Hey friends, every single day I wake up and do 5 things. Check my texts, Slack, email, X and LinkedIn. And if you’re anything like me, as soon as you log onto social media in the morning, you're probably going to see something new about AI.
Over the last few months, my feed has been completely taken over with non-stop updates about the state of the AI landscape. Literally every day (and sometimes every hour) I’m seeing new startups that are launching, new companies that just raised funding, new announcements from Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, XAI, Perplexity, and more.
If I’m not seeing updates from the companies themselves, I’m seeing commentary from the investors and users, the news outlets and publications, and the founders and operators like you and me. At least on X and LinkedIn, it feels like the AI conversation is the only real conversation that’s trending right now.
And to some degree, I think that’s for a very good reason. The tech is getting way better, the applications are getting broader and we’re starting to see real business value get generated from these tools. I still think ~50% of what you see online is probably noise and a “nice to have” feature that doesn’t move the needle for most founders and operators but it’s very clear that some of these tools definitely will.
So as you are trying to sift through the noise and understand what’s happening in AI, you need to be a little bit careful. Instead of getting caught up with every major product release, you need to focus on what’s actually delivering results today. Not in 24 months and not “if they can make this feature work someday, that would be cool.” No, you need to forget all of that and focus on the companies that have already shipped products which are helping you do the number one most important thing in business… And that's to make more money, not just save more time.
For example, ChatGPT saves you a lottt of time, and therefore it lowers your expenses and you can do more with less, but it doesn’t outright make you money. You can’t just connect ChatGPT to your Shopify store and have it increase your revenue. Maybe one day that will happen, but today it doesn’t. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably a founder or operator who wants to make more money! Because that’s what actually moves the needle for you at the end of the day. So if you give me 4 minutes, I’ll show you an AI tool that’s doing just that. Deal? Alright, let’s get into it.
The 30 second hack to generate an extra six figures in revenue.
The category that I personally like most for AI tools right now is email and SMS marketing. Literally every good eCommerce brand I know relies on these two channels to be major revenue drivers for their company. Based on most of the reports I’ve seen, email and SMS often drives up to 30%+ of a store’s total annual revenue and it’s almost always the number 1 and 2 channel for retention and reactivation after you’ve made the first sale. Paid ads get new people in the door, but email and SMS is what keeps them coming back and buying over and over again.
And as you might have seen me talk about recently, I was looking at the email revenue breakdown from a brand I was consulting with, and it had 50% coming from the welcome flow. That might sound good on the surface but that’s actually a really bad thing! That means none of the other core email flows they set up were driving results. The email sequences I was looking at specifically were the site, cart, and checkout abandonment flows which should be the real money makers!
Instead of telling this brand to go work with an agency to strategize, rewrite, redesign, implement, and A/B test the site, cart, and checkout abandonment flows, I just installed Instant’s Shopify app, and configured the branding, fonts, and colors. 20 days later, revenue sits at $127,226.37 which was generated at a 51.9x ROI compared to the price they paid for Instant. How is that even possible you ask? Well, let me tell you, and this is where the AI piece comes in.
I’ve talked about Instant before but it has a few main features for how their product flywheel works. First, you start with the Instant pixel on your website. Their pixel can remember opted-in shoppers and take note of their browsing behavior (i.e what pages they looked at, what products they lingered on, what specific SKUs and colorways they added to their carts, etc). It’s really powerful and very accurate.
Then they have a best in class pop-up tool, which is also powered by AI, to serve your site visitors the perfect popup at the right time, in order to capture their email and SMS information regardless of whether or not they make a purchase during that initial visit. In the past, I used to tell brands that if they could get 2-3% of their cold traffic to give you their email and SMS info, they were doing well. With Instant’s tool, I’m seeing opt-ins on popups increase by 2-5X the normal rates. It’s literally adding 2-5X more emails to your list which gives you 2-5X more opportunities to convert these leads after they close their browser window that day.
Okay, cool, so I can see and remember my shoppers, track their behavior and I’ve added more emails to my list… But I still haven’t made more money, what’s up with that Nik?
You’re right and this is the big one that will actually put more dollars into your bank account at the end of the day. Instant can create, send, and optimize all of your core email follow up flows. They personalize the emails with generative AI based on what the user actually did on your site. It literally knows what product and variant they spent time looking at and will include an image of that product and a CTA to purchase. If the consumer doesn’t buy from the first email Instant sends, they have an insanely powerful automation called “price drop” that sends them a custom discount or offer in the next campaign to get them to buy. This happens all without humans intervening. It’s 100% automated and actually makes you more money.
It’s one of the very few products leveraging AI that I can’t stop telling my friends about. It takes 5 minutes to set up and as long as you are on Shopify, you can get this running in just a few minutes.
When you have it enabled, your opted-in prospects now get personalized emails with the right messaging, at the right time, and with the right offer based on how they interacted with your site. Instant will send emails for all of your main flows including the welcome flow, browse abandonment flow, add-to cart abandonment, checkout started, loyalty winbacks, and more promos that get automatically sent when you release new products, have back in stock alerts, other seasonal promos and more.
These emails convert way better than humans sending them because it’s all 1:1 customized to the exact person on the other side of the screen and it’s all powered by AI. I think I’ve personally convinced about 50 brands to start using Instant but the results their teams send back to me clearly speak for themselves.
Here’s just a few that stand out:
Linda’s sells high-quality quilting supplies and provides educational content to empower quilters of all skill levels. They are a merchant with thousands of SKUs, where manual campaign management is literally impossible. With Instant AI powered price drop flows enabled, it quickly became a top-two performer, just behind their cart abandonment flows (also from Instant) in total revenue. After using instant, they added $2.8M in incremental revenue which was a 109x ROI compared to what they paid for the tool. Now, Linda’s email revenue makes up 51% of their total Shopify revenue, 5x higher than before Instant which is insane.
Or Karen Kane, who saw $2.7M in incremental revenue and a 91X ROI compared to what they paid for Instant. For years they were barely driving any revenue from their browse abandonment flow, then they switched to Instant AI and that single flow jumped 8.9x and became their #2 revenue driver. The automated price drop campaign has also become a massive flow for them, driving 20% of their total flow revenue (which was 0 before Instant).
Or The Noli Shop, who saw $1M incremental revenue which equates to a 42x ROI compared to what they paid for Instant. First of all, Noli saw a massive increase in total subscribers from Instant Audiences (the popup tool that remembers opted in shoppers) and it’s been compounding month over month for almost a year. Now, their Instant campaigns are driving 11x more incremental revenue in month 9 vs their first 30 days, due to all the people that Instant remembers over time. The story here is simple. Capture more emails. Send more personalized campaigns. Make more money! And do this on auto-pilot without human help.
Then there’s another leading skin brand I know about who saw $1.1M in incremental revenue in the first 100 days on Instant. They achieved an absurd 303x ROI compared to what they paid for Instant. This brand has consistently achieved 10-20% MoM growth in email flow revenue through Instant’s identification. They’re sending more emails every month, and because revenue per email is constant, they’re scaling faster than ever before.
I think the best part about Instant is that the more emails you send, the more Instant’s AI learns and is able to run A/B tests in terms of copy, images, products, and offers to improve your revenue per email. This is how the significant MoM growth is achieved with Instant AI.
What blew me away is how bought in their customers are. The case studies are super powerful, but here’s what leaders at these companies have been saying about them as well:
“Since starting with Instant, our email flows have never been simpler and have driven us more revenue than ever before. Total game changer.” – Yentrang Phan, Director of Performance Marketing, TRX
"At Neuro, we're always looking for ways to deliver the most personalized experience possible. Instant made that easy to achieve, with no additional work from my team, and delivered immediate ROI. It's helping us drive profitable retention by turning traffic into long-term, loyal customers." – Brooke Cullison, VP of Media & Acquisition, Neuro
"We already had strong traffic and Klaviyo flows in place, but Instant unlocked a layer of incremental revenue we simply couldn't access before. The impact was immediate, measurable, and scalable." – Charlotte Hamrin, Head of E-Commerce, Kind Patches
“Instant’s capabilities are the best we’ve seen and we’ve tried them all. What impressed us was how quickly we started seeing results, and how knowledgeable and committed their Customer Success team was.” – Leanne Chan, Senior Director of Retention & Growth Marketing, ThirdLove
I think it’s pretty hard not to get excited when a ton of great operators have such good things to say like this.
Why Instant helps you increase the metrics that matter:
Another thing that I think is really important to explain is that Instant judges itself on the metrics that actually matter.
We all know that if you are a serious eCommerce brand that cares about revenue, profitability, and growth, your open rates and click rates from email don’t really matter. They might look good in a cool dashboard report but open rates alone don't pay the bills. Instead, you want to be measuring:
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Revenue per recipient: Not just revenue per email sent, but revenue per person on your list. This tells you if your list quality is filled with good contacts who actually buy or if your list is degrading over time.
- Instant gets that number up by 30-50% overnight by leveraging hyper-personalization (copy, products, send time, shopper behavior, smart coupons) across every email.
- That 30-day number is just a start. Instant Labs turns every single email send into an A/B test. Subject line, graphic, messaging, tone, send time so that your brand can easily see 5-20% MoM improvements.
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Incremental revenue: This is the big one! You need proper holdout testing to know what revenue you wouldn't have gotten without these emails being sent in the first place. Instant has this baked in and they are super transparent to show you the before and after of how much revenue they drive for your brand compared to your existing email flows. If you’re only running 3-4 email flows today, your retention marketing is missing out on some key high-intent actions that your shoppers take on their site: browse abandonment, abandoned collection.. Instant takes away the pain of setting them up, updating them every week and supercharges them with AI-personalization.
- & Time to purchase: How long does it take someone to convert after joining your list? The best brands on Instant can tell you that their average customer converts 2-4 hours after opt-in, and they use that data to optimize their nurture sequences.
When you are using Instant, you get to see all 3 of these metrics (alongside the standard revenue per send, and aggregated stats on email revenue performance) which tells you exactly how much money you are making from these campaigns. The best part about it is that these emails are fully automated, so Instant often gets installed and the magic starts happening where the tool pays for itself in the first week while you are busy working on other things.
Alright, that’s pretty much it for this week. Now that I’ve shared the sauce, are you going to be the one person who reads this email and lets your competitors use this tool before you? I didn’t think so. If you're serious about increasing revenue from email, you can get 50% off your first 60 days of Instant now. I’ve recommended dozens of companies I work with to use it and the results have been so strong that they all wish I had gotten them on Instant sooner.
Thanks again for reading and I’ll see you on Sunday!
Nik