The Art of AI-Driven Personalization in Marketing with Ryan Burrer - 89

In this episode of the D2Z Podcast, Brandon Amoroso welcomes Ryan Burrer, Principal Sales Engineer for New Products at Attentive. Together, they delve into the intriguing intersection of marketing, AI, and personalization.

Ryan, a seasoned expert with over a decade of experience in the email service provider domain, unveils valuable insights into the ever-evolving marketing landscape. They explore the shift from traditional, channel-centric strategies to a more unified, customer-centric approach that meets the rising expectations of today's consumers.

One key highlight of their conversation is the significance of consolidating various marketing channels into a single platform. This approach not only provides marketers with a comprehensive view of customer behavior but also empowers them to tailor communications according to individual preferences, thus enhancing the overall customer experience.

Ryan and Brandon discuss how AI can automate decision-making processes, generate personalized content, and predict customer behavior. The result? A more engaging and personalized customer journey.

Ryan provides valuable insights into how Attentive leverages AI to craft highly personalized and engaging email campaigns. Moreover, they peek into the future of AI in marketing, where it plays a pivotal role in guiding marketers on audience building, timing, and messaging strategies.

The conversation also delves into the challenges of a post-cookie world and the need to transition to more reliable tracking methods, such as device tracking and IP-based identification.

As the episode unfolds, Brandon and Ryan explore the emerging trend of marketers expanding their communication channels beyond email and SMS. They contemplate the use of platforms like physical mail and WhatsApp to engage customers effectively, providing a glimpse into the future of customer communication solutions.

Tune in to this captivating episode of the D2Z Podcast to gain valuable insights into the evolving world of marketing, AI, and personalization.

Timestamps:

🎙️ Exploring Marketing Evolution with Ryan Burrer (00:00:00)

📈 The Shifting Landscape of Marketing Channels (00:00:36)

🌟 The Power of Customer-Centric Approaches (00:03:08)

🎯 Precision through Personalization and Segmentation (00:04:19)

🤖 Unveiling AI's Impact on Marketing (00:08:00)

🚀 The Future Unleashed: AI in Marketing (00:11:50)

📱 Attentive's Innovative SMS and Email Approach (00:13:11)

🍪 Challenges in a Post-Cookie World (00:13:41)

🔍 Towards Deterministic Tracking (00:14:06)

📦 The Magic of Product Recommendation Feeds (00:15:05)

📊 Trends Shaping Marketing and Customer Engagement (00:20:27)

🤔 WhatsApp Limitations: Unraveling Marketing Challenges (00:25:40)

🚀 Future Avenues in Marketing: What Lies Ahead (00:26:30)

🌐 The Quest for a Unified Platform in Customer Communication (00:27:05)

🔮 Speculating on the Future of Marketing Tools (00:28:01)

🛠️ Build vs. Buy: Deciphering Decision-Making in Marketing (00:28:48)

⚖️ Balancing Innovation and Customer Trust (00:34:47)

Ryan Burrer

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-burrer-60332852/

Attentive - https://www.attentive.com/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone thanks for tuning in to D2Z a podcast by using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency, oetri. Today I'm talking with Ryan Burr, principal sales engineer for new products at Attentive, which is a multi-channel customer experience platform. It has been a close partner of Electra for the last couple of years. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 1: 0:37

Yeah thanks for having me, brandon. So before we dive into the things that we want to cover today, can you just give everybody a brief background on yourself and how you got there?

Speaker 2: 0:49

Of course, hey everyone, Ryan Burr, principal sales engineer. Like Brandon just said, I lead all of the technical sales efforts for our email products and other new products here at Attentive. Very deep email nerd I would classify myself, as I've spent the last 11 or 12 years working with other email service providers before joining with Attentive and before that active as a marketer myself. So I understand a lot of the tasks we have to go through.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Nice, the SendGrid and Twilio. We never worked with them directly, but they're pretty much the backbone for most of the I would say business-facing products that are out there today right.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Yeah, definitely a big infrastructure player, which I've enjoyed kind of getting my start there because it teaches you a lot of the hard skills of kind of being an expert on the channels, of just reputation mechanics and how they work and things like that. It's been really interesting over the last couple of years kind of seeing the channels come together, because even at Twilio and other groups a lot of the time we were always thinking of channels as very channel-centric. You had different strategies and whatnot for each channel and it's been really interesting seeing how the markets kind of moved into bringing everything into single tools, consolidating and finding value between how you use those channels to build a better customer experience.

Speaker 1: 2:12

What are some of the value props to having one source of truth for email, for texts, for other forms of communication, versus going with a point solution for each? Because obviously, like three, four years ago that was sort of the tried and true method was to go with a point solution for email, a point solution for SMS, a point solution for direct mail, whatever it may be. But now it feels like everything's coming together.

Speaker 2: 2:45

I think there's a couple reasons, one or a couple of values. I'd talk about One. I think our customers expect it in today's world, where they expect a lot of the marketing strategies that we go out to market with are conversational and we start to see consumer behavior react negatively nowadays when they feel bombarded or like spammed or attacked about channels. Bringing everything into one place gives me that more unified view of what my consumer is doing on site. So I start to understand things like channel preference. Does Brandon, does he engage more often with SMS or email? And then, now that I know that, what do I do with that information? Do I always make sure that I'm communicating with Brandon on SMS first and then maybe use email as like a reengagement step, something like that? But I try to move away from this idea of like just bombarding brand with both at one time and seeing how that works. But also still, that is a winning strategy for some brands, so it's very brand centric for a lot of people.

Speaker 2: 3:43

I think too, we've all watched kind of like the rise of CDPs and tools that are kind of, in the sense, have tried to take this idea of like point solutions and bring them into a single solution to try to give you that intelligence and whatnot, and I think that that's one piece of what CDPs are really meant to do.

Speaker 2: 4:01

But at the same time I think we're starting to see the marketing, the market that's largely owning these channels, kind of moving to consolidation to try to provide customers that value Without using outside tools like a CDP. I think, too, there's like always values of like cost savings. Right, if I can pick and choose what channels I use as a marketer, I start to increase my ROI over time by being a little more centric and focused on how people have engaged up to this point as well as marketer efficiency, like just not having to jump between three different tools to do that email, sms and physical mail anymore. Being able to bring it all in one just brings down the time takes to actually complete a day to day activity and things like that. So we're starting to see kind of like value across the board, not only on the customer side but also internally for the marketers who are using the solutions.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Do you think that'll translate over to the website at a certain point, because it feels like we're doing a lot of, you know, segmentation and personalization within the email and SMS channels, but not necessarily on site yet.

Speaker 2: 5:05

Yeah, and I think that's one of the more exciting things that attentive has kind of been sprinting into and has been doing for a while now.

Speaker 2: 5:13

Largely by getting like product catalogs from our customers, we can start to see what they're doing on site, how they've engaged with different products.

Speaker 2: 5:21

Like, did I go to a web page and look at a certain collection of products from your catalog more than twice but still didn't purchase? And if I've done that, maybe consecutively at different times, well, you've basically figured out about me right, as I have an affinity towards buying that product or that collection, and personalizing your marketing strategy from that point on to engage me across the channels we've been talking about is always going to be a winning strategy. But I do think others are coming. Other people in the marketing automation space, other competitors are now also headed in that same direction of making sure that we all have access to a customer's catalog. That are JavaScript tags track what those users are doing on site and finally, we're starting to see marketers bring that site behavior and channel behavior into single models so that they can start to understand again like preferences, affinities, propensities to buy, things like that All the fun things we like to kind of wreck our brains about, as marketers can finally start to have like data points that make sense of that.

Speaker 1: 6:20

How is AI helping speed this process along or facilitate things?

Speaker 2: 6:27

for you guys, as you go into this, yeah, I'll actually say something a customer told me not too long ago when I tried to do. What my day to day job is is like finding workarounds and things like that a lot of the time, which was we were looking at affinity modeling and propensity modeling and we're trying to figure out if someone's looking at these products, how do I know that they then have an affinity to buy this other product, right? So like kind of a cross selling idea and essentially like showing how we could build these as humans gets us to a point. But what really got us going was the kind of innovation that AI is bringing to those kind of problems. Like AI is always going to have a stronger, more conviction around things like cross cell behavior or affinity or propensity, because it can make connections that a human mind can't. At the end of the day, like knowing that someone who looked at black wool socks might actually be interested in a black wool winter jacket Isn't usually something that a human is going to sit there. If I'm looking at like 50,000 product IDs in my catalog and I'm going to make that connection, it's been really interesting to watch AI kind of automate that decision and criteria and what fascinates me is. That's one part of what AI is actually driving for differentiation.

Speaker 2: 7:42

Now for marketers, attemptives won awards in the generative AI space. For SMS AI, we can build, copy and listen to your brand voice. We've got 78 billion SMS signals to learn from. It goes into audience building, which we've kind of been talking about with the whole affinity modeling. We're testing out send time optimization using AI. Personalization AI tries to create connections between subscribers to figure out what's the best chance for personalization and a specific experience, but it's kind of across the board. Almost every activity I feel like that marketers are typically going through when we think of what it takes to build out something like an email campaign or an SMS campaign is likely going to have AI at some point having its hands on that process to just alleviate some sort of bandwidth issues or drive better intelligence.

Speaker 1: 8:30

At the end of the day, the one thing that I'm looking forward to AI to do is taking more of, I think, an active role in telling us what we should be doing, versus us still telling the platforms and the systems what it should be doing.

Speaker 1: 8:47

Because, if you look at, our segmentation process is still so manual. And why am I the one thinking of the audience building, why am I the one thinking of the copy and creative versus the platform telling me, hey, brandon should receive this type of communication at this time, or replenishment flows, for example. Still so, we're just at the cusp of what we can do there, because we're sure we'll run tests around the proper timing or there's some solutions that'll say we can tell you the ideal time to hit this customer with an email and text that they'll be likely to reorder. But it really doesn't feel like even that whole process is one to one. Yet how do you deal with somebody who bought $500 worth of stuff versus somebody who bought $50 worth of stuff, and when you should reach back out to them by? And there's even other variables like do they have a family or not? Are they purchasing for themselves? Are they purchasing for a group? How do we get AI to help us get to the true one to one personalization.

Speaker 2: 9:48

Oh man, this is really I'm glad you asked, because it's really one of the foundational elements that we're focused on when we think about AI is driving better performance through personalization and things like identification for segmentation. What I mean by that is so we have been testing out of product we call AI journeys internally, which largely is a way that we can start to try to drive the highest level of personalization and kind of a cross-sell behavior to consumers as they go through a typical cart abandon. We've always been using these templated approaches that are largely hey, first name, don't forget about this item, and then that leads to a cart link. It's a winning strategy. There's really nothing necessarily wrong with it. But what we're now testing is using AI to start to make deterministic signals on why someone should be cross-sold to a different product and then personalizing that message so like no longer. Hey, you forgot this in your cart. It's much more. Hey, ryan, that white shirt that you're wearing or that you're looking at is going to look great with the shoes that you bought three weeks ago. It's in your size, it's in your favorite color. Do you like to learn more? And that's kind of where we're excited to have, because that's really hard for a marketer to do at scale.

Speaker 2: 11:03

If I'm thinking of just basic personalization, it's typically not even possible in most solutions.

Speaker 2: 11:09

So we've started to generate these messages on the fly using AI and we're seeing a lot of success there.

Speaker 2: 11:14

The other part of that it's usually associated to one of our other products that we have in beta right now, which is our automated campaign solution that uses AI to actually generate audiences for us that we think that have the highest likelihood to buy the products that we're going to be marketing in the message, and then it influences some send time optimization on that audience, just trying to figure out when are they most likely to actually engage with the send, and then using generated copy again to spit out the most compelling personalized copy that we can generate to that audience as well. And again, these are the kind of tools that we're interested in building, using AI again, hopefully to drive that more performant message, and we're putting a lot of chips in the bucket. That personalization is going to be the strategy that really kind of like blows the top off this whole thing of really where we can start to see AI become extremely powerful. Generative audience building is definitely a huge part of that, though.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Yeah, and it feels like things are moving very quickly, so I think that it'll be here sooner, sooner rather than later.

Speaker 2: 12:13

I mean it's kind of like a year ago we weren't really. It was like all theories of what we were going to be doing with AI, and it's been nuts in the last year to kind of just see this rat race of everyone running into it. I think the interesting part for me is just what it takes to train good AI right over time. You have to have good data sets to be able to kind of continue to get more out of those machine models, and I think marketing automation is an amazing space for AI in that sense because it's constantly going to be learning from engagement rates of what worked for different senders and things like that, and it's a really cool space to see this kind of come to fruition.

Speaker 1: 12:49

Can you talk a little bit about how attentive started with SMS and moved into email versus you know most of the other players in the space. They were email platforms and then they added on SMS and I've definitely seen some friction in both ways. But it feels like even more friction for the platforms that started with email and then added SMS versus the platform Well, really the only one I can think of actually that did SMS first and was the because, like Postgres, hasn't added the email. Most of the SMS only solutions haven't added email. So I think attentive is the only one that I'm familiar with that has gone SMS than email. But I remember from you know, like the luminaries event, you were talking about how the phone number is that unique identifier for the customer versus all these random emails. But there's some other benefits too. So what has that process been like versus you know everybody else who's really gone email and then added SMS and to the phone.

Speaker 2: 13:43

Yeah, yeah, it's a really good point, I think. One the market in general is moving to consolidation again. Right, I don't think there's going to be a lot of disparate SMS providers and email providers there will be some, for sure but I think in general we're seeing, like you said, a lot of the ESPs moving to the SMS space and then people like attentive building out email. What's been really unique for me and this whole experience so far I'm about two years deep with attentive on this run of building out our email product building an ESP from 2021 to 2023, like in today's age with the tools we have access to and kind of the advent of APIs and all this fun stuff that's happened in the last couple of decades. We're not having to rebuild a lot of the functionality that marketers found important in 2009 to 2012 that they're not really using in today's tools. So it's been a really interesting exercise to hear from marketers day in, day out in my normal job. What do you find useful in your current ESP, what kind of values that drive, how does this impact certain KPIs, how does this impact your day to day? And then taking that internally to figure out how we kind of either solve these larger macro problems that we're hearing from our marketers, but in a way that hasn't been done by the market today, or even just building what we find these marketers have really loved within their other ESPs. So we're getting to learn from, like, what people are already doing, which I don't think many ESPs that existed today have kind of had the benefit to be able to do. In that vein, though, to your point, id identification really just for anyone watching this like the concept of tracking anonymous users on your website, cooking them, using other mechanisms to track them and then targeting them with our automated messaging is given attentive, a benefit that I don't think anyone else in the market really has.

Speaker 2: 15:33

Because of starting with, phone number is our primary key of record and because of the nature of SMS engagement, and what I mean by that is, if you think about how many emails of probably anyone watching this actually has or has had throughout their lifespan, it's definitely more than one for a majority of the population. Meanwhile, phone numbers tend to be very persistent. I haven't changed my phone number since I first got a phone a cell phone in like I don't know 2001 or something like that, so it's been with me a long time and I have not changed it at all, so it's persisted with me throughout my lifespan. But emails I probably have hundreds of emails as an email engineer, so I'm a really hard guy to track, using cookies on the Internet, of what I'm doing over email, the SMS I have to verify it through TCPA. It's a very easy way to track me. Now, all of us in the market, everyone in marketing automation, we include figures or values in URL so that when users click those URLs, we can re-cookie new devices or we can refresh a cookie because these cookies expire over time. Right, cookies are not a perfect way to track users on the Internet. The difference between us and these ESPs, though, is that SMS tends to have anywhere between like a 20 to a 40% click-through rate on most campaigns, whereas email is usually between like 0.5 to 4%. That varies pretty widely from there, but if you think about how these cookie refreshing policies have an attentive, has, massively fresh cookies and a database of many, many devices per user, and it really just goes into how engaged the channel is.

Speaker 2: 17:08

We're also not the most self-serve company on the planet.

Speaker 2: 17:12

We kind of act like an agency with self-serve tools in some ways, and what I find interesting about that is we're not setting customers up incorrectly the first time.

Speaker 2: 17:21

Right, it's always handheld, so we don't tend to see customers have issues when they come to us, which again impacts their engagement, tend to see better engagement than what they were doing before when they come to us and then also, just with our AI tools that we've been talking about the value of the generative copy we're able to release.

Speaker 2: 17:40

All these strategies go into trying to drive more engagement, which, in the end, for us, the major goal of engagement is conversions, for sure, but also identification, to be able to take a better shot later on if you need it and better track these users on site. Yeah, it's been really interesting to build a new ESP, learn from marketers in today's age, but I do think attentive has kind of had an unfair advantage when it comes to how we have traditionally database and thought about identification. Just because of starting out with SMS, which has been really valuable for us, we're typically seeing a very nice performance lift on email when customers come to us, because we're not thinking of just email versus SMS, we think of subscribers. So every cookie SMS subscriber actually impacts their email identification rates as well, which has been really cool.

Speaker 1: 18:28

What is a post cookie world going to look like?

Speaker 2: 18:32

Man. I think we're starting to see some of it, right like there's. There's groups that have started to move away from third party cookies. We've we've never really used third party cookies much, and I mean those are going to become invalidated later in 2024. So we're starting to see people pull back from that already, which is largely how a lot of individuals have been doing, like identification sharing.

Speaker 2: 18:55

If they offer that today, I think what we'll see is that cookies will probably remain in some respect, like what we'll probably see, those dwindling expiration dates. So today it's like seven days safari, 30 day Chrome Probably see those go further down over time, and then again the name of the game will just become people engaged, so those cookies stay on. Where attentive is actually testing right now is moving much more into device tracking, though, and starting to utilize IP and other deterministic signals to understand who a person is, based on device information that we have about them, and again, we already have a lot of that information. So it's not something we have to start from scratch on, but we're already seeing really good performance as a result of moving away from cookies. I won't even say moving away is the bad way to say that Enhancing cookie tracking with device tracking has been working really well and I imagine similar strategies are going to be used by other marketing automation firms over time.

Speaker 1: 19:56

I am fortunate in that you know we've stayed away from ads and you know paid media for the most part. But it feels like that side of the equation is going to get impacted even more than necessarily what we focus on on the retention side. They seem to have been getting the bulk of the pain from all these privacy policy updates that have been rolling out, because once you own that customer it's a lot easier to be able to keep track of them, even with. You know we've been doing some cool things with, like you know, direct mail reactivations and stuff like that, because even if you opt out of email and SMS, you still have your address when you place the order 100%.

Speaker 2: 20:43

I think that is a strategy that again, brandon, that you'll see more often from other marketers in the space is this idea of.

Speaker 2: 20:52

We've largely thought of retention channels as email and SMS for a very long time.

Speaker 2: 20:57

I think as you go outside of the United States you start to see things like WhatsApp kind of take advantage of different kind of trends in different markets. You're hearing a lot more from customers of physical mail making another resurgence in the marketing funnel, right where we're starting to send out our physical flyers and catalogs and things like that to customers maybe disengage or like very high intent to purchase. But I do think in the same way we're talking about SMS and email being better together to limit opt out rates and drive conversion. We're going to start to see these other tools used for similar strategies right, like, if I have more subscriptions, I have essentially more opportunities to bring someone back to an engaged state and get them to convert from me, whereas if I'm really locked into just one subscription for SMS, one subscription for email, kind of got two shots with each customer. So I do think what you're talking about and the success you found is going to be something that you see more used over time.

Speaker 1: 21:58

What are some of the other trends that you've been seeing in the, in the market, with, with your customers we're especially going into 2024, which the brands be thinking about when it comes to? You know their email and SMS strategy. And then my next question is going to be given that you already have email and SMS within attentive, you know, is there a logical next channel that you think you guys might want to, you know, creep into or partner with as everything becomes more? You know, omnichannel?

Speaker 2: 22:28

Yeah, really good questions. I think, in terms of other trends I'm seeing, I would say to the audience if you're not doing product recommendation feeds today, you should start doing those quickly in 2024. We've seen, I think, like a 38% average increase in triggered email revenue as a result of using product recommendations and attentive, and that's just our own models. I think it really blows the top off it when you're talking about other products out there that all they do is modeling. So if you're not doing that, it's an easy way to provide personalization. I definitely think it's a winning strategy for almost anyone. Obviously, there's caveats if you have limited SKUs and age gating and fun stuff like that, but definitely a winning strategy for most marketers in the retail space that I'm working with right now.

Speaker 2: 23:15

I think the other piece and it's largely something that I think we're approaching head on with the new investments we're making and identification, which, again investments for attentive in this whole concept of our tag or ID is really never going to stop. It's one of the ways that we see if we can differentiate over time. But we have noticed a lot of customers starting to move to these plugins that allow them to better attract identification, and I'm not going to name them off, but I think the audience will probably know a bunch of the ones I'd be referencing. I think this is really coming from a place where marketers are being asked to do more with less, and it's never like we're asked as marketers that, hey, you did great this year. Next year you don't have to make as much revenue, right? That never is said, if anything. It's the complete opposite Like you did great this year, that's to exit next year, and I think marketers in general are trying to look for better ways to identify their customers, to keep taking these shots and trying new strategies, and so we've started to see an ad of plugins that are really designed to help with device sharing not device sharing, device tracking, I would say and there are some solutions that are kind of like gray area of compliance that are around this whole idea of ID sharing, and I think attentive is really interested in providing more signals to better identify customers. So that's why we're investing in things like device graphing if we can, and that's just something we've been testing internally before we decide if it's going to be something we release.

Speaker 2: 24:47

But I think what has been interesting in that trend is really just kind of people's attitudes or appetites towards kind of going into a realm of maybe gray practices to drive better revenue, and it's often my job to try to coach them that we can still get there with best practices. We don't want to make Google mad or anything like that as we go about trying to find more change under the couch cushions and things like that, but I do think you will start to see more of us in the marketing automation space again, using more signals to deepen our identification tools so that marketers aren't going elsewhere to grab that information. And then again, like we talked about, I think to your point, bringing more solutions into a single solution, some more channels, more plug-in stuff like that, to start bringing in things like physical mail, whatsapp, whatever other channels customers are interested in, and then I think what's up?

Speaker 1: 25:41

Let's just say WhatsApp is one that's fascinating to me, because there's a lot of limitations from WhatsApp itself in terms of what can and can't be done within the platform.

Speaker 2: 25:51

Yeah, yeah, and it's expensive.

Speaker 2: 25:52

Right, it's not a cheap channel, I think, for many to use, but, yeah, you can kind of sense, when we're getting RFPs now, even that largely many of them are dictated in a way that I need a single solution for all of my channels going forward, and I think in that realm you were asking about next channels for attentive.

Speaker 2: 26:17

I'm probably a bit over my pay grade, to be clear, but I think we are very impressed with the mobile resurgence that's happening right now with people who have mobile apps and are engaging in push. I could personally see that being the next avenue we try to go into again just deepening, using the same device graphing that we have, or the same identification tools that we have internally, and now enabling that on other channels. I can say, though, because of our focus on SMS and mobile first marketing, I think push makes a lot of sense for us going forward, and I think I would just say that it's nothing set in stone. So it's definitely a thing, but I think our customers are really going to be the ones who dictate where we head with that over time.

Speaker 1: 27:05

Yeah, plus push is free. So there's a lot to be said.

Speaker 2: 27:12

When you look at cohorts of engagement and revenue creation right, and you look at that mobile app audience people actually willing to receive push and download an app tends to be quite high. So I think it is something we're really interested in. We have released SDKs that work in mobile so that we can start to do firing our sign-up units and looking at event tracking pretty soon. So again, I think push would be a nice another channel in our tool belt over time.

Speaker 1: 27:39

It's just one step closer to having that truly unified place for all customer communication. And I wonder. Most markets will ebb and flow in terms of they start off with specialization and then they move into products to everything for everyone. That ebb and flow back and forth. But something that is interesting to me is what are the three, four, maybe five platforms that'll be here in three to five years? Because I don't think there's going to be truly an all-in-one platform in the sense that there's not going to be something that handles subscription, commerce, email and SMS, website personalization, returns, order tracking there's a lot of things that go into a Shopify storefront right now and what are the three to five overarching categories that one company will put their plant, their flag in and then pick up the underlying individual components to bring it under one roof. I don't think it's going to happen again then where, like those five, all go into one.

Speaker 1: 28:52

So it's been interesting to see what some of the businesses out there have been adding on to their suite, like Yapo subscriptions Not really sure whether or not that makes sense to me personally and there's some other ones where Akenno has gone down the route of basically becoming a zero-party data platform, which I actually think makes some sense to have the quizzes, the surveys, the reviews all within one platform. And then you have Klaviyo adding reviews. That feels more like maybe an easy cross-sell or a way to get people onto another solution. But does that really line up with the long-term vision with adding in a CDP as well too? So it's just interesting to see that happen in real time. But also the build versus buy sort of approach, where Attentive has done both buying tone and buying privy. But then you have some other businesses that haven't bought at all, even though I think it would speed things up pretty significantly for them. So that's another interesting higher-level strategy thing that just watching from afar has been fun to see.

Speaker 2: 30:11

I think too, brandon, on the vendor side, it's a fascinating piece, right, because there are customers on every tool right now that want different things and are comfortable with different things, and, for instance, a lot of my more enterprise customers. An all-in-one solution almost scares them to a rate, right, like if I ever want to leave that all-in-one solution, what's a migration, look like to the next provider. And now suddenly am I looking at having to either build or buy like six different applications to now unpack what I just moved into versus others. They love the agility of having everything in one tool. I get to orchestrate better. I have everything there. I'm using the CDP to do intelligence, like that kind of like different strokes for different folks, I think is probably the best way to say it, but it's definitely true, and I don't think in this market you can make everyone happy, right, and I agree with you too. I think that over time we'll see a handful of providers that are really still around, but what I kind of foresee is that each one is kind of pigeon hold to different types of customers from that point on, like attentive, if you were to throw us into the ring of brands that you just referenced we're very, very focused on really just trying to drive the best performance across channels right now, and, I think, another big piece for us, like I'm here to talk about email and new products, because that's what I do, but we're very, very focused that we've created the best in market SMS platform and we can't let like we can't fall asleep at the wheel on that. So almost every major project that we're talking about with AI and other tools, it's always kind of in the nature of, like we do it for SMS first and maybe another value that we have, because AI and SMS is pretty simple. When you kind of take AI and try to throw it at email, it becomes a whole different beast in some ways.

Speaker 2: 32:10

But I do think, like it's important to our groups that that we kind of maintain internally for attentive, that we're always maintaining this idea that, like, our goal is to drive performance for our marketers across the channels and be there as a consultive part, consultative partner. Sms, though, is still what we hold our hat on, and it's still going to be really like what we view as kind of our best in best in class solution as we go forward, and it's something that we're very cognizant that, again, we don't want to fall asleep at the wheel and really just sound like we're just building out all of these new products to kind of find cross market fit and things like that. Like we have a pretty good understanding of our market and again very proud of the SMS product we built to date, so it's going to be something we continue to invest on. They probably have been a higher degree than we have in the past, even while we're building out these new things, and I think you'll see that from others as well in this space.

Speaker 1: 33:06

Yeah, it's like balancing, you know, what are the easy revenue wins versus what makes sense for the long term product vision, because it's obviously easier to sell new products into existing customers than it is to bring on new customers altogether 100% and there's a that even tugged some heart strings for me.

Speaker 2: 33:27

A lot of what I do is talk to our existing customers and you got to maintain a really high level of trust throughout those conversations, right? The worst thing I could do is not understand someone's use cases or problems and I go in to sell them email and it's a bad solution. I just lost that trust with that customer that was probably happy before that. So we're very selective too of how we think about like market fit, who we talk to, those kind of things. We're kind of at a point now where we're very much extrapolating that and kind of go into market and more full force. But again, it's been a really interesting exercise in that piece. If I go back to like the first question of what's it like kind of building out a new email tool, having 8000 customers I get to talk to day in, day out that are happy with our business is a very easy way for me to get product research and things like that.

Speaker 1: 34:17

What's your favorite customer success story with the email product thus far?

Speaker 2: 34:22

Oh man, favorite customer success story. It's hard because I've probably had over 1000 success stories at this point in the last two years. There's been a lot of it. I won't name drop anyone right now but there's someone in the health and beauty business that if you went on our home page you'd see them on there.

Speaker 2: 34:47

I think the success for me as an engineer really came from kind of getting over qualms of being the new kids on the block with email. Right, it's often usually you guys know SMS, but email is completely different. There's a lot that goes into strategizing and supporting and remediation and things like that. How do I know I can trust you? It took us a long time to get over that but ultimately is where we kind of brought myself and a bunch of other email subject matter experts in and talked about our thoughts and strategies in the industry, made them comfortable. We have increased their triggered email revenue now by, I think, like 120% versus where they were prior about six months ago to us.

Speaker 2: 35:29

Again, that's really just because the identification tool we built, but it's also because we've really strategized with them where they were kind of used to like a I go into a queue and I wait to talk to someone and I may be asking something that's too strategic and they're just going to point me to a doc versus we're kind of saturating this group with named resources to make sure that their content strategy, their segmentation strategy, send time optimization is all dialed in as a result of that, plus identification is what I think really drove their performance increase and that's a kind of a repeatable story, frankly, that I've found success with day in, day out and it's got its own challenges of trying to showcase, like we know, what we're doing with email.

Speaker 2: 36:11

At the end of the day, I think probably the hardest part I run into usually is retraining customers to think differently around how they've used email before, which is a task right. Like we as marketers, we typically fall into something that works and we're very, usually not very malleable to try out new workflows in a lot of ways. So that's usually part of my job is just to make these customers feel safe, hopefully supported, and counsel that we're console, consultating with them at a good rate and then hopefully driving success at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 36:42

Yeah, well, I mean, we got clients who love to just batch and blast, and very frequently. So I can imagine here and the very it's hard because you know it drives revenue, but long term it could be better. But if you stop sending you know the volume, maybe you decrease it by, like you know, 50% because of the way that you're thinking about the customer communication strategy. Now there will be a dip to start and then that causes some panic. Yeah 100%.

Speaker 2: 37:14

One of the tools that we use in attentive email very frequently is we have deliverability consultants that are in-house, and these are all. Some of them are groups I worked with at Sengard and Twilio for a decade and what I always love talking to customers about is like I used to have to sell professional services to do what these guys do for free for attentive customers today. And the reason I bring that up now is because a big strategy we've been doing since I've worked with these groups many, many years ago is thinking creatively around this whole concept of like understanding who's driving the most revenue from a like a cohort of engagement basis. Right, like you have your zero to 14 in email and you're 14 to 30, 90 plus stuff like that in terms of engagement rates that you're usually segmenting for. But we can usually help customers kind of understand that by getting into their data and seeing it and then helping them with frequency and targeting so that it sometimes it's even like sending less but making more revenue at the end of the day.

Speaker 2: 38:16

And again to your point, like a batch and blast marketer who's used to sending to their full file and gets that very nice like revenue per email number that they're used to. It can be a scary task to be like we want to help you, coach you to send less, but we think you'll make more money over time, and it kind of goes into these concepts that we see pretty much across the board, which is largely. I mean, when you say it out loud it's kind of like a dumb moment, but your most engaged audiences are usually the ones buying at the highest frequency and have the lowest probability of opting out. So driving more frequency with those audiences while being more strategic with the people who are lapsing.

Speaker 1: 38:51

So often, that's a winning strategy.

Speaker 2: 38:53

And that team also does like inbox testing for free. We do proactive alerting and monitoring with Google Postmaster tools and all these first and third party tools that we have. So very interesting value add that we've been able to drive. But again, kind of the tune of that story of like send less to make more revenue is not something that you hear too widely in the market right now.

Speaker 1: 39:17

And that's something that I still see with some of the brands that we work with as well and it's just an over reliance on the status quo versus being able to break out and potentially test and iterate into new areas. But the ones that are able to are typically the ones that are more successful in the long run. But this is honestly a super interesting conversation. I really think there's a lot of value in here for those that are listening, especially when it comes to just how to think about handling all these communication channels and the values that come out of being in one platform. But thank you so much for joining us. Before we hop off, can you let everybody know where they can find you in an attentive online?

Speaker 2: 40:07

Yeah, I mean attentivecom, so our hosting website. There's a contact sales form in there. If you reach out, it'll get you in touch with me. Anyone who watches this. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn now and love to connect and not can help with any questions concerns anything like that from there too. Well, brandon, thank you so much for having me too. This was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 40:27

Yeah, of course. Thank you for hopping on, especially before the holiday. Well, as always for everybody. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom and ElectricMarketingcom, and we will see you next time MUSIC.