A DIS-LOYALTY Program?? 🟡GUEST: Amanda Cole, CMO at BLOOMREACH!🟡 | Ep. 496

0:01Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That, and we have somebody here that I genuinely like this person. They are, she is not only a big deal in the marketing world, but she's cool. She's normal. She's awesome. She's my friend. I'm all in. Amanda Cole is here. Now, you know who Amanda Cole is because she is the chief marketing officer at Bloomreach. She has a big job. She's leading the company's global marketing strategy.

0:44She was named one of the 30 agentic marketers to watch. I barely even know what agentic means. That's a big deal. Now, Bloomreach, you know what that is because it's valued at over two billion dollars it is like the leading e-commerce personalization platform and here's the weirdest wildest stat about bloomridge yeah they got like 1400 of the biggest brands every brand e-commerce brand every brand you know uses them but they power the equivalent of 25 percent of all e-commerce experiences in the united states and in the uk what does that even mean this is wild it's all amanda's fault amanda welcome back to the show thanks for having me i'm calling you every morning to start my day that was awesome i could have gone on forever because you are a big deal and one of the reasons i like you a lot is because you don't just say what everybody else is saying you say these things and i'm like oh my god she just said that i need to know more about that so i want to rip through especially from your purview you have this like you see it all happening at scale with what's really happening in marketing I want to ask you some hot take things that you've said, and then I need to tell you, tell me, what do they mean?

1:54Are you ready for this? Let's do it. Let's go. You said, and this is the weirdest thing ever, because at the end of the day, you guys are selling a MarTech product thing. You literally said, don't invest in MarTech, divest from MarTech. What is wrong with you? Yeah, it's true. I mean, we're all living this reality, right? Where software and systems and all those things are being rewritten in front of our eyes. I mean, just like from our, obviously I work for a B2B SaaS company. We sell to B2C marketers. Our job is to sell technology, MarTech specifically. And you see the market just making a big shift because we are all becoming aware of the fact that much of our technology is surface level UI to help us communicate very minimally complex ideas to a computer system.

2:44And you don't need workflows for that anymore. You don't need a UI for that anymore. You just need to know language and be able to communicate in a conversational way to a computer to get it to do stuff for you. So all of these lightweight tools that don't have big structural data sets that actually help you move forward with your job and the complexity of what your role is, you don't need them anymore. So I'm going through this with my team. What are these lightweight tools that gave us a wrapper that we no longer need because now we can just conversationally interact with our computer systems?

3:19Wow. So, okay, let me unpack what you're saying there. So you're saying that the big mothership tools, like a Bloomreach, not that it's commercial for Bloomreach, but there's a lot of these big kind of like SaaS platforms that are kind of running our business. Those are kind of like, all right, table stakes, we got to have those. But a lot of these one-off things that are maybe more task-oriented tools, you're saying, we really don't need to have this smorgasbord of all these tools. I saw somewhere in the average enterprise marketing stack, you shared this stat somewhere, has 91 tools but they barely use any of the capabilities is that is that what we're talking about it is absolutely what we're talking about and these are the these are the lightweight tools these are tools that you know you're usually signing up with your credit card they're 10 to 15 they're they're things that made a portion of your job much easier at some some point in time if you think about like social media how do i manage and stay on top of social mentions that might be something that you pay 10k a year for or maybe an analytics tool that's something on top of google analytics or pulls together lots of different data systems and gives you visibility into how effective those are.

4:22But really, it's a lightweight wrapper over a data set that already exists that you just are trying to understand because you're not a data analytics person. Now, you don't need that data analytics person to ingest and understand lots of data. You don't need a lightweight wrapper to help you layer over filters and visualize a report. You can do all of those things. My favorite is Claude Cowork. I was very upset this weekend and this past week when it was down. But those kinds of tools, I would absolutely be saving budget and divesting from those and creating your personal workspace in these new agentic places.

4:58Listen, everybody out there wants a promotion. You do one of two things. You do exactly what Amanda just said. You get rid of these things. You could do it yourself. You do it within your company. Or if you have a big platform, go and ask for a demo of the platform again for what you already have access to that you're already paying for. Because every big platform like a Bloomreach has new stuff going on that you're not aware that you're probably paying for and not using, but you should. I want to go to the next one. Okay. This one, I can't even believe that came out of your mouth. Don't build a loyalty program, build a disloyalty program.

5:33What is going on here? Yeah, I mean, what we see oftentimes with loyalty programs is they're discount buyers. And so there are people who are looking for sales or they're there. They want to be notified. They I do this. I go to my local Froyo and I get stamped so I can get my free Froyo. So what is really the intent behind loyalty? If it's to build brand loyalty and build brand advocates that actually help you drive more revenue, that is a great loyalty program. But if it's just to drive sales, don't don't go down that road. And we have a big program around loyalty and what it means to actually build an effective loyalty program with our partner, Antavo, that launched in the last couple weeks.

6:11So there are some good guides in there around what you should do. But another thing that we see, and this is tied to loyalty or disloyalty, is you should be excluding a lot of these sales shoppers or a lot of these high returners, especially in e-commerce, from ad spend. We save customers millions of dollars by excluding, by pushing negative audiences into their ad networks. And I mean, I genuinely mean millions of dollars a month that we save our customers because we're able to identify these disloyal customers who actually are only one hit wonders or looking for sales. And your business, you'll see your conversion rates improve.

6:47You'll see your spend and ad channels decrease. And your customers who really, truly are loyal will surface and you can reward them in different ways. So, wow, that's super interesting. So I never really thought about the nuance of loyalty, not just being all your customers. You're talking about loyalty are actually the people that really care about your brand, not just the people that want the super discounted stuff. And are you seeing a lot of people take advantage of what you just said? I've never thought about not including them in my retargeting, remarketing, whatever, targeting them on social, kind of that discount buyer.

7:22Do people do that? Am I missing the boat? Is this a thing I should be doing? Yeah, I mean, some of our most successful customers, definitely, as you said, you want a promotion, you save the company money and you provide better results. This is one of the fastest ways to do it. And it is one of our most popular use cases with our with our e-commerce brands. And the guy who actually invented NPS, Fred Reichelt, who is a principal at Bain, changed his view of NPS and is actually now promoting this concept of earned growth, where it's how much revenue do you get from people who refer you into their network?

7:54So word of mouth, great referral source, really difficult for marketing to track. But now there's a ton of opportunities for us to actually track who are the brand loyalists who are helping us grow as a business. And those are the ones that you can invest in heavily. Okay, that's my new favorite line. I probably am late to the game. Brand loyalists instead of just loyalty customers. Let's go. I'm sure that's a thing and I didn't know it, but I like it. Brand loyalists. Okay, I feel like I invented it, but I didn't. Okay, let me get on to the next one here. Because this is going to be a crusher.

8:26Because a lot of people that listen to this thing are marketers. Some of them want jobs. Some of them hate their jobs. Some of them want new jobs. And here's what you said. It's not my fault. It's Amanda's fault. She said, don't hire more marketers. Train your AI agents. Then hire fewer, weirder people. I got the weird part down. You got the weird part down. You're hired. Yeah, I think that, and this is not necessarily just related to marketing. I think there are a lot of jobs where we've said, like, this is too difficult. The automation or the systemization of this would be too complex or potentially too expensive.

9:03We're going to throw humans at this. And so they give them titles of marketing or in our world, we're very creative in the tech space with these jobs. You see it somewhat in customer service as well, particularly in e-com, who are the people who are going to answer the phone and actually provide support calls. It's not often built around being a great experience. It's where can we replicate this at the lowest cost possible. And so those are the jobs that I think really are challenged right now because a lot of automation is going to be able to be applied there. And I strongly recommend marketing teams are often very small.

9:37So you don't see 20 people in marketing doing the same thing. You usually have one person doing the job. But then there are going to be functions or capabilities where in which there's a lot of repetition. And rather than immediately thinking of, I need more people, I need to hire someone, think, how could AI do this first, and really try to automate functions of the job, because we all know we never are running out of things to do, we all have a lot to do. And so if you can create time and scale for yourself, rather than saying either I can't do it because I don't have the right people or asking for budget to hire people, instead really think about how can AI do this.

10:17And then when you do hire, when you do decide, I actually need more hands, hire weird people, hire people that think differently, that don't live in a box, that the first answer is I can't do that or that's not how we do it. Hire people that really think very differently from the way the world runs today. So like, do you, like you're going to interview somebody and somebody comes in in a tank top and flip flops and they're, you know, I don't know, carrying a bag of popcorn. you're like oh extreme weirdo you're hired or i mean is that not what we're talking about we're talking about more of like the way that they they they think in some way it's definitely the way they think although i i i love a unique personal style as well uh but but i mean the first time i met you i can i will not forget your cheese hat that you had on so that's right you kind of have a personal style but yes it's much more about thinking how you approach the world that that you're not going to, you don't have a framework that you live by.

11:18You're essentially very open to things being done in a unique and different way. All right. I want to go totally off script. We didn't talk about this, but I'm just curious about something. Whenever I follow you on LinkedIn, and by the way, I'm not just saying this, we're going to put in the show notes, she's the best follow on LinkedIn. And I'll tell you why Amanda Cole is the best following then. You post stuff and I haven't heard it anywhere before. Okay. You're saying there's this new thing about Bob that's out there. I'm like, I didn't know about that. How come I didn't know about that. So I want to know how does Amanda Cole, the human being, you have a lot going on.

11:50How are you keeping up with all this new stuff that's going on out there? Do you just stay up all night reading the most boring stuff? What are you doing? I need to follow your playbook to stay on top of things. I don't, I don't have any hobbies. So that's definitely an issue. My work life balance is not, is not great. I am, I am kind of super obsessed with the space. Um, and so So there are just a ton of resources that I follow. I do still think that Instagram and TikTok are great sources of inspiration. You hear Allie Miller, for example, is someone that I follow religiously on Instagram. She's a huge AI influencer.

12:28So she'll talk about something conceptually, and then I'll dive down the rabbit hole of researching it. Another person in marketing, Emily Kramer, she has MKT1 as a newsletter that she has. She does an awesome job really talking about things like using Cloud Code or Cloud Cowork, which I think I already said I'm a fangirl of, and then actually giving you tips and tricks on how to leverage it in your real life. And then I work for an AI company. So I'm really surrounded by it from everybody that we interact with. And one of the products we sell is AI-driven marketing and personalization. And so I really need to be up to speed in the customers that I interact with and what they're going through and their evolutions are a big part of our conversation so i guess i'm just steeped in it from all angles yeah well i'm also glad you said about work-life balance and i don't encourage you know i have no work-life balance either uh but but i do listen everyone should have a work-life balance i don't think a work-life balance in my humble opinion is you shut it off at 5 p.m on friday and you don't think about work until 8 a.m or 9 a.m on monday morning i think work-life balance is like this bigger picture thing and i think it is healthy for people to hear that, you know, work-life balance is not this structured thing.

13:39Cause I know you're a big family person as well. So like, do you, I mean, not to get into the weeds on personal stuff, whatever, but do you have to be like, you know, do you shut it off? Do you put your phone away at dinner? Like, cause I think it's important for people to understand how do you kind of manage to do it all? Yeah. My husband is actually a therapist. And so we spend a lot of time talking about this. That's an advantage. But it's really like, you know, like, I mean, this isn't just my job. I'm very, very interested in it. And I think I want to be an active participant in shaping what our future looks like when AI is part of it.

14:14I mean, we've seen this transformation happen with mobile devices, with the internet, with Wi-Fi. Like we've seen these big technology transformations happen and life has molded around what's available to us from a technology perspective. And I want to be part of how we think about that and what it actually looks like to integrate it into into our lives and I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to do that um that said I just I think it's it's really individual for everyone there my I have a my middle son is graduating with a biology and chemistry degree and he is absolutely obsessed with bugs he wants to research them he wants to collect them he wants to understand them that's all he wants to do ever and that's his passion it also happens apparently there happens to be a career in that.

15:01Good for him. My oldest is an artist. My youngest is a math nerd. So I think that I do hate the find your passion and you'll make, you'll find money. Cause I don't think that's correlated, but I do think that, that I am benefiting from the fact that I'm just very interested in this topic. And so it is a bit all consuming, but it doesn't feel overwhelming. And I think that's an individual choice for everybody. Okay. I, now, now everyone's going like turning off the radio because i'm just so curious when your son was younger and you're in your house and there's like a cockroach somewhere in the corner of your house not that your house is infested but there was a bug somewhere you're all like ooh disgusting was he like oh my god i want to go and grab it did you see it the animals that he had the lizards the spiders the fish like Absolutely.

15:53Wow. Amazing. You'll have to listen to this and be like, what did you guys wind up talking about? You all. That's amazing. All right, listen, everybody, we're going to put Amanda's LinkedIn. Everyone should follow her. She is an incredible follow, but also, Bloomreach has something that is just available now. Bloomreach.com slash cloudy. Okay? This is this two-minute thing where you go there. It was a personalized forecast, had to upgrade from your legacy ESP to a modern email sending platform that does it all. I am telling you, this is worth two minutes of your time. It is bloomreach.com slash cloudy.

16:33Bloomreach is awesome. Amanda, you are awesome. Thanks for being here. Wait, I have two huge things to share with you. First, I have a book coming out. Stupider People Have Done It. It's coming out the first week of June and all net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. This book might be terrible, but who cares? When you buy this thing on Amazon or anywhere else, you are going to be helping to kick cancer's butt. Let's do that together. The second thing is you can go to jschwedelson.com. On the upper right-hand corner, there's a thing that says partner. My agency wants to help you.

17:12If you're a business marketer, consumer marketer, does it make a difference? I wanna help you drive net new sales, registrations, growth, change the design, all the stuff that you are doing. Hit me up there. Also, if you wanna do brand collabs, I wanna know about your brand. I wanna help you amplify that message. Go to jschwedelson.com, click on partner. Let's do stuff together. And the last thing is leave this show a review if it wasn't the absolute worst podcast you've ever heard. And you're awesome for being here. Later.