← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
Intuit Mailchimp's Head of Email Product discusses removing friction from martech
00:23:37
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- [00:00]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [00:20]
Stamps.com Announcer
Still waiting in line Again, that's time you will never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply
- [00:52]
Greg Kilstrom
hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile Brand, and here's a question for you. What's the hidden tax that your organization pays every time a creative asset moves from a design tool to a marketing platform? And how can you shorten the time to gain important insights about how your campaigns perform? Agility requires more than just speed. It demands that we eliminate the friction between our systems and processes so that teams can move from concept to customer with minimal translation errors and maximum impact. It also means that we need to find the best ways to understand campaign performance without requiring everyone in marketing to be a data scientist. Today we're going to discuss the persistent gap between creative design and marketing execution, as well as the value that AI based campaign capabilities can add to the understanding of analytics and performance. Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit, subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor TechSystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world adoption. For more information go to techsystems.com now let's dive in to help me discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome Osei Amageme, Head of Email product@intuit mailchimp. Osei, welcome to the show.
- [02:28]
Osei Amageme
Thank you so much Greg. Thank you so much for having me here.
- [02:30]
Interviewer
Yeah, looking forward to it. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a Little background on yourself and your role@intuit mailchimp.
- [02:36]
Osei Amageme
Yeah. Okay, thank you. So my name is Ose. I am currently the head of email product@intuit mailchimp. So a lot of my work is building that experience that marketers can come into mailchimp and create and send the campaigns they really want to target their audience. Before Intuit, I spent about two years working at TikTok leading our advertising product and before that about half a decade at Adobe. So really working for creators is kind of like my sweet spot.
- [03:03]
Interviewer/Co-host
Yeah. Yeah, I love it.
- [03:04]
Interviewer
So yeah, let's dive in here and want to start from what I mentioned in the intro, the strategic shift and closing some of these gaps. So the new mailchimp integration with Canva addresses some of the long standing workflow
- [03:21]
Greg Kilstrom
gaps between design and email deployment. From a product strategy perspective, what was
- [03:27]
Interviewer
the critical business or customer challenge that made solving this a top priority for mailchimp?
- [03:33]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, this was a very, very fun one to work on. So, you know, marketers love Canva and we always found the situation where people would like, do all of your designs in Canva and want to come send an email in mailchimp, and would often have to download the email as a flat JPEG file, put it in mailchimp and send it. But that was a huge problem because it meant that your email might not necessarily be on brand. It meant like all of the alt text and tracking parameters you had in those emails are. And worst case scenario, you may actually get flagged as spam by Gmail and other inbox providers because it feels very spammy. So we went to Canva Create a few years ago and chatted with a few of our users and realized that, okay, people want to be able to create an email in mailchimp, send it without doing any of the editing in mailchimp. So we decided to build that out with Canva. So now a marketer or a designer will build an entire email in Canva, which is their product of choice and don't have to do any of all those other things in mailchimp, they just bring it over, hit send, and voila, it's in the subscribers inboxes. So it was a very, very fun product to work on.
- [04:42]
Interviewer
Yeah, and it feels like a very organic process now too as well. Because to your point, designers, marketers are, they're already using both, you know, they're already using mailchimp, they're already using Canva, but connecting those gaps, you know, how do innovations just in general like this influence the overall Platform and product strategy. And what do you think should be guiding companies platform strategies as things like this become more possible?
- [05:10]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, this is, it was, like I said, it was a very, very fun one. I think it's also changing how we view things internally, but also how I think like marketing leaders should also look at things so internally. I think there's this, you know, the past used to be like, hey, get everyone onto your platform when they're on your platform, lock them in and make sure they never leave. But one of the things we're looking at now is, okay, it's like, how might we expand the pirate partnerships? How might we like meet marketers where they are? It's like, hey, you love to do your designs in Canva, do it in Canva. Let Milcham do the things it's good at, which is getting your data, helping you hit your subscribers where you want to hit them. But then for marketing leaders, I hear a lot of, you know, this urge to get a lot of tools and it's like, hey, the way I see it is like before you onboard a new tool or think about an integration, it's like you got to think, okay, how is this going to change my team's life? Are they going to have to like move to a new platform? If not just find a way to connect people to the tools they already have and figure out a way to make those workflows really, really better. And that's one of the things we try to do with this integration. Just make what normally happens a little bit more seamless.
- [06:18]
Interviewer/Co-host
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
- [06:20]
Interviewer
So let's talk a little bit more about this workflow aspect. And certainly AI and automation is a huge part of every marketer's lives these days and continued talk about doing more. You've talked about the roadmap moving towards AI agents that can autonomously plan and even execute cross channel journeys. How does an integration like this, which unifies a lot of things, unifies creative and channel data and that marketing component, how does all this act as a step toward that future?
- [06:56]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, I think as you're talking about AI agents and AI and how it fits into the world, the way we're thinking about our roadmap really follows that pattern and that playbook of meeting people where they are and actually help them do the things they do well. So I'm going to take a sidestep from what we did with Canva and think about, okay, what we started hearing for people. So about a year ago we asked all of our, we brought a Bunch of users in. And one of the things we asked them is like, how are you using AI? And they said, we spend all of our time in ChatGPT and Claude planning for campaigns. While that is great, the AI models are great. But the challenge as a small business owner or marketer is you put in whatever prompt you have in and you get some kind of like, campaign plan. But that might be the same plan that your competitor down the street is getting. So we decided to think, okay, hey, how might we help you get a better bang for your buck while using, like, our AI platform? So last actually, early this year, we launched an app inside of ChatGPT where you can actually log in with your Mailchimp account and ask AI or ask Chat GPT to do a plan for you. And what it does is it does two things. It takes all 22 years and 2 billion email campaign of what we know of what makes a good campaign in mailchimp and adds it to your own actual data. So when you're getting like a campaign plan, you're not just getting something generic, you're getting something that actually like, understands you, knows your business, but also is like bespoke for that need. You are. So to be very honest, our playbook now is basically say, hey, where the marketers want to do their jobs. How can we augment that with the thing that mailchimp knows best, which is marketing and also your prior data and putting it together into like creating like a campaign that works for you? I think the next step there is beyond just like laying a foundation is like, how do you then scale that into something more proactive and something that's more like, just like organically great for the user?
- [08:49]
Interviewer/Co-host
Yeah, yeah.
- [08:50]
Interviewer
But yeah, to your point, the foundation has to be there to be able to connect these things. And I think that is one of the things that I've certainly seen with the, let's call it the early days. I know we're only a couple of years into this, but like the early days of, of all this generative AI stuff was a bunch of copying and pasting. Right. Kind of similar enough to the, the Canva design to mailchimp email send. It's copying out a chatbot or Claude into something else. And yeah, each of those platforms holds a lot of knowledge, but the integration of those two, to your point is, is where the real power is. And then then building on top of that, then you can start doing some really interesting automations and stuff as well, right?
- [09:33]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, yeah, I can also add to that, I think so with our ChatGPT app and the cloud connector. So we're not just giving you a bunch of random ideas and strategies on what to do. You can also post getting your strategy, actually create a campaign inside of ChatGPT. And it basically gives you a list of campaigns you have to create across email, SMS and automations. But then you can also start to vibe, edit and create them inside of ChatGPT GPT. And once you click a button, it takes it all into mailchimp and you have something that's ready to send. And it, like I said, it follows the exact playbook of what we're trying to do in Canva is like, you're already comfortable working in ChatGPT. I don't need you to bring you over to Mailchimp to start from scratch. Just meet you where you are, create an experience that's great and that's bespoke for you, but then just like get it to the point where you hit send and you're ready.
- [10:20]
Interviewer/Co-host
Yeah, I love that.
- [10:22]
Interviewer
So then let's talk a little bit about, you know, when things like that are possible, when we're reducing just the
- [10:28]
Greg Kilstrom
friction from the process.
- [10:29]
Interviewer
Because again, what you're describing, that's certainly marketers may have wanted to do that stuff for years, but actually getting it done and the planning and all that, it's so much, not only moving but just thinking through a lot of details and sometimes even repeatable details. But it just reduces so much friction. What you're describing, when you do that,
- [10:53]
Greg Kilstrom
what changes as far as measurement?
- [10:55]
Interviewer
I mean I'm sure There's always traditional KPIs that are going to be useful and meaningful, but are there other measurements that marketing leaders should be thinking about and when, when they're, when they have access to this type of automation and workflow?
- [11:09]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, I love marketers because like, you know, I haven't met a more data driven folks than marketers. And the thing is like it's very easy to like want to be like, okay, hey. And the truth is like measurements is easy for like campaigns because like you can actually like measure something. And when I worked in ads, it could be raw ads. But your question goes really into the worlds of this like overlooked portion of marketing, which is marketing ops, which is like hey, and when you start to like reduce friction, it's more of a marketing ops problem. I wouldn't say that you can't really measure things from a traditional campaign lens, but I think like traditional campaign KPIs are like lagging indicators. They show up after the Fact that so you've simplified the workflow, you don't really see impact initially, they kind of show up after the fact. So one of the things we have been looking at even internally at Mill Champ and I think marketers should look at is really looking through marketing ops. KPIs like cycle time and throughput and review time. So in stuff like what we're trying to do here is in the past, how long would it take you to make a back to school, where we're about to hit the summer and back to school campaigns, how long would it take you to create a back to school campaign? Now with some of these integrations and tooling and even leveraging AI, is it faster? Are we seeing less cycle and review times? Do you have to review things five or six times or is two times good? And what we're seeing is that in the longer term when you have shorter cycle and review times, it kind of frees up your team's creativity to actually spend more time thinking about what the messaging of that campaign is going to be. And that usually translates to downstream impact in the outcome. So I would say measure initially for improvements in your marketing ops metrics if you have a marketing ops team or just like thinking about how you can measure just like the cycles for each campaign but then see if in the short to medium term you can actually extrapolate that to actual like bottom line metrics. Because at the end of the day we really need to hit those revenue goals that we all have.
- [13:08]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, well, and another thing I love that you just underscored as well. Is it all of this stuff lets marketers be more creative and more strategic and everything, you know, because a lot of the, the foundational stuff gets taken care of and it's, you know, it's, it's, it has to get done and it did get done with very manual effort and stuff. So you know, to me that's one of the biggest benefits of using automation and AI for things is just that.
- [13:37]
Osei Amageme
So yeah,
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Greg Kilstrom
let's talk a little bit
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Interviewer
more about AI and analytics as well because I know Intuit mailchimp also made another important announcement for its analytics AI functionality. Tell us a little bit about that. So it's native conversational analytics agent and mailchimp. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and what it can do.
- [14:02]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, I think we just released a product called Analytics AI and I think the name is kind of self explanatory AI for your analytics. But I think what's more important is why we decided to do this, everyone who's worked in marketing, we all want to be data driven. And we have so many sources of data. And quite frankly, you ask for data and you get a dashboard. And dashboards are really, really great. But the truth is, they don't tell you what I call the so what. So it's like, hey, you get like this like, blanket thing that 35% of people perform set actions and you don't really know why. And what we're trying to really do here is stopping you to have to do like a lot of like, backend queries or putting things in a spreadsheet is like, hey, you have all of your data sources, all of those, like, really important questions that you have. Can you just like type it into your chat that really understands your performance data and understands, like your past campaign history? And then you get insights that are really, really tailored for you. So it's less about like, here's a spreadsheet and you see a number that's like, oh, 35% is like, what does 35% mean for my business?
- [15:06]
Interviewer/Co-host
And.
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Osei Amageme
And how can I actually take that into doing something that scales into another campaign? But the truth is, I feel like this is just the first level of what we can do. So what the problem we're solving now is data and insights that actually matter to you. But I feel like the next evolution of this could be we don't know what we don't know. For people who are new to marketing, you actually don't know the right questions to ask. AI is can we actually now start to get proactive insights? It can be like, okay, Greg, you ran this campaign. Here is what we're seeing and here's what you should do next. And I feel like that's going to be the next evolution of this product. But it's something that we're really, really excited for and we're getting lots of great feedback from all of our users who've tried this out.
- [15:51]
Interviewer
Yeah. And I mean, it's so key because I know so many people are switching between Shopify and their website and their AI and stuff like that. So you've got, you've got all that in one place to be able to ask questions of it. And I think that is, you know, whether you're a large marketing team or a small marketing team, you know, the problem remains that if you have to hop from place to place, you're not getting the full story. Right?
- [16:19]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And you mentioned Shopify and is one of the other partners we have where we're actually also embedded in Shopify Sidekick, which is also like their version of like this conversational thing where. And obviously Shopify data is also connected to mailchimp. So like you said, you're not just asking a bunch of random questions. You're asking questions that are directly tied to your business. You're like, mapping your marketing outcomes and maybe marketing spend to actual business goals. And like I said earlier, when you ask a question, it tells you the. So what? It tells you the why things happen. Not just a bunch of like, hey, you ran this campaign and it led to X amount of revenue. That doesn't really mean anything and is not necessarily actionable.
- [17:02]
Interviewer/Co-host
Yeah, yeah.
- [17:03]
Interviewer
So let's talk a little bit about what this means for marketers. I mean, again, you know, lots and lots of manual effort and hopping between things is going away. You know, it's not completely gone. I know there's some marketers out there still doing way too much of that. But as this stuff goes away through, you know, integrations like this, what does the, you know, how does the role of the human marketer evolve? You know, what should those leaders out there that are, want to grow and retain and, and support their teams? What should they be investing in as far as time and focus?
- [17:37]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, this is a very fun question. I get asked a lot. And you know, you know, there's. There's one angle which is off here, like, AI is going to take all of our jobs, and there's the other. Then there's, then there's the more reasonable answer, which is like, hey, AI is going to take the jobs, hopefully that we don't want to do, and it can free up marketers to be more creative and strategic. But I feel like that's also an incomplete answer. I think the role of the market in the future is most likely going to be like a brand custodian, I think as AI starts to get better at execution, but also at strategy because it can actually synthesize a lot of data. I think the most important skill for marketers is going to be what I call taste. And what does taste mean? Taste is like your ability to discern what actually makes sense for your user. And that comes from really understanding your brand, really talking to people to know what really moves the needle, understanding your customers, understanding your company, being able to pull random trends from, from the world and say, okay, this is what makes sense for my business. I think that's going to be the role of the marketer going forward. We're going to be like, more like custodians of the business and custodians of the brand and be really be responsible for crafting what story we get to tell about our businesses at each specific time. So I would spend a lot of time if I was a market leader, like asking my team to really invest in just like all the knowledge about our business that they need to know. Because that's going to be the key defining factor of a market of the future.
- [19:03]
Interviewer/Co-host
Yeah, love it.
- [19:05]
Interviewer
And then, you know, also looking ahead, you've linked design and email. You know, we talked about the canva mailchimp integration, even some of the AI or the AI and analytics integrations. What's the next broken bridge, so to speak, in marketing that you think is ripe for innovation?
- [19:25]
Osei Amageme
Yeah, I think I started to allude to this a little bit when I talked about like maybe the next step in some of what we're doing in like our analytics thing. But I do feel like the next step is more proactive stuff. It's more like, hey, even with all the AI things we do today, still very reactive. It's like I have an idea, I go to AI and I do a bunch of things to it and I then I create something and it goes out. But then it's like I would see that bridge between like being able to more, more proactive stuff. So it's like, hey, here's what you should do based off of what we know about your business and here is how it's going to play out. When I worked in the ads world, there was something that was fun where it's like you're running a campaign or you're running like an ad and ads campaign. And sometimes like we built like ML models that we help you like balance out your budget based off of like different campaigns that was going out. And I, and I see that really happening in like fully omnichannel marketing going to the future. So you have your ads, you have your sms, you have your email pieces and AI being able to really orchestrate that for you. And maybe you're playing this role of a creative director or you're playing this role of the manager who's helping AI really do all of that for you. So I really see that bridge of AI stepping in as a sidekick or an assistant helping you build marketing campaigns with you is that next bridge that needs to happen. And whoever solves that is going to be a trillion dollar company in my opinion. You know?
- [20:53]
Interviewer/Co-host
Love it, love it.
- [20:55]
Interviewer
I'll get started right now, but yeah, love it.
- [20:58]
Osei Amageme
Do you want to call?
- [21:00]
Interviewer
I Know, I know. I love it. Well, o say thanks so much for joining today. Great, great talking with you and hearing your insights. I got a couple questions for you as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
- [21:17]
Interviewer/Co-host
About?
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Osei Amageme
Oh my God, the Niners winning the Super Bowl. I'm just kidding.
- [21:22]
Interviewer
Anything's possible, right?
- [21:24]
Osei Amageme
I, I think one thing we would definitely be. Oh, I wouldn't say one thing we'll be talking about. I would say one thing I want my wish to be is more like I, I, I would like us to as marketers move over from campaigns as the unit of marketing work. I think that's really easy because like a campaign is a self contained unit that we can actually measure and see outcomes. But one of the things I will be interested in seeing is how we can actually evolve with AI now being able to really link that to business outcomes. So it's less about what is my Black Friday or my back to school campaign. It's more about, okay, I have this quarterly goal of XYZ amounts of revenue and what is all the marketing jobs I can do to get that. So that's the one thing I'll be working. I think we should definitely be talking about. And I know it sounds crazy, but I've seen remarkable progress over the last year with AI that I really believe that we can actually do this and it would be something that we might be talking about next year.
- [22:21]
Interviewer/Co-host
Yeah, love it.
- [22:21]
Interviewer
Well, we'll have to reconvene here and talk about it. That's great. And then last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [22:32]
Osei Amageme
Oh my God. I think one of the things I do now is totally unrelated to work. So I'm a huge soccer fan and I also just love to, to read. So like I touched on earlier, I think taste is going to be like the defining thing over the next 10 years with like, with AI. So I'm trying to learn as much as possible about things that are unrelated to my job because I feel like the beauty is being able to connect pieces that don't really connect ordinarily with your job into bringing pieces for your life and connecting that with your job. So like I read a lot of books that are totally unrelated to like product or tech or marketing. I'm reading a book about soccer called how to Win the Premier League because I'm like, okay, let's see what we can bring from sports into the world of product and marketing and tech. And yeah, it's been fun. It's been fun so far.
- [23:19]
Interviewer/Co-host
Love it. Love it.
- [23:20]
Interviewer
Well again, I'd like to thank Osei Amageme, Head of Email Product at Intuit mailchimp for joining the show. You can learn more about Osei and
- [23:27]
Greg Kilstrom
mailchimp by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [24:27]
Podcast Host/Announcer
The Agile Brand.
- [24:32]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [24:52]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Still waiting in line Again, that's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.