Email Is the Signal Agents Will Weigh with Ose Amiegheme of Intuit Mailchimp

You know, I think we kinda started off in our green room that the old moniker is email is dead, and yet it just lives on, and I don't think email's ever gonna be dead.

So tell, tell us your kind of view on email today.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Email's, like, a 40-year-old technology, and most of the technology, including, like, our in-inboxes, are, like, 20 years old.

So everyone's been trying to kill email for a while, and it still lives on.

And I think one of the things I want to touch on is I think email's becoming more and more important now.

So we're seeing two things happen in the market.

One is acquisition is becoming more expensive.

Paid social is, like, cl- the prices for paid social, the CAC, is going way, way over.

And the second piece is SEO, which used to be, like, the free way to acquire people, is dead with...

I wouldn't say it's dead, but it's dying with LLMs being, like, the way people find information now.

So what we're seeing is people are relying more and more on owned channels because it's like, hey, I already have these people here who have invested in me, so it's how can I build this relationship, really, like, drive revenue? And what we're seeing with, what we're seeing with our numbers is that people who do this actually get, like, 10 to 20% more ROI because email's also, like, free, in quotes, versus when they spend all of this money on, like, paid acquisition.

I'm not trying to say acquisition is bad, but it's just, like, we tend to focus on, like, acquiring new users and not as much on, like, what can we do to actually nurture people who have purchased or, like, have a relationship with us i- in the past.

So that's why email continues to live, because it plays that role.

Yeah, talk a little bit about that nurture role, and I think m- may- maybe a lot of merchants forget ...

Not a lot, but I think m- merchants oftentimes forget that they have this backlog of customers, and it's n- it should never be a one and done, right? And your email is the place where you can communicate everything, new things, updates, new products.

Talk about that nurturing phase.

Yeah.

I think, I think it goes into, like, another thing that's been around for over a decade, which is, like, customer journeys and, and, and automate, automated messages.

So Someone buys a product from you, and I think every commerce store does the same thing.

You get their email and you get them a welcome offer.

But what happens after that? Most people just pick their email list and spam them.

I'm using spam in quotes there with the same message, and then there's no, like, differentiation.

So what happens is, like, people don't click your emails, and as, as people don't click your emails, your de-deliverability score tanks, and people are like, "Yeah, email doesn't work." So a little bit of that is, like, the nurturing and understanding those like, okay, what-- who are these people in my list? What do they care about? What are some of the signs, and how can I, like, tailor the messaging for them? And I think that's where, like, AI is playing a role today in some of the things that we're into nurturing for building, but even some of our competitors are also building, I think, and we're seeing more, like, more nurturing coming into how people think about, like, the people who are engaging with them in their lists.

Yeah, I, I, I'm, I'm gonna be moderating some panels at eTail Boston coming up, and one of my panelists is, uh, Burdenbee.