Rock Your Inbox: Building a Weekly Email Digest That Hits the Right Note

Email personalization can go far beyond adding a subscriber's first name. In this session, Andy King, founder of Email Love, shows how his team used AI, behavioral data, WordPress, and Customer.io to turn a batch-and-blast weekly newsletter into a personalized 1:1 email digest. The challenge: Email Love had valuable first-party data about which emails subscribers liked, which brands they followed, and what content was trending, but that data lived in WordPress and wasn't easily accessible for email personalization. Andy walks through how Email Love used AI to help bridge that gap and create a weekly "Trending This Week" email personalized to each subscriber's interests. You'll learn how they: ✦ Use email likes and brand follows to personalize each subscriber's weekly digest ✦ Create a different experience for subscribers without enough personalization data using trending content from their analytics platform ✦ Use Claude to help plan and build the integration between WordPress and Customer.io ✦ Sync WordPress and analytics data into Customer.io profiles using a Cloudflare Worker ✦ Use Customer.io attributes, segments, Liquid logic, and recurring automations to generate personalized emails at scale ✦ Design the email in Figma and use AI to help apply the Liquid personalization logic ✦ Build monitoring and health checks to catch problems with automated data syncing And the personalization is making a measurable difference. Across 165,000 emails sent through the automation, Email Love found that the personalized version generated 23% more clicks than the version based on general trending content. The takeaway: AI is lowering the technical barrier to advanced email personalization. The opportunity isn't to let AI do everything for you, but to use it to unlock customer data that was previously difficult or expensive to access and turn that data into more relevant email experiences. 00:00 Introduction 01:51 Building a Personalized Weekly Email Digest 04:22 Going Beyond First-Name Personalization 05:51 Using AI to Unlock Customer Data 07:29 How Email Love Personalizes Its Weekly Digest 09:31 The AI & Email Personalization Tech Stack 10:51 Building the WordPress to Customer.io Integration 15:46 Using AI, Figma & Liquid for Dynamic Email Content 17:11 Building the Customer.io Automation 18:06 Results: Does Email Personalization Work? 19:49 How to Build This Email Personalization Strategy 21:47 Key Takeaways 23:42 Q&A 30:35 Closing