Email Marketing in Agentic Commerce with Rahul Talari of Relvino

Yes, that's great.

So let's start with what's wrong before we go to what's right.

So the way today marketing works and how teams do marketing, especially with email and SMS on tools like Klaviyo and Attentive is you send a cart abandonment email when someone adds the cart.

and abandons it two hours later.

You send them an SMS 10 hours later.

And you do this rule-based approach of assuming when people are going to interact with your website based on triggers that you set manually, where your marketing team and data silos that you're analyzing.

So the signals that you're capturing are not actually based off of user behavior.

They're based off of assumptions based on market research as to when someone would come back and shop on your website.

This is what is called the spray and pray approach, which is absolutely...

the legacy way of doing it and how incumbents do it.

And the right way to do it is to really understand the shopper and what they want as a person.

So as you, Brent, and not a cohort that looks like you in Massachusetts who has a family and is married or in Hawaii, but you, Brent, as a person, how you shop, And what Relvino does is it helps understand the shopper and engage them at the right time with the right content through the right channel.

So we're not spraying and praying a thousand emails to a thousand shoppers who've added to cart and abandoned.

We're only sending 50 emails by identifying the strongest intent and providing them the right content at the right time through the right channel for them to actually engage and convert.

So this is what is kind of the state of the art of these role-based systems that send emails or SMS based on triggers versus actually modeling visitor behavior.

What's going right is to be able to allow for the brand to set their guardrails and to allow for the tone, the voice, the strategy, the products, and...

The kind of image that they want to put in front of their audience is what is going right.

That will always stay in the human's control and the brand's control versus the volume, the repetition, and the automated way of marketing based on user behavior is what is something that we're trying to solve for right now.

Yeah, so the difference in that rule-based is the if-then statements, right? And the newer approach is going to be where we're using some agentics, some large language models or small language models to help better understand the intent of the user.

Is that correct? That's

right.

So we don't have flows, no more segments.

Every single shopper has their own marketing agent based off of sparse data we collect on the website as to how they click, browse, abandon, or convert.

Offsite data as to how they click, open, and purchase through email, SMS, and any other data that we can get from the CRM about who this user is to market for them as a person.