Episode 6:
Preparing for Email Personalization With Brian Riback of Labrador

Scott Cohen: Hello all, and welcome to that inbox army podcast. I’m your host, Scott Cohen. With me as always is my cohost, Garin Hobbs. Garin, how’s it going today?

Garin Hobbs: Not too bad. Always beautiful on a Friday, Scott.

Scott Cohen: Absolutely. I love doing these on Fridays. Alright. Today, we’re gonna be addressing one of the elephants in the room. There’s so much talk about personalization, dynamic content, ai you name it.

But people often forget about the important infrastructure, the foundational work that needs to be completed prior to all of this stuff happening. So we went out like we always do and got somebody a hell of a lot smarter than me to talk about this stuff. Joining us today is Brian Riback, founder of Labrador, a consultancy specializing in empowering small businesses through strategic Martech alignment, process optimization, and training. Brian, welcome to the podcast.

Brian Riback: Thank you so much. I have been so excited for this for since we, talked about it. So this is gonna be great.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I’m looking forward to it too. But before we get into the weeds, I love to learn a little bit about people’s journeys. So how they ended up where they are now. Tell us about your journey to Labrador.

Brian Riback: Sure. So, I started my career right before there was something called Google that you might have heard of. Right? And, there were a lot of opportunities for me to actually do some personalization with respect to ad placement on a website for a radio station I worked at called Z100 in New York. But there was no ad placement.

There was no trafficking. It was basically going to my boss and saying, do you mind if I sell this? And she says, sure. And without realizing it, I was starting to develop a deep interest in putting the right thing at the right place at the right time. And, you know, as I progressed and email marketing became a thing, I started to get deeply interested in that, after working for Avis and Budget Car Rental, where I was responsible for sales retention or rental retention year over year for business programs and all these different things and looking at the behavioral patterns and whatnot.

And I got a job working at, Cheetah Mail, which is now I think Experian Cheetah Mail, now back to Cheetah Mail, whatever. But it was the original Cheetah Mail.

Scott Cohen: Lot of changes there.

Brian Riback: Oh, absolutely. And, I became just infatuated with Frederick Lindbergh, who at the time was the CTO. He’s just so brilliant and his approach to segmentation and whatnot was so ahead of its time. And, from that point, I just kind of fell into a lot of different types of work where I have this job title of email marketer, and that was, like, 1 nth of what I actually did. Because I’ve always believed that email cannot succeed in a silo.

Right? It’s only as good as everything that empowers it. And so I wanted to get not just beyond being a generalist, just beyond it because I don’t think you could be an expert in everything, but just beyond it. And started to thought feel this really deep interest in both marketing and technology and what makes them work together. And then all of a sudden, Scott Brinker comes out with the term Martech and chief Martech and all these things.

And I and I said, yep. This is me. This is what I want to do. Except it really isn’t a 100% of what I want to do because what I, although I take a responsibility for Martech optimization, to me, that’s the 2nd step or 3rd step. Right?

For me, I care more about the people who have to use it every day and whether they’re empowered to use it. And that’s where I decided to come up with the concept of Labrador. Because what I focus on with Labrador is problem prevention. Everyone’s out there solving problems. I prevent them from occurring in the first place.

And the number one way I do that is by drawing a line in the sand between empowerment and enablement. I can enable you to do anything. You might not know how to do it, but you’re you can. Technically, there it is. Empowerment, make sure that your teams can do it, that they have the tools, the concessions, like custom dashboards or whatnot to be able to do it.

And when I talk with, clients or leads, it really intrigues them. And what blows me away every time without reservation is the look on their faces when they’re like, wait. Hold on. You’re actually gonna care about me, you know, in a in an inferred sense. And it’s it’s just wonderful because I’m not going to give them more tech that they won’t know how to use their benefit from.

And now I’m doing exactly what I love to do.

Scott Cohen: It’s awesome. Yeah. It’s, I like the you you said, like, you know, just above a generalist, I call that knowing enough to be dangerous.

Brian Riback: Yeah.

Scott Cohen: Which which I feel like particularly, like, email code and stuff like that. I I I like to say, I know enough to be dangerous. Yeah. You know, you don’t want me to start from scratch, but I could edit pretty well, it’s been a few years, so I probably can’t even do that anymore. I’m probably blowing smoke, but let’s let’s be fair.

Oh, yeah. So when we talk about personalization, we’d like to say if you Garrett, I think you’ve said it before. If you ask 5 different people to define it, you’ll give 5 somewhat different answers. Right? But before we dive into how it’s, you know, that empowerment and enablement piece, What does effective personalization look like in 2024?

Brian Riback: Well, whenever I work on a new project, the first thing I do is agree to a common lexicon. So in other words, what I might define something as, I don’t care. What what are we calling it for the sake of this project? Right? And let’s come to an agreement on on what we’re talking about there.

Because I have I have the Frederick Lindbergh version of personalization, which I stand by as being the standard because the guy half invented it from my perspective, you know, from a data perspective. And, when I when I think about, personalization, what I’m what I’m focused on is the experience of having a reference a personalized reference to somebody in an email or in an anything. Right? So the personalization is is a category. It is not a verb.

It is not an action. It is a category. And when we look at it that way, I think it actually takes some of the intimidation away. But at the same time, the the the powers that be it, all the ESPs that are out there, I think have dug their own hole in trying to create the false perception that it’s so easy to do. It’s so easy and and, again, that’s enablement versus environment, but it that is where the the honed separation really is for me.

Garin Hobbs: To answer your question,

Brian Riback: I think I did.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. I mean, if anything, you’ve just really reinforced the fact that it is subjective. So having that common ground is, you know, hypercritical to making sure that everyone’s on the same page. And being on the same page begins with that, you know, common thread of shared language. So I think that’s an excellent place to start that most people don’t really think of.

It’s hard to imagine an industry more fraught with subjectivity than, you know, than email. So I love that you’re kind of just lancing that right off the start.

Brian Riback: Yeah. It’s funny. My my wife makes fun of me all the time because I I very much get lost in semantics, but I don’t think they’re semantics because I have seen them substantively matter.

Garin Hobbs: They they matter. That that difference definitely makes all the difference in the world. You know, so anytime I think about things like personalization, it seems strange, but it always evokes for me the story of the little red hen. Right? Everybody always wants to focus on sort of the end product.

Everyone wants to eat the bread, but very few people think about all the things that are necessary going into it. Who will help me plant it? Who will help me harvest it, grind it, etcetera? So to power all of this personalization and reach this, you know, Nirvana of of individualized experience, what do companies really need to have in place? What resources, infrastructure, etcetera?

Brian Riback: Well, I think you actually said the first step. They actually have to have common sense. You know, it’s like someone asking me to go to 2 Main Street and cook a meal for finally of 10, and I go to 2 Main Street, and there’s no house built yet. You know? It it it’s just you you have to appreciate that.

Yes. Personalization can drastically improve engagement and conversion rates. Absolutely no question. That’s absolutely true if it’s done correctly. But let’s define correctly.

Right? If you include someone’s first name in a subject line, statistically speaking, if we could speak in generalities, because I don’t like saying industry average. What nonsense. But if we agree that putting first name in a subject line does improve open rates, just for the sake of this conversation. Right?

Good. Okay. Start with that. But make sure you don’t have curse words and, you know, cities that accidentally made it into the first name field because somebody used too many commas when they built a database out and it confused the platform. And the more these companies move forward with bad habit after bad habit, they’re digging themselves into a deeper hole.

So as soon as you start adding on more of the complexities of personalization, you’re damning yourself for the future. Because then when you try to employ something, you think you’re employing it right, but you’re not. So the first step is having common sense and say, okay. What’s realistic based on my team? What’s realistic based on my database size?

Right? So what I my first question I ask when somebody wants to do personalization is, how large is your database? Oh, we got 50,000 people. No, no, no, no. When I say database, again, lexicon, I mean active people.

So show me how many people have opened an email or engaged with an email. Thanks to Apple, we can’t just use open. Engaged with an email at least once in the last 90 days, but they’ve been sent at least 3 emails. 1st, a lot of the ESPs today, we can’t actually build that query because they they treat profile data and campaign data as separate, and they don’t have time series databases. So because they they they wanna save money.

So they don’t know the last 3 or the last 10, the last whatever. And and to me, that’s problematic, but a conversation for another day. But what, what happens is they run the query if they can. A 50,000 person databases is knocked down to 9,000 people. And then the conversation, 9 times out of 10, actually goes away for personalization and goes towards an acquisition strategy.

Because then I start looking at the, rate of attrition, which is unfortunately called churn, which it isn’t churn. Churn is based on paid something no longer paying for. But, you know so engagement attrition, no longer engaging with the content, that’s what I care about. That’s number 1. So it sounds silly, but once it’s explained to you, there’s a little more context.

You never wanna call any somebody’s baby ugly. But when you could get to the point where you look at someone and say, look. You brought me here for personalization. I understand that. And if you wanna stop the conversation here, that’s fine.

But the truth in the matter is you have an acquisition problem because you don’t actually have an acquisition strategy. You know, you’re you’re coasting along and you’re losing 15 to 20% of your database every month. You need to be gaining that times 20 or 30% or whatever in order to start worrying about anything. You have to get your house in order. And that’s what a really big part of it comes down to.

Then there’s strict organization. There’s people understanding the difference between a segment and audience, a tag, or whatever. The ESPs have not done us a favor there either. They all apply the terms differently. In some cases, there’s not they’re the same thing.

They don’t really have a single difference. You know? And so Just

Scott Cohen: just just how they name automations. Right? Automations, journeys, streams, flows. I mean Right. It’s it’s all the same thing.

Yeah.

Brian Riback: Yeah. Yeah. It’s when when you have marketing people naming things that operations people should be naming. But, you know, but I think that that’s, you know, that’s part of it too because the other aspect of personalization is that it requires a highly organized approach. Very, very it’s it’s it’s like, you need a librarian involved to help you create your your indexing of just assets, just just assets.

You know? And then so if we start to think about personalization, okay, we go back to our friends that have 9,000 people in a database. Okay. No problem. With 9,000 people in your database, I’m gonna let you do first name, dear first name, whatever.

And at 9,000 people, it’s not hard for me to put together a Python query and just say, you know, look for these curse words or look for invalid characters. Look for this. Look for that. And then, unfortunately, more times than I wish it to be true, when I look at the results that it’s just unusable. So now do I wanna go and really invest money or time to figure out the first names for these people?

Or do I say to myself, these people, yes, they engage with content, but, no, they haven’t bought anything. They, you know, they’re reading this content, but, otherwise, don’t engage with my brand. They really worth investing into? I mean, maybe to sell something and something again, they’re not buying anything from you. So in my mind, I it always comes back to ROI.

So if your net revenue is not going to be increased as a result of your efforts, it’s not worth doing. And people say, well, personalization doesn’t really cost much. It’s natively available. It does cost much because the risk of sending an email to somebody and it says, you know, dear kitten or dear blank bad word, there’s an opportunity cost. And you’re, you know, you don’t you don’t need that in your lives, especially in in a in a b to b world.

So I could take this further, but I don’t know if you wanna cut me off with with something.

Scott Cohen: I I think it’s amazing. We always talk about the positives. Right? The the net positives that you can see there. I I like that you talked about the risks.

Right? Like, it’s everything has to be done right. And then you have to I mean I mean, the number of times that I ran into when I was brand side of some people did all caps. Some people did all lowercase. Are you gonna have to put in the little, excuse me, the code to do do the whole well, make sure it all is formatted the same way.

And what if they mistyped their name, but they didn’t realize they mistyped their name? You know, what if the cat walked on the keyboard? You know, I mean, there’s there’s a lot of little things there that there’s it’s the risk reward. Right? And you could argue that, I mean, at a 9,000 person list, I would say the test has to be big enough that one person can’t change the results.

Brian Riback: Right?

Scott Cohen: I mean

Brian Riback: Yeah.

Scott Cohen: If one person acts differently, you go, oh, they won. It’s like, well, one guy. One one guy did something different.

Brian Riback: Representative sampling.

Scott Cohen: Yes. Yes.

Brian Riback: You know, it’s funny. I I worked on one database for a publisher in New York. Their database was 2,500,000 people. So, okay, now we’re talking about some good numbers. Right?

2,500,000 people. And they wanted to do a direct mail feed. And, you know, I I did some cast certification, so I knew that, you know, the addresses that were valid were indeed valid. Okay. Those were postal addresses.

Life is so much easier. So no problem. It’s great. But I said to myself, I wonder how many of these people have incomplete addresses. Right?

And so I had the data science team do some querying and the amount of people where they had the street address, city, state, but no ZIP. You know, Johnny or whatever who used to work here, he couldn’t forget how to get the leading 0 on the New Jersey and Connecticut ZIP codes to not be removed in the database, so he just removed the the ZIP codes. And, so

Scott Cohen: Been there.

Garin Hobbs: A little a little oxygen’s razor.

Brian Riback: Yeah. I was I mean, you know, it was so silly. And so, you know, what did it take them? A half hour using the post office’s API to append, you know, the ZIP code. And then all of a sudden, I mean, we had, like, you know, in the tens of thousands of more addresses that we were able to send to.

And, you know, so so it goes to to your point, Scott, in a way, which is if I wanna have a representative sample, I need as many people as I can that I know are valid. You know?

Scott Cohen: Yeah. And how many of those people have moved?

Brian Riback: Well, that’s the funny part.

Scott Cohen: Then you just go, oh, it becomes acquisition and reactivation.

Brian Riback: Except, again, it’s postal addresses in New York, and Sandy hit, hurricane Sandy.

Scott Cohen: Oh.

Brian Riback: How many of those addresses no longer existed? Yeah.

Scott Cohen: There’s no official

Brian Riback: record of that. It was Yeah. It was it was it was hard. It was a hard hard guy.

Scott Cohen: I I worked at a company where the the people that had not ordered in a really long time, we called them the dead file. Yeah. We would joke that some of them might actually be dead. So what do we do with them without asking?

Brian Riback: I get that. Hey. That’s in publication. Used to sell ads for cemeteries, so I I get it. I’m with you.

Garin Hobbs: At least ask the appropriate audience for that. Right?

Brian Riback: Exactly. Yeah.

Garin Hobbs: Brian, something a few minutes ago really kind of stuck with me, and and I love the way you phrased it. You know, a personalization, it’s not a thing. It’s a category. Right? It’s not a verb.

It’s not a singularity. It’s it’s a it’s a category, and it strikes me there’s a very broad spectrum, you know, within that category. Everything on the low side from, hi, Brian, to, hi, Brian. You look really great stepping up or working your blue shirt today. Here’s some turkeys that would go well for that or go well with that.

Right?

Brian Riback: Right.

Garin Hobbs: What do you see as the dividing line between effective personalization and just plain creepy? You know, I I I love hearing these types of, you know, personalization horror stories. You have things like that that you might share. At the very least, what where do you see that dividing by?

Brian Riback: One of the things that baffles me in our industry are the steps a company will take to do anything but ask their customers a question. It’s unbelievable. They they will do they will go through steps, and they will purchase data, and they’re gonna go to, like, sales whatever.com, and they’re gonna find out their new company that they don’t, you know, they don’t work at the old they go through all of these steps and I’m just like, pick up a phone, send an email, you know, not a market HTML marketing email. Send an email from customer service. Say, John, Hey, Susie.

What is so hard about that? But we we don’t do it. And so we we, shoot ourselves in the foot with this kind of big brother, you know, approach. And so under the umbrella of personalization, using literal terms, you could we could all name them whatever we want, the 4 corners of the earth. But you have rules based, r u l e s, rules based, and non rules based personalization.

That’s the 2. That’s the only 2. K? Non rules based is dear John, dear Cindy, or putting your city or something in a in an email or whatever. If your data is healthy enough and you’re confident in it, have at it.

It’s certainly not gonna hurt. It it will have some benefit. I mean, if it’s that or nothing, do it. Just make sure your data is written. The other is rule based.

And rule based is to say there’s, a term called predefined segments, and those predefined segments are a tool that are not used enough in our industry anymore, because they lead to something called a derived segment or derived database value I should say. And, let me take a step back and I’ll timeline it for you to show you how it works. The first step is we want women in New Jersey ages 35 to 49 who have an income of this and they add 5 more parameters. Right? When you leave non data scientists or non developers to build that segment, it’s you’re just creating an opportunity for disaster because the Boolean logic is not something everybody knows.

It’s just true. You know what I I I I don’t know how to give someone a pedicure. I don’t know. You know? So it is so we don’t all know everything.

So what I’m saying is is that you create a predefined segment and that that’s something you run on the back end. Right? Because we know that that’s a core audience for us if it’s client side or client you know? And then what we do is we create a derived segment. So when I go to build this when when that person who works on the team goes to build the segment, all they have to do is, you know, audience preference equals t or, female gold level equals t, t f.

Every field in your database, other than the ones that would be used for content placement, like first name and last name, should be brought down to the binary level whenever possible. So you have the predefined segments built on the back end, and the derived segments are the ones that segments are built out of. When you start to do that, you you have to be careful because if you put in there that the city is, you know, Jersey City, you can’t then have the person go in and put in, you know, city equals Dallas. It’s not gonna work. So you have to be very careful on how you do them and, but but this goes back to our point from before.

It’s not easy to do this stuff. It might be easy to use it when it’s set up correctly, but it is not easy to do this stuff. You have to appreciate the complexities built into that because then there’s the step further. The step further there is, is it a static or a variable template or dynamic template, I should say. Well, with not template, segment.

Is it a static or dynamic segment? Right? So, you know, we count these people. This is the group of people. It’s never gonna change.

This is my list of deli owners. Right? Or it’s dynamic where it’s deli owners who, you know, live in these 5 ZIP codes. Now deli owner 3 moves and is no longer in that ZIP code. They need to fall out of that segment.

So that’s a dynamic segment. And why I’m explaining all these different pieces because everything I just said falls under behavioral or rules based segmentation. If you go back to where I started, I said non rules based segmentation is if your data’s healthy, you wanna use first name, have at it. Simple. Yeah.

Yeah. It is. But you wanted to be hero based con dynamic content. You wanna see that needle move. It’s just not an easy thing to do.

You need a data scientist. Maybe not as a permanent fixture, but certainly upfront. And you need to have somebody, an old codger like me, come in and be able to help establish a logic. The way these ESPs and companies are building out journeys, this and this and that, is not correct. All they’re doing is sending out emails on a timer.

No matter what the trigger is and this or that, it’s baseless. And it’s not scientific. And I don’t mean to speak in absolutes. I certainly don’t mean it that way. I don’t mean like every company on earth.

But I do think the great majority of them are that can’t afford data scientists. Does that make sense? The the Oh, yeah.

Garin Hobbs: It does.

Brian Riback: You know what I mean?

Scott Cohen: Oh, yeah. It’s, the data infrastructure I mean, it it’s a garbage in, garbage out thing. Right? So, I mean, I’ve done, you know, I’ve I’ve been on a in a CDP selection. And then, you know, CDPs are only as good as the garbage you put in.

Brian Riback: Yeah.

Scott Cohen: That that that they won’t spit anything out that’s good for you if you don’t get that proper. Right? You don’t Yeah. And it it’s also are you collecting the data you intend to use? And that’s where, like, creepiness can come in.

It’s like you’re collecting data that you think is cute, and you might do these little notes there. Is it useful? Probably not. You know? It’s Yeah.

Scott, here’s the thing.

Brian Riback: There’s so many levels to what you just said. First of all, is the person analyzing the data have any idea what they’re looking at? Right? Is there anyone there that’s gonna know how to use the CDP? Is there enough data, valid data?

I have never come across a client other than enterprise level that asks for a CDP where I didn’t say you don’t need a CDP. At the very least, you’re not designed or set up to have one.

Scott Cohen: Right. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, in in in my view, focus group of 1 here, CDPs are great if you’re doing all channels. Yep.

If you’re just focused on email, I don’t think you need a CDP.

Garin Hobbs: Well, I see

Brian Riback: the impression is we want it for data visualization. I go, what are you talking about?

Scott Cohen: None of them no. No. It’s it’s it’s a pipe. I mean, let let’s be fair. It’s a pipe.

But, you know, what’s interesting, I think, you know, we talk about this in data collection and data usage. There’s this sort of dichotomy of privacy versus data collection. And we’re in this world where people expect high levels of personalization and think you already have the data, and in some cases people do. But then this expectation of privacy and, of course, the ever building privacy legislation, the US is behind the rest of the world. Let’s be fair and likely always will be because there’s too much money involved.

But how do you reconcile the 2 camps?

Brian Riback: It’s actually a very simple concept. It’s the same answers when people ask me, how do you protect deliverability? Right? When GDP Gower came down, everybody was so scared. I wasn’t scared.

None of that stuff scares me now. Why? Because I don’t send emails to people that don’t wanna hear from me. So if I don’t send emails to people that don’t wanna hear from me, I don’t have a thing to worry about. And I think it’s very true with with this too, data privacy and whatnot.

If if you know that Old Navy asked you your preference of t shirt size or color, or they know that your mail, you know, because you subscribe or or you register for their credit card or your their, you know, loyalty club or whatever thing they wanna call it. It’s not loyalty, but whatever. You’re not surprised that they know it. And at the same time, you’re actually happy because, you know, I I actually like my Kohl’s emails. I like them because I get to see when there’s a really sale on something, everything like that.

I would not like them if they’re sending me stuff for women. You know? I have this problem with YouTube. YouTube thinks I’m a 60 year old overweight woman who for some reason can’t figure out what bra to wear. I mean, that’s what I that’s what I’m living with.

You it’s crazy. You know?

Garin Hobbs: I honestly I I had a similar experience with a, very well known, sort of upscale, clothing retailer. Very often I will buy things for my wife. Right? Which is an added category purchase for me since most of my other purchases are strictly men’s clothes. So to your earlier point, rather than asking you the question to understand the context, they simply start marketing women’s clothes to me.

Here are items you will like. Where if they had simply identified it as an out of category purchase and then asked me the question, it would now be, here are other items she will like, which puts me in the mindset of buying for others rather than feeling this irrelevant connection of buying stuff

Brian Riback: for myself. It’s such a missed opportunity, man. I see it all the time. I saw it when Victoria’s Secret was my client. I see it now.

It it is it is ridiculous. Take note of that once a year, the husband buys something. This brought me back to my Avis budget dates. Right? That that next year, it’s their birthday.

Like, the like, the CEO is traveling to a client same time every year. Upsell them then. You know? If she liked this last year, she’s gonna love this this year.

Garin Hobbs: And And then position positioning you as a gift, I think studies show it’s what? 2, 3 x. People spend more on others than they spend on themselves. So if they couch it that way, not only are they getting the relevancy, but I’m likely to open my wallet even wider.

Scott Cohen: I think that that, Brian, you mentioned earlier that you don’t understand why people don’t ask. And I’m not saying this is the right answer. I’m saying the answer is people are terrified because of unsubscribes. We had this conversation. Yeah.

Right. I I’m with you. I’m with you. Like, we shouldn’t be afraid of that. Like, if they’re gonna unsubscribe from that, it’s because they’re out anyway.

Alright. So

Brian Riback: go down this lane with me for a second. Yeah.

Garin Hobbs: Of course.

Brian Riback: Important. Alright? The the whole idea of email marketing even before websites was built not not the technology, but the philosophies. Right? Was built by the same people who managed and sold ads in print media.

Right? Maybe TV. My k. So what they did was they applied this familiar philosophy both because they feared for their jobs and also because they didn’t know any better to the online world. So the same exact thing.

I mean, if you if you think about it. Right? If if you saw an ad in Victoria’s Secret on page 42 of the New York Times or something like that, Okay. You get an email from, you know, with, lingerie on it the second your boss walks by, you go, oh, crap. It’s it it those things are not equal thing.

But but because everything was built on this this singular framework, if that makes sense, it’s like Mhmm. That philosophy is what has did down the line. And so as a result of that, sales teams, CEOs, everybody quantity, quantity, no, quality. I tell people all the time, I would rather have 1200 people totally engaged in my email marketing than a list of 3,000,000. I I would.

Garin Hobbs: Yep. Let them go with gladness in your hearts. Right? They’re only those are only gonna be the folks who drag down your deliverability, who otherwise pose a risk to 100% inboxing. Right?

So let him go.

Brian Riback: Absolutely. And, Scott, I I think I cut you off before, and I feel bad that I did.

Scott Cohen: No. I was just saying, like, we had we had a Matt Homan who runs subscription prescription, and we talked about this a lot. Like, you know, people don’t wanna send out emails going, hey. You know, your next shipment is up, or do you still need stuff? Do you need to pause?

Like, they’re so afraid of people canceling the subscription that they never mail it and don’t realize the customer value of it of, like, your customer experience improves when you ask questions. Now you also have to realize your response rate to those are gonna be pretty low.

Brian Riback: Okay.

Scott Cohen: So you’re you’re really freaking out over a very small percentage of people, but there’s that brand equity you build of, hey, can we do better for you? Tell us more. That may not show up in email, but will show up in revenue. Right? That sort of indirect brand value down the line.

Brian Riback: People that know me are sick of me saying the following, but it’s one of those sticky things that it’s true. When you’re gonna send email, you have to answer 2 fundamental questions. Not one or the other. You have to answer both. Why are you sending the email, and why should the recipient care?

And those two answers should let you have the solace that, okay. I should send this email. You know, it’s it’s if if, you know, something got rained out and it got canceled, you wouldn’t think twice. You’d send an email right away. You wouldn’t even think about it.

You do it impulsively, but it’s it’s not an impulsive thing. It’s the right thing to do. You know? It it’s it’s just not. And and, wow, do companies miss out on opportunities with that?

I see it. I see it with, like, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and all these other companies that, like, have there’s so many partnerships that they miss out on and opportunities they miss out on because they were afraid of sending too many emails. Sending too many emails means sending too many emails without answering those 2 questions or too many times in one day. It’s it’s just true.

Scott Cohen: You can send as often as irrelevant.

Brian Riback: Yep. There you go.

Garin Hobbs: Yep. Audience will tell you where the limit is, for sure.

Brian Riback: Oh, yeah. So, Brian, you know, as

Garin Hobbs: a person who’s also been involved in personalization strategy for, you know, several years now, I see people approaching it similar to the way that I see people approaching AI right now. Right? Hey. It’s it’s it’s it’s effective. It’s performative.

It’s going to boost my KPIs, without necessarily understanding how they will strategically apply it. And what I see oftentimes is an overinvestment in third party solutions, additional technology, etcetera. How much tech is too much tech? And I’d love to hear your thoughts on sort of mapping needs identify needs to that tech.

Brian Riback: I actually have 2 kind of fundamental, approaches that I that I follow. Let’s let’s go back in time a little bit and understand how Salesforce became successful. Right? Salesforce built its infrastructure, and all of a sudden they needed to scale and add more tools. And they were about to invest 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars into doing just that until their biggest shareholder, Steve Jobs, came and said, hey.

You know, I’m having so much success with this app store. That’s what you should do. And we went from having platform solutions to point based solutions. One of the worst things to ever happen. And so what I wind up doing is I come at it from a perspective of okay.

Is that client using the product of a company or just a product? Right? Because that difference really, really matters. Because, if most companies are using platforms at some point, be it marketing automation or CPP or whatever, you know, CRM. And they they wind up having so much duplication in their countless statistics.

You know, if you if you look at the, Martech map, the landscape, you know, that Ritz put up not Ritzen. Anyway, the the thank you. Yes. Sorry, man. I love you.

You’re my hero. I just forgot your name for a second. It’s it’s it’s out of hand, and it’s so totally unnecessary. And the best example I see of it is like, okay. I have I sign on WordPress.

I’m using HubSpot, doesn’t matter which one. And I just signed up with Gravity Forms and I also use Jotform. I go, what the heck are you doing? First of all, it’s logistic night logistical and unsustainable nightmare, but you’re also hurting your ability to leverage data real time to enhance conversion rates. Right?

So it’s that kind of a thing. So the first week to my second point, people are thinking about what they want for them based on what other people are doing, what g two says. None of that stuff matters. What do your customers need to feel happy and content? Right?

What do they need to stay engaged with your brand, and, you know, not move over to one of your competitors? Because for them to move on to one of your competitors is an investment of time they likely don’t have. So you you must have given them one heck of a reason to stop using your service and, no company’s immune to it. Disney had this promotion they ran a little while ago about you could win a free trip for your family to Disneyland. When everybody got to the form, it didn’t work because there was a browser conflict between the form that they embedded and the, you know, the actual browsers.

Ridiculous. And not even just because it’s Disney, and no one’s immune to these types of things happening, but because it’s wholly avoidable. You don’t need duplicative tools. You know, that has to be and so it it comes down to budget and ROI, not just of how much those cost tools cost, but how much they cost to maintain. My father always taught me, it’s not whether you could afford the car, it’s whether you could afford to maintain the car that you really need to think about.

And, you know, that that sticks with me here. So how much tech is too much tech? For me, I wanna use as close to one piece of tech as absolutely possible. Not not likely realistic, but but that’s my mission. So unless my tool doesn’t offer it, I don’t yeah.

I don’t I’m gonna look at it. Does it integrate naturally with my HubSpot or my ActiveCampaign? Because if it doesn’t, I don’t have a development team. So that’s not gonna help me at all. I could pay for a freelancer to come in and set up the connection, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna have custom web services developed for this one integration.

Right? So it’s it’s it’s it’s just thinking things through common sense logically and saying, is the feature truly going to be a benefit to both me and to my customers. I I say that in the wrong order, to my customers and to me. But that really is to me how you determine it. And then the last piece of it is, somewhat related, which is, you know, don’t try to put the cart before the horse.

You know? People in their homes, they do if they get estimates, they make sure certain things are ready before they, you know, have someone paint the house. They’ll take the stuff off the walls. But not not with this stuff. Not with tech.

You know, they all have to get the next toy that’s available. Everybody wants a chatbot. Forget the fact they don’t have any data and they have no repositories of information indexed anywhere. They’re gonna start paying for the chatbot tool, and it’ll be 18 months before they just give up on because they didn’t have time to finish the repository. You don’t need a chatbot.

Miss I mean, does it help? Not if it’s not right, so don’t do it.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Well, it’s that chatbot’s great example garbage in, garbage out. Right? Like, you have to the it’s not just a monetary investment. I think it is is a key thing here.

You talk about the time, you talk about the money, but it’s your time. Right? So

Garin Hobbs: It’s operational.

Scott Cohen: You know, we’ve we we help people, you know, go, hey. I’ve you know, changing ESPs even for the right reasons is a pain. Oh.

Brian Riback: It’s an

Scott Cohen: absolute pain in the ass. Right?

Brian Riback: Oh, awful.

Scott Cohen: But and and so when you get to that point, you go the first question out of my mouth and that always is 1, why? What what are the issues that you’re running into? And can you solve it with your current platform? And then number 2, and I may have gotten my letters and numbers mixed up here. But who’s gonna who’s gonna be the end user?

Right? Because if if you are if you have a team, like you mentioned, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The last brand side job I had, they were on marketing cloud, and I went, please have a dev team. Because you have to have a dev team to run that platform. It’s a great platform, but it’s very resource intensive.

Brian Riback: Right. Absolutely.

Scott Cohen: It’s very resource intensive. If you are being if you are the owner of a small business and you’re running email yourself, my recommendation to you will be entirely different than if you’re running, midsize to small enterprise brand with real dev resources and everything. Right? So you gotta match it up to who’s doing it, who has the time for it, how easy is it, and they get realistic in terms of your output. Right?

I mean, we talk about personalization all day. So the the good and bad thing about email is that just sending out an email works.

Brian Riback: It it does. You know, and unfortunately, makes the arguments that we have a little harder to say, yeah.

Scott Cohen: But you know, take that one.

Brian Riback: You know, we made we made money on it. I I know that we’d make more money if, you know, we Yep.

Garin Hobbs: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. The story of our lives. Absolutely. Let’s talk you know, we we talk in tech here. You know, it’s been it’s been around for 5 years, believe it or not, but amp for email.

You know, the big thing from from Google. We had Nick Einstein from Netcore Cloud on the show talking about it a few weeks ago. You know, have you done any work with AMP? You know, what what have you seen there? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

I mean, there’s a lot of complexity to it that can be glazed over, glossed over a little bit, so we’d love to know your thoughts on that.

Brian Riback: My favorite tool, the only tool that I universally love for every client is Stripe. I’m not endorsed by them, so I’m not saying that because I’m gonna get a kickback. It’s because I genuinely mean it. As somebody who works on emails, it’s by far the best tool that exists. And they, they have a lot of AMP functionality.

Dimitri, who’s the brain of, of Strypo, he and I have had discussions, about, about AMP. And for me, I don’t think it’s worth it. And there are very few black and white, you know, answers, especially in our world. But I just don’t see the point from a business perspective, to do it. I don’t get it.

There’s a lot of reasons that I’m happy to get into, but just to answer your question, yes I’ve used it, but no I don’t go out of my way to.

Garin Hobbs: So it sounds like one of those just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Brian Riback: Yeah. Very much so.

Garin Hobbs: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve got a million of them, Brian. I’m gonna ask maybe for just your 1 or 2 of your absolute favorites. Can you give us some success stories on the impact of personalization? Good or bad?

Yeah.

Brian Riback: Well, I

Garin Hobbs: guess it’d have to be good if there were success stories. But

Brian Riback: Well, in my in my experience, the most successful personalization campaigns are those that are multichannel, or, you know I I refuse to call it omnichannel. It just confuses people. Omni means 1. Okay? So let’s just be clear.

Even though you might describe them on paper as omnichannel campaigns, they’re multichannel because they were sent by more than 1 channel, period. End of discussion. Talk about lexicon. Anyway Tell

Scott Cohen: us how you really feel.

Brian Riback: Yeah. It doesn’t keep me up at night. I worked on a project with, Disney World, which was to this day my favorite project I ever did. And what it was, you would, let’s let’s position where we were in the world at the time I I did this because that’s important. This was probably around 2007.

So, you know, put that in your mind when you think of, yeah, but you could adjust on this. No. Not in 2007, I couldn’t. Right? So, when people would call, which by the way is still the preferred way for people to make reservations for Disney because they go out of their way to make it a very confusing experience if you’ve never done it before, and you could buy a Hyundai for the price.

So you wanna get it right. You you go to, call and you make the reservation. And when you’re making the reservation, again, talking about not big brother, they’re asking you who’s in your family. Well, we have 2 boys, and because it’s Disney, people will give out information like you don’t know. It’s, it’s amazing.

You’d be hesitant to do it with most companies, but Disney, you’re excited to because maybe Mickey Mouse will know about it. I mean, it it’s incredible thing. And, what we did though is we would send the purchase confirmation after they booked the vacation. And in it, we would invite families to click through to create their own map, not not create their own map, but create their own journey through the parks. I wanna go to this ride, then I wanna go here, and I’m with this, this, this, this, this.

And what they didn’t know was that 3 to 4 weeks later in the mail, they were going to get a, and it was made out of, like like, what, cotton paper. It’s amazing. A printout of the park with their navigation written on it and the kids’ names and everything. And That’s cool. It but what made it so great from a business perspective is you’re gonna pass this store.

Stop there for 20% off. You probably could use that 20% off at any store. But the fact that you’re passing that store, you drove relevance to that person at that exact moment. And on the bottom of the map, it and and this is true if you’ve ever booked a Disney vacation, you know it. You need to book reservations for dining ahead of time.

You you do. You’re not gonna get the place. So on the bottom, it it had, like, recommendations for restaurants based on the resort you stayed in, and that is personalization at its at its height, in my opinion. I just but I also don’t know that it would be possible with most companies because you have to be willing to give a lot of the information out, a lot of the answers out. You know?

Garin Hobbs: I have a similar example. One of my favorites, and I’ve seen a lot. I consider myself that old jaded guy. So I was really impressed by this one. It was done by Boden, clothing retailer in the UK.

And And I wanna say this was maybe between 6 8 years ago. They had done used Movable Ink to do this amazing love letter for their win back audience. And there were some very cool dynamic mergings in there. So there was even some very cool dynamic computations in there as well. So it started off, hi, first name.

Johnny started Bowdoin x number of of days ago, and that was a running computation that they would show. Since that time, you know, you’ve ordered or excuse me. And your very first order was x, and they merged in the actual product that represented their first purchase. Then, x number of products or packages that, you know, soon showed over your up up on your doorstep over the next y number of months. So all of these, again, being dynamic.

The last item you ordered was this, you know, polka dot whatever, merging that in. And it’s now been, you know, z number of days since you’ve received that. And so it was just this beautiful history, in retrospect of their entire, relationship. And then it ended with, hey. We miss you.

We’d love to see you back. Here’s 20% off on your next order. But that, I wanna say, resulted in a I might be butchering the number. Something like an 800% lift in conversions from their win back audience was one of the most brilliantly put together and well executed and effective and impactful uses of personalization.

Brian Riback: You know what I think?

Garin Hobbs: The common thread standard.

Brian Riback: The common thread between both of our examples, I think, is using personalization in the name of service. It you know? Yeah. It’s huge.

Garin Hobbs: It’s that to me. It’s also making the story about the customer, not about the company and not about the product. Right? This is my story.

Brian Riback: What they need to know and why and when.

Scott Cohen: My story, I think, is key because, you know, I think about and it’s about shareability as well when you like, you people are gonna talk about that. Like, look at this map. Let me show you. Right? With with Disney.

Right? Like, there’s there’s that share I mean, 2007 shareability, but still, like, it’s it’s that shareability. And, like, you’re talking about that example of Boden. It’s like, hey, look. It’s this and then.

It’s kinda cool. Let me show you how they did this. I think about Spotify wrapped every year. People get a huge rise out of that, and that’s email, that’s social, that’s the app. It’s shareable, and it’s you you get exposed to go, oh, crap.

I really did listen to that song 35 times this past year. That’s probably only 35 times. Wow. I thought I listened to that all the time. Yeah.

And so it’s it’s interesting. Those are the types of things that you’re you have the data on hand. Right? I mean, Spotify, if you think they’re not collecting data on you, come on. You are the product.

Right?

Brian Riback: But you know what? I I think I think what’s huge is to to really respect the fact that email is the most intimate form of communication when we talk about mass marketing. We go to websites. We go and read blogs. We go to YouTube.

We receive email. So inherent to that, there is a certain level of intimacy you might get away with in email and you might not elsewhere. But make that about the engagement you have with the user where they’re not only not surprised you’re including it. They’re happy you’re including it because holy crap, I did forget to buy more batteries. I do need them.

You know, like, that it’s it’s not complicated.

Scott Cohen: You know

Brian Riback: what I mean?

Scott Cohen: On the flip side, you have the the guy who posted Amazon, I needed one toilet seat. I don’t need more toilet seats. Stop sending me emails about toilet seats. Exactly. So it’s there there is that give and take that is just so natural with personalization, that risk reward.

Right? Like, okay. I got one toilet seat. Maybe think about I mean, Amazon, I mean, just the sheer number of SKUs in each of those, if you think about it, has its own life cycle. Right?

So if you’re doing true replenishment, things like that, if some guy’s breaking a toilet seat every 10 days, you might wanna send him an email about therapy, not necessarily about toilet seats. But I’m I’m just saying, like, I think about, like, Overstock or, you know, some of those where they have millions and millions of SKUs, and I go, that’s just insane. Right? That’s just crazy.

Brian Riback: The the difference, though, is that they are indexing them for search on their site search and also for filtering. So you do know it’s an electronic. You do know that it’s so it it’s not so many steps away from it, but it’s that their their all their efforts are on AMP and not on improving the database so they could send its double a batteries. You know, like it and to me, that’s a perfect example of why why are you messing with something that only works with 1 email client, you know. And and by the way, the worst part about AMP beyond anything you can’t get very many analytics from.

You know, if if you want 0 party data, you need to bring somebody to a page. Why are you keeping them in the inbox? We we spent our entire careers focused on getting people the heck out of the inbox to a page. Why do you want them in the inbox? Get them out of there.

They can’t buy anything there. You know? So get them out. I I don’t I don’t I I could go off on that for, like, an hour. I just don’t get it.

You know? Sorry to deviate.

Garin Hobbs: No. That get them out of the inbox is is is a mantra I repeat as well, Brian. I was so thrilled to hear you say that. It’s, yes, validation. Right?

Yes.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Just just get him get him out of the email. I’ve been saying that for years too. Like, what what they shouldn’t read it. I don’t care if they read it or not.

If they click through Yeah. Exactly. Then they go order or do whatever we want them to do. Like, I don’t care how long they spend in the email if they do what we want them to do.

Garin Hobbs: They say, that’s a great subject line product. Yeah. Unless the email is the product, move them out as quick as possible. Yep.

Brian Riback: We had a great subject line. Our open rates were huge. Fantastic. You had the lowest cut rate I’ve ever seen on an email.

Scott Cohen: Or to your point, the Disney example you mentioned earlier where it’s like, wow. We got this amazing click through rate. Well, no conversions. Well, then the site’s broken.

Brian Riback: The form’s broken. I I am fundamentally against awareness, as a tool of marketing. I can’t stand when people use that word in front of me. But if if somebody wants to use that word outside of the email channel, I go, whatever. That’s your problem.

But don’t tell me email is for awareness. First of all, it would destroy deliverability. 2nd of all, it defeats the entire purpose of email. Right? People say, I don’t really care if they read my email.

I just want them to see a reference to my company in their inbox. What are you talking about?

Garin Hobbs: You’re doing wrong. You know?

Scott Cohen: I mean, there is value to be in there, but that shouldn’t be the only value you’re deriving from it.

Brian Riback: Right. Exactly.

Garin Hobbs: It’s yeah. It’s the first step, not the end game. Mhmm.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Exactly. Man, we could go on for another hour. But I am. I’m ready.

Think. Yeah. I think I think our audience would be like, alright. An hour is enough. Come on.

Brian, where can people find out more about you and about Labrador?

Brian Riback: Well, they could they could go to my website, labradorconnect.com. It’s an awful site. I have not had any reason to update it because, you know, it just I most of every client I have actually is referred to me by somebody, which is a a pleasure. LinkedIn, looking up my name, Brian Ryback, is, you know, is a great channel too. To find me or, you know, I’m always in New Jersey, so come to the shore or something and hang out.

But, I I love engaging with people. Be it a sale potential sale or not, just being, a voice that could try to talk them out of the bad ideas everyone else is talking them into. I love it. And certainly working with agencies that bring me in and say, before we do our work, you got to talk to Brian. That seems to be the trend.

So You

Scott Cohen: gotta you you you gotta come in and call the baby ugly first, which we we like to do as well. We like to call them. We don’t like to call the baby ugly, but we will call the baby ugly. Let’s put it that way. Yeah.

Brian Riback: It’s not

Garin Hobbs: a joyful thing. We’re just not afraid to do it. No.

Scott Cohen: Well, thank you for coming on the show, Brian, and thanks to you, our listeners and watchers, for tuning in. Check us out. Inboxarmy.com. Till next time. Be safe and be well.

Thanks.

Brian Riback: Cheers. Cheers.