Episode 19: 

COLD OPEN
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   00:04
Black Friday is six weeks from today, and the stuff that decides it happens now, not on the day.
BEN WALTER   00:09
We typically see that a lot of brands treat BFCM like a one-day event or more and more like a one weekend event, right? And then their revenue falls right off a cliff after that. It crashes hard, right? They're not thinking about what comes after.
GIL HSU   00:24
I strongly don't believe in magic prompts. That there is this magic set of words that you can say that like will magically get all the things that you want. This is much more of a conversation.
BEN WALTER   00:35
What really matters is not necessarily somebody who can write a good prompt, but of course somebody who understands what good output is, right? It takes an act of Congress to change the price of direct mail.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   00:46
You can upload an image of the actual postcard and say, this is what we use for our postcard, create a flow with similar messaging. And then Composer can create the flow, it can design it, it can pull copy from that postcard, and boom, it's activated.
GIL HSU   01:01
Yeah, 100%. We just turned on image recognition, which has been super exciting. And yeah, people have been using it like just like that, like image to flow. It's awesome.
BEN WALTER   01:21
So cool. Everyone in the chat, go build this right now. It's already done, exactly. Yeah.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   01:30
Done. They're done.
EPISODE
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   01:32
Well, welcome to BFCM Starts Now, and thanks so much for being here. Black Friday is six weeks from today, and the stuff that decides it happens now, not on the day, as everyone knows. Quick intro on me. I'm Zak Cassady-Dorion. I'm the founder and CEO of ECD Digital. We're Shopify Plus partners. We're one of about 35 Klaviyo Elite partners, and we're recently named the Klaviyo Partner of the Year for Americas. I am extremely excited for today.
This is gonna be it's gonna be more of a round table. And I'm joined by two of my favorite people in the e-comm space: Ben Walter from PostPilot and Gil Hsu from Klaviyo. Gil is a senior product manager at Klaviyo who builds marketing AI. He led omnichannel campaigns, which was the biggest launch in Klaviyo's history. And he's here to talk about Composer, the newest product at Klaviyo that's been getting all the hype recently, and another product that Gil leads. Ben built PostPilot's partner program from zero to eight hundred members. And he made PostPilot Klaviyo's first and only premier direct mail partner. And also, I recently got to share a stage with Ben when PostPilot was named Klaviyo's technology partner of the year. And I gotta say, I work really closely with both of these guys and they're both amazing operators. Ben, Gil, welcome. Can you guys give a quick hello and say one thing you're seeing in the market right now heading into BFCM?
GIL HSU   02:53
Ben, you go first.
BEN WALTER   02:54
All right, I'm up. What's up, everybody? Good to see some familiar faces in the chat. Zak, thanks for pulling together this crew here. Really excited to sit down today, talk with you both. You asked me one thing I'm seeing in the market right now. We're having a lot of great conversations. A lot of brands are getting ready for the BFCM weekend coming up. And one thing that we're seeing, and luckily a lot of brands are sort of shifting their narrative and approach on this, but we typically see that a lot of brands treat BFCM like a one day event or more and more like a one weekend event, right? And then their revenue falls right off a cliff after that. It crashes hard, right? They're not thinking about what comes after. And today we're gonna be talking about the preamble, what's to come, how are we how we're getting ready. But a lot of how we get ready for BFCM also impacts how we perform after BFCM. And so I want to hopefully weave some of that into our conversation today.
We see on our side that one-off mail programs, people who just launch a one-time campaign over BFCM weekend typically lose about 84% of their revenue once BFCM ended. If they're not thinking about how they're approaching those folks after the BFCM window passes. So that's one thing we're thinking about. We're seeing some brands starting to shift their approach and their internal narrative on hey, our pre-BFCM prep also matters when we're thinking about our post-BFCM cleanup.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   04:20
Ben, I love that, right? Because, a lot of brands make so much of their revenue it around the BFCM and they put so much time, effort, and money into it. But then brands are also always talking about how they want to have a they want to level out their revenue throughout the year. So kind of like what you're saying is, brands need to think about the post BFCM revenue, like how to turn those first time purchasers during this one holiday period into lifetime customers. I like that a lot.
Gil, how about you? What one thing you're seeing?
GIL HSU   04:53
Well before the thing that I'm saying, I I have a little gripe about with that intro. You said favorite people in e-comm. Why do we need like a caveat on that? It should just be favorite people generally.
BEN WALTER   05:08
Right?
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   05:09
I love that you say that because as I was saying that, I kind of like I kind of felt a little bit uncomfortable. I was like, why did I—
GIL HSU   05:17
It was the script that somebody gave you. That's what probably what it was. Yeah.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   05:21
No, I used Composer to give me the script.
GIL HSU   05:25
Well no, then we gotta blame my team for it. No, anyway. So some of the things, we're in super important time now. And having been sort of in the luxury of being with Klaviyo for a number of years now, been through this sort of BFCM cycle a couple of times. Now this is being my third one here, I think there are some really common patterns that we see in the in this stage ahead of BFCM, and that is preparation for delivery.
For delivery during this time period, right? So there's a couple things that we see customers do very frequently, which is one, start to ramp up sending, right? So that when you get to the actual send date of BFCM, it isn't doesn't feel like an anomalous spike for these inboxes from you. So if you start to ramp up on your sending now, it gets you some more protection, more in the view of the inbox provider. So that's number one. And number two is list hygiene. It's being able to say, okay, I've had a year to like look at my segments and look at my profiles, which are actually those that are engaged and which are not, and let's do some cleanup before I start to do some very noisy sending right now. So those are the kind of two things that we see a lot of customers do in this preparation time out of BFCM. And I'm sure this everybody here is already on it. But if you're not, like those are a couple of things to take away.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   06:44
I think yeah you definitely see a lot of customers doing that right now for sure. But there's also a lot of people that are not doing that right now. And like we see that because we do tons of audits here at ECD of accounts and we go in and we see a lot of people who send out, don't send to their entire list, then all of a sudden it's BFCM and they're start sending to their entire list, and then no one's opening or receiving their emails because they're getting blacklisted. So like I think like what you're saying is a super good point, but it's that's what everyone needs to be doing now.
BEN WALTER   07:16
Hey, that's why you got the mail guy in the room too, right? You warming up your lists and how can we warm them up better? Put the mail next to—
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   07:23
Exactly. And Gil, that sort of leads me into a question that I have about Composer and how you can use Composer for that. But before we jump into that, could you just really simple layout what is the new Composer product that everybody's been talking about in the e-comm space?
GIL HSU   07:37
Sure. Yeah. Composer, we're super excited about it. We just GA'd the product officially this week. And so the sort of simple TLDR is that Composer is Klaviyo's marketing agent built by Klaviyo. So anything that's related to marketing, Composer is. Klaviyo has built Composer to have a built-in opinion about what good marketing looks like. It has understanding from 200,000 brands that have been using Klaviyo for a long time, it understands what good deliverability is, what good content is, what good analytics or auditing or performance. It has all this understanding built into it. And so that if you need a marketing agent by your side within Klaviyo, you can just turn that on, conversate with it, and then be able to do things really, really quickly and also at scale.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   08:25
That's great. How are some, so you get all the analytics in the back end about how brands are using it. The brands that are doing a really good job with it, how are they using Composer?
GIL HSU   08:41
Yeah, it's really interesting because we're still in the early days of Composer. And I think the really obvious trend that we see is that Composer is being used to help find gaps within existing accounts. And so if you're saying, like, I've had this, maybe I'm a bigger larger brand and I've had my e-comm program, my Klaviyo program for quite a while, it's very common to have the sort of Klaviyo manager, this person that might have done or built or designed everything, have come and gone.
Or maybe things that were like a priority from a certain team's leadership at one point may have shifted. And so over time, these things kind of develop cruft within the Klaviyo program. And the thing is that people are a bit timid or scared to really edit things or turn things off in sort of large, sort of very sort of final ways, right? Like to delete a flow or to any one of these things is a bit scary.
And so what we see very, very common is probably like two to one, where people are using Composer to audit their entire program, to find gaps within what are some conflicting logic within flows, what are opportunities within my segmentation that I'm not currently doing? Maybe my list has grown, but I haven't my segments aren't capturing them. Or just looking into like compliance issues. Like we see it's actually pretty popular to be using Composer to author some SMS compliance checks within your QA process for emails, for SMS sends. So there's a lot of this sort of like, help me understand where my gaps are, help me understand where my blind spots are, and then let me clean up my account. So that's the lion's share of the usage now. But we expect that to kind of tail. Like once these accounts get healthy and clean, then they're gonna be like, okay, well, what can I do next? And we're excited for that part too, but we're still like, It's just a huge, huge opportunity to help everybody get to a really clean and healthy account.
BEN WALTER   10:45
It's like your next best new hire.
GIL HSU   10:47
Yes, exactly. Exactly. We actually just had a customer call where a person was like, wow, we've been really leaning in onto Composer recently. And we had headcount specifically for somebody who is more of a operator level, trying to like turn on campaigns every day and so forth. And then they said, actually now with Composer it's so easy, like I could do it. We think about changing like putting those resources to more of a a marketing strategist instead. Like what should we be doing more at scale if we knew that the execution was Pretty easy. And so that was a super interesting call and sort of kind of validating to the hypothesis that we had early on.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   11:26
That's great. I had tons of points in there I want to dive in deeper on. But before I do that, Ben, direct mail is one of the oldest marketing channels out there. And so, share with us a little bit about why people should be so excited about DTC using direct mail for DTC and why it's one of the hottest, hottest channels out there right now.
BEN WALTER   11:52
Yeah, for sure. Happy to speak to that. And Zak, you called something out like direct mail is not new, right? It's been around a hundred year plus tried and true performance marketing channel. The hardest part about mail before PostPilot took it by the reins and said, Hey, we're gonna fix this for modern e-commerce DTC operators was truly the segmentation and the attribution, two biggest pieces, right? How do we actually know that we're sending to quality recipients?
How do we build based off of intent metrics and based off of the strategies that we're already deploying on our other channels via Klaviyo, email, SMS, extended through lifecycle and loyalty? and then how do we actually make sure this is working? So when PostPilot said, How are we going to fix this problem? We focused first on deep integration. So our deepest integration, of course, is with Klaviyo. That allows us to build.
Direct mail that is directly aligned with our existing digital strategies. And when you implement a tool like Composer, that just takes it to the next level because anything that you would be using Composer for to dictate strategy in advance of Black Friday or throughout the entire year, those same strategies relay and translate right into physical mail, right? Where are you placing that mail? That's what's going to matter. We're not necessarily sending it right next to that first email in a welcome series, right? Or next to that.
First email in an abandoned cart, but there's going to be these strategic placements. Now, why should brands be excited about direct mail for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then larger the holidays? Well, we actually put out our BFCM benchmark report about a month and a half ago. And there are some pretty interesting stats when you dig in there. I would highly recommend that everybody goes and takes a look at that. If you haven't already considered direct mail and lock yourself into direct mail, our headline, proof point here is that All brands across all brands who sent direct mail in 2026, the aggregated incremental ROAS was a 3.9 X across all BFCM campaigns. So that's incremental ROS, right? Measured against holdout audiences, people who received mail versus those that did not. And there are some other stats that go along with that, right? Those that got mail over the BFCM weekend spent about 14 and a half percent more than those that did not receive direct mail. So very quickly.
Like we always knew, right? You said it was an old channel, it's been around, and there's a reason it's been around. It works. PostPilot came in to show you that it actually works for modern e-commerce brands. And we see the best brands, Hex Flad, Dr. Squash, all these leading logos in the space who have time and time again succeeded this time of year specifically, but of course throughout the rest of the year as well.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   14:35
Yeah, we're at ECD it's no secret that we are humongous fans of PostPilot. And we love building the PostPilot and the Klaviyo strategy. Like they're we don't think of them as separate strategies, but they're one strategy that needs to be built on top of each other. And now like what I'm loving too about Composer is being able to leverage Composer for PostPilot segmentation.
Gil, like you were talking about earlier, you're saying, using Composer to really find those segments that people you haven't touched, you haven't sent a message to an email or an SMS recently, but there's something else as well, is that there's still a lot of buyers on that list that you can't send an email or SMS to. So Ben, like what how would you use Composer to target some of those people?
BEN WALTER   15:24
Yeah, folks that are not opening emails.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   15:26
No, folks that are on your email list that you can't email because they've unsubscribed.
BEN WALTER   15:31
Yeah, 100%. Well, look, I mean, maybe Gil can speak a little bit more to the prompting of Composer itself because I've spent a little less time in the tool than I know the teams behind it. But very simply, right? Like anybody who is no longer engaged or is completely unsubscribed from your email communications, SMS communications, et cetera, whatever digital communications. The cool thing is, right? Jim actually threw this in chat, no deliverability issues with DM, right? We have about 100% deliverability rate. And the cool thing.
About mail in the US is that you don't need explicit consent. It's under a different set as set of legislature than digital marketing communications. So if you were to go into Composer and you were to prompt it saying, build a segment of people who have maybe engaged in previous BFCM activities, have opened previous BFCM campaigns in recent years, but have since unsubscribed from digital communications, Composer should go query all of your data.
Build out that segment for you. And then very simply with our connectivity, you can basically pull a segment ID into PostPilot and send that campaign out. Zak's team or our team can help you, of course, with the design and the strategy overall, how we're building around that. I recommend working with Zak's team. They do it best. And then it's as easy as that. Those mail pieces are gonna hit their door within about a week. And hopefully we'll have two outcomes. Number one, we'll get them buying again, especially for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
But two, we'll also hopefully get them re-engaged in email, SMS, and those other digital communications so that you can continue to send them those comms through Klaviyo.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   17:10
Thanks, Ben. I put you on the spot there too. Asking about how you'd be prompting Composer. But I think you hit the nail on the head. But what and Gil, I'm gonna have you chime in. But first, so Ben, you're telling me that it's October 15th. You're and if I haven't started if I'm a brand, I haven't started on PostPilot yet, am I'm not too late?
BEN WALTER   17:34
You're not too late, but you're getting close. Our cutoff for guaranteed BFCM deliverability is gonna be November 9th. So if anything that I've said so far has inspired you, please reach out to our team. And ideally, we get going now. Another stat that's worth mentioning, automated campaign sorry, excuse me, automated campaigns typically outperformed one-off campaigns incrementally by about 1.5 to 1.7x. So That creates a strong case to automate these sends today. Let them run through. We're still going to send obviously our bulk hits around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but you want to have those baseline automations set up. And again, that's easy via the Klaviyo integration. So yes, not too late, but please reach out sooner rather than later.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   18:16
Gil, if a brand, if one of the brands contacted you and said, Gil, I wanna hire you for a couple of prompts to help me get ready for Black Friday Cyber Monday, what are the prompts? And so I guess they don't need to hire you because you're gonna do it for free right now, but what are like a couple of the top prompts that you would, if you're if you were in charge, what would you be prompting Klaviyo and Composer right now?
GIL HSU   18:46
Well, yeah, they don't they definitely don't have to hire me. We're gonna definitely put these all in the account as pre-built prompts anyway. But yes, so I mean these are good. The thinking here is really to let Composer do more of this legwork. I don't I strongly don't believe in magic prompts, that there is this magic set of words that you can say that like will magically get all the things that you want. This is much more of a conversation. And that's one of the things that is a part of the recent release in GA is just that.
It feels more intelligent, it feels more conversational, and you can actually just sort of steer together in terms of what your goals and what you're trying to get done is. So in this case, if we're talking about BFCM and we're certainly talking about omnichannel and then having another leg here with direct mail and PostPilot, in my mind, the things that I'd be interested in is first doing analysis, right? Trying to understand what happened last year and say something to the effect of, BFCM is coming up.
I want to understand the things that have happened last year, some of the things that went well and some of the things that didn't go well. Help me get a summary or a list of things on both sides of this so that I could make something actionable for this year. So you this is the sort of like analysis portion of the work, right? And this is where Composer is really quite good at. And so then you can start to piece together some information around, maybe we had Maybe you didn't do a sort of ramping for sending and so deliverability became an issue, right? So these things could be surfaced through Composer's insights. And then you can start to say, well, that means like we should build out a schedule or a calendar of campaigns to go out with a growing list of segments to for the next month and a half or so, right? So there's that. And so once you start to get these insights.
Then you can say something to the effect of, okay, this is interesting. I agree with these, I don't agree with these. Let's start to build a plan. Right. So now you can have Composer come back to you with an action plan. And this is where some of the differences when you look at these LLM products that are more product agnostic, domain agnostic, is that they can give you guidance, but they can't give you actual objects or they can't get you actual the things that will work within these platforms. So where Composer kind of separates is that it starts to, it can actually build drafts of these campaigns that could stack, right? You could say, well, here's the first out of the, a seven series, and the first one starts to do the T's, and all you get to when you get to seven, it has the actual reveal or the coupon or whatever it might be. And so you can have Composer kind of build the strategy, build the calendar, all within your assets, all reviewable before send. And you can start to iterate.
Iterate on in this case seven you could iterate on all seven at the same time thematically maybe you want to pull some content or some context from other places you can feed that into Composer ultimately developing this plan and then lastly you can go ahead and say all right this looks great let's build let's save all these drafts get them ready to schedule maybe get them ready for the rest of my team to approve and then from there at this point this is like business as usual we've got these drafts ready to go team is gonna review and press the button, we can send that all out. So all this sort of legwork that was kind of pretty opaque, hard, you needed a strategist to kind of really dig in, a lot of that is taken off. And then you can lean on Composer to do that and then you start to get these gains of actually doing the thing that you wanted to do.
BEN WALTER   22:27
I love that. I mean, Zak, hopefully you don't mind me jumping in. One of the things that I love talking about this time of year is like margin protection because so often you see brands just kind of doing a blanket discount. And Gil, we were talking about like prompting Composer today, gaining insight on previous BFCMs, especially last year, like asking it questions right about and then breaking out maybe like how individuals are responding to different incentives. That can allow you to be very strategic.
As far as the messaging that you're placing in front of them, the offers, like, the magnitude of offer that you're giving them and the timing of that offer. So I really like that. Prompting now, learning. So you can figure out a very, very careful and thought through approach as we head into November.
GIL HSU   23:12
And what's super exciting about that bit too is that then you can also start to use Composer to sanity check these ideas, right? These strategies to say, hey, should we, for this group, if I did a bit of a more aggressive discount, like, does that make sense? Do we think that this would work? And you can then start to do that across all the different slices and segments that we're thinking about, or timing, or all these other variants, you can have again a strategist that was trained on 200,000 brands. You can get that at your fingertips at any time.
And that's really, really helpful to get confidence in the program that you're trying to build.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   23:45
One of the light bulbs that went off for me, so we work super closely with the whole Composer with you, Gil, with the whole Composer team. And one of the light bulbs that went off for me, and it should have been something that was obvious, but for whatever reason, it was not. And so it was a light bulb that went off is watching you guys, like your you and your team work inside a Composer, like and showing us like specific things. I think When brands are hearing about like prompts and like what prompt do you need to use in Composer, prompt it's kind of misleading, right? Cause it prompt kind of suggests that it's one, it's a one-way, one way messaging where you give it one message and then you want to get your entire results based on one prompt. When I'm seeing you guys work in Composer, you guys are having conversations. And it's so it's not a prompt that you want to be doing. You started with a prompt, but if you don't like what you're getting or if it's not going in the direction that you want it to go in, like you need to you iterate it and it's just like you're talking to a strategist, like your e-comm agency or your head of retention, where you're having a conversation. If they tell you something that you don't really like or if they're not really understanding, then you correct them and you tell which way you want to go. I think at that like seeing that, it was like, okay, this thing's really powerful. It's not just one input and done.
GIL HSU   25:07
I mean, the AI space is changing so fast. I mean, it wasn't that long ago, maybe a year ago, where like that people were saying, prompt engineer was gonna be like a really hot job, which is so that so to be clear, that job is a person who can write prompts well. Like that's a job. And now it's like, well, we really shouldn't have this like super high bar for communicating with a tech. I mean, that's sort of what an engineer would normally do. So Now the technology, the we are built on top of the best frontier models. And so your ability to converse with it for it, you can kind of give it a vague question like, How did it go yesterday? And it will understand the context of that this is, you sent a campaign, what flows were on, what what people were added to your list. It can give you a full report on this, or if it didn't, if it didn't felt like it had not enough context.
It will come back to you and say, well, what do you mean by that? Like can you give me more clarity on this? I saw there were these three items. Which ones do you care about right now? You can click on them. If you've ever played with Claude, it's exactly like that. We have that built into Composer. So yeah, one of the one of my missions is just to make the bar to entry super, super low that anybody could use this thing and really get the sort of power of a really expert marketer, just like built right into the product.
BEN WALTER   26:32
I love that you brought that up, Gil. The prompt engineer, it is funny, right? There was a time like about a 30 to 60 day period of time where everyone's like prompt engineer is the job—
GIL HSU   26:42
Of the future. Prompt engineer.
BEN WALTER   26:43
I think what's interesting now, what really matters is not necessarily somebody who can write a good prompt, but of course, somebody who understands what good output is, right? And that's what builds the case for sure. You need people like Zak's team at ECD who know what good output looks like. So that Composer is building these strategies, right? If you have somebody at ECD that knows, okay, great. Doesn't matter if they can write good prompt, but they need to know what's actually good coming out of this. That's what I think is like the future of this space.
GIL HSU   27:13
Yeah, it's that the other part is a super good point. The other part is in very, very solid, right? I think, what's interesting when you look at these LLM products, they're encouraged or incentivized to kind of keep the conversation going. So part of that is for things that are like Claude or Chat GPT, they're inherently agreeable, right? They'll say you're they'll say that you're super smart, that this is the best idea ever. I remember reading about some guy who like AI claimed that it's like, my God, like you just invented gravity. Absolutely, you are clearly the inventor of gravity. And so, and part of like when we at Klaviyo are thinking about the AI harness that we've built on top of these LLM products, it is because it is that we Klaviyo have a strong opinion about what the sort of marketing domain and space looks like. With that said though, that We are really an expertise in the Klaviyo domain. And when we think about like Zak's group and that team who has like large, broad domain across even above and beyond Klaviyo, that's where it starts to get really interesting, where some of these nuances can really feed context into a Klaviyo, not only a Klaviyo program even before Composer, but especially now with Composer. You can be actually teaching Composer some of your ECD's strong opinions about what good marketing is outside the slice of what Klaviyo is. And so for that, we're trying to build in memory into Composer. We're trying to build in custom skills, projects, these type of things, so that all of this context stays here and that every Composer instance feels personal to them. And if you have an expert like Zak and Zak's team, you will basically get all of the upgrades kind of out of the box.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   28:59
Well thank you guys. Thanks for those compliments.
GIL HSU   29:02
The last one for the webinar.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   29:05
I feel like you're making me blush over here. The first time that I saw like the first demo I got a Composer, that was like one of the light bulbs that went off of my head as well, is that it's you have Composer now gives like the power of the sun at your fingertips. But you still need to kind of know, how to drive it. But I think it just makes everyone so much more capable.
So like for instance, you still need to know like what good looks like, because AI can be confidently wrong, often and it could tell you to, so you need to sort of know how to guide it. But by like feeding Composer your own existing strategies, it allows you to accomplish so much more. Like historically, right, whether you're if you're a brand operator or you're like ret if you're a retention operator or if you're an e-commerce agency like us.
Historically, like 80% of the work that brands pay us for is for execution. And that execution is extremely important work, but where all the money gets made is in the high level strategy. And so now it with Composer, it's freeing up a lot of our time to be able to spend more time on the higher level strategy while Composer can take over some of that execution.
GIL HSU   30:24
Yeah, I think one other piece too, I was trying to think about this when Ben was mentioning just thinking about these other channels, right? prior to working on Composer, I was leading the omnichannel effort. And that vision is super exciting. And these are all stacking concepts, right? But the idea that, you have your central database for your profiles that then can be leveraged across all these channels. So email, SMS, right? We also have RCS, and then we have WhatsApp, we've got push.
We got social now. And then we are also thinking about direct mail. But the point is not just that, that each of these have just one opt-in segment just for them and they don't talk to each other. These are all sort of comprehensive view on your profiles. And so then you can really do this type of slicing that Ben was talking about these are the conditions that, I'm looking for somebody who didn't engage with email, right? To do for my direct mail.
And so these are the type of cross-channel slicing that with more channels you can do, A, but then B, then when you have Composer, it's like you can imagine any type of targeting and Composer will just go ahead and do that for you. And so super excited about being able to do that at scale. And then, this won't be the end of like new channels. There'll be more and more new channels. So it's gonna get more and more complicated. So having some way to do this really simply is we're very excited to be a part of that.
BEN WALTER   31:51
Yeah. And today, I mean, PostPilot, we pass back events data. So if we send a PostPilot campaign, we can send Klaviyo an event basically to say, yes, this campaign went this is what that campaign was. So that data would be considered then, of course, when you're prompting Composer. And it'll only get better, right? We're early days on the connectivity. Right now, of course, we have basic events data that pass back that you can use. And then of course, if you're building any Composer segments, prompting Composer, and you have that outcome, you can pass that back to PostPilot. It will get more integrated as we move forward, but already there's so much that you can do.
GIL HSU   32:27
For sure.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   32:30
I mean for one of the I we work super closely with your team, Ben and for a marketing channel that's so old, you guys are out of, we work a lot of different software companies. Your guys' company in particular is one of like the most forward leading company as far as like leaning into AI and doing really cool stuff. I'm loving seeing what the we like we have our we are our Klaviyo AI audit.
BEN WALTER   32:55
That's great.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   32:57
And we worked with Drew on your team to be able to tie in features from PostPilot to be able to audit PostPilot accounts as well using your guys' AI tools.
BEN WALTER   33:08
Yeah, Zak, thanks for calling that out. I mean, we definitely see an agentic future here at PostPilot and we're so happy to have partners that lean into that with us. I mean, yeah, it's been incredible what your team has done with Drew on the AI audit so far. So excited to see how that continues to scale.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   33:30
So, okay, we've talked a lot about what you can do in prep for going into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Audit using Composer to audit your flows, using Composer to set up segments that you're gonna send out your direct mail, using Composer for segments for your email for your SMS, using Composer to help you create a deliverability warm-up strategy to be able to get more of your list engaged. Also using Composer to be able to sunset people who are just not going to engage. So then you can send to send to larger portions.
MID-ROLL  ·  ECD AUDIT SPOT   34:03
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ZAK CASSADY-DORION   34:18
But let's talk about the event. And so like for the event, let's talk about like that seven day period around BFCM. So this is like this is the period like as an e-comm agency, like there's we have a blackout on vacations, like no one's allowed to take vacations this time of year, and we have people that are staffed on the weekends in case clients have any issues. And brands they have the same stuff. Like no one's taking vacations over BFCM. Everyone's at their computers, figuring out like What can I do to drive more revenue right now? So I think with Composer, there's some good stuff that you can do. Like when you're in the fire, in the moment, Gil, any things that you can think of that operators can do during the during like the actual event.
GIL HSU   35:04
Yeah, I mean, I think, one of the most exciting pieces about having, an AI that's baked directly into Klaviyo is being able to do sort of like ad hoc kind of reporting analysis, being able to understand what are the some of these signals, right? So if we're looking down the sad path and something looks wrong, maybe deliverability had the issue, maybe things didn't get sent on time, these are things that you can be kind of, triaging with Composer in the moment, making a new draft, sending it out, trying to recover.
In that time is like never easier to kind of send something out. So like use that to your advantage. And so that's like one part of it. And then the other part of it is like if we just like think a little bit about the strategy for the day of, I think this is where kind of on the themes that we were talking about is where you can actually start to be more aggressive or just thinking about your segmentation strategy. And because the sort of The cost, the time cost to be sending and building individual campaigns has gone down. That means that you could be thinking more about the different types of targeting, the different types of content to each group, the different types of promotional values, or each of these things, like all these variables. You can now start to kind of play with these at scale. So that's on the create side. But then the other part that made it hard to be able to do that so many of these variations was on the reporting side. It's on the other side.
Say like, well, was this actually better? Was it worth the time for making all of these variations? So that now is also easier for to make sense of all of these things that you've made and all the things that are sent out. So you can start to be kind of building these sort of micro experiments with the different segmentation, be able to consolidate that and you can do that really on the big day and which is really, really exciting. You don't have to think about all of that headache of building during that time.
BEN WALTER   37:03
Gil, with the Composer tool, because I saw the demo live at K:BOS, which was fantastic, both in the PAC, the Partner Advisory Council Day, and then of course the day of. It's proactively monitoring all your campaigns that are queued, right? And then, it'll notify you proactively if it thinks that changes should be adjusted. I would assume that I don't know, maybe is there anything that Klaviyo is going to be sort of like releasing day of in a sense of like Composer is gonna be proactively monitoring and providing you updates? Like should we be watching for anything cool day of from Klaviyo?
GIL HSU   37:38
So, this is for day of what we are trying to really work racing towards. I mean, everybody in this space is racing towards new releases for this. We obviously like really indexed on stability of the product, but what I will say is that the proactive monitoring, the QA process, which is right before send, all of this intelligence that's baked into getting this thing out in the most kosher way possible, all of that is going to get improved ahead of time. It's a bit it's funny here now that we're working in the AI space that what is a feature release. We do these big announcements, we had K:BOS, we have all that stuff, but under the hood, we ship about 10 to 20 updates a day with Composer. And so every day the product is gonna get better leading up to K:BOS. The things that we are heavily invested in, Ben, you kind of like, you can sense it is around the auditing, the compliance.
The just making sure that when things go out or about to go out that they are ready to go kosher for getting out the door. So those are the things that we're invested in right now. And you may not totally feel all the differences. It just it's going to be there when if something goes wrong.
BEN WALTER   38:50
That's amazing. And I assume everybody should download the app today, right? Is that's live on the marketplace yet or is that still coming?
GIL HSU   38:59
So the product is built directly in the Klaviyo experience and everybody has access to it. So if you are in the app, there's a couple different entry points for Composer. It has a side panel chat, it has a full screen chat, but it's all it's available on every account. It's free to use to start. And so yeah, definitely, definitely explore that.
BEN WALTER   39:17
I was referring to the mobile app, but I that's that I may have misspoke there. I know that there's a mobile app coming, I don't know if it's ready yet.
GIL HSU   39:27
The mobile app is coming, which is really, really exciting. There's the date on that is still TBD. We're trying to get it out for BFCM, but I am I'm hesitant to make any promises with it.
BEN WALTER   39:40
Totally.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   39:40
Yeah, I knew where you were going with that. I think Miguel did too. Ben, so Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like the day of November, December. Everyone knows Meta paid ads get super expensive because everybody comes out of the woodwork to do their paid ads. Does the same thing happen with PostPilot? Or does the price stay the same for direct mail?
BEN WALTER   40:06
No. Well yes, yes. The price stays the same. I was gonna say everybody's coming out with big budgets for sure because that we they want to hit a larger portion of their list this time of year. But the really cool thing, and thanks for prompting me on that one, Zak. Well, one, it takes an act of Congress to change the price of direct mail, which is pretty cool. And they're not making any changes this time of year. So while we see that our our standard, beloved Paid programs are going to fluctuate quite a bit as obviously demand and inventory fluctuates. The price of direct mail is to stay consistent. So if you're thinking about the cost of your marketing, and if you're thinking about margin protection, you can have a pretty reliable and stable, you will find a reliable and stable channel here with direct mail via PostPilot. Obviously, the timelines are a little bit different, right? If you're preparing for the actual day of and the Black Friday push that's gonna come a little bit earlier, as Zak alluded to. But yes, this is a very stable channel considering the time of year.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   41:01
Yeah, you and that was like one of the points that I was leading into is like, we do a lot of Meta advertising at ECD and with Meta, we make our clients tons of money with Meta. But the fact of the matter is like during this time of year, it just gets more expensive because everyone comes out of the woodwork and does it. So it's harder to show up. It's another reason why direct mail using PostPilot.
Is so profitable during this time of year, especially in comparison to how the costs other places increase a lot. Your direct mail does not increase. I sorry I probably I didn't prompt you too smoothly. I sort of answered. Like, one of the things I think during Black Friday Cyber Monday, like during the actual event it's people spend a lot of time people spend a ton of time talking about their offer.
BEN WALTER   41:48
No, no, no, we're good.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   42:04
Like, what offer are we going to do? What are we going to do this year? What do we do last year? What's going to work? And, I'm a big believer that yes, your offer is important, but what's more important, especially this time of year, is just showing up and like and getting in front of people. Because everybody's gonna have an offer. And so it's not so much about the offer that separates you, but it's about showing up, just getting in front of those people, getting in front of those eyes. Because.
Friday morning, Black Friday or Cyber Monday morning, you wake up and everybody and their sister is sending emails. So it's like, how do you show up in front of those people? And I think, one really good way obviously is direct mail, because not everybody is sending direct mail yet. And so that's one way. But I think another way to that people should really be thinking about Composer during the BFCM period is the segmentation.
And I'll tell you, we audit a ton of Klaviyo accounts. Like we probably audit, 30, 40 Klaviyo accounts a month. And one of the things that almost always shows up is that the segmentation is poor. Because it's one, it to do like really good segmentation, it historically it takes a lot of work because it takes a lot of creativity. You have to, it's there's a lot of psychology behind it. You need to know what people are doing, how they're thinking, how they're feeling, who your customers are. But I think now.
You can use Composer to make it that much simpler. And so, like what I'm thinking of is like during BFCM, what our strategists are going to be doing during that time period for our clients is, and I encourage everybody on here to be doing this, is to be using Composer to figure out who has not received your emails, who has not opened the emails, and then not even sending them new messages, but replicating existing content that you've already created and just getting it in front of.
Because and it's and another thing is too like figuring out the best time to send your messages. You can use Composer for that. We used to years ago at ECD, we created this system of finding out the best days and times to send messages to each individual client. And it was awesome. It was this like really cool thing I was super proud of. But now it's all you just ask Composer. Like you could say, Composer, when were the best times for me to send email and SMS to my clients?
The last two BFCM holidays. You get those numbers and then that's when you send the messages. Like Gil, can you sort of I sort of threw a lot there, but like can you talk about how you would be using Composer like specifically like for those areas during the holiday?
GIL HSU   44:47
Yeah, I mean totally agree. Like segmentation, I think is, let's say like selfishly from my lens, right? the AI that can kind of do many things, whether it be audit reviews or creating campaigns or creating entire flows, these are like super complex things. But what's really, really interesting is that if it's just like ROI for AI tech to do something, it is definitely on segmentation. It is like I can just take These little IDs of users and put them into buckets based on what I understand about them. And it will be exponentially more valuable for the customer. So that so with that lens, that is 100% what customers or folks here can be thinking about is, how do you leverage Composer who has this intelligence and context around many parts of the profiles to do this sort of deeper segmentation?
But it doesn't have to just be segmentation around things that I've had seen historically, right? That's one part of it, of course. But also kind of projecting out to the future, understanding what the sort of the nature of BFCM is for those profiles, maybe thinking about benchmarking across what other brands are doing, what are how are they doing segmenting too? And then how do you use like the performance of this segment could compare to other brands within that industry or slice of companies?
So all those things together, having being very creative and exploring and iterating, having a conversation with Composer, those are the ways that you can get really interesting segmentation done for BFCM. And I'm already kind of monitoring the sort of growth in segments within accounts at this time of year as a result of Composer. And it's super interesting to see the trend line. It is like 100% a hockey stick. So it's super, super cool.
That's super fun.
BEN WALTER   46:38
And I love the, I mean the toggle, toggle on, toggle off feature of like your most engaged, like, cohort. Like you just very simply do that within it. And one of the things that I was just thinking about while you were talking through that and thinking back to the previous discussion point about what to do, the week of. Because we pass back events data, like PostPilot events data that we've sent a postcard, and because direct Black Friday, Cyber Monday direct mail is going to arrive.
Early. The really cool stat with direct mail is that it typically like the peak conversions are around the two week mark. So that means that right the mail is still sitting in the home, come Black Friday, Cyber Monday, especially if it's a well designed piece, maybe on the kitchen counter, the coffee table, magnet on the fridge. You should be leveraging Composer to build a, an email campaign that basically prompts them to look out for that mail or revisit that mail, right?
Remember what we sent you, right? Especially if it's a cool piece, right? We see that, a lot of creativity with physical mail when it's actually arriving in their hands. So you should be prompting Composer to say, hey, take a look at anybody who received a postcard, our Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign, and then build an audience or segment that we can send them and include some messaging that's related to the fact that they received that card and that's likely still sitting in their home.
GIL HSU   47:58
Yeah, this is exactly the type of use cases that gets unlocked when the sort of the time cost of building these things gets so low. You can just again just be super creative, know where all these like endpoints are. You can even ask Composer like what are the opportunities here based on the events data that I have that I'm not currently taking advantage of. Well, you have this PostPilot integration, you have that. So let's take advantage of it. And it can draft those campaigns for you. So lots of synergy here, which is super cool.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   48:26
Yeah, or you can take all that create the segment but then you can have it create the entire flow and you can you can upload an I believe you could do this now. You can upload an image of the actual postcard and say, This is what we use for our postcard, create a flow with similar messaging. And then Composer can create the flow, it can design it, it can pull copy from that postcard, and boom, it's activated.
GIL HSU   48:53
Yeah. 100%. We just turned on image recognition, which has been super exciting. And yeah, people have been using it like just like that, like image to flow. It's awesome.
BEN WALTER   49:04
So cool. Everyone in the chat, go build this right now.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   49:08
Done. They're done.
BEN WALTER   49:10
It's already done, exactly. Yeah, it's time.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   49:12
All right. So I think we got we had some good stuff for before. I know we're coming up on time and I want to save some time for some questions. But we came up from we did leading up to BFCM, we talked about some solid takeaways that people can do during BFCM. But a couple points I want to talk on is the post-BFCM. And I'm not, I don't let's skip over like the December time period. I want to talk about January, February.
About turning those first-time purchasers during the holidays into ongoing customers. How are some ways, Ben, you want to lead this one. How are some ways that you could leverage PostPilot to turn those first-time purchasers over the holidays into ongoing customers?
BEN WALTER   49:52
Yeah, I love that you teed it up for sort of the January, February timeline because referencing back to our BFCM benchmark report, we see that win-back repeat purchases peak around the 31 to 60 day mark after that initial purchase. So if BFCM buyers are coming in on that weekend, when does that 31 to 60 day window fall? That is going to be around early January through the middle of January.
And into the end. And so this is where you can leverage Composer to be pretty effective for sort of that post-BFCM targeting. We want to make sure we're converting those folks, especially if we I mean if we haven't set up the automations in advance, and even if we have, a simple prompt that I was thinking of in advance of today was build a segment of first-time customers who ordered in that BFCM window, maybe between, the 20th and December first and have not yet ordered again, draft a 45-day second purchase flow. And Composer will go and build that out for you. And then you can tie that back into direct mail. You should be placing direct mail sort of at the front end of that flow. We want to be placing direct mail just a little bit before we expect them to be coming back so that we can ensure that we're capturing that intent. So that would be a very simple way that I would go about this. And the other thing to think about again in sort of your BFCM prep, how it plays into your post-BFCM success.
Make sure you have those bread and butter automations, those Klaviyo integrated automations turned on with all of our welcome series first time buyer. That should be stuff that you have in your account, always on, always firing. And those segments will automatically refresh. So you can use Composer to help sort of dictate that today, as Gil was saying, prompt it, asking what you're missing, how you should be thinking about the strategy overall. And then so when your additional Composer flows are going out, that'll be there effectively to support it.
So a couple of different ways that we can think about it, but definitely that January, February timeline is when you want to ensure that you're leveraging the poser and making sure you have those right communications going on.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   51:58
I love that. And I just wanna double tap on one of the things that you said really quick. Just for clarity, how at ECD, how we do it, and Ben this is probably how a lot of your brands do it as well, building the your flows, your PostPilot flows building on top of Klaviyo, how we do it is we mirror the flows. And so if it's an abandoned cart flow that runs seven days on and if the person still hasn't purchased on day 10, we trigger a postcard.
Same thing for the browse, same thing for the welcome. We wait for the email and the SMS to go through. If those don't trigger a purchase, then we send them to PostPilot. And then that's where we get the purchase. And so it's super simple. You just mirror what you have in Klaviyo already, maybe what Composer built for you in Klaviyo, and then just add that flow over to PostPilot.
BEN WALTER   52:50
Yeah, super straightforward. And if you're leveraging Composer to, again, build out the optimized segment. I mean, we've all spoken about it today. Like not everyone's going to see that offer, right? On the emails. Like not everyone is going to open and necessarily see that offer. So that could be another layer that you add in, right? Like, everybody who made a purchase, but also everybody who did not make a purchase and did not see the offer. How are we thinking about our approach to those individuals in the month and months to come?
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   53:21
Love it. Gil, any some tactical, tangible suggestions on how people can use Composer to get those one time purchasers into repeat buyers in January, February?
GIL HSU   53:29
Yeah, I mean, I think, one of the things that really excited that we shipped at K:BOS was something called scheduled tasks and skill and custom skills. And so, the the short story there is like, hey, I have a prompt. I want to do it every day, every week, every month. And so what some of the popular use cases of this is like thinking about reporting, thinking about, auditing what has happened after post-send.
But the exciting thing about having an AI that can both do reporting and do creation is to start to make these loops where you can say, okay, every day or every week, let's do a sort of deliverability report on the things that I've sent. And so just after BFCM, this will also get hit, right? And then you say, okay, from those learnings, let's make another segment or let's clean this up. Right. So You can actually build that into the scheduled task that runs every week or every day, and then it will fire. You can run that now, and then it will be used after BFCM getting into January. And so what you can then do is you can have this sort of auto cleaning kind of well, how do I make these with the same goal that you just said, right? How do we make these folks into repeat buyers? so you can bake the strategy both into the prompt and to the execution, and then have some of these things run a little bit more on autopilot. So make your lives easier.
And then you can start to experiment with these loops.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   54:52
I love it. Guys every time I chat with either one of you guys one on one, I feel like it's like the conversation just flies. And then the getting the three of us in a room, I feel like we could just keep on talking for hours. I feel like I got to half the stuff we wanted to talk about, but I feel pretty confident that we have some very tactical strategic things that people can do now and over the next six weeks to make themselves a lot more.
Any I got a couple questions here. So if anybody has any specific questions that they'd that they want to get us answered, feel free to add it in. And in just a minute or two, I'm gonna share our giveaway. I might even put it on the screen right now as I answer as I ask read off a couple of the questions that came in. Gil, one question was for you. Can you share a bit more about the R about the new RFM models? or maybe like how Composer can leverage those? I know it's they came in from Jim.
GIL HSU   55:56
Well, so in terms of I can't speak too much about the new models themselves, but Composer has the ability to do RFM analysis just generally, right? So you can genuinely ask it to look at your profiles and your segments and then try to do RFM analysis and then even go step levels deeper to be super, super articulate to be able to break out these segments into smaller and smaller slices.
Can do that ad hoc. You can do that right now. So I encourage you to try it out. I think it's one of the most powerful use cases that we have in Composer.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   56:32
I love that. And to, Composer being able to leverage data from all of Klaviyo, I think is one of the most powerful things, right? So if you're using marketing analytics, being able to leverage the data there, being able to leverage any of that event data is something that's extremely powerful.
GIL HSU   56:50
Absolutely.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   56:50
All right. The we got the free the offer you guys have all been waiting for. There's only 20 spots available because time is tight. So what we're offering is we're doing a free Klaviyo and PostPilot audit. So somebody from our team will do a 30 minute call and we'll audit your accounts and give you some tactical things that you can start doing today to make more money during the BFCM period.
We'll this will be posted as well online when we post all the socials. But we got about 30 seconds left. Anything else you guys wanna say, Ben, Gil?
BEN WALTER   57:26
Man, thanks for having us. If I can leave everybody with one thing, remember November 9th, it's our cutoff and do not undercommit. We see that brands that commit to this channel and spend a meaningful amount out earn by a long shot. Anybody who's underinvesting, that would go typically for any marketing channel. But in our benchmark report, we saw the brands that committed to this, invested a reasonable amount for the size of their brand, saw 127% higher iROAS by comparison to any brand that was underinvesting and being a little shy.
On testing out something new. So work with the experts over at ECD and they'll tell you what's the right amount to invest in this channel.
GIL HSU   58:08
Yeah, thanks. I'll echo that, Zak. Appreciate you setting this up. I think the big thing I'd say right now is that Klaviyo as a whole is super, super invested in getting you all very, very familiar with Composer. So we have given all accounts a bunch of free usage just to make the bar to entry super super low. I did mention that there's of course a free tier, so that will be good for most people, but we've given extra extended usage for free on all accounts.
So please go try it out, play around with it, try to break it. I'm sure you can find me on LinkedIn if you want to yell at me, if you want to do that too. But please try it out. We're super excited that we could get this ahead of get this out ahead of BFCM. And so hopefully this becomes an essential part of your work.
ZAK CASSADY-DORION   58:45
All right, Gil, Ben, thanks so much. And everybody who's here, I hope you guys have the absolute best BFCM ever. And I can't wait to hear how good it is.
OUTRO  ·  ECD AUDIT SPOT   58:52
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