A Conversation With Chloë Thomas of eCommerce Masterplan

With 5 books and 2 full-time podcasts on ecommerce bearing her name, it's fair to label Chloe Thomas as an expert in the space.

This conversation about ecommerce, email and marketing proves it. It's also fun! Chloe and host Matthew Dunn trade observations about the incredible evolution of e-everything — commerce, marketing, mail and more. Shopify gets tossed back and forth, along with Klaviyo and Amazon.

There's also a tiny bit of wandering down memory lane — stone knives and payment gateways kind of stuff. :-)

TRANSCRIPT

A Conversation With Chloë Thomas

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[00:00:00]

[00:00:09] Good morning. It's Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. Not morning for my guest. Chloë Thomas. We're talking from the, from the uk, correct. Chloë? Yes. Yeah. Done in the far southwest of the country. Yeah, far Southwest. Well, welcome and nice to, nice to connect. Luck. This will be our first conversation, right?

[00:00:25] Mm-hmm. , we didn't plan all this in advance, even though it's gonna be brilliant. Hopefully brilliant. Might go terribly wrong, but we'll find out. Won't we? , I'm, I'm a little intimidated cuz you're, you're a pro, you run two separate pro podcasts. Your yourself, it's e-commerce master plan and keep optimizing.

[00:00:40] Do I have that right? Y you do have that right? Yes. Uh, we've got e-commerce master plan, I interview retailers about how they're running their e-commerce store and that's been going since 2015. And then, Yeah. Uh, keep optimizing is all about marketing for e-commerce. So each month we focus on a [00:01:00] different topic.

[00:01:01] Okay. So we might do email marketing just for a month, so we try to fit it all into one month. Um, and then each week I interview experts on the topic. Oh, wow. And why the focus in e-commerce? Why, why the interest? Um, I accidentally ended up working in e-commerce in the early two thousands as I was trying to escape the world of banking

[00:01:22] That was the first place I got offered a job. Yeah. So, um, I have been in e-commerce ever since. I've run an agency for 10 years. I've worked client side. Um, I've been a consultant and a coach, and these days I'm lucky enough just to. Think and listen and speak, which is a, a hugely lucky space to be in. But it's a, it's a space that's endlessly fascinating.

[00:01:49] Endlessly, you are being unduly modest because, uh, five books, you've actually five books on the topic. So, uh, yeah, the, the [00:02:00] thinking and then the hard work of writing and making it clear and communicating it to people. Yeah, which is the, um, the hard, the hard bit is creating content of value, creating content's quite easy, especially with all the AI stuff that's going on at the moment.

[00:02:15] But creating content that people value and get on well with is, um, is the difficult bit. Yeah. Some, yeah. That actually makes a difference in sticks and things like that. Um, so let's work e-commerce a bit backwards since you've been in this space, uh, a while. And as maybe I'll share, I have as well. What, what's different now from when you started in the e-commerce space?

[00:02:41] In many ways, very little. Okay. We're still trying to do the same things. Consumers are still broadly the same, although their, their desire for connection has grown. But the really big thing that's changed is how easy to use the tech is and how cost effective the tech is. When I, [00:03:00] in my first job in e-commerce, we were talking about building a welcome campaign, an email welcome campaign from sign up.

[00:03:08] Through a series of session of emails that would get 'em to buy. Yeah. And I remember writing out pages and pages of scope and brief of how I wanted this done, to send to some techie who would then quote me three grand, you know, 3000 to build it. Yeah. And now you can, with a free program, you can set it up in minutes.

[00:03:29] Yeah. But yet so many marketers still fail to do it and still fail to do it well. So the tech has. In many ways lowered the boundaries to entry, which means we have to be better marketers, but still many businesses are failing to find the time to be better marketers. Right. And while I agree about the tech making it easier, um, it doesn't mean that there's not too many choices of.

[00:03:58] Tech and tech [00:04:00] stacks and this is the right welcome series and no, you should do it that way. Like it, there's an overwhelming amount of, of stuff to choose from and I think it's easy to get paralysis and not, not do it right. Oh, so easy. And you know, I have, I've been in those businesses where there's a massive whiteboard with the mo whiteboard on the wall.

[00:04:23] Yeah. With the most amazingly complicated email flows going on, which the world of quizzes, you know, and zero party data has just made that, oh, I could ask 20 questions and they'd each have these individual, it's like, no guys. One, see how it goes. And, and I say that with passion because I am someone who would want to create the most perfect stream of emails in the world, , and then build the whole thing.

[00:04:47] And I have to hold myself back cuz it's, it's very easy to, to do a lot of work in a, in any of these areas. Um, but not. Create anything that works. [00:05:00] So, so the tech, the, the ease of the tech is both a blessing and a curse I think sometimes. Yeah. And I mean, I'll put my techy hat on. I, I, I think the, the, the ease of a lot of tech tech stacks and tools, it's easy at the front end, but answering that longer term question of, Can we live with it, grow with it, manage it, keep track of it is, is not necessarily as turn turnkey.

[00:05:25] Like there's a lot of dusty forgotten out of date, uh, abandoned shopping cart messages out there in the world, right? It's like, oh, well, oh yeah, we, we still run that, don't we? Yeah. . Well, it's like there's. There's a reason my PO, one of my podcasts is called Keep Optimizing. And it's because prior to it becoming a podcast, it's my own personal mantra, which is built out of, or, or evolved out of my frustration where I still had a marketing agency.

[00:05:53] We did a bit of email marketing, but we primarily did Google ads for people. Okay. And my frustration of someone coming and going, oh, could you take a look at our [00:06:00] Google ad, see if you could help us. Yeah. And I'd log in and they were paying like a thousand pounds a month and no one had logged in in 12 months.

[00:06:08] and you're like, okay, here's, here's my budget and here's what I would charge you to fix this and to make it work for you. And you know, back in those days we were charging maybe 300 pounds, 500 pounds for our entry level. So like half the, what they were spending, they go, oh no, we can't afford that. I'm like, really?

[00:06:24] Really? Right? Really? Um, so you'll just give Google a thousand pounds. But it's exactly the same with with email. We put. The, the joy and the power of all marketing is in doing it, seeing how it works and optimizing it, and you've gotta have that regular process of optimization. Whatever your marketing channel is, or you are not gonna get the results.

[00:06:46] Anyone who thinks they can do anything once in marketing, whether it's a post-purchase campaign Yeah. Or whether it's Google Ads or Facebook ads, or TikTok, and get amazing results with their first go is delusional. Because even if you get [00:07:00] great results, you can get better results if you go back and reiterate Yeah.

[00:07:03] Sorry, getting a bit ranty there, Matthew. Sorry. No, no, no, no. I, I, I, I, I, I get it. I get it. And, and even if you get stellar. You know, people times, markets, they're going to change, right? You can't, you can't ignore it. You can't ignore stuff for 12 months. I, I, I, I equip, um, my, my son is starting up his own business and he was sweating his way through website.

[00:07:27] Oh, it's not done yet. I said, it's a process, not a product. You will never be done. Your website? Never Just get it live. Yeah, get it live and then Yeah. You, yeah. You know the drill. Um, yeah. Tell, tell me a bit about God. Do you call 'em your customers? Tell me a bit about the people who you help and serve with, uh, with the work that you do as a podcaster, as an author.

[00:07:51] Um, I, who do they tend to be? I tend to call them an audience these days. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Um, I'm trying to get in that habit. , they are. [00:08:00] They are people working at or running e-commerce stores, so think Shopify or BigCommerce, something like that. Yeah, we come maybe, um, yeah, they might be, they might be selling via physical store as well, but they're selling some kind of product to consumers via an online Okay.

[00:08:16] Their own online store. And we, we surveyed them earlier this year and the size of business seems to kind of mirror the industry. . So we don't get many startups, pretty much everyone's already up and running, but they go from a hundred thousand turnover up to like 10 million turnover. Mm-hmm. , um, across where, where they are.

[00:08:35] So it's the whole industry, but I try and pitch it at the smaller guys, what we do. Mm-hmm. , because I, I find if you do the content for the smaller guys, the big guys like it as well because they actually still need to know the same. A lot of the time or they get to feel smug because they're learning things.

[00:08:50] Um, , you know, they go, oh, I already do that. Okay, we're good. We can take that box. , you, you, um, in the, in the, in the curve. You just drew in the [00:09:00] air there. If someone's listening, um, I find intriguing because you can't talk about e-commerce and not end up talking about Amazon at some point, but I'm gonna assume Amazon is not necessarily.

[00:09:13] The, the core audience for you? No, not at all. And um, it's, , it's an area I st I've always tried to steer clear of. Mm-hmm. from a keywords perspective, if nothing else. Cuz a lot of Amazon sellers are FBA sellers, which was is one of these kind of side hustle topics that people get into. Yeah. And my audience very much aren't side hustlers.

[00:09:38] They're, they're doing it. They're developing. Yeah, they've not gone, oh look, we need a gar. Everyone's buying garlic presses. We better create a garlic press. They're a bit more bought into their own brand than that, so I've avoided it because you kind of end up going down that rabbit hole. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . But interesting, in that same se survey we ran, um, a few months ago, my audience are more likely to be [00:10:00] wholesaling their products to other retailers than they are to be listed on.

[00:10:05] Makes sense actually. Yeah, makes sense. Um, it gets back to what, what you were saying at the beginning about how tools and tech have made many tasks easier. I suspect one of the temptations for the side hustle, I'll sell it on Amazon, is it, is, it looks like almost everything's done for you. So, gee, why don't I do that?

[00:10:26] Like, if everything's done for you, then what's your actual value and control in the equation would be my question to those tempt. Well there is, um, cuz we, we do cover bits of marketplaces, you know, kind of that bigger Amazon, eBay, et cetera piece across the things I do because it's actually, if you are a big brand selling via those channels, it's really hard to find the content that speaks to you are not, um, the specific Amazon seller because you've got a whole other load of like, brand restrictions.

[00:10:58] How do you deal with your wholesale [00:11:00] customers and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And, and actually the. One of the reasons why I suspect people are selling on selling wholesale rather than Amazon is cuz wholesale is a, is another business model. Yeah. But it's not a particularly difficult business model to get your head around.

[00:11:16] Whereas to sell well on Amazon or eBay or the others, you have to really learn how to play that business model game. and it's, it's intense. It's about keeping your stock in and if the sales suddenly go up, you need the stock to feed that hungry monster. Otherwise you will never rank again. Ba I, I massively simplify.

[00:11:36] Yeah. Um, you know, there's a whole SEO strategy, there's an ad strategy. It's like duplicating all the workload again, but. Kind of pivoting the knowledge by about 90 degrees , you've gotta kinda like fully relearn. So it's, it's, they're really, really tricky marketplaces to, to get them to work for these. Yeah.

[00:11:55] I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm totally in, I'm, I'm not surprised to hear you say that where, where the, the wholesaler your, [00:12:00] your customer says, well, we also we're really good at making socks, so if someone wants to play that, on Amazon or eBay with our socks like giddy up, they'll get a cut out of it. Uh, we don't , we don't want it.

[00:12:14] We're staying away from it. It's your keep optimizing mon mantra, but the volume goes to 11 on those markets cuz it can change overnight or if you get good at it, some guy will clone everything. and sell the same, right, same stuff. Yeah. And you're trying to deal with, with that one, those are my images that you're using on your store.

[00:12:35] Don't do that, right, ? Well, yeah. It's like, um, earlier this week I found, uh, someone giving away my book on a website somewhere. Which, you know, it's one of those dangers of being an author as you just, uh, you know, at some point someone will, will scan it or will do something and will be giving it away to people who sign up to the website.

[00:12:55] And you, you could get all litigious about it, just go, Ugh. But [00:13:00] it took me, me 20 minutes to find your website. So I suspect I'm okay and it's not gonna affect me too much. And at least the content's out there. So yeah, you, it can be, it can get complex. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, um, The thing that intrigues me about those, those big markets I mentioned Amazon, you through, through, uh, eBay, the mix, which, which, uh, which I was glad to hear as well.

[00:13:22] Um, there's a natural market structure that was gonna show up in e-commerce in other spaces, right? It's gonna be a power curve. There's gonna be whales, there's gonna be minnows and, and the mid-size fish at who have to learn how to do this whole game. And, and you are helping them men as mid-size fish, you know, not.

[00:13:41] Uh, figure out how to do this as more and more and more commerce moves into the digital space. Right. Shift. That's not gonna reverse itself. Um, sometimes the big guy set set some of the rules for the game, and sometimes they're like, they're the, they're the frame and everybody else is playing against them.

[00:13:59] I'm [00:14:00] really intrigued with, I'm assuming you work a lot with Shopify and I've been mm-hmm. watching Shopify evolve for the last, those have been eight, 10 years, like really interesting. Counter to Amazon cuz they're sort of arming everybody, minnow and fish, mid-sized fish to, to compete pretty darn well.

[00:14:18] Right? With that, yeah, with that big guy. Yeah. I mean, What, you know, there's, there's forever. The, um, the thought of what if Shopify creates a marketplace? Um, you know, I don't think they're ever gonna do it. No. Uh, because it just, I think it would become a distraction. But I, I have to say the, how the existence of Shopify has changed the industry as well as just the fascination of Shopify and how they've gone.

[00:14:46] Building what they've built is, it's fascinating and it's one of the most interesting things about it for the industry is, you know, e-commerce is a, is it's a useless word, basically because one [00:15:00] person's e-commerce is a direct dispatch, c b D oil, um, that they're selling all over Canada or something. And then another person's idea of e-commerce is Walmart.

[00:15:10] And then another person's idea of e-commerce is the table booking system on a. , um, for a hotel or something. It's really, it's a really amorphous term. Yeah. It's like, it's, it's like commerce. Only there's an e in front of us, right? . It's one of the, you know, it's one of the, one of the most useless words in the world for people.

[00:15:29] People having different definitions and the number of businesses who now identify themselves as Shopify businesses is phenomenal. Interesting. It's a real. It's become really tribal in the industry, which is something which we never really had before. No one was that kind of connected to it, which I think is partly because it was a game changer and it was an easy way to do it.

[00:15:53] So a lot of the noisy people who were going, I've done this, you could follow in my footsteps. They were all about the Shopify [00:16:00] factor and then the way Shopify have developed their partner program mm-hmm. with their agencies. Has become kind of cult-like as well. It's been a cult, like's a bit bit too strong, but it's a really, it's something which never existed in the space and it's really fascinating to see it.

[00:16:18] Hmm. Partially, I suspect it's because Shopify has done, has done a fantastic job. , uh, serving their, serving their customers. Like they, they really, they really have, uh, what you said at the beginning about how, how much easier things are. It's like, yeah. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Here's a story just for your reaction.

[00:16:40] Um, I told, I talked with a guest about this the other day. Um, I live in a small town in the Pacific Northwest in, uh, in the us. Bellingham happens to have a terrific farmer's market, one of the best in the country. Mm-hmm. . . There's a guy who sells hot sauce at a, you know, small stand there. [00:17:00] So this guy, funky hot sauce.

[00:17:01] Look him up. His hot sauce won top in the world about two months ago. Wow. Like Nuro uno, rip your head off. Hot, hot sauce top in the world. And I had read, saw an article in the paper, cuz you know, Bellingham shows up in my newsfeed next, next Saturday. I'm walking through the market, I see him, I'm buzzed over there.

[00:17:22] I'm like, Hey, congratulations. Like, I didn't know it was happening. And he said, our website has gone completely bananas. We actually, and he said this, I was like, oh no. He said, we actually had to shut, we actually had to shut down taking orders. And I'm like, oh, no man, because they couldn't keep, he and his wife are, you know, up until three in the morning fulfilling orders and stuff.

[00:17:44] Oh. And so I said, well, so what are you gonna do? Well, you know, it was a GoDaddy and blah, blah blah. So we're gonna move to Shopify. Came out of his mouth, right, came out of his mouth. Like they've got that kind of, uh, mojo. Even [00:18:00] for some guy who really doesn't know anything about, I don't think he knows anything about e-commerce, just judging from, from the comments he made, but they're seen as the viable step.

[00:18:10] for something that's starting to scale and, you know, obviously move beyond the hobby stage. Yeah. And they, they've just removed the barriers to entry completely. You know, I, I talked about scoping out the welcome campaign earlier, back in the early days of, of my career, you were, you know, to get a basic e-commerce site up off the ground.

[00:18:27] You were talking 20, 30,000 back then. Now you do your Shopify subscription. Pay, you know, tens of dollars. Check, check, check, check, check, publish, and, and you're up and running. Yeah. You know, it's actually easier than setting up a WordPress site, . I mean, it's, yes, it's, no, you're absolutely right. It is. Yeah.

[00:18:47] And then the, the other thing which they've done really well on, if you can contrast them to WordPress, is because it's a commercial organization, they've. They've really, um, restricted access to the app [00:19:00] part. You know how if you're on a WordPress website and you're installing a plugin, you're like, , hope this is a gonna work, and is it gonna kill anything?

[00:19:07] Yeah. On Shopify, you know, trying to get listed in the Shopify app store is not easy. I know many people who've tried to do it and have failed, and it's very, very complicated. It's very hard to get an app in there and, It's, but it gives the con the, the, the Shopify customer, the, um, confidence in the, the, yeah, the confidence.

[00:19:29] That's it. The confidence that they know whatever they're gonna get is gonna work with their software and it's not gonna break it and it's been vetted, et cetera. Well, I'll give you, I'll give you an analogy since you used App Store. It's, uh, it, it fits, um, , you know, windows computer, right. Which I don't use anymore.

[00:19:45] You could screw the thing up big time by installing the wrong fill in the blanks, print drivers or whatever else like mess, iPhone, Android phone. Like we, we blithely go, oh yeah, that's in the app store. I'll stick it on my device. [00:20:00] And remarkably everything just keeps working. Mm-hmm. and app A doesn't screw up everything else.

[00:20:04] And it sounds like Shopify has, has made that. Platform play and done the, the hard investment and policy work to say you, you don't just get to list yourself and, and do stuff cuz you might break our customer's store. Yeah. Which, which then also has the impact now with the scale that they've got to that.

[00:20:24] Most of the people who've put the apps in the stores, if you go to their website, they talk Shopify app first. Yes. Yes. And then further down the page will be, we also integrate with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. , but because the, the, um, the ecosystem, the noise is so great around Shopify.

[00:20:41] They always talk Shopify app first, and they'll, you know, you'll see their stands at events will have the Shopify integration bigger and more obvious than any of the others, which is it? Is it? Wow. It's just, it's just fascinating seeing how strategically altered the, um, altered the industry. Yeah. [00:21:00] Well, and, and I think, you know, like, like the mobile device that just works, I think ultimately, Th there's a, there's a huge service there.

[00:21:09] Let me, let me contrast. I, you know, I, I happen to have an iPhone iOS device with WordPress website. How's this for an analogy you don't often hear like, I've worked with WordPress websites, I hate 'em. They drive me nuts cuz it's so easy for the dang thing to break. and then if you get it all working a month later, it's like this needs to update that and the wrong php.

[00:21:30] And I'm like, oh, geeing at Christmas. This is like such a stack of tinker toys. I can't believe anybody uses it. You get the hardcore, I'm gonna roll my own e commerce guy. Mm-hmm. , who loves the fact that she or he can do that fight. Good on you. Go for it. You can probably do stuff you couldn't do anywhere else, but you're going to end up being an amateur software develop.

[00:21:52] if you go down that road, cuz you're holding all those bits together. Well that's it. Shopify, that's the huge thing. Whi, [00:22:00] which Shopify did was that? Well, they won. They lowered the bow, the barrel. Barriers to entry. The other thing which they did was they took a load of things off your plate. You know, I've, I've been in the mail, or I started off in the mail order industry in e-commerce.

[00:22:12] So I go to the big mail order gatherings in the uk and there would be at least two sessions with a lot of people moaning about going, what? What have you got in your payment processing deal? Oh, you've got better than me. Who did you get that from? You know, , they were just obsessed with payment processing deals.

[00:22:29] And Shopify took those tab, or We'll, we'll just process it for you. These are the deals. They're they're pretty good. Take it. Yeah. Um, you don't have to worry about all the setup 3D secure and all that horrible stuff. We are just gonna do it for you. Brilliant. I don't need a finance director for a while longer.

[00:22:43] Yeah. They went here is we've given you a basic workable, um, order dispatch system, which is gonna get you X far and then you can integrate it with something else later. Brilliant. I don't need a head of ops at this point in time. Right. Then they went, um, you know, we are gonna worry about the hosting for you.

[00:22:59] [00:23:00] I mean, that was groundbreaking. Yes. Well, I don't, I don't have to do volume Yes. Predictions anymore. Yeah. For those people. Cool. So, you know, the uptime of your website was there and they. It was such a restrictive platform. You know, one of the reasons WordPress is a nightmare is because you have access to everything, which is awful.

[00:23:20] Um, for, for 95% of us, that is not a good thing. And Shopify went, oh no, of course you can't change the checkout, right? We built the checkout, get out the checkout, go and work on something more valuable for your business. Yeah. So as a business owner with an idea and the ability to create a product, You didn't have to worry about that bedrock stuff in e-commerce or that obsi stuff was just done and you could just go and deal with products and customers and growth and that was such a game changer in the space.

[00:23:52] The restriction ends up being freeing exactly as is so often the case. This is so often the case. It's really, [00:24:00] it's intriguing. Now let's, let's, let's use that as a little side step into email, which is an interesting topic too, I hear. Um, Shopify put a hundred million dollar investment into Clavio like six months ago.

[00:24:13] Yes. I would assume it has something to do with the fact that Clavio have, I think 80% of Shopify stores have downloaded Clavio big number. Yeah. So you, you'd want that on your, on your, uh, you, you'd wanna have some skin in that game. Yeah. I, I believe now I, I'm not deep into the VC capital world that goes on in the e-commerce space.

[00:24:38] I read the occasional LinkedIn post on this, so if I get this wrong, everyone apologies. I'll just caveat that front . I believe this is, this is believed to be a method that Shopify have done before, which is they've gone in, they've seen something getting big and trusted in the ecosystem. They've put money in and then they've gone deeper later.

[00:24:56] So I suspect it's heading in that route. But [00:25:00] when I saw the news come in, I was kinda like, all right, next email. You know, , it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't that surprising. Right? It wasn't like, you know, if they put the money into, I dunno, some, some email system I'd never heard of. I'd have been, If they put it into Infusionsoft or something, I'd have been, whoa, that's a bit left field and a terrible idea.

[00:25:21] No, they renamed themselves. Keep, yeah, . I, once upon a time, I was an Infusionsoft certified, um, person. Can't, what the name then, and then there's a recovery group for that. I hear . Yes. Yeah, I believe there is. I know some of the UK we're all in recovery together. Um, talking of over of, of the WordPress scenario of having too much access.

[00:25:42] Right, right, right. And too much and to, and, uh, restriction is freeing or, or the opposite. Um. So what you're saying, and I agree with you, is that the, the, the, the make it easier. Just take care of this function like investment in Clavio is, is a step in the direction of, look. Eventually we're gonna make [00:26:00] that difficult, complicated thing called email even more turnkey, right?

[00:26:04] Sign up and you go, yeah. Fill in these boxes for your nurture series. What's a Nurture series? Shut up. There's the Nurture series. Fill in these boxes. Don't ask questions. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, I mean, I, I assume there's, it's gonna lead deeper integrations for Collo than anyone else with the system, which, I mean, they're pretty deep in there already.

[00:26:24] Yeah. Yeah. But I, I doubt it's going to lead to. Merge of the brand. I suspect Clavio will remain as a brand on its own. Um, I don't think it'll become Shopify email. I don't think they'll, they'll go that way because I think there's too much brand equity in the two brands. And I don't, also don't think sh um, Shopify want to kick off the other email providers.

[00:26:45] Yeah, you're probably, yeah, you're, you're, you're probably right. Um, I'll, I'll throw an analogy out, um, into it. Buying Mail Champ. What about a year ago? Was that, that was a. Huh? What, what, what it was like, you can hear the, [00:27:00] you can hear the, the gears come to a halt. I'm like, Hmm. And I've, I had into it as a, a client in past ventures, and I have a lot of respect for the corporate smart, and culturally, that's a very, that's a, that's a very effective machine.

[00:27:16] And I'm like, why'd they do that? Uh, let's see. I'll bet the. between mm-hmm. , MailChimp customers and into a customers is massive, and I don't think they'll kill it as a. Yeah, because the brand equity's too good. But I suspect the more and more into it, you know, customers and users will, oh, mail champion. It fits and it's tied in more tightly and stuff like it get, it ends up being the privileged, preferred, you know, default client, so to speak, for that particular function.

[00:27:45] And that's a lovely thing. It's like, yeah, X percent of people use the built-in email client on their. For their Gmail account. Why? Because it's built in and it's already there. And I filled in three boxes and all my Gmail comes into it, so that's fine. Right? [00:28:00] Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a better equation.

[00:28:02] Didn't have to fuss around with yet another setup. And Clavio probably a similar thing for, uh, for Shopify customers. Um, what, what, how much do you, uh, talk, uh, talk, think, and advise about advising the abstract sense about, uh, the role of texting in commerce? Text is a, is a one of those really interesting ones that people keep saying is gonna be huge next year.

[00:28:29] Um, and it's driving good results for people, but it's such a intrusive marketing method, you know, it's like, I, I get text, text slash WhatsApps from friends and from banks. Right. And delivery. So it's either service based stuff, which I wanna know about quickly, or it's, um, friends who I wanna know about.

[00:28:54] Yeah. I don't want to be hearing about your 20% off sale and so forth, you know? Yeah. So, [00:29:00] We often cover SMS and text marketing, you know, on the show. And we'll always add in the caveat, please do not duplicate your email automations into your s m s activity. Please don't do that. Um, do look at, should you be running s m s?

[00:29:19] Does it fit for your business? Can you do, cause I think there's, there's a role for an abandoned bark basket, sms. There's a role for a, your, um, your loyalty. Points are gonna run out next month. Sure. Those kind of servicey elements. Yeah. To get the, the delivery updates coming from your brand instead of the courier.

[00:29:38] Yeah. It's worth what, it's, it's interesting in there, but I think the, you know, the 20% off sale now on side of it maybe for your loyalist customers, but I can't see that. that becoming big anytime soon because I think it, most retailers at the moment have massive overstock and a whole load of stock they need to shift because [00:30:00] everyone bought too much.

[00:30:02] I'd be massively generalizing here, but it's, it's gonna be one, you're gonna hear the industry talking about it a lot for the next year or so. Um, and if, if text was as powerful as everyone was saying, we would be getting a lot of text messages right now from the companies we're, we're subscribed to saying, Uh, you need to buy this stock cuz we've got too much, we're doing big discounts.

[00:30:22] So I think if it doesn't, if it doesn't become hugely adopted for traditional marketing by, you know, January time, you know, the, the January sales 2023, then we're not gonna see it coming huge anytime soon. I, I like your distinction. You know, service and service c versus marketing. And I think that's a great line to put in the sand on conversations about, about, uh, messaging channels generically, because they are so intrusive.

[00:30:53] I, I signed up for a couple of brands. One I like. I've got this whole drawer full of identical, [00:31:00] uh, brand T-shirts. Right? My wife's crazy, but I like the T-shirt. So I signed up for their text messaging. Um, and I'm thinking, is this gonna backfire on these guys? Because as I get more t-shirt, socks, whatever, from this company, they're just training me to wait another week cuz it'll go on sale.

[00:31:17] Mm-hmm. because all they ever have to say is blah, blah, blah is on special with a yada yada percent discount over and over and over. Okay. I don't need those. But if, if I got a stock up on t-shirts for the summer, oh, somewhere in the next month or two, they'll cut the price by a ridiculous amount, and then I'll pounce.

[00:31:36] So they're just training me to wait and pay 'em less. Huh. And it really is annoying. Like ? God, yes. The daily pop-up from the, you know, the t-shirt guys, like, that's not that interesting. And they're not even, there's no, there's no variety. There's no like, It's, it's pretty dumb , marketing wise. Well, the thing is, I think you have [00:32:00] to, I often say, you know, you shouldn't be going, we need to do more sms.

[00:32:05] We need to do more Facebook ads. We need to do more email. You should be saying, we need to get more sales from our existing customers who like buying this product. How do we do that? How do we do that? And then finding the marketing method, the marketing strategy, the marketing messaging that works. And I think.

[00:32:20] I think SMS is still in that category of things, which we're all like, oh, that's really cool. It's a really good idea. It's still the techies telling us how we should use it, and the brands haven't yet found the really cool ways to use it, which we've often seen in the, in the e-commerce space, is some tech comes along and everyone goes, oh, you're gonna use it for this?

[00:32:39] And we go, okay. Which, oh no, we actually end up using it for this. Yeah. Which is awesome at, but we totally skirted around what the creators thought it was happening, like, yeah. Yeah. I was having this, this debate about AI chatbots the other day on LinkedIn and, um, no hot topic that. Yeah. Saying about how, you know, we'll be replacing our customer service teams with [00:33:00] AI chatbots, and I'm like, I don't think we will.

[00:33:02] But I think what we will be doing, and this is being proven in various spaces, is that an AI chatbot deployed in certain spaces can improve customer service levels and free up the humans to do the more in-depth stuff. Like, where's my order? I've lost my tracking code. Yeah. I can't find my discount code.

[00:33:24] Those things, which it's very easy to give a chop chat bot to deal with and where the consumer wants the answer straight away, you know, faster than a human can type. Yeah. Let alone reads the message in the first place. But I don't think going. AI chatbot run my run, my run, my customer service is ever gonna work.

[00:33:41] You know? Cause we have this whole, your chatbots will take a, you know, build all these flows. We go back to flows again and whiteboard, , you know, build this in your chatbot automation and your life will be brilliant. It's like, yeah, but humans aren't. Not, that's, you didn't draw and I'm gonna run right into it and go, this [00:34:00] sucks.

[00:34:00] I hate you. Right. Why? Yes. You didn't plan the box for me. Right, . Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, we're, we're messy, but we're impatient. I like, I like your notion about, you know, about that, that kind of fit because where there's, we're really, it's helped me, helped me navigate the. For the energy your company and chatbot was like, oh, hey, I'm happy to do that.

[00:34:20] Right? Wire me into inventory, supply orders and all that other stuff and I'll answer questions all day long and, and, and you won't have to give me a pension either, so yay for a chatbot there, right? But. You have a really easy breakout. Give me another human being. Uh, cuz we'll want that. Uh, yeah. What's your, uh, I'm curious your, your thoughts about the AI's, uh, sudden and kind of unexpected invasion into the world of art and visuals.

[00:34:50] Yeah. Um, I'm , I've been in the industry. I've been in the marketing industry for 20 years, e-commerce for nearly 20 years. I'm now quite jaded, [00:35:00] when new things come along. So back in the day I would get super excited by them, you know, and lose a day, you know, like flick up on Twitter. I go, whoa, wow. I need to go and, you know, chase that down.

[00:35:10] These days, I tend to sit back and wait and see what happens. So I think it's, I think it's interesting, but I don't think that, or AI copy creation is the full solution. You know, I, I quite like the idea of next time I run a big event I'll get the headshot and I'll get some AI thing to make them look pretty and like someone graphically designed them.

[00:35:32] Maybe I might do that. Yeah, yeah. Um, I might try and stave off bothering to get some new headshots done, you know, which has been on the to-do list for the last two years. By AIing somewhere. I don't know. Yeah. Um, and you know, next time I'm trying to come up with some content ideas, I might use some AI text bots to flesh some things out for me or give me, gimme a starting point, but I don't think it's gonna be the final piece.

[00:35:57] you know, um, I saw, saw an [00:36:00] example on, um, LinkedIn just today of someone who'd, um, who'd been putting in why, you know, trying to get a text bot to write articles based on a question. And they put in the question, why is an abacus more effective than a calculator ? And they got two paragraphs back explaining why you should be doing all your calculations on a, you know, on a bead and wire abacus.

[00:36:21] Cause it was better. And it's like, It still depends on the intelligence of the human being answering the question in the first place. So when that whole squishy area, uh, whi which, which will affect how these things fit as tools of, of the ethics design of the AI engines like you. Okay. Ai, you should answer the question, the human poses.

[00:36:44] Okay. If I pose the question is, tell me why an abacus is better than calculator and you do that. , uh, the, those of us with horse sands who are actually humans go. Yeah. That No , right? Yeah. Song. I don't think so. Um, I, I [00:37:00] do quite like the idea of, um, I've no idea how to do this yet. I believe it's probably possible, but feeding the text of all my books and everything I've written over the years.

[00:37:09] Into an AI chat bot and then getting it to write a load of tweets for me. I quite like that as an idea. Well, you, so the, so it's trained on me trained and then it could just, well, artists are having this debate right now, because let's say, let's take that as a strong man. This is a good closing discussion.

[00:37:26] So if someone did that right, did the, you know, Chloë bot, um, and someone else said, wow, I'm gonna have brilliant marketing tweets going out all day written by the Chloë bot. Would you be going, uh, hang, hang on a minute. Like, that's my stuff inside the machine there. Like, um, I think it would depend on how that was.

[00:37:52] Attributed back, you know, if they said, if it was clearly, obviously obvious that they'd trained the Chloë bot on [00:38:00] Chloë's stuff and they were linking back to Chloë. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, you know, I, I trade in free noise basically, you know. My content is 99% of it is free to consume and the, you know, the books are less than a five are on Kindle, so they're essentially free to consume as well.

[00:38:18] Yeah. So I don't have a problem with that as long as it's attributed back. I have seen a few artists Yes. Getting quite Yes. You know, in the world of, of art, getting quite annoyed at it being done. And I think that is, um, , you know, if, because if, if someone is sharing my, my Chloë bot words for free, uh, but, but linking back to my content, then they're prob probably gonna drive me some more listeners, some more readers, et cetera.

[00:38:46] Sure. So I benefit it from in some way. But if you are an artist who is creating Yeah. I dunno, 30, 40 artworks a year. Yeah. Yeah. And all of a sudden a bunch of 'em are showing up that look like your stuff. And that like [00:39:00] is w was. Your, your, your core value. The thing like the thing that brought people to you with check.

[00:39:06] Um, and all of a sudden it's like cloning, you know, in the style of fill in the blanks, one of the art bots has actually removed the style, style of parameter. I think because of this, because of this very debate and. I don't know. Like I, I, I don't think we'll settle this verbally, and I don't think we'll settle this anytime soon, , but it, it does open up some pretty profound, interesting, challenging questions.

[00:39:35] Um, and, and mar marketing marketers pretty big. Pretty big. Uh, Consumers of creative. It's one, one of the reasons I've been looking at the, at the, uh, generative, generative AI space, like Hmm. As a tool, not as a solution. Mm-hmm. , I think we're going to, I think we're gonna do more stuff and we're like, Hey, draft a, draft a [00:40:00] webpage for me.

[00:40:01] I'm not gonna hit publish, but draft it for me so I can go in and go, oh, change. . Nah. Rewrite that. That's pretty good. We'll keep that and Right. It'll be faster. It's just, you know, it, it'll make stuff easier. That was hard, like you said about Shopify at the very beginning. Yes. Yeah, I think, I think there's a place in it.

[00:40:19] I think it's, I mean, we've had, we've had AI running on e-commerce sites for a while and oh, it's one of those areas where we've seen people say, no, it's gonna do all of this for you, and then actually it does this bit. And then you still have to do this bit to get the best results out of it. And I think, I think we're at the cusp of it, and we will see over time whether useful.

[00:40:40] Uses of it as a tool are, uh, we shall, we shall see, we shall see. Closing questions so I can free up the rest of your, cuz you're near the end of the day there. Uh, do you yourself, uh, keep and grow, uh, any sort of email list for either of your, uh, podcast? [00:41:00] We have one centralized list that we keep and grow for the overall business.

[00:41:06] Okay. That's terribly segmented. Um, , but , but yeah. Okay. Okay. It's like, so it's, it's the, it's the plumber's, you know, plumber's wife question. Right. It's okay. Talk about email. How do you do it yourself? Like, we're awful at our email list. And I know it , even though I'm talking about email with people all the time, like, uh, because it's a lot of work.

[00:41:28] It's still a lot of. I mean, we've, we've got about 6,000 clean on the list, cuz I keep it regularly cleaned. Um, but we've got about 300 signed up to each podcast list. Nice. Okay. Because, um, I did a bad job of organizing that, the beginning of the process, so I'm trying to get more people on the individual podcast list, but Yeah, yeah.

[00:41:50] You know. Yeah. It, it, it, it, it, it's one of those, like, there's never, there's no end to the stuff you need to do to keep a. Running. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we've got a relatively [00:42:00] good welcome campaign that I did check about two months ago, so it's not horrendously out of date. optimized baby optimized . Yeah.

[00:42:08] Worries. It's on my list to, to re revisit relatively frequently, so, okay. We're not, we're not totally terrible, but, um, not perfect either. So, Chloë, where do, where should I, where should people who are listening go to, you know, learn even more from. If you head to e-commerce master plan.com, you will find links to my podcast books and all the things I'm up to and ways of signing up to my list as well.

[00:42:31] If you wanna see how well slash badly I do my own email marketing . Cool. Perfect. Well, let's wrap on that one. Chloë, it's been absolute gas talking with you. It's been marvelous talking with you too, Matthew. Thank you. All right, we're out.

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