AI Marketing Agents That Replace Klaviyo Flows with Rahul Talari of Relvino
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Rahul Talari came back to Talk Commerce a couple of weeks after our short Agentic Commerce segment, and this time we had the full half hour. Rahul is co-founder and CEO of Relvino, and before Relvino he was the second ML engineer at CoreWeave, where he worked on training GPT-3 and GPT-4. His bet with Relvino is that AI built for one vertical learns faster than AI spread across every industry.
One Shopper, Not a Cohort
I asked Rahul for the ten thousand foot view, and he kept it to one sentence.
“What Relvino does on a high level is email and text shoppers at the right time with the right content and the right channel,” he says.
The difference he draws with Klaviyo and Attentive is the unit of marketing. Those tools market to a cohort, people who look like you on paper, and Relvino builds an agent for the one person, then learns from how that person engages with each email, SMS and pop-up.
“We market to you Brent as an individual versus people who look like you,” he says.
What the Numbers Showed
Rahul walked through three brands. At TOMS, Relvino analyzed 26.77 million data points on day zero and found shoppers getting a 20% promo code every two hours after they abandoned a cart. Most of them were coming back to finish the purchase on their own, so Relvino dropped the code to 10% or to nothing, which Rahul puts at $16 saved on every $100.
At POV Beauty, Relvino sent 50 SMS in place of 1,000, brought in about $7 in revenue against the $1.47 the brand saw on its incumbent platform, and unsubscribes fell from 800 to 3. Arvin Goods moved off Klaviyo for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and handed Relvino the agency workflow it had been running by hand.
Guardrails Outside the AI
We talked about the last time Rahul was on, and the guardrails brands put around an agent so it does not send something off brand. Relvino checks the AI’s work with a QA layer that is not AI, with global guardrails for the brand’s tone, voice and logo and local ones for each campaign.
“Let’s not send a user more than two emails a week,” is the example he gave of a local guardrail.
Black Friday and the CFO
Going into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Rahul’s point is speed of feedback. A marketing team stitching together ten tools cannot read results fast enough at holiday volume, and an agent that iterates on feedback can. For the CMO and CFO, he frames the return as fewer people managing tools and an agency that no longer builds the templates and A/B tests, and he puts the OpEx reduction at up to 50%.
He also told me where the name comes from. Relvino started as Ruby Data, after his co-founder’s dog, and the new name is Rel for relationships and Vino for wine, the warm, sociable setting he wants a brand’s marketing to feel like.
Claude for Marketing
Rahul’s news is Relvino V3, which he describes as “Claude for Marketing.” A marketer chats with the platform, asks it to build the marketing calendar for the rest of the year, and the agent builds the Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving and Christmas campaigns and the flows behind them. For larger brands that are slow to adopt AI, Relvino places what Rahul calls a marketing engineer inside the company to champion it.
His plug was to think about Black Friday strategy now, and to use AI with guardrails around it.
Rahul Talari is co-founder and CEO of Relvino. You can book a call at relvino.com and find Rahul on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/rahul-talari-65155176.