John Surabian III on using AI in lifecycle marketing
John Surabian III is Brand Growth Strategist at Clickable Impact, INC., which provides lifecycle marketing for D2C brands, including retention marketing and media buying. He discusses how the agency tests tactics on its own products, uses AI to analyze customer data, and checks its findings before they shape live marketing.
AI can speed up customer-data analysis and drafting, but its findings need to be checked against real purchase behavior. Human review still matters for final client-facing copy and sales conversations.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
My CEO’s, Mike and Caroline Sierra started Clickable Impact about seven years ago, alongside FlightPath Golf, a golf brand I help run. FlightPath is our test kitchen. Every email flow, offer structure, and scaling tactic we use gets tried on our own products, with our own money, before a client ever sees it. That’s the real difference. Most agencies show you a deck. We can show you what happened when we ran it on a business we’re responsible for. We focus on email and lifecycle marketing, mostly in Klaviyo, for e-commerce brands. We’ve worked with 20+ brands and hold a 4.8-star rating. We stay small on purpose, so the person who builds your flows is the person who answers your email.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Right now it’s a mix of referrals from existing clients, marketplace leads like Thumbtack, and direct outreach on LinkedIn. Cold Outreach works, but it’s slow. You’re interrupting someone’s day and asking them to trust a stranger. I’d like more of it to come from people who’ve already seen our thinking: press quotes, published case studies, and clients telling peers what happened to their repeat-purchase numbers. Those leads show up already knowing what we do, and the first call is about their business, not ours.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Handed over: the first pass of customer-data analysis. AI is very good at going through order history and spotting patterns, like how first-time buyers behave differently from repeat buyers. We then check every finding against real purchase behavior before it becomes a flow rule. On FlightPath, that check is what set our first-order vs. repeat-order logic.
Went back to human: I think everything still requires a human’s touch, but if I HAD to pick something: Final client-facing copy, because AI drafts read generic and clients notice; or sales and discovery calls, because AI summaries miss what the client didn’t say. AI still does the drafting, but a person owns the final version.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, prospects come in much more informed. Many have already read up on flows, segmentation, and deliverability, and some have tried building things themselves before they call. The conversation starts further along, which is good, but it also means they’re comparing us against "I could probably do this with AI." If they found us on AI, they have not told us yet, but we’ve started asking every new lead how they found us.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do: use AI for the heavy lifting, like data analysis, first drafts, and testing variations, but verify every output against real customer behavior before it touches a live flow. Build your own small tools for the jobs you repeat every week. Put real effort into being quotable and findable, because the way buyers research is changing faster than most agencies are adjusting.
Ignore: anything promising "fully automated" marketing with no one checking the output, and the pressure to adopt every new tool the week it launches. An AI step that silently stops working is worse than no AI at all. If you can’t see what it did, you don’t own it.
Thank you to John Surabian III and the team at Clickable Impact, INC. for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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