Bonus: Send Less, Earn More: What Brevo's Data Says About Email Volume and Conversion

0:00Some people love email, some people love SMS, some people love WhatsApp. Not everyone buys and consumes information the same way. And of course there's a regional element to that, but there's also just an individual preferences. I might like SMS more than you like SMS, so I might engage more with SMS. Push could be the same thing. Do personalized messaging. Don't just send out blast spam email all the time. Send out messaging that's targeted to your audience, what they really want to hear. Companies that sent less email actually have much higher conversion rates, much higher click-through rates, and offset, of course, the volume senders.

0:41Channing Ferrer:Hello and welcome to the D2C podcast. Today, my guest is Channing Ferrer, Chief Revenue Officer and CEO of the Americas at Brevo. Brevo is a customer engagement platform out of Paris with about 600 ,000 businesses on it. They just landed on the Inc. 5000 off of a 100 % growth in the US. Before this, Channing spent six years at HubSpot running sales strategy, threw the run from$200 million to$1.5 billion, and then ran sales at SEMrush as well as Brandwatch, Back to Growth. Welcome to the D2C podcast, Channing. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks, Eric, for having me. You have had quite an epic SaaS career.

1:18Channing Ferrer:And I know that you advised Brevo for a year and a half before you joined. what made it an attractive opportunity for you to jump to? Definitely. So I had the fortunate opportunity, as you said, to do advisory work. Most times you join a new business, you don't have that chance to kind of get under the hood a little bit ahead of time. So one of the things that there's multiple reasons. One of them was, first of all, I got a chance to know the product. And I felt really good about the product, knowing, of course, the MarTech space very well from a variety of my prior experiences at HubSpot and SEMrush and Brandwatch and elsewhere.

1:50So I felt like we had a good product, number one. Number two, I got to know the culture and the team culture. And it was very collaborative to me. That's a very important part of a good company culture is collaboration. But intense as well, which I really appreciate too. So that mix of intensity and collaboration I liked a lot. And then number three was, frankly, the challenge. And this was the thing that really was enticing. We're a European headquartered business and we're trying to grow globally. A lot of the teams I've run have been always very international. But I've always done it from the headquarters here in the U.S.

2:20And this challenge was kind of doing something a little bit different where the headquarters were over in Europe. And I've got to help build the business globally, inclusive of building it in the U.S. And I thought that was a fun, interesting opportunity slash challenge.

2:33Channing Ferrer:And how I see you coming off a 100 % growth in the U.S. How has that transfer been going from Europe into the U.S.? Yeah, it's been good. I will say the U.S. market is a tough market. I mean, there's a lot of competitors. It's obviously a huge market, but also just highly competitive market. And the way people buy in the U.S. is a little different than the way people buy in Europe and even elsewhere in the world. And I knew all of this, of course, when I joined. So I'd say we're growing at a very good clip in the U.S. And globally, we're growing at a good clip as well. But U.S. is our fastest growing market right now.

3:06One of the things that I think we realized very quickly as I was joining and really as I was transitioning into joining, but fortunately being on the advisory board, I was able to have input on this, is we needed a different product mix. and the product mix for the U.S. and it really went beyond the U.S., but the product mix in the U.S. was too extreme. It was either a very low-end self-serve or a much more complex enterprise solution. We didn't have anything that sat in the middle. And the middle to me was that sweet spot for us. So we launched our pro offer that sat between our enterprise and our standard product, our self-serve product.

3:41And the pro offer is taking off. And that's been the thing that's really helped, I think, accelerate us for the U.S.

3:47Channing Ferrer:market. I think that probably fits right in the D2C podcast market is that Pro. Yes, I think you're spot on. What's the main difference? What does it enable that the self-serve doesn't? Yeah, so with Pro, you're typically going to get a little, there's more capabilities, there's higher volume that you can send. From a capability standpoint, there are some lightweight CDP components built into Pro. So if you have some data integration that you want to do, which typically a business that's a little bit complex, but not highly complex. you do have different data sets that you might want to integrate to help do more personalized marketing.

4:21We have some of those as a default built into Pro. We have elements of enterprise. There's like flavors of enterprise, like custom objects, for example. You can use one custom object in Pro, and that becomes very helpful. You might want to have a, you know, there's a variety of use cases there, but you might want to do one little custom thing. That custom object allows you to do it. Reporting, there's enhanced reporting, and that's another big selling point in the Pro offer is the significantly enhanced reporting package that comes with pro versus the self-serve offer is another reason people typically will shift over to the pro product.

4:51Channing Ferrer:So every SaaS platform I chat with is obviously integrating AI deeply into their tool set. How do users sort of interact with AI and what's AI actually doing in the Brevo suite of tools right now best? Yeah. So I think of AI in a couple of different ways. There's the really basic functionality, which is help me do this. And we have our ARA tool that helps there. So you can go into the ARA AI and ask questions that'll answer those for you. But that's more of just an agent on the side. That's like a support agent teaching you what to do. I think more interestingly is actually an agent that does things for you.

5:23So we've got various Brevo agents built into the product today where you can go in and say, build a campaign for me. And it'll automate that campaign building process. You can validate and then you can say, okay. So there's components throughout the the Bravo experience where you can leverage AI to run things for you. And I think that's a really important part of how we use AI today is this kind of assistant that manages it for you. But still, there's the human oversight to validate, is it the right thing? And then the third layer to it is integration with conversational AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude or so on, where I can go in via a connection through our MCP server and go directly into Claude and say, I want to run a campaign in Brevo and here's what I want it to look like.

6:10And then Claude will go and connect back into Brevo and run that campaign for you. And in fact, you can live, you can do all of your marketing through Claude if you want. You don't actually have to ever log into Brevo. It'll report back to you in Claude and give you all the outputs that you need. So some people do that in full. I have a customer I was talking to the other day who they're just living in Claude the whole time. They have their Brevo account, but it's just connecting into Brevo. But then other people will just do some things through Claude and live maybe more in Bravo.

6:35Channing Ferrer:I'm finding that all the time where I'm just, it's just every day I'm unlocking like new things that I can do just from the Claude terminal. And it's surprising me all the time with how much you can do from there. Super interesting time for that sort of thing. One of the main things that we talked about on the pre-interview was the idea of the wallet. I use the wallet, I use my Apple wallet for lots of different things in life. I haven't really had it integrate too much with my e-commerce purchases. So make the case for the wallet. Why is the best loyalty tool already on the phone? Yeah. So I was just seeing an updated demo actually of the wallet features that we just released.

7:14And I'm more and more impressed every time I look at our wallet capabilities and just what wallet can do for someone. It's so logical even, I think. So the idea with wallet is you can put your loyalty cards into your Apple wallet or your Google wallet or soon even your Samsung wallet. And if you're a retail company, let's say, and you put your loyalty card in there, then you can, as a consumer myself of that product, I can go into my Apple phone or my Google phone and I can see here's my wallet, here's my loyalty cards, here's how many points that I've earned, here's where I can redeem those points, here's ways for me to earn more points, and you can push promotional elements through the wallet.

7:54So I I could say to the consumer, as a retailer, I can push something saying, we have a holiday promotion now. And so suddenly they look in it and now the card changes colors. It turns into a holiday card and there's a promotion that shows up within that that they can jump on and leverage. So it's just such an easy way to capture the attention of a consumer. And wallet cards are extremely sticky. Once people install wallet cards, 95 % of those cards remain for 12 months thereafter. So if you think about email unsubscribe rates and the way other people try to capture information, it's just information and sharing of information that becomes a very sticky channel, the wallet channel, that is.

8:37So it's something that's, I think, relatively newer in the way marketers are leveraging it. But to me, it feels like a huge opportunity leveraging the wallet alongside wallet. Then you can also do things like geofencing your experience. And again, if you're a retailer, that means if I'm walking past the retailer, I can push a notification. I can do something based on my location physically. And I have my points. I have my card. It's all kind of in one spot.

8:59Channing Ferrer:What does it look like for a brand that doesn't have retail? Yeah. So actually, it's something we've been kind of looking at is who else uses wallet. And so retail is the most simple use case because we all kind of have loyalty elements within retail. But loyalty can fit beyond that and wallet even. So for example, on concerts, I'm going to a concert. I could maybe buy my ticket through a wallet experience. And the ticket then lives in the wallet. Now that that ticket's in the wallet, we can use that ticket to create other promotional opportunities. And maybe it's buy a souvenir for a 10 % discount.

9:32Maybe it's follow on to the concert, use this ticket to do something else. Once again, we can leverage geofencing. We can do push notifications. So that's another simple example that we can use it. But there's a lot of use cases that extend well beyond the retail space where I think this wallet experience can become very unique.

9:49Channing Ferrer:Give me an example of a brand doing this really well. Yes. So, Salomon. Salomon's a great brand. So Salomon, outdoor brand, skis and other outdoor equipment. So they use the Brevo Wallet tool. And within that, their promotional cards exist there. People will sign up and they can monitor their points and create incentives through Salomon. So when you go to either Salomon store or even online, you leverage it. So Salomon, I think they're one of our better users. There was another, I can't say the name, but another international brand actually who's a retailer that uses it. And what they do is very interesting.

10:31They create unique personalized offers because there's so much data that they can capture through the wallet that they know not just where the person is, but other preferences that that individual consumer has. So they're not doing generic offers. They're doing actually highly personalized offers. So you and I might receive a different discount offer or a different incentive offer because of our different wallet usages.

10:53Channing Ferrer:The geofencing is an interesting one, too. I haven't heard – I used to work for a company, Mobile DSP, and we used to geofence different offers and try to reach people in kind of different moments. Is the geofencing, I guess, is this combination between Brevo and the wallet. Like the wallet itself doesn't have push capabilities, right? The wallet doesn't have the push capabilities, but you can do push, obviously, on your mobile phone. So you can do push alongside the wallet, but it's not pushing into the wallet exactly. How do you compare push to something like SMS? Yeah. So it's just another channel.

11:27There's a variety of channels. And I think one of the more important things we see our best customers using is using and leveraging those channels in a cohesive way. So what I love about push is, once again, I'll go back to the geofencing. we can geofence an experience. So if someone's walking past this concert or somewhere in the concert or walking in a mall, in a shopping mall or wherever, we can push something to them. At the same time, they might not jump on that push notification because it could be, hey, take 10 % off and go buy our widgets today. They might not jump on that, but we could then send an SMS the next day saying, we knew you were here, or you can say whatever you want in terms of sharing information, but you can send a similar offer when they're not in that geofence location.

12:08So the geofence to me feels very relevant for push. And what I love about push is that real time notification. And we're going to do that when there's urgency, but also SMS isn't that urgency. SMS is just another channel for communication. What I find and what's most interesting is, and we did a study with our customers on this, is some people love email, Some people love SMS. Some people love WhatsApp. Not everyone buys and consumes information the same way. And of course, there's a regional element to that. WhatsApp is used much more in Europe or Latin America. SMS, email, and maybe more in the US.

12:44But there's also just an individual preferences. I might like SMS more than you like SMS. So I might engage more with SMS. Push could be the same thing. Some people prefer it and some people don't.

12:54Channing Ferrer:WhatsApp's an interesting one. I'm using it more and more in my personal life. It has a much bigger footprint in Europe, you're saying. but is it growing in the US and Canada as well? Yeah. So I'm surprised it's not growing so much in North America, actually. It's growing, but Europe is growing much faster and specifically for marketing reasons. So I think what I look at is how are marketers using it? I'm not looking at pure WhatsApp adoption. That could be growing, but from a marketing standpoint, it's growing very rapidly in Europe. And what we're seeing is there's a lot more functionality coming out with WhatsApp as well for how you can kind of market and track and sell things even through WhatsApp.

13:31So it's beginning to push well beyond, I think, what you can do with SMS today in terms of the capabilities and even the tracking of engagement through WhatsApp. So we're seeing 170 % growth last I looked, kind of year-to-date growth on WhatsApp in Europe right now. That exceeds what we're seeing in the US from a growth standpoint for WhatsApp.

13:50Channing Ferrer:One of the cool differentiators with Brevo, as I understand it, is you guys bill on sends instead of pure list size. Why make that decision? And what does that enable for, in terms of efficiency for e-commerce brands on Brevo? Yeah, it's one of the things people love about us. We think of it as, you know, we'll charge whatever you consume. We call them consumables. So if you're sending a lot of emails and sending a lot of SMS, the idea is you're getting value from that. So we're trying to align our billing to the value creation that we have. And if you're using a lot of consumables and sending a lot of email, then in theory, you're getting a lot of value from that while on our billing.

14:28If you just have a big contact database, that doesn't mean we should bill you a lot for that big contact database, because you might not be engaging that deeply with that contact database, or you might have it for other reasons, but you're not driving a lot of maybe revenue through that contact database. So we don't think it's fair to charge based on the size of your contact database. We prefer to really lean into charging based on how much of the product you are ultimately using.

14:51Channing Ferrer:One of the things we have an email podcast on the D2C network here is when we talk a lot about efficiency and just the growing gates that Gmail, for instance, puts on the quality of your sends. So I can imagine by charging people on the emails they actually send versus their list size, it frees them up potentially to focus more on efficiency and focus more on the people that are really moving the needle and the addresses that are actually really worth mailing versus always feeling like, oh, I'm paying for this whole list, so I've got to mail the whole list. Do you find that your approach leads to a better focus on efficiency?

15:26Yeah, it's actually something we advocate for, which is a little ironic because it's against our, in a sense, not to our benefit. But we advocate for do personalized tailored messaging. And that means don't just send out blast spam email all the time. Send out messaging that's targeted to your audience to what they really want to hear. And we did a study on this and we found that companies that sent less email actually had much higher conversion rates, much higher click-through rates. And it offset, of course, the volume senders. The volume senders had much lower conversion rates and click-through and open rates, and they weren't really seeing the ultimate benefit that the slightly more personalized, more targeted email senders were seeing.

16:07So it really aligns to, and the nice thing is it aligns to the interest of the customer. I mean, our customers want to, they don't want to just blast emails. They want to ultimately get a return on that investment. They want to see revenue come from that communication module. And therefore we're recommending avenues and channels to do that, that aligns well for them and is also financially viable.

16:29Channing Ferrer:You really want to meet customers where they're at. And one of the things that we talk about on the email podcast quite a bit is flows versus campaigns and how flows are going to be triggered by actions wherever possible. So flows are sort of inherently going to be a little bit more specific. Obviously, you can have specificity in the way you segment your campaigns as well. How do you think about the dichotomy between flows and campaigns when brands are sending? When I look at the flows, that's the thing that I think is the most valuable because it's a personalized experience that's happening and can capture that data point.

17:02So we know that when someone does one thing, they tend to go here or When someone does something else, they tend to go there. And this leads us down the path of understanding how to communicate with these consumers. So this is, as I was saying before, the kind of the omni-channel options you might have for communication, push, SMS, WhatsApp, email. Everyone has their slight different preferences. And we can determine those preferences through these flows that they're taking ultimately. And as we learn about those preferences, we can create a much more personalized experience. And the personalization isn't just content.

17:32We often think of personalization as trying to create content that's relevant. It's the engagement channel. And I think the flow dictates that engagement channel because we can see fairly consistent approaches for people. So I think the flow is so important because we do want to find the channel that people like to engage with most frequently and then lean into those channels. So campaigns are useful as a starting point. Campaigns are great when you have a specific thing you're trying to advertise. If we get into the holiday season or something like that, of course, we want to run certain broad based campaigns.

18:04But I think over time, you can learn the flow and therefore learn how to engage directly with each individual and have that personalized experience.

18:12Channing Ferrer:Which is going to create more efficiency, like you say, higher click-through rates and ultimately better metrics from the ISPs themselves. Is that something you see becoming a bigger concern for brands who maybe, you know, who haven't focused on this level of specificity and maybe have burned out lists in some ways? Yeah, it is. And I think it's a big challenge, especially in the U.S. even, because the laws in the U.S. allow for you to capture lists in a variety of ways. We can buy lists and send you those lists. But people are getting much more savvy with their email and how they're managing their own email and look at the options within email and other email providers.

18:47it's very easy to click the spam button or reject emails. And as we as consumers do that, it obviously has that negative impact to the sender. So our customers are very conscientious of this. We advocate for them as well. We have a whole team of people that are focused on email deliverability, and we help them think about how best to optimize their email deliverability. And again, it is a really critical element to what they're doing. Email is still the core method of communication we find. While everyone's building other omni-channel flows, email is a core component of that in nearly all cases.

19:24So they have to build around that, but that email deliverability is super critical for them. And it varies by email provider, of course, how they're handling and what they're doing. It varies from Gmail to Yahoo to Hotmail and so on.

19:37Channing Ferrer:What happens when a customer on Brevo outgrows the tier that they bought? And how do you spot this early and what do you do? There's two things that can occur. One thing is you might be at the pro level, let's call it, and you've bought a certain amount of email volume, let's say, and you have a monthly volume. And let's – a really simple good example. You get into Black Friday season, and now you've decided, well, I'm going to send for the next couple weeks. I want to spike my email volume because I've got a big database, and I know people are eager to hear from me right now. So I'm going to spike my volume.