Silver linings in omnichannel marketing with Chad S. White

00:00:05

Eric Trinidad: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Emails Not Dead. My name is Eric and this is Jonathan.

00:00:10

Jonathan Torres: Hello.

00:00:11

Eric Trinidad: Hi. There you go. There we are. We're just a couple of brochachos talking to you about email, a couple geeks here and there, trying to tell everybody about the things that we know and just kind of fun stories all the way around. JT How've you been, sir?

00:00:24

Jonathan Torres: Doing all right. Doing good. You know, it's hot. It's Texas, so just trying to survive.

00:00:34

Eric Trinidad: Do you remember that parable about the wind and the sun? And I feel like the wind. Like bet the sun, like they couldn't get Texas to sweat enough. And I don't know what the result of that was, but it's definitely we're losing a battle here with the sun, and it's just so damn hot.

00:00:52

Jonathan Torres: It's not great.

00:00:54

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, but it's not weather talk. It's emailed talk.

00:00:57

Jonathan Torres: Yes. No. And especially when we got guests waiting in the wings.

00:01:01

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. We got some, a couple of great people joining us today. We have Nick Schaefer, our manager of deliverability and compliance here with us, joining us again. Nick, how are you, sir?

00:01:12

Nick Schafer: I am great. Thanks for having me, guys. It's been a while since I've been on the podcast.

00:01:17

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Welcome back, sir. Yeah. Always good to have you. And first-time guest, longtime listener, I want to say Chad S. White, multi-author of Email Marketing Rules and the head of research of Oracle. How are you, Chad? Welcome to the show.

00:01:36

Chad White: I'm great. Thanks for having me.

00:01:37

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, thanks for coming on. We recently met at Email Evolution. How did you enjoy the conference? I know it's been a while since, you know, everybody's been out in the conference scene.

00:01:48

Chad White: Yeah, I know for sure. That was my first live conference in a while and it was a strange mix of feelings. I was a bit apprehensive about doing it, to be honest. I realized just how much like I missed being around, you know, so many email geeks and getting up on stage and it was really great. But yeah, definitely a little bit weird after like a good two years of not being live in person, you know, at an event like that, I feel like I threw off the training wheels pretty quick and I was feeling good and it was really just great to catch up with so many industry friends and meet new friends.

00:02:27

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, are we the new friends? I feel like.

00:02:31

Chad White: You're the new friends.

00:02:31

Jonathan Torres: I'm going to squeeze myself into that.

00:02:33

Chad White: Yeah, absolutely. Which is always great. I'll tell you, anytime I go to an event, you know, every single time I meet people that I've met on Twitter and on LinkedIn that I've never met in person before but have had conversations with or some kind of exchange. And that always seems very magical to me to like, you know, these people. Like, I feel like I know them in some way and then I meet them in person and it's like, Oh, like now you get like that full like personal experience. I don't know. I just think that's amazing. Love the Internet's. Love being introduced. And I love meeting people in person that, you know, like kind of form these, you know, fledgling relationships online first.

00:03:19

Jonathan Torres: We talk about this continuously and I think it's just a thing that will just keep coming up because of the way that the email community is so tightly knit. You know, I think so many other industries, it's like, oh, there's a competitor over there, and they're just the competitor, and you don't ever talk to them, you don't want anything to do with them. And email is so different and the community around email is so different. Like, enjoy that. So, so much. So it's like it was really good. It's a good experience. Like, you know, getting out there and getting to meet you and meeting a bunch of other people like in the email industry. I think that's awesome. And the way that we can network and talk and learn from each other and make this a much better landscape, I think is so, so good.

00:03:53

Chad White: Yeah 1,000%, yeah. I recently did a piece among a lot of other people with Webula and they were asking us like, "Hey, what do you like most about, you know, the email marketing industry? And almost everybody, one of their three points was like the community. And that feels like such a shill, right? Like it feels like, oh, well, of course you're going to say that. But it's so not true of every industry. I've worked in other industries before, and there's not that same level of camaraderie like there is in email marketing there just isn't, you know, some other industries. Yes. But like, we should not take that for granted that, you know, people are very open and welcoming and there isn't like this like incredibly hyper competitive. Like "I would never help you because then somehow, like, that diminishes me in some way." There really aren't those kinds of attitudes. It's very much everybody sort of in the same boat. And again, don't take that for granted. There's something special about our industry and it makes it so much more fun to be a part of. Speaking for myself and I think a lot of other people. It's so much fun to be a part of.

00:05:06

Nick Schafer: For sure like yall have hit the nail on the head. We all missed that. And we were all like, had that desire to get back in person and see people again. All the email geeks community, but just people in general. I was apprehensive, just like you, Chad, because like I hadn't been at a conference since I think it was February of 2020, so it was over two years for me as well, and it was just so good to get back out and see people in person and, you know, get back to that camaraderie. Yeah, there's no like enemies in the email industry, really. Like, we're all there just talking, collaborating, sharing ideas. It was really cool to see people in Scottsdale and to meet you in person.

00:05:44

Chad White: I think I was a little bit not to compare levels of apprehension, but I think I personally was a little bit traumatized because the last event I did was actually the Unspam event. And that happened like March. I want to say it was like March like 15, 16, 17, something like that, you know, back in 2020. And yeah, I remember it very well because on like day one of the conference, the W.H.O. declared COVID 19 like a national and international pandemic, a global pandemic. And then the next day, South Carolina, where it was held, declared a health emergency. And then the very next day, the United States alert the like that. And by the end of it, like, everyone was like, holy moly, we got to get home before everything goes like lockdown. It was really panicky. So I think because that was my last conference experience, I think I was a little bit extra trepidatious. But again, it really was amazing to be at the email evolution conference and yeah, looking forward to the circuit starting back up.

00:06:51

Eric Trinidad: Do you know which next one that you'll be attending?

00:06:53

Chad White: So I'm definitely going to be at Oracle Cloud World in October. So it's October, I think it's 17th through 19th. Put in, you know, submissions to be at other places and yeah, we'll hear. So hopefully it'll be other ones as well.

00:07:07

Eric Trinidad: Keep that one in your back pocket until you know for sure. Don't want to get anybody's hopes up just yet. Okay. Understood. Understood.

00:07:14

Jonathan Torres: So, yeah, I mean, they kind of get into a little bit of the conversation like a definitely a deliverability focused podcast first. But we, you know, I think there's so many things that are tangentially attached to that, you know, in the way that we have to look at it is a very holistic view. So when it comes to all the different things we're doing in email, it all plays a role within it. So, you know, we're kind of getting into that part of the conversation. And I think one of the things that we talk about when we start getting into that is that there is a bunch of technology and there's a bunch of things that we can look at and there's a bunch of marketing things that we can look at, right? The art and science coexisting together in one of those things. And I think, you know, people say that have baking and and cooking and there's an art and a science behind it. And I think email is the exact same way. It's the cooking of the technology world where art and science have to mix in a really great way. Do you have anything to say about that, like in the way that you're seeing the landscape right now, change between that or the coexistence of both of those things?

00:08:11

Chad White: Gosh, I'm trying I want to give credit where credit is due. It's either Clint Kaiser, our head of Analytics and Strategic Services, or it's Daniel Deneweth our head of deliverability. One of the two of them, I can't remember which, likes to say that like good strategy is good deliverability, and like these things are absolutely like intermeshed, you know, and in today's complicated, you know, deliverability space, like, you know, engagement is still incredibly important and I mean hugely important. I'd say it's the biggest factor, you know, when you kind of break down all the other elements. And since engagement is so important, that means that, you know, email design is important and, you know, email messaging is important and personalization and segmentation and interactivity and all of these things as they all contribute to engagement. So yeah, no, I feel 100% that deliverability and strategy are inexorably intertwined and deliverability really sets like the floor for like what we need to achieve, right? Because that's how we know we're meeting the expectations of our subscribers, the expectations of inbox providers, and that's the floor that we want to be firmly on. And when we see our deliverability fall, that means that we're not living up to that sort of baseline expectation from consumers, from subscribers and from inbox providers that we need to meet. So yeah, these things are absolutely overlapping then circles for sure.

00:09:43

Jonathan Torres: I don't know. Like Nick, do you have anything to say about that?

00:09:44

Nick Schafer: Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting how, you know, oh, everything meshes together and everything is always changing. I think someone was mentioning that a second ago. I think, you know, there's been different iterations of your book Chad because everything is always evolving. So you have to pay attention to what's going on in the industry and adapt. I know there's changes, you know, frequently things like new authentication measures coming out, new things to help senders, things like BIMI as an example. So it's just staying on top of things and really paying attention to the landscape. Something currently going on, Spamhaus is making changes, so a lot of senders are concerned about that. ESPs as well. I know no one wants to end up on any kind of blocklist spamhaus being one of the main ones that you want to, you know, stay away from. But yeah, it's just really, you know, always evolving landscape that you just kind of have to, you know, stay on top of and make sure you're doing the right thing. Because as Chad mentioned, like, if you aren't, you know, sticking to what's like true and sticking to your plan, like your deliverability will suffer. Everyone will know it. I found that out very quickly in my time as a technical account manager, whenever I had clients that I was, you know, working for to help them achieve the best results, if they saw any kind of different performance, you know, they would let me know immediately. And we would go back and look at all the things that they were doing in their email marketing program to figure out what could be the culprit. Obviously, there's many things that could have caused that. When you hear about it, when things start to to suffer, that's definitely when you got to take a closer look.

00:11:19

Chad White: And certainly, I think, you know, for a lot of our clients, our clients tend to be very large B2C senders. And you didn't mention it, but the elephant in the room for me is mail privacy protection. You know, we're coming up on the one year anniversary and lots of brands use a 12 month look back window for email engagement when they're constructing their active mailable lists. And we're seeing a lot of our clients really struggle with how that is shaking out because they're losing so much visibility into engagement. And it's a really kind of a frightening situation for folks that are trying to do the right thing, that, you know, they have good engagement, but they can't see it anymore. So they can't see which folks are engaged and which ones aren't. And that makes it very, very difficult for them to do what's right, which is to mail people that are engaged and to not mail or mail less, folks that are disengaged. This is what mailbox providers want us to do. And Apple has made that very hard for us to do, unfortunately. And that's one of the things that really frustrates me about the whole situation, is that we've had, you know, 13 ish years of engagement based email filtering, and the rules have been really laid out very clearly. And now one major player has come along and kind of messed up a paradigm that was really working well. It's really working well. And, you know, email marketing is not perfect, obviously. You know, some folks will get more email than they think they would like. But on net, you know the system was working and now we've kind of thrown out 13 years of deliverability improvement, and now we've got to reinvent the wheel to make sure that, you know, we're serving our subscribers well and not sending to folks who aren't engaging. But it's definitely, I think the trickiest thing going on right now. Nick, and you talk about how things are like kind of constantly changing, I think that's sort of, you know, certainly on the deliverability front, the biggest change and you mentioned Spamhaus. Yeah. And the beginning of June, there are a lot of informational listings, I think it's what they call them and then they all kind of went away and now a lot of them are back. There's a lot of senders who are currently like under warning at Spamhaus and it's impossible to connect those to MPP. But it seems to me to be more than coincidental that here we are coming up on the one year anniversary of MPP, knowing how people tend to select audiences and now all of a sudden there's a huge number of warnings from spam. That seems? Yeah, I think you'd be a little bit foolish to kind of dismiss those as purely coincidental. So yeah, I think there's a lot of challenges right now and deliverability. I know that Validity, you know, has said that, you know, we've already fallen from sort of a long term deliverability like inbox placement average of like 86% to 87% down to like 82% to 83%. And I think when they came out with that, it was like, you know, a couple months ago and so probably even lower. So yeah, things are changing and you know, email marketers need to. Rise to the occasion and do their best to figure out, you know, this new world that we find ourselves operating in. But it's tricky because we went from having essentially a sort of one set of rules for everyone to follow to now, everybody has to determine their own secret formula for inbox placement, and that just makes it exponentially more complicated. And frankly, you know, for our clients, you know, brands that can afford to get extra help, they're going to be okay. It's the folks in the middle that I feel really bad about. You know, it's those mid-sized senders that can't afford the extra help to figure it out. Those are the guys I really feel for right now. Yeah, yeah. Definitely kind of scary times.

00:15:48

Eric Trinidad: For those smaller businesses, mid-sized businesses. I mean, those opens were like their bread and butter. Like that's what they put all their money into like that's exactly what they were using to get all their metrics back. And now that's kind of the wayside.

00:15:59

Nick Schafer: The thing about it is it's just Apple has done it so far right MPP like there's been hints that this is the future that maybe some other companies are going to start doing this as well. So yeah, email marketers have to adapt and change the way they measure success and look at some other metrics because it's not going to change. You know, opens are going to be less and less of an option to use as a term of keeping your list healthy.

00:16:24

Chad White: So first of all, it does appear that Yahoo at some point is probably going to join Apple in some fashion. They've indicated as much for a while now. I think they were even talking about it before Apple did it. So this is like an idea that like I thought that they've had for a while. So we'll see exactly how they implement. It might be slightly different, who knows? But I think we should kind of assume at some point that's going to happen. The big question is Google going to do it? Is Gmail going to do it? And there I don't think so. And I don't think that Microsoft is going to do it either. But for Google in particular, it would be just an amazing reversal because they're the ones who pioneered engagement based email filtering, which is completely predicated on us having visibility into engagement. Right. Because we can't possibly be asked to adhere to rules that are predicated largely on opens and then they block our ability to see opens like that just doesn't make sense, right? I mean, the point of rules is so you can follow them. And if you have a rule that just can't be followed because you've made it impossible for us to follow like that just doesn't make sense. And I think the other thing that's really important to recognize with particularly like sort of Apple and Google is that Apple's business is a consumer business, right? Their customers are consumers. That is not the case with Google. You know, Google's customers are businesses. And so I think there's a long tradition of Google knowing who their customer is. Those two big reasons. It seems very odd to me that would change. So I would be very, very thrown if Google were to turn around and jump on that bandwagon. And so I think what that means is that the future is going to be bifurcated, sort of like it is now, where you have one group of subscribers where you can see reliable opens and one group that you can't. And based on our experiences here at Oracle Marketing Consulting, when you can see opens, do what you've always done, like use those opens. For our users where we can't see opens, you know, we've been trying all kinds of other kind of algorithms and different things for our clients and none of it works as well as using opens and supplementing with clicks. So when you have the opens, you should absolutely use them. The other thing I wanted to add, Nick, is that, you know, it's true that the future of opens is a little bit dubious, but there are a lot of brands, you know, to Eric's point, that rely on opens because of how their business operate. I've seen a lot of pieces talk about, you know, the death of opens and really sort of like applauding it and how like, oh, like you shouldn't be using this anyway. And a lot of those pieces, you know, how its a vanity metric and on and on and a lot of those pieces have a very like retail e-commerce frame of mind, you know, because they talk about how like you shouldn't be using opens, you should be looking at conversions and revenue and stuff. But there are lots of brands who aren't selling like that's not what they're about. You know, they're B2B brands that, you know, want like retention, you know, or their media companies or brand manufacturers that aren't selling directly, that are looking for engagement. They're looking for brand engagement and brand awareness. They have different goals that don't directly track down to email marketing revenue. So I think we need to like always kind of keep an eye on like what kind of business are we talking about? Yeah, retailers. I think they're not going to mourn the lessening of opens, you know, the loss of some opens as much as other brands. But again, in the deliverability world, you know, the loss of opens is just enormous. Like that loss is tremendously felt. But from a metrics standpoint, I think it's still a really useful metric for some kinds of brands. It's not the most accurate metric. It gets inflated by a bunch of things and deflated by a bunch of things, but it's our most frequent signal. And over time, it's a very reliable vector for where things are headed with a business.

00:21:02

Jonathan Torres: It's one of those things where we leaned in, I think, as an industry and, you know, people that were in that space and especially in deliverability and, you know, trying to see all those things that we built something that was very reliant on that. And companies built, I mean, entire systems that were just reliant on the metrics. And when you get lost in the data, I think sometimes that's what can lead to problems later on when you're only reliant on that data and you're not looking at a bunch of the other things behind the scenes and from previous conversations that we've had and kind of like looking into this and talking about this whole experience and how this has all been, the next big piece of that is what do customers need to consider whenever they're looking at, yeah, stepping outside of that, like using what data we can still get from those open metrics and data we can still get from, you know, some of those other data points that we have that are available to us. But then building to create the right experience and create the right set for the customers that we do have and not be so reliant, I guess on those numbers like yes, we do have to rely on them and do you know, for practices and for what we're trying to do, but to be resilient against that and I know part of the things that are written down for that stuff before is really as a business building up brand and content within the messages and, you know, experience and the way that you communicate with that. Like what would be your advice whenever it comes to that to build resilience against having to rely on so much of the data?

00:22:20

Chad White: I think there's sort of two different ways to come at this problem. I think one is that we need to, you know, change how we do positioning and repositioning and re-engagement and frankly, you know, how we design some messages to try to get more clicks, you know, and not in a way that, you know, our agenda over our subscribers agenda, but just sort of being cognizant of the fact that we kind of need more clicks in order to have an easier time. So having, for instance, more non promotional content or surveys or things like that that get people clicking but don't, you know, are probably like driving like the core of your, you know, marketing agenda, you know, those are smart things to do. And then again, like sort of at the front and end of the relationship, you know, stronger positioning, more double opt in, you know, where it makes sense because part of what we're discovering is that clicks are like twice as powerful as opens and that they tend to qualify people for twice as long. So getting clicks is really, really important. So things like a double opt in is actually, I think, a bit more powerful than we ever really thought it was. It can really qualify someone for a long stretch of time giving you, you know, lots of opportunities to get additional clicks to continue that qualification. You know, re-engagement campaigns used to be all about, hey, can we just get an open and see that thats, a live communication and now that's not sufficient. So those have to be redesigned to get a click and we'll probably be seeing more repermissioning as well. A lot of brands don't repermission, which I think is a missed opportunity and I think kind of a requirement now. Otherwise you're just going to be losing too many people. So I think theres a lot of brands who need to get on board with repermissioning and figure out how to do it well. And then beyond that, there is the coal question of what other metrics could we use to qualify people. So I mean, opens were almost the whole game before right and we're losing a lot of them. And so there's a gaping huge hole in our qualification system for, you know, determining who's an active mailable subscriber, someone who's safe to mail. And a big way that we're going to plug that hole is through omnichannel signals. And in some ways, I feel like this is one of the kind of good things to come out of MPP is that, you know, we have had a very siloed approach to, email marketing and email marketing metrics and sort of like huddling over like just the metrics coming out of our email systems. And MPP is definitely forcing more brands to kind of look at the dotted lines of email marketing. Email marketing is fantastic at driving direct email marketing revenue. And certainly during the first year of the pandemic, it was amazing. Everyone was super happy with their email marketing in the first year of the pandemic because so much more business is being done online versus in stores. Everyone was super thrilled and that's great. That's that golden path that we want people to go down. But I think everyone is now being reminded that that's not the path that a lot of people choose when engaging with email or get a message from a brand, and maybe they'll just read the envelope content and not even open it. Or maybe they will open it and they'll look at it and then they'll close their laptop or put down their phone and they'll hop in their car and they'll drive to that place of business and they'll convert. And most of the time email marketing gets zero credit for that activity. Which was completely prompted by the email and like that happens all the time and is completely normal behavior in the same way that like abandoning shopping carts is like, that's not an alarming thing that's part of shopping. Like that is a natural behavior that is not an aberration. It is not a thing to be corrected. And we often sort of talk about shopping cart abandonment. Everybody else is like fixing a problem with shopping cart abandonment. No, shopping cart abandonment is like a thing that you do when you shop and that's like a very natural thing. And, you know, looking at an email and then going to a store because of that is also an incredibly natural behavior. As an industry, we are not well connected to understand that influence and MPP is definitely driving more brands to get a grasp on that, because if you send an email, you know, promoting X and then all of a sudden you see one of your subscribers buying X at one of your locations, you can reasonably draw some lines and assume some connection there. And especially in those cases where you're writing a great subject line and in my mind a great subject line is one where you can take action without even opening the email. I love that and I hope that that's not one of the things that starts to kind of go away. Where you try to kind of game things or we're like, Oh, we really need people to click. So let's write these like very, you know, obtuse, very clever, you know, vague subject lines to get people to open the message. And then maybe they'll click. I think that would be a bad outcome for MPP and I hope that doesn't happen. What we need to do is not try to manipulate subscriber behavior, but get better at measuring the stuff that's hard to measure now. And things like CDP's are really helping because a lot of times we have this data, it's just fragmented and disconnected and all over the place and things like, you know, customer data platforms help unify all that information and clean it, kinda scrub it, make sure that you know the right stuff actually gets saved and acted on. And so I think we're having a bit of a reckoning with just how messy and disconnected our businesses are and our data is. And that, you know, if you're looking for a silver lining and with MPP, I'm always looking for a silver lining. I think that's one of them. I think that's one of the things that it will be very good, is that we'll have a much more sort of holistic view of what email marketing does. And, you know, looking at how email marketing affects customers, not just subscribers, which that's really the name of the game long term, is to not be channel operators, but to be business operators and to be working with all the other channels in a coordinated fashion and sharing data, sharing insights and all this cross-pollination. I think that's the future, and I think MPP is definitely kind of given us a big kick in the rump to start walking down that road a little bit faster. I kind of wish it didn't happen. But, you know, kind of looking for that silver lining, I think that is a plus.

00:28:58

Jonathan Torres: With the expansion, the growth of that and the way the technology has allowed for those kind of things to happen, it's so much easier to do it. We see the impact with those smaller companies, the, you know, medium sized businesses that are just still trying to build up some of that that are so reliant on some of the older things in order. It's a much heavier entry point to get to that spot, but it's also a great opportunity to start building that now. And as they grow and as they can continue to, you know, become larger as a business and, you know, expand their markets, perfect, like start doing it now, start finding those ways to get into those multichannel locations. And with multichannel marketing and information that you can share from, you know, within your own self, within your own data set, that first person data is so, so good and you can use it much better than you can. So, so many other things. Right? And I think that gets lost. So I love to hear it and people talk about it and let's dive in and dive in now because earlier you start the better.

00:29:47

Chad White: And it's definitely going to get easier, right? This is now become like a very high priority for the industry. And so again, CDP's, I think are an indication that this is a problem that, you know, solutions are being designed for. And that's very good. I remember ten years ago I was at Salesforce and we were talking about, you know, building that like that unified view, that 360 degree view of the subscriber. And that was ten years ago. We were talking about that. And it's really just now happening. There's a lot of things in email marketing that have very long arcs, and this is one of those things and it's really complicated. So you would assume it would have a long arc, but I think it's just going to get progressively easier and easier.

00:30:32

Jonathan Torres: Agreed.

00:30:33

Nick Schafer: Yeah. Like Silver Linings. It's great to look for the silver lining, as Chad was mentioning. And I think that taking a look at all of the data that you have for customers is very important. But one of the things you said scared me like, please, senders do not like start trying to deceive recipients with subject lines. Like I've seen that before. It never turns out well, let's not do that. Another thing he mentioned, like the re-engagement campaigns. All companies need to be running those. Those are extremely important. You need to keep your list up to date. Less hygiene is one of the things that I kind of preach about, especially whenever I was an account manager. I would make sure the customers were always keeping their list up to date. Keep everything. Keep your list hygiene in check and don't deceive recipients, please.

00:31:18

Chad White: Yeah, I really hope MPP doesn't, you know, convince some people that they need to go back to sort of like open-bait subject lines and like, you know, clickbait body copy. Like that's not going to end well. But, you know, there's no doubt that MPP has made clicks like more of an imperative. And yeah, my fear is that some people will degrade subscriber trust in order to accomplish what they feel are like goals that are imperative for them. I think there's ways to do it that don't compromise trust.

00:31:48

Jonathan Torres: Even more to that point. I think there's a lot to be said for those emails that aren't necessarily so much of it is ROI, right? Like I think so much of it like in our collective minds, right? Whenever you're sending out like what am I going to get as a benefit from this message and how is it going to like benefit me in a monetary way to do it? There's so much opportunity left on the table when you're only looking at it in that view for those emails that are just engaging for no other reason than just be engaging and to promote brand and to promote the way that you want to communicate with your customers and your audience and keep them in the loop and make them want to want that stuff. You know, overall, I've seen some really, really good ones. I mean, there is one, I'm not going to say brands or anything. I just love the way that they did it, though, because, you know, as a subscriber, as somebody who's in the email world and getting things from them like, yeah, they sent out marketing emails and they let me know about new products that are coming up and then they'll send out one that's just a bunch of jokes, you know, like all in relation to the products that they sell. And I'll read those all the way through. Like, I love it and I'll see it. But that reminds me like, okay, cool. Like this is part of the brand that I bought into of this relationship that I bought into and not just like, Oh, they're trying to get me to click on this thing because they're trying to send me to the website because they want to sell me something. It's a very important thing that I think is just too often left on the table.

00:32:59

Chad White: Part of this, like sort of holistic look at metrics hopefully will also drive us to more of a sort of relationship lens, right? Like there's still so much that is campaign driven or look at a particular campaign and we say, all right, this campaign, you have these results and then we send another campaign and we compare it to the last one or, you know, to the campaigns for the week. And I don't think that that's the way to do it either, because every campaign should have different goals. And, you know, if you compare a campaign that is used to drive awareness, then of course, it's always going to look like a horrible failure compared, you know, to that campaign two weeks later. That's about, you know, driving conversions. But, you know, like these all work together, right? And they work throughout campaigns where you have multiple emails that are part of a campaign that builds towards some ultimate conclusion. But I think also for subscribers, you know, in this day and age, you know, you also need to have like an arc that you're building with them as well, because their interests ebb and flow. And, you know, sometimes they're in the market and sometimes they're not. And understanding when they are should change your messaging. You know, your system should, you know, change what they recommend, in terms of personalization and segmentation and automation, all of those things should all, you know, kind of reinforce when someone starts to truly appear to be in market versus when they're not, behavior should be very different. Then again, I do think that, you know, MPP and other things are kind of really kind of ushering in a more kind of holistic subscriber centric view. But it's definitely going to be a process for a lot of brands to get on board with that. And certainly and I think a lot of industries like retail in particular, that is very, you know, week to week, month to month driven in terms of revenue. It can be hard to kind of step back and realize, well, if I manage my, you know, particular subscribers differently, I actually I keep them warm so that they're going to be more inclined to engage when they're ready versus, you know, just hammering them all the time in a way that makes them fatigue and tune out. Right. But like, that's a really hard thing to recognize for a lot of brands.

00:35:21

Eric Trinidad: As things are growing and changing, like we were saying, keeping your head on a swivel, making adjustments and just evolving. So does this lead us into the conversation of your new book and the title of that book when number four comes out?

00:35:39

Chad White: Well, again, one thing that is exciting is that this upcoming March will be the ten year anniversary of the first edition. So that's pretty cool.

00:35:48

Nick Schafer: That is awesome.

00:35:49

Chad White: I think that's pretty awesome. I will say at some point there's going to be a fourth edition. I will say that. I mean, that seems, there's too much that's changing and evolving.

00:35:59

Jonathan Torres: Don't let him put pressure on you.

00:36:02

Eric Trinidad: Yeah.

00:36:02

Chad White: So that's. It seems at this point, it's the inevitable thing. You know, it's very cool to me that, you know, that so many people enjoy Email Marketing Rules. And, you know, I know people who have like all three editions, which is amazing to think they've been, you know, reading my book, the different versions for ten years almost now. That's pretty amazing. And for me, I consider it to be a labor of love. I get a ton of gratification from people, you know, saying that they, you know, they read it and it gave them new ideas and i've run into people who've said, like, you know, I'm new to this industry and this is the book that I picked up first and, you know, wow. Like, really set me up to be successful. I don't know if there's anything better than that. So that's great. So I'm super stoked that coming up on ten years for the first edition. And yeah, at some point there will definitely be a new edition.

00:36:56

Eric Trinidad: If you can float Nick like the first copy, that would be amazing. So he has the trilogy?

00:37:01

Nick Schafer: Yes.

00:37:01

Eric Trinidad: You know, the orig trig.

00:37:03

Nick Schafer: Yes. I will take a signed edition, but no like really like going back. First, congrats on ten years. That's amazing and a wonderful thing. But like the last example, you used someone coming into the industry and the book really helping them. That's where I was, you know, like nine years ago. I came into the email space. I didn't know anything about email. We wanted to build out this new managed offering where, you know, we had account managers. I quickly realized deliverability was important. So I just went to research for books and I found your book and it really set up a lot of principles that steer the direction. I know like we're still using those books today. I think JT held one up a second ago. I know the Tams, the technical managers still read it. So yeah, that's a great example. Someone coming into the space just wanting to like learn about it. It's a great book. So for all those listeners, if you haven't picked it up yet, yeah, check it out.

00:37:57

Chad White: That's amazing to hear. Thanks, Nick.

00:37:58

Nick Schafer: Of course.

00:37:59

Eric Trinidad: That should be about it for this episode. Chad, Nick, thank you so much for joining us this week. Really appreciate your time. Really looking forward to seeing you. More on the circuit there, Chad. Hopefully, you know, we'll be together again soon out there with the rest of our email geek friends. So it'd be really great.

00:38:19

Chad White: Yeah, absolutely. See you around.

00:38:20

Nick Schafer: Thanks for having us, guys.

00:38:21

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And JT, do you want to say where they can find us if they want more information.

00:38:26

Jonathan Torres: I'm going to leave it to Thomas.

00:38:29

Eric Trinidad: Thomas where can they find more information about all the things sir.

00:38:33

Thomas Knierien: If you want to find more information about our podcast, please visit Mailgun.com and head toward the resources section for the podcast section, you can find all of our episodes. You can find the most current episode with Chad here, and if you see us out in the conference space in next few months, we'd love for you to meet up with us. Chad also recently received our Email's Not Dead big red T-shirt that was floating around. Everyone's loving them right now. So we hope to get more out to you in the email geeks field, everyone. So we hope to see you soon.

00:39:03

Eric Trinidad: Right on, till the next time. Thanks, everybody. Have a good one.