Dylan Byers

Scaling DTC Brands - Ecom Agency Co Founder @AploGroup & Co Founder @getallanai

[Jimmy Kim @jimmykim]

Email personalization is mostly a scam...

A subject line with your first name.
A product block based on your last browse.
A segment built around one shared trait (a static rule)

That's not personalization.

That's the illusion of personalization.

And brands have been calling it "1:1 marketing" for years while still building one email, for one broad segment, with one offer.

The gap between what we call personalization and what it actually feels like to the customer is enormous.

And the reason it hasn't closed is simple, the operating model hasn't caught up to the strategy.

The more personal you try to get, the more creative, logic, testing, QA, and maintenance it takes.

So teams default back to what they can actually execute, quickly.

One hero with one offer, one campaign all to one broad segment.

Here's the reality: paid media figured this out already.

On Meta, creative gets tested constantly.

Different angles, formats, and messages get served across audiences and the system learns what performs.

Email has never worked that way.

Most email testing is still a subject line swap or a different hero image.

Not better segmentation.

A better learning system.

On this week's @SendItpod, I sat down with @LiamVeregin and @thejacobpaduch, co-founders of @getallanai, to talk about what actual email personalization looks like in 2026 and honestly, it's the closest thing I've seen to the version brands have been chasing for years.

Listen to our conversation here: https://t.co/IygOkqr6ba

Big thank you to our sponsors of this pod: @omnisend and @Retentiondotcom. @ecomchasedimond recommend them to be a part of your stack

[Chase Dimond | Email Marketing Nerd 📧 @ecomchasedimond]

Every once in a while, I see something in email and go… huh, why isn't this already how it works.

This is one of those.

It's called Allan.

Your designer stops building emails, they build blocks (heros, body copy, CTAs, product modules).

@getallanai sits on top of your ESP to assemble a different email per subscriber at send time.

Every element becomes part of a live multivariate test.

You've been sending one email to 50,000 people who have literally nothing in common.

Allan sends 50,000 versions and lets the data sort it out.

Same infrastructure. Completely different outcome.

Definitely worth a look → https://t.co/Slpkv5kluB

[Dylan Byers @dylanbyersecom]

Identifying a goal then working backwards to see how to get there / if it is possible within constraints in DTC is an important part of the planning process.

Quick look into how we do it @AploGroup

E-commerce KPI setting and intro to forecasting https://t.co/98eAs8jx7w

[Dylan Byers @dylanbyersecom]

DTC Health and wellness brands have great opportunity between holiday + new year healthier you angles

It’s a bit counterintuitive to leverage a high growth moment back to back with strong incentive but those who do leverage it often see great success and setup for LTV that year

[Dylan Byers @dylanbyersecom]

One of the biggest takeaways in the last year of running Meta ads is that creative variation at scale matters.

Your ad does your targeting and chasing a better variation of a top performer all the time isn’t always the best next step.

Make ads for new avatars. In new formats.

[Dylan Byers @dylanbyersecom]

@Jon_Keyte @elijah_modifly @ashvinmelwani @triplewhale Remarketing continues to work for many brands, just have to be cognizant of the weaker correlation with results that view data has, by focusing on allocating dollars off of click based revenue this will yield a more “real” attribution. Tools like TW solve that problem.

[Triple Whale 🐳 @triplewhale]

real ones are in their triple whale dashboard on a saturday 🤝