Key highlights:
00:58 - 09:40 - How does Shanif Keep Customers Clicking? - Personalisation. If you send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, you’ve got a far better chance of engaging them and hopefully getting the conversion. If you can find that right moment to delight them, educate them, or get that correct product in front of them, then you’re on to a winner.
It’s a very data heavy space, but its important not to get too bogged down yourself creating hundreds of segments. It’s still OK to be fairly broad on this.
You also need to weight your data. Some data is more important than others. Pure transactional data is pretty strong, but maybe geographic data has some indicators, but its still not going to be black and white.
10:27 - 12:50 - How to Get this Right? - Firstly, centralise your data. Make sure you can get a good view on everything at once so you’re able to create segments, see how different audiences response and interact with your business.
Then look at some simple opportunities. Look for where people are buying several different products together, and use this as the upsell idea for those who arent buying them together straight away.
Come up with some high level objectives. What are you really trying to achieve here? Is it an improvement in email performance? PPC? Social ads? Explore that data, and come up with some ideas to target that specifically.

13:21 - 19:56 - Automated vs Manual Recommendations - Smaller brands can definitely get started with manual. As recommended before, find products that are regularly bought in addition to your best sellers, and offers those as upsells to anyone who didnt buy them. Automation kicks in when you’ve got the data and the scale to support it. It works well for companies with loads of products, because it can match them up automatically, but again, this only really works if theres enough data to allow the matching.
Automation also gives you other insights that you might have missed. If you have a product that almost never sells, and suddenly it gets picked up by the automation, you’re going to want to look into why.
20:22 - 32:12 - What are the Challenges in Getting Started? - The biggest blockers here tend to be one of two things. Either a company doesnt have the resource to explore this, set up some manual automations, then manage the integration of automation, or they don’t have the knowledge to even begin targeting this.
As we all know, sending the same message to everyone on your list just doesnt work, yet so many businesses still do it. So if this is you, just think how much more money you could be making, how many more customers you could be stealing from your competitors by just putting in a little work and leaving some emails on autopilot.
32:25 - Who Would Shanif Like to Take For Lunch in the D2C Marketing World?
Neil Patel, Nick Sharma, Chase Dimond.
If you’d like to hear more from Shanif, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or head over to https://conversionadvocates.com/.