apart from a labor problem because you're still ending up with 100,000 different emails that are getting delivered with no actual rhyme or reason behind it. So that's the missing layer, like the vibe coding and the generation of emails in an instant. While it's fantastic from a labor standpoint, that's not really the leverage. The leverage is like, how are you packaging the information within that and how do you actually constantly learn what type of content to serve? to different individual subscribers. Like that's where you get the actual juice out of what you're doing here. And so yeah, basically Jimmy, like that's kind of the thought process that we've also had with Alan. It's like, well, you think of a platform like Meta and you think of like how it serves creative. You upload, to your point, you upload your different creative formats, your angles, your copy, et cetera. Meta takes all of those components. It pulls in a creative and copy that it believes is gonna be highest converting for you, Jimmy. So you might get a video-based asset with certain copy. I might get a static image, so on and so forth. And it's doing that. And then within the ad set, you see a bunch of different ads that are basically getting different amounts of spend based off how well they're performing, which functionally means they're getting served more and they're outperforming other assets. So you think of email, none of that logic really applies to how content gets served on the email side. And that's really the angle that we're taking with Allen is like within Allen, we're uploading a bunch of content, your base assets. You can upload like specifically designed content for different placements, whatever it may be. And then Allan's basically taking all of those components and building emails on a one-to-one basis. And it's learning over time on a segment level and on an individual level engagement, and then basically serving the components over time to more people that are performing better. And it's kind of rank ordering all of that content constantly. So what you end up with is you end up basically like a constantly optimizing system where you're constantly shuffling creative in and out and serving it more frequently based off of how well it's performing. So it's really, that's the analogy we draw. We kind of say like ads manager for email marketing to kind of draw that analogy to how the content gets packaged. But I think it's incredibly important to really highlight that because I think again, back to the point you made, Jimmy, like building emails instantly all day long is great, but it's not actually, that's not where the leverage comes. And that's what we're trying to build with Allen is actually that point of leverage with how the content's served and packaged and also self-optimizing over time because you think of Any A/B test or split testing you do might be a couple variations. You're doing one path A, path B, but then you have to take that and apply it to your future sends, very manual. Allan's effectively doing that at a massive scale constantly and constantly shuffling. Jacob might have something else to add on to it as well, but that's my brief ramble on kind of what we're trying to build and where we're coming at it from.

It's funny how much time brands spend trying to get more traffic. And how little time they spend thinking about the traffic that they actually already have. Because every day people are landing on your site, they're browsing products, clicking around, and then they're leaving without buying or joining your list. And for most brands, they just accept this as normal. I don't know why, but they do. And this is where retention.com comes in. It helps e-commerce brands identify anonymous website visitors and turn more of that traffic into opted-in email subscribers. So instead of only marketing to the people who actually fill out a form, you can actually grow your list from the visitors who are already visiting your site. And what I like about it is that it's flexible. You can start free, you can turn it on when you need it, you can pause it when you don't, and you just pay as you go. There's no big annual commitment, so you just test it, and if it works for your brand, you keep using it. It's basically a way to get more value out of the traffic you're already paying Go check it out at retention.com today. And now we're back to the pod.

Yeah, I would say, I mean, like you can get 10x, 20x leverage building with, for example, vibe coding an email 100%. And you can have maybe 20 different segment ideas that you might send to. And let's say you wanna send 3 times a day, for example, like all of a sudden you might have 7 segments you can consistently hit. Once that email goes out, like it's gone. Like you might have split tested it, you might have done something to it, but like You've only got 10x leverage. With something like Allan, you get 100,000x leverage because you're actually sending something unique to every single subscriber in a permutation that's actually testing that. And over time, it's actually figuring out with every single send what's working, what's not. So the learnings are actually meaningful. Whereas if you're just sort of vibe coding an email, by the way, I think that's where all this is going as well. Like it's gonna be a hybrid approach of vibe coded templates with dynamic content inside of it.

Yeah.

But I would say that like that dynamic piece is still key because if you take it to the limit and if you have like half a million people on your list that you're sending to, that's half a million different segmentation opportunities if you take that to its natural extreme. But you also need aggregate datasets because like, for example, click engagement data is super hard to accrue because like half the people won't open your email and then how many people of those are actually gonna click through?

Yeah.

You wanna get a statistically significant result on a bunch of permutations that has to be done over time. So there's like a ton of really like small tactical stuff that needs to be considered inside of a larger testing framework. And I would say that that's kind of the biggest, that's sort of the biggest piece that's maybe missing in some of these static designs.

Yeah.

I mean, look guys, if you're listening to this pod and I know they kind of went through their thing, but like here, let me keep it really simple and easy. If I've got 50,000 people on my list, And I want to send 50,000 unique emails to my list. What Allen does is basically allows you to load creative and copy, and it's going to figure out based around the data that's being sent by your ESP, I'm assuming your Shopify, all the things that they have data around, and being able to personalize and customize every email down to the core. So 49,999 people are going to have a different email than the first email they had. So each person ultimately gets a separate email. Is that the correct way of thinking about it, Lee?

Yeah, exactly. It's one-to-one personalized emails. And by the time this airs as well, we're going to have some really, really cool updates that'll be live where essentially it's going to automatically digest, to Jacob's point, where the automatic generation of content really comes from. It's going to automatically digest all of your content from your site as well. So you can basically place your URL into it and it's automatically going to start building content for So it's gonna be very easy also to get leverage on your ability to produce content from that perspective. But yeah, you're exactly right, Jimmy. Like that's effectively it. You're uploading all of your content into Allen. Allen's creating permutations of those base assets. So if you just give it your asset library, it's gonna take that and start building content around it. And it's serving on a unique basis, one-to-one personalized emails. And that's functionally the gist of it. And we've seen crazy leverage in 2 places, like on the agency side with how we use it. It's allowed us to do a lot more and deliver a much better service for our brands because we can actually cover what I like to call more surface area within the account. Whereas historically, you know, if we're limited to a certain quantity of emails that we're building, this goes for internal teams too. Like if your quantity is 30 emails a month, you can only make 30 emails a month. But what happens if you want to go after all these pockets of your list that are really not focused on, but there's actual incremental revenue to be had from them? You then have to divert attention away from the high leverage segments you're focusing on. But with things like Allan, we can set triggers up to automatically go after these components of the list and basically not take away any labor on our end and output on our end from what we're already building. So it allows us to really kind of COVID the surface area within the retention program, which I think is hugely valuable. So that's something on the labor side. But then also just from a performance standpoint, like we're seeing better revenue per recipient, things like that, which is obviously what we're all here to do is drive revenue.

Yeah, exactly. So I was gonna ask that. So revenue per recipient is up as you're seeing this happen just because you're seeing better emails being sent to users. I mean, it kind of makes sense.

Yeah. And you can, you can basically like the simplest way to think about that too is like, if you A/B test something and you figure out that one variation is better performing and you start moving to sending content more like that, in theory, over time, as you do more and more of that, you should have better performance across all your metrics. But that takes a long time. With Allan, again, you're basically effectively like A/B testing, you know, tons and tons of variations of content. And it's learning over time as well what is most engaging, and then it's applying that to future email creation, emails that are being made. So that's where a lot of the revenue per recipient gains come from, is also seeing that kind of constant optimization of content in a way that is not possible to do manually. So that's one area that we're seeing. And then just again, the ability to cover more surface area, I think, is a really big thing too. Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know if there's anything else you want to add there.

Yeah. Incredible use of AI. Let me ask a question that I think people are going to ask. This is a bolt-on, right? Like you don't actually have to go switch ESPs or do anything crazy, right? You're just simply adding it to your tool deck that you do and it's basically running as kind of like an automated agent that's handling this side of things.

Oh yeah. And this comes from our experience on the agency side working with so many brands. We've like the headache of moving ESPs and migrating ESPs. There's always a headache involved in that. And regardless of how much promise there is around no dip in performance and whatnot, there's always usually something that ends up happening that where you miss something Sure. Or what it's accomplishing. You know it well, Jimmy. And obviously every team involved does their best to prevent that, but it's always a difficult thing to do. Like, it's just a— not difficult is the wrong word, but it's something that takes time and there's always things that you can't forecast. But so yeah, basically plugs directly into your ESP and sends from there. So that's kind of the route we're going with it. So it's almost like a brain feeding the content into how you're sending it. Within the rails, which are the ESPs, and that's how we want to really, really build into the tool.

That's really cool. And then so you've obviously proven it out at the agency level for your own clients, and then now you're rolling it out to brands also. So brands could also participate in this if they are generally, as we were talking about this on the pod just a couple weeks ago, but like retention teams are slimming down right now, but they're being asked to do more. Like that's kind of like the weird seesaw that's happening. Obviously. Operators are telling them lean into AI, do more automated, yada yada yada. This sounds like a great addition where it probably doesn't cost too much as far as a lift is concerned, but the output is dramatically better. The question I have from that is like, if someone comes up and signs up for Allen and sets it up, right? How fast do they set up? Like, how fast does it take before they're sending their first personalized email out?

Yeah, Jacob, you want to take that?

I'd say less than a week, Jimmy, typically. It can also be like same day if they have the content ready. It's super quick to get set up. But because we do white glove onboarding for a lot of our brands, I'd say between 3 and 5 days is typically the turnaround to get a brand live that's coming kind of with, with no assets, nothing like that. But if they have assets ready to go, it's a really quick turnaround because it's just 5-minute integration, copy paste an API key, no IP warming, no list migration needed. Everything syncs directly. And also, this is important to a lot of teams as well, but like your attribution is consistent with what you've already been doing. So if you want to basically test this against what you've already been doing inside of your account, or just bolt it on top of the existing flows that you have or campaigns that you're doing, all of that's in one ecosystem, in one place where you can actually compare all of these results apples to apples without having to do sort of, let's say, more complicated And sometimes often messy kind of attribution to figure out what's actually driving value and where.

No, that's cool.

I think one other thing too to add, Jimmy, that you mentioned, like we're already seeing use cases around this is also agencies using the tool for how they deliver their service to brands. And because it was something that we built internally to also give kind of acceleration efficiencies to our workflows on the agency side before it was released as a standalone product that brands can use. We also have a really, really interesting agency offering that'll allow brands to basically, you know, run a lot of their retention marketing through Allen and speed up a lot on the scheduling, QA side, proofing, etc. So there's a lot of cool stuff there that we're also seeing use cases around on top of just the brands leveraging it for personalization. So yeah.

No, I love this idea. So where does this go? Like, where do you guys see yourselves going? Like, obviously, this is You guys are entering the market, obviously proved it with clients, have real users today, but where are you guys going with this? Where do you think about it? Are you going to start layering some type of strategic side to it? Tell me about where you guys think about this.

Jacob, you want to take that one?

I'm happy to share on the product side and I don't want to say too much. I don't think I should.

Yeah, just tease the audience a little bit. Tell us where you're heading because I think that is important for people. A lot of tools out there, a lot of toys out I wanna make sure that they understand that this is very different. I don't think there's anyone in the market doing anything like this, which is why you guys are on here. But tell me, like, where are you guys heading with this?

100%. I mean, I would say that email is definitely the core. Email personalization, I would definitely say, is the core feature, but it's personalization at large. I think the next big step function is gonna be pages. So making sure we have a congruent kind of experience between What email the person gets and what onsite experience they see. That goes all the way through not only the landing page experience, but also the CRO piece as well. And then I would say that data enrichment is the next piece. So just having a better and better graph on your customer.

Sure.

And also figuring out, let's say, cost-efficient ways to utilize as much data in your customer graph inside of meaningful personalization decisions, because just Let's go back to the vibe coding example. If you vibe coded 10,000 emails in one month, you'd end up with a pretty expensive Claude bill. So to figure out how to actually do this at a scale that makes sense for the expected kind of, let's say, LTV of each customer, you really need to make sure that you're doing this in a way that your tokens are efficient, but you can still do it at scale with every single send that you do. And then when you're sending, you know, millions and millions of personalized messages. So there's a lot of very interesting technical challenges in that, ones that, you know, in building the product we've had to overcome. But I would say, yeah, we're very excited about just personalization at large. SMS is a big next product on that side, of course. Pages, we're super excited about. Onsite CRO, we're super excited about. So there's a lot of really great stuff that's coming in the pipeline. And I would say like enrichment is a really big one. And then obviously integration partners as well. So on the Omnisend side, we have a big partnership and integration coming up there and then obviously opening this up as an API service too. So yeah, a lot of exciting stuff I'd say on the horizon here. But yeah, email is absolutely sort of the core, the core product and the core use case. I think that a lot of brands struggle with right now for all the reasons we chat about.

Hey, it's Chase. Got 30 quick seconds? We built something specifically for you. Jimmy and I together have over 20 years of combined experience in email marketing, and we finally put everything together in one place, and it's called Ecom Email Certified. I know it's fancy, but it's going to be great whether you're brand new or running campaigns for 7, 8, 9-figure brands. It covers it all, you know, deliverability, AI, copywriting, design, strategy, SMS, literally everything. Has over 175 total modules totaling 25+ hours of content. It even has quizzes, a community, and you're gonna get a real certification. It's way better than college. Don't tell your professor that, but it is. And we've designed it to take you from beginner to certified expert. We're talking about the kind of marketer who actually moves the needle and drives real revenue. Check it out at ecomemailcertified.com. And now back to the pod. Yeah.

Yeah.

I would say the onsite personalization, as you guys talked about it, would be still like my favorite thing to see come out. I feel like years and years that this has happened. There was a company, I can't remember their name, but I remember maybe a couple years ago they were charging like $2,000, $3,000 just for onsite personalization. And it wasn't even good. It wasn't tied to the email. The email didn't have any real personalization. And then when you got to the site, it was okay, right? If they had data, they had cookies on you and they've seen what you shopped, they were able to display that. But they weren't really doing onsite personalization the way that you really need to be able to drive to Make people feel like, hey, like this is for me kind of situation. And I think that would be a really cool thing to see what you guys solve with that for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think too, like just to Jake's point there, like the cohesiveness of personalization through the customer journey, again, kind of a buzzword, but I think we've gone into it a good amount through the conversation now, but that truly is like what we're trying to seek to with—

Yeah.

You're trying to solve this problem, personalization.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Because again, again, buzzwordy, but if you unpack it, like there's a lot missing currently in the current infrastructure and tooling out there. But Jimmy, how about you? Where do you see everything heading? Because you're the email guy, you've been in the space for longer than we have. So curious your take on it all.

Yeah, we've been talking a lot about this too because you're right. Like, you know, we thought about a lot of the different ways and paths that go building email. No, like that's not really a very functional use of AI. I think about like The data and the enrichments and the ability to be able to identify a user. Like in a perfect world, I'm getting an email that is very catered towards me because this is the email that talks to me. I get on the site, it shows me all the things that I'm interested in because it knows me based around my data. It's kind of like Amazon-ish a lot of ways, right? Like Amazon does a good job doing this already, but that power and Amazon experience power does not translate often to a direct-to-consumer store. And if you literally could just have an Amazon-like experience on a direct-to-consumer store, I'd probably be more likely to shop on a direct-to-consumer store than the Amazon side. So to me, Amazon's already proven like there is something, and I know they've got thousands of data scientists behind the scenes that are making this happen, but I believe with AI, we're going to accelerate that and catch everyone up. And so I guess my simple answer would be if I could have an Amazon-style experience as As a direct-to-consumer store, I do believe that that is literally the next level of generation of what we would call personalization in this space.

Couldn't agree more.

Yeah, it's very— it's actually super simple. It's not like these big companies aren't doing it. It's always a challenger of the direct-to-consumer company trying to do what the big companies are doing. And I don't know how much their tech costs, but I know their tech costs a lot, and they've got a lot of people running and operating it. And AI today is doing this at a much efficient speed. And dude, in the next 6 months, 12 months, I mean, you know, it was only a year or 2 ago that we saw video with Will Smith with 5 fingers and eating like things. And now we're at a place where video is almost unidentifiable at this point.

Yeah.

So I think that we're just at the forefront. And I tell people all this time, like, I think we're at like the GeoCities phase of what the internet was when the internet was growing in the '90s. I mean, that's how old I am, but I remember that. And now we look at the internet and how far it's gotten. It's the same thing with AI. Like, we're just at the infancy of AI and things are changing. You know what I mean? Like, everything's changing. But I do think that the habits of users and the habits and behaviors of people aren't evolving because that's just how life is. And the core sector of the world who can spend money right now are the millennials, Gen Z, Gen Boomers, right? Like, these are the people who can spend money. You got to cater to them. you know, thinking about a lot about this stuff, this is really where a lot of this goes.

Totally. Yeah, 100%.

Well, guys, yeah, any final thoughts before we wrap this thing up?

No, I mean, I think it was a great conversation. I appreciate you having us on, Jimmy, and, uh, yeah, chatting through it. It's been fun. And thanks for, you know, giving us the opportunity to also share a bit more about what we're doing with Alan. And, uh, yeah, it's been, been fun.

Yeah, this is awesome.

And we'll throw guys listening We'll throw the link to Allan. I think a couple of people have asked in some of our other pods, but we'll throw the link. It's getallan.com. We'll throw the link in the show notes description. Go check it out, guys. It is really just the one unique AI tool in this space right now that is actually doing something different versus just building emails. And no offense to those people who are building emails, but to me, that's not really an evolution. It's just a time crunch thing. And really between the next couple weeks and months, whatever it is, That's going to be replaced with just the ability to do it on Claude, for example. But something like you guys are doing is very cool. That's why I wanted to bring you guys on. Being operators, being in the agency space, being in the direct-to-consumer for as long as you guys are, you guys aren't just showing up. You guys are solving an actual problem within your own business and now for your clients and now for other brands. So very cool. Thank you guys, Liam, Jacob, for being on the pod. With that being said, thank you guys all for tuning in and we'll see you guys next week. See you guys later.

Thanks, Jimmy.

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.