[00:00:00] Phillip: What if I told you that all of the skills that you've acquired over the past ten years and all of the best practices that you hold dear don't really hold true anymore in the age of AI? You might believe me, but you're going to need some evidence. We're going to provide you with a case study here today. Today, we're sitting down with Alon Turchin. He's the VP of Retention at Particle, and he's going to tell us about how he quickly scaled from sending 1,000,000 emails a month to 10,000,000 emails a month in a matter of weeks. Not months, not over a year, not warming up a list, but in just weeks by using a new technology called Composer with Klaviyo. He's gonna tell us about how this new product suite from Klaviyo allows companies like Particle to find new techniques, new segments, new lists, new flows, and how companies can accelerate the tactics that they've been putting off for years because they didn't have the time, the energy, the institutional knowledge to be able to build upon it. The best practice playbook that you thought that you knew and held dear is now in question, but we can build on a new future, and AI is gonna help us get there.

[00:01:18] Phillip: Let's go live to the interview that we recorded here in this very room at the Tobacco Dock at K:LDN 2026. One thing I keep hearing from marketers is that the job doesn't get any smaller even though we're using AI. It's actually getting a little harder. You go slow, slow, slow, and then fast. And that makes the job a little strange for marketers because the expectation now is more personalization, more channels, more testing, more speed, and then more relevance. And as we're hearing in this season, more context, more customer context and more automation. But somehow, we're doing all with less headcount. And that's why Klaviyo's latest release caught my attention. So as you may have heard, Composer is what's allowing these...

[00:02:33] Phillip: Composer can audit your campaigns and identify what's missing. And then there's Customer Agent, which can resolve shopper questions across chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and now in more than 100 languages. And Klaviyo's social marketing can turn Instagram DMs and comments into profile data that triggers all of your flows. And I think that last one is super interesting because social interactions, they usually disappear into the platform. With Klaviyo, those signals can become part of the customer profile that actually shape what you do with that data next. And so this release is not just more marketing tools. It helps you actually have customer relationships in your system. It makes it a CRM platform, and then you can act on it. So no more copy pasting, no more hopping across channels, and no more "did anyone follow-up on that" in your team Slack. You need more connected data and more automation, and that's what Composer and Customer Agent and Klaviyo Social Marketing... Now let's get you back to the show.

[00:03:52] Gilbert: Hi, everyone. My name is Gil Hsu. I lead Marketing AI at Klaviyo. Really excited to have Alon Turchin on our podcast today.

[00:03:52] Alon: Thank you for having me.

[00:03:52] Gilbert: Yeah. Excited to have you on. I was hoping to give everybody just a little bit of context on Particle and what you do. Could you just tell us a little bit about that?

[00:04:09] Alon: Particle is a D2C self care products for men. We operate globally, but we focus on the US audience. I'm a VP Retention in Particle. I lead a team of five. Retention is super important when you're speaking about self care products.

[00:04:09] Gilbert: Yeah. It's very important.

[00:04:09] Alon: And I manufacture everything in the US. Our warehouse is in the US, we're kind of an American company. And our marketing team is based in Israel.

[00:04:38] Gilbert: Interesting. Also, for this conversation, you know, I was gonna talk a little bit about the marketing job, how the landscape is changing. And really, like, not too long ago... And, obviously, times have changed from that. You know, I'm curious about how you think about how the job is much more around experience orchestration and how you think maybe brands are getting it wrong about that shift in terms of what the job is for marketing.

[00:05:11] Alon: So you're right. Marketing has changed. It used to be just send a campaign, look at the ROAS, move on to the next one, send to, like, broad audience, all the engagement, and send once every, like, two or three days and be happy with the results, and that's it. So, yeah, marketing has changed. Now I believe that you should send way more campaigns, but it's not just about the campaigns. The campaign is not the product. The system is the product. So the system is the journey after the campaign, after the flow. So I'm focusing more on sending more campaigns to different segments, and increase the capacity, and then increase the revenue, and that's what we did in the last year. We also changed the strategy... see great results. We doubled our revenue just by that, and the experience the customers are having is way more personalized.

[00:06:15] Gilbert: Wow. That's really interesting. So I guess thinking back about when this... for your own personal journey or leading this, leading Particle, how that transition where you started from, let's say, less sophisticated now to more personalization, was there a moment where that really you felt like clicked and you needed to have something changed in order to move on to sort of more complexity and more targeting?

[00:06:38] Alon: Yeah. When you increase the capacity of the campaigns and the active flows, which is a lot as... so far as, obviously, in order to monitor it, to create everything, you need more hands. You need more people. Most of the time, I'm doing the strategies, so I need more hands-on people to actually deliver. And that when we realized that we need to increase the team in order to send more personalized messaging... recently, right, in terms of number of, like, sends to different segments and growth and personalization.

[00:07:45] Gilbert: I have in my notes here that you previously were at a million sends, now at 10,000,000 sends a month. And as you just mentioned, revenue has doubled. So I'm curious, why do you think... or you can tell the story. Why do you think that sending more to the right segments is better than less sending to just a broader audience?

[00:07:45] Alon: I believe that sending more is not just a general campaign. It's more like telling the story to different customers or not even a customer yet. And by targeting different segments, I can reach them and tell them a story, and I know how they act and react on the website after one campaign to another. So there is like a continuation of stories, speaking with them, and I believe that I need to keep in touch with them all the time, sending a campaign once every week or once every three days. Sometimes it's not enough. It's not just selling to them... communicate with them.

[00:08:25] Gilbert: So how did the sort of segments that you have... I'm curious. Like, you said 150 flows. Like, how many groups of sort of bespoke segments do you think that you have?

[00:08:33] Alon: I kinda can separate them between the customers and the noncustomers. If I'm looking at the acquisition part, I'm more focusing on the urgency. Like, when did they sign up for us, if it's, like, three months ago or even less. So the intent is different because they still remember the brand. They saw the TV ad, so they remember everything, and I need to reach them while the lead is still hot.

[00:08:33] Alon: And if it's someone that signed up like three months ago, even one year ago, you might even forget about the brand. What are we doing? Maybe I need to, like, resell him again the products. And so those are two main tiers that we are focusing on with non-customers segments. But with the customers, again, if it's just someone who just bought for the first time, which most of... to treat them differently, make them feel like top customers.

[00:08:33] Alon: So the messaging is totally different between those.

[00:09:34] Gilbert: So I think the one caveat is I think everybody would love to do better segmentation, more segmentation, more sending, but it comes with complexity. So, like, how do you think about that, and how do you, like, keep it manageable amongst a program that is so, so complex now?

[00:09:49] Alon: So, obviously, hiring more people, which is not always the good answer, but this is what we are doing, but also adding more tools that can help us. So I leave the strategy to my head, my mind, but the working hands, and I assist AI content. I build my own tools. I use Klaviyo's tools. I use other tools. Everything I can do to help me design the structure of our calendar, basically, marketing calendar.

[00:10:17] Gilbert: I think that's super helpful context. And me for one, you know, at least on the remarketing AI side, we definitely 100% bought... complexity as we know. We hear this from customers. This is why we've invested in building AI products like our recently released Composer. We had an opportunity to chat a little bit earlier where you got a preview of Composer. I'm curious, do you think Composer can help with the sort of complexity that you're dealing with now in your program?

[00:10:51] Alon: Most definitely. This is the brain that we need because the capacity of our emails and campaigns and segments and forms. By the way, we also have, like, over 100 forms. So to monitor everything manually, it's almost impossible. And this is where Composer can help.

[00:10:51] Alon: Just by asking a couple of questions. He knows the brand. He knows the content. He knows the account itself. He can also help me make the right decisions.

[00:10:51] Alon: And this is what I need to make a better brand, make a better content.

[00:11:27] Gilbert: We just released Composer for public beta today, but very excited to, like, have you try it. Right? A tool like Composer already can do some very interesting things within your Klaviyo account. What do you think Composer can do to uncover new opportunities?

[00:11:50] Alon: So Composer right now, I think, is more the brain behind it. So it's helped me think about the problem or look at the problems or even find the problems, which is hard for me maybe to do. So it's like the brain and the eyes.

[00:11:50] Alon: My wishful thinking is that Composer will be... and it will be... I trust you. It will be also the hands, not just the mind. So combining that, that's gonna be a very powerful tool. So I'm definitely looking forward for that. And also, I want it to be a push assistant, not just pull one. I don't want to ask him a question and then come up with the answer. I want him to help me and push to me, toward me...

[00:11:50] Alon: ...all the problems he finds, all the opportunities he can add to my wish list.

[00:12:34] Gilbert: Yeah. So and when you say the hands, you wanted to be able to do things for... table with Composer or AI, like, doing for you now within your program?

[00:12:45] Alon: Yeah. We are running so many flows, and some flows have more than 40 messages. So changing filters, changing rules, or adding content, this is stuff that, obviously, after testing, I want to trust Composer to do, and that's gonna reduce a lot of manual working.

[00:13:06] Gilbert: Yeah. So I'm curious, you know, as we're kind of rolling into this very unknown world of AI and especially the tools that Klaviyo is building, I'm sure tools that you're using as well. You know, if we're thinking about how do you keep the essence of Particle within your marketing program, and there's parts of it that you're giving away to AI, and there's obviously parts that you're still a human in the loop. You know, how do you think about keeping the soul of Particle within your marketing program as it becomes more agentic?

[00:13:33] Alon: I'm the one that basically feed it with what's Particle vision is. O... that is going to the right path. And I also a freak of AB testing, so I can always test if it's something maybe I... I never assume something. It's not like assumptions. So I always want to test if something is working. So I'm very open to other suggestions to, like, other ideas, but I always test it. So if the test works, I'm on board. If not, I'm going back to the table and write down...

[00:14:13] Gilbert: This is all about the testing.

[00:14:15] Alon: I'm a freak of AB testing. Yeah.

[00:14:19] Gilbert: Okay. So just to wrap up, you know, for those that are not quite as advanced as you, you know, what advice would you give to someone that is earlier on their journey, earlier on their agentic journey, and especially maybe somebody who's gonna be trying Composer soon?

[00:14:34] Alon: First, you need to know your audience. Don't assume that you know him. Don't think, oh, yeah. I know what's working. I know what's the benchmark. I know what other people are doing. What... understand where the barriers are. Try to understand how to approach them, what triggered them. I always believed that sales, it's 90% psychologic, especially in online selling. It's not just the numbers. The numbers will tell you the story, but eventually you need to understand what's in their mind. It's called the limbic system. In your mind, in your brain, this is the decision maker. And you need to learn that and you need to understand. And then you can also create more content, more relevant content, and then eventually, you will get the results you want to.

[00:15:26] Gilbert: Yeah. I love that. Alon, thank you so much. This was a great conversation, it's just super interesting what you're doing here at Particle, and, you know, thanks for being here.

[00:15:35] Alon: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.