Marketing automation beyond guesswork

Most conversations about marketing automation start with a platform. Which one to pick, which flows to build first, which template converts best.

Casper Ackermann and Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen, who between them have spent the better part of a decade running the marketing automation practice at s360, start somewhere else entirely. With what a new client actually says when they walk in the door.

We sat down with Casper and Emil as part of our Hello Retail Conversations series, a collection of unscripted conversations with people shaping how ecommerce works.

Watch the full conversation with Casper and Emil here →

The problem is almost never a data shortage

Ask a new client what’s wrong, and the answer is rarely specific. It’s a feeling.

“It might be just a feeling: we have this flow set up, we don’t feel like we’re hitting our customers at the right time. We don’t think it’s good enough, really. And then it starts basically with us doing an audit and taking it from there.” (Casper Ackermann)

Underneath that feeling is almost always the same pattern. A lot of moving parts, and no clear view of which ones are working.

“All these moving parts, and the volume of those, can lead to companies not having an overview of what to do next, what to optimize, what to actually fix. They just have a feeling that something is broken.” (Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen)

When growth turns into chaos

The chaos gets worse, not better, as a business grows. More profiles, more consents, more data flowing into the marketing platform, more ways for a campaign calendar to drift.

“Many of the businesses that we speak to have a feeling that it’s a little bit chaotic, especially as they grow in size.” (Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen)

Emil describes a recent audit where campaign frequency had no real rhythm behind it.

“Just recently I did an audit where the campaign frequency was fluctuating. They were just sending campaigns left, right, and center, basically. And the flows were sending, but they didn’t really have an understanding of are they sending to the right people, are they actually delivering the right messages.” (Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen)

From newsletters to trigger flows to true one-to-one

Casper has been doing this since 2012 and started his own agency, later acquired by s360, in 2016. Emil joined him six years ago. Between them, they’ve watched the same evolution play out across hundreds of ecommerce brands.

First it was broad newsletters. Then came the first triggered emails, abandoned cart and post-purchase, which used to set the frontrunners apart from everyone else.

“The frontrunners back then were the companies that managed to trigger a post-purchase email or an abandoned cart email. They were the frontrunners. And today, that’s for everyone to do because data is more available.” (Casper Ackermann)

Then came basic personalization. A first name, a product recommendation block. What Emil sees happening now is the next step, one most brands haven’t taken yet. Using product data to decide when a message gets sent, instead of only decorating it once it does.

“We can now way more effectively use product data as a trigger layer as well.” (Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen)

Personalization vs. segmentation

Ask most ecommerce teams if they personalize, and they’ll say yes. Casper and Emil see something different when they open the account.

“For many of our clients, when they came to us, personalization in their view, it’s not so much dynamic personalization in a message the way we’d probably define it. It’s much more so, I do a bunch of different segments and send out different variations.” (Casper Ackermann)

Splitting an abandoned cart flow into “customers who’ve bought before” and “first-time visitors” is a real example Casper points to. It’s a start. It’s also close to the ceiling of what most brands do today.

The dream state: One-to-one, in content and in timing

Where is this heading? Casper’s answer is specific. Who gets a message, when they get it, and what it says, all tailored on a genuinely individual basis.

“I think we’ll get to a point where e-commerce businesses have the ability to fully tailor a message on a one-to-one basis.” (Casper Ackermann)

Emil frames the same shift as the end of guesswork.

“I think we’re close to something where we don’t have to guess anymore across all types of data layers.” (Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen)

Ten years inside Klaviyo’s growth

s360’s relationship with Klaviyo goes back further than most agencies in the market. Casper’s agency picked it up in 2017, when a client asked about a new platform built specifically for ecommerce.

“We started working with Klaviyo in 2017, back when we weren’t a part of s360. We were one of the first agencies to really start working with Klaviyo, at least in Denmark, on a partnership level.” (Casper Ackermann)

The partnership deepened from there. Official partner status in 2018, elite status, Klaviyo’s highest tier, in 2022.

“We became a partner officially in 2018, two years ahead of any Danish agency that became a partner. In 2022, we became an elite Klaviyo partner, which is the highest tier. We are measured on the same criteria as an agency would be in the US or UK, in absolute revenue numbers.” (Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen)

Where AI earns trust in marketing automation

Handing a message to an algorithm still makes plenty of ecommerce teams nervous. Some algorithms more than others. The deciding factor, in Casper and Emil’s experience, is how bounded the decision is.

“If you have an AI that ingests text in a potentially uncontrolled manner, that causes a lot of nerves in many e-commerce businesses. But if you have an AI that is there to pick the right products, the risk of something going wrong is perceived as lower.” (Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen)

It’s also why the pairing of Product Agents with s360’s marketing automation practice makes sense to Emil. Product data stops being a personalization layer applied after the fact, and becomes the thing deciding what to send and when.

Vibe coding: Build the small tools yourself

Both Casper and Emil have started using AI-assisted coding to build their own internal tools, rather than waiting on a developer or a roadmap.

Casper’s clearest example is a client’s customer service team, who needed to update communication preferences on customer profiles without getting raw access to the marketing platform.

“We vibe-coded a very small and simple platform for a business. In the past, building that would have taken quite some time. But here we had it live in less than a day.” (Casper Ackermann)

Emil applied the same logic to the agency’s own analytics. s360 built its own platform, Klaviyo Hub, to pull account insights together the way the team actually wants to see them, cutting audits that used to take ten hours down to two.

Casper’s caution for anyone tempted to go further is that this is a tool for the gaps around your foundational platforms, not a replacement for them.

“Don’t build foundational tools. Try to see if you can solve the small issues around your business.” (Casper Ackermann)

The most under-used asset most brands already own

If there’s one number from the conversation worth sitting with, it’s this one. It isn’t about missing data. It’s about data nobody’s using.

“The far bigger issue, the far more normal issue, is probably clients not using the data they have, as opposed to we need to get more data. Normally when we do an audit, it’s probably, you’ve tapped into 20% of the use cases there is from a personalization perspective.” (Casper Ackermann)

Emil’s addition is that once the first-party data is genuinely in use, the next lever is zero-party data, asking customers directly what they want, and feeding that straight into how product feeds and messages get tailored to them.

What Hello Retail brings to this

At Hello Retail, we’ve spent years building product-level behavioral intelligence. Knowing when a product has been viewed repeatedly, when a replenishment window is opening based on purchase history, when a price drops on something that’s been sitting in an abandoned cart.

That’s exactly the layer Casper and Emil are describing when they talk about product data as a trigger point rather than a personalization afterthought. Product Agents puts it to work inside Klaviyo. The intent is defined once, and the system decides who to contact, when, and with which product, rather than an agency team building and maintaining that logic flow by flow.

It’s why s360 and Hello Retail signed a partnership agreement, pairing Product Agents with s360’s marketing automation practice across their client base. You can read more about s360 as a Hello Retail partner here.

Final thought

Casper’s closing advice cuts against the instinct to always outsource further.

“Take more of this work in-house and be way more serious about investing in an in-house CRM operation. You’ll get way more out of it doing most of the stuff yourself, and then maybe having a good partner on top that’s seen 100, 500 different cases and can help you, rather than under-investing internally or externally and not appreciating the channel.” (Casper Ackermann)

That’s the thread running through the whole conversation. Use what you already have before reaching for more.

About Casper and Emil

Watch the full conversation with Casper Ackermann and Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen on the Hello Retail Conversations page →