The Future of Email: Recent Episodes
Matthew Dunn
On this email marketing industry podcast, we encourage marketers and product developers to share their journeys and expertise to discuss the power of email marketing. We cover topics like business challenges, leadership, marketing, and of course, the newest technologies and innovations in email marketing. We’ll also let our guests share on the subjects they’re well-known for. No matter the topic, you’ll be hearing real stories from real people.
Turns out podcast experts make great podcast guests, and they don’t just talk about…podcasts!
Jeremy Slate runs a leading PR firm for the podcast space — Command Your Brand. As you’d expect after 1,000 or so guest spots, he’s smart, relaxed, affable, funny and extremely thoughtful about the space.
True to form for The Future Of Email, this conversation doesn’t stick to a script. Jeremy has some keen insights (and concerns) about AI and the changes it may bring. He’s optimistic (refreshing) and isn’t expecting the Terminator at the front door.
Another fun thing about Jeremy - he’s a serious expert (Master, in fast) on the Roman Empire. Apparently that’s a thing with a certain segment of the population, but for two business guys in the media space, with a shared interest in history, it’s just a super-fun ball to bat around.
Email does come up — along with Spotify, MTV, Alexander the Great, and, oh yeah, podcasts. Want to command your brand? Check out this conversation — and take a look at Jeremy’s agency :-)
If this were a Friends episode — which is becoming a recurring premise in these show notes — this would be "The Other One About Writing." Guest Grace Aldridge Foster shares her passion for that most essential element of email, writing!
How would it feel to face a room full of Green Berets and tell them their writing needs some work? Grace sheds quite a bit of light on that, as she's done it repeatedly! Even top-notch soldiers, according to Grace, often need to work on their writing skills — including email. BLUF - Bottom Line Up Front — doesn't always do the job.
This conversation wanders as much or more as the average email thread, but at heart it's a couple of people who value and care about the power of language comparing notes on the challenges of using language effectively and well in now-mostly-digital channels. Are reverse-threaded email messages just DUMB? Why do we still do that? If you use the right emoji, did you just make a faux pas that tells everyone you're out of date? How the heck would you know?
Fair warning — if you listen to this conversation, which you should, you'll probably end up thinking "My company should hire BoldType to help everyone write just a LITTLE bit better. That would pay for itself 100x in a month."
Super-fun, super-smart, super-interesting guest. Don't miss this one.
Want a little glimpse of the future? About halfway into this conversation, Renards Skutels describes a recent experience that his agency Chatsmart engineered for a client. The client's customers engaged live with a WhatsApp GenAI chat agent — the example Renards gives is “I have dry skin in the winter.” The chat agent sent the customer a catalog of applicable products to solve the problem, and the customer purchased — all within the WhatsApp app.
In some countries — most particularly, China/WeChat — a complete in-app transaction cycle like this is commonplace. It's pretty cutting-edge for the EU, though. While WhatsApp appears to have the user-preference edge, Meta is playing catch-up to WeChat on the supporting technologies required.
For North America, it's like a peek into a multiverse future, where the winning reality isn't set yet. Is Renard's story an example of
- How Amazon will function in a few years?
- How Canadians — and perhaps Americans — will use WhatsApp in the near future?
- Or — wildcard — how RCS might seize the pocket as Apple and Android play cyber-detente / cold-war?
What does this have to do with email?
Well...everything. Email isn't going away, but it's less and less the first-habit communication channel. Chatsmart is working on the front lines of app marketing in the EU market(s). Market dynamics and culture are different there, to be sure, but ask yourself this...do you check your messages or your email first? Which do you look at immediately, and which later?
This conversation will make you think about how things might look in a few short years.
If you're growing a midsize business, and need to focus your team's time on the business rather than social media...give Wendy Pace a call. Wendy had the courage to be a guest on The Future Of Email when she's not really a big fan of email!
Pace Setting Media handles social media for companies; they're immersed in helping clients learn who their customers really are, and how to reach them (cost-effectively) on a wide range of social-media platforms — including email :-)
AI comes up a lot in the conversation, with divergent opinions on the probable outcomes. Will AI make credible, compelling video content — or more drivel? Will copy and writing get better? Wendy's clearly paying close attention to the space.
It's been said that email is the original social media. This conversation tends to suggest that opposite, at least in terms of social media as it operates circa 2024. The heavy hand of algorithms and filters in the social media space don't apply (at least, not as much) in the inbox. From Wendy's perspective, that's bad — too much email. From Matthew's perspective, that leaves the person in control albeit with an additional workload.
If you're starting to think that you're under-utilizing social media and/or email to grow your business...give this conversation a listen!
If The Future Of Email were 'Friends', this episode would be titled "The One Where They Talk About Music A Lot". Guest Cloé Luv is a serial entrepreneur with considerable experience in (among many things) the business of music. Cloé is also a CEO, influencer, brand expert, success coach and Forbes Coaches Council member.
Cloé is her own best example of the importance of passion, focus, leveraging one's strengths but keeping the important stuff in mind along the way. (Cloé's first job dusting the video-store shelves is also a pretty good story!)
"I always urge people trying to make a name for yourself, make, make a brand. That's all branding, whether it's music or business. That's why I take it everywhere. It's the same foundation, create a brand for yourself."
There are plenty of gems in this conversation about business, and branding, and even email, to be sure.
To be candid, if you're looking for "email marketing tips", this may not be the best Future Of Email episode. (See Ryan Phelan, Kath Pay, Chad S. White episodes for that.). But if you want to hear two people with passion and expertise for both business and music explore the current and future state of that field together...this is definitely the conversation for you!
" Don't fall in love with the paycheck, fall in love with the client." That's one of the bits of sage advice from Sam Saifi, founder of Revenue Labz.
Sam shares his journey into email by way of copywriting in this email-and-marketing focused conversation. While Sam operates from the UK, the majority of his clients focus on the US market as well. Revenue Labs "with a zed" specializes in e-commerce DTC (direct to consumer) clients, particularly those based in the Shopify ecosystem.
Sam's got a refreshing enthusiasm for email — given that it's older than he is, that's kind of fun! He and his team focus on the trackable, scalable, measurable and own-able aspects of email. Sam and host Matthew Dunn also delve into text messaging for marketing purposes.
The "Labs with a zed" label isn't accidental; Sam shares some terrific advice about a testing-centric, data-centric approach to scaling a DTC brand.
If your company is in the DTC space...this is a great conversation for you!
When’s the last time you just picked up the phone and called someone — no calendar appointment, no text-first? If that thought makes you kinda jumpy…you need to listen to this conversation with Mischa Zvegintzov.
Mischa is — his description — ‘old school’. He made over a million phone calls and pounded the pavement. Now he helps companies capture the value of -their- conversations — with customers, with podcast guests, and as podcast guests.
Does email come up in the conversation? Absolutely! Even though he’s completely conversant with social media channels, Mischa is 100% keen on the value of the you-own-it relationships in an email list.
This is also a refreshingly personal and non-pitchy conversation — about being a parent as well as an entrepreneur.
Anna Levitin of Powtoon is the 2nd guest to Zoom in from a bomb shelter! Anna is the super-active email face of the super-cool company Powtoon, a visual communication platform.. (Editor's note - host Matthew Dunn is a Powtoon super-user and fan :-)
Anna made her way to email from traditional media and digital marketing. Running the email arm of a global SaaS company like Powtoon has some distinct differences from consumer marketing. Powtoon has a loyal (and opinionated) customer base of over 40 million users, spanning many languages and cultures. Powtoon itself has team members in multiple countries. English, as she observes, is not a perfect solution!
That puts Anna and her colleagues at Powtoon in a funny position — at one of the leading visual communication platforms, communicating through a distinctly not-visually-centric channel: email. (Anna notes that they create a LOT of gifs!)
If your company has "a user base", and email is one of the main channels for connecting with them, you'll find this a terrific and useful conversation — one of the two best bomb-shelter conversations on The Future Of Email so far.
Like most people “in email”, Melanie Balke, the CEO and founder of The Email Marketers, found her niche in email along the way. The Email Marketers is an agency focused on email and SMS marketing for ecommerce and B2B SaaS companies. They function as an outsourced email department, and also help companies build in-house email teams.
For Melanie, good email marketing comes down to being a "good sender" - providing value to subscribers, building community, having a strategy, thoughtful segmentation and targeting. Bad senders spam, blast everyone, and ignore feedback.
As is common these days, Matthew and Melanie end up talking about SMS and messaging. As it grows, restrictions will come just like email has faced, and brands need to use it to actually add value to consumers' lives. For now - Wild West!
Melanie has the experience marketer’s take on personalization — it’s TOUGH! Personalization and segmentation is best when tied closely to a company's own data about customer behavior and preferences.
Because of the ecosystem (Shopify + Klaviyo) used by so many of her customers, this conversation goes farther into how effective email marketing can be when “all of the silos are connected.” Want an invigorating look at best practices? Check out this conversation!
Ever make a connecting flight through Atlanta - Hartsfield? While it’s the busiest airport in the US, moving between flights is easier than in most airports. There’s a fascinating analysis about why Hartsfield works well, based on the (proposed) constructal law of physics.
That’s not what this episode of the Future Of Email is about, but it’s close!
An email MTA – Message Transfer Agent — does some of the same jobs as an airport. MTAs hand off email messages — to mail delivery agents (think Gmail), or possibly to other MTAs in between. At scale, a busy MTA could be juggling a million email messages. Like a million cranky fliers at Hartsfield, each message could have its own complications. Flight delays = slow domain lookup. Address not found = lost my ticket. You get the idea.
KumoMTA is a new open-source MTA, created by 3 founders with incredibly deep experience in the world of email. Two of the founders, Tom Mairs and Mike Hillyer, joined host Matthew Dunn for a Future Of Email conversation about MTAs, open-source, founding companies, creating niches, finding traction, the virtues of Rust and scriptability, and quite a few more topics. Actually, the conversation was as busy as Hartsfield on a Friday!
It’s easy to take email for granted, whether you just get too much of it or you’re professionally responsible for that. This is a great conversational glimpse into the sheer complexity involved in making a Hartsfield-for-email work well, at scale — and at the surprisingly calm, smart business model to releasing the code that does that job for free, as open-source software. A super (and technically deep) conversation — stay tuned for a followup in a year!
If you booked a lift ticket to go skiing for the first time ever, would you rather get an email pitching you on buying a ski condo, or one with helpful tips about where to park, the best route to walk with an armful of skis and gear, and a coupon for $5 off a bowl of chili?
The tactical view might be that one ski-condo sale would pay for the whole email department; the strategic view, Karen Talavera would probably say, is that the helpful email will bring far more condo sales in the long run.
Strategy, email marketing, and - yes - skiing were among the topics in this back-and-forth conversation about the future of email.
Karen is the principal at Synchronicity Marketing (and a ski instructor!); she helps companies across the spectrum with strategy-first marketing. With over 20 years of deep experience in email, Karen has learned how to harness technology changes for business impact.
This is a fun, casual look inside strategic thinking for your email marketing program. Don't miss it!
Email is a conversational channel. Dumb statement of the obvious? This conversation with Tyler “Sully” Sullivan, founder of BombTech Golf, might make you think about that in a different way. BombTech is a direct-to-consumer maker of golf clubs.
Sully started the company in his basement (literally), and cultivated it as e-commerce evolved by (as he says) listening to the customers — primarily through email. This conversation was recorded a few months after Sully’s sale and final exit from BombTech. His focus these days is helping other e-commerce companies achieve similar growth with the help of the Ecom Growers agency.
What makes this conversation particularly valuable to marketers is the live example of fundamental value of really talking with customers. Email was/is perhaps the best digital channel for that, but the principle is what counts. Sully recounts how customer feedback was the key input in the hot-foot dance of selling a manufactured hard good; guess wrong about what the market actually wants, and you may have a container load of duds and debt. They’ll tell you what they want — the job is to listen.
This is a super-engaging and inspiring conversation for marketers and entrepreneurs alike. Pull the pin and check it out! And check out EcomGrowers.com
The people that make conferences work are like ducks — calm on top, paddling like heck underneath to keep the momentum up. This is a conversation about conversations, in a funny sense. Kristen Haines, CEO of Mailcon, is in the business of creating events that provide opportunities for meaningful conversations. She’s extremely thoughtful about how to do that well, and her insights don’t stop at the conference business.
Case in point — Kristen -is- Mailcon. She’s the highly-visible, public face of the conference. (As she shared, someone said “Hey! Mailcon!” to get her attention!) It’s more typical for conferences to be ‘their own brand’, and the people who run them to be a bit more anonymous.
What does that have to do with email marketing? Well…is there A Person who’s the voice of your company emails? Or are your emails — like most conferences — corporate and kind of anonymous. Kristen notes (by contrast) how Hubspot handles email. Every email is from a person at the company; their name, picture and phone number are on the bottom of the message. Will companies eventually ‘hire’ an AI to be the face of the company. Good thing to speculate on — As it inevitably does in mid-2023, AI came up.
What’s really refreshing about this conversation is hearing about Kristen’s willingness to push the envelope and try things. She calls out a few things that have worked well, and others that haven’t. If you attended Mailcon last year, don’t expect next year to be identical. With Kristen Haines at the helm, expect some authentic and fun surprises.
Planning to go to a conference this year? This conversation will make you appreciate those calm, poised folks who are paddling like heck to make it a great experience.
Larry Kim is a man on a mission. Not content with bootstrapping and ultimately selling Wordstream, he’s swinging for the fences again with Customers.ai. Most of the conventional B2B marketing channels are badly broken, as Larry shares. Cold outbound is dismal; inbound/content is awful; paid ad rates keep climbing. With Customers.ai, Larry’s moon-shot is what he calls “intent-driven outbound marketing.”
What’s that mean? It’s a combination of intent and content; signal-driven intent (like a visitor spending significant time on select pages on a website), and deeply tailored AI-powered content, driven by thousands of personalized data-points, to capitalize on that moment of interest.
Host Matthew Dunn posed the question ‘Why work on this?’ Larry’s response was “This is the most interesting problem in sales and marketing! We want to displace big chunks of the sales and marketing stack through AI.”
When a been-there-done-that entrepreneur like Larry Kim is clearly “all-in” on something, it’s really worth paying attention. It’s difficult to argue with his assessment of the problem — B2B sales and marketing is an exhausting, turgid mess that doesn’t work. Larry’s vision of a replacement is compelling, but also a bit unnerving. Customers.ai is aiming for full personalization — every word and every pixel in the message custom-for-you. As Larry himself says in this conversation, “ It's actually not significantly harder to shoot for something like hard and valuable versus something dumb and easy. So, you might as well go for it.”
Want a glimpse at the future of B2B marketing? Check out Customers.ai and this conversation.
You’re caught in a tug-of-war between AI and human knowledge. On one side, the colossal email inbox providers fighting to keep billions of inboxes at least partially free of spam, scams and junk. On the other side, every legit playing-by-the-rules brand using the last un-gated digital channel to talk with their customers and prospects, enlisting the help of human and AI experts to get their messages in front of customers.
The tug-of-war is called ‘deliverability’, and this in-depth conversation with expert Nicolas Toper gives a glimpse of the mess on that digital battlefield. “…our job is to basically understand what this AI is doing. So human people can do something about it.”, Nicolas said.
It’s not as simple as AI-vs-human, of course. There are bad actors, good actors. Information that the latter can use to stay good can be used for bad, and vice versa. Email is a self-policing industry — there’s no United Nations Office of SPAM enforcement. So companies like InboxBooster have a vital — if daunting — role to play in helping companies navigate the battlefield.
Wondering how to keep getting your messages through? Check out this conversation, and check out InboxBooster.com.
Want to learn a magic trick for email marketing? Marketing agency CEO (and former magician) Josh Kropkof of The Email Agency shared a great one: personality beats ‘personalization’.
If you have a copywriter with wit, verve and a passion for your business/customers, put ‘em in charge! (If you don’t…invent one and put them in charge!).
Too many brands think that the marketing they do in the email channel should look like the marketing emails in their inbox. Trouble is, too many of the latter are limp and lifeless, with faked-up customer intimacy (“Hey Bob!”) and nothing to say but “Sale!”, over and over and over.
Messages can be — SHOULD be — conversations between companies and customers, according to Josh. The numbers they put up for their customers — many of them DtoC brands — strongly suggest that The Email Agency is bang-on with this approach.
What's particularly striking about this conversation is Josh's commitment and connection to his agency's approach. He -knows- this stuff works, and it's really compelling to hear him talk about the ongoing journey of putting it to work for clients.
True story — the conversation continued for at least half an hour after recording stopped :-) Check it out.
BONUS — if you want to learn more about this, sign up for The Email Revolution newsletter at https://email123.club
Email is only for people over a certain age, right? Wrong! Both of the email whiz kids from CodeCrew are younger than email itself, but they make a convincing case for the business value of the channel. Alex Malone and Andrei Marin (aka Dr. Drei) and their email marketing agency team at CodeCrew have hit an average of 1,300% ROI across a huge range of clients.
Beneath the modest whiz-kid team demeanor, Alex and Andrei drive results through a clear grasp of marketing fundamentals. Tell a great story. Be useful. Be interesting. Be valuable. You're not fooling anybody — and be yourself.
Steve Jobs has a famous bit about caring how the back of the cabinet looks, even if it's not visible. The CodeCrew crew exudes that same level of craftsmanship and care for detail for their customers and their channel.
Think email is old? Dead? Uninteresting? Stodgy? Have a little fun, and check out this conversation with the CodeCrew.
Some business books are dashed off to burnish credentials, as if “thought leadership” is a matter of page count. Others — the ones to read, learn from, and read again — distill hard-won, genuine expertise in a field that the author genuinely cares about. Kath Pay is the latter kind, and her book (and company) Holistic Email Marketing is most definitely one to read and learn from. She’s also a terrific podcast guest, as you’ll see in this episode of The Future Of Email.
In the book, Kath characterizes email marketing with 3 legs — marketing principles, technology and creativity. All three come up in this master-class conversation about email marketing. As a strong proponent of principles — like “lead with strategy” and “email is the push channel” — Kath has a way of effortlessly knocking complex problems into solvable form.
Among the interesting side-trips in this conversation is Kath’s observation about the budget priorities of businesses. Kudos to her for saying what so many marketers think — companies will spend tons of money on technology, without enough investment in staff + training + time + creativity to really use it.
The great news from this conversation — hopefully not a spoiler — is that a new edition of Holistic Email Marketing is looking likely. Get a sneak peek at some of the author’s thinking about that, and the future of email, in this fun conversation.
Missing the big wave versus catching it can be a matter of inches and an extra push to make or break the ride of a lifetime. Shortwave co-founder Jacob Wenger may not be a surfer, but he and his colleagues look to have caught the big wave after years of hard paddling. The wave in this case is the "AI moment" embodied in the ChatGPT buzz; Shortwave's particular ride is putting AI to work on that tough, tough problem called email.
Shortwave's tag line is "intelligent email, powered by AI." The Shortwave app (mobile and desktop) looks like an email client, but acts more like an email assistant with (as Jacob says) some opinions of its own. Among the assists — intelligent, automated handling of sets of messages; message summaries and 'magic tags' to tell that smart assistant how you want things handled.
Jacob shared the driving vision behind Shortwave -- creating a common communication platform not owned by anyone. He also delved into some of the pragmatic decisions involved in moving forward. Why build on top of Gmail? Why not become an inbox provider?
As Jacob shares in this engaging conversation, email is simultaneously one of the best places to apply AI, and one of the hardest. It's probably the most personal data-collection for each of us — but it's built on standards that are older than Jacob!
If you want a glimpse of the future, grab the Shortwave email client (Shortwave.com and mobile). Ask Shortwave to summarize a long message thread and go...Wow....
Check it out at Shortwave.com!
News flash: your email team is overworked. Not because they're not really good at the jobs involved (they are), but because email marketing is NOT "hit send."
This conversation with industry expert Luke Glasner goes deep into the details of what makes email marketing so tough — the technical details (15,000+ email clients), the data details (opens and clicks aren't what you think), and the organizational alignment. Luke says it well — email marketing is really a software development job.
Every email that lands in an inbox is a complicated digital artifact. Creating millions of those a month ain't easy! If you're involved in email marketing, and are feeling that burn, this conversation will give you some ideas for moving forward and making the job (and results) better.
A super conversation with a passionate expert, for anyone in email marketing.
Guest Adeola Sole — fan of all things email — Zoomed in from London to join host Matthew Dunn for this conversation about email, CRM, AI, and being nice to Siri (or not). Adeola is a super-visible figure in the UK/US email marketing industry, speaking, moderating and consulting on email strategy.
While it's easy to put "UK/US" together, this conversation delves a good bit into what's different about marketing in general, and email in particular, between those two markets. As Adeola shares, UK and EU consumers usually have and use WhatsApp; by contrast, there's no single widely-used messaging app in the US market. Will email stick around? Adeola thinks so, for many good fundamental reasons.
As this conversation was shot around the time ChatGPT passed 100M users, Adeola and host Matthew Dunn do end up speculating quite a bit on AI. Will AI transform email? (Yes). For the better? (Probably). In predictable ways? Definitely not!
This is a great conversation for marketers working across national or generational boundaries!
As a little girl, Jessica Totillo Coster slept in her new shoes. As she shares in this fun conversation about e-commerce, e-fashion and email, she was destined for this. As the head of Ecommerce Badassery, Jessica helps other businesses use the lessons that she, Zappos and other e-commerce pioneers learned the hard way.
As she says, "One of the things that I discovered very early on: most small business entrepreneurs who sell physical products are not utilizing email to its fullest potential at all. I'm here to teach you all day long on the importance of it and get you started."
Jessica is delightfully skeptical about the return of effort for social media by contrast: "It's funny because so many of us spend so much time, energy, and effort creating an Instagram post that 3% of our audience is going to see, that is going be gone 24 hours later. Whereas when you send an email, 99% of the time, it makes you money. So I tell people all the time, if you can only do one: Send an email."
This conversation is a delightfully pragmatic quasi-coaching session for retail e-commerce from a genuine e-commerce badass!
With over 25 years in privacy law, time in Federal service, and a decade of close with with the largest email senders and providers, ArentFox Schiff partner Reed Freeman knows a thing or two about the digital domain and privacy.
If you think your company is paying plenty of attention to complying with privacy laws...you may want to listen to this. If you don't...you may want to listen to this!
Reed shares some fascinating examples of the intended and unintended consequences in this fast-moving space. Do you record calls? Potential privacy issue. Is your opt-in easy and your opt-out difficult? Potential legal issue in the near future. Recurring subscription business? You might want to listen in.
One tip worth excerpting here: "Obsess over your consumer complaints. They're the roadmap to avoid Federal investigation."
It's not all bad news — as Reed says, people generally think the legal requirements are more stringent than they actually are. This is a in-depth conversation about email, privacy and the changing legal landscape with a genuine expert in the space!
Kickbox is an email verification company that has expanded to include deliverability. Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations at Kickbox, has been in email since 2015. She shared her fascinating back-and-forth journey in the technical and business sides of email. At Kickbox, Jennifer focuses on helping clients understand the complexity of the email stack.
In this casual conversation, Jennifer and host Matthew Dunn discuss the complexity of email across many fronts. They cover deliverability, SPAM, AI and the challenges of email coding. Side trips include privacy legislation, the dubious joys of the pandemic and SMS-vs-email. They do agree strongly that the four day workweek is a good idea!
The juggling act of profession and parenthood is one of the through-lines in this conversation; Jennifer shares some of the particular challenges of doing that during the recent pandemic.
How email actually flows around the globe, to the tune of 300+ billion messages a day, is a story that may never be fully told. Brian Minick, COO at ZeroBounce, certainly knows a big chunk of the story.
ZeroBounce' lead line is "email validation", but the full range of the things they do for some of the largest companies in the world goes way beyond email validation. Brian joined host Matthew Dunn to talk about the complex back-end world of email in some depth. They cover deliverability, validation, SPAM, Gmail, open rates, reputation, AI and even "known complainers".
Brian has a deeply informed and passionate grasp of his field, which really comes to life in this conversation. If you use email in marketing or service, this episode has some extraordinary insights about how it all works, and how to make it effective for your business.
Chris Arrendale brought years of experience in email, data and security to this in-depth conversation about email, data and security :-).
As the CEO of Cyber Data Pros, and privacy chief at Inbox Monster, Chris has lived in the tough jobs of balancing the needs of marketing against customer privacy and data security. He drills into this privacy-vs-personalization dilemma in depth in this conversation.
Will people provide their data? In return for clear value, yes — IF they trust you. Chris and host Matthew Dunn also delve into the challenges of law in this area; is CAN-SPAM due for replacement? Would GDPR work in the US? Will the death of 3rd-party cookies — IF it happens — make things better, or not?
A great conversation for anyone interested in data, marketing and privacy.
Consumer email is one of the silent wonders of the Internet era. For a recurring cost of zero, people get a lifetime digital home address, gargantuan storage and polished, thoughtful interfaces on all of their digital devices. The work behind the wonder was the focus of this interview with Josh Jacobson and Marcel Becker, respectively the SVP and GM of Yahoo Communications, and the Senior Director of Product Management at Yahoo.
Yahoo Mail is over 25 years old (wow…), and the company used that quarter-century mark to bring a massive interface update to their 200+ million customers. Their focus, as Josh shares, is helping people use email for ‘the business of life.’ The measurable behaviors of those millions of users gave Yahoo some surprising insights about how email is evolving — for example, over half of the messages Yahoo users open relate to shopping!
Marcel is particularly involved in the complex “back end” of the email world — subjects like deliverability, anti-spam, and email security. As he notes, the notion that email is old and going out of fashion isn’t borne out by the numbers — there are millions more inboxes and billions more messages every year.
Yahoo is a market leader in advancing the ‘underpinnings’ that will enable future innovation in email, with strong support for initiatives like structured data and AMP for Email.
Over 1/4 of American adults have a Yahoo inbox. If you’re one of them — or if you use another consumer email platform to manage the business of your life — this is a fascinating peek behind the curtain to see how much work goes into that silent wonder.
With 5 books and 2 full-time podcasts on ecommerce bearing her name, it's fair to label Chloe Thomas as an expert in the space.
This conversation about ecommerce, email and marketing proves it. It's also fun! Chloe and host Matthew Dunn trade observations about the incredible evolution of e-everything — commerce, marketing, mail and more. Shopify gets tossed back and forth, along with Klaviyo and Amazon.
There's also a tiny bit of wandering down memory lane — stone knives and payment gateways kind of stuff. :-)
Working at a large, growing and (preferably) successful company is "an MBA of its own", notes former Googler Ben Lund.
Ben has taken that gMBA and hit the street, launching his own marketing agency, Rise Marketing Group. He's quite thoughtful about the jobs that an agency does for clients. Rise Marketing doesn't just focus on SEO — they help clients with social and email marketing as well.
In this conversation, Ben and host Matthew Dunn discuss the current inflections in digital — more focus on privacy, battles for ID control, the death of cookies and even the green-vs-blue-bubble world of SMS. A great conversation about digital marketing with someone who really knows the space!
Reinis Krumins of AgencyJR is living proof that email is a multi-generation channel that's NOT going away. As he shares in this conversation, email 'amplified everything else you do online.'
It's fascinating to hear someone younger than email share his own discovery of the channel. Whether it's "because you buy stuff" (receipts, logins), or because you apply for a job, or have a job...email is unavoidable.
Reinis operates out of Europe; his perspective on how email interacts with messaging is informed by that, as apps (particularly WhatsApp) are more predominate than SMS, unlike the North American market. America, as he says, is something of an outlier!
This is a great conversational glimpse into the mind of a marketer in another market.
What's it like -after- your startup is acquired? Jack Wrigley has been living that experience in a particularly vivid way, joining the ranks at former sometimes-competitor Webbula after helping Kickbox grow into acquisition. As he shares, it's not all that simple; "giving up your baby" is a long and sometimes emotional process. The mindset shaped by time as an entrepreneur isn't always an exact fit for later roles.
As a long-time figure in the world of email, Jack has a super-informed perspective about it. There's an incredibly complex world of "moving parts" that enable the seemingly-simple act of sending an email around the globe. Those parts are in constant evolution — for example, "deliverability", as Jack says, has become a vital and much-more-common service in just a few years.
Jack is a super-enjoyable guest. He's clearly both passionate and thoughtful about his market space; his story about the T-Mobile texting experience shows the professional value of staying open and observant in the moment. Jack and Matthew spend considerable time kicking around how sms and email are evolving together, and speculate on where that might go.
A great conversation to put some depth to "just hit send."
Would you rather fill in a form, or answer a few quiz questions? Gen Furukawa, co-founder of quiz engine Prehook, explains how quizzes intrigue people while growing marketer zero-party data.
It's one of those "big little changes" that's easy to miss.
Email marketers talk about minimizing the number of questions on an opt-in form; Prehook's approach is really to ask better, more interesting questions! Gen also shares some interesting lessons from previous companies; moving from the world of Amazon to the world of Shopify, as he has, is a glimpse into very, very different philosophies and approaches to ecommerce.
The proposition of his company is pretty darn compelling — increase list growth by 3x and conversion rate by 25%. Want to learn more about your customers? Check them out at Prehook.com
Subscriptions might seem mundane, but as Matthew Holman shares in this conversation, subscriptions are a complicated dance. A subscription is a mutual commitment, out into the future. Whether it's truck tires or carrots — both of which come up in this conversation — there's an intricate cadence to making it look easy.
As the marketing force behind QPilot, helping ecommerce companies move from single transaction to subscriptions, Matthew is kind of the dance coach. He's taken a rich and — for lack of a better word — humanistic approach to challenge of bringing QPilot's subscription technology to their B2B market, by focusing on community and content.
Matthew's response about the future of email is quite thought-provoking — "personalization", but not necessarily the simplistic kind. This is a great conversation for marketers.
How do you brand and market a farm? Are pictures of carrots and cows enough? Or do things like defining the ideal customer for THIS farm also matter? Brand and marketing expert Orshie Herbein of Brand3 joined host Matthew Dunn to discuss email in the broader context.
Brand3 has a terrific swing-for-the-fences vision of transforming one million brands "from noise to clarity." Clarity, for Orshie, requires thoughtful work such as idealized customer profiles — even for farms. It's refreshing to hear someone put the 'marketing job-to-be-done' of email in the correct tactical slot. Email alone won't grow the farm — although growing a farm without email is also a stretch!
When something new, exciting and insanely cool make it to public awareness, it's a pretty fair bet that a bunch of people somewhere worked on it for years before anyone knew. So it is with BombBomb, a Colorado-based company who pioneered video-centric email more than 10 years before the pandemic pushed everyone on-screen. This relaxed, fun conversation with BombBomb co-founder Darin Dawson gives a glimpse of the passion that keeps companies going in the tough years pre-cool, and after. BombBomb has a terrific goal: Humanize the Planet. As Darin shares, face-to-face video changes the 'EQ' and relationship-building of channels like email and text. It took (literally) servers in his closet to deliver that early on, but the vision has stayed consistent. As video use has picked up, BombBomb has found a fit in the many niches of "trusted advisors" — people whose personal credibility and expertise is key to their business. The nice thing is, the world has more-or-less moved in BombBomb's direction. People worry less about looking like newscasters, and more about being authentically themselves. BombBomb just released their 2nd book on this core philosophy - Human Centered Communications. Check out the book and the platform at BombBomb.com.
Digital marketing expert Tali Hasanov dropped in to talk about the complexity and challenges of marketing strategy. Tali helps clients 'across the spectrum' with email, Web/SEO and personalization. She's got a very keen and experienced perspective, focused on getting long-term results. Tali is also a classically-trained pianist. We delved into what she learned in the world of music, and how it's helped her grapple with complexity in the digital world. Strategic Email and Digital Marketing | Google Top 1% Premier Partner | Speaker | Artist & Designer | Pianist
At 50 years, is email itself 'too old to learn?' Not even close, as this in-depth conversation with Aaron Smith reveals. Aaron and his company Sageflo are helping distributed brands get eye-popping results from email and SMS marketing by unleashing the power of local. Sageflo should be a Harvard Business School case study; as they pushed on from incubation within a top email-marketing agency to spinout to pivot, Aaron and his colleagues found traction in unlikely places. Aaron even shares a bit about the emotional side of shutting down a product — not an easy decision for a team! Sageflo is helping email learn a couple of unexpected new tricks. The core product helps distributed teams handle the tricky job of balancing centralized branding and localized email and SMS marketing — with eye-popping ROI. Sageflo's Archiver service complements that by saving every single email sent to every single customer — a lifesaver for call centers. Entrepreneurship is "hot" these days; this conversation is a great glimpse into the entrepreneurial journey. HBS, give Aaron Smith a call.
InboxArmy is the company you call to tackle tough email problems. They can attack design, coding, testing, setup, deployment, automations and migrations, on dozens of email platforms. InboxArmy CEO Chris Donald also happens to be one of the nicest and most generous folks in the email space, says host Matthew Dunn. The two of them caught up "in public" in this conversation about email. Chris is currently running InboxArmy from Thailand; that little personal fact became a pivot-point to talk about the cultural situation and "fit" of email. (TL/DR: US is more email-centric; Thailand, more app-centric.) Chris shares some of the fascinating differences he's observed, such as: it's not uncommon for someone in Thailand to post their bank account # on social media on their birthday, so people can give them money! It's an in-depth conversation with an expert who has been deeply involved in email as a marketing channel for over 20 years — don't miss this one!
Scott Cohen: "There are certain things that I've done strategically over the years, that at a high level don't change — like, Where do you start? You always start with welcome. You always start with whatever your version of abandoned cart is. Those are the high touch points. Those are the low-hanging fruit. _How_ changes with every company. The high level things never change, but the ground level things change all the time and it's always different. When I was agency-side, I had clients in the same industry. They were competitors, and their lists acted differently. You would think they would act somewhat the same. And they didn't!" Scott was awarded the 2021 EEC Stefan Pollard Email Marketer of the Year. He's a bona fide email marketing veteran — with the unique combination of traits that requires. Patience, curiosity, a terrific sense of humor and a knack for figuring things out. Looking cool & collected, and (as he says) paddling like a duck the whole time! If you're wondering how to build an effective email marketing program, or make a good one great, Scott shares some absolute gems in this conversation.
Psst. Here's a super-competitive business secret: write better. What goes into "write better"? A lifetime of research to come, says entrepreneur & expert Rob Ashton. This episode is a surface skim of the deep dive Rob is doing to get people to take the written word more seriously. Rob founded and ran Emphasis, a company that has trained tens of thousands of people at some of the world's leading organizations to write better. After leaving the CEO seat, the temptation to 'spend a few months' to learn more is looking like his lifetime pursuit. It touches everything. Why does communication at work so often misfire? Why is good writing seem so effortless to read? As Rob sees it, the key to progress is becoming more familiar with how our brains make decisions based on what we read. It's a fascinating and complicated topic, and Rob readily admits that he'll probably never be finished understanding it. Fortunately, he's sharing that journey with everyone. He's working on the book, but for now, grab his free Influence course via email: https://influence.robashton.com/
Email is just part of the toolset for digital work; author and entrepreneur Simon Severino Zoomed in from Vienna, Austria to talk about work itself, in depth. While most of this conversation is about people and how they get things done — and the term "email" doesn't come up that much — it's actually an in-depth conversation about the context in which email operates. We're all the CEO of our day — check out this invaluable CEO advice from Simon Severino.
How do you focus on running a business with 10 air raids a day? Dmitry Kudrenko, CEO of Ukrainian companies Stripo and eSputnik, joined me to talk about that, and the future of email, and more. Dmitry is based in Dnipro — still a relatively peaceful city in Ukraine. His customers and colleagues are global, which as he noted has been fortunate. Dmitry is a genuine visionary for email. He's wonderfully articulate at sharing that vision, turning Elon Musk, re-usable rockets and self-driving cars into handy metaphors on the fly. The key message of this conversation is that Stripo has a terrific vision and value proposition for marketers and martech platforms! Learn more at Stripo.email. Doing business with companies there is a great way to support the people of Ukraine.
An effective email program can help a small business grow. Creating and running one is a specialty. Elizabeth Jacobi is the specialist. Elizabeth's company Mocha Bear Marketing puts her decades of deep experience in high-level email programs directly to work for the small-business clients that are her passion. For this episode, Elizabeth Zoomed in from Southern California to share some of her insights and observations with host Matthew Dunn. Her observation that small businesses frequently hire bookkeepers to sort out Quickbooks and accounting is a natural comparison; if that saves time on the cost side, why not invest in the same kind of specialization on the growth side? This episode has invaluable insights for any small-business owner or operator, and great inspirations for email marketers!
Acronyms are a strange phenomenon. We take a phrase that means something, and instead of creating a new word, we use the initials. Knowing the acronyms in a given subject area is a hurdle. Then you start using them. Then you start assuming that anyone you speak to also knows them. Try searching -your- favorite acronym — I'll bet there are multiple definitions in complete different industries. At the same time, acronyms are incredibly valuable. Acronyms that define market sectors become powerful mental categories; dominance or ranking within a category is everything. So...what happens when acronyms collide? That's really the backdrop of this acronym-packed conversation about the email space with subject-area expert Chris Marriott. Chris was the first expert in the space to (correctly) identify the overlaps (many) and differences (few) new category/acronym "CDP" — Customer Data Platform — and the older one "ESP" — Email Service Provider. His taxonomy from a couple of years ago was so good, the largest analyst in tech picked it up. (Bad Dobby! Copyrights!) Now he's projecting that the two will essentially merge. Chris bats around the definitions, differences and some of the likely developments in the space with host Matthew Dunn. It involves some side-trips through history of this particular niche — acquisitions, consolidation, new developments — and some judicious guesses about who's next. If you deal with "martech" (marketing technology, a portmanteau rather than an acronym, thankfully), this conversation should get you thinking!
Jay Schwedelson was running the halls of direct marketing conferences as a child, as he shared in this conversation. So the quality of his insights into marketing today — remarkably free of digital hype — shouldn't be a surprise. Jay's "side project" SubjectLine.com has tested over 15 million subject lines; his agency business has helped thousands of customers, and his new Guru conference has already drawn over 5,000 registrants for its very first event. Jay and host Matthew Dunn hash through the opportunities and challenges of marketing today. A fascinating, fast conversation with a true expert in the space.
The phrase "email deliverability" is a mouthful of syllables, but it becomes nearly poetic in the hands of Yanna-Torry Aspraki of EmailConsul. She sat down with host Matthew Dunn to discuss the issues, players and mysteries of deliverability. How are Google and Gmail different from Hotmail? Who is Spamhaus, and what's their role? (Quite pivotal, it seems.) How is deliverability like a credit rating? Yanna-Torry's intense interest and and involvement in this complicated technical space makes it seem almost fun. If you're wondering whether buying an email list is a good idea (it isn't), you should listen to this conversation. If you fly an 'email geek' flag, you'll enjoy this conversation. And her closing thoughts on the future of email will interest just about everybody!
This conversation is like a masterclass in miniature. Luke Charlton shares succinct, powerful insights into powerful copywriting, and applying it to marketing. With over 1 billion emails sent and tens of millions earned for clients, he knows whereof he speaks! Understanding your market in depth, and listening to what they say and understanding their needs and frustrations are key - 'that's where the money is made', as Luke says. Outstanding and helpful advice, wrapped in that warm Aussie accent. Don't miss this one!
"The best question I've ever asked anybody in this industry is what does success look like in your email program? Why should someone say yes and sign up?" Wisdom from one of the most experienced email marketers out there, Andrew Kordek of iPost. There's an unmistakable charm to a genuine enthusiast. The person who loves something wholeheartedy — not just because it happens to be their line of work — has a pull-you-in magnetism that makes you think "Wow...there's a lot more to this than I thought!". That's Andrew and email. Andrew has seen email from just about every side, including founding one of the best-known email marketing agencies, and now to working "vendor side" with a terrific new ESP, iPost. There's even a rumor that his license plate says something about email! This conversation with host Matthew Dunn is all about the email space — what makes it interesting, how it's evolved, how it might evolve going forward. They delve deep on the impact of a well-run email program on businesses, and the challenges of building them.
Is email AI more demanding than a 2-year-old? COO Erica Rench of Rasa.io has first-hand knowledge of both. Rasa is a fascinating company in an unusual niche — email newsletters. The platform does some unusual things, to say the least! Rasa automates 'curation' — the painstaking job of collecting, summarizing and presenting disparate content. But instead of handing out the same content to everyone, Rasa's platform tracks individual subscriber interaction with newsletter content, and tailors an AI-driven "newsletter of 1" to each subscriber. Erica joined host Matthew Dunn to talk about the opportunities and challenges of such a powerful toolset.
Over 20 years ago, email standards added an HTML 'body' to the plain-text 'body' of messages. So for over 20 years, email has been technically equipped to fetch images on-the-fly from remote Web servers. That little technical accident is the foundation for a niche part of the email industry. The most frequent label for that niche is "real-time content". But as Sean Duffy — founder of Reignite, a company in this niche — and host Matthew Dunn — founder of Campaign Genius, also a company in this niche — discuss at great length...there's more to it than that! Modern email marketing is a complex game; the marketing messages in your inbox are likely to have required multiple people multiple days of work before hitting Send. That's true even when — like most emails — thousands of people get essentially-identical content. To make the content more personal, more relevant, more interesting takes technologies like Reignite. By using data and rules to produce content — like personalized images — these platforms give email marketers a route to better engagement with less work. As an experienced email consultant, Sean is quite objective about the challenges of real-time content. For better or worse, it's not a mainstream practice. Is that because email marketers are stuck in old habits? Because the technology is too complex? Because it's still too technical? This discussion gets "into the weeds" on all of those issues, and more. Personalization gets quite a bit of airtime (or a thrashing). As common as the term is, it's still squishy and undefined, and email industry practice shows it. If you've thought that email could use an update...this conversation is for you!
Email presents some of the trickiest design challenges in the digital world. With old HTML standards, limited style commands and over 15,000 variations of clients to handle, email design, production and approval is a massive job. That's where platforms like Chamaileon come in. Chamaileon re-imagines the workflow of email production — 10x faster without coding! Founder and CEO Roland Pokornyik Chamaileon zoomed in from Hungary to speak email with host Matthew Dunn.
If you've ever contemplated going for it and starting your own company, this is a great conversation for you.
Part of the business of technology — like any business — is talking the talk. Complexity and constant change spin off acronyms and terms quickly and endlessly. The sales person rattling off the terms may...or may not...really understand what they're saying. Sometimes they're just reading the marketing blurbs in their head.
Other times, the marketing person themselves — in this case, CMO Lauren Meyer of independent mail delivery platform SocketLabs — talks the talk and has walked the walk. Lauren joined host Matthew Dunn to talk about 'deliverability and beyond', tracing her career arc through the dense, difficult and detailed world of email deliverability through to her current job, helping SocketLabs connect for and with its customers. Lauren is a delightful interview subject, with a wry knack for tech insider jokes and an infectious laugh. She downplays the rarity of that career arc; hands-on deliverability and C-level marketing are VERY different jobs. Lauren makes it sound natural. This is a particularly engaging conversation for people facing professional development challenges in their workplace. Hearing from someone who lived through great and awful bosses, worked her way up through the uncharted career ladder of deliverability and email to become a visible and respected figure in the field — while apparently having a lot of fun along on the way — is an inspiration.
Don't miss this one.
If you've been feeling that your email marketing program could be done differently...REALLY differently...then this conversation with entrepreneur Steven Werner is a must-listen. Steven shares an approach to email relationship-building that's incredibly effective for his business — which pivoted with great success from live events to webinar coaching during the COVID pandemic. S teven and host Matthew Dunn share a common interest in the power of story — they're on the verge of "story geeking" at points! But the through-line back to email marketing is quite simple and direct. There's a great deal of wisdom and simplification in Steven's advice about the role story and story structures play in both marketing and sales. Fun conversation with a fascinating guy!
Demeaning email as dead is a standard launch technique for new social networks — with the frequent addition of 'nobody under the age of ___ uses email.' So it's a pleasant surprise to hear Forbes 30-under-30 winner Pierre Lipton speak with deep knowledge and enthusiasm about email as a channel. Pierre is co-founder and COO of 1440, an email newsletter 'covering the biggest stories of the day across industries and geography, all in a 5 minute read.' In just a few short years, 1440 has attracted well over a million daily readers. Pierre's conversation with host Matthew Dunn focuses on journalism as well as email; 1440's distinct business model is a deliberate reboot of data- and fact- based news. Pierre shares some fascinating statistics about the wide range (geographically and politically) of 1440's reader base. An in-depth conversation with a very thoughtful, informed and modest guy! If you spend considerable time every day trying to make sense of the world by de-biasing sources on your own, go to Join1440.com to get some help.
Women of Email is a dream turned reality — a professional network for women working in email marketing. Jen Capstraw, one of the co-founders, joined host Matthew Dunn for a deeply informed conversation about email. As a former journalist, professional marketer/speaker as well as non-profit founder, Jen has a deep affection for the email space: "No strangers in the room", or words to that effect, as she says! As this conversation took place in the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, global events did hijack some of the conversation time — but true to the world of email, there are some terrific email companies there and Jen speaks of them. She also shares some fascinating observations and hunches about the opportunities for neurodiverse people in the email space; email is at once highly structured and quite chaotic, which not just anyone can handle. Women of Email, along with the Email Geeks (Slack) community, have pioneered compensation transparency, now requiring compensation figures with job postings. This lead to a deep discussion about the evolving workforce — talent, education, and the changing levers of "labor" and companies.
You may not have heard of Jay Gibb's company CloudSponge, even if you've used their service. After well over a decade, as Jay shared, CloudSponge has a strong hold on a narrow but powerful niche: address-book access. Confused as to why this is an email conversation? Stick with us.
Jay shared with host Matthew Dunn why address books are such a powerful lever for digital marketing. As Matthew said..."so, if I'm browsing microphones and want to share the one on sale with my buddy...CloudSponge would enable the merchant to handle the email-share for me, pulling his address out of my online address book via CloudSponge."
CloudSponge gives their clients 2x-3x improvement in the most powerful digital channel of them all - word of mouse from someone you already know. It's one of those easy-to-overlook friction points in the evolution of digital — the challenge of typing just 1 email address, much less 5 — that CloudSponge eliminates.
Their customers run across the spectrum — from ecommerce merchants to crowdfunding sites to email publications.
This is one of those conversations about a niche that (a) might make you say "we could use that!", and (b) make you say "that's actually harder than I thought, now that he describes it!". Deconstructing the long-term roles of email is part of the picture, of course, but mainly this is a fascinating little glimpse into a neat business.
If you like technology, you're going to enjoy this conversation. (If you like dogs, too.) Keith Kouzmanoff of Inter7 has decades of deep experience in the world of email, and an encyclopedic grasp of how it works. That's clear a minute or two into this lengthy, discursive, and sometimes inside-baseball chat! At times, Keith channels Wallace Shawn — sort of "My DNS with Andre" — and at times, he drop conversational asides that merit an hour of followup research! Keith and host Matthew Dunn bat around some difficult email questions. Why does innovation in email proceed at this glacial pace? Why do other RFC/standards-based fields evolve more quickly? What channels compete with email, and how is that likely to affect email in the future? If you'd like to have just a bit more idea what goes on behind the curtain in the Wonderful World of Email...this is the conversation for you.
Chad S. White is rightly regarded as an expert in the email marketing space. With 3 books and over 3,000 posts on email marketing, he's earned it! Chad is Head of Research at Oracle Marketing Consulting; his prior positions include influential roles at Litmus, Salesforce and Responsys, in addition to columnist and writing engagements in numerous publications. As this fascinating and incredibly wide-ranging conversation shows, he's also deeply thoughtful about the broader context in which marketing and email exist.
Filmed a few days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chad and host Matthew Dunn had a hard time staying away from the geopolitics and cyberpolitics wrapped around email. Chad's insights into the long-term impact of Apple's MPP are fantastic, and his prognosis about how brands and companies will have to adapt are well worth the listen. His understanding of the current "martech mess" will make listeners chuckle — and think.
This is an action-packed hour of conversation that will just fly by.
Steffen Schebesta heads up North American operations for marketing platform SendInBlue. He joined Future of Email Marketing host Matthew Dunn to talk about the capabilities company brings to their focus on SMB (Small to Medium Business) customers' digital marketing. As a successful entrepreneur, Steffen and his team built Newsletter2Go, scaling it to the point where SendInBlue saw the logic of joining forces. That deep appreciation for the challenges of SMBs shines through in this conversation! Steffen shared a broad-and-deep grasp of the value software companies bring to SMB customers — not just bits-and-bytes, but informed and accurate decisions about what's effective, practical and even legal. Shopify, email, SMS and messaging, mom-and-pop corner stores, and even the challenge of moving countries in the middle of a pandemic with a 4-year-old — it's all here! BONUS: Listeners can get 50% off the first 3 months of SendInBlue. Use promo code "FUTURE".
Tim Watson of Traction Six has decades of experience in the email business, which he has turned into a foundation for helping businesses in all sorts of industries. The word 'email' didn't show up that often in the conversation about the future of email, but the context for innovations like email did. Tim's made a thought-provoking web of connections, drawing on his wealth of experience and knowledge. You may want to have a pencil handy, because the book and topic references come fast! This episode will particularly interesting for entrepreneurs — the Entrepreneurial Operating System came up frequently. Fascinating stuff!
Billions of people send hundreds of billions of emails a day by clicking a button; the technical complexities beneath that planet-wide and essentially free 1:1 messaging system aren't something they have to think about. But Tim Moore and SocketLabs think about those complexities all day and every day. SocketLabs is one of those wonderful, fierce, independent companies tackling an incredibly ambitious goal — making email message delivery smarter. Tim shared some insights from over 15 years of deep experience in the email space. We touched on where the big cloud providers are with email (nowhere, pretty much) and why. We threw darts at deliverability. Tim 'onboarded' as CEO during the pandemic; it's interesting to hear how he and the team have made that work, and what it says about the future of work in a deeply technical company like SocketLabs. Embrace the chaos, says Tim. Super fun conversation with a really smart guy.
What happens when you put a couple of email people capable of "geeking out" on deep, arcane subjects on a Zoom call together? Here's your chance to find out. Mike Donnelly, CEO of The Seventh Sense, joined host Matthew Dunn for a no-holds-barred email geekout. Big data, delivery time optimization, cloud computing, privacy, monopolies, standards, the-sky-is-falling marketers — and that was just the first 20 minutes. If your company uses HubSpot — or sends email — you'll find this episode especially fun!
How do marketing agencies market themselves? Solomon Thimothy's company ClickX has a solution — they're an "agency for agencies", and a platform to help agencies grow and scale. Solomon shares some thoughtful observations about marketing in the digital space — the challenge of privacy balanced with personalization and marketing scale...the increasing role of digital 800-lb gorillas...the overwhelming amount of data companies juggle, and more. The changing notion of work also comes up, as talent of all sorts is critical in the agency world. Energizing, fun conversation with an innovator in the marketing space.
Talking with someone who really understands an industry is always a pleasure. You may not think of company acquisitions and company mergers as an industry, but Kison Patel does — in fact, to him it's a science. It's a fascinating notion! Kison shared many of the lessons he's learned from countless M&A events — not all of them successful. Among these — human issues, emotions, and culture are (it turns out) pivotal. M&A is not just a spreadsheet undertaking. Kison's books on M&A distill all of this for further reading. Of course, with the value of email as a company asset, email marketing and email lists are a part of the fun.
“The one with the guy who really REALLY loves marketing." If FOEM episodes were titled like Friends episodes, that would be it. Wayne Mullins is sort of a marketing guru. He's quietly built a crackerjack marketing firm from a small town in Louisiana — a firm with marquee, repeat, nationally-known clients. This conversation makes the reason for such success clear — a passionate and visionary founder, and the kind of easy rapport that builds a team. It's particularly interesting to hear someone who understands social-media marketing wax nearly poetic about email, too!
Designer to agency owner to SaaS entrepreneur to acquisition — Elliot Ross has lived the journey fantasized by many. Taxi for Email, the London SaaS that Elliot co-founded, was acquired by a US email provider — SparkPost — which was acquired by Amsterdam-based MessageBird at nearly the same time! In this candid and informative conversation, he shared some of the ups and the downs of the trip. He provides a wealth of modest-but-sage advice. Build a solution to a problem. Realize that acquisition is a process involving hard work, without a predictable outcome. London is not Silicon Valley is not Amsterdam. Get a really really good lawyer! Super fun conversation with a smart, down-to-earth guy.
In the connected world of email marketing, Jenna Devinney of Webbula is, as they say, "well known." Her innovative content has helped spread ideas and innovations globally. It took a bit of coaxing to get her out from behind the camera, metaphorically speaking. Host Matthew Dunn asked her about the excitement and challenges of a relatively new job in a brand-new industry.
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn speaks to Ugly Mug Marketing's Wayne Mullins. Matthew and Wayne discuss boutique agencies and how they grow, how Wayne learned the fundamentals marketing, the importance of being result-driven, and more. Check out Ugly Mug Marketing at https://www.uglymugmarketing.com/ Interested in being a guest on the show? Apply https://campaigngenius.io/podcast/ (here).
Your host, Matthew Dunn talks with Andy Seeley of Creatively Disruptive. Creatively Disruptive's team of professional nerds are sherlock-holmes-level focused on getting behind your brand, flooding your inbox with sales, and kicking your competitors' butts! Let Creatively Disruptive be the one to fight those pixels, keep up on all the latest algorithms, and make sure your campaigns and website are firing on all cylinders, and crushing your goals. To learn more about Andy's work, visit https://creativelydisruptive.com/ (https://creativelydisruptive.com/) If you'd like to be a guest on The Future of Email Marketing, click https://campaigngenius.io/podcast/ (HERE)
Your host, Dr. Matthew Dunn talks with Nicole Phillip of meMarketing. meMarketing is a digital marketing and branding company that delivers comprehensive solutions to business, entrepreneurs, and non-profits. meMarketing helps leaders create brands that inspire and grow by applying our unique branding and marketing strategy. To learn more about Nicole's work, visit https://www.ministryeventmarketing.com/ (https://www.ministryeventmarketing.com/) If you'd like to be a guest on The Future Of Email Marketing, click https://campaigngenius.io/podcast/ (HERE)
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn speaks with Nerddigital's Marcio Santos. Nerddigital coaches course creators to help get them to six figures in six months. Nerddigital helps creators accelerate this growth -- without the need to spend a fortune on ads. Check out Nerddigital at https://www.nerddigital.com/ Check out Nerddigital's course revenue calculator at https://www.nerddigital.com/futureofemail/ If you're interested in being a guest on the show, apply https://campaigngenius.io/podcast/ (HERE).
In this episode, your host Matthew Dun speaks with Maropost's Dennis Dayman about the intersection of law and tech, marketing automation, digital privacy, digital natives, and more. Check out Maropost at https://www.maropost.com/
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn speaks with Trilogy Interactive's Brian Sisolak about how political America adopted the web, user agent data, altering your statistics in the face of uncertainty, email in the political space today, and more. Check out Trilogy Interactive at https://trilogyinteractive.com/
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn speaks with Videosocials' Vikram Rajan about good marketing and its relevance, video and email marketing, email being the original internet social media, and more. Check out Videosocials at www.videosocials.net If you're interested in being a guest on this show, apply https://campaigngenius.io/podcast/ (HERE).
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn speaks with Wingfire Media's Ronald Kimmons about expediting the growth of your company, a launch campaign versus content marketing, using a timebound method, the emotion behind buying solutions, and more. Check out Wingfire Media at http://wingfiremedia.com/ If you're interested in being on the show, apply https://campaigngenius.io/podcast/ (HERE).
Your host, Dr. Matthew Dunn talks with Tim Kachuriak of NextAfter. NextAfter combines the perpetual learning of a fundraising research lab, the practical application of a digital-first agency, and the rigorous instruction of a training institute. To learn more, visit https://www.nextafter.com/ (https://www.nextafter.com/) If you'd like to be a guest on The Future of Email Marketing, click https://campaigngenius.io/podcast/ (HERE)
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn speaks with LeeAnn Marie Webster about nurturing your email list, practicing email marketing with the receiver in mind, perspectives on SMS, the ideals behind possessions, and more. Check out LeeAnn's website at https://leeannmariewebster.com/
Veteran marketer Stu Swineford joined us from beautiful Colorado for a long conversation about marketing, work, people, non-profits and purpose-focused companies. "We're really trying to find people who have a company ethos that is a little bit bigger than just making money; it's about trying to do something else to help the world." Stu and Matthew are both small-town Colorado kids, which made the conversation particularly rich. To learn more, visit https://relishstudio.com/
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn talks to OperationsAlly's Ada Barlatt about trends, ESPs, visuals, and more. Check out Ada's website here: https://www.operations-ally.com/#/
Your host, Matthew Dunn talks with Ross Brouse of Continuous Networks, a tech provider in New Jersey and New York. Ross believes in changing the IT industry and how it markets to potential clients. To learn more, visit https://www.continuous.net/
Your host, Dr. Matthew Dunn talks with Daniel Monte of The Snow Agency. Breaking down his career journey, Daniel is the senior manager of email and SMS marketing. To learn more, visit https://thesnowagency.com/
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn speaks with Ferrotec's Christopher Carr about the power of marketing automation, systems over solutions, segmenting, developing the entire system-based solution based on analyzing every piece of data, working in a niche, and more. Check out Ferrotec at https://www.ferrotec.com/
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with Time on Target's Kevin Snow about sales and marketing automation, outsourcing your experts, being committed to your customer's growth, knowing what your company's vision is, and. Check out Time on Target at https://www.time-on-target.com/.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to Westerlund's Xiao DaCunha about translations, culture, texting, and more. Check out Xiao's website here: https://westerlund.co
Your host, Matthew Dunn, speaks with Jenna Tiffany of Let's Talk Strategy on her up-and-down journey of writing her book, the history of SEO and email marketing, and more. To learn more about Jenna's work, visit https://letstalkstrategy.co.uk/
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to DSM's Darren Magarro about soft skills, trust, content creation, and more. Check out Darren's website here: https://thedsmgroup.com/
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with The Email Optimization Shop's Jeanne Jennings about the importance of networking, the rhythm and formula of writing email copy, click-rate as a metric, diversity in the email industry, and more. Check out Jeanne's website at https://www.jeannejennings.com/.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with The Email Company's Jeff Ginsberg about not limiting yourself to one platform, not being confined by the constraints of your ESP, the problem with corporate culture, and more. Check out The Email Company at https://www.theemailcompany.com/.
Your host, Matthew Dunn, talks with Thomas Fairey of Stakester on what it's like to be on the cutting edge of e-games and how email-marketing has been a landmark in Fairey's work.
You host, Dr. Matthew Dunn, talks with Skip Fidura, a fractional CMO, author, and speaker, on not just his knack for bowties, but all of his experience in email marketing. To learn more, check out https://www.skipfidura.live/
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with Twist Consultancy's Nick Crawford about the integrated marketing mix, understanding your customer, earning your spot in someone's inbox, accumulating knowledge about your customer, 'less is more' in email marketing, and more. Check out Twist at https://twistconsultancy.co.uk/.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to Business Success Factors' Doug C. Brown about listening, communication, spam, and more. Check out Doug's website here: http://www.businesssuccessfactors.com
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with Naresh Vissa about direct marketing, the foundations of being an entrepreneur, bringing in a different perspective, controlled email marketing and social media, building your email list, and more. Check out Krish Media & Marketing at http://www.krishmediamarketing.com/.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with Blueshift's Josh Francia about accessible data, a unified experience with a brand, scaling at speed, using data to make informed marketing decisions, CRMs, using data for the customer's benefit, and more. Check out Blueshift at https://blueshift.com.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with Reflektion's Rui Ewald about understanding purchase intent in real-time, AI-driven personalization on a platform, cross-industry eCommerce personalization, the importance of being data-driven, and more. Check out Reflektion at https://reflektion.com/.
Your host, Matthew Dunn, talks with Lisa Jones, an inspiring woman who went from Nasa to the owner and founder of iMail on this extra fun episode of The Future of Email Marketing.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with SparkPost's April Mullen about developing copy that truly resonates with consumers, getting the most out of email marketing, scaling up your volume using cloud capabilities, changes in the email space, broad data analytics, the accuracy of data analytics, women in email marketing, newsletters, and more. Check out SparkPost at https://www.sparkpost.com/.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with Samantha Iodice about entering email marketing as a career, the nuances of email analytics, integrating your marketing and seeing the big picture, maximizing your brand's opportunities to make impressions, and more.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to eFocus Marketing's Kate Barrett about challenges, data, touchpoints, and more.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to Spike's Glenn Edley about small businesses, MailChimp, content creation, and more.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn speaks with GreenRope's Lars Helgeson email marketing in context, leveraging automation, understanding all of your marketing channels and pulling them together into an integrated CRM, the dangers of siloing data, and more.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to Email Connect's Chris Marriott about ESP's, RFP's, being future proof, and more.
Your host, Dr. Matthew Dunn, interviews Nicholas Einstein of Cheetah Digital on his impact in email marketing.
In this episode, your host Matthew Dunn, talks to TextRequest's Kenneth Burke about text messaging for businesses, driving sales, creating conversations via text messaging, and more.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to AudiencePoint's Paul Shriner about sending analytics, send-time optimization, packaging your innovations, ordering your subscribers from most to least engaged, and more.
In this episode, your host, Matthew Dunn talks to BEE's Massimo Arrigoni about building email marketing software, empowerment and speed in emailing, the user experience, and more.
Your host, Matthew Dunn, talks with Ryan Phelan of Origin Email Agency on the growth and changes in email marketing and the complexities in consumers today.
Your temporary host, Josh Elledge of UpMyInfluence, talks with Dr. Matthew Dunn of Campaign Genius on the innovations and the facts on email marketing, and his ideals for this podcast.