Inside the Emails of July, Step One and APG & Co: Three Klaviyo Champions on Why Segmentation Is Dying | The Klaviyo #632

(bell rings) - The future really looks like discounting to solve a problem, not discounting to plug a revenue or profit gap. - We spend, like majority of our marketing time, a lot of our creative time is building campaigns, but the flows is what actually gets them to convert. - I think there are definitely efficiencies, but I can see the opportunity with it and building efficiencies within the team. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - All right, here we go. Here's our second of three interviews live from KSID, this year in May, 2026. Welcome back to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, otherwise known as Bushy, and just quickly, just before we get into today's episode, I know you pumped for it, but if you like having a cheat sheet to go with your listening, we put one out for every episode of Add to Cart, and we put in the Add to Cart newsletter, which drops some time on Monday, whenever I get my stuff together, and it goes out on Monday so that you can either use it as you're listening to the episode, or maybe you don't have time to listen to today's episode, but you want all the goodness out of the episode. That cheat sheet is your guide. So never miss one, sign up to the Add to Cart newsletter at adddicarth.com.au. Now, a big thank you to our sponsors, Clavio and Shopify for making Add to Cart possible, more from both of them a little bit later, but as I said, we are coming to you live today, well, not live, it was recorded, but it was live at the time. From KSID, and this is the second of three special episodes that we recorded there. You heard from Ed Hallon, the co-founder of Clavio last week, and today, we do talk about Clavio, but this is a really a CRM and email conversation that applies to anyone who wants to get more from their retained audience, no matter what platform you are on. Although Clavio is pretty good, but when I knew that we had three recording slots available to us at KSID, I got a little bit cheeky. Yes, we've had Ed and we've got a special guest next week, but instead of three separate interviews, I cheekly put forward a panel as this middle session. So I wanted to get full value out of having the best Clavio people together for the day. And you may remember that previously we've had Greg Taylor, the founder of Step One on the show, and we've had Aithen Didescaloo, who is the founder of July, join us for a very special live show in Brisbane, but today, we're going a level down. We're talking to the people who actually do the work, not the founders who are just out there being the face of it. We're talking to the people actually running the platforms day to day. Don't come for me, Greg and Nathan, I know where you are. Today, we have three very special guests. We have Lockie Agnew, who is the head of technology at July, seven years in building most of the stack himself. Then we have Harnie Riffay, who is the chief digital officer at Step One. They're an ASX listed Bamboo Underwear brand, chasing $100 million with a team of 50. And lastly, but not leastly by any means, we have Alice Michael, who is the head of e-commerce and operations at APG and Co. She's running digital across sports craft, sabre and jag simultaneously. So we're going to get nerdy. We're going to get nerdy on email. We're going to get nerdy on retention. Here it is. Here's Lockie, Harnie and Alice. Alice, Harnie and Lockie, welcome to Add to Cart. What a special treat, have you all in the room together? Thank you. I have to say we're in the hottest podcast room in the history of the life of the fridge. We have a strict one hour timeframe here. And I know that we've got a lot of opinions, a lot of expertise in the room, and I want to draw it all out. Firstly, I'm going to go around the room. Tell me why you were Clavio champion. So hi, I'm Alice Michael, head of e-commerce operations at APG and Co. I'm a Clavio champion because I have put in place some really great custom engagement strategies and really utilizing the platform to its forest. Right. We'll dig into that. Awesome. Harnie or Fied Chief Digital Officer at Step One. I like being a Clavio champion mainly because it really is a powerful feedback loop. And there's probably two things. One is you directly get to tell Clavio what's good and what's bad about the platform. And you probably get to see it actually get fixed in real time. And the second thing is just connecting with other brands that are solving different problems and the same problems in different ways to be able to actually be like, hey, you solved this thing. I solved this thing. How do we solve it differently? Could we solve it better? What's working? What's not? If that happened yesterday, maybe over a few brews as well. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Right. Lucky. I'm lucky. I'm a head of tech here at your life. I've been here seven years. I've kind of touched all the pies I'm calling my fingers in over the years. But nowadays I'm more on the integration than the high level planning side. So I mean, the data where it needs to be, the integration is what they need to be. Clavio champions is exactly what Harnie was saying is I have a lot of opinions on the way. Tech should be built. And getting my voice heard is always nice, especially for a platform the way it's something best to. That's correct. Well, we've had Athon, I'm a podcast years and years ago, and we've had Greg on the podcast. We haven't had anyone from-- A-B-G. But it's actually nice to meet the people who are doing the real work. He's not funny. Yeah. But yeah, he's a funny guy. All right, let's start. So Alice, I want to start with you. I know that you, one of the first projects you did was moving off Salesforce market in Clavio for a very simple reason. Yes. So it actually was exact target when we were on Martin Club. Yeah. So when Martin Cloud acquired exact target, that's the version we were on. So pretty old. So just to clarify that, that it's not the new Martin Cloud. I've been a new Shrini Cloud. No. But we-- We are. We had a huge bottleneck. And that was that we needed to develop our to build our campaigns on our own. I don't even think that thought is existed. We used a third party for a bounding cart. We decided that we needed to be able to scale and remove that risk. So we moved to Clavio so that we could do that. And things could change pretty quickly. Did you do all three brands at once? All three brands at once usually is a staggered approach. So we'd get one right. And then we roll out, it's usually the smallest brand and which is Jag in our-- In our three. How long did that take? Took about eight months, all three brands. Yeah. And then just after that, we re-contained to consoles as well. Yes. It's a bit of a-- That's a lot of re-touching. Oh my gosh. It's got to be-- We've done three in six years. Are you happy with your platforms at the moment? We are about to build-- We were so-- [LAUGHTER] --but we're not. Yeah, because I mean, I'm happy five-class. It's an evolution. Yeah. We get stuck where-- which is your retail. And really in-store focused. And that's a big portion of our sales. So for us, what we would like is tools that enable our team to be able to make changes and people's quickly. We don't have a huge development budget. So that sort of comes into that change as well where-- We've kind of got-- we can use it as an email to its fullest with just one person, someone who said, oh, it's going. I guess you having visibility over your end customer isn't probably as clear as these guys. Not from the end store. I mean, we've got a lot of customer data, but not from that end store relationship point of view. It's sometimes hard to tag the customer. Yeah. Is that part of the decision and re-platforming is like to bring in your pause data and stuff into a unified source of truth? So we do have a unified source of truth, which we use on the own. So that tail, sort of CDP-- Great taste. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great platform as well. And that sort of powers the data into Clavio and then into the end store experience and on site as well. So we do have that. Yeah. It's going to be a lot better to say on that. That makes sense. Well, I think we're on the topic of CDP. I know that you have strong opinions about CDP. And we literally have the beta-ccr-m-tika going behind our head at the moment. Classic. Tell me about your approach, because you're one of the first brands to be on Clavio's beta-c-c-r-m, which launched last year. Where do you describe your level of integration and use of Clavio right now? Yeah. So I mean, I think it's a no-brainer. All of our processes are deeply embedded with Clavio. And we've data-driven marketing, thinking just throughout the entire business. Everything from what data we collecting, how we using it, how we segmenting on it. But then also now what we're doing is looking at things like customer age and customer hub and how do those active surfaces that power the other parts of our business? How do we personalize those surfaces? But then also how do we pull data from those surfaces? How do we understand what customers want, what they don't want, to be able to kind of inform our total view of customer through the CDP? Like the CDP is the tech, really. But what you're getting is a view of customer. And so it's just like, OK, how do we find the perfect stitching of all these different things together from our own tech to Shopify, to Clavio, to APIs, to Bada-Dada, to get the most accurate view of who our customers and how we service them? Where does that sit? Clavio? Yeah. Clavio is a pretty good one. And the lean stack is like Clavio Shopify. And then we build a bunch of custom stuff on top of that. But I mean, it's always been man with tools versus man with tools. And so all women with tools, man in the quotes, man kind, including women. So it's always been person with tools, person with tools. I didn't manage to trip you. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. He had a rehearsal. He was. But it is even more like that now for a number of reasons. Like the cost of technology, the cost of developing technology, the cost of buying technology is fundamentally lower. And so now everyone has access to the same stuff. Now you have to be smarter, right? And you have to know how to use it better. And you have to know where the value is. And you have to know how to grab it from the customer and really be like, OK, tell me what you want. And he's half that battle knowing how to apply. You can actually push the tool reliably first, what you then have to build yourself using all those connectors. Yeah, I think so, right? And I think it's like something I've literally said before is that like, I'm in arms race with all my providers. I'm an arms race with Clavio, arms race and Shopify because I'm not going to wait for them to build it. I'm going to build it when I need it and when I think that there's real value in developing a solution. But then Clavio will come out and be like, hey, we actually built a better one. I'm like, oh, okay, interesting. You guys build a better one. I'll come in and try and improve it. Or I'll use your APIs or we'll build it into our ecosystems some other way. I'm in the same battle for the last like five years with Shopify Inclaveo. It's like, I'll be like, hey, I really need this feature like blah, blah, blah, blah. I never like, oh, it's in the roadmap. I don't like never happen. I'm going to build myself. I would be doing that. We went ahead this pretty early. There's so many things that was kind of like, hey, we need this now. And I was just like, I'm still building it anyway. And now all the past two years have done is just accelerate that where you're building around your core platforms. But when you need something, you're going to do it anyway because that's what you want to do. Is that mean you minimize plugins and extensions in favor of doing it? So correct. I mean, you add overhead of managing your own version of it. And then when Shopify Inclaveo do all these things that I usually backtrack and be like, we're just going to go with it. I think like for me, it's like, you have to constantly experiment and constantly see like where the box stops. And to know like when that build versus buy decision is a good one, like, you know, sometimes just getting a plug in and paying 80 bucks a month is like, okay, cool. So everyone's time. But there's other times where you're like, I just don't think that like, what other people are built is right. Like we're not really going to extract the value that we think that we need to extract. And so that's when we go, okay, I think we should build this. And there's an actual case for a boat like to to lockies point right like if Shopify comes out and they build out the platform or clover comes out and they build the platform, I'll always default to them because I know that they're building an ecosystem that works together. I'm building extensively on top of it. But I know that they're always going to try and build robust, extensible platforms. Like that's why you invest in the brand. How does that sit with you, Alice, from a large Omni channel organization where things might not move as fast? Yeah. That that build versus buy. Can you be as agile as you want in adding new features and functionality? Not as quick as what these guys are saying really. We tend to, we still input into the roadmap, but we tend to sit back and wait to be released. Yeah. Yeah. Did you go to one moving process? Yeah, a lot of in past each brand has their own initiatives as well. So, you know, if we can start it in, it might not be a priority as well as what I'm saying. So it's it's when it comes out and when it's at the when it's ready, that's when we're all adopted. Do you feel the heat from like competition that can move faster in your category? Yes. Yeah. We do. Yeah. How do you think you're going to fix that long term? Well, hopefully I'll move to Shopify's just one piece of that puzzle in the digital space. I would say, yeah, that's quite a big part of it. We're also looking at launching new customer loyalty programs at the moment. We've got very late old legacy loyalty programs, which is you sign in to get 10% off your full price purchase. We've got a very high tag rate on that, but we're hoping with new loyalty and Shopify that will start moving in the right direction. Sorry. You rang the throw on your own, the loyalty. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because the one thing we do have for where we've almost got too much of his customer data. Yeah. It's just so that's not our challenge. We've got that. Too confused. Isn't it? Isn't it? How many people you've got coming into your store to spread our interactivity? Yeah. We know, you know, birthdays, we know what they like. You know, we've kind of got that put down. It's just the okay, how do we use these tools to you know, sorry. I need to prioritise your data. Right. Like you have so much data, I think people just get trapped. Yeah. I have all these different data points. See like what's mission critical? What should you be focusing on? What does that say about customers? Yeah. You know, I could analyze things till the cows come home. Right. I have. And then you just end up taking it, zooming out and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. Okay. Let's just do this much simpler and normally the result is better. But obviously you can't focus on everything once. You've got to pick the battles a little bit. Yeah. Picking and choosing battles, I'd like to talk about email. We'll start email because I feel like there's a natural progression before we get into AI and I'm really hesitant to. I'm not really AI. Really early in the conversation. They have a getting out of it. Well, I mean, an hour. We will get into it. But I want to understand first, like you talked a lot around mastering automated flows. Yeah. Tell me about that journey, at your light, because you've actually been on a journey yourself from a D to C. R. to other having your own stores to having stockers. Yeah. How have you thought about flows? It's really interesting in July flows. There are a big rev driver for us for a couple reasons. The biggest one being there's a there's a long-purchase period between wanting and buying for premium luggage. It's at a pretty high price point, especially if you're buying any set. So it's almost like a random high. It's expensive and it's like, okay, it's this commitment because it's lifetime. Like you're you're really thinking about it. It's a thought about decision that you're making. I have one of the OJs that Ethan brought with me with him when he did the live podcast and it's got add to car, - We'll get these new ones. - No, no, no. I don't need them. - Go to 9G, it's great. - Yeah, that's what we're talking about, but it's great. - Yeah, so there's long purchasing season. Right? So we spend like majority of our marketing time, a lot of our creative time is building campaigns because we want, we want these beautiful campaigns. We want to sell the dream of travel. Like there's so much that gets put into it, so much time and effort. But because people are going on the web site so much, they're not purchasing of the campaign, purchasing of the flows. Because they're going on multiple times, we have the remote that they're coming on, that the flows is what we're trying to make, that they're going on. So this is what actually gets them to convert. Because they're thinking about it for so long, and we end them back. So no matter what, our main web drive will always be out of flows. - Gotcha. - And how long are you setting up those flows for? How long is a customer in flow state? - Hopefully the dream is within a week or two, that's the sweet spot, it can be months. - Yeah, it can be months. And they usually aren't going through samples. We're actually doing a big body of work of reimagining. Because we have such beautiful retail stores, we have such beautiful experiences we're going there. And we've kind of felt recently that because we've elevated so much in the physical retail space, that emails are kind of like bread and butter, emails. It's like, we're not elevating here, we're not doing the same. So we're actually hopefully about July, rolling out brand new flows. But there's also a lot of stuff that we want to do around first party data with them. So if you know what someone's traveling right, how nice would it be if like a week before you trip you like, we're so excited for your trip in XYZ, or your suitcase to your board, this would be a perfect trip. Or I don't pack themselves around your actual trip. Because usually, it's almost like 70, 80% of customers are buying for a trip. Like you're not casually buying luggage for, and maybe one off of a teacher. - To a short, for a few months. - Yeah. - But to have that data, I need to do all that and really elevate our flows to be much more personal first party data rich. It's kind of the direction we want to go. We want them to be gorgeous, look like they're retouched over so that that elevated experience that you're getting when you go and touch the physical product to store, you kind of get on the digital side as well. - Any fashionista knows that if you want to make smart wardrobe choices, everything needs to live in the same wardrobe. Not half your clothes in the spare room, shoes in the garage, accessories in the car, Princess Polly realised the same thing was true for their marketing. As they scaled globally and opened physical stores, their email, SMS, app and install data were all living in different platforms, which makes it pretty hard to scale a great customer experience at scale. So they pulled everything into one place, Clavio. By consolidating their channels and customer data, Princess Polly unlocked a clearer view of the customer journey, smarter automations and faster global scale. In Q3 last year alone, they drove 2.8 times year on year global revenue growth with over 60% of that Clavio revenue coming from automated flows, even better. Flow revenue grew more than four times year on year. Turns out when everything's in one wardrobe, picking the winning outfit gets a lot clearer. If you want your marketing to scale with style, head to Clavio.com/au and see how brands like Princess Polly are doing it. Because you're not heavily promotional, do the odd spend and save. Yeah, but it's not, they've had like 20% offside wide kind of stuff. No, I mean, we have for a few times, we have a warehouse sale, we should do it really well, but discounting is really an out-of-the-house. Unless it's like, like, like, - like, luxury, baby. - Yeah. But also, when we do, we discount it. And I like 20% off flat. It's like, spice and stuff, - hair up, what's the case you want? - Don't get drapes, too. Yeah, but it is pretty much luggage. It's lifetime, it's great value for what you're getting, but it's so easy to fall in this, we have a funny way of purpose. Like, this discounting hell is just kind of like, you're to race to the bottom to, you know, who can do the biggest discount. All you're doing is killing profits for people that are probably gonna purchase anyway. That's right. I think the other thing for your category rights is that same thing with us is like, if you do discount, they buy the luggage, they're not gonna come back for a very long time, right? It's not like, yeah, like, well, but I mean, even for the luggage, right, even if there isn't a discount, you just put your bags. Yeah. So it's different with something that's like, a perishable or it's like a supplement brand, like you grill and sell, yep, you get great auto volume, they chew through it and then they have to come back. And maybe that's a test and try strategy, but like, you're essentially cannibalizing future sales, right? And so you kind of need to build that into, like, it's, it's bad money. It's not a good revenue. Most of our marketing is acquisition. It's like, 'cause we've got left-time, we've got left-time warranty, it's very good, we stand on the shoulder rep products, like we stand by them. People don't purchase more than once very often. A lot of the time it's just one single purchase and then second ones, maybe some packing sales or some stuff that they like. Bag's a little bit of a dream game. We've got it in the past two years, but acquisition starts such a big part of it. And what do you do with your customers then? After they bought the, the ideal kid, they bought their bag, they bought their packing kits, do you just go, well, it's been nice now on your team? They know. And this is what we're trying to get really good at in the next 12 months is if you really look after customers, it's like, we're trying to try acquisition into more acquisition, right? If we've got a customer and I've got a purchase again, you can win on word of mouth. It's like if you are the best customer service, you've got good post, just flows around like, we want to be sending you emails around like, how to best look after your suitcase. What if it comes back from the airport's fresh? How do you do all these things for that particular legacy of board? If you do all this post purchase really premium stuff, you can get word of mouth because everyone's like, hey, July, it's not just when you purchase they're looking after you for the next five years. And then that's acquisition again, it's like you can get more customers just by looking after your customers. There's probably been a gifting in there. I'm thinking back to my situation and that we're a July family. My wife's got everything, but everything, it's fantastic. And it was my sister and law's 40th birthday. What are we going to get? My wife was the first to say the brand new July luggage set. Oh, my gosh. She was still buying, but it just wasn't for her. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We said a lot, but that's really hard to hard to optimize for. Yes. So it is something that we actively do. Like we do stuff like we're working with like wedding registries and places where people produce some of that gifts. But the biggest thing is if you just look after your customer, they're going to be more infant. And you see in the airport, like if you go see someone would say, like, hey, that's okay. And like you have like really honest conversations with the airport just because you're part of the same little club. How's it compared to Undy's? Obviously you can't do that in the airport with Undy's. It's comparing Undy's and also a little bit more, I'd say the replenishment might be a little bit more often. Potentially. I mean, like we have a lot of customers that are huge advocates, right? And like people that have been around like OGs forever, you know, and we actually saw there was someone left like a Facebook comment the other day to a link of like a blog that they have about all their step on Undy's, a guy in the UK. And he's literally collected like every single limited edition print. Like since the beginning of time, like cataloged Undy's like, please, I'm looking for this one print. You guys haven't re-released it. Like I would do anything for this print, right? So we have a lot of brand advocacy and still word of mouth is really strong for us. Like we do have a great product, right? We have an excellent product. Like you won't get the type of zero-cap acquisition and refer a friend's stuff if we didn't. So it's really strong. Like in terms of like showing it off, people, people love it. Like people love to have the waistband and like all the different cool colors and people love to talk about it. But yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to think about repeat purchases. And what that looks like, like, you know, I was just saying before to someone that like, you know, you might come in and men will come and buy a seven pack or a 15 pack of Undy's or something. And then it's like, okay, cool. What next, right? So your exact question, Nathan, is like, what next? And the answer is like, we have a lot of things that now we're working on to really bring them back into that ecosystem. Like we've started doing complementary products. We do socks, sleepwear. We just released our new launch of like athletic compression stuff, which is, which is looking really cool. But even our limited edition prints, right? Like that's a huge source of incrementality for us. And the way I think about it is literally like this is like, you can come in and you buy your 15 pairs of black and navy and gray that you're gonna wear every day. And you're like, okay, cool. I don't need to look at step one ever again. Oh, cool. They're like some cool new print, same Patrick's day, Valentine's Day. That's a sick print. I really want that. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, that's true incrementality. So it's like, even then what they need, but then a little bit of what they want. 100%. Like something fun and cool. And like we have a really like we pride ourselves of being a funny company. Like we all have a sense of humor. We love a bit of a gag and a joke. And like, you know, we'll do some really funny cool stuff and do some naughty campaigns and things like that. Like we're a big fan of cut their marketing. And people resonate with that. Like they want like an authentic brand that speaks with humor and gets them and it's like, can say us where I would. And they'll be fine. So it really is something. Question about the flow. Yeah. Like how many flows do you have running? We have the basics. It's like browser band and macata band and check out a band and welcome flows. But we're starting to edge into now our fam segments. So like if someone is like a loyal customer and they're moving to at risk, we want to send very direct emails about that. So that's kind of what we're building out at the moment is like our fam switches. So the second that they're switching from different categories of buyers, we're kind of targeting them a little bit. Again, it's a little bit. Those who mind on our fam, can you give us a brief explanation? Yeah, our fam, I mean, I forget what it says for it's something reach frequency and monastery. But it kind of is just like an xy axis and depending on how customers are purchasing the amount of money that's spending, how frequently they're buying. I got places them into different keyword groups. So it's kind of like you've got like loyals and champions, which is like your repeat purchases. They're there all the time purchasing from you. You kind of have your pre purchased customers. So like people that I forget the names of them. But they're kind of like anyone that is like browsing site, you know about them, but they they have a high frequency device. And then you've got things that are like at risk churned and like inactive. And a customer will always live in one of these groups. But the really interesting thing is when they switch. So like depending on the events that they're on site for, they're gonna switch over the course of them being a customer for you no matter what. They're gonna move across these different categories. But the interesting thing is when when they trigger across these different categories, usually you can get very targeted messaging. And that's kind of like where we're thinking about putting out this cat's in is kind of like we don't need to do a blast, 20% off the website. But if we've got a customer that purchased one small bag and that particular type of customer has purchased before and they bought package up something, you can get very targeted message when they go from a loyal customer to an at risk customer. And we want to really nail down that. So it's much more targeted on messages that you send them at the time that they need to purchase or the time that they're sorry that they're likely to purchase or need to purchase. You guys using RFM? Yeah. So we use it's maxi-ladex seemed within Clavio to to power the RFM cohorts. We've just enabled it. So we haven't quite got flows off it yet. The idea would have that would be that you'd have an abandoned car, but then you'd have one specific to champions. You'd have one specific to your at risk group and then you'd have one specific to I don't know the inactive. For example, I know we would have maybe where we are on the discount drug. So we're happy to give a discount so we would do a discount or maybe another service that we can try and get over the line with. But that would be example how we're using your money to use it in future. You got a nice sense. I think that for us like probably the RFM modeling is not as mature from Clavio as I would like. So we've kind of built our own custom modeling of what those cohorts look like, like who are our champions, who are our more or less and things like that because the modeling's good, but it's not malleable by category. So what does a champion look like for someone else? It's probably not what a champion looks like for me. That's what we're battling out. Yeah. It's like a bag that purchases a luggage by a very good. Yeah. So it's really difficult to kind of use that as a one size fits all. And so what we're finding is we're just layering and we're basically doing the same thing but with different segments. Right. And now Clavio's added like moves in or out of a segment. You can essentially create the exact same functionality as you would have done with an RFM like flow. Right. So we're trying to let custom attributes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we run the model, it gets pipe back to the property, that becomes a segment and then you're good. We used to do it with just like arbitrary rules and stuff, but we've just become a little bit more advanced. We have a lot of our data stuff in big query now and we can really run some cool models and then pipe that back in. But yeah, I mean to what Lockhe said before around like discounting and flows, I think that's the future. I think everyone had this big discounting drug thing and we were certainly guilty of it as well. But the future really looks like discounting to solve a problem, not discounting to plug a revenue or profit gap. And those problems are like, you know, we need to move old stock or we want to incentivize people to try something new or we want to try to survive a behavior. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's specific. Yeah. For a good. It's probably a good, right? Like you want to do this thing? Here's a discount. You're like, here you go. Just keep following us, right? But some customers need that. Like not all. And they don't like it. So you're like, you're giving discounts to people that don't need that that pure or 20% off. But some customers really do need that 20% to get there. Yeah. And that's where like all the actual personalizations, CDP type data really makes a huge difference because you might think like, oh, okay, well, what percent of people didn't need the pop up, what percent of people didn't need this discount. Yeah. I will test it whatever. But again, that's a, that's like a big swing, right? Like it's just a brute force. Like ultimately, what you want to do is be bringing in things that are like machine learning tools that understand that specific consumer in that moment, where they're browsed, what they've done, who they are. And saying, I think your propensity to convert is pretty high. Right? I'm not going to give you a pop up. Like, we'll deploy something else to collect your email, but it's not going to include a discount versus someone else where it's like, ah, I think this person's pretty close. Basically, buying the heavier, but I don't think that their propensity convert is like over X. Therefore, we're just going to nudge them these different ways to try and get them now. And there's a bunch of tools out there that do that, but I think the philosophy is there where we have so much data now. Like, let's use it. Right? Do you think that's part of the problem because the philosophy is there, and like you hear this all the time around, dynamic segments and moving people in and out based on the customer journey? I'm literally putting in a personalization tool, at the moment, a well-known personalization tool is not dynamic at all. It's very manual, moving customers in and out of segments. Are we waiting for the tech to catch up with the theory? I think you can do it with any platform. Is it a saying it's up right, Rera? Maybe. I just feel that it's so great. Yeah, it's kind of. The thing is, like, these platforms, we've been convinced to do like either of them, because of the same thing, because I could do it, like, honey could do it. Your day to day couldn't. Like, the people in the business that are actually using these tools, it was just too complicated. They didn't want to spend time to do something that was increment, like, small incremental gains. Is there a joint thousand other things? There's even a thousand other things that maybe we'll have easier ROI to measure, but you can do it with anything. It's just sometimes you have to go under the back end and check the actual events and pipe things that are different places. It wasn't a little bit. I think the other thing is, like, yes, there's all this personalization, yes, there's all this data, yes, there's all these tools, like people over cook it. It's so easy to over-complicate things. For the most part, you can really just test and validate a bunch of assumptions and then be able to action it. If you just make a guess, you're like, "Okay, what would a customer do on this page? I would signal to me that they're either not confident or they can't find the right information or they do that. Okay, the dwell time's going to be a bit higher. They probably click the size and fit thing a few times. They probably just roll up and down. Cool. Why don't you guys just run a really simple test? You can go and generate the code in court or whatever you want to do. Go and generate a simple test. If these conditions are met, deploy pop-up and just AB test it. So easy. You don't need to go spend $20,000 on a personalization tool from whoever. But obviously you could figure out what those things are going to be. Next time you want to spend $20,000, do you just give it to me? I don't worry about it. You could figure out what that type of purchase behavior is, or particular side as well. Just like install your hot charzio clarity. So you can just watch a few sessions and be like, "This person, I don't think it's going to purchase, just from what they're doing." You don't have to be a serogeneous to go watch like 10 videos and be like, "These are the purchase behaviors that I see that aren't turning into a conversion." It makes sense. So obviously the ideal scenario is that we have these dynamic segmentations where we can trigger the right flows of the right time based on behavior, based on what they're spending, based on recency. Is there, I'm going to direct this to you, Alice. Is there a place still for demographic segmentation in email and SMS? Yeah, I think so. Definitely for us because you've got the men's and men's split, so both coding and Yeah, I do think there is that. We do see within our business a higher portion of them and buying from men. So we've allowed our content as within director to women and to buy from men. But yeah, I don't think there is still a place in it. I would challenge the question. And like the pre-subposition of the question is that like you have these segments, right? And you're building out segments and then are you going to build these behavioral demographics into these segments? Like I think the North Star here is you don't have segments, right? The North Star is it's true one to one personization, right? Like I shouldn't have to know the behavioral demographic segments and traits of this person. Like the ecosystem and the tooling and the tech and your CDP and all that stuff should know all of that. It should eat it. And then it should be like I know what's best for Jess for David, for whoever. Because like even to the men's and women's thing, right? Like we have our women's category as well. And you know, we do that kind of segmenting now. I want to get better at it. But in a North Star world, it's like if Jess has like a husband and kids, like I don't want to be sending her an email with Jess Women's stuff, right? I've lost an opportunity there to sell her some men's stuff. Yeah. And so how are we generating this on a one to one basis where stop thinking about like segments? Maybe you can think about segments post that, right? And use that as a diagnostic tool. But the way you want to be talking to people is really one to one. And that's the goal. Well, like segments and like the crazy flows you see in some cave or a cat. I just so that we can get really pointy into the messaging that we're doing for a particular segment. And look at what they're protesting, all the things, right? There's mental models that we've built around to do that. But like with AI coming into marketing, these things are mental models that are going to be a thing of the past. Like I'm 100%, they're just a way for us to knuckle down and then do set messaging, depending on different groups and different events and all the things. The second that we can get like one to one, do you need a catering by AI? Branded how you want it to look, doing all the things. That's the future of email marketing. I agree. And I think it's really exciting. When we've been talking about one to one communication for a long time, I would've been stuck with these things. No, you could get. But if you look at what's happening in social, that's why I think it's exciting for email and CIO around, but we'll be able to do it. Social was like, oh yeah, we'll be able to do one on one. And then they were like, actually, we're going to hide the algorithm and you can't target anyone anymore. Just give us your creative and we'll do the one on one. It's like, they've taken it away. That was the promise. So we've got power now back through our CRM to be able to do that. Yeah. I want to talk about AI. We've uncovered it. We've talked, we've lifted the lid. Really? I feel like we've got a ton of eyes. I'm so happy about each of you. We talked about running experimentations with AI before. You said that you're playing around a lot. I'm going to start with you, Alice. We're not really. So a very short answer from me. We're very mature in space. Yeah. Even with the Kavi AI features, I mean, we're doing-- we're using a little bit of it, not much. The brands, they've got very strict brand guidelines and how they, like, content to be displayed. So we're not able to fully utilize the AI content feature. So yeah, and we're just getting into building flows with AI and not even so much in Kaviode, but we've just gone into price account and Claude to try and use that. So we're very, very early, every day. So not much going on. I think that's a normal story that I'm seeing is hearing in called retail. Yeah, it's a journey. We do want to get there. We're encouraging it. But it's just a-- Yeah. Not as balanced as some of the other brands are going through. But it connected all up to emails. And you've got what's sending emails for them and all sorts of stuff. Building the content, writing the SME, all of that sort of stuff where, yeah, we're not-- Do you find that there is an opportunity for the digital and the econ team to be leading the way, at least from an operational perspective, if it was not creating the content? Yeah, I think there are definitely efficiencies. I can see the opportunity with it and building efficiencies within the team. I think there's a little bit of an education piece and even a little bit of a brand sort of need let go of their image so strictly and kind of accept that if we want to move really quickly, then we have to let things-- Is there also a piece there around, actually, if we get this right? If we sit this up in the right way, we can actually have a stronger brand. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing is, I think that there are lots of ways where you really can short-circuit like the brand piece. And because I think that a lot of the conversations I'm hearing as well as, well, it's not reaching our brand. It's not the premium feel of doing this. But even when Lockheed was talking before around, we provide luxury travel experience. We're creating this luxury piece of luggage for you to go and explore the world. And that's a premium thing that we want you to feel good about. Even something that we've implemented is like one-to-one email personalization based on first-party data. So if you go to our search and you type in, what are the best undisputed basketball? We'll personalize the product page. But then if you abandon, you'll get a one-to-one email from customer support that'll be like, hey, we saw you looking at why these were great for basketball. Here's the exact reason why these are amazing. Let me through this again. So you go to our AI search. You go to our search, natural language search. On site? On site, sir. What are the best undisputed basketball? This problem really came from a place where we have a lot of undisputed relatively similar. And people need to be able to do product discovery. And so what are the best for X? What's the best for tennis? What's the best for paddle? And if you've got one search that's just natural AI language, you haven't got the separate. You know how you're saying, saw it together and Amazon just brought it together. It's all together. Because then you're also able to run out of it. It's over it. All goes the same database, all the stuff. So you go and search that. We'll personalize the page. We pipe that context back into Clivea. Right into our CDP. So now we know you're like basketball. We know you're looking for stuff. This is your question. And then when you go and abandon, we literally generate a one-to-one email for you. That's like, hey, this is why it's great for basketball reach out if you need anything. I'm building the exact same thing. Yeah, so literally, literally what I was thinking about for you, right, was ahead of time, capture the data around where you're going on vacation, when you're traveling, when you're doing this, then after their vacation, even before, send them a one-to-one personalized email, hey, I know your trips tomorrow, just hoping your luggage is all good, to reach out if you need anything. Here's some personalized tips for XYZ locations. Ryan, go pull an API. Like these are the top things to do in Italy. We're trying to get this off as a test in physical reach out, because it's much easier to capture those things and put it on a custom of gun file install, because like part of the retail handle kind of how they talk to customers is usually to lead with what went and travel that you're going. And if they were only talking about this, like it takes two seconds for a retail staff member, so just be like, this is supposed to lead in this day, this one, leave a little message for them to send, maybe a couple days before, then their date to be like, hey, hope you have a great trip. So that's going to be our first roll out of like that very one-to-one. Is it easy for your retail time to put that information in, because that's usually the break point? Yeah, so we're sure if I pause, so I'm just building like a spool, they'll use to look a little witted to happen, and things just filling out on a custom under-saves and then they parked back to Clevver Cup. Yeah. Great. I love that basketball example. That's great. I'm living, I'm living, I work on that, I don't know. What's the last experiment you've noted out on with AI? So we made a decision in like December last year that we wanted to get serious about AI. So first off this year was me just building a lot of cool tooling. I finally rolled out last month. So it's pretty much the core of it is the only way that AI is good is if you're done with it. And your AI can get real accurate up to date data fast. So we've kind of built like a data lake essentially that pretty much is sourcing all of our main sources. So like you got like Shopify, Clavio, Deputy For Retail, Meta, Google, all the things that people ask about it a lot. And it's built on small tools. So I can talk and go and fetch like the one-on-one individual things from each fund. So if you go and ask for it now, because it's all plugged in via MCP connectors, anyone in the business can go ask like what are the top forming ads and should we be running these as any of the email flows or is there any like cross system things that commonalities? Because that's where it's really powerful right? Because if you're just looking at your meta dashboard, you're just looking at Clavio dashboard, you're just looking at your Shopify numbers. You're not going to see all the interconnection parts. Yeah, for like sure revils down this day, but also spend was down, no one was opening emails. Maybe there was something else going on. Maybe no one was excited to go travel because whether was shit and like region by region. So like Melbourne might be popping off as soon as you're not. And these are the things AI is really good at because they can go fetch all these like really raw data points and do great insights as long as you die as that. Yeah. And I think as long as you've got a point of view as well, I think this is happening. Yeah. Test me on it, give me other ideas, but you've got to go in that opinion because if you just open up, go tell me what this might mean. You'll get it if you're an idiot before you're just an idiot. Yeah. Right. So my big thing is I have conviction. The way that found this thing is really interesting because they usually have very pointy questions that require very pointy things and different data points. And they usually have to go talk to like six people to get everything they want to happen inside. And I've kind of built everything around Ethan in the way that he's scared. He talks to the business is like he will usually have this one idea that's like so dumb, but it might make sense if all these data is fine up. And he's now able to like at the speed of his own thoughts, like run through ideas, figure out whether this is a good idea, whether this would work depending on like whether all things work or the ads work. And so you enterprise clawed throughout the organization? Yeah. So that there's no data. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I thought. Yeah. Yeah, great. And everyone's got access to the same data. So even if your merchandise are you can go in and go, Hey, how's this got performing in email this way? Correct. We ran so silage for so long, different different things. Closed down the source true. That's called pulse is the system. I go, keeping you think run pulse. Hey. But that's not so true. Then like we never had traditional BI dashboarding. Yeah. It was just one of the things that lag behind in my job last year was to build BI, but I built this instead because I'm like, it's a, it's a tie lit. But it was what you have to do is right. You have to have a precinctive person to be able to have a read a graph interpret that as insights and then take insights into actions. Claude, you skip that. It was a bit like what are the actions I need to do for ads today? And it will go grab the data interpret all the things. Something that would have taken a mid to senior person a day two days to go figure out what they should be doing. And it doesn't all instantly straight into action. We've all been there, right? Slipping on a great looking pair of shoes. Only to regret it a couple of hours later. Who knew that blisters could get blisters? Well, the founders of Frankie Ford did. And that's why they've created a line of stylish for diatrous design footwear that don't just look good. They actually feel good too. But what began as an online success story quickly stepped into the real world with retail stores opening across the country. And when they moved to the Shopify Plus plan and rolled out Shopify POS install, Frankie Ford really hit their stride. Now everything works together from online browsing to install buying. It's one smooth, unified commerce experience for both customers and the Frankie 14. And with the Shopify App Store, they're able to test new features quickly to see what works. It's paying off to, with 170% increase in site visits, a 25% drop in return rates and more happy feet than ever. Streamline, table, seriously stylish. That's Frankie Ford on Shopify to read more success stories like this, so Shopify case studies online. How do you reckon this would go? I'm going to say it's a worry isn't it? Because you just start to go, yeah, it really does. It kind of takes thinking away. As these new, you know, junior start and. Genius have a top. Having through university, I kind of wonder. But surely they're the humb to this. Right? No, they can absorb information so fast. Right? That's where hiring is so important. Right? Like you have to hire for attitude. Yeah, it has. Like you have to hire for coachability and for attitude. And like you can see A+ players when they're juniors. Right? You see them. You're like you are a rock star. Like you're anything to figure it out. You are a killer. Like you'll go and do it at home. You'll figure out the tools. You'll work it out. And it's never been easier for them to learn and absorb so much. Right? And so there's this rate of learning that's like hyper exponential now. And actually, something I was saying to someone here at KCID was like, you know, he was talking about, "Oh, we're an 80 year old business and it's hyper enterprise. We have all this things. I'm a run, you know, there's all these roadblocks. But you know, we're just going to take it day by day and kind of grow it slowly." And I said, "Well, that's great, but there's a difference between growing and falling really slowly." Right? And there's also such a thing in my brain as AI inflation. Which is if you're adopting AI like 5% week on week, year on year, whatever it is, everyone else is adopting it at 20%. Like that's AI inflation. Right? And so you actually are not growing. You're fundamentally net negative. And in an ecosystem where the barrier for entry is so low, you just can't compete. Right? And so that's why I was asking about your competitors before. Because sure, they might not have the legacy stuff and the retail footprint, also stuff, but could they spin up a digital presence faster than ever? Could they spin up all the assets faster than ever? Do they have the preciousness of the brand that you guys have? No. Right? But could that almost make their brand and even better brand build it, create a more faster, better attack the right audiences, potentially? Yeah. Right? And so those are the things that like, I think, and you know, I used to run digital at like a 300 million dollar FMCG business with keeps enterprise stuff. So I know that it can be really slow. But I think to all the executives, you have to really take a look at the mirror and just think like, "Do I want to win?" Yeah. Right. And you just have to be honest with yourself because if 5% year on year is enough, okay, cool. Then go and go and say it's going to take three years of steering committee to get caught. But if you want to be the best and deliver the best outcomes, and be the best for your customers, right, then you need to be serious about ripping some red tape away. Something I'm going to say is what's happening today as well, is a lot of people are like really scared or they don't know what to start. But it literally feels like 15 years ago when Google decided to be thinking, "Just Google it." [laughter] It's cool to know so much about AI. Like when someone goes and asks me like a really pointy AI question, I just go and ask cool it anyway. I know. So I'm just like, just talked AI about AI. Yeah. You just figure it out. I just use Whisper and as my function K and talk into it and go, "Hey, I'm thinking, I'm not a developer by any means. I'm a shit developer, but I've learned how to be a bad developer." [laughter] I go, "I'm thinking about building this. This is what I needed to do. This is the outcome. How would you build it?" Mm-hmm. And then we go, "I do this, this, this, this." "Just respect, talk, and go, do you want me to build it?" Yeah, let's start. Let's chalk it down a little bit. But even at a non-technical level, right, we're talking about at the moment in July, just setting really in-depth brain guidelines so that we can have for tone of voice copy dogs that AI can just exactly replicate. We'll get everything on point. And the marketing team came to me and they asked how to write an AI-ready copy doc. And I was like, "I'll score it." "Claw it will write you the guidelines to write a copy doc." We'll write the copy, but we know what we want. But the guidelines for it, it's cool to do that. I think to your point, honey, is really interesting, especially around enterprise organisations where we're saying, "Actually, we need to move slow because we need to take the team on the journey and we need to upskill them." I'm like, for the last 50 years, we've been asking teams who aren't technology native to learn how to use enterprise systems. Like, you think of AI tools. Yeah, they're not intuitive at all. And also the side money tools that you get into. Is it text box? Tell us what you want to find out about. Like, the actual on-ramping for teams is nowhere near as scary as what people think. Data security, absolutely. You've got to be careful. But there are certifications. There's all information. I think in a lot of ways, the enterprise market has even more value. Because in all these giant businesses, and I've seen it, if you think, "Oh, you have an old ERP, and you have another thing, and another system, and another thing." "Oh, what do we do?" We're either going to hire people to fill those gaps. Take things and do exports, and that are expensive. Time consuming, slow mistakes. Or we're going to go build this really complicated middleware and higher engineering teams and do all it together. Like, I think that there's going to be a whole new market, where it's like, "Okay, I'll just build agents to replace the headcount thing. They don't need even API access, right? The agents will just control browsers and go and do it. And they'll just go and do all the manual work that enterprise businesses have been throwing people at." Now, once you remove the people from that equation, like, things get faster. Because every person brings in a communication tax, a bureaucracy tax, a process tax. And so, the more streamlined your business is with people that are making critical decisions about the way the business can move, the faster you'll move. Right? Like, executives and even like, senior leaders in a business, like, they have one job. And it's to make very few high-quality decisions. Everything else obfuscates that. And it's about signal to noise. Is there a big risk there? Because if I'm putting myself in Greg Shoe's or Aitens Shoe's, and I've got Hane here, I've got Luggy here, who are just training up their bots and letting them run riot, the streamlining the workforce, they're creating amazing content, they're doing all this great stuff. You guys disappear. Who's looking after the agents? We were actually talking about this yesterday. The tax can be an accelerant over the next couple of years. You need to buckle up and just lay a cup on the chain that you need some really good tech highers in your business. Because if you want to start doing cool stuff, especially the enterprise level, or a little bit bigger, if you want to be on the bandwagon of this, you want to get everything out of it. Get some tech highs, but if you've got one and you're worried that they're going to up and go, for sure, this person is managing your infrastructure, get to them if that's your thing to turn. It's so important though that if you do want to do all this cool stuff and you do want to bridge gaps, you want to build cool platforms, you want to do all the cool stuff that comes with AI, and there's no out of the box solution that's good yet. You need good clients. You need to know what's in place, that you need to know how things will work. I think that there's probably a few things, right? For me, it's simpler than ever to set things up, and it's way more simple than people think. To set up an MCP, tech guys love to throw these acronyms around. MCP, API, LLM, whatever, right? But at the end of the day, you're just sending some data to a thing. The thing comes back with data. And even from a UI perspective, on a computer, it's actually very easy to set up. Just go and watch YouTube video. But I think we have all these-- >> We all do it in like 20 minutes, end-of-the-plit. >> Yeah, exactly, right? But there's all this mysticism around AI. And I think if you really bring it back to-- I'm not saying everyone needs to understand how the models work. But understand, as we move into the next generation, what is mission critical for anyone in the business to understand? When do I use an MCP? When do I connect one? What is it? Those are questions that are going to be durable truths from now on, and things that you should know. So in terms of de-risking, you have these tech guys and all this other stuff, everyone should know about it. Everyone should know what it is. Everyone should know how to set up an MCP. Everyone should know how to do it. >> The rating about it get caught to write your video. >> Yeah, let's talk about it. But there's a lot of things to learn. I've learned a bajillion skills on YouTube. That's just my way of doing it. I learned how to program on YouTube. I learned how to do Photoshop on YouTube. I learned how to do everything on YouTube. My entire life is YouTube. And now you have AI. AI is even better to learn on. And so, yeah, I mean, it's all out there for the taking. Like I said, the barriot entry is so low. >> I think it's a choice at this point. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Like if you're not learning how to do it stuff, like sure you don't have to do a code or you don't have to be all these things. You don't have to be cracked out deploying out websites for your marketing. You don't even do it on that. But if you don't know the basics, you're choosing what's the one on purpose. >> Yeah, I agree. >> It's so available and it's so easy. Like, MCP sounds like a scary thing. It's not. It literally takes 30 seconds to go to everybody's. And you'll know that acronym for the rest of your life. >> And I saw Alice before when we were talking about talent coming through. You're like, "Oh, I don't think they're quite there yet." >> Yeah. >> I'll put your opinion if you were coming through in e-commerce and maybe even see our own. Because there's a lot of CRM jobs out there at the moment, especially at entry level. I don't think that's the talent to meet the demand. >> Yeah. >> What would you upskill in? Like, where would you put your attention if you're coming through? >> I think I would put my, well, I think it's more about the grit, like the attitude of yourself than it is about skill set. I agree with Jaime when he says that. Gosh, I don't even know. Like, I'm trying to take myself back to like one specific skill. >> You like to learn. >> Like learn data, learn, learn how everything works, how everything's connected, especially in e-commerce, like the basics. I always say, "If you're going to work in e-commerce, my biggest piece of advice is to set up your own website." >> Yeah, agree. >> And actually, just even if it's like a Shopify basic, just so you can understand how things work and see things in motion. >> And there's plenty of small business lines out there that if you put your hand up and you said, "I'm really interested in Shopify and Clive out. I'm happy to spend." >> I feel home. >> I know it's a day. >> Yeah. >> It's a day. >> Yeah, I would love that. I would think that's a really strong kind of, and then yeah, just a great amount of shoes. really for me it's like the passion like if they've gone and our university built a website and then come to you and they're showcasing that and they've got that ad shoot that I would take them on. Yeah. You know something the individual tools are going to change so much over the next couple years but the ability to learn how to learn is crazy. Yeah yeah yeah. Like being able to want to yeah that's something that like you really can't teach like if you try and teach someone how to go look something up like that's already too late it might be in genuinely it's like you should be hungry to learn how to do things and like because it's going to change so much the next two years if you're not willing to change by sets change workflows change skills yeah you're gonna find I think you you need to find like I always think of this thing which is like I want strategic practitioners and what I mean by that is I want people that can think big picture but do it every day right like they understand the brand and creative strategy but they in the meta account they understand like CRM and retention but they're looking at email flows right like they get the whole breadth and depth of it and you need people that like you know it I think that we can talk about like they have to love learning for me it's like learning and service of something so be problem led have a problem you want to solve like find people that are problem oriented and be like I love this problem right how am I going to solve that and you'll find at least in my experience that when you find those people they will not stop until that problem is solved and if that means learning 500 different tools and learning how to be a graphic designer and learning how to write code and learning how to do this and learning how to build an mcp like they'll figure it out because it's in service to their purpose which is the problem and you just have to like want it you know yeah have a genuine passion for it yeah did you guys all go to university now I'm gonna drive out I did six months six months yeah yeah yeah would you do it again oh I mean they paid me to go to uni so I think it's actually entirely different now I think that the ecosystems entirely change like when I hire I don't care if people have a university degree like I assess on output and outcome but I think like even I was actually speaking to someone who who's moved from the US like come here to study and they just said like the ecosystem here is awful just like there's no engagement in classes anymore like people don't rock up everything is remote like people you know just not engaging not making friends and like for me like don't get me wrong I have a lot of problems with standard tertiary education and I was already building stuff before during after uni and had side projects and things so like it wasn't really for me but like the structure that's around tertiary education cannot mirror real life and the rate that we're changing in real life and so I'm just like guys I don't care how you want it yeah but like can you do it yeah I don't know if you guys since I'm on right at uni paper recently but one of my friends is a nurse on right so her writing like a paper for a third degree and it was literally a chatchieb tea dog that she was working through and then she went through and just re-wired it so that it didn't get done by the AI and I was like love what's the point of any of this yeah please please please please please help see and she's very smart yeah she's very smart but that's exactly because we're we're assessing to a standard criteria and not assessing based on outcome right yeah like did you talk about this did you do this to do that right for me like we should totally be assessing based on what happened in the workforce right like could you actually told this problem could you actually do it like the best university assessment is like hey go build a business like for a business degree go build a business for a software and join course like you have a year build a piece of software that's really cool I think it's really important because those entry-level jobs are going to get less and less as people like you guys strip out and automate some of the season now and now less losing jobs they are they literally are and I don't think it's a bad thing because we're worried about other areas yeah yeah well and come me from an advertising background I cut my teeth doing manual tasks the years which taught me a lot of the foundations of why how to think about things right because he kind of doing things but now I say actually go in and just do like building a create if you don't have those foundations that strategic thinking the philosophy is of why we're doing things how customers but we're going to miss a lot so I think as we're thinking about learning it's really important we go you get in the tools and do agree but also take the time to learn from others who are more senior because that connection between junior and senior is going to become a lot more tenuous I think we're actually harmed a lot of the younger generation by not giving them the ability to execute and really live and breathe the problem right like for me I got that kind of ownership relatively early and I loved it because I could just dive into the problem and do it like what you get now with a lot of these things like you have a grad program and there's a rigid structure and you're in the learn this and there's hierarchy and that it it it it it okay if that's what you want to do great but is it going to expose you to the the stuff you need to get exposed to the information the data the way that it really moves like how the world and businesses move and shifts like I don't think so right and so I I'd almost encourage like most people to go and start a business and fail right like go and try a million different things and that will teach you more like if if you're worried about like oh my skills gap on a resume is not that good go credit your own role try and do that and then when you do go for a role that you really want like hey I started this thing I did matter I built the website I did this I did or that I did it all day I like this is my CV like I can do it for you too and I'm happy to learn with you on this on this journey but everything is really down to pragmatism and the ability to actually create value I'm like especially with employees like I want to create value for them as much as they create value for us yeah right and it's like I want to enable you and empower you such that you never want to leave right that you feel purpose driven and fulfilled and that you're learning new stuff and that you want you want to stay here right so if someone comes in if like my top ASAP player comes in with like a giant mega offer from our competitor he's like actually know I'm good you know like I feel good here I feel fulfilled here I'm seeing here I'll stay right like that should be the motive I think it's a huge thing is you go learn how to create your own value rather than hiding for a job to come up and go so 60 grand I'll go take that and that'll be it's like no how do you create value and how do you get paid for the value they create it more limitless we've gone in all sorts of areas that I never intended to go but I'm so glad I'm gonna ask each of you we've gone final closing thought which is a lot more aligned to CRM I mean it's all aligned to CRM but I'm gonna ask you for one thing that you think or retail and e-commerce operators should be making sure that they're doing in their email or CRM platform like what's one thing that you often see is missed and one thing that you're most excited about in this emerging space if we take ourselves forward 24 months what do you think the future of this is gonna be you do have a lot of data of a lot of analytics but there's a lot of times you don't look at it like there's so many numbers that you just like you build flows off them you do all these things you're actually looking at the numbers of like how many people are actually in your at risk thing and is that going out what's that going down like actually keep in track of your analytics within CRM it's like one of the things that is so important but so easy to look at by the way side I'll say automation and employers and testing your emails as well and also testing them keeping on top of your inbox providers rules and regulations we've been stung by sending unengaged or not relevant content to people so I would say stay on top of that so you know what's going on with your providers, test your emails, make sure the you know make sure the format the layouts you know by device it all works you know that's probably basic and then automation so flows yeah and it just that just builds efficiency not overclocking not yeah not overcompete them you want to get to a place where you're getting a majority of your revenue from flows and also your sessions really and we're still very much focused on a lot of campaigns so we've got some way to go but that would be what we'd focus on yeah next 12 months I think it's so I mean one to one for customer for sure for operators I would say just the ease of getting all of that set up within the platform so at the moment there's like three separate AI bots I think branches Clavio it would be like merging them and then even supping something on top that could pull out reporting and provide customer sentiment and CSAT and themes and just more of that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so months and I hope it goes that way so make my life what it's gonna be interesting to see if it all comes together naturally or it gets more dispersed yeah I mean bring us home okay I think my answer's going to be pretty pretty straightforward I think the first one is just data right like strategic data collection at the end of the day like all the cool stuff we're talking about in terms of one to one personalization and knowing your customer like it all comes down to what data you have about them and being really strategic about what data you're collecting when you're collecting it when's the right time to collect it and then how you use it right and like for me it's always that data is a value exchange you don't want to be asking people for 500 different things you want to be asking them for the thing that you need it for right in that moment and be collecting it strategically so that's from first principles like shit and shit out get good data know your customer well in your CDP and you'll be able to do awesome things and the second thing most exciting about is like leverage right like even if headcount stays the same each person can do more and they can do more in multiple directions so like you know my my paid advertising guys are generating creative right and the creative is winning and then you know the graphics guys can pull insights and they can be like okay what how should we build the next thing I'm able to look after all of it and generate some really cool automations like where we're just now starting to build some agents to do full market research angle generation creative generation like at scale right to just give it a brief and it goes so all those things are examples of leverage where we're just going to get more bang for our buck in terms of impact and I don't think that's going to go any way anytime soon I think the ability to to generate leverage and to access leverage is going to get even better even faster so it's super exciting like I'm personally super pumped for the year ahead like I think we've got heaps of exciting stuff I love the team I have I love the tech that we're working on I love the business like we're ready to go I'm pumped up I'm ready to go thank you so much it was so nice to have three different perspectives all from clavio champions you're all using the platform in the best way possible so it's a real testament to you and your teams but three very different businesses in different stages with different goals but it's It's nice to hear some common themes around that we need to progress with AI with any perfection. We need to be curious and we can't wait for people to give us permission. If you need something, don't wait on Shopify or Clavier to give it to you. There are ways to do things. You've got to be genuinely curious and be willing to tinker. That's the world we're in. So thank you so much. Beautiful one you need to tell us. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers. That was lucky. I hugged you from July, honey rafi from step one and Alice Michael from APG and co. What a crew. I could sit all day in that room with them to talk email and CRM, even if it was 30 degrees with no aircon, which to be fair, it was slightly uncomfortable towards the end, but it was worth it. I hope you agree. Three things that I want you to take from this one. Firstly, discount to solve a problem, not to fill a revenue gap. All three panelists had different versions of this, but the framing that I kept coming back to is Pavlovian discounting. I just like saying Pavlovian discounting. So a discount should be designed to drive a specific behaviour. Whether that's to move old stock, get someone to try something new, nudge a buyer who is so close but might just need that extra push to get over the line. They're all legitimate reasons for discounting. The second that you start reaching for a discount to hit a revenue number, you're training your best customers to wait and you're giving away margin to people who would have bought anyway. So before the next discount email goes out, ask what problem is this actually solving? How can we do this in a smart way where we can encourage a new Pavlovian response from our consumers so that we're growing in the long term? We're not just feeding the beast in the short term. All right, secondly, use your discounts when customers switch RFM categories, not when you need to hit a number. I loved all that conversation around RFM. We started to nerd out but we could have gone even deeper. Both Harnie and Alice talked about this in depth. The moment a customer moves from loyal to at risk is the moment a target of message needs to land. That is when they need the nudge. That's when it feels relevant and when it's most likely to work. If you just do a blanket 20% off the whole list, it's noise as we talked about just before, but a well-time message to a customer who has quietly started drifting, that is a conversion that you almost missed out on. Set up the triggers. It's easy enough to do now. Watch where a customer is almost leaving a group or is just entered a new group and deploy your incentives at the moment when that customer is at risk. Lastly, stop thinking about segmentation as the final result. Segment's, I think, they're all right. They're still a bit of a work around. They're our best current approximation of what we think can deliver a personalized message. They're basically demographics going to the next level but we know that's not the endpoint that we really want to get to. We really want to get to that one-on-one communication and we're actually not that far off it now. AI is closing that gap really quickly. So the question is not how to build a better segment tree. It's how to get your data right so that when true one-to-one is available, you are ready to use it. All right, a big thank you to our partners at Clavio, Enter Shopify for making Add to Car possible. These conversations happen and this access to this amazing talent that we had today. They happen because of our partners and we really do appreciate their continued support for our podcast and to be able to bring all this to you. Now like I said at the start of the episode, if you're not getting the Add to Car newsletter, why not sign up via the link in the show notes or visit add to car.com.au and click on newsletter in the header and you'll be able to sign up for free every episode. You'll get the cheat sheet. You'll get the links. You'll get everything that you need to make the most out of what you just listened to. That's it for this week. It is part two of three series at Clavio's caseid. We'll be back with a special, a big, massive finale next week.