Ep. 182 – The Importance of SMS!? 📲 ===> GUEST: Kara Trivunovic, Senior Vice President, Zeta Global – Why Human Connection MATTERS In Digital Marketing! 💘

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are back for do this, not that.

And I'm excited because we have a fantastic guest. We have Kara Trivunovic. And I think I said it. Did I say it right? Oh, my God.

No matter what happens to the podcast was success because I said that, right? And coming from a person whose last name is terrible, which as mine shuttles. Anyway, so who is Kara? Why is she here?

First of all, she is the senior vice president of strategic solutions at Zeta Global. And before I tell you why, Cara's grade, Zeta Global is a big deal. They have a thousand customers over 15 different verticals.

And so Kara. It's all Kara's fault there, right? She does all this stuff. But the reason I'm so excited that she's here is that.

And she probably beat me up for saying this. She's been in this game like, as long as I have, which is way longer than I want to admit.

And so she's really seen, especially email and some of the other channels just emerge and change. And we're going to dig into email and AI and SMS and how it's all coming together and some real stuff that's going on now. So that's why she's here.

So, Cara, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. I'm excited.

Excellent. So before we get into email and AI and not just the boring version of that really important stuff, tell me, what did I miss?

You know, how did Cara become Kara?

Oh, boy. Kara fell into email marketing, like, completely by accident.

So years and years ago, coming out of college, I worked for Brierly, which is a loyalty agency, worked on the United Airlines business. And there was a group of about 4 of who they were like, hey, you guys are like all of our recent college grads.

Like, United Airlines is really interested in doing this email thing. Can you guys go figure it out? And that was really where it all started, completely by accident.

But it was a channel I fell in love with, really enjoyed it. Found myself getting into the tech side of it way more than I thought I would.

And I've really been able to kind of catapult that into a 25 year career.

I love it. And it's so true. It's like nobody, like growing up is like, I want to be an email marketer. That doesn't happen. Right.

It's like the entire everybody that does this literally fell into it by accident or forced into it. But it's a great world, right? You're happy?

Yeah, I love it. I, I do love. My kids don't understand it. They're like, what do you do and why?

100%. And I given up. I'm like, I just do marketing. Who cares?

Yeah, exactly.

All right, so, so let's get into this.

When I say email and AI, instantly what people think about is, oh, I'm going to have IT write my email and do some sort of content generation or, or who cares? But, but you all over there at Zeta are doing something really interesting with email and AI.

Can you share with us what you all are looking at and what you are finding? That I think is pretty eye opening.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it is, it's, it's, it's an interesting conversation because I think first people are like, oh, AI is going to take my job, right? And, and there's this fear of how to it and why to leverage it.

And then I think, you know, you immediately go to, you know, some of the places, you know, around driving personalization or automating processes and things like that, which can be really exciting and fun if you lean into it in the right way. But I think, you know, we're taking this perspective and really looking at where AI and the human element of everything comes together, right?

And there's this reality that we have to coexist.

And as the industry emerges and continues to evolve and grow, it's a very real part of how email is determined to deliver, whether it gets placed in an inbox or on a promo tab, how it gets summarized by ISPs.

And so there's a lot of things to take into consideration, but we have to make sure we're very careful to not over index there because you lose this human connection with your customer.

And so we've been spending a lot of time kind of balancing the art of the human and what really appeals to your customer and what do they love about your brand and how do you connect emotionally while still satisfying the needs and the requirements of the AI.

So when you say that is it like, you take an email that you have put together and you have a group of people that look at it, human beings look at it, and be like, this is great. I connect to it. And then simultaneously you ask, AI, take a look at this email. What do you think of it? And you're getting. Are you. Are you doing that?

Are you getting different kind of reactions from the humans versus the AI?

We are. We are, absolutely. So we. And we're just gonna.

We're gonna be releasing a white paper here pretty soon, but we've done the analysis on email from the first half of the year, and we approached it not from the perspective of, like, email experts or people who work in the industry. On our side, we actually looked at it from a consumer perspective.

What were the favorite emails you received this year and what did you love about it? Right. What connected with you? What stood out? Why is it memorable?

And so we got submissions from around the organization, and then we took all of those same kind of opportunities and the creative for those, and we ran them through AI and we really did find that they didn't really agree on any of it. Right. The top 25 for the human was completely different than the top 25 for the AI. And it does. When you look at the AI and the.

What's strong about it and what can be optimized.

So we built a creative auditor agent that we use in our platform that we partner with our clients on, and it'll go through it, it'll tell you what's great about it, and it's all about the best practices. Right. It's clear, clear and concise design. It's very readable. Looks good on, you know, in dark mode.

You know, headlines are good, call to action is strong. Right.

Things that could be better, you know, could lean into social consciousness, could pull in, you know, a, you know, a quote or, you know, customer feedback. Right.

When you start looking at the things that really resonated on the human side of things, it was the color really grabbed me or the animation of this puppy was really cute, and it got my attention. Some of it leaned into the emotional side of things. And there was one that stands out that was really oriented around improving your mental health.

And the person that received it really meant something to them, and it helped them think through a simple process to address their mental health, which is not something that the AI is going to pick up on. Right. And so it really, it was really fascinating to see, like, what our number five was, for example, was.

I think it's like 17th or 25th favorite, like, something like that. And so it's really fascinating to kind of see that difference.

So let me ask you, are we heading down a really bad path?

Because not just what's going on in Zeta, but all the big platforms that are out there, everybody's incorporating these AI components with looking at content and suggestions and this and that, whatever.

And then marketers are going to be like, well, I'm going to use that because it's AI and it's speeding up the process, and I'm more able to get everything done. But are we going to be basically just pumping out garbage or not the best? Because clearly the humans have a different feeling than the AI.

I mean, I think we have to be careful, right? So what I find AI really, really helpful for is a couple things. One is not having to start from a blank point place, like a blank page, right?

So subject lines, headlines, being able to kind of ideate if you give it the right direction, right. If you. If you want. If you want to lean into an emotion and you share that there's an emotion you want to lean into, it can help you, right.

From that perspective, I find too, that the agents that we're building, they start to learn your tone a little bit as well. So it's constantly learning. It starts to learn your tone.

And so if you are giving it the right input and you're not in this, like, set it and forget it, I'm just going to let it run. It's more effective.

But everything that we do, whether it's content or creative or design or audience identification, has to come with some level of validation from people. Right. And being able to connect it back to your brand. What is the emotional connection that your customer has?

How do you make this a conversation and not just a talking. At some point, somebody, Right. And still factor that in.

Where I find it's really helpful is in automating some of the mundane processes or simplifying things that are complicated.

Like, if you want to do heavy personalization, it can write the liquid scripting for you so that you don't actually have to do that if you're doing a whole, like, you know, part of the problem. If you think about personalization, email, the big problem always has been the QA work that has to happen.

You can write the agent to let it do the QA for you, and it can check and balance against these things to make sure that it's all coming together correctly. When you're automating things like that, I think that's a great place to set it and forget it.

And then it frees you up to spend a little more time thinking about the things that should still have a personal connection.

I think that's so important for people to, especially as AI goes further, inserting the human element or else you're really, you're just gonna be a waste and it's not gonna perform well.

But I wonder what, I wonder what your opinion is and what's going to happen, you know, with, you know, Google's already there kind of bucketing things with the promotions have and all using AI, but they're going further and Apple rolling out iOS 18 with the bucketing automatically of, of their emails, into promotions, into this, into that, using AI to determine what should go where. Like is it going to matter that the human beings looked at it if the AI bots are going to decide where it's going anyway?

I mean, what, what's your view on AI kind of taking over our inboxes?

Yeah, I mean it's going to be really interesting to see how that transpires. I think that, you know, we kind of got a glimpse of that with Gmail and the tabs that happened there.

We saw some impact, you know, in a little bit, but not a lot. Some people adopt them, some people don't. Some people turn on more tabs, others turn them off. Right.

So I think any time that you're talking about a consumer having to change their behavior and how they engage with something, nine times out of 10 they're going to default back to what was most comfortable for them.

And so I really am not sure, you know, how impactful it's going to be because I think the consumer adoption piece of that is going to be a really critical factor in how that's going to work. Right.

So I mean think about like every time like Outlook says, hey, we want to change you back to this new view, and I'm like, no, put me back on the old one, I'm good.

Right? It's so true. It is to be determined for sure. But Apple's definitely going to try to push that on us. There's no doubt.

So talking about pushing things, let's talk about SMS for a second. So email is amazing, but really we're in a world now where it's, you know, this, this 360 view. Right.

Yeah, I think that, you know, I, the way that I like to approach it and I think about it is kind of twofold. So I think SMS a, you have to be very, very careful with it.

If you abuse it as a channel, if you over inundate customers, I think that it can lose its value very quickly and it becomes like this visual wallpaper, it becomes this annoyance, it becomes this stop. And that's real easy to do. Right. And I think it starts with the way that we're acquiring permission for mobile. Right.

Because it's like, hey, you want 20% off? Give us your email address. Great. Now you have to give us your mobile number and we'll text you that coupon.

You have to have a value to the customer beyond that coupon. And where I find SMS to be the most effective is in moments where you need real time connection and communication with the customer.

So a great example is, and we've talked to other brands about this, if you're an airline and you know the customer is traveling today and you know their flight is gonna be delayed and Starbucks is a, you want to say, hey, sorry, your flight's delayed, go grab a cup of coffee on us, you want to text that to them because it's happening in a moment, it's happening in real time and there's a real value exchange for the customer in doing that. You don't want to send it an email because it may or may not be in their inbox.

They may or may not check it and it'd be really frustrating to see that after that moment has come and gone.

And so I do think that it has to really factor into the immediacy of the need to have eyes on it or and you know, really the opportunity to kind of embrace the customer in, you know, in those moments where the value exchange will be real.

Yeah. And I think, you know, you touched on something that's really important, the difference between SMS and email.

And you can send an email and let's say it wasn't the most important thing, it wasn't the greatest thing.

It didn't do great when you said, okay, you could live to fight another day, that person's probably still going to give you another shot the next time you send an email.

But if you kind of abuse somebody's, you know, phone with a message and they will that you get like one or two chances before the like no chance, goodbye. Just so much more personal.

So I think it's really great advice that to really appreciate that value exchange when you get that phone number because it's not the same as the value exchange. When someone gives, you know, their email address that. Is that a fair way to look at it?

Absolutely. And I think we have to learn from the mistakes that we made in taking direct mail and trying to turn it into email.

You know, there was a whole period of time where we're like, we're going to take this postcard and we're going to send it an email.

And I think we're seeing a lot of that happening right now too, is we're going to take this offer that we're going to send an email and we're going to also send it in an SMS message. And I think that that is we should learn from the mistakes we made.

Each channel has its own distinct purpose and use and is a part of the conversation. Have you seen, oh, what's the movie with Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, 50 first dates? Yes. And it's like that.

I keep saying the same thing to you over and over and over again. Eventually you're like, holy hell, would you stop? Right? That's how it is. Right?

If you're in email and SMS and we're sending the same message over and over, it's like, just stop.

I love it. I love it. I'm so on board with that. All right, so let's pivot into the chaos of this podcast. Since you brought up a horrible movie.

I'm all in on horrible movies. And I have no idea. We didn't talk about this, but you seem very cool. I like horrible tv. I want to know, do you go deep?

Like, will you watch reality tv?

Oh, yes.

What do you watch? I need to know.

Oh, goodness. So, well, this is really funny.

So my husband is actually the one who got me into reality tv because he was like, he was into all of the Jersey Shore and the Housewives.

Yes.

I am a big. I am a big below deck fan. Love.

Yeah. You watch below deck and below deck Mediterranean.

Oh, yes. And sailing.

Well, the whole thing. So what do you think about, like, the relatively new captain? Are you on board?

I'm getting there. Like, I just love Captain Lee.

I. I get it. So do you feel pressure?

I don't like change.

Right. Change is hard. So do you feel when I watch the show, Because I watch. I'm very big into Bachelor Nation, all bachelor things, but I do.

I was until they started with the whole, like, bachelor Patcher in Paradise.

No, no, no. That's Silver, the Golden Bachelor.

That's when I was, like, done with it. I can't do it anymore.

Oh, don't even. That's not. That's not real. But wait, I have a question for you on. On Below Deck.

Okay, so when I'm watching that and the chef is working his tail off, or her tail off, whatever, making all the food in this very small area, and then they bring it out, and invariably these obnoxious people are like, this is not good. As if they're like Marie Antoinette. Do you feel for the chef or do you feel for the people that are eating?

I feel for the chef. I think it's ridiculous.

Would you be like that or would you be like, this is great?

Here's what's really funny, too. I've recently had an opportunity because I know somebody who knows someone who's been on the show on Below Deck, and I actually.

They're like, hey, we had a cancellation. Do you want to come on with you and seven of your favorite people.

Let's go.

I was. I really wanted to go, but it was a really expensive vacation for three days, and it was hard to justify. But.

But we talked about it, like, what kind of people would we be? What kind of guests would we be? And I actually think we would probably be a little too boring for Bravo. We probably would not make the cut.

You would have stepped it up. I feel like you would have stepped it up. You would have them do the inflatable slides. You would have been all in.

It would have been fallen off the side, broken. Yes. Amazing. Well, this is all amazing. All right, before I let you go, Zeta has a big, amazing event coming up called Zeta Live.

Tell everybody what they got to do, how to register. Shaq is going to be there. What is going on?

I am so excited about that. So it's September 26th. Going to be in New York. Lots of. Lots of great, incredible speakers going to be there, a lot of networking opportunities.

We're going to talk about some of the latest innovations in the industry and some really insightful sessions. I'll be leading a panel about customer experience, which is very exciting. So all you got to do is go to ZetaGlobal and register.

You can attend virtually or in person, but Shaq is going to be there, and I think that if you want to see him, you got to come. So we're really excited about it. We actually already. I think we've crossed the 10,000 attendee mark on the virtual.

And, you know, we still got some time to go, so would love to get the folks there.

I can't recommend it strongly enough. I attended last year. It was awesome. I learned a ton.

We're going to put it all in the show notes. Follow Cara on LinkedIn. Where else should they follow you? How else do they get more involved with your world? Cara?

I'm everywhere. I'm everywhere. I'm on. I'm on all the channels. So you know, Twitter, insta. I'm everywhere. So definitely find me. Love to connect for sure.

All right, Kara Trunovich, we're going to put it in the show notes. You are awesome, Cara. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. I love it.

All right, take care.

You too.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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