Osom to Know - a WordPress podcast

Greg Zakowicz [00:00:00]:
You know, brands were kind of manipulating those in different ways, getting people to provide reviews for different reasons and things like this. And Shopify knew it and you know, and they just cut a whole bunch of reviews, I mean thousands of reviews. For some brands, you know, we have this terminology as like close to cash. When you got something in your cart, you're close to cash, right? That person's going to spend the money. It's just a matter of where they're spending it, you or someone else they're interested in shopping. And that first message is always about, let me tell you about the brand because that's how I'm going to build a connection with

Maciej Nowak [00:00:33]:
Hello everyone, my name is Maciej Nowak and welcome to Osom to Know podcast where we discuss all things related to building great websites. Today we are talking email, retail, economics and a bit of a crystal ball gazing with Greg Zachowicz, Senior e Commerce expert at Omnisend and a true return of the Inbox. Greg has spent 15 years helping shops and agencies turn insights into revenue, so I asked him to unpack the real life numbers behind me still converts and how that changes when the economy wobbles. We start with the recent tariff stuff, what brands actually saw on the dashboard, why consumers are still hunting for value over price, and how Q4 planning now begins in August. From there, Greg walks us through the three automations every store and agency should launch this week, which is welcome. Product browse and cart recover plus a simple customer non customer split that fixes most plus and prime mistakes. We also dig into whether to freeze or double ad spend when budgets tighten, moving B2C tactics like visual emails into B2B streams and how agent style AI search will change list, building reviews and discoverability. If email feels old school, this conversation might change your mind and your margins.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:48]:
If you want to keep learning more about building great websites, please subscribe to our newsletter@osomstudio.com newsletter and this is OsOmstudio.com newsletter. If you are watching this on YouTube, give us a thumb and subscribe to our channel. This means a word to us. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Greg Zakowicz.

Lector [00:02:17]:
Hey everyone, it's good to have you here. We're glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the Osom to Know podcast.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:25]:
Hi Greg, thank you for joining the pod.

Greg Zakowicz [00:02:29]:
Pleasure to be here. I'm excited to talk about all the stuff we're going to talk about today because it's, it's a passion of mine. So we're going to get into it. We're probably getting on tangents, which I'll take you on, but this is going to be awesome. So thanks for having me.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:41]:
Very good. I really like the energy. All right, so, you know, taking that energy, let's start with something heavy. So we are past a couple of weeks since, you know, all of the tariffs chaos happened. And it was not one day event. It was no a couple of weeks and now it was a couple of weeks ago, things settled down a little bit. But I'm curious now, what have you seen throughout that time of huge uncertainty? What's going to happen? And a little bit like businesses are a little bit freezing in terms of decision.

Maciej Nowak [00:03:20]:
So I'm curious, what do you see behind the scenes on, you know, I don't know, clients, accounts or trends or what transpired to you?

Greg Zakowicz [00:03:30]:
Yeah, it's a really good question because we're still, you're right, we're still in the middle of it and. But you're right, it is settling down based. Probably based on where you live, it's settling down a little bit. So the early onset was from a consumer standpoint and maybe from a retail standpoint with a little bit of panic. It was, what does this mean? How does this gonna impact my prices? How does this impact how I deal with supply chain if you're a business? And there were really no answers, right? So it was kind of like, hey, we'll slap all these tariffs on in one blanket move. You guys figure it out and then we'll figure it out as you figure it out and then you gotta figure it out a little bit more as we react to it. So ultimately what that happened, what that caused was from a consumer standpoint, a lot of uncertainty. I wouldn't say, I said panic before and I wouldn't say panic, but there was a lot of concern from consumers and we started to see this.

Greg Zakowicz [00:04:23]:
Right. Part of that concern is we've been dealing with inflation since COVID So you know, the reports and everything will say, well, inflation has come down. It's come down from where it was, which was really, really high. It's still high. I feel when I go to the grocery store, I feel when I buy my kids clothes. And the challenge there is for the last 18 plus months, we've been seeing consumers kind of become more value focused here in the states. We've seen it overseas as well, uk, wherever you want to be. It's.

Greg Zakowicz [00:04:55]:
I'm obviously gearing towards states because I live here, but there was a lot of value Focused purchasing, that's still the case. So what that means from a consumer standpoint is a little more, a little more specific with their purchases, intentional. So you know, people would trade down brand names. So you think about groceries, you get an Oreo or something, maybe you get the store version of the Oreos. If the, the taste is good enough for you, right. You hit make those trade offs, it could be Nikes to something else. Right.

Greg Zakowicz [00:05:29]:
And that's been pretty persistent. We still see that today. So from a retail standpoint, if you can't compete on price, you're kind of losing out. Then you throw in tariffs and say, okay, my costs are going up, I can't compete on price already. I'm not a huge retailer like Walmart or someone that has buying power to it. And then you're going to lose on price a little bit more. And that really has focused from a brand standpoint is you need to focus on value. And value doesn't have to be price all the time.

Greg Zakowicz [00:05:56]:
It can be speed and cost of shipping, return policies, customer service, whatever it might be. But you've got to really promote the value. So it's starting to settle down a bit now. But we're coming up on Q4 sooner than people want to realize and I think that's when we're going to start to see some of those inventory challenges. If you're a retailer, some of those price points come up a little bit and I think that's kind of going to be the bellwether a little bit. So there's a lot of different things that go into this. It's kind of a long but high level view of it. But the, the value focused purchasing, it's not going anywhere and it's, it hasn't been going anywhere.

Greg Zakowicz [00:06:31]:
And I still think we're going to be seeing that over as people get used to it. We're going to see that come up and be persistent. My guess is probably for the next 12 months and if things go nicely, there's kind of smooth out. Companies adjust. Everything happens here. I think we'll probably see that come back, people start spurging a little bit more. But you know that value focused stuff is really important now. But it's good for brands, right? Brands for a long time have forgotten about it.

Greg Zakowicz [00:06:59]:
Whether you're selling product, whether you're a services company, whether you're creating content for something, trying to sell, you know, a program or educational tool. A lot of people have forgotten about the value of it and they've been focused on the Transactional side. And I think it's kind of a good reset for. For people across the board if you're selling something, to really focus on the value now.

Maciej Nowak [00:07:24]:
And you mentioned the Q4 coming up very soon. Why is this so important? Is it because of, you know, closing here and, you know, reporting off sites at the end of the year and everything like this, or is it more just, you know, Christmas, Black Friday stuff kind of thing?

Greg Zakowicz [00:07:44]:
Well, I think it starts with retail, but it carries over to businesses as well. Right. So from a retail standpoint, it's obvious it's the biggest time of year. People are shopping for Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever holiday they're. They're giving it. But also people feel good. Generally, they feel good around that time. They want to spend a little bit more, whether it's on gifts or to treat themselves.

Greg Zakowicz [00:08:04]:
It's been a long year. It's kind of that reset. Let's wind down, enjoy things. Last year, we kind of saw that muted a little bit. Sales were still up from a retail standpoint, but we saw consolidation. This goes into the value. Right? So value focused decision. I'm spending more of my dollars with single retailers versus 20 different retailers.

Greg Zakowicz [00:08:27]:
Maybe I go to 10, but I'm spending more with those 10, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:08:29]:
Because I'm getting the value. From a business standpoint, if you're a B2B company, you're selling some sort of product or services, it's kind of the same thing. You have a lot of companies that will start to look at their tech stack at the end of the year. Contracts might be coming up, so they're looking at those type of things. If you're just like a services company, it's also a time where people look to just kind of reset. Okay, if the costs are coming down, I'm spending a lot here. It's kind of at. I said it's that time to reset a little bit.

Greg Zakowicz [00:08:58]:
But now they're starting to look at, you know, maybe it's not a tech stack, but they're looking at, okay, do I need this product? Do I need this service next year? Do I need to downgrade that service? And they start to take stock of what they have and do that inventory a little bit. But I think that carry over because the mindset's already there. From a consumer standpoint, everyone's shopping if they celebrate something around the holidays. But that does trickle down to a business side as well. But you also have a lot of contracts that just come up in the year. So there's the plan of the next year. So it's kind of a two pronged approach business. Obviously you're not probably going gangbusters Q4, but it's kind of that reset area and you want to be ready to put, push the gas pedal down come.

Maciej Nowak [00:09:38]:
January 1st and also September. October are famous for, you know, budget planning months. Right. And this is on the edge of like third and fourth quarter. And setting the budget for the next year is something that's done every fourth quarter. Right. For businesses like bigger, bigger organizations.

Greg Zakowicz [00:10:00]:
That's true. And if they're still going through that evaluation process, say okay, this is our budget going into next year and they start that evaluation process. October, November, December. That's when you want to start planting the seeds. You want to start making those connections really again, driving home that value. Whether it's on social media, whether it's through email, whether it's combination of all these things. Paid search, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:10:21]:
We want to promote that value to get people in there and be like, okay, I'm going to be, I'm going to consider switching here. I'm going to look for the best value possible. And then we start to see those value promotions come up. And again that could be customer service. If you're B2B, obviously customer service can be huge touch points. Personal account manager, not personal account manager, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:10:42]:
Services offered. And can they scale with you if you're planning on growing? Can they work with you if you sink down a little bit without kind of holding your, your hand to the fire? But those things all start before the actual sales process starts.

Maciej Nowak [00:10:58]:
Very good. You mentioned that. Because I wanted to dig here a little bit more because to get that value, you know, across whatever, like across the website or you know, in a physical store, you have to get to these people right. Earlier so that you maybe educate, maybe you do some marketing for them. But so, so what I wanted to ask is that in light of this slight, you know, slowdown or you know, uncertainty, what might happen is that people like for example, we had a couple of clients who were reluctant to do anything. This is one approach. And the other approach, I've heard, let's say can be, let's double down on the marketing spent so that you know, one approach, one, one spool says okay, freeze marketing spent in times of uncertainty. The other school says double down because you want to get ahead of the race.

Maciej Nowak [00:11:55]:
When dust settles, you are further in the race, you have a handicap. How do you see this? Do, can you confirm or do like disprove one of the Schools, like, what do you see from behind the scenes what happened during that time? If you have any data on it?

Greg Zakowicz [00:12:15]:
It's tough because I don't look at anyone's balance book, so it's hard for me to be like, hey, they probably should have spent here, but I can always spend someone else's money pretty easily. So that's the other thing. I think the general, my general rule as a starting point is you got to move forward, keep moving forward. If you kind of stay stuck in the mud, someone's going to move forward, someone's going to be doubling down the marketing spend and you're going to be a step behind at that point. Now, this is kind of where the obvious part comes up. But you know, when times are good, people have, and businesses have a tendency to be like, okay, we'll throw some money on Facebook, we'll throw some money on LinkedIn ads, we'll throw some money on paid search. And they're not really tracking it overly close. Like, okay, this fits.

Greg Zakowicz [00:13:03]:
You know, this is the cost per click and it's a window range and we're good. And they don't think about optimizing. And then when times become tough or challenging or uncertain, they're like, do I need to spend that much when they haven't been either testing or really being critical of things when times are good. And that's where staying on top of your ad spend I think is more important than anything. I have no problem with doubling down on it. Are you doubling down on the right places?

Maciej Nowak [00:13:28]:
Right.

Greg Zakowicz [00:13:28]:
Hey, we promote on paid search, we do meta ads, we do Tik Tok and we do YouTube ads. Well, are all of those performing exceptionally well for you? You know, maybe, maybe not. But you've got to be tracking it. You know, maybe you want to dial back on the Tik Tok or dial back on the meta. Everyone keeps telling me meta ads are still great, they still love them, right? So, yeah, maybe that's the place you want to go. You know, maybe paid surges become more complex or just lack not as efficient because you have people using, you know, GPT and perplexity to start doing some searches. So you're kind of refining down a little bit. I think just knowing where your value, you're getting your value from.

Greg Zakowicz [00:14:08]:
I think that's the most important part. So I have no problem doubling down on social media, doubling down on email marketing, which by the way is a lot cheaper in a lot of respects. And that's probably where your automation comes in a little bit. More you get better bang for your buck. And you could also reduce your, your paid retargeting costs. But just knowing your numbers, right, that's going to be the critical part of it, in my opinion.

Maciej Nowak [00:14:30]:
It seems that it's harder to do when times are good because there's less, there are less incentives to be diligent in the spend. And when times are hard, then you are maybe overreacting over, over optimizing and not having the data from better times. It's like being a little bit lazy when the times are good, which strips you down from like, you don't have the tools when the times are bad. So it's more difficult and you do mistakes. But obviously in theory, everything looks easy. But you know, when, when you have to apply this, this is, this is different thing. And I'm saying this because there's also that very popular saying that you don't know, like, you know, half of the marketing is not working. You just don't know which half of.

Greg Zakowicz [00:15:22]:
Which half.

Maciej Nowak [00:15:24]:
Yeah, yeah. So like, it's always difficult thing, but.

Greg Zakowicz [00:15:29]:
Yeah, and it's natural. So that's natural tendency, right? When times are good, you know, you can spend the extra money on whatever, whatever marketing channels you want because you want to focus on growing other areas of your business and in refining those things, right? It's the operational side, it's the customer support side, it's the level of service you're providing, you know, whatever it might be there, you don't think about it. So it's human nature and I don't fault anyone for doing it. You just want to focus on the next area of growth wherever you can. It's just understanding some of those fundamentals and coming back to it. And maybe you haven't done it over the last year and a half or two years and that's okay. Now is the time to kind of look at that and go, okay, historically, where have we been? Where are we getting our best return from? You know, and it's like having I kind of related a little bit to if you're cost controlled, kind of like you have some sensitivity like a food allergy or something. You don't know what it is until you've cut something out of your diet for a little bit and you're like, okay, symptoms went away.

Greg Zakowicz [00:16:33]:
It's that thing, right? And you might want to do that, okay, we're spending a lot on LinkedIn ads. Is it working for. So I don't know, I don't know, cut the LinkedIn ads off and See how you do or reduce that, spend a little bit and see how it is. You know, you probably, your gut feel, most people's gut feel is probably close to right. So start with a gut feel, kind of move from there, use some data with it, but kind of build that. But it's human nature to do that and I don't fault anyone for it. It's just a matter of okay, now times are a little bit wonky. What do we do to adapt? And I think that's where, right.

Greg Zakowicz [00:17:06]:
I kind of mentioned email before but think about how all these channels interact with one another. So if I'm, you know, on Facebook or Instagram, I see something, I click over. Are we tracking that to see? Okay, I get a lot of clicks but not a lot of conversions there. What do we do there? Well, can we use, you know, if you're on the website, email, you know, we talk about browse abandonment. So low cost, can I capture that, can I capture that email address when that person comes over or their mobile number for SMS marketing and I can retarget them at a much lower cost and see if I can convert them that way. And you know, you focus on one thing that helps feed the other, that helps feed the other and hopefully you reduce the cost in the meantime but also increase your marketing efficiency.

Maciej Nowak [00:17:48]:
I wanted to dig deeper here as well because I don't see so many, maybe in states that's different but in Europe I don't see so many people using email as a tool except like, you know, obviously when you do the purchase you stay and you get some newsletters or stuff like this. But like I haven't seen much good results on my, you know, email account. You know, though I rarely saw interesting offers or interesting stuff that send by the merchant my way. And I'm curious to know if this is my thing that I am not on many lists or these lists are, you know, not great, you know, in terms of, if we are speaking of, of merchants and also not much card abandonment. I was buying recently like a custom made bookshelf that you could, you know, customize every centimeter. They were chasing me for, for abandoned cart. And this is so rare that, you know, I'm not seeing this so much. So I'm curious why is this gate, why is this the case where you can revise these baskets and it's not being done? So I wonder what are the challenges here?

Greg Zakowicz [00:19:09]:
Okay, did you buy from that, that retailer that was sending you the abandoned cart messages?

Maciej Nowak [00:19:14]:
I bought, but different thing from a basket. So I did because I wanted that stuff. I wanted that stuff. So look, it was like an accident, but never mind. But I bought. But they were, they were diligent in reviving the basket that I haven't bought, if you know what I mean.

Greg Zakowicz [00:19:37]:
I'll get into a whole bunch of metrics and numbers for you here kind of as benchmarks. Why they're not doing it, I don't know. I, you know we have this terminology is like close to cash. When you got something in your cart, you're close to cash, right? That person's going to spend money. It's just a matter of where they're spending it, you or someone else. I mean, in your case, if you've got a customized product, you got to be, you've got to be sending shopping. Look at all the effort you did. Like, you got to measure it.

Greg Zakowicz [00:20:03]:
You've got to, you know, height, width, length, you got to make sure the books fit on there. Like you got to be precise. That is someone who's buying a bookshelf, bar none, like they are getting it. So I'll drop some benchmarks and then we're going to talk through why people aren't doing it and kind of the how to make a more effective little, you know, from a optimization standpoint. So I talk about, I mentioned email automation before and this is really where I think it can supplement and help connect those different marketing channels, you know, paid ads or whatever. So automated messages. So omnisend last year we sent, we sent 26 billion marketing messages last year. So it's a lot of messages.

Greg Zakowicz [00:20:43]:
So out of those, 37 of all email orders came from automated messages. 26 billion messages. Those messages accounted for 2% of a sentence. So you have to go 2% of those 26 billion messages drove 37% of the email sales. It's completely outweighed. The reason is pretty simple. It's the relevant messages. They're based on user behavior.

Greg Zakowicz [00:21:06]:
So I sign up for an email program, I get something. A lot of times retailers will discount that. So people will sign up to get the discount. But it's an intense signal that there's a, there is a signal that they're going to purchase, Browse abandonment, product abandonment.

Greg Zakowicz [00:21:20]:
These are things where I'm on your website, I'm checking something out and then I leave. It's most people online, Windows shoppers, we can target them with a message that's relevant to what they're looking at. So again, intense signal, but targeted and very relevant. And then card abandonment is pretty obvious, right. So I've identified what I'm going to buy. It's just a matter of where I'm buying it, you know, so we should be. So those three make up the majority, over 80% of all automated email orders. So if you're a brand, your services company, you're a B2B company, all those tactics still apply.

Greg Zakowicz [00:21:53]:
It's. But at the end of the day it's about relevance. Are the messages relevant to you? So you mentioned, you know, you gave the example before. Hey, we send emails, we don't really see a lot of return on them. I would say are the emails what your customers are looking for? Right. So a lot of retailers which just send best and blast messages messages, it's the common approach. It's going to be relevant for some, it's not going to be relevant for most because they're just, they're, they're, you know, they're shotgunned out. Those automated messages target individuals based on user behavior.

Greg Zakowicz [00:22:24]:
They're automatically relevant because the content is based on what they're doing, which is guide that journey and it's focused on that relevance. If I would say if you're a retailer, cart abandonments, you gotta have it, have to have it, right? But the other two I would focus on, those are the key three, right. We talk about, you know, what are your pillars, welcome messages, product abandonment, card abandonment. And then from there you can move on to other things like post purchase, you know, those. I don't, I don't even know what to say with them. Like Those are the three I would do applies to B2B as well, right. So we think about, you know, again, we want to capture that email address. How do we capture the email address? If we're a services company, maybe we have, you know, email services like optimization, optimization, agency services.

Greg Zakowicz [00:23:11]:
We have SEO services and we have, I don't know, pick something else, right? Paid ads services.

Greg Zakowicz [00:23:16]:
If someone lands on from a LinkedIn ad or a meta ad over to the SEO services, we know they're interested in SEO and maybe we have a different pop up only for those SEO people, probably in some sort of ebook or you know, free consult or something. But we capture them, we can tag them with SEO and now we can start to retarget them, right. We can send them a welcome series based on our SEO services and then we, we subtly call out the other things.

Greg Zakowicz [00:23:42]:
Need help with paid ads we also have that, but we, we target that around what they're interested in and what We've generated there and hopefully, right, we think about abandoned car. Well, you don't just put SEO services into a cart and you abandon it, but treat your product abandonment or those browse abandonment messages as a shopping cart abandonment, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:23:59]:
Give them service, promote your value, tell them all the benefits that you offer. So we can apply these tactics. D2C, B2B, whatever you want. They all apply the same. It's just a matter of the content we're putting in there, right? Information versus product and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

Maciej Nowak [00:24:16]:
Yeah, yeah. Because one of my questions was okay, how we can apply what you described in cart abandonment and all of the email automation around a service company, let's say web development agency like us, and you did the sig, you explained. Now I have one question less but I would like to know, but because again, one more one of the question was, okay, you can do marketing automation without having customer emails. And how you do this, like how you extract these emails from, from, from the behavior, you know, there are the legendary, you know, like lead magnets and gated content. You leave an email and, and get to know what's, what's the case study. On the other hand, I read a lot of criticism against, you know, if your case study is not accessible, this is a huge barrier. If you have to leave your email and you know, LLMs won't crawl it or won't, you know, you won't be able to share it with, with the bots. On a broader scale, it's a downside now maybe because such a content won't be, maybe you won't get traffic served, you know, from LLM to your website because the LLM will, you know, analyze it and give the context, answer somewhere else and you will not benefit it.

Maciej Nowak [00:25:44]:
You will be downloading information only and this is not good for you. So it's hard to balance that. But the question remains how you extract these emails from your traffic.

Greg Zakowicz [00:25:58]:
Yeah, you're right. It's really hard to balance that. My general approach to things. I like ungated content. I think you gave a good example. Customer success story is if I'm shopping for a product and you're like, hey, you know a service. And they're like, hey, see how this client, we help this client? By the way, you can't help, you can't see it unless we do something like they're shot, they're on your website. They're there for a reason.

Greg Zakowicz [00:26:25]:
So I like un ungated content for that reason. Get them the information as Much as you can. I think that's an indication where, how do we capture the email address if we're, if we're keeping everything open and available for them? Well, I think about some of those other things we could do. One, we can just call it out and test it and be like, hey, you know, I don't know, maybe it's, you can still offer a discount if you want 10% off, you know, the first, you know, month of contract or whatever. But it's kind of further down the road. Think about, do you have a piece of content where we can give them the case study for free, but there's a piece of content that's kind of like an addendum that you don't need to have as part of the case study, but would help provide value for this. So I don't know.

Greg Zakowicz [00:27:12]:
We'll just use SEO as a services example. But hey, how we help them rank their top five keywords on page one, top couple of results, whatever it might be. Here's the case study for by the way, maybe Here is the 10 point checklist that we used that for them to monitor and evaluate all their future, you know, blog posts or SEO written content. And that's the email, that's the gated part. So you don't need it as to feel the success part of it. But it's an addendum and maybe that's something that they can print out, they can tack up or they can always reference and it's nicely branded with your name on it. All right, so it provides some sort of value there. So that's how I would initially look at it.

Greg Zakowicz [00:27:54]:
And then you can kind of dig deeper down. Okay, maybe there's one or two that we want to gate because we know they're really popular, they're a huge brand name and those are the ones we can kind of drive that off of. But I would look for some of that, that other additional content where you might able to provide a checklist or some sort of other addendum to it while still making the initial thing available and accessible. And if you do that, obviously you can get some of those email addresses in, see how it works for you. You can always refine and things as you go. But, but that's an instance where if we get the email address then we can start retargeting, we can start, you know, marketing our product positioning and our, our props and things like that. So it's an example, not a bulletproof solution, but it's how I would take my initial approach to it and kind of again you throw to the wall, see what sticks.

Maciej Nowak [00:28:47]:
Yeah, yeah. Unless you test, there's you know, very little you can do to like envision what will happen until, until you test.

Maciej Nowak [00:28:59]:
I'm curious, what do you see that is migrating from like, I know consumer websites into B2B space is. Aren't. Do you see in trends like there's a trend of D2C where for example, we are observing a lot of manufacturers we work with open part of their product range to you know, for direct sale via, you know, e commerce platform. So not everything's not to you know, make their distribution channel too angry, but part of their, you know, product offering is certainly going to be, you know, available via their own platform. And this happened, we started to observe this for you know, a while ago, you know, I would say a couple of years ago. I'm, I'm curious if you see anything else that you know, B2B organizations are taking from, you know, like consumer apps, shops, websites, anything like this you can see.

Greg Zakowicz [00:30:03]:
Yeah, great question because we've been kind of seeing this transformation, I would say over the past 10 years and it's been really slow and I probably so like your time frame last couple years I think is, is when it's kind of accelerated a little bit more. You know, we, we've slowly become a very visual. We've always been a visual society but our online lives have become a lot more visual. One, because the nature of the Internet. But two, social media just trickling down into our everyday. So you know, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, like they're all just, they're visual based. Even meta now is, or I say meta. Facebook is becoming a lot more visual based versus text based.

Greg Zakowicz [00:30:43]:
That stuff feeds down into your, your everyday psyche for. And I think the one thing we're seeing obviously like browse abandonment type emails. You know, look at five years ago, very few B2B brands were doing those things. Ten years ago, almost none.

Greg Zakowicz [00:30:59]:
Cart abandonment mostly in the B2B space. I would see it with conferences like registration type stuff. Hey, you almost register for XYZ conference. Let us help you finish off that registration. So that's. We see a lot more B2B now with you know, quote unquote cart abandonment if they have any sort of cart. But you get close to doing whatever the cart abandonment could be, know, filling out a lead magnet page.

Greg Zakowicz [00:31:24]:
So it's kind of like browse abandonment there. But hey, you almost downloaded the white paper, you know, stuff like that. So the Big thing I'm seeing to answer the question is the visual nature of emails filter into the B2B world. So, you know, traditionally those B2B emails would be very newsletter oriented, a lot of text, maybe some stories, you can still have those things, but it's mostly the visual cues and then you can click on the visual to get to the landing page where you can read more about it. So, you know, capturing images, maybe a headline, maybe a one sentence or two that kind of explains it. Kind of like you would get like a news digest every day. Those are the things we're starting to see, seeing it a lot. But B2B companies start to shift to make a visual, let you scan it quickly.

Greg Zakowicz [00:32:15]:
The other component to that is many of Those, you know, B2B emails used to be a lot about, hey, let us tell you about our company, our product releases, our improvements, great things we're doing. It's transferred to a very much a me society, right? So what that means is we can still tell you those things, but we need to tell it in a way of how it's going to help you, right? It's the, the proverbial what's in it for me. B2B needs to start doing that and we could do that in a visual society, you know, in a visual kind of aesthetically pleasing email. But it's going to be very much like, hey, did you know you can save 15 minutes by doing, you know of, by doing this because of our new product release, right? So we, we show them how to use the product more. We show them how they can save xyz, money, time, efficiency, manpower, whatever it is. So those two things are the things that have really trickled down from a D2C world into a B2B world. It's very visual, aesthetically pleasing emails, a lot less text and then the what's in it for me?

Greg Zakowicz [00:33:24]:
So we, we make it less about the company, more about the actual recipient of it. Those are the two things that we've really seen pronounced H. Okay, because these.

Maciej Nowak [00:33:35]:
Type of like very B2B2 very B2B kind of emails, they tend to be famous for. I think at least speaking about 20 years of experience, no one cares about or stuff like this. So you know, that there is that zero was in it for me. And I think, or maybe that's only my, you know, social media bubble. I hear so much, so much about the end customer or end user or the other party. What's in it for me? What's the benefit for me? Like I Can't think how can someone say, we've got 20 years of experience and we do this, this, this, then this like zero relevancy, like nothing from.

Greg Zakowicz [00:34:22]:
So this is one of the best practices from a DTC world that has shifted over the years. I still have debates about this over, you know, over coffee or soda or whatever. But, you know, welcome series. Used to sign up for brands emails and the first message is like, oh, thanks for joining our community. You know, we're. They tell you the brand story behind it. And I was like, hey, we're going to email you this many times a week. You know, they're signing up because they're interested in.

Greg Zakowicz [00:34:50]:
We talked about intent before. They're interested in shopping. And that first message is always about, let me tell you about the brand because that's how I'm going to build a connection with you. And I'm telling you now, like, don't do that, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:35:01]:
You can have a little maybe image and link somewhere. But they're signing up because they want to shop, right? They don't care. I tell people, I'm like, they don't care. They don't care. Like, those are value ads. They're not the reason they signed up. And it's very much like that in the B2B world. Because you mentioned like 20 years of experience.

Greg Zakowicz [00:35:19]:
No one cares, right? How are you going to help me? So it kind of put an example. Like we talked about customer success stories or case studies before. So this is pretty common that a business will send their customers like, hey, new case study out. Look how we helped XYZ brand cut down their expenses by 20% or their manufacturing time by 10%. And I'm like, okay, so you want me to read like there's a different way to frame that? Like, no one's gonna. Why am I gonna spend five minutes reading this when I'm already a customer? Right? There's a different way to frame that. Hey, you know, can you segment your audience to people that maybe have the same challenge? Because you probably have a CRM that, that captures this data in some fashion, even just a tag and an email provider. Can I send those people and frame it around them? Hey, you know, we know you have this challenge.

Greg Zakowicz [00:36:15]:
We just helped them do this. How can we do that? Like there's a different way to frame that success story to be about them rather than being like, hey, look what we did for this company. You know, you want to frame that around like, hey, let us help you do this. And by the way, here's Proof that we can do that for you.

Greg Zakowicz [00:36:33]:
We initiate that conversation that way. So sometimes it's about where you frame the words and, you know, the visuals versus redefining your entire program.

Maciej Nowak [00:36:42]:
That's very interesting because you mentioned that you can segment your audience and send. The natural next step is you send a different version or totally different version of a given message, the given email. Maybe this is the same thing that should happen on the website as well, where you have adaptive content and provided you have enough information on your visitor, you can phrase things differently on the website. You know, these case studies, the, the, probably the, the biggest change is how to get that information ahead of that person visiting the case study page or, you know, listing of case studies. Because with email you have part of the information you saw where that person visited, which parts of the website were visited. So that will be difficult. But with my long, long run, maybe not run, but an intro, I would like to ask, you know, what can you get out of a suit of tools or, you know, can you share with our listeners more about the segmentation or rather good features of proper email? No, properly owning the email tool, you know, whether this is for newsletter or automation.

Greg Zakowicz [00:38:08]:
Yeah. So I'm going to go back just real quick. So your long tangents are like half the length of mine, so you're good. So I'm going to go back real quick to what you were saying about having customizable web content. So think about it even just from a landing page standpoint. So you've got an ad on XYZ platform, they click over. The ad is obviously targeting something very specific. SEO, manufacturing, whatever it is, could have that landing page customizable.

Greg Zakowicz [00:38:33]:
But maybe you're. Or maybe it's generic, but maybe the pop up. So we go back to capturing the email address. Maybe the pop up is something that says like, hey, what is your biggest challenge? And you have a couple options there and let us send you something to help you, you know, evaluate challenges or providers or whatever it might be. So you just ask them, like, what's your biggest challenge? By the way? We got something, we'll just make it easy for you and we'll send you some stuff based on your challenge. That's an easy way to kind of maybe test out a different way to collect email addresses. But that also might bring it back to the question you just asked. Hey, what do we look for in a provider that's going to help us? And I think, you know, a lot of providers now offer the same suite of tools.

Greg Zakowicz [00:39:13]:
So unless you're trying to go, you know, I say really cheap but like a lot of providers will have free plans as well. Omnisend is one of them. But you know, they offer a very similar suite of tools. So I think it's just a matter of pricing, understanding the features you're actually going to use. Because like, hey, we could spend a little bit more and we'll get these 50 extra features and if you're not using those 50 features, you're paying more for the same thing, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:39:41]:
So I think it's understanding your capabilities. Segmentation is a really good one because I always tell people segmentation can be very simplistic and it can also be very complex and hard to scale and hard to manage. It depends on how you want to use it. So you know, I think if you're looking for a provider, make sure the segmentation is robust. Obviously we live in an AI world so if you're unfamiliar or maybe less nuanced with creating segments and all the different nuanced rules, maybe look for a tool that has AI built into it where you can have conversational, hey, build me a segment for people with XYZ and it suggests and then creates that segment for you.

Greg Zakowicz [00:40:19]:
It makes it easier for you. I think. So when you're looking at tools and providers, I think you look for the things you want to do, the things you can realistically do and make sure those things match and then you can start evaluating prices, features, usability, ui, ux, stuff like that. You know when we look at segmentation, I would look at, you know, okay, when we have a pop up and we capture that information, that user, can we define them to a segment right there and that could be check boxes, it could just be tags on the pop up form, stuff like that. Can you use different pop up forms at the same time for different pages based on source codes or utms or whatever?

Greg Zakowicz [00:40:57]:
Those things will kind of be important for B2B people. Most providers will have those functions built into them already. So. But those are like small checks you should do. And then for segments, what are the, from a business standpoint, understand what the problem you are solving is. So if you're an agency and you've got three services, okay, you've got three services but what is the problem that we are filling or meeting with those services and really break it down because then it allows you to segment a little bit better and it doesn't need to be really complex but allows you to target a little bit better. So yeah, we've got, you know, We've got consulting services for people with manufacturers. You know, we deal with manufacturers.

Greg Zakowicz [00:41:40]:
So, okay, what are the manufacturer's biggest problems and what are we actually solving? Are we solving a time issue? Are we solving a staffing issue? Are we solving a knowledge issue? Are we solving a pricing issue? And that's where you want to hone at and those will help build your segments. Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna solve a time and staffing issue. What content do we have for this? How can we easily tag these people when they come in or tag current customers with it? And then we just build segment. Okay, here's my manufacturing time savings segment. What content? And that gives you an idea. When you send emails, sometimes it's not about sending 10 versions of the message. Sometimes it's just not about sending that one message to that one group where, you know, the contents are relevant and that segment just becomes a suppression segment for you for that send.

Maciej Nowak [00:42:27]:
Yeah, because they return or sign out.

Greg Zakowicz [00:42:29]:
Yeah. Does that answer the question you were asking Maciek?

Maciej Nowak [00:42:35]:
Yes, and I want more because segmentation is only part of that. Right. And now I'm trying to understand, for example, if someone doesn't have it, like where do you even start? Because obviously you start by collecting emails, right? You've got something, we talked about this previously, that you collect this gated content. Not gated content, you know, something in exchange for your email. But then what? How do you think about growing that muscle of email channel? Because, okay, you can have a newsletter, build your own like personal thing, your own personal brand. But this is for creators, for, for someone you know, any individual. But if you are a business, how do you do this on a system, in a system systematic way?

Greg Zakowicz [00:43:30]:
Yeah. So there's kind of two sides of this coin. And I'll address, I think the one you were asking for first, Second. So. Because there's a lot of complexity to it and it's not easy. So what if we have everything set up now, right? The goal is obviously to figure out a system to tag new. New contacts coming in, new customers coming in a way. And if we have on have an understanding of how you want to segment, you can do that.

Greg Zakowicz [00:43:57]:
So, hey, I just signed a new customer. What are the services they're paying for?

Greg Zakowicz [00:44:01]:
And you start tagging those people appropriately so you can do that moving forward. You know, that's the easier part of things. I think the question you were asking before is, okay, I've got a bunch of customers, I don't have a segmentation strategy. How do I go back and retroactively tag these people into the appropriate segments. The answer is it's not necessarily easy to do, but it's not impossible. And I think you got to. Sometimes you have to be a little creative and sometimes it's going to take a little bit of manual work so it's a little bit easier. Okay, here's how I start.

Greg Zakowicz [00:44:33]:
Top, high level, waterfall your way down. So okay, we have free offerings. X, Y, Z. Okay, let's. How do we define who's an X, who's a Y? And you just start with that high level tag. Okay, let's move these people. Manufacture and let's move these people to a paid search.

Greg Zakowicz [00:44:50]:
Or let's move to ppc. Let's move these people to SEO. You got to have, I'm assuming you have some sort of system that lets you know that if not, you need to create one somehow how to do that moving forward, you know, to retroactively get these people in there. Well, one, if you have any sort of criteria in there. So we know where you can build a segment and have them automatically tag both in a segment, then you could tag them. I'm trying to think of something off the top of my head.

Maciej Nowak [00:45:20]:
No, but I think that's clear because we are digging deeper into segmentation and I'm curious about, you know, more holistic approach to this because obviously segmentation is one very like fundamental item. But when you are thinking like you don't get into this into an email suit just to do segmentation, you know, something has to follow. These emails have to follow. Oh yeah. And yeah, so I'm thinking about, you know, the whole strategy. Let's assume you have a business. But no one was doing any emails. Right.

Maciej Nowak [00:45:55]:
So there were there are no emails except for the existing customers. There are, there's no gated content. There's nothing except current customers. Don't focus on. On them too much. But you know, you know what I mean? The decision comes. The company wants to implement that immense suit because they heard so much good stuff about it. You know, how can you convey what is that email suit? Why is it good? Or what are the traits of having this channel of marketing operated in a proper way? Like, you know, reference way.

Maciej Nowak [00:46:35]:
Like how does the reference way of operating this marketing arm look like? That's. That's what's interesting to me.

Greg Zakowicz [00:46:43]:
Yeah, so good question. I think I understand you a little bit better now too. So sorry about the tangent before.

Maciej Nowak [00:46:49]:
Sorry, two long tangents on my end. Look, I totally get it.

Greg Zakowicz [00:46:53]:
So I kind of alluded to different pieces of this before but I'll try to kind of level set here. So initially, you know, our data will tell you email, we break these down 68 to 1, return, return on ad spend, you know, so your ROI on it sometimes can be a lot obviously T2C so a little bit different than B2B. But here's how I look at it. Email is a first party channel. It's them giving you consent to email. So that's step one. And holistically how I look at that is okay. I paid ads certainly work.

Greg Zakowicz [00:47:27]:
The cost, the performance fluctuate from time to time. Email is consistent. I pay XYZ a month and that's it.

Greg Zakowicz [00:47:35]:
You don't have those costs. So that's how I look at it initially. Now if I have a controlled cost, this goes to your question, how do I holistically make this work with these other channels and also make it an engine of its own. This is where those three automations I talked about come in. Because if we can automate things out, let the automation do the heavy lifting of my answer for this, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:47:57]:
So use the automation where it can and then your scheduled messages should fill in gaps.

Greg Zakowicz [00:48:04]:
So we want to follow intent, we want to follow journey, we want to follow engagement. Even if they're customers, if they're engaging in something, we want to kind of follow that and keep feeding them. So if we know from PPC standpoint they are coming in from XYZ source, of course we can tag that, right? We can send them those automated messages to feed them down that whatever content that we've used to generate them that's going to feed them. Let's talk about the other side. So scheduled messages, I've got customers, I've got non customers who are also signed up, maybe prospects. Some are hot, some are warm, some are cold. And I've got this list now what do I do to target these people? So this is again where you have a little bit of that segmentation strategy. Again, if nothing else, suppression.

Greg Zakowicz [00:48:50]:
So you got to figure out just what your email is going to look like, how often you want to send. You know, if you're a B2B company, you don't need to be sending three dimes a week like a retailer. Maybe it's once a week, once every two weeks based on your business and your customers make those emails useful for them. The one thing you can realistically do here, it's not a foolproof science but if you're looking at either segmenting for short term engagement or just I've got this list, I don't have them segmented. I got to figure out what they're engaged with.

Greg Zakowicz [00:49:24]:
You can create some sort of automation that's click based. So hey, I'm going to send this email out on a Tuesday. It's going to go to everyone, it's going to be on XYZ topic. I'm going to make it aesthetically pleasing. But say you've got a navigation bar up top or maybe just have three different call to actions in there. We can create some sort of automation says hey, when they click on this message, put them either tag them with this or send a follow up message and you automate that follow up message.

Greg Zakowicz [00:49:51]:
And you just want to test the engagement. So if I know I click on whatever the new webinar coming up that you're promoting, well that's my cue that I'm interested in. One, that topic but two that may be that type of content. And then we can follow send an automated follow up message trees later if they didn't, you know, sign up or something, just you know, again remind them of that webinar but also have links to previous webinars or on demand ones or whatever. Just an example of ways we can start kind of automating some of these things as a test to try to figure out what sticks and then you can start segmenting those a little bit. Then when you're ready to send, you know, say your cadence is one message every two weeks. You've got your three audiences and you build a message that is mostly based on what they're most likely interested in and you just schedule it off to them.

Greg Zakowicz [00:50:41]:
And see how it goes. And if the engagement's really bad, you figure out okay, is the engagement bad because of the topic? Is it timing? Are we sending too much? This is where looking at unsubscribe rates or how you know you're always going to get unsubscribes, is it accelerating? And if it's really high in spikes, either the content's off or you're sending too much. And so if you're a B2B company, I look at it a little bit different than a D2C company where D2C I'm trying to sell something, I was something, I got a sweater, I got something, I want you to buy it today. The B2B is more around engagement and getting cold customers or cold leads warmer and just again reinforcing the value here so you don't need to send once a week, you don't need to send even once every two weeks. If, if that's not your business model and not your strategy, but it's about engagement. The goal is to get the clicks, to get, you know, opens are one thing, but you want to get the clicks, you want to get people driving to your website. And that's how I start. If you're not getting the clicks, you're.

Maciej Nowak [00:51:40]:
Not, you're not something strong, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:51:42]:
Yeah, yeah. And it just might be, you know, maybe you got this email, they, they were a cold lead or a warm lead 12 months ago, now they're not right. And maybe they're still. And if they're opening, I mean there's some indication there, right? So maybe you're in the back of their mind got you're living rent free back there, but maybe it's just an indication they're not quite ready yet and you know, pay attention to those things. So filter down your engaged versus non engaged contacts too. So you don't want to send everyone every single time, right? If you're just kicking up your email program and you send five messages, right, Start slow, but if you start sending five messages, you got this pool that hasn't opened any of them, kind of pull them out, send them instead of once every two weeks, maybe they get one every three weeks or four weeks and figure out if they're coming back to life or they're dead. And if they're dead, there's no point of sending an email to someone who's not even opening it. No point.

Greg Zakowicz [00:52:37]:
It's going to ruin your deliverability, you know, just let them go. But you have those email addresses now. You can use those email addresses to maybe retarget on some paid social because emails may be not their jam anymore or they don't check it as much or you're starting to go to spam or they forgot about you. So you can always test those on paid social, paid retargeting and see if you can get them back to life there. And if they come back to life there, they'll pop back into your active emails and then they'll move over to that, that healthy thing. So it's not a great answer for your mind check, but it's, it's kind of taken from a slow approach and just being like, okay, let's start very high level with it and filter down.

Maciej Nowak [00:53:17]:
I think, you know, when you start doing this, there's so much stuff you can do. Like, you know, you mentioned you get back to the segmentation And I see this as a core functionality on top of which you build different strategies, like you build different content for different segments. And unless you do that segmentation, you have one segment, right? Everyone, I called everyone. And then based on the behavior you can derive from that, these new segments. And when you have this, when you are getting a little bit more visibility into your list, you see patterns, you see segments. And then there's even more work to validate these if these are correct segments and different offering for them, you know, retargeting like it's like a tree that has only more and more branches you can follow. And you know, that advice starts slow. I think there is no other advice like thinking about this.

Maciej Nowak [00:54:19]:
There's nearly no other advice because you will get buried in optionality and you know, no, nothing will happen or will will or what will happen will be done unless you start slowly. Embrace the tool and the whole concept of what you are doing within this arm of marketing.

Greg Zakowicz [00:54:41]:
Yeah, and I'll say two things here as well. So one, every business, I neglected to say this before, but every business should have just if you're starting or starting slow, two segments, customers, non customers, right?

Greg Zakowicz [00:54:53]:
And then you want to see how those, those two emails perform independently of one another. That's going to give you a really strong indication about am I feeding the right type of content to my customers? And then does this content resonate at all with non customers? And you know, some of those email addresses are probably dead or whatever. So you're going to get non openers. But two segments to start customers, non customers, everyone should kind of have that info. Second side, right, is B2B has got to be a little more careful. I say careful might not be the right word, but maybe you have less flexibility than a brand selling a product. Because right. I get badge and blast messages all day long.

Greg Zakowicz [00:55:38]:
And I might have bought sneakers. I might like this brand because I bought something for my wife. I'm not interested in most things. But you have a little more leeway because I'm gonna not bought a sweater before. I'm still a dude who wears a sweater or am I giving gifts?

Greg Zakowicz [00:55:54]:
So the products are always relevant to something, but if they're not. Like people tend to be forgiving of D2C brands in a way they're not maybe not as forgiving with B2B is like, I don't care about this, right. And then it's easier to tune those off. So that's where I say, you know, splitting customers and non customers is a really Good indication of that because it allows you to a little more easily see whether the content you're delivering is actually helpful because you do have, I think a little bit less leeway than you do as a brand selling a product.

Maciej Nowak [00:56:30]:
Makes sense, makes sense. And I like living this topic for a while. I wonder because you also mentioned, you know, AI tools that can be embedded in the, in these suites and I'm curious, do you see any tools that are interrupting the flow or you know, flow of messages or you know, making it harder to get to people or anything? Like I'm looking for any negative behavior or negative results because of these tools emerging. And to give you an example of what I'm looking for is the AI overlay in Google search results which is a negative factor for the websites because they are stripping from the part of the traffic, you know, part of the traffic. So for them or maybe rising cloud on the websites because of the bots or that crowd all the time beginning websites. Right. So we see this as well that AI bots, not only regular bots but now AI bots are crowding our customers websites more and more heavily which puts a strain on the server. The website gets slower and you know, and this is not optimal.

Maciej Nowak [00:57:47]:
So I'm thinking if there is anything like this you are observing in your world of email marketing.

Greg Zakowicz [00:57:54]:
Yeah I would say it's impacting email less. So from a negative standpoint.

Greg Zakowicz [00:58:01]:
So the benefit we're seeing from AI is mostly tool built stuff. So it's stuff integrated with the tools that can help you write your email copy, it can write your subject line for you. So it helps with the production side, it speeds up the production side which helps, you know, smaller companies that are maybe more pressed or even mid sized companies that just want a second like different perspective of things. So I think from an email side that's where it's impacting more. I think the really interesting part is kind of what you mentioned. It's the non email side of things, it's the customer journey. So you know, I'm looking at specifically like Perplexity. GPT is obviously the big one but Perplexity has really got some cool stuff going on.

Greg Zakowicz [00:58:45]:
And from a DTC standpoint I'm looking a lot up with like agentech, AI and E commerce shopping agents. I think it's a really interesting and really quickly developing area. But you think about from a B2B standpoint, if I'm a consumer and I'm looking for a new product or a new vendor, what am I doing Right. So traditionally you go to Google and be like okay, you know, manufacturing agencies or no supply chain or SEO agencies. Right. Best you type in like best SEO agencies. Maybe under a budget you get this pool, some paid ads and a bunch of listicles that you're going to and now people are going to chat GPT. What are the 10 best SEO agencies? But they're being more conversational or they're setting budgets on there for under 2000amonth or 1000amonth.

Greg Zakowicz [00:59:39]:
Brands need to make sure they're in that conversation. They've got those other variables where like brands don't want, maybe want to put their pricing on there.

Greg Zakowicz [00:59:48]:
So they've got calculators and pricing is not a one size fits all. Typically there's services and there's you know, add ons and integration costs and stuff like that. But I think that's where the complexity is coming in. Lexity is doing stuff with you know, booking, travel and stuff now, but being a lot more conversational between image searches, like image results just like Google, like they're, they've, they've announced they're kind of going after Google, but they've got a shopping tab, they've got an images tab, they've got a search tab.

Greg Zakowicz [01:00:19]:
And I think the offs, the off email stuff is where the bigger kind of disruption to the traditional customer journey comes in. So from a brand standpoint, how do you optimize to be in that list of results that comes up and then how do you do it in a way where you don't get disqualified based because you're over optimizing for those results? Like okay, we're best for under 10,000. But you also service $20,000 clients, right? Are you left out of both of those? Are you included in one but not the other? This is kind of the, the area that I see unfolding quickly from a B2B and a D2C standpoint that people are trying to navigate. We talk about tariffs disrupting things, right? People are trying to navigate this stuff right now too. And there was no really click cling on answer about like okay, how do we do this in a way that's going to set us up for the long term success? It's kind of trial by fire and play it by year and see how it goes.

Maciej Nowak [01:01:16]:
And there's to your point, there's more and more tools that are focused only on discoverability via LLMs like Propensity, ChatGPT, Gemini. There's a lot of tools that are centered around like you know, there's Ahrefs that was built to monitor your keywords. Now there are clones of AHREF that only analyze the traffic from LLMs like this tool, but taken to LLMs and like they're like growing like crazy clone after clone. Just for that one thing of how am I ranking within LLMs with my brand?

Greg Zakowicz [01:01:59]:
Yeah, and I think this is where like product reviews, right, obviously big for products, but I think reviews on things like G2 and for business reviews, super important here because right, what if I'm searching for something like give me the top rated. Well, top rated might be listicle and might be SEO driven or it could be a huge factor of the results based on online reviews of that company. So, you know, if I've got, I don't know, two reviews, one's a five star and one's a one star, you know, I'm going to settle up at a three star review. And I was like, oh, this brand's got three stars or this company has three stars, right? And it's, it's because the focus wasn't on generating reviews before. It was just kind of like, okay, someone was mad and someone loved us and boom, we got there. And I think collecting reviews on business sites is going to be really important in these factors. I think the other thing comes in, it's probably a little further down the road is like what happens when these things all kind of coalesce, right? Google is building a shopping agent. Amazon has a shopping agent.

Greg Zakowicz [01:03:07]:
Perplexity is building and has a shopping agent. You know, Walmart is going to build a shopping age. What happens to the ecosystem at that point point, like how does a brand fit into that? And is it going to be like, okay, I've got to pay for to be included in Perplexity but left out of this one or like I kind of see this thing going kind of like search wind, right? It's pay to play at some point because it's going to be a limited ecosystem there. That's the one thing we don't really know yet is how it's all going to settle. It can be 100 different players or they can be like three different players, right, that dominate and the other ones just kind of filter in. But I think product review, like brand reviews I think are going to be big in this factor because like I'm part of my refinement. If I'm on chat GPT, I'm like, okay, give me the best 10 agencies for XYZ. I get this list of 10, okay, eliminate anything that's under three stars or has a lot of recent negative reviews.

Greg Zakowicz [01:04:06]:
What are the pros and cons of these? And you've got to factor in like you've got to use the experience as a consumer shopping for to figure out how you need to optimize to get the results you want to get.

Maciej Nowak [01:04:17]:
And that's something that you would do either way when filtering out. I know restaurants on Google Maps. Right? You do this either way. Right.

Greg Zakowicz [01:04:25]:
So 100%.

Maciej Nowak [01:04:28]:
When thinking about G2, what I would fear or you know, controversy about Trustpilot as another platform which collects reviews is that I don't know how to put it, but they tend to be skewed. You know, the, the, you know, like with any open platform with reviews, people tend to pay for reviews, for example. Right. So it's like maybe this somehow transpires to the LLM somehow that these reviews are skewed or maybe there's competition that is doing the the opposite thing for, for their competition. What I heard is for example Reddit a good source of true because this is so unfiltered but again not as easily like you can't match it as easily as on, you know, platform review made for reviews for different companies. It's like perfect example of digestible data for LLM for analysis. Right. So, but, but yeah.

Maciej Nowak [01:05:32]:
And maybe you know, to your point, five, farther to your point is that maybe we'll see more independent platforms with reviews for different things. Hard maybe to imagine this with such giants as Trustpilot, MG2, but maybe because of that necessity and us with the, you know, AI keywords, observability platforms, maybe this is what will happen with more smaller platforms but more trustworthy, less, less huge. I don't know like my, my wide thinking here about the future, what's going to happen but you know, we'll see.

Greg Zakowicz [01:06:13]:
So I think brands, like companies already started to look at this. So I don't know if it's related or not. My guess is it is related. But you look at a major brand like Shopify, which just recently, about a month ago, they deleted a whole bunch of reviews that were outdated and predated at the time. Like they're pretty good at cracking down and having various specific guidelines for brands to get reviews now. But back in the day, I say back in the day, it was only a few years ago but you know, brands were kind of manipulating those in different ways, getting people to provide reviews for different reasons and things like this and Shopify knew it and you know, and they just cut a Whole bunch of reviews, I mean, thousands of reviews for some brands that were either outdated or before they started enforcing those policies. My suspicion is they did that because they know how much, how important reviews are going to be. They want to kind of level the playing field a little bit and be more of a authority source for it.

Greg Zakowicz [01:07:14]:
So you're right. I think you might have, like, you could always have a, an AI agent that deals with nothing but reviews, that feeds other LLMs and stuff, you know, so it's interesting. I just, you kind of see these, these breadcrumbs a little bit. You don't know where they're going, but you kind of see these couple things. You're like, okay, there's a couple there, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire. Sometimes. Yeah, well, usually there's, there's fire. Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz [01:07:37]:
Could just be smoldering, but there's something there. So it's going to be interesting how it plays out for sure.

Maciej Nowak [01:07:44]:
And to wrap up our conversation, what would you like to happen in a year's time, you know, in terms, let's say to make it a little bit narrow, what would you like to happen in this time from, in your area of what you are doing on a, you know, day to day basis within, you know, intersection of marketing, email marketing, a little bit of AI, like what would you like to happen?

Greg Zakowicz [01:08:10]:
Well, if we take retirement off the table. Because I would love to retire. Probably not happening in a year though, unless something dramatic happens. But yeah, you know, it's a really good question. I don't, I don't even know, man. How do I even answer that?

Maciej Nowak [01:08:25]:
Yeah, look, I'm not asking what will happen or who will win, you know, the current, you know, table of best LLM for this, but rather what you like to know to happen. What would be nice thing to happen. You let me know that that's, let's say it's happenable, like it can happen. But now within your field of expertise.

Greg Zakowicz [01:08:48]:
Let'S say, I would love to be able to have a firm understanding of how agentic AI fits into the shopping ecosystem for brands and be able to articulately and accurately talk to people about that. It moves so quick. Like there is literally something every single day on agent AI that rolls out and it's hard to keep up with. At some point it's kind of going to settle down a bit, but still be like we're a few years away at least from once you get it working. Consumers need to then adopt it and trust it. And it's got to work perfectly. Otherwise, adoption slows. But at some point it's going to uptick.

Greg Zakowicz [01:09:38]:
That's going to take time. It's just consumer behavior. It does with everything. But at some point you might see that hockey stick. But a year from now, I'd love to be able to look at these and be like, okay, I know offhand Perplexity does XYZ and ABC and they're testing this and Google is doing this and Apple is doing this and Meta is doing this. I think Meta's want to launch out for a year, you know, and look at all these things and be able to just ramble that off top of my tongue, you know, top of my head and talk about it as articulately as I can about email. I would love for that to happen. I think it's probably going to be a challenge and I would love for that to happen.

Maciej Nowak [01:10:12]:
Beautiful answer. I liked it.

Maciej Nowak [01:10:13]:
I like it. All right, Greg, it was pleasure to have you on the podcast and I hope our path will cross one day. Now in. In I conference in a word camp, whatever, shop talk. We'll see. Thank you so much for being here.

Greg Zakowicz [01:10:31]:
Awesome. Thanks for having me. I enjoy the conversation today. This was fun.

Lector [01:10:34]:
If you like what you've just heard, don't forget to subscribe for more episodes. On the other hand, if you've got a question we haven't answered yet, feel free to reach out to us directly. Just go to osomstudio.com/contact thanks for listening and see you in the next episode of the Osom to Know podcast.