Episode 18:
Navigating the Yotpo Migration with LB Blair

Scott Cohen: Hello, all. Welcome to that Inbox Army Podcast. I’m your host, Scott Cohen. With me today is my cohost, Garin Hobbs. And also joining us today in this special episode is principal technical consultant at SendEdge and our resident deliverability privacy and security guru, LB Blair.

Welcome back, LB.

LB Blair: Thank you so much for having me for the three-peat gentlemen.

Scott Cohen: The three-peat . Think you’re the first. And

LB Blair: and, also, I mean, I think it’s a thank you for taking my request that we could talk about this because I just I feel really bad for people in this pitch.

Scott Cohen: Yes. As many of you know or are tuning in and likely know, Yotpo has decided to sunset their email and SMS platform, which has created the need for thousands of companies to migrate their email programs somewhere else by the 2025. And as of this recording, which I will tell you is August 26, you’re kind of in a stealing your phrase from before we hit record. It’ll be a devil’s choice, and we’ll get into this a little bit. But we’re gonna talk frankly about how best to approach really ESP migrations in general, and we’re really gonna dive into what these Yachtpo folks are diving into and what they should be thinking about before they make a move over to, I think it’s a tentative and Omnicenter, the two that Yacht Post specifically called out, but there’s a ton of platforms out there that may or may not be a good fit.

So let’s jump right in. All of us here have been through an ESP change, usually of our own decision, not necessarily foisted upon us. So this this is not unprecedented. If you remember the Bronto shutdown, they gave a little bit more time than Yapo, but a very similar scenario of, hey, guys. Sorry.

But, you know, usually in this case, we I like to say, don’t make a switch unless it’s absolutely necessary, even if it’s a good decision because even good decisions take a lot of work. Unfortunately, Yatpo has put us put these customers in a position where it’s necessary because there’s there’s no other option. Let’s start high level, and we can dive a bit. Both of you can dive a bit into sort of specifics for Yachtpo, but, like, what are your general key factors, decision factors that go into first? Yes.

You should pick somebody new. And then, you know, b or two, I don’t remember which one I just used, that you know, what should the Yachtpo folks be thinking about and, like, who they should consider? Let’s start there.

Garin Hobbs: Great question. First off, it’s not an easy question. Right? If you look at the latest iteration of the Martech Martech, landscape map, by my last count, there were over 700 email enabled or email capable platforms out there that represent a potential solution or switch, for all of Yotpo’s customers. That’s a lot to dissect.

Right? Now Yotpo’s made it little bit easy by saying, hey. If you really liked, or enjoyed using Yotpo, take a look at these two, these two folks. They we feel it would be a really easy transition. Likely, they did a bit of sort of matching up saying, hey.

Here are our capabilities. Here are the capabilities of the other two. Seems like a pretty easy transition. For those of you who don’t wanna climb this hill, this is a lower mound for you to, for you to surmount here, and so we made it really easy. Right?

But it should be bigger than that. Again, when you’re when you’re spoiled for choice, when you have 700 folks out there, it means you don’t necessarily have to make a rush decision. It means you don’t necessarily just have to look at those two. I like to sit my clients down anytime they say they want to make a switch. Very first question I ask is, are you sure?

The second question I ask is, are you absolutely sure? The third question I ask is, are you sure that you’re sure? Right? And here’s why. It it’s never an easy thing.

It always takes many times longer than you anticipated, planned, resourced for, and it usually consumes more budget than you’d anticipated. So buckle up for one. Right? So that’s why I say, are you really sure? When I think about the things that compel people to switch, sometimes it’s just, hey.

We don’t like the platform. Okay. Fair enough. If if you find it daunting in its approach, if you have a difficult time extracting even fundamental capability from it, that’s a good enough reason to switch. But by and large, I like to say if you feel as though your desirable business outcomes, if you feel that your strategy is any way limited by your technology, that’s a really great time to switch.

That is a very, very valid reason. We can’t grow beyond x because of where we are. Perfect. Technology should enable the strategy. It shouldn’t limit that strategy.

So I think that’s a really great, time to look. Is there anything business critical or mission critical that’s being limited? Second, going back to the first one, is it too difficult to use? I I say one of the latest figures I saw was that the average utilization rate of, any ESP out there is hovering somewhere between 2530%. So are putting ROI aside, because that’s a different factor altogether, if you’re spending a lot on a solution and only flexing maybe 25 to 30%, that might be an opportunity to look for something that maybe is easier to use or that is better postured for you to extract the maximum value opportunity and functionality from.

L. B, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

LB Blair: Yeah, yeah. So I agree with you honestly on the, like, people, you know, if you’re going to migrate, it needs to be for the right reasons. Because I always say, you know, one of my favorite quotes of all time is from Mike Tyson, who says, Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And let me tell you, migrations, warm ups, which a migration inherently is going to entail a warm up, they love to punch you in the face. Like, this is why I’m not a fan of like warming schedules, warming plans, things like that, because you’ve really especially in the early stages, you’ve got to kind of adjust like day by day.

You’ve got to it’s like I mean, honestly, it’s like running air traffic control. You’ve got to deal with what the conditions are on the ground, what other planes need to take off, you know, things like that. But is it safe to take off? If it’s is it safe to send? I’ve seen people entirely brick warm ups just because they kept going and kept following the plan when it manifestly was not working.

I would say, you know, really, and I think Garin’s point about utilization is great. I think, the way I tend to look at things are time based. Like, is this platform burning your team’s time? Is it really convoluted and complicated to implement the majority of your use cases? Or does it support the majority of your use cases with one or two click functionality?

I think that’s a big thing. I mean, the approach I take because I also audit entire ESPs. Like I’ve audited an entire ESP for sale to a venture capital firm. And I’ve had other ESPs contract me to audit them to make sure their platform is technically sound. So I tend to start with that.

I look, you know, is there something basically I look for what Garin was talking about of is there something fundamental with this platform that is getting in their way? Or is there a reasonable workaround where, yeah, we’d prefer it be two clicks, but it’s got to be five? You know, things like that because, yeah, it’s expensive and painful to migrate. An email is like a cruise ship. It does not want to turn on a dime.

Like it’s, know, when it’s going in a direction at a certain speed and velocity with number of passengers, it doesn’t want to just do, you know, spin around and get, you know, and that’s what hopping on another platform is. Like you basically you’re going to have new IPs, you’re going to have new DKIM signing subdomain or domains plural, depending on if you’re utilizing a subdomain strategy, etc. There’s a lot of little and there’s a lot of stuff. I like to say this a lot. Order of operations, which is there is going there’s a very rigid waterfall order of operations that things typically have to happen in a migration.

Like there are certain things that it’s like, no, this is process blocked by the next step. So that’s why they’re very rigid. They’re very they’re rigid and they’re fragile, which means

Scott Cohen: you can handle with care. Yeah. Handle with care. Like, is key, right? You have to allot have you to allot the right amount of time because it’s very easy and very fast happening to dig yourself a hole, but it doesn’t you can’t go too fast.

Do it it’s Garin, you like to say this all the time. I think it’s a navy seal saying and other things like slow is slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Right? And you can’t you have to go slow and you have to go smooth. Now you’re right, l b.

Like, you can’t just go, oh, it’ll be fine. We can double every day and it’ll be fine. You hope that’s the case, but you also can’t assume that’s the case because then you’re back to sending five a day very quickly because you went, oh, it’s totally fine. It’ll be fine. Right?

Yeah. Exactly. So

LB Blair: Dear, guess It was not fine. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: So how do you balance that? I mean, you’re talking about I mean, this you know, when this goes live, when we push this out, it’ll be September. Right? It’ll be it’ll be early September. We’re talking four months left in the year.

LB Blair: No problem. Most crucial four months of the year for every marketer and

Scott Cohen: even Yep. Yop Post should have waited until March. Right? Like like, hey. We’re doing this, but you have till March.

Like, we’ll get you through q q four into the new year. Now I get why because books and every there’s financial reasons and blah blah blah. Sooner or Or exactly. Right? So Like I mean, it it’s neither here nor there.

We can all debate that. But you have four months to I mean, you you’ve they probably have customers ranging from 2,000 people on their list to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. Right? I mean, they have thousands of customers of varying sizes. The folks that are

LB Blair: When I was running, like, Pier one and Dressbarn I don’t know if Dressbarn I think Dressbarn used it too, but I know Pier one, we used it. We didn’t use their email capabilities. We used Klaviyo. I think we had it integrated in Klaviyo, so it would send which I think that’s the elephant in the room. I thought it was mad weird that like they didn’t bring up like Klaviyo and probably like Netcore as alternatives to Yatpo email, just because those are core e commerce platforms.

I think the world of Attentive, I’ve got to admit I’ve never used, I think it’s Omnisend, but I just think, you know, in terms of e commerce functionality, I mean, I would say Netcore, especially when you’re talking about enterprise scale and Klaviyo were kind of, you know, the go tos. So I thought I did think it was really weird they weren’t kind of highlighted as well.

Scott Cohen: I guess I guess you kind of have a let’s go back to that devil’s choice, though, right, that we were talking about before we went on the air. So it’s September. Do you and you need to give time for warm up. Right? The the smaller customers will be okay because you can get to critical mass very quickly and pretty easily, and dropping down if you have to is not a big deal.

But when you’re talking about Black Friday and you have millions of people on your list and that’s when everybody opens up the coffers, right, and goes, we’ll just mail everybody. How like, your choice is either to literally start now or yeah. It’s

LB Blair: Or I yeah. You’ve got I mean, basically, like I said, yeah, think the devil’s choice I outlined for sunders above a certain size is effectively you either have to start migrating now and hope to get done before you go into peak Black Friday, Cyber Monday sending like basically hope. I mean, I would start now and hope you can be done by, November. And then you should be able to, like, you know, you should be reasonably warmed or, you you’re gonna run it on you’re going to be doing both at the same time, or come January, you’re going to have no platform. And you’re going to have no warmth.

You’re going to no ability to send. You’re going to have all this send volume and possibly all this post purchase email flow volume. And if you’re trying to push all of that out off a brand new platform, potentially new sub domains, almost certainly new DKIM signing sub domains, which just be aware, in all the webinars that were kind of going around last year where, you know, Marcel from Yahoo was on and Lily from Yahoo and several of the folks from Gmail, I think they have magic technology that makes you forget their names whenever they actually, you know, come out of hiding. But they all spoke about how they really focus on the DKIM signing subdomain as a key identifier. So that for sure is going to change, especially because you’re gonna to operate like both platforms in tandem for a while.

That’s kind of the big difficulty that people are put into. And I think honestly, couldn’t come at a worse time. I would probably I would basically say anybody who thinks they possibly feasibly can should try to migrate B4 because the filters get tighter during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Total global aggregate email volume goes up, But user and user attention to email may go up, but it doesn’t go up by the same factor. Like global email volume like 10x or more.

I think user interest may be two or 3x’s. So there’s this the filters get tighter because they especially they’re pushed more than ever now by AI to be efficient with server storage space, with computing resources, because AI just wants to gobble it all down. So, yeah, you need to I think it’s going to be rough for the folks that try the second option of, well, I’m going to try to migrate like during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, just because you’re going be splitting your volume over two platforms, which can look inherently kind of sketchy, like, you know, like like traditional, like snowshoeing. Now, granted switching from I’m not saying switching from one platform to another is snowshoeing. But what I’m saying is, it still is going if you’re sending like the exact same content from two different platforms, it’s going to at least It’s raise some going to at least engage that suspicious rule set.

And I think we all know the more kind of suspicions your mail raises in the spam filter, the worse things are probably going to go for your your deliverability.

Garin Hobbs: Agreed. The theme I hear there that actually is much broader than just the important and critical considerations of deliverability, The rule that I I like to keep in mind all the time is the best way to maximize success is to minimize the risk of failure. Right? The risk of failure during your busiest time of year is is much higher, not just for the reasons the the very important reasons that you just outlined, LB, but even taking a step back and thinking more practically. Right?

Every single brand, every single marketing team at every single brand, they’re stretched to their limit during, during holidays already. It’s not like most folks have this this second or third bench of resources waiting to be called in by the coach. Right? Like, no. There is no backup.

You’re using your backup, and you’re using your backups backup during holiday time. So to think that you’ll have a second parallel team that can, you know, handle the migration and get everything stood up and all of the complexities and all the little things that go along with it while still accurately executing on their holiday plans and strategy, that’s wishful thinking. Right? Even if you had an agency partner such as ourselves, it’s still a very fraught time. So get ahead of that.

Right? Get ahead of that. Start now. Start early because we all know it’s gonna take longer than you thought. It’s gonna take more people than you’ve resourced for.

You might find a little bit of reserve. You might and you have the time and the reserve to deal with that now. You’re not going to once, October starts hitting. Right? So get ahead

LB Blair: of it.

Scott Cohen: But I think what’s critical here is, you know, one of the common mistakes I’ve seen when people go through RFPs and and, you know, ESP changes and stuff like that is they go, we need to move in four weeks, and we’re starting now. And what happens when you have four weeks to make a decision of this magnitude? Like, the ideal is you’re thinking not just for the next twelve months, but you’re thinking two, three, four, five years out. Right? So the obvious you know, my next question would be, what let’s talk about for the people that are under the gun now.

What are the mistakes they should avoid? Because clearly time, which we would say you need to give adequate time for this decision, is a clear mistake to avoid, but they can’t avoid that one because it’s been foisted upon them. By the way, you guys have five months. Get out of here. Right?

I mean, they’re basically being evicted from an apartment in the equivalent amount of time. Like, I’m giving you seventy two hours to get out. That’s the type of we’re on the astronomical scale of time in terms of what email platforms need. You know, email programs need to move around. So what other mistakes should they try to avoid right now?

And or what what should they be thinking about in terms of I need to ask x y z of Atenev, Omnisync, Klaviyo, what you know, whatever the platforms they are that are they’re gonna be looked at. And should they just blindly pick one of the two that’s been recommended, which I think we would all say easy high level answer is no without the correct evaluation. But, let me that’s they they have no time. So, obviously, if you had time, take your time, but they don’t. So what should they do now?

LB Blair: I got I I can jump in on that. I would say, you know, one of the first things I would recommend is get a good benchmark in your existing system of where you are. Identify, do you have any deliverability issues? Just make sure you have all of your monitoring set up, your Google Postmaster Tools, your Microsoft SNDS, your, you know, make sure you’re monitoring your metrics by mailbox provider. And, you know, because the big thing is you want to identify any issues because switching platforms can be an opportunity to not bring those with you.

Like switching platforms can be an opportunity for kind of a fresh start and to not bring any existing issues. I would also say, you know, really evaluate what feature, you know, honestly, biggest thing I would say, and this is something that’s honestly followed me from my days of being like corporate internal tech support, but be able to describe what the system should be doing when everything is working well. There are numerous folks that would come to me and be like, Hey, there’s an error, there’s a bug, there’s a problem with this. And I’d be like, Okay, well, what’s it doing? And they, you know, they kind of explain it.

And I would say, well, how is that different from what it should be doing if it were working properly? And it’s like, if you can’t explain that, then you you know, it’s really hard to choose a platform if you don’t know what it should look like when it’s working properly. But I think, you know, really go through and evaluate what features you’re using, what features you’re not, because you’re going to pay for every feature in an ESP. So you might be able to go to an ESP with a, you know, less robust feature set if that just doesn’t isn’t what your use case needs, if it’s like super simple. But I mean, that would be the big thing.

I would honestly look at I would say, look at your entire Martech stack and see, are there any opportunities to consolidate? Because I’ll tell you this, the last thing any marketer wants these days is one more platform to log into. Like, that’s the biggest thing. So perhaps see if there are opportunities to simplify, consolidate and not bring no problems with you.

Scott Cohen: Unfortunately, it might have been the reason they went to Yapho in the first place, right? It was, hey, I’m already doing referral and loyalty over here. Oh, they do email and SMS suite. Now they’re being forced to divest again.

Garin Hobbs: Agreed. I you know, I mean, success, especially in in marketing digital marketing success sits at the intersection of people, process, and technology. And most often when people are, you know, sort of investigating or evaluating technology solutions, they tend to dive deep into the technology and not quite so deep in the other two aspects. So along with what everything that LB said, I agree. Maybe put a little bit less weight on the features.

Here’s why. There’s nothing that’s easier for an ESP to do than, you know, develop a feature simply so they can have a tick box in the competitive feature set matrix. Right? And then everything seems apples to apples. But are they easy to use?

Are they practical in their use? I think about certain platforms with personalization capabilities, for example, that require you to learn an entirely different language just to be able to flex purse you know, purse personalization. So cool that you have it, bro, but how usable is it for the least experienced member on my team? Right? So I tend to to, work with people and really encourage them to focus on the process and on the people portion of it.

Right? You can have all these great capabilities, but again, if you can’t extract that value, if you can’t extract that functionality, it becomes very costly or very difficult. You have to hire specialized skills to do so. What’s the real value of it? Right?

LB made a couple of I points that are

LB Blair: wanted to jump in and say a big thing that in a lot of cases, the platform is selected by someone who’s not even going to be using it. Like in a lot of cases, they’re the decision maker. I would say, you know, wake up, everyone. This all all you practitioners out here, because I’m going to assume that’s probably the majority of folks that are listening to us or practitioners in the platform all day, every day. Now is your time.

Now is your time to rise. Rise up and be involved in picking the platform, raise this issue up and be like, hey, we are like on a plane and running out of runway here. Like so and then you will have some involvement in selection. I do think that things are shifting more towards having the practitioners have a lot more feedback at, like, the very best brands around. And that’s so important people, like Daryl said Garin said.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I mean, it’s having gone through this on the brand side, I was a practitioner who tried to drive that decision making and a little tip. Know who you have to convince and convince them that they have to do the least amount of work possible to make it happen and take ownership of the process because the only way you get IT people on your side is by telling them they don’t have to do anything except maybe one I mean, yeah, the the tech the technical requirements and stuff like that.

LB Blair: Are lazy. All the best IT I all the best

Scott Cohen: IT

LB Blair: people are lazy because we’re always looking for a more efficient, a more automated whatever way to do it. So, yeah, appeal to their like, appeal to IT’s

Scott Cohen: That’s the that’s the sell job. That’s the sell job. Don’t worry. I can do most of it. You just need to do this little part for me.

And, you know, all that the DKIM and the SPF and all all the DNS record stuff you have to do, let them do it because that’s their domain. So you don’t wanna step on any toes, but you could if you can get it down to, bro, that’s all I need, and maybe a login to Snowflake or something like like whatever sort of data warehouse you might be sitting on, things like that, that’ll work wonders and also give them candy. That also works well. But it’s you have to and then, of course, be honest with the process as well. Like, hey.

This this is gonna be the timeline we need to do. Build those plans. The practitioners know what it looks like because what you’re what you wanna do is build your own list of needs and nice to haves and make sure that it’s honest. Because, Gary, to your point about the the the features, the higher ups are gonna be like, oh, that’s cool. And they’re gonna be like, great.

Garin Hobbs: Shiny things.

Scott Cohen: We don’t need that right now. We need this. And by the way, this platform doesn’t do what we need, but it gives us this shiny object thing that we’ll never use unless this stuff gets done. So you gotta really craft that plan.

Garin Hobbs: I like that point. Right? The needs. I often see some of the needs come in late. But if you start with those, especially the big qualifiers or disqualifiers.

Right? Are you a health care organization, or are you somehow health related? Do you have a HIPAA requirement or a BAA? That’s gonna narrow the field down really quick to just a handful of folks. Think about the structure of your data.

Right? You’ve got platforms that are are built on structured data, platforms that are built on unstructured data. I once, was involved in a, sales engagement with a very well known multi brand, shoe retailer. And we got all the way to the end, and they say, you know what? Your solution’s the absolute best.

It’s better than anything that we’ve seen out there. Really got our our, our eyes and our our brains open thinking about what the future should look like, but it requires that we flatten our data. We know we need to do it, but we don’t wanna do it yet. So things like that need to be brought to the fore as well. Right?

So does it match up with the data, the integration landscape? So you talked about, you know, the rest of the Martech stack or just the rest of the technical stack. You know, does this plat the platforms I’m looking at, which one acts as a force multiplier? Which one lends, more value, more functionality, more speed, more more value from what I already have versus what’s just gonna sit on its own in a silo because it doesn’t speak to anything very effectively. So get those things out of the way first because after that, the rest simply becomes shades of nuance.

And, you know, like like we were speaking about a moment ago, it’s usually a soft value, ease of use, but I would make that a very hard and primary value as well. Because it’s not just can you use it, it’s not just can IT use it, it’s not just can the devs use it. Can the least experienced member on your team sit down and deliver or build a campaign or an email or a message with as much elegance, as much innovation, as much, you know, efficacy as the most experienced person on your team? Is it, does it create parity within your teams as well? I would think those things should be primarily important.

And then take a look at all the shiny bells and whistles with regards to feature and functionality. And spoiler alert, you won’t find a whole lot of difference once you start getting to that level. But the real important things, in my opinion, are the things that, LB and I just kinda chatted through.

Scott Cohen: 100%. Yeah. It’s it’s a tough it’s a tough decision to make no matter what you do. Right? And the easy use thing, I it ten years ago, you would have been like, oh, if it’s easy to use, it’s not sophisticated.

These days, it you have many platforms where it’s the learning curve is much shorter than a Salesforce marketing cloud or or something like that. Right? And but you’ll also find I like to say that all the platforms speak the same language, just different dialects. Right? And some dialects are super complicated, and some dialects are very simple.

And that I think is true. We sort we we get into some differentiators down the line. I mean, we it’s a podcast. We gotta talk about AI. But in in the scope of the Yotpo folks and then in the general scope, like, how crucial is AI to a tech stack right now versus, say, three to five years from now?

Because I think I just saw data this week or last week that’s, like, 80% of corporate AI projects fail or something like that. It’s and and all the energy you talked about the energy. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s yeah.

It’s it’s bad.

LB Blair: I’m gonna say something really controversial probably. I don’t think AI is ready yet. I think the rate

Scott Cohen: of is screaming

LB Blair: just still too high. So what where I kind of come from is I’ve been an ergonomics geek for ages because I have a neck injury. And one of the key ergonomic technologies that you can use is something like Dragon Speak, which is like a natural, you know, we’re doing natural language processing for many, many years back in like, you know, into the ’20, you know, mid-2010s. And I think even into the late twenty tens, we were really blocked and locked at about 86, 87% accuracy. Excuse me.

And then that made a big jump to like 94, 96%. Somebody made a big breakthrough and it made a jump. And I think that’s a lot of what’s enabled AI. But I think it’s I think the rate of it going screaming crazy is just too high because part of you know, here’s an example. There was a support agent that just made up a company policy to tell a customer no.

Now, here’s the thing. I came up through support. I can guarantee you a real employee would do that. The agent is acting exactly like a real employee would under kind of the same resource constraints and pressures because like I’ve absolutely when I was sitting there helping a customer, I’ve gotten messages from the director being like, why are you still in that call? Because the problem ain’t solved yet, man.

And that’s what people pay us for.

Garin Hobbs: And yeah.

LB Blair: But here’s what I think is there needs to be a lot more work in AI put into curating the data set that you train it on. Like, I think they think they can skip past that with more resource allocation, better models. And that does more resources do help reduce the hallucination rate of the AI. But it’s it’s unfeasible at this point. It’s unfeasible amount of resources.

We need to work on the training, training the models better with more curated data sets and humans need to curate those. You don’t need to train it on every agent you have. You should train the AI on like your best five.

Garin Hobbs: You know, there are just some aspects that can never truly be replaced by a human. Right? You can you can step back here. I’m reminded of a story about the Apollo program, about the the trip to the moon. Right?

And, you had all these brilliant scientists, all these brilliant engineers from, you know, the best universities across NASA, you know, putting together the Apollo program. And so many of them raised their hands and said, you know, if we didn’t have to worry about keeping a human alive, if we didn’t have to worry about life support systems and and things of that nature, this would be much easier. Can we do that? And the answer was a resounding no. And the reason they the no came from the top because it was if there’s no human in there, nobody cares.

So what? You sent a machine into space. Where’s the achievement? Where’s the accomplishment? Where is the advancement of human accomplishment and, you know, civilization?

It’s kind of similar to AI as well. Right? Hey. Great. Have the computers run the things that, you know, aren’t necessarily critic aren’t necessarily human critical, but things like strategy, design, copy.

So many of those things need to be born from the human experience, from the emotions. Right? I mean, how many times have we saw in these podcasts, Scott, that, you know, over 90% of the decisions that we make as as people, as humans, as consumers, they’re driven by emotion. They’re not driven by anything else. None of these models really understand yet how to replicate that, how to how the impact of the feel, right, and how that drives people to action, how that puts a hand on a mouse, fingers on a keyboard, or a finger on a touchscreen to follow through on that call to action.

You know, those are the things that go ahead, L.

LB Blair: It’s so funny to me because we all like to think we make most of our decisions based on logic, But when you actually study it under a microscope

Garin Hobbs: We are not rational beings.

LB Blair: No, absolutely. And that’s why I have a problem with the whole discipline of economics. It’s like, all right, we’re going assume that actors are rational. Well, now you’re just messed up from the jump because that is not the case.

Scott Cohen: Well, I mean, there’s there’s a scene in West Wing. I don’t know if you watch West Wing LB, but, you know, that the president is in a Nobel laureate in economics. Right? And then they’re doing an economic meeting, and the chief of staff points to one guy and goes, where do you think we are in a year? And it’s like economy’s up, you know, stock market’s up a thousand points, and then the other one does the polar opposite.

And he goes, well, in twelve months, one of you is gonna look like an idiot. And it’s like they’re looking at the same data and extrapolating different prognostications. And you go, how yeah. Economics is educated guesswork. Right?

I mean, it really is. I mean, there are some things that are hard and fast, but other things you’re you’re hoping that people act rationally. 90% of our decisions are driven by emotions and the subconscious, by the way. I think that’s a key thing too. We don’t even know we’re making those decisions, but those decisions are being made without us consciously knowing and driven by our experience.

Yeah. It’s I think we’re AI doesn’t have that.

LB Blair: Yeah. I think we’re operating in our, like, you know, surface level con or our conscious mind, you know, that we’re operating with, like, we think we’re being logical, but really, yeah, it’s like those emotional currents in the subconscious that are driving a lot of our decisions. And I mean, I’ll say this. I don’t want to be too harsh on Yotpo because I will say one of my favorite things to say email is hard. I don’t blame them for getting out of the And honestly, SMS is getting harder.

SMS content filtering is going the direction of email for sure. I am seeing more folks run into network blocks due to due to, you know, link URLs in the content, things like that. I mean, email is email. You know, let’s give credit where it’s due. Email is hard.

It’s very resource intensive. It requires a lot, a lot of domain knowledge and expertise to be successful at it. And it’s, I mean, honestly, working in an ESP is in deliverability. I mean, it is literally like having one teacher to manage like a thousand feral toddlers, like in a daycare. I mean, it’s the moment you get what you stop one of them from falling off a cliff.

There are three more dangling over the edge. I mean, it’s it’s definitely challenging. It’s challenging to scale. And if you don’t automate compliance properly and things like that, gonna be a big resource drain for sure.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. It’s a favorite saying of mine, right? Emailing is easy, but email is hard. Right? I wanna I I wanna echo something you just said here, LB, a moment ago, and that’s, you know, hey.

Let’s not be too hard on Yopo. I have no ill feelings toward Yopo whatsoever about this. Certainly, it created some inconvenience for their customers. I would like to hope that they think of that as they created some opportunity for some of their customers rather than inconvenience. But hats off to Yapo, right, for just having the the sense of reality to say, hey.

This is not what we’re best at. We can’t really wildly differentiate ourselves and deliver, you know, a meaningful additional value. So we’re just not gonna do it. It’s not our core expertise. It’s not our center of excellence.

And frankly, it’s a distraction from our core mission. I applaud that. I applaud that even more fervently in a time where every single one of their competitors is seeking to do the opposite, just the opposite. Hey. We’re not an ESP, but we have ESP adjacent functionality.

We’re a CDP. We’re a deliverability solution. We’re this, that, or the other. So let’s just bolt on an ESP, slap up an interface, and go out there after the enterprise market. That’s the other thing.

All these guys always wanna go after the enterprise market to do so. Right? That’s a whole other podcast right there. But as I mentioned, you know, earlier in the podcast, there are over 700 folks in the email space. We don’t need one more.

We need the best. We need innovation, and none of these folks are innovating. They’re just competing with each other and try to get a bigger share of your customers’ marketing dollar by extending their functionality rather than innovating and moving technology, moving strategy forward in a truly profound way. So hats off to you, Yopo. I I appreciate you calling us bait a spade.

LB Blair: Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. I do feel badly for their customers, I don’t think it’s they intended to hurt them. Being said, I definitely want to make sure we give people some kind of practical things, you know, to consider, as far as like, you know, what should you look at, you know, in terms of migration? I definitely think, you know, one thing would be your scale. What is your monthly sending volume?

Look back twelve months, twenty four months, year over year. How has your send volume gone up? Has it gone down? Like kind of make a little projection of what do you think you’re going to do during Black Friday, Cyber Monday? And you know, that’s going to be really crucial to running an RFP.

And that’s also going to let you know kind of how long a runway you need to warm up. As well. Because I want to say like when I we started with stood up pure one on Klaviyo, I think in about eight to ten weeks we were able to get to, you know, 4,000,000 and some change volume like every day. So it’s definitely you know, you can move pretty quickly with a warm up if you set you make sure everything’s set up well tested, ready to rock. Know, check how many novel how many do inventory of how many automate material automations that you have, what’s sending the most volume, things like that, and really start taking stock of how much stuff you’re gonna have to migrate because that’s gonna inform kind of how quick you need to move.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah, exactly. The number of migrations, these aren’t just lift and shift most of the times. Most editors or canvases within the ESPs, a lot of times they have their own sort of little proprietary tags or other things that they slip in. So many times these things have to be rewritten or recoded. They certainly have to be reqaed.

How many of those do you have? How many automations do you have? How many journeys? How many messages within those journeys? You’re gonna have to rebuild the logic triggers within them as well and perhaps reestablish data connections.

There’s a lot. It’s both deep and wide. It’s not just one or the other. Yes. These are all things that you can do while you’re going through your warm up, while you’re going through your ramp up, while you’re establishing your sender authority, etcetera.

But how long do you practically need? Certainly, you can do a step on, step off model and gradually sort of, you know, build up here as you’re as you’re building down here. But do you have the full picture of that? How long is it gonna take? Do you have the resources to do it?

Do those resources have the availability to do it? What else is gonna be competing for their time and their attention? Right? Even working with an outside partner, there’s still an aspect of onboarding and them getting familiar with the programs and understanding your priorities and giving you the order of March and all of those good things as well. So there’s a lot more that goes into it than most people really take the time to fully understand and appreciate.

Decide that whatever you’ve decided in your head in terms of how long it’s gonna take, add a couple of months to that, add a zero or two to the cost that you think that it’s gonna take as well, and then you’ll find yourself to be, better prepared. Right? Forewarned is forearmed folks.

Scott Cohen: Why don’t we let’s talk about those resources. Right? I mean, we’re all three of us here are in a position to help LB. I yeah. I mean, what would you like to offer the folks that are watching and listening?

LB Blair: Yeah. So one thing I’m gonna be doing is, a free for anybody having to migrate off Yopo, I’m gonna give two hours of advisory, like, while supplies last. I should have bandwidth for, hopefully, 10 or 12 of these before the Black Friday, Cyber Monday really hits. So the while supplies last is, I’m primarily a solopreneur. So I have a great team supporting me, but I’m kind of the bastion of knowledge here.

So, I can’t do an unlimited number of these, but it’s completely free. No obligation to buy. You’re not going to go into some marketing list and get a bunch of emails. Like I’m honestly probably not good enough at following up with interested sales prospects, kind of probably the opposite, a bit of an absent minded professor syndrome. But yeah, what I would say is happy to offer like one advisory hour and then probably give you a little bit of homework to look into and then come assess in a session to assess that data and give you some advice.

Well, okay, here are some platforms I think you should consider or here’s some I think you shouldn’t consider because they’re probably not going to be able to accommodate your use case. Like help folks with my like kind of wider view of the industry screen in, screen out, you know, selections and help them realize, all right, do you have a delivered problem you might end here’s how to avoid taking it with you. Things like that.

Garin Hobbs: Excellent. Yeah. As you know, Scott, here at Inbox Army, we’re doing everything we can to support those folks for a quick and easy and pain free as possible migration off of Yopo as well. So we’re offering some very, very heavily discounted, migration pack migration and stand up packages migrating from Yopo to any platform. We’re also, as LB said, also happy to help, with your assessment of, what are some of the more viable platforms, which ones are gonna meet both your user needs as well as your business needs.

The stand up package with us starts at five thousand, usually runs a little bit more quite a bit more than that. That is the setup and configuration of the ESP, the connections to the rest of your Marstack MarTech stack, native connections, additional custom work, maybe additional cost, the deliverability setup, your SPF, your DKIM, your DMARC, setting up your feedback loops, your envelope rules, your suppression, etcetera. Warm up for up to 50,000 subscribers and migration of up to three three message automations included in that price as well as the migration of all of your data and customer info. If you have more automations, there’s a very modest additional incremental cost for that. If your subscriber list is above 50,000, we’re giving those in large tranches as well.

So another 1,500 per additional half million subscribers that need to be warmed up and ramped up. The other thing that LB said that I really wanna harp on here, this is an opportunity to to clean house as well. So we’ll also dive in with you, to perform a little bit of strategy. What do you wanna be doing more of with this evolution? What do you wanna be doing less of?

What are some of the things that were blockages? What are some of the things you’ve been trying to do but can’t? And we’ll put you in perfect alignment of all of those desirable outcomes. Yes.

LB Blair: Yes. Gwen and his team are gonna be the Marie Kondo of your ESP. Like, if it if we don’t love it, we’re not bringing it with us. Like, so this is absolutely an opportunity to clean things up and hopefully find some efficiencies. And honestly, I love the people element of it.

Find a platform your team’s actually happy to use because that’s going to make so much difference with how things get done and things that like dragging out, you know, pile in a bunch of doom tasks on your people. And I would definitely say, you know, this situation, it’s definitely going to be important to have some surge staffing because I’ve done a lot of these migrations as well. You know, from a deliverability perspective, I tend to focus on the super high scale ones. And I don’t know if there’s anybody on Yotpo doing super duper high scale email. But my migrations typically start at like a million recipients plus.

But otherwise, I’m not going to be a good I’m not going to be an affordable value unless you’re dealing with very large scales of email. But, you know, I think having some search staffing is really good and especially honestly have some Sherpas, some guides that know your new ESP. It can help train your team because I’m just going to be It was funny. When I was at IBM, my manager was like, LB, you’re killing it on the metrics. Your satisfaction score is great.

Your time to ticket resolve is great. But I am getting blown up with you not watching the training videos. Like I’m getting compliance alerts, like constantly. How are you bad at watching videos? And I’m like, I mean, I got ADHD and these things are boring.

So like nobody wants, no employee, no employee in the middle of Black Friday is ever going to find time to watch a bunch of ESP training videos. Like, it’s just

Scott Cohen: not That gonna is true.

LB Blair: You can end creating problems or like, know, inefficient uses where like somebody’s doing a five click solution when it could be too if you knew the platform. So just be aware you’re gonna be moved on a tight timeframe. I’m need a little bit of surge pricing, but hopefully you’re going to get to a much more stable, stable place. And I think that is probably one thing to look at is what is the tenure that your email platform has in the email field? And are they growing?

Or are they shrinking? Because you don’t want to end up in this situation again where You know you’re on a platform besides we’re not going to do email anymore. Like we decided email was too hard. We out.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. It’s hard, and I think we need to we’ll leave it at that. Email is hard. We’re we’re here to help, and you’re it’ll be okay. It will be

Garin Hobbs: be okay.

Scott Cohen: Okay.

Garin Hobbs: Email It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.

Scott Cohen: Not you, Sean. Not

LB Blair: you. Hosted.

Garin Hobbs: Don’t mess with me, man.

LB Blair: Email therapy session is hosted daily.

Scott Cohen: Yes. Email therapy. Alright. We’re gonna leave it at that. Thanks again, l b, for the three Pete.

We’ll we’ll get this posted and of course, take us up on the very generous offer from LB to offer some free consulting. And, you know, if you’re interested and you need some help in migration, give us a call as well. You wanna learn more about inbox army? Check us out inboxarmy.com. Actually, we will get this up correctly, but go to inboxarmy.com/yachtpo, and you can see how we approach an ESP migration, and then you can let us know.

Till next time. Be safe and be well, everybody.

Garin Hobbs: Cheers all.