Episode 17:
Handling Your “Mess of Data” in Email with Chris Behrens of BearMail

Scott Cohen: Hello all, and welcome to that inbox army podcast. I’m your host, Scott Cohen. With me is Bob to my Doug McKenzie, my cohost, Garin Hobbs. Garin, how are you doing today?

Garin Hobbs: Pretty good, Scott. Take off.

Scott Cohen: Take off, Alright. These days, we as marketers and, frankly, humans, we’re inundated with talk and mostly poor usage of AI. And there’s always big talk about collecting and using data, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Most people don’t know what types of data they’re collecting and what types of data are actually being used, which means the following statement is true for AI, CDPs, email programs, you name it. Garbage in, garbage out.

And it’s a mess. So today, we’re gonna be talking about what to do with that mess of data you’re likely holding on to. With that in mind, in the guest chair today to discuss all things data and email marketing and maybe some other things is new dad, Chris Barron’s founder and CEO of Bear Mail. Chris, to the podcast.

Chris Behrens: Thanks so much for having me, Scott. Really excited to be here.

Scott Cohen: Heck. Yeah. We’re excited too. But before we get into the weeds and start nerding out about data, I love to learn about people’s journeys, so how they ended up to where they are today. Tell us about your journey to today and bear mail.

Chris Behrens: Yeah. Absolutely. So I like to say that email found me versus I found email, and I think that’s probably That’s

Scott Cohen: pretty true.

Chris Behrens: For most everyone in the industry. I don’t think you set out to find email necessarily when you’re going out to out from college. But, I got a degree in marketing analytics, and my first job out of school was as a CRM analyst at a larger advertising agency. And the client that I was working on was a large CPG brand that had a highly sophisticated CRM program. And my responsibility was to analyze their email marketing program and identify opportunities for them to improve engagement and drive better loyalty within their loyalty program.

And I quickly discovered that email marketing can be hugely personalized to an extent that I never thought possible. And this was back in 2010 where I spent I spent many hours analyzing between 30 to 70 different versions of a campaign going out the door all at the same time, and it spoiled me rotten because now I, you know, have seen that that was one end of the spectrum for email marketing, and there’s the other end of the spectrum for email marketing, which is one size fits all programs and not personalized communications. And so I quickly fell in love with email because it was data driven at its core, and that’s who I am as an individual. I’m highly analytical, and I love math, I love numbers and email to some extent largely has always been about the data and reaching the consumer and knowing who they are to deliver a better experience. Love email and I’ve been in the space ever since.

Garin Hobbs: You know, I gotta say that’s what I love about our industry. It’s folks of different interests, different proclivities, different backgrounds. It’s such a seductive addiction no matter what you’re into, right? If you’re the analyst, if you’re the numbers geek, hey, have at it. There’s worlds of data to dive into there.

If you fancy yourself more of a psychologist and for you email, it’s really figuring out what it really takes to compel people to action. Again, there’s everything there for you as well. I’m always surprised, just the diversity of background we find with people in our industry. So love to hear your story, Chris.

Chris Behrens: Absolutely. I think there’s a place for everyone in email, like you said, and that’s what makes the industry so fun is that you have people from all diverse backgrounds when it comes to business or marketing or psychology or even unconventional degree programs where school degree programs don’t really define how you enter email. There’s so many different entry points for why you fall in love with email and why you stick around email. And, frankly, I can’t ever think of a reason why I would wanna focus on anything but email and CRM space. So Same.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. You you get some CRM a little bit in school. I mean, I was a corporate communications major, and then I was a copywriter. And then I went, wait. I actually know what works in this channel.

This is cool. Right? I mean, I’m I’m old enough that I was writing TV and radio ads in my early career, so, you know, nobody does those things anymore. But it’s but to your point, email found me. Right?

It’s like, oh, you’re writing the emails. Why don’t you do them? And next thing I know, it’s been seventeen years of a career. So there you I keep Garin and I talk about this all the time because he’s been doing it longer than I have, and it’s like the gray hair show all the bad reports and failed tests and everything else that we’ve run. But You wouldn’t change anything.

I absolutely would not. The you know, we’ve come from all walks of life, and there there’s something it’s like it’s like a little bit of, a fraternity, you know, sorority type thing. Like, once you’re in email, you’re like, I’m in the club. So it’s Cultish.

Garin Hobbs: It is cultish.

Scott Cohen: It it is a little positively cultish. Let’s put it

Chris Behrens: that way.

Garin Hobbs: Absolutely. Yeah. No Jonesboro here, but yes.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, let’s let’s dive into that nerdym. You say you love data.

You love analytics. There’s a ton of data everywhere. You know, you’re working with folks who have a ton of data, and they simply don’t know how to use it. Right? They simply don’t know what they’re sitting on.

So I always like to paraphrase Inigo Montoya. Let’s go back the beginning. Where do you, Chris Parents, start with data?

Chris Behrens: It’s a great question. I think clients are always tempted first to try to figure out how they utilize all of their data that they have about consumers and subscribers. And the first place I always start with data is what are we looking to accomplish in the first place? And then how are we going to use that information to do something different with our programs? And if we don’t have an answer to that, to me, the data is not relevant to talk about at this point in time.

I think that’s the temptation that most clients I work with go down is that they want to know everything they can about consumers, and that’s great. But if we’re not going to use that information to do anything differently, then that information is just information for your headspace, and you don’t really have anything relevant to do it do with it besides, you know, know the information in your head. So, you know, from my perspective, I always like to decide, you know, what what are the goals of our marketing programs and what are we trying to get our subscribers to do? And also most importantly, what do they want to do? They’ve signed up for communications with your brand, and they have an objective for what they see themselves doing with your brand, whether it’s buying your products or engaging with your brand on a deeper level.

And so figuring out a consumer’s motivations is, first and foremost, my number one objective is to figure out what do consumers want to achieve and what does the business want to achieve and how do those two things intersect to deliver some value for the program?

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s got it. You can’t know where you’re going till you know where you are. Right?

So it’s and and where you want it. Absolutely.

Chris Behrens: Exactly. And I think I have Go ahead.

Garin Hobbs: No. Please, Chris.

Chris Behrens: Oh, I was just gonna say, I think, kinda to put it more concretely, I think I always I’ve worked with a lot of professional sports teams and sports organizations, and they tend to largely have some of the same objectives, which is get people to come out to games and grow fan engagement and drive merchandising sales. And so when you think about various industries and what they’re trying to achieve from a business perspective, oftentimes when you look at specific industries, it comes down to one to two primary objectives in which you can start to design programs around those objectives and figure out how you quote unquote put your subscriber hat on or in this case put your fan hat on to go drive a better experience for what they’re looking for.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. I I have those similar conversations at least three, four times a day with our clients. They’ve There’s no end to the data they have, but I tend to hear the same thing over and over, and that’s we don’t know enough about our customer, right, and then you or our prospects. And you look at the data and what you see there is a lot of profile data, a lot of event data, but there’s not a lot of context to it, right? So what I like to reflect back to them is in the midst of all this data, if you could only know one thing about your client or your customer, what would that one thing be?

And I understand that’s, you know, sort of subjective or, you know, largely unique from each business to the next, but I think what we’re really talking about here, Chris, is foundational data. Right? So in the broader general sense, what would you say would be those three, five, 10 attributes or data points folks should really be focusing on before getting to all of the window dressing maybe a little bit later on?

Chris Behrens: Yeah. I love that question because I think it narrows your mindset about what’s really important for any program that you look at. And from my perspective, there’s three places I always really like to start in terms of what we can know about a consumer that really helps start to drive some personalized or value driven experience. So number one, when did the person sign up for your program as a really simple starting place? So just from that information alone, we can know, do they know a lot about your brand or do they not know a lot about your brand?

Where does the education part of your messaging start? Just by knowing that information alone is hugely valuable no matter which industry that you work with. Number two, what are they clicking on within your program’s content is always an extremely valuable part of the conversation. So the consumer is always telling you whether they know it or not, what they’re interested in and what they might be interested in in the future. So using that information just to understand, are they recently interested in something or has it been a while since they’ve been interested in something?

Simply knowing that information upfront is hugely powerful to start to drive a better experience for the subscriber. And then finally, have they actually put money down or made a conversion commitment to your brand is really valuable information no matter which industry you work with too. So are they a prospect? Are they a first time buyer? Are they a repeat buyer?

And when it comes to the goal for most email programs that I work with, it’s finding a large swath of first time buyers and trying to get them to the next purchase because ultimately that’s the biggest challenge you have for almost any retention program is figuring out how you move the needle from someone who comes to your brand once experiences something great, but then get them to come back again for whatever industry that you’re working with. And that varies obviously from industry to industry and brand to brand. But largely speaking, those are the types of problems that I like to center around because everyone typically has access to this data, and everyone can use that information to start to develop some basic life cycle marketing programs as well as some basic personalization programs.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I mean, that that nuance of when people raise their hand. Right? You know, you talk about how recent and how far are they along before they even raise their hand. I mean, when I was in higher ed, for example, we had a welcome program, a nurture program that ran for almost two years because it was front loaded, right, for the first thirty days.

People were excited about going back to school. They’re gonna do all these fun things. And then after that, you’re like, oh, wait. It’s like a two to four year commitment for these people. They’re gonna take some time to think about it.

We need stuff for them too. Right? And then with newsletters and everything else and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? But there’s this but when is very important.

And also, I would add one thing. Who? Right? Because if they come you get somebody who’s a new purchaser from you. I mean, let’s your sports example.

Right? Maybe my wife goes out and buys me tickets to go see the Utah Jazz for Christmas or for my birthday or whatever. Or probably for me, would be the Utah sorry. They’re the mammoth now, not the hockey club anymore, because I’m a hockey guy more than I’m a basketball guy. But if she’s buying it for me, do you know that they’re shopping for themselves or shopping for somebody else?

I mean, those are those are things that can be pretty critical. Or Garin uses this example all the time. He shops, and then maybe he buys something for his wife. And next thing you know, all the emails are about stuff for his wife. He’s like, that was one time, guys.

Settle down.

Chris Behrens: So You they put it in.

Garin Hobbs: Right? It’s not other dresses she’ll love. It’s other dresses you’ll love, and that’s a very quick psychological disconnect. Right? It’s so yeah.

Unless hey.

Scott Cohen: If you wear dresses, Garin, no judging, man. Do do your thing. Be you.

Garin Hobbs: This time of year, I’m open to it. It’s hot.

Scott Cohen: The boys gotta breathe. But but, you know, but we talk about these fundamental things and and, you know, when, what, and, you know, why. I mean, this is the classic, five w’s type thing. But what’s like, how do you go what’s next? What’s we talk about what is their purchase behavior?

What are what are they clicking on? What what’s actionable from that? What are some three or four things that you go, hey. If you know this, do this. If you know this, do this.

If you know this, do this. Like, walk us through that a bit.

Chris Behrens: Right. So let’s let’s just take a sports example. Right? Let’s say we’ve got a a person who has made one previous ticket purchase. They’ve been signed up for email for a while.

They’re regularly engaged with the program. They open and click regularly. They’re just not ready necessarily to put money down again, or they haven’t done so in a while. So with just those three pieces of information that we talked about, meaning they’ve signed up, when they signed up, what they’re doing from an email frequency perspective in terms of their engagement, as well as whether they purchase or not, we know that, A, they care enough to put money down for the team. Your example’s perfect, Scott, that we don’t we actually will know the information about whether it’s you who put down the money for tickets or whether you’re just an attendee who’s come along for the ride.

Right? Because that’s a totally different mindset in terms of potentially your commitment level to the team if you’re being brought along for the ride or being gifted the tickets versus if you put the money down to go buy the tickets. So understanding just that information alone, think about, okay, what can I do to get this fan to come back and make a second purchase, which is arguably one of the hardest things you can do in any industry, right, let alone sports? And so when you think about it, there’s something that is emotionally compelling about why they participated with your brand in the first place. So reselling what that game day experience was like for them and harnessing those memories that they had about what their experience was like when they first came to your brand is something that is hugely powerful in sports, let alone any industry.

Right? Because there is some positive impression that you made with them where, you know, they decided to commit at least their time and usually their money and dollars to go participate in your brand experience. And so using that information to resell the experience and also reminding them of some social proof points along the way for, you know, why people do continually come back to to go see mammoth games, for example, or Utah Jazz games. I think that’s what’s really cool about sports is that it’s so oftentimes that you find fans that are attached to the wins and losses on the board versus necessarily the experience. And I think the great brands out there, they don’t sell price.

They don’t sell discounts. They sell the experience. And so if you can create a great experience, that’s really where the power comes in with personalization and driving better outcomes for your business, particularly in sports where you have that deep emotional connection and possibility for creating lifelong brand advocates for your sports team. Right? Because once you pick a sports team, typically, you’re not you’re not straying from that fandom once you’re in.

Right?

Scott Cohen: I have Not if you’re

Garin Hobbs: a good fan. No. Unless you’re a Rockies fan. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: That is a little tough. Yeah. Yeah. May maybe by the time

Garin Hobbs: this Yeah.

Scott Cohen: What what is it that to they have to go, like, a 108 and o or something to, like, best that it’s it’s something ridiculous. Like, they can’t lose a game to I believe it’s like the all time record. I’m pretty sure that was a few days ago, and they’ve already lost since then. So Yeah. Best record’s out

Garin Hobbs: of the question.

Chris Behrens: Exactly. And I’ve experienced a little bit of that myself with being a Chicago Cubs fan for most of my life and, you know, for a good a good long twenty years of my life, it was which is far shorter than most Cubs fans’ dreary and, you know, dismay about how bad the team was forever. You know, it’s it is about that experience as as crazy as Wrigley is and as as as funny as the experience might be. I think that’s what they really sell is figuring out that it’s a great experience to come out and see again and again and again. And that’s what great brands really do is they sell the experience versus selling necessarily discounts and, you know, things that are short term gains for the business.

So

Garin Hobbs: I love I I love that answer. I’m a huge fan of, you know, leaning very heavily on aspects such as context, emotion, and impact to drive email strategy. One, it’s for a lot of the reasons that you said. Right? I mean, it gives you that allows you to really kind of strum those most resonant chords within the individual.

But to your point, it also means we’re now motivating intrinsically rather than extrinsically. Folks are motivating themselves rather than being compelled by discount price promotion, which is a game of increasing anti and not at all, you know, sustainable. If it took 10% to get them this time, it’s fifteen, twenty next. It’s a race to the bottom. So I really like leaning on that.

However, you know, how do we get that critical data? There are a lot of inferences that can be made off of, you know, customer actions, by, you know, overlaying multiple data points and drawing a conclusion. I’m a big fan of just asking the customers, the subscribers, right? Polls, progressive profiling. I do get a lot of resistance.

Chris, I’d love to hear your thoughts on really how we get the real understanding behind the data points themselves. Right? What’s your favorite sort of go to techniques and tactics here?

Chris Behrens: You hit the nail on the head, Garin. Zero party data is my favorite space to explore because if you ask consumers what they’re feeling, generally they will tell you that particularly if you make it a fun and engaging experience. I think everyone thinks about asking for data as the dry and boring survey in which you lead someone to a SurveyMonkey page and slowly integrate those insights back into your ESP to go activate. There’s so many more fun ways to do it, particularly when it comes to to email and simply, you know, asking someone with a simple yes, no poll. And an email can be a hugely powerful driver for understanding what you’re gonna do with the person next.

Simply asking, have you been out to a game? Yes or no. Yeah. If you don’t know that information, and we can use that decision split to say, you’ve been out to a game. Great.

Let’s figure out a way to make you come back to the game. Nope. You haven’t been out to a game. Let’s figure out the best way that we can tell you about the experience and figure out how to educate you about what we have to offer. Right?

It’s very Yep. When you think about data collection, I think the great thing about working in email is that click data has always been a hugely powerful driver for understanding consumer motivations and using the content upfront and being transparent about what you’re asking for and why you’re asking for that information is great for the consumer and great for your brand.

Scott Cohen: I think that A 100%. I find that brands and marketers are afraid to ask those questions. And I think part of it is they’re worried people are gonna unsubscribe, which I always go, if they were gonna unsubscribe from that, they’re gonna unsubscribe anyway, so it’s not a loss. Yep. But but two, I think the concern is, and let’s be honest, it’s we’re gonna ask for this data and then not use it properly.

Oh. Not use it at all. Like, what’s you know? Yeah. I mean, it what happens if you go out and go, well, how often do you want us to email you?

And then you say once a week, and then you still send them three to four times a week, like, whatever you’re doing.

Garin Hobbs: That’s right.

Scott Cohen: It’s like, well, why did you bother to ask me in the first place? Why did you waste the time to ask me? And so I don’t know if if if the fear is the first one or the second one. It’s probably a combination of both. But it we shouldn’t be afraid.

Right? Like, we shouldn’t I mean, people it’s it’s a matter of establishing trust. If you ask people questions and you use that data and you listen to them, people get more invested. I mean, am I wrong here? I mean, is it crazy?

Garin Hobbs: I I don’t know. I think you’re crazy. People love opportunity to do so in a lot of these programs. To your point, a lot of that sort of lack of opportunity is driven by the marketers’ reticence to ask in the first darn place. But I think you’re onto something here, Scott.

I think that reticence is really rooted in, we don’t really have a meaningful strategy to activate that data and reflect that back to the customer. Or, hey, it’s a big leap for us to get there. And so we’re interested in asking, but maybe not yet. That’s what I see. Otherwise, they see no excuse or justifiable reason for the hesitation, for the reticence.

It’s you put a question out there, people are going to want to ask. I will say one condition there, though. Something that I’ve seen and experienced is that how you ask that question for that critical data point can make all the difference. Sometimes you need to ask it in an oblique sort of way because we as human beings, I found, we have a tendency to answer in the aspirational, in the positive. We often will answer questions with who we wish we were or how we like to see ourselves versus who we really are.

I might’ve told this story before, but this really came through to me loud and clear. This had to have been ten, a dozen years ago, doing some consulting for one of the big food websites, might’ve been cooking.com, might’ve been Food Network. But the adherence and participation within their daily recipes email program was surprisingly low. And it’s difficult to understand why because they were delivering the exact type of recipes people asked to receive. You went to the program, you want to receive these types of cuisine, this type of cooking?

Is it this topic, that theme? And that’s exactly what they would deliver. Then I decided to take a look at preferences combined or overlaid with actual click behavior. And what I saw was a complete and utter mismatch. Scott, Chris, what type of recipes do you think people were saying they wanted to receive?

Right? You can see where I’m going here. Give me a couple of guesses.

Chris Behrens: I’d say anything in the healthy eating space, people want to be healthy.

Scott Cohen: Boom. I would Vegetarian. Go

Garin Hobbs: ahead, Scott. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: No. Was gonna say the other one. I mean, my wife cooks five, six, sometimes seven nights a week, and she always thinks she has to get these new recipes and try new things all the time. Aspirational. And we went, you don’t have to.

We’re fine with hot dogs and french fries from the freezer. Like, settle down. So, you know, definitely healthy for sure because that’s always, for many people, that’s always aspirational. Vegetarian perhaps because that’s sort of health oriented. I would say baking too.

Right? I mean, I think anything when you’re getting a daily recipe, you’re like, oh, shit. Now it’s work.

Garin Hobbs: Yep. Right? You’re right. It was healthy eating, low carb cooking, vegetarian recipes, but then also very complex sort of, you know, Tony type of thing, you know, beef bourguignon and duck a l’orange. What do you think their click behavior actually reflected, Gentlemen?

Scott Cohen: The easy ones. Comfort, easy. Comfort food and yeah. Mhmm.

Garin Hobbs: Yep. The worst comfort foods, the heaviest, just dirtiest desserts you can imagine, and the things that can be done in five minutes with a microwave. You’re absolutely right. So I learned there very quickly. You need to ask the question obliquely.

And I think a lot of us who took psychology in college learned this as well. There’s that famous sort of study that if you asked people if they went to church on a Sunday, they’re more than likely to hear yes. But if you simply because people feel that’s the answer you wanna hear, the answer they have to give, or it somehow reflects that they’re this good, upstanding person. But if you change this question slightly to what did you do on Sunday, church very rarely enters the picture. Right?

So yes, polling, I love that. Make it slightly oblique so we’re not leading folks to a biased answer or to an aspirational answer. But, yeah, brands, if you’re out there listening, just ask. Just ask. It’s easy.

Just ask.

Scott Cohen: And that’s why when you that’s why when you look at political polls and poll questions, look at how they ask the question.

Garin Hobbs: Oh, they’re structured. Those are choreographed.

Scott Cohen: They’re a 100% structured

Garin Hobbs: to get the answer they wanna show.

Scott Cohen: 100%. I love that. Answer that they wanna show. So well, I mean, asking questions, using click behavior, is there such a thing as too much data? Absolutely.

Much data is too much data? And then what’s your process for mapping that data to program requirements?

Chris Behrens: It’s a great question. And to quickly revisit, actually, Garin, I know that you had your story about working with Food Network about the recipes and figuring out, you know, how kind of relating back to the question, how much data is too much data? I have my own story related to that as well in which, you know, what people say is different than what they actually do. So I was managing the email marketing program for Famous Footwear, and we built a preference center in which we asked, what type of content would you like to receive? And it was very simple.

It was either women’s shoes, men’s shoes, or kids shoes. And overwhelmingly, the individuals who applied the preferences in the preference center indicated that they’d like to receive women’s shoes. And when you look at the individuals who were actually selecting those requirements for the preference center, what you found in their behaviors is that they were predominantly not purchasing women’s shoes. In fact, their predominant behavior was to purchase kids shoes. When you think about the consumer who’s buying for- Moms.

Shoes, it’s moms with kids. They want to receive inspiration for themselves because they want to shop for themselves, but ultimately where their dollars are going is to make sure that their kids have shoes every back to school. And so when you think about the framing for your question around how is the question asked so we can use that information to positively influence the behaviors that we want to, the question framing is absolutely critical. I love your example from Food Network. So I just wanted to circle back to that.

Garin Hobbs: No. Yours as well. Right? It’s it’s there’s what you want, what you like, and then there’s what you actually buy. And those two things don’t always agree.

Chris Behrens: 100%. I you know, I’m

Scott Cohen: not a religious guy, but I was almost a religion minor in college. And there’s the famous Saint Francis of Assisi line, always preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words. And Yeah. That’s I mean, if we’re summing this up, it’s like, well, they’re saying they want to get women’s stuff, but the gospel is they’re buying kids stuff.

Chris Behrens: Exactly. I love that. That’s awesome. And going back to your questions.

Garin Hobbs: Just saying, I I would argue, Scott, you are a religious guy. It’s just golf and email are your religions. That’s that’s

Scott Cohen: all good. I I do pray to the email gods a lot. That is true. Every

Garin Hobbs: you hit send. Yes.

Scott Cohen: I love that.

Chris Behrens: Every time you push send or schedule an email, you are praying to the email gods that it’s gonna go out to the appropriate audience at the right time.

Garin Hobbs: There are no atheists in foxholes nor no atheists at the point of clicking send.

Chris Behrens: Send anxiety is one of the most real and relatable behaviors that I have ever seen.

Scott Cohen: This is my sending hand.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah, it’s got a brace on it. But getting back to that question, I I think the figure I’ve heard quoted casually, I can’t recall the source, is that, Hey, in all of this data we go through such pains to collect, there’s maybe 5% that represents a truly actionable insight, right? How do we separate that wheat from the chaff? How do we really get to the two? How do we get through all of the data that we have and don’t need to find those little kernels that make all the difference in the world?

Chris Behrens: Yeah, great question. I think, like you said, I have rarely seen a brand use more than about maximum 25 to 30 different attributes about their customer. That’s been very generous in terms of attribution and what you know about the customer. From my perspective, it all comes back to what can we do differently with your experience if we have this information? Right?

Because I think what I find with almost every client that I work with is that they’re data rich, at least from amount of data that they have, but both insights poor and content poor in terms of trying to deliver a different experience. And particularly the latter, I’m really interested in how this evolves over the next six to twelve months even when you think about, I know something different about a consumer. What can I do differently? Meaning, what’s the creative experience and actual email that they’re gonna receive that’s going to be better or at least different than what they’re receiving today? And content creation has always been a space that I think brands have struggled with because it requires manual human intervention to create content at scale, and that tends to be relatively expensive.

And now with the introduction of tools in AI that make content creation a little bit more productized, I think it’s an interesting space that’s developing slowly, and it’s very immature to be clear. Think there’s plenty of copy out there that is very clear. It’s written by AI still even though it’s gotten significantly better over the last twelve months. And there’s image generation tools, which, of course, we know all know the famous misspellings on the chat GBT images that we see viral all over the Internet whereby that space is gonna be rapidly disrupted. Eyes.

Right.

Scott Cohen: It’s the eyes.

Garin Hobbs: It is the eyes.

Scott Cohen: The eyes and the fingers. Yeah.

Chris Behrens: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s the exciting part from my perspective is thinking about we usually know a lot about our consumers because we have so much data, but we are unable to deliver experience that’s different because we don’t have the manpower to go produce content that’s different and we don’t have the capabilities to coordinate what that experience looks like, not just in email, but across other channels. So I’m super eager and excited to think about what that space transforms to over the next year or so in particular. I know brands are starting to be far more mature in this space and far less manual in their efforts recently.

But I think that’s the space that really excites me the most.

Garin Hobbs: It does for me as well. But I want to gently push back on something you just said. I feel like we do have the technology to do those things. What we lack is the mindset, right? What we lack is the commitment to approaching marketing from that perspective because it’s more difficult.

Requires thinking, right? Again, going to tell another story here. So Calm, right, the meditation app. They were a client some years back when I was with another email platform provider. And one of the big issues they had was they were losing a good amount.

And I mean, around between 6080% of their new subscribers within fifteen minutes of first downloading and using the app. Think about what that’s doing to their their customer acquisition costs. Right? But you look at the the notices that folks are getting, the push notifications, the in apps, the emails, it’s, you know, within an hour or so or less of signing up, it’s, hey. It’s time to meditate.

Don’t forget to meditate. Don’t you wanna meditate? Let’s meditate. It feels burdened. It feels burdensome.

It feels task driven. Right? It also, to your point, feels like one size fits all. We’re trying to push people to a mechanical sort of response. What we’re not doing and what is really easy to do is thinking about the reasons why people would wanna do that and tying the call to action to those specific reasons.

Maybe it’s get a better night’s sleep. Maybe it’s, reducing blood pressure and stress. Maybe it’s having a mental component to your physical workout regimen. You know, maybe it’s finding five minutes in this increasingly crazy world to come to center for yourself. Right?

But what I found is if you just, a, going back to our early point, ask what’s bringing them to meditation and then reflect the CTAs back according to their answer, it’s no longer it’s time to meditate. It’s be sure to stay on top of your sleep goals by finding five minutes to meditate today. But we don’t stop and do that. And AI is not doing that because we’re not programming AI to think that way, right? Scott and I were at a conference a few weeks ago and one of the most profound but simple statements really stood out to me and that’s AI is really nothing more than search engine results sort of generated, right?

So in search engine results, there’s no EQ in that. And that’s what’s really missing from all the AI is the EQ, the context, the understanding of feeling, the understanding of what motivates human beings to action and how that might differ across maybe five different sort of archetypes or personality types, for example. So I feel like we have the ability to do it. And in fact, we even have the data if we bother to focus on it. What we lack is just the resolve or the commitment to doing something like that.

Don’t know, Chris, do you think about that?

Chris Behrens: I think there’s a fair pushback. I think when you think about how a program is typically structured, you think about the way things have always been pre AI in terms of campaign production and campaign execution, there was largely manual intervention at every step of the process to go develop a campaign brief, support creative production, get the campaign assets created in your ESP, build a target audience, send the campaign out the door, generate reporting and insights, and iterate. So it’s largely been the same cycle for the entirety of email marketing existence. And so having a disruption to your process or rather an enhancement to the process in which you have efficiencies created along the way where you say, instead of manually creating all of these steps along the way, we have some efficiencies in which we can begin to think about scaling our efforts and creating more time for creative thinking, as well as realizing what we want to go do. That’s where the real power starts to come in.

I think, to your point, it doesn’t have to be dramatic creative changes when you think about what the experience looks like. It can be as simple as CTA changes or subject line changes or copy changes, which I think requires human intervention, of course, like you said, because ultimately, AI is not an emotive tool at the moment. And, you know, I will be I will be simultaneously fearful and excited for when it becomes a more emotive tool beyond what it is today. But for now, I think human centered intervention for creating marketing campaigns is absolutely going to be critical for a long, long period of time. And that’s going to be a differentiator for brands is thinking about, I can’t just press a button and make an email campaign come to life and really get to understand my consumer at a truly deep and emotive level to drive business outcome.

There has to be some human intervention in there to deliver an experience that’s actually human and actually resonates with people because humans like talking to humans. Humans, generally, my experience, don’t necessarily like speaking with AI to the level of depth or the level of emotional engagement as, you know, what you get with the human interaction, of course.

Garin Hobbs: Unless it’s Anadarmus in the second Blade Runner movie. Thin.

Chris Behrens: Of course.

Scott Cohen: Yes. I, for one, welcome our over robot overlords. But I I think you’ve touched on a key thing here, Chris, which is and I and I’ve I’ve said this a lot. AI can tell you what, but not why. Yep.

Mhmm. Once it can tell us why, that’s that’s when we start getting a little worried. That said, the challenge for us human marketers is there are definitely peep AI can the the problem with email is bad email works. Right? To a certain extent, bad email works.

You just show up and you can make money. Yep. I mean, how else is spam still around? Right? Why is spam still around?

Because it’s cheap and it works. It works enough that it pays for itself. So the challenge for us human marketers is we now have to be better than bad email from AI. Because if the client or whoever else is stepping in can replicate you without trying, that’s a problem. So, you know, the agent Us agencies, like, our value is, yeah, AI can get you here, but we get you here way up.

And if you can’t if you can’t get whoever you’re working for or with from here to here, that gap is a problem for your skill set. That’s a skills gap. But there’s like, we we’ve AI has established a baseline for, it’s good enough.

Chris Behrens: 100%.

Scott Cohen: We gotta get we gotta get an email out the door. We gotta make some money today. I don’t care. Get something out. And that’s It’s raised.

I mean, it’s a double edged sword. Right?

Chris Behrens: But It’s raised the floor for what’s acceptable in email marketing today. It hasn’t necessarily pushed it and raised the ceiling necessarily. And so that’s where the human intervention comes in, like you said, is to

Scott Cohen: Yeah.

Chris Behrens: Figure out how your skills beyond go beyond the the floor of what AI can offer to add incremental value. And the floor will keep getting higher and higher slowly and slowly. So it’s our job as marketers to figure out how we maintain a human connection and drive a mode of value for what we’re doing.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I mean, let’s dive a little deeper then on AI. When we’re talking data, it’s garbage in, garbage out. Right? So why is data so important in this AI puzzle?

Chris Behrens: Great question. Like you said, garbage in garbage out, it’s been a truism with any use cases related to data since the beginning of using data in any marketing channel. So if you get a steaming pile of garbage in, you’re going to get a steaming pile of garbage out. And one of the most neglected pieces of marketing in general is investing into data quality. And I think where brands tend to get trapped with data quality is to look at all of their data comprehensively and think, I don’t know where to start in cleaning this mess up.

There’s oftentimes these large legacy programs, have countless database tables and hundreds of attributes over many years that have been poorly organized by six different teams who’ve all come together to contribute to the current state of what the program looks like. And so when you think about using AI appropriately, you think, what are the most valuable contributors to generating a positive AI outcome? And it tends to really narrow it down, typically from my experience, to three to five or seven different attributes in which you really focus your core around cleaning up data that’s actually predictive of the outcome and or helpful for driving a specific AI outcome. So let’s take an example such as send time optimization, which has been, quote unquote, AI driven program for many years. If you think about what are the inputs to driving an effective send time optimization program, you think about when do people engage and when do people convert?

If you have reliable data around that, you typically have some reasonable predictor of maybe when they would like to receive communications. Ideally as well, you have some information around when are they in market to purchase and when are they in market to convert. And simply just having those pieces of information as a baseline is oftentimes good enough to get you an incremental outcome that’s perhaps better than what you’re doing today. And I think the trap that marketers tend to fall into is thinking there are we need hundreds of attributes to predict every single outcome that is going to be useful for AI. And oftentimes, AI is productized and dressed up to be simply a three to five variable model that has been casted as AI as a product for this moment in time.

And I think that’s the key thing with AI is just an understanding that nobody’s ever going to have 100% perfect data, and that should never be the outcome for any program. Any marketer who claims they have 100 clean data, I largely am not going to trust at this point in time. I’ve had a couple clients claim this, of course, but, snaring the focus to understand what’s gonna drive your outcome is the most important thing.

Scott Cohen: Well, you may have multiple pieces to that. Right? Because, like, Amazon, for example, breaks every model known to mankind because people buy everything on Amazon. I mean, I had the great story last year that I bought fox urine. Or no.

Coyote. Coyote urine. Coyote. Sorry. Coyote urine.

Because I have squirrels in my backyard that I’m trying to get rid of, and I’m trying to scare them off because I don’t wanna you know, I don’t own a gun, and I’m not gonna go out and buy a 22 for the purposes of shooting at rock squirrels. Although I’ve been tempted. But I’m sitting here going, what would a next logical product be for somebody who has never ever in fifteen years of buying from Amazon bought Coyote urine. What’s my next next logical what’s that I mean, that’s like an AI buster. Right?

Like, oh, well, he’s never done this for fifteen years. Now it’s all of a sudden that he might be interested in this next. And I it’s it’s hilarious to me. Right? Yeah.

It’s but I think about that. And then there’s also the you sit there and go, I’m trying to solve this problem. Right? And and so you get rather than trying to think if you have enough SKUs like Overstock or Amazon or I even think of department stores, right? You can buy all sorts of stuff, not that there are that many anymore, but the old seers of the world, right?

Showing our age. But how would you go about with what we have now going, oh, they’ve bought from every single department in the store. What’s next? That’s probably too big of a problem to try to solve. But you could go, hey.

I want people to go, I bought a lawnmower. How can I get them to buy a weed whacker? And then or or they bought this or not. Like, do you like, do you have to solve everything, or can you bite size it? And maybe that’s the way to go.

Chris Behrens: Exactly. And using like you mentioned, you’re not gonna always have data to go predict an outcome when you’re thinking about buying, you know, your coyote year, an example, is perfect and that you’ve never

Scott Cohen: It blows up the bottle.

Chris Behrens: Right. Flows up the bottle.

Garin Hobbs: In each case.

Chris Behrens: Exactly. So signals are everything. Right? Because AI can’t work without inputs that are valuable to drive a specific outcome. So, you know, having some sort of indication about where where your journey should go based off of what people are doing or what people are saying is absolutely essential.

Garin Hobbs: Feel like ESPs are doing their bit to kind of encourage people to think more that way. They’re doing it in a very sort of stick rather than carrot driven way. Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen some of these sort of what I call, you know, most recent wave or third wave solution providers go from a promise of, We consume all of your data, and that’s our value proposition, to, Hey, you can have this much customer data. Beyond that, it’s an additional fee, right? So what is the natural reaction?

Because marketing budgets are always very tight as you start extracting data from the platform and you leave just the most recent data in there is what I’ve seen as the reaction. Rather than necessarily the most critical data, they’re leaving just the most recent data. So I’m really hoping folks really start to kind of pick up on the necessity to really reassess what is most important, where are the actionable insights, what data do I need to really drive my strategy? And most importantly, with all of this in mind, what should my strategy really be today and what do I need to support that? So I feel like these things are starting to kind of coalesce.

It’s another aspect of human behavior that oftentimes we don’t change until we’re driven or forced to change. So it is good to see these folks exerting a little bit of that pressure and hopefully kind of accelerating this evolution a little

Chris Behrens: bit quicker to the next step.

Scott Cohen: Well, mean, what’s the stat that the average brand uses? Like, 10%, 15%, maybe upwards of 25%, not just of their data, but of the platform capabilities?

Garin Hobbs: Oh, 25% utilization rate. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: They they get they get sold this. You can do everything. And it’s like, great. I can send my emails now.

Garin Hobbs: They’ll wash it back.

Scott Cohen: And that’s all they do.

Chris Behrens: Yeah. Exactly. And I think it’s so tempting when brands decide that they get attracted by a new ESP with all the new capabilities and bells and whistles that in theory solve all of their problems. It’s not just a technology conversation, it’s a people and process conversation about doing something differently than what you’ve done before. Yes.

Right? And I think that’s where most marketers and brands that I see that end up switching technologies or investing in new technologies end up stuck is that they start to blame the technology for the problems that they still encounter from the last couple of years when in reality, their people and process have not changed to help them take advantage of their new investments that they’ve made to go take them to the next level of

Scott Cohen: their program. 100%. Alright. Last fun question. What are some of your favorite brands these days when it comes to email marketing?

And you you you can brag about one of your own if you want. Let’s talk about everybody.

Chris Behrens: I love it. It’s a great question. You Actually, one of my favorite brands, from an email perspective is Nintendo. Nintendo, I’m a big video game nerd. So naturally, I’ve been subscribed to Nintendo emails for as long as I can possibly remember.

I have every Nintendo system you could ever think of. I was playing, you know, the original Nintendo Entertainment System and handing people the controller when I was a baby to make sure that other people could participate in the fun that I was having. So I I think I’ve always been a huge fan of Nintendo. And in particular, what I love about their program is they have this great system called My Nintendo, which is effect effectively a program which allows you to allows Nintendo to understand what games you’re interested in and what games you might be interested in based off of your playing behaviors. So you voluntarily opt in to, provide this information.

And so Nintendo knows exactly what my game interests are and kind of where where how my gaming has evolved as I’ve grown as a person. And so I I was one of the people who got Nintendo Switch two right when it came out, of course.

Scott Cohen: I’m just gonna ask.

Chris Behrens: I am a huge Nintendo fanboy. And within an hour of getting my Switch two turned on, I got this great onboarding email from Nintendo. One, just telling me how I get the most out of the system, which was a nice and helpful piece of information to have, but also recommendations on games that I would be relevant to me based off of the games I had previously played on Switch. So they knew, for example, I was a big Breath of the Wild fan because I, of course, had poured in a hundred and twenty hours into that game. And

Scott Cohen: You and me both.

Chris Behrens: Proud and ashamed to admit that I have done that, of course. And they are selling me on the new enhanced version for Switch two, of course, because they know that’s one of my favorite games that I’ve ever played. So just having a deeper understanding of who I am and what drives me based off of my usage of their products has been hugely helpful for me from a consumer experience perspective. And I think that’s where any great email marketing program shines, right, is getting a true understanding of what you’re doing and what you care about as a person and delivering content that’s relevant to that past behavior or past motivations that you’ve had as a person.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Sony does a good job with that on the PS five as well. I’m not a super nerd like the two of you. Garin knows that I have spent more than a hundred hours on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, for example, because, you know, you you I I can be a Viking with an axe and chop people up. It’s pretty great.

Of course. But I would get emails and push notifications through the app on my phone and all this other stuff. And so it was like, hey. You’re at this point. I’m like, damn.

Like, I literally just turned on the game. Boom. Just it fires the email. So it’s that’s good use of data. Right?

And it also but also making it clear that, yeah, we know this about you, and here’s the value we deliver as a result of the data that we know about you. So some people might will probably get freaked out by it. Some people I mean, I do this business for a living. So I’m like, hey. This is they have this well set up.

Good job, guys. Like, you know, I can do that. But, yeah, it’s they know what they’re doing. Right? And there there are there are some people out there that know what they’re doing.

Chris Behrens: And 100%.

Scott Cohen: Sony and Nintendo are two of them.

Chris Behrens: Yeah. I love that example. And I think, Sony and Nintendo too do a great job of gamifying the experience too, where you feel proud to show that you’ve been playing these games for so long based off of your achievements you have in these games. So you see screenshots flying all over the place about here’s how many hours I’ve played this game and here’s all the things I’ve done. And they use all of that information to say, great.

You’ve done all these things. Here’s what’s next for you now. And it’s not a strange experience at all because Yeah. You’re providing value for what you’re gonna do next. So

Scott Cohen: Important important sub question, Chris. Are you a finisher or a completionist? Cause those are two different things.

Chris Behrens: Mhmm. It’s a great question. I typically am a completionist. There are some games that I feel are almost impossible to complete, Breath of the Wild being one of them. Karen, if you have this experience.

But there are games where you want to be a completionist, but I feel like you have to be an absolute hermit to be a completionist. I think, you know, there’s certain games that, you know, I would love to spend another 500 hours in Zelda, for example. Sadly, time is not in our yeah. Exactly. Having the kids and, yeah, there’s other things in life, unfortunately.

So

Scott Cohen: I’m I’m I’m in between. Like

Chris Behrens: Yeah.

Scott Cohen: I I’m never I’m like a 70% guy.

Chris Behrens: Okay.

Scott Cohen: You know, I feel like I do a lot so that the end isn’t too ridiculously hard because I’m, again, I’m not a nerd. I’m the type that, like, put me on story mode. I wanna enjoy the story and hack people apart. I don’t care about making things hard

Chris Behrens: Right.

Scott Cohen: And and all these other things because I’m doing it to get out of the day. Right? I’m doing it to get to push everything out. I’m not don’t make me think this hard. It’s You know?

Like, I finished was it God of War Ragnarok? And I’m like, oh, I finished the game. It’s like, you did 60%. I’m like, that was only 60%. Good lord.

Garin Hobbs: I find myself putting off the end of the game and going off onto the side quest to, you know, be more of a completionist. I’d say, some of the Red Dead games, Ghost of Tsushima, for sure. That was a beautiful game. I did not want that to end. And so instead of finishing the last bit, I’d go off on the side quest.

But in any case, we’re probably losing the ladies at this point.

Scott Cohen: I wouldn’t be so sure about that anymore. There are plenty of of female

Garin Hobbs: That’s absolutely true. I’m thinking of the broad general audience. But yes.

Scott Cohen: Yes. Yes. Anyway, you know what? This is a great place to stop. We we’ve, you know, we’ve gone for almost an hour.

So, Chris, where can people find out more about you and Bear Mail?

Chris Behrens: Yeah. So people can follow me on LinkedIn. So my handle is Christopher Barons, and I post content regularly there about email and SMS marketing specifically for retailers and sports teams. I also have a new interview series I’ve launched called the Chalk Talk, which interviews sports marketers about how they’re building email and SMS programs. So that’ll be launching officially on Monday, June.

So feel free to check out, the YouTube channel, which we’ll be launching shortly, which you can follow along on LinkedIn for that.

Scott Cohen: So when this goes live, it’ll be in the past, so June 16. If from June 16 on, go check it out. But yeah. But thank you so much for joining us, Chris. This was great, and thanks to you, our listeners and watchers, for tuning in.

If you’d to learn more about inbox army, check us out, inboxarmy.com. Till next time. Be safe and be well.

Garin Hobbs: Cheers all.

Chris Behrens: Thank you.