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Speaker/s name

Dela Quist

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What’s happening in the (email) field anno 2021 and how can we prepare ourselves for 2022 when we’re talking about email delivery?

Speaker
Dela Quist

Founder and CEO, Alchemy Worx

Video URL

https://vimeo.com/536341250/73ed167bb0

Transcript

Andrew Bonar 1:00
Welcome to day two or day one, some of you the Inbox Expo 2021, sponsored by Netcore. It's been a long night for me, it was a fantastic day for everyone yesterday that was able to make it to the APAC sessions. And I'm really, really excited. So we have the request of known dentaquest. Probably for as long as I've been an email, or almost as long as I've been an email, we've had them a few heated discussions. And I always love the fact that he makes me think I love to be challenged. And that is a man that when he challenges you, he backs up with facts and figures. So it's always a good discussion. And you're always left wondering whether you need to rethink some of the ways that you were thinking about email before. And that's why I love listening to data. That's why I love having dinner on our shows. And that's why there are being on somebody else's stage, there's almost always a reason for me to be buying a ticket. So without further ado, I would like to welcome dentaquest, the founder and CEO of AlchemyWorx an email in the agency. I know there's lots now around but I do remember a time when I was able to say with the considerable pride that we are the only agency that are focused 100% on email. And I believe that they still have email at the very focus of everything they do. But I will hand over to della and he will be able to introduce alchemy works far better than I

Dela Quist 2:40
thank you. Good morning, everyone. And Andrew, very kind words. And I'm delighted to be asked to be a keynote speaker for the netcore inbox Expo spring edition 2021. As, as you've already that we've known each other for a long time and have had many debates always ending amicably, I have to say, because I always have the data. But that's another story. And I'll also say that it back down and when you're right. So that's only when you have the data as well. And the final thing I would say is that Andrews core expertise is something that I don't even come close to understanding and I've always appreciated working with him. I also have to say I'm really, really impressed and amazed by the speaker lineup and more importantly, the audience people often to think think of shows webinars as being about the speakers that for me, it's actually about the audience. And the reason for that is most of the speakers kind of know what I think. And and we will either already agree or disagree and the audience are what makes it because I'm going to throw things at people today and in my my next presentation, which will be sort of more detailed, more technical, and have more data than this. I will be following up on that. And I hope that as we go through the journey in my presentation, you'll appreciate my efforts. I'm the one thing I'd also say I always have two disclaimers. The first is a lot of what I say is tongue in cheek. And the second thing is apart from saying what are the things that is tongue in cheek, is I kind of always assume a level of knowledge of the audience. And so my disclaimers always hashtag DBS, which stands for whichever way you want to look at it either hashtag do be smart, or hashtag. Don't be stupid. You can take a pic I found that dv smart gets me further in the world than that Be seated. As I pointed out, I've been around for a very, very long time. I started out in the works in 2020 2021. And that's kind of where I actually started in email a little before. But I started out in New York in 2021. And before I forget one, can I correction, I am the currently the CIO, and not the CEO, I've relegated that duty to Alan Levy, post the merger of our two agencies. And I have to say that his skill set is far better suited to CEO than mine. So I'm glad that I thought I would do show you a few things. What was email like 20 years ago. So first of all, 20 years ago, some of you in the audience would have been sort of possibly 10, some of you would have been 20, some of you have been 15. And as you can see, 20 years ago, I was 17. So that's a joke. 20 years ago, I was not 17. But I'd like to think I was 17. And Tony Blair was in power in the UK, and George Bush had just become president of the US. That's what Amazon's homepage looked like. It's unbelievable to believe that yes, that is exactly what it looked like. And compared to now, the products they sell, the way they approach the market, etc, etc, was infinitely different from today. And I also dragged out an email from 20 years ago, and that's Netflix and Netflix back then were one of the best email marketing companies around or their email marketing output was one of the best that there was, there are a couple of reasons for that two or three reasons for that. 20 years ago, there was a great big question, HTML or text only. And as you can see, not only was Netflix, HTML, but they also use lots of images, which is, again, kind of a No, no, back in the day.

And, you know, things have progressed tremendously since that time. And, you know, I've been really, really pleased to see that journey. And the final point I was sort of reaching for, when I think about Netflix, Netflix was also one of the first brands to actually use data about subscriber behaviour and preferences within their email. And you'll note that that email says films we think you'll like, or movies we think you'll like, and they were doing that. So that was absolutely state of the art. And if you think that everybody was like that, or indeed everybody was as good as Amazon was 20 years ago, that's far from the truth, probably somewhere between 20 and 40% of emails with text only back in the day. And that's a very, very important thing to point out. And 20 years ago, one of the things that hasn't changed is the 20 years ago, as you will see, there was still that question, which is, what should we do with inactives. And I was, I was 100%, behind the school, that you should not mail in actives, so much, so that I actually was headlining a conference for probably about 2006. And I played a clip of the Monty Python, dead parrot sketch, where, as any of you knows it, or you can look it up on YouTube or Google it. Basically, there's a refusal to accept the parent was dead. And so it's like, No, I won't take it back the parents alive. And that was my view is that if people don't open an email for six months, or 12 months, you should absolutely leave them alone. And I was so convinced about it, that I was advising all of our clients to do precisely that, stop mailing them, it'll improve your open rates. By sleight of hand, by the way, it improves your open rates by sleight of hand, not because you actually did anything different. It's just that you stopped counting the inactives in your rate. And so the total number of actives grew as a percentage of the database rather than anything brilliant that you did. So I set out to try and prove it. And believe it or not, one of our clients at the time, and the reason I worked with them is that at the time, they had the largest database of the clients that we were working with back in the day, and they were sending a weekly newsletter out to their target audience and they just refuse to take their enactors off the list. So I'm like I am going to show them with data how stupid they are being and I couldn't and you won't be able to either If you actually go and look at your inactives, and look at the percentage of people who reactivate every time you send them an email, it's amazing. And I continue to do that, the client allowed me to do that. And so I ran their inactive file separately and just looked at everybody who reactivated from the original pot that I created back in the day. And I ran that test for four years. And I can tell you now for at least three years, the first three years of that test, the open rate of the inactive file was somewhere in the region of two to 3%. Every time we sent an email every single time we sent an email two to 3% of the that unengaged list would open an email. And that related to the best part of 800,000 people over a three year period, and I was faced with incontrovertible evidence, there was nothing I could do to dispute the fact that I was the dumb one, not them, by urging them to stop sending to inactives. And it's a problem that kind of exists still today, one of the things that you will find is that marketers are absolutely terrified of inactive people on their file. There are some good reasons for it. And this is where I'm invoking hashtag, DDS for the first time, you don't just take a bunch of people, which will be a bigger list than your active list who you haven't mailed for a year and send everyone an email in one go, that would not be smart. You have to work with your agency, you have to work with your deliverability company, you have to work with people like us. And that will show you how to mail those people safely. And that's the key, you should mail your inactive safely. So

as far as everybody should be concerned, there are inactive people everywhere. But the reason they're inactive people everywhere is simply because we don't do enough to reactivate them. And it's just something that puzzles me. And every client we go to, I will find far more the inactive file as a proportion of the total database is way, way too high. And another way of putting it being gauged proportion of their list is way too low. So that's kind of how we looked at all that's kind of my feeling. And you know, I that's one of my favourite movies. Again, it's quite an old movie. But you know, the whole sixth sense is that they're inactive. They're everywhere. What am I going to do, and they're terrifying. And what I'm going to try and show you is that we shouldn't be afraid of why should we get afraid of them. One of the best ways of demonstrating why we shouldn't fear inactives is that one of the reasons we do fear in actives is that subscribers give us incredibly mixed signals. You know, and if you were to, as Adobe has here, and we did with the DMA A few years ago, every single survey, if you ask your audience, what they don't want to get so in Adobe survey, and it's one of the most comprehensive ones. And the other thing is that they've done it over time. And I like surveys where you can see behaviour over time. So I'd recommend that you try and find them and download it. So the question was, if you could change one thing about the emails you get from brands, what would it be and look at it in Europe, 45% of subscribers or people questions said, make them less about promotion and more about providing information. It's the same thing in the US. It's 40% make them less about promotion, and more about providing information. So what do we do, we got Oh, my God, oh, my God, all these promotions, we've got to stop doing it. Everyone hates this. That's why they're unengaged. I need to be nicer to my customers, I have to give them lots of value added content, I have to x, y and Zed. Now, I'm not saying that's what you shouldn't do. But what I am going to show you is what those same people said when they were asked the question the other way, in the same survey. If you look at the same survey, the results are incredible. The question was What are you most interested in receiving from a brand 51% of people in Europe said special offers and promotions and 62% of people in the US it's special special offers and promotions. So who do you believe? Do you believe a subscriber Who says I hate your content? Because you're always selling to me your sell, sell sell? Why aren't you noticed to me you're not respecting me you're just being black batch and blast etc, etc. Or do you believe it when the same person comes back and says actually what I liked most from you is offer some promotion. And this is consistent. It has always been the case. If you ask the human being Do you want to See more ads or commercials on TV? Or do you want more billboards or posters on the highway? Or do you want less content and more ads in your newspaper? The answer is always No. It's a question. I don't waste my time asking. Because people's behaviours, exactly the office opposite. If ads and commercials didn't work, they wouldn't be exist. If billboards and posters or posters didn't exist, didn't work, they wouldn't exist. If newspapers ad news ads in newspapers didn't work, they wouldn't exist. If email didn't work, because people didn't want them. It wouldn't exist. And yet, all of those things are still there. So the question you kind of have to ask yourself is why is this the case? Or actually better than that, one of the things that I would ask is, so what actually is the value and this is one of the things I found out, as I told you that we did a study right back in the day with one of our clients, which Firstly, second set me on the route to understanding that inactivity is not a permanent state. And that not opening an email is not a measure of disengagement or annoyance with your brand, or any of those things. And this is actually a case study, based on

work we did with a client, which was to show them how valuable their inactive addresses are. So we were able to work with the clients and look through their historical data for the last 12 months, and we were able to show that customers that they did not email at all, were worth $113. So you're right, if you don't email people, because they were unengaged or inactive, they'll still spend money with you. But they spend $113, in 12 months. If you look at the people that were actually on the list, that number jumps from 113 to 625. So there's a massive premium for sending people emails, and I would argue that this tells you for this particular client that the value of an email address that they mailed because the people who were inactive, they had the email address, and for whatever reason, they didn't mail that either unsubscribed or they were suppressed, or they decided that they didn't want to receive any emails, as in the clients who decided they didn't want to receive any emails. And were able to show them that every email address that they mailed was worth $512 more than every email address, but they didn't. Now we dug a bit deeper. And if you look here at the bottom, you'll see right there that the online revenue per customer was high, even if people had not opened a single email in 12 months. So you can see here that the value of the dollar value of someone who was on the list that received email, but never opened was $437 compared to $113. That's really significant. It's a huge number. Does that mean you shouldn't care about engagement? Does that mean you shouldn't bother trying to get people to open an email about your emails? No, not at all. Because there's actually engagement premium, an engagement premium is here. And you can see that someone who had opened email within the last 12 months spent close to $800, compared to the $400 spent by people who've got email and didn't open a single one. Engagement is extremely important. And anybody who hears what I say, or her hears me speak, and takes away from it that I'm saying, it doesn't matter. You don't need to engage people just send any old crap to everyone on your list every time. They're breaking the hashtag DVS rule because that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you have to keep them on the list, you have to mail them in a way that's respectful of this status. And more importantly, you do have to try and engage them. But one of the things that I have always observed is you can't engage someone you don't email, the minute you stop emailing someone, you will never be able to engage them again. So engagement has to be created by your activity. It doesn't happen spontaneously. And I want to delve a bit into why this is the case. So it's what I call the halo effect of email. And if you look at this chart here, and Andrew may actually pull this closer in a second. But if you look at this chart here, what you will see is that an email that you see And arrives in an inbox. And people can do one

important thing, who is sending the email, that's probably the most important thing that people look out for to ascertain that it's not spam, to make sure that they don't make a mistake. And they don't confuse, for example, an email from their mom with an email from Amazon unlikely, but you know what I mean. And so that's what they do. And the choices you can make is you can open the email later, or you can visit the website, you can visit the store, you can delete the email, you can mark it as spam, you can just ignore it, or you can find out, none of those things will show up in your open rate, every single one of those some of which are incredibly powerful. So for example, visit the website without opening the email making a purchase, that's what contributes to the 400 plus dollars of someone on the list, visit the store without going to your website, or opening an email and spending money that shows tremendous value as well. Um, delete goes without saying Mark spam goes without saying ignore goes without saying. But one of the things that's important about it is that and I'm going to focus on the word ignore, but it applies to delete, etc, etc, is that you can't ignore something without acknowledging it. And the definition of the word ignore is to willfully choose and that's a very important thing, willfully choose, you can't ignore something you don't actually spot, you can only ignore something that you see and choose not to. And that choice is something it's a process that takes place very quickly in the brain. So inbox email, don't want to delete, that looks like they spent no time at all. And indeed, they spent a microsecond, making that decision. But that imprint done over and over and over again, is a very, very, very powerful branding opportunity. Now, let's say they do open and it goes to clicks. And the same thing again, they can click or not click, but if you look at the click, you can see that there's a whole bunch of activity within clicks that are not recognised, and you cannot see from your report and analytics. So do not assume that failure to open or failure to click means they either don't want to get email from you or they're not engaged with your brand. And then of course, we got the easy stuff, if they open and they click and they browse the site. they abandon cart, they do whatever those are all things we can see. And we can track and this is what everyone is interested in. But this bit here is actually tremendously important. And probably worth over $400 a year for the brand that I showed you. And could be more or less for you depending on the sorts of products that you buy and sell on which takes us to another thing that you know, I spent quite a lot of time looking at and speaking to people about and trying to explain to them that saying the Battle of Laos is dead is actually a very limited way of looking at what's going on. And I don't say too often because it doesn't make any friends. Everyone's still back from last thing and I'll explain what I mean by that.

What they're doing. And by the way, that should make you I'm sure many of us have seen this over and over and over again. So if you look at it, let's take a batch of bars so what happens you have one everybody on your list and you send them an email to everyone that for Blatter bathroom glass. So you decided I'm going to split my listening to engage in unengaged. And what do you do you treat everyone within that segment in the same way. So your unengaged people get bashed and blasted, and you engage people get back to the lasted. So you go a step further and say, Oh, now I want a VIP segment and a absolutely dead file or an in between, it doesn't matter what you do. And in each one of those segments, the same thing is true. There will be people in the list who are about to move up into a higher segment, and there'll be people in the list who are about to drop out of that segment. And it just goes on and on. And and you know, when you're a kid, and your math teacher is trying to teach you the concept of infinity and they say what's the biggest number you can think of? And depending on how old you are at the time, you'll say a kajillion trillion and then the responses How about a kajillion trillion plus one, there is no number that cannot be improved by adding plus one. And the same for a segment there is no number of segments that you can have Have manageable or not, you can imagine it that doesn't have the same phenomenon in it that people are moving within and without the segments. And that's something that is a real challenge. And you know, there may be some of you out there who are running 20 3040 segments, there'll be others of you have five or six or seven. But either way, you're limited, because you actually treat everyone within the segment in the same way. And if you didn't, then it wouldn't be a segment as we understand it. And so just to show you this is basically what's happening engagements is a dynamic process. There are people at any stage and this actually, I picked three segments because it's easy to show, you could put several and then have a very complicated chart or you could put two and make it a very simple chart I decided to so this is your own engaged your engagement purchase, and you will have purchased. So as you can see, every time we send an email, people can move in two directions. So the unengaged can buy straight away. Or they can engage and so opening emails without making a purchase, people who made a purchase can drop straight into the unengaged by never opening an email again and never purchasing or they can go into engage they open emails, but they haven't bought for a while. And the same is true from engage our purpose purchase, you can move down to unengaged or you can move up to purchase. And this is happening all the time. More importantly, it's not only happening all the time, you will find that everybody on your list moves in and out or for those at every stage. So depending again, on your, what you sell, and your your, the length of your sales cycle, or your product cycle, that could be multiple times a year, I think Amazon, or it could be once every three or four years, or once every one two years. Think about once a year think insurance, through four years buying a car, buying a house that are those sorts of things. And this is going all the time. So my view to the people who say bathroom glass is dead is Yeah, that's a bit disingenuous, it's really just such an easy thing to say it's a headline capture, but it's meaningless. All you're doing is baton blasting 10 groups rather than one. And this dynamic process and the idea of looking at your audience as a whole, and focusing on movement rather than static nature or that static segment. That's what we call audience management and alkaloids alchemy works. And that's something I'll be talking about. In my presentation later this week, I'm going to be focusing on it. But the message that I want to give you an it's one of the perhaps paradoxes of how we talk about what marketing is or should be. And the truth about what marketing is or should be, is that

you need subscriber level behaviour, you have to understand what each person is doing with every email that you send. Otherwise, you can't and you can't really, truly either do audience management, or really, truly optimise your database and maximise it for engagement. So what you're doing is you are not focusing on reducing this group and increasing these groups. And to do that, you have to get people out of there faster, and keep people in the states longer. And that's the definition of audience management. What do I mean about what by subscriber level? Well, as I showed you, before, every email that you send, the following can happen. Someone can be on the list or not on the list. And if they're on the list that they can be sent that particular email or not send that email. And if they're sent that email, they can open it or not open it, and if they open it, they can do one of a number of things, click not click, delete, unsubscribe, whatever. And if they do any of those things, for the sake of argument, click, then they can go to your website and they can either abandon the cart, fill the cart, make the purchase, etc, etc. And what you have to do is you have to log and understand how every person on your list interacted with every one of the emails that you send and what that interaction is. My biggest complaint is that as we move towards if you like AI and more and more email providers are pushing themselves is helping you make that decision. Our AI tells you who to send emails to, etc, etc. For obvious reasons that's done out of the black box, you just get presented a list of all the people that will fill the category about by this week for the sake of argument, or opened in the last seven days, or eight days or 10 days, what you can't do. And please feel free, I want to know every email that allows you to do this, and it makes it easy to do, what you can't do is you can't export the data to the subscriber level, which would allow you to validate whether the API is working or not. And the real reason why they don't typically make it easy is that it's a lot of data to store. It's a tremendous amount of data to store it's a tremendous amount of data to to manipulate and move around. And then if I sort of saw what was going on, and figured out, I could do it myself, and it'd be what am I using AI for so there's a number of good reasons not to do it. I prefer to work with email providers and email platforms that make it easy for us to look at our data to a subscriber level. And it allows us to do something the best, probably the best at describing it. It's like watching a movie, imagine watching a movie one step at a time, one frame at a time, it's the difference between a photograph and a movie clip you what most people are trying to do is optimise every frame of the movie, and they lose sight of what the movie is about. And what I'm urging people to do is do the opposite, which is to focus on the bigger picture. Look at movement. It's a critical part of what's going on. And a single static snapshot of what your segment is on a particular day that you put away and then pick another static segment, snapshot and look at that and optimise it. And then a week later, you do exactly the same thing. That's neither audience management. Nor are you fully optimising. And it means that you don't understand really valuable things. For example, how long does someone stay unengaged? on your list? What percentage of your highly engaged bar, let's say recent purchases? What percentage of them drop out of that every single week? If you looked at that, you might be surprised to find some people I've shown were surprised to find that actually highly engaged people are dropping out of their list at a rate of about 5% a week. And get

people moving out of unengaged into engaged at probably half that. And so how do they make up a difference acquisition. And we all know that acquisition is more expensive than retention. And email is really valuable for retention, marketing more than acquisition marketing. And so you are doing yourself a huge favour if you start focusing on the movement. And if you look at the chart, what you're trying to do is make these lines thicker, the thicker it is, that means the more people are moving in the right direction. So you want the greens to be very large, lots of people moving upwards and you want the Reds as in the bad things to be as you want to minimise that as much as possible. As far as engaging on purchase. I would say you're probably okay with that number in equilibrium. So on that note in looking at the time and mindful of hopefully being able to answer some questions, I am going to say thank you and back to Andrew

Andrew Bonar 33:35
Thank you amazing I can see I'm in the chat room. I know you can't see in the chat room so hopefully you'll be able to join everyone in a few minutes because we're going to be cutting to Paul airy shortly. However, very different new. So yeah, join us in on hopping dela. You'll be able to talk in the breakout.

Dela Quist 34:02
All right. Thanks everybody. Have a good day. Enjoy the rest of the show.

Andrew Bonar 34:06
Bye bye

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