# Marketing automation beyond guesswork – Casper Ackermann & Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen > Casper Ackermann and Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen both work inside s360's marketing automation practice: Casper as VP for one of the agency's international offices and its subject matter expert on marketing automation, Emil as Senior Director & Head of Marketing Automation, a role he took over from Casper in February 2026. This episode looks at what s360 actually finds when a new client's marketing automation setup gets audited, and why the problem is almost never a shortage of data. - **Series**: Hello Retail Conversations - **Episode**: Episode 08 - **Guests**: Casper Ackermann — VP & Marketing Automation Subject Matter Expert, [s360](https://s360digital.com); Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen — Senior Director & Head of Marketing Automation, [s360](https://s360digital.com) - **Published**: September 4, 2026 - **Watch**: [https://helloretail.com/en/conversations/marketing-automation-beyond-guesswork/](https://helloretail.com/en/conversations/marketing-automation-beyond-guesswork/) - **TwentyThree photo_id**: 131197228 --- ## About this episode Casper Ackermann and Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen both work inside s360's marketing automation practice: Casper as VP for one of the agency's international offices and its subject matter expert on marketing automation, Emil as Senior Director & Head of Marketing Automation, a role he took over from Casper in February 2026. This episode looks at what s360 actually finds when a new client's marketing automation setup gets audited, and why the problem is almost never a shortage of data. Casper and Emil trace how personalization has moved from broad newsletters, to triggered flows, to today's early attempts at true one-to-one messaging. In the large majority of s360's audits, brands already hold far more usable first-party data than they act on. Casper and Emil put a number on it: most clients are using around 20% of the personalization use cases their own data already supports. The conversation also traces s360's own history with Klaviyo, from one of the platform's first agency partnerships in Denmark back in 2017 to elite partner status today, and into the new partnership with Hello Retail. For Emil, pairing Product Agents with s360's marketing automation practice matters because product data stops being only a personalization layer and becomes a trigger and timing layer in its own right, deciding not just what a message says but when it should be sent. They close on where AI fits into marketing automation right now: which parts of agentic AI still make clients nervous, why a tightly scoped AI (picking the right product) earns more trust than an open-ended one, and how both are already using AI-assisted "vibe coding" to build small internal tools, like a custom analytics layer, without waiting on a developer. --- ## Guest — Casper Ackermann Casper Ackermann is VP at s360, based in one of the agency's international offices, and s360's subject matter expert on marketing automation. He ran his own email marketing agency for eight to nine years before it was acquired by s360, and led the agency's Marketing Automation practice before handing that role to Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen in February 2026. - **Title**: VP & Marketing Automation Subject Matter Expert - **Company**: [s360](https://s360digital.com) - **LinkedIn**: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccackermann/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccackermann/) ## Guest — Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen Emil Flou Hjorth Jensen is Senior Director & Head of Marketing Automation at s360, a role he took over from Casper Ackermann in February 2026. He has worked alongside Casper for six years, first at Casper's own email marketing agency and now leading s360's Marketing Automation team for clients across Denmark and beyond. - **Title**: Senior Director & Head of Marketing Automation - **Company**: [s360](https://s360digital.com) - **LinkedIn**: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/emil-flou-hjorth-jensen-806549127/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/emil-flou-hjorth-jensen-806549127/) --- ## Notable quotes > "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, VP & Marketing Automation Subject Matter Expert, s360** > "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, Senior Director & Head of Marketing Automation, s360** --- ## Key takeaways 1. **Most brands use about 20% of the personalization they already have** — s360's audits keep finding the same pattern: the blocker isn't missing data, it's undecided data, which segment, which product, which moment to act on. Casper and Emil put the number at roughly 20% of available personalization use cases actually in production. 2. **Product data is becoming a trigger, not just a personalization layer** — Emil's read on pairing Product Agents with s360's marketing automation practice: product data now decides not only what a message shows, but when it fires, timing sends around real signals like replenishment windows and price drops instead of one generic flow for everyone. 3. **AI earns trust in marketing automation by being tightly scoped** — Clients get nervous about AI that freely generates copy, but far less nervous about AI making a bounded decision, like which product to recommend. Casper and Emil see that gap closing as agentic tools get more controlled, and both are already using AI-assisted "vibe coding" to build small internal tools of their own. --- ## Transcript by chapter ### 0:00 — Common Customer Pain Points *Discussion on the typical problems new customers face, focusing on retention issues and the chaos of scaling marketing automation.* So if things are really burning and you're sort of having the first meeting, it's a bit of a more acute situation. What kinds of problems do you typically hear from your new customers? Yeah, I think mostly, at least speaking from our side of the table, obviously it's a lot of CRM related. So obviously in terms of the broader s360, what they'll come to us with is probably something related to retention. So we have some customers that we have trouble retaining, or we have a sense of a feeling that we need to retain them better, really. And how to do that can be a variety of things, and it can be a myriad of issues. But I think really when they come to us, that's it. We want to do better retention. All right. What would they typically say? How do they sort of articulate their own problems? Yeah, I think it depends on what type of company it is. It can be for smaller companies, I'd say, or S&P type companies. It might be just a feeling, you know, we have this flow set up, right? 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, right? Yeah. And I think in general, what I'm also seeing is that a lot of e-commerce businesses today have a lot of moving paths in their marketing automation operations. So they are sending campaigns, they're doing lead generation, they have all these flows running. And at least from what I'm seeing and what we're seeing, you know, all these moving paths, and the sort of volume of those can lead to companies not, you know, having an overview of what to do next, what to optimize, what to actually fix, but they just have a feeling that something is broken. And I think that's a core issue that we're seeing. Do they feel that it's sort of a chaotic situation for them, or do they feel they have things under relatively okay control, or what's typical for them? Yeah, I think many of the businesses that we at least speak to have a feeling that it's a little bit chaotic, especially as they kind of grow in size, because as they, at least typically as they grow in size, you know, the number of profiles or consents are increasing, you know, the amount of data coming into the marketing platforms, you know, is increasing. And I think that leads to a little bit of a, you know, that leads to uncertainty and that leads to a little bit of chaos sometimes. And, you know, just recently I did an audit where, you know, the campaign frequency was, you know, fluctuating, you know, and they didn't really have a, you know, they were just sending ### 3:03 — The Evolution of Marketing Automation *A look back at the shift from basic newsletters to triggered emails and the current move toward intelligent product data usage.* campaigns every, you know, left, right, and center, basically. And, you know, the flows were sending, but they didn't really have an understanding of, you know, are they sending to the right people? You know, are they actually delivering the right messages? You know, what about the lead generation? All these things that sort of, you know, that comprise the entire marketing automation setup were, you know, there were some uncertainties across the board, really. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's get you guys introduced. Can you sort of give us sort of versions of s360? What are you guys doing? What's your journey been? A bit about yourselves? Do you want to go ahead? Yeah, sure. So my name is Casper. I serve as a VP in s360 for one of our international offices. And in addition to that, I am a subject matter expert on marketing automation. And my background is that I ran an email marketing agency for eight, nine years before we were acquired by s360. And s360 is a European marketing and AI agency that helps retailers and brands grow. Yeah. And I'm Emil and serves as the head of marketing automation at s360 today. I took over that role actually from Casper just this year in February. And me and Casper to that story worked together in Arckermann ### 4:37 — Personalization Maturity *Analyzing the difference between simple segmentation and true one-to-one dynamic personalization at scale.* The former agency have been working for six years or so now. So there's been quite a lot of water under the bridge when it comes to the two of us and what we've seen in terms of use cases and clients over the years. It's a functioning marriage. I'd say so. I'd say so. Still functioning. Yeah, still functioning. Still functioning. Yeah, and so the reason we wanted to talk to you guys is that we have signed a partnership between s360 and Hello Retail. We're sort of exploring how to start giving you access to using our product intelligence data, the AI models, our new Product Agents solution. But today I really want to sort of talk about what good and bad marketing automation looks like to you. And I'm especially interested in sort of this idea of is this the time where all of the guesswork is sort of beginning to fade and that we can actually use data to not just guess better but actually know what will happen in terms of e-commerce customer journeys, the kinds of content we send out via marketing automation platforms, ### 5:53 — The S360 and Klaviyo Partnership *The history of S360's relationship with Klaviyo and their journey to becoming an Elite partner.* and how you guys sort of tap into various data to make that happen. So that's from my side, that's sort of the overarching theme for today is about the relationship to guesswork that exists in e-commerce and how that's evolving right now. Where do you see this? If you sort of look back a couple of years and sort of compare that to now, where are we on that evolution towards less guesswork and more knowing? I think we're close to something where we don't have to guess anymore across all types of data layers. So I think what I mean by that is if I go back to six years ago when I trotted into the office and started working with Casper, it was right around COVID times, obviously e-commerce was booming. But I think just around there and maybe a little bit before, many companies were just doing basic CRM email marketing. We had some profile data, we had a consent, we sent some emails. Then companies really started figuring out, okay, we can actually use event data, purchase data from Shopify, etc., to create automated flows and trigger them. And then I think we've had five or six years where people more or less are starting to get better and better at personalizing the personalization layer, but have never really tweaked, especially for bigger companies like retailers, the product data and how to use that at scale in an intelligent way, where previously it was just a part of personalization layer. We can now way more effectively use product data as a trigger layer as well. And in those conversations with customers, are they sort of coming out of consent issues, cookie issues, or is it something broader? Is that something that you introduced to them ### 7:56 — Leveraging Product Intelligence *How using product data as a trigger and timing point improves customer journeys compared to static flows.* or do they come with the need themselves? Depends on where they're at. Because if it's a company like the example I alluded to just in COVID times, it was a lot of companies that were just sending broad manual newsletters. Then the next step is just let's set up a good basic flow setup. Using product data at scale in terms of triggering messages at the right time is way ahead of where a company like that might be. But if you have all that set, then you're probably at a point now where you want to look way more at product data. Yeah, and I think to your question about guesswork, I think the benefit of having done this, on my part at least, for 13 years, when I started with what I would call professional digital marketing back in 2012 or 13, working for a modern IT SaaS platform back then, our main email marketing efforts were ### 9:02 — AI in Messaging: Control vs. Risk *Discussing customer anxiety regarding AI-generated content and the importance of controlled AI for product selection.* campaign-based or newsletter-based. And then I started my own agency in 2016 and started working with some clients back in 2015. And back then, 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. The marketing automation platforms have evolved and have made it easier for close to almost all companies to actually achieve that. And so what I've seen is that you've moved from sort of broad newsletters into triggered emails into the first steps into, and we also talked about this before we pushed the record button, into sort of personalized or some basic personalization of content, you know, using the first name, maybe ingesting some product recommendations into the emails. ### 10:01 — Vibes Coding and Rapid Prototyping *Exploring 'Vibes coding' to build custom analytics layers and internal tools with a significantly shorter time to market.* And I think that sort of almost evolution is now at a point where, you know, for many companies at least, the data is getting to a point now where they are correct and usable, and with usable also available. And I think that's also what Emil alluded to, you know, actually allowing companies easier access to the data and for the usage of data in a personalization. I think that's what we're seeing right now is the final step. Yeah, I feel like we've... The latest step. Yeah, sure. It's also just that we've been talking about personalization to customers for an extremely long time now, right? I mean, it's been going on for the better part of two decades that from the customer vantage point, they've been hearing vendors and implementation agencies sort of talk about now personalization is at a point where you can really get an advantage out of it. And having sort of followed those sort of ebbs and flows of personalization and sort of how it has evolved over a very long time, to me at least, it feels like, okay, now it is actually becoming true that now many more customers sort of that are not at Google's size or something like that can actually do effective personalization. But when you guys speak with customers, what do they say about sort of personalization maturity? To be quite fair, I think it is quite low. But that's from our vantage point, obviously working with this every day. I think for many, actually, 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, oh, I do a bunch of different segments and send out different variations, which is not really, it's personalization, but it's not in a scalable way. It's very statically created, right? And I think a lot of companies are still trying to do the basic personalization at scale in a good way. And I think are probably still struggling with mixing up who are we sending to, i.e. segmentation versus personalization, what are we showing within a certain message. Right, yeah. Well, let me put it differently then. And from your vantage point, what's the sort of the dream state that is about to come in a year's time or something like that? What are you working towards when it comes to personalizing better, using the product data better? I think we'll get to a point where, and this is looking a little bit ahead, but 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. So meaning that not only is the content specific to the customers, but also where it's sent and who's it actually triggered to. And I think right now, ### 13:06 — Staying Competitive as an Agency *Strategies for avoiding commoditization by providing high-level advisory and proprietary insights.* and also as Emil mentioned just a short while ago, right now for many companies, the personalization they're doing is that they are, without going too technical on it, they're basically splitting a flow into an abandoned cart flow and sending one email to customers who have purchased before and one to potential customers who have just left something in the basket and haven't purchased for the first time. And that's where we are with personalization on a sort of broad scale. And I think in the future what we'll be seeing is that businesses will have the tools available to them to actually also tailor sort of sending times and content on a much, much, much broader scale. I think that's where we're moving towards. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I also wanted to hear a little bit more about your sort of engagement in the Klaviyo community. You have a pretty sort of special tier of partnership together with them, which means that you get access to other information. You have a different sort of vantage point of looking at not just Klaviyo as a company, but what the technology does and how sort of where that's evolving, what kinds of importance that has for your customers. I'd love it if you could just sort of talk a little bit about your guys' journey with Klaviyo and where you see that heading. Do you want, I can maybe go first and then you can take it from where I handed over the reins of the marketing automation team. Sure. So our partnership with Klaviyo goes way back. So we started working with Klaviyo in, I think it was around 2017, back when, you know, it wasn't, we weren't a part of s360 actually. ### 14:59 — Data Challenges *Addressing the gap between collecting first-party data and actually utilizing it effectively in marketing.* And we got to work with Klaviyo because a client of our agency came to us and said, hey, we're using MailChimp today. We found this new platform. It's built for e-commerce. What do you guys think about it? I was sitting there, you know, I think it was, yeah, it was probably year two of the agency. I was like, yeah, I've never heard about them before. But, you know, as you always do in sort of a startup environment, you were like, yeah, we can definitely work with them. So we started working with Klaviyo and I think our first sort of point of contact was a guy called Phil Klaviyo, who was at that time, I believe, one of the first Klaviyo employees in Europe. So we were one of the first agencies to really start working with Klaviyo, at least in Denmark, on a partnership sort of level. And from there, we sort of grew that partnership. And as I always say, you know, we as an agency, we go towards the tech that our clients need and want. And actually, you know, so as more and more, and it was a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy probably. It was, definitely. Because, you know, we saw the results we could create with Klaviyo. More and more customers also saw the results that we and others obviously also could create with Klaviyo. So more and more customers went into Klaviyo. So it was like a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I'd say. So that was sort of the beginning of the partnership and the first few years. And obviously, we grew in partnership status. And I think maybe... Yeah, and I think a couple of comments to that. And some of this may be a shameless plug, but just to what Casper said. We became a partner officially, at least in 2018. And we were 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 still are. I was just in London in May, speaking as part of four elite agencies to the entire ecosystem in EMEA. And I think what's pretty amazing, thinking back on it and talking to all these brilliant agency founders when I was in London, that's actually below our tier, is that we are measured on the same criteria as an agency would be in the US or UK. In absolute revenue numbers. So the amount of clients we've been able to help relative to our market and position is something I am really proud of. And obviously, it really got crazy back in the COVID days. And Casper alluded to, I think it was a little bit of a market where it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And we started helping a lot of companies. They started talking to each other. Then suddenly, every e-com business or e-commerce in Denmark had to use Klaviyo, in their view, at least. But also, just because it is a great marketing automation platform for e-commerce business. Of course. It's like, you know, and I think, you know, that was also... We've always had that position. We want to work in something that makes sense for our clients. So that's how it started. And that's how it still is. And, yeah, when you then, how intentional or unintentional it is, end up working a lot in one system, obviously, then you also have an ICP that you can really cater to. Because then we can really specialize within our team on that. And I think that's at least something we've succeeded pretty well with. I love the framing about the sort of the focus on results, that it's about the results that you can drive with the technology. And sort of by being part of that community, you get to know it super well and can sort of take advantage of new features and all of that stuff. So you guys have partnered with us at Hello Retail after we launched what's called Product Agents that plugs into Klaviyo. So can you sort of... This doesn't need... This is not sort of about promoting that particular product, but can you talk a little bit about what's sort of underneath that? What is it that you hope to be able to drive in terms of results? Where does this fit into sort of your ideal of a modern marketing automation practice? Yeah. I'll surface this with saying we wouldn't partner with Hello Retail if we didn't see it had value for our clients. So I think for me, if I were to put it like in one sentence, the really cool thing about it is moving using product data, not only as a personalization layer, but as a trigger point and a timing point. That's really the main thing. Because if we allude to some of the things Casper talked about, if you're a large retailer, you have many SKUs, for example, and you want to create post-purchase journeys, for example, or at some point in the life cycle of a customer. It's really, really hard to statically create different journeys. If you're a Bauhaus or a Jem & Fix, there's a huge difference if a person bought a mownlower or something to bake with or a little whatever. So the fact that we can time it based on the product data is a really big thing. And I think in general, what I find super cool about the product agents is that it allows the e-commerce businesses to do more. And I think I mentioned that earlier when I sort of walked through the timeline of the evolutionary timeline almost of e-commerce businesses with marketing automation. We are at a point now and also have been for the past few years where a lot of e-commerce businesses have, you know, what I would call the basic e-commerce data available to them in the marketing automation platforms. So if you want to do more, if you want to personalize more, if you want to cover more of the customer journey better, you need more and better data. And I think that's what you get with prior agents. And, yeah, super excited about that, actually. And what about if you look at product data and sort of more broadly and what we call Product Intelligence at Hello Retail? How do you guys sort of picture that that can be useful for building solutions? If you think about it more broadly? Again, I would say in terms of timing, frequency, if I have many skews and the products differ a lot, it will take me an infinite amount of time to create different branches of journey where something makes sense to communicate about after 28 days. And something else, a way bigger product may take half a year before it makes sense to time to message again, if it may be replenishment, for example. So I think that's the really big thing. A huge add-on is that based on how it's built, you know, the personalization is at a one-to-one basis as well. It's not just static text that we've based within a certain message. It's catered to the individual person. Yeah. Do you see about the one-to-one nature of the emails that we want to sort of equip an agency like you to help customers send? What are you sort of seeing from the customer side when it comes to anxiousness over letting the AI do the messaging and sort of do the selection of products? It's a very important touch point with the final shopper and their customer that they're trying to build loyalty around. So it better damn be really, really good, right? I mean, are you sort of having those kinds of discussions with customers about AI usage for messaging? Yeah, ### 23:20 — How controlled the AI is I think the discussions around AI and especially agentic AI and marketing automation is something we've had discussions with clients on for quite a few years now. And I think the main topic of discussion is how controlled the AI is. So if you have an AI that ingests text in a potentially at least uncontrolled manner, that causes a lot of nerves in many e-commerce businesses. But if you do have an AI that sort of are to pick the right products, the risk of something going wrong is perceived as lower. So I think the main point is that if the AI is in the eyes of the e-commerce business seen as more uncontrolled, that creates some nervousness. But I also think that as tools sort of evolve within the AI landscape, you know, those nerves are being calmed a little bit. Yeah, it's a bit of a transition period, right? I mean, we use that a lot in all sorts of ways, also in our own marketing. And I really do feel that it's a short transition period in the grander scheme of things, right? Because we can definitely get extremely close to something now that is just completely indistinguishable from what human beings might write or select. And a lot of it can for sure do better if orchestrated right. And I think that's part of it. We're probably better educated now in terms of seeing, okay, the benefits versus the risks. The benefits far outweighs the risk in most cases. I think a general point as well is probably that we probably do see that a lot of scale-ups or SMBs in their very nature are ahead of some bigger companies that might be hampered by corporate compliance policies and whatnot. And that's a very real thing. Yeah. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Vibe coding, basically. And sort of if we broaden the sort of the lens around AI, what does this mean for you as an agency? What kinds of discussions are you now getting into and expectations from customers after they have tried some AI coding themselves? So – If they have. I don't know if they have. But I assume they do. I can speak from my perspective at least and say that I'm – and Emil is probably laughing a little bit right now as well. But I'm big on Vibe coding. And I think it's a fantastic opportunity for many companies. And sort of our first step into Vibe coding in relation to marketing automation has been building our own analytics layer for better understanding of our clients' data, basically. And, you know, marketing automation potential and, you know, marketing automation potential and opportunities and whatnot. And I think what I would like to stress to many – to the e-commerce businesses viewing or listening in on this is that Vibes coding presents a fantastic opportunity for you in a CRM, obviously, CRM and marketing automation perspective to uncover more opportunities and better understand the data. Because, obviously, in most marketing automation platforms today, you have an analytics layer that presents data. But as many marketing automation platforms are, almost, I think, all marketing automation platforms today have API access, you can fully tailor within a vibe-coding platform the analytics layer to your specific needs. And I think that's a big opportunity for many e-commerce businesses today. I think there's going to be a democratization going on. I think previously, I think one of the struggles from sort of marketing teams is that normally the head of marketing or head of e -commerce or whatever probably comes from a paid background. There's a huge gap between the CRM team and probably the head of marketing in discussion what's going on. And that person never really knows how to dive into the platform and whatever. So I think with what Casper alluded to there, there's quite the opportunity to build some quite simple to do with the appoints, some solutions where you can, both from an employee perspective, from a management perspective, get access to and see the things you need to see without, you know, having to do an audit of 20 hours or have to discuss it with employees, basically. I can actually come up with an example of something we did, which I think is, obviously, I think it's pretty cool because we did it. But we vibe-coded a very small and simple platform for a business that had the case was that their customer service people, they had to basically be able to, let's call it update or edit properties on profiles. And those updates were meant to control what the subscribers received in terms of communication. We didn't want the, or the client didn't want the customer service personnel to actually have access to the marketing automation platform for two reasons. One, security. Two, what they actually had to update was not named in a manner that, you know, that made sense in a customer service perspective. So the Vibes coded platform on top allowed for super easy access to actually control the communication preferences. And in the past, building that would have taken quite some time, actually. But here we had it live in less than a day. And I think that's another, and it's obviously a very specific use case, but that just proves, I think, the very shortened time to market that Vibes coding presents for businesses in solving issues that in the past would have taken a lot of time. Yeah, I think we're obviously a software maker. So we also do see customers that are sort of experimenting with how far can they get in terms of sort of reproducing some of our solutions. I am 100% sure that some of them that sort of decide to, okay, let's build it ourselves, that they're going to come back to sort of prepackaged solutions because they completely oversee the maintenance issues. And security, of course, as you also alluded to, right? But the maintenance part of, or building software is one thing, maintaining it and evolving it is a bit of a different game. And if you don't have the experience of sort of being a software producer, then that's going to hit you at some point. 100%. And I'm not saying that everyone should just go ahead and try to build, you know, the next Salesforce or any other major platform. What I am thinking is, and we also discussed this earlier, you know, with API access to parts of you, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say what part of the product intelligence part of, of the Hello Retail platform, with API access to that and a Vibe-coded platform on top, you can basically dive into your data and transform or get insights based on your specific needs with a Vibe-coded platform. So I think, you know, what I think is the, from my perspective at least, you know, a big takeaway on Vibe-coded solutions is that don't build, or at least this is my opinion, don't build foundational tools. I think that's, that I would not do with Vibe-coding. But, but try to see if you can solve like, let's call it the small issues around your business with the. I can, I can, I think I can easily relate to that in our own marketing operation here. I would certainly not try to replicate HubSpot that we use. So, but I am, I am absolutely using their UI a lot less now. Yeah. Just tapping into the data with the, with our Vibe-coding, Vibe-coding based platform, right? So it's a lot about sort of being creative around the workflows in between the different platforms or the different foundational tools. Yeah. So I can, I can definitely really relate to that. I think it's a, yeah, there's probably, there's probably three layers to that the way I see it. Like there's going to be some very specific use cases for each company where you probably want to build your, that could be like a native operating system to the company. I think that's what we hear a lot about that webOS these days. And then I think agencies, I think, and I think we're seeing that a lot with s360 as well. Agencies will play a bigger part in creating proprietary tech in the sort of vertical market softwares with various sort of niche type tools that are needed, but are not like a foundational platform. And it doesn't make sense for a true software company to create and try to scale. And then obviously the true software companies building foundational type stuff. Yeah. And it gives you access to all of those internal tools, right? To build them on the fly and not having to wait for developers to create the new dashboard or what have you. Interesting. Let's get back to Klaviyo and your marketing automation practice. I want to hear more about sort of, we talked a little bit about what you guys see in terms of the dream state in the next coming years. But I want to sort of double click on that and hear more about your thoughts on where is this going? I think both if you look at what is interesting from the Klaviyo roadmap, maybe, if there's anything there, or how you want to sort of take it forward. Or maybe in a completely different way, how do you intend to give yourself an edge against your competitors when it comes to marketing automation? Yeah. ### 33:55 — Klaviyo's AI Roadmap: Composer & Customer Hub I can start a little bit on the Klaviyo and the AI side in general. For us, I think Klaviyo is not very different than all of the other platforms right now. It's that you're seeing a lot of native AI agents being built within the platform. Klaviyo has their version, Composer, which they are heavily investing into. It's already in the platform. It can help create emails. It can help you segment. It can help you build flows. And that's not Klaviyo, but broadly, we will see that getting rolled out. And I think it's naive to think that it's not going to be very, very good at some point. I don't think we're there yet. It can be a huge help, but it will be very sophisticated and very good. I think on our end, back to the sort of proprietary tech part, we've really tried to say, okay, this is really a tough landscape. So maybe what we should try to do at first is build something where we can be more efficient ourselves and provide our customers with better advisory. So a little bit what Kasper alluded to with the analytics platform. We have our own name for a platform that we call Klaviyo Hub, which is a platform we've built to basically gain all the insights from our Klaviyo accounts in the way that we want to see them and get them presented. So an audit that in the past may have taken 10 hours can probably be done and better in a couple of hours, as an example. What about you, Casper? Yeah, I think on the Klaviyo side, I think what I'm quite excited about is the – and it's not a new, new feature, but sort of the whole – I like the perspective of Klaviyo trying to take more ownership of the customer journey. And what I mean with that is that they released a customer hub functionality some time ago that allows businesses to easily deploy some sort of loyalty functionality on the website. And I think that's super exciting because it allows sort of Klaviyo to sort of almost extend their reach from being a platform that collects the data and sends emails to also a platform that handles some of the on-site capabilities of an e-commerce business. And I think that's super exciting. Also, the marketing analytics layer in Klaviyo has become more sophisticated. The KDP that they launched many years ago now almost has evolved and has become way better. Emil has made some really cool use cases lately, I think, that I'm quite excited about. And on the marketing analytics side, that allows, you know, greater insights into, you know, how leads or subscribers from certain sources actually perform down the funnel, which is a functionality or which is an insight allowed by the marketing analytics layer. So that's two Klaviyo functionalities that I'm super excited about. And just to sort of underline what Emil said, you know, the way that I see it and that we see it in terms of ### 37:17 — How s360 Stays Ahead as the Market Catches Up staying competitive in this market is that you need to, as an agency, and that is what we are trying to do, is to always understand what will be the next thing that clients will request. So back in the argument days, the name of the agency that we were in before being acquired by s360, you know, for many years, our, you know, license to play almost was that we were extremely good at building flows and building up the automated email sequences. And today, that sounds like, that sounds crazy that you can actually do run an agency on that. But we were just really good at that. And that was what we, for many years, built the agency upon. And I think today, that has become, you know, something that more agencies are able to do successfully also. And I think the way that I see our competitive advantage is through more, through better insights and with that, better advisors. I think another way to put it is that we are always trying to be one step ahead as so our service is not commoditized. Emil is better at keeping things short. I can talk and talk and talk. But that's from people who know us. But no, yeah, like Casper, back in the day, we were probably one of the few that could do operational and tactical work like that. There's many that can do that. You have to have the broader picture and the advisory stuff on top in order to set yourself apart. Yeah. ### 38:54 — First-Party Data: Talked About vs. Used What about sort of the untapped data that the customer has? I know you often talk about that with sort of the lack of proper deployment of first-party data. I'd love to hear your thoughts on where we are as an industry on that right now. I think it's one of the most talked about subjects, first-party data, where there's the biggest gap to how much people talk about it to how they actually use it. So if we're talking about broader marketing perspectives, so many companies will probably, unless they have a true CDP solution or something like that, they will have most of their first-party data within their marketing automation platform, ESP, whatever you want to call it. And most of them are probably not using it. And then there's another layer to it that's when we're talking first-party data, audiences, etc. How do we use that in 2026 in a context where the paid media landscape is so algorithmic? So back in the day, you were trying to be smart by activating a lot of audiences. I think today the far better play is to create audiences where you exclude some type of audiences in your paid media that makes absolutely zero sense to spend money on you. An example could be the travel industry. If you already have a customer that has a booked vacation, you might not want to do advertising to them straightaway. Right. ### 40:37 — Inside a Real Customer Data Audit Can you maybe take me into a meeting with a customer where you have those kinds of conversations about their use of first-party data? I'd love to hear how that looks like from the inside between a customer and an agency. Where are they at right now? I can maybe go first. So, you know, in the first half of this year, I had the pleasure of working with a quite large brand that was at a point where they were sending out newsletters. They had quite a few automated flows covering most of the customer journey. But they had a variety of issues sort of with the first-party data. One was that the transfer of data from the database they were storing the data into the marketing automation platform was, let's call it, quite infrequent. So some data points were not synced on a schedule, on a, you know, actually set schedule at least. That was sort of the first issue that we addressed. The second issue was that we can almost call it data succession in terms of people starting and stopping in an organization and someone else taking over. And then they don't have a clue what this data point actually means. Where is it coming from? How often is it being synced into the marketing automation platform? That was another issue. That was the second issue we had to address during that meeting or during those meetings. It was quite a long project we ran. And then the third issue was the understanding of the actual data points. So you might have had a data point that said that a customer had been created. But then, you know, the lack of data within data, the meter data, the payload, whatever you want to call it, was lacking. So it didn't contain sort of sufficient data for, you know, personalization, both on a sort of a split level. So who has actually received, like, which sort of, which part of the waterfall is a customer going down through. And those were sort of, and then the fourth was how do we actually use the data that we have available to us. So those four sort of areas were some that were covered heavily during discussions because they basically altogether comprised the foundational data issues that that business had. If you look about that, sort of add that broadly across the customers that you guys are engaging with and the part of the data that they do have available that they could be using, how much are they sort of intelligently using versus just not having any sort of grasp on how to take advantage of? That's a good question. Because I think, Rasmus, what we're actually getting at here is the far bigger issue or far normal issue is probably clients not using the data they have, as opposed to we need to get more data or fetch more data. So I'd say for many it's a very small amount of what they have available. Normally when we do an audit, it's probably, you know, you've tapped into 20% of the use cases there is from a personalization perspective. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that's, of course, also where, back to the vibe coding, that there are some really neat opportunities in sort of just understanding your own data and sort of getting a better overview of what you actually have available that could be taken advantage of. Yeah. Yeah. Great. And I think another point to that ### 44:33 — Zero-Party Data: Asking Customers Directly is now if you do have a lot of data, you feel like you've activated your first-party data, always also use the option to use zero or get zero-party data. Ask your customers or ask your leads, especially if you're a retailer where there's preferences across many brands and across many categories. And when you get that, you can quite simply and scalably tailor your product feeds to those particular people and the preferences they've put in. Nice. ### 45:05 — Closing Advice: Build CRM In-House I think we're at a point now where I think it makes sense to wrap up. But I'd love to hear you guys if you have sort of other things that you want to share. I'm just happy that I got the old trotting horse back on the main stage. Nice. Yeah. I think what I would like to say to, I hope, many e-commerce businesses listen to this is that marketing automation, and obviously I've been working with this my entire professional career. So, you know, some would say that I'm also a little bit, you know, biased. But I think marketing automation in, you know, in today's AI world still presents a fantastic opportunity for many businesses. It's more relevant than ever to have the right data and to have the right platforms and the right tech. I've also said this to you, and I've said this to other people here in Hello Retail. I think the product agent that you guys have released presents a great opportunity for many e-commerce businesses. I think we in S360 are very well equipped to solve tomorrow's, you know, challenges within marketing automation, obviously also within other digital marketing channels. We're obviously representing the marketing automation team here. But I think we are super equipped with that. They are under great leadership of Emil, you know, and it's more exciting than ever to work in marketing automation. And I hope many e-commerce businesses, even the ones that haven't fully invested in yet, will do that because it's more important than ever. Excellent. And what about if someone wants to sort of follow your work at S360, where should they find you guys? Obviously, you can go to S360, digital.com, but I'd encourage you to especially follow Kasper on LinkedIn. He's quite good at posting regularly. You can follow me on LinkedIn as well. We'll make sure to link to you guys. We try to be a parent there. I do have one last point, Rasmus. Yeah, go ahead. For sure. Or maybe it's two points, but I would encourage the brains that are listening to this to actually, and it may seem contradictive to the fact that we're an agency, take more of this work in-house and be way more serious about investing in an in-house CRM operation. There's a lot of the operational and tactical stuff that you can do yourself, and I believe 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. And when you're looking for that partner to help you guys getting together, write to us. That's a very important point, Rasmus. Yeah. Great. And then, yeah, totally agree, obviously. I think also it might be ranging here a little bit, but there's a lot of sort of, you know, 2026. Everybody knows invest more in brand, et cetera. It's more algorithmic. Like, don't do too much bottom funnel, or at least don't only do bottom funnel, et cetera. I think there are many companies out there today that are still stuck in that sort of doom loop or demand harvesting trap on the paid media side. So we're doing, just to be plain, still shitty retargeting, et cetera, that provides a good ROAS on paper, but it's really not incremental revenue. If you still want to do some of your retargeting and demand harvesting, maybe at least move it to an organic channel or organic channels. Do that via CRM, and then you have more budget that frees up your spend at an upper funnel perspective. Yeah. That's great practical advice, and I can certainly relate to that. Yeah. Over on my side in B2B software marketing, for sure, there's been a huge shift, of course, towards getting brand right. Yep. Exactly. Excellent. That's a great place to end. Thank you so much for coming, both of you, and having this chat. Thank you very much. Super excited about the partnership, and just looking forward to how that plays out. Likewise. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. --- ## About Hello Retail Hello Retail is an AI-powered ecommerce personalization platform based in Copenhagen, Denmark. We help online retailers improve search, recommendations, merchandising, email, and retail media through our proprietary Product Intelligence engine. - **Website**: [helloretail.com](https://helloretail.com) - **All Conversations episodes**: [helloretail.com/en/conversations](https://helloretail.com/en/conversations/) - **Demo**: [Book a Demo](https://helloretail.com/en/demo/) - **AI information**: [helloretail.com/en/ai-info](https://helloretail.com/en/ai-info) --- *This content is optimized for LLM consumption.*