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April Mullen

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April Mullen, Director of Brand and Content Marketing, SparkPost

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https://vimeo.com/532439182

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April Mullen 0:27
Hi, everyone, thanks for joining, I'm so excited to be here as the final presentation of the day or of the conference for the Inbox Expo. Nely Andrew have really put on a wonderful conference. They've really outdone themselves this year. So thank you for everything. And thanks for having me. I'm April molen. I'm the director of brand and content marketing at sparkpost. But you also might know me as one of the co founders of the industry group women of email. I also am on the board the Mac of the email experience Council. And I've been teaching MBA students since 2020 13. At the University of Missouri, St. Louis Business School, and of course, the topic I teach is email. And I love email so much. I am a quintessential email geek. I've been doing it for a long time, have been in the space for over 1415 years. And so excited to dive into the content today. So what you see here is Aretha Franklin, she is a legend. And when I think about the term respect, I think about Aretha song RSP CT. But what you might not know is that the song was actually written by a man named Otis Redding. And he said, Well, I guess it's that girl song now after he heard Aretha singing on the demo tape. And I love that it's known as Aretha song. Not because Otis didn't have talent. Otis is a wonderful musician. But Aretha was really big on the the notion of respect, and, and making sure that respect was realised by all people, whether they were a man or a woman, black or white. It's our basic human right. And so she really brought the soul to the song, and made it made it hers and made it made the term respect something that we all think about when we listen to that song. So I want to talk about what happens when we don't have respect and what it costs us not just as a society, but also in business. A lot of people 66% will have declined performance. So they're not going to have the productivity that they normally could have 30% or less creative, their creativity goes out the window because they feel demoralised. And 13% of you that are managers are spending over a month a year, mending relationships, or sorry, 13% of manager time is spent mending relationships, because people are, are not really sure how to handle disrespect and and it's so freely thrown about in not just American society, but the global society. So I think this is an important topic for us to focus on. And it cost us a tonne of money. $7 trillion in lost productivity as a result of people being disengaged as a result of disrespect. So as people in the email industry, obviously a big part of our jobs is to be creative and to drive revenue. And if we can't do that, because we feel disrespected, then we're obviously hurting ourselves in our industry and the people around us.

So do that I say, Take another line from Aretha Franklin, take care TCB which means taking care of business. And I want to dive into how we should be thinking about respect. And I think we need to deliver respect with intention and authenticity in everything that we do. This is really important. So want to start by talking about respecting your subscribers. This is where you know this is this is what how we make money. This is how we drive revenue for our companies. This is how we create engagement. And there have been a tonne of great sessions all week about this. We have Lauren Meyer of sparkpost Labs talking or socket labs. I'm so sorry. Talking about respect for your subscribers your ticket to the inbox and email deliverability being achieved because of love and respect. And Kate Barrett, you know, using Aretha Franklin song and so you've learned a lot this week. Hopefully in all the sessions on how to meet the needs of your subscribers, and I love this old graphic, in fact, it's kind of like you can see a little bit of the fuzzing behind it. This is actually somebody's handwritten sketch, I actually could not find who This image was attributed to. But I love using this, I actually use this in my email course with my students, that relevance comes in between what you want to say and what they're interested in. And our job as his email marketers is to find that perfect spot of relevance. And that's really where the respect for our subscribers comes in. And I know we've been talking about this for years, but I'm going to show you a few things that will hopefully inspire you. But we saw this meme circulating a lot last year, where people were like, I don't want the email to find me. And that really hurt me as somebody who's really passionate about email. And I know it's kind of to be funny. But the truth is, there's a lot of opportunity for us in the email space to do better, myself included when I'm developing campaigns. And so doing things like personalization, I know again, a concept that's been used for a long time, but the Spotify email this is, this has to have gangbuster performance, because people love seeing things about themselves reflected back to them. And so if you tell someone that you're tracking all this data in them, and expose it to them in a way that's really fun, and engaging, like Spotify does here in their urine email, it's one of the email campaigns I look forward to the most every year. This email by a skincare company called hers, I love how they personalise it by showing you where you're at in your journey saying trust the process and right about now, you might be asking yourself, why is my skin more flaky and irritated than when I started, they're basically setting the expectation for the consumer that like, we know you're going through a rough patch right now with our products, but this is expected Hang in there. And even showing a slider bar of when the consumer can expect things to get better. Sometimes they just want you to guide them in email is an excellent way to do that. This email by godaddy says we applaud you where they're telling people that you know, they're they're really excited about all the things that they've done as a an entrepreneur, knowing people had a hard year last year. And this is a wonderful, wonderful email. And it doesn't even really have personalization in it. So this is an I'm a big fan of like, inspiring people, not just with the big lofty ideas, but also things that you can do just by putting some thoughts to paper and developing it. And this one, I think is an excellent example of that just using kind language, and really celebrating your subscribers. And then a couple more examples. nazi.com It's a company here in the US, they actually used a Jewish term for Happy Holidays here on the screen, I don't know if you can see my pointer. And a member of an industry group said as a Jewish person, I was so excited to see this right before Passover, it just made me feel relevant and made me feel important. So again, just just using information that you may have on the subscriber and their purchase habits and things going on in the world. So speaking of things going on in the world, rooted, it's a company that sells plants, it's one of those millennial kind of hip companies, they're selling plants to people. And they did a whole manifesto on stopping Asian hate. There's been a spike in in hate across the country in the world. And they addressed it, they took a point of view. And it wasn't just virtue signalling, they actually talked about how they were going to address it. And then to share that with their subscribers in a way that I think is super relevant. It's timely. And again, it's not, not just personalization that makes something relevant. And so I love this example.

So the next area of respect is respecting the power of email as a channel. This is something that I think about so much. I evangelise it with my students. I talk about it in industry groups. It's something that I'm incredibly excited about. And I tried to harness like, why I'm so excited about email and why my love for it seems to be never ending. I think it is the superior digital channel. And the reasons for that are multifold. First of all, it's not owned by Facebook, or Twitter, or other tech Titans. It is really the channel of the people. And it's this unwalled garden that can really be we can innovate in it because it's not being controlled by some company. Now there's obviously a tonne of problems. We don't have email code standardisation, mailbox providers, will prevent us from always getting to the inbox and that's fine. It protects the consumers, we should be doing a good job anyway, if you know there were a lot of deliverability sessions this week that talked about that.

The next thing I'm excited about with email is the fact that it leverages first party data. third party data was having too much of a moment for a long time, as well as acquisition and advertising. And it feels like with the third party, Cookie crumbling in the browsers and idfa going away, and other ways of tracking consumers in a way that makes them feel like they're being spied upon. First party data and email is now going to become really important. And when we think about first party data, the ground zero of that is the email address, you may not have their phone number, you may not have their home address, you may not even have their name. But oftentimes, when you have a piece of first party data on a consumer and your database, it is an email address. And that raises a lot of opportunity for us as we watch our advertising counterparts, see the third party cookie crumble in their strategies dissipate. The next thing that I think has has really made email, something that has has longevity and will continue on is that it has flexibility with images and text. I mean, yes, it is a pain, that there's no standardisation. As I mentioned, it's really hard to produce emails, it's harder than coding for front end. But it's also flexible. And if you take a moment to think about any channel or something that dynamic could be sent to an individual, digitally, that has that level of flexibility. You won't really find it SMS, MMS kind of starts to touch that. And it's kind of having a moment as well. But it's nothing compared to what can can happen in email. The next thing is, email is an app that comes pre loaded on every smartphone, you don't have to ask people to download your your app, it's, you're already in an app on the user's device, not not saying that you shouldn't invest in mobile apps. That's that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm making is app adoption is really hard. And that job is already worked out. For us. We are there. And as long as we're being relevant, we can we can show up there on the app that's on their phone. And if we do some kind of interesting things, I'm a fan of amp. I know a lot of you aren't, but something amp or like like amp or amp like could actually deliver on the promise of having app like experiences so this could continue to expand. And lastly, something that I have been kind of like obsessing about is how the content isn't determined by algorithms. Getting to the inbox is determined by algorithms. But the content itself is not determined by algorithms. And what I mean by that is when someone signs up for your email programme, they are trusting that the content you're curating for them is something they're going to be interested in. It's not like a news feed. And I guess some some people, some email marketers are using artificial intelligence. But for the most part, content is coming from the trusted source. It's a human making a decision or setting dynamic rules on what consumers will see. And I think that makes our channel pretty special. And the world feels that way to the newsletter in particular is having a moment, Twitter just acquired a company called review a newsletter company, and insider Inc, bought morning brew. In the US It was literally just a daily newsletter that went into people's inboxes every morning, and morning brew sold for $75 million, which I don't know about you, but if I'm a couple people cranking out a newsletter every day and I sell it for $75 million, I'm going to be pretty excited. And then Facebook is planning newsletter tools after you know they're seeing they're kind of like having their oh we need to get in on this moment. And I got to give a shout out to Massimo ericone the CEO of be editor. I love the way he positioned this because I couldn't quite like put my I couldn't quite pinpoint like why this newsletter boom was happening. But he did. And he said it very elegantly. He said newsletter is read stay in dive in store for later offline too. So there's this notion of like, I can do what I want with it, I can come to it when I want to, I can triage it and versus a social post is more of a glance, leave and discover now not later, online only. And so I think there's something to this that we all need to be pretty Get excited about, we have the flexibility of not just not being super disruptive, but allowing the consumer to decide when they come to us which SMS doesn't have that. And I think that's probably the closest channel to email.

So next up is respecting the industry that we are in, we have a pretty special industry. And there are so many more logos I could have put on here, I actually, email expert is a community. This inbox Expo is a community, there's so much chatter and things going on. And it's really special. But there's email geeks, there's women of email, really good emails, mogh, espc, only influencers, all these different groups, etc, or I'm on the Mac. And there's a lot of great community that has happened in email, and everyone I feel like I can find their niche. If you're, you know, kind of more into deliverability, there are a few groups that you might want to go into, if you're more on like the creative or coding side, you know, you might want to hang out and really good emails and check out like the code that they post on their website. So there's a there's a lot of really exciting things happening in the industry, with industry groups. And I just love the community that's out there. So for those of you that that are involved in some kind of industry group, I highly recommend it but I'd be I'm betting that a lot of you are already in several groups. And I would say beyond being involved in the industry and helping to make decisions. Some of those groups even lobby different governments on ways they should approach privacy and, and different laws that affect email. But I would say you should also make a commitment to mentor others. This one has was not traditionally super important to me as I was growing my own career. I also just didn't have a lot of mentors as I was coming of age. And that was partially how women of email came to be was the need to have more support for specific things impacting women. And so now we spend about one to two hours a week and I'm a very busy person. But I spend one to two hours a week with someone outside of my company, where I'm giving them advice or talking about salary, or saying here's what i think you know, when you go to talk to your boss about getting a promotion, here's what I think your title should be based on. You know what, what you've been doing. And it's not because I'm some kind of expert, it's just you know, I've been working in the space for a while. And I've seen a lot of things I've been in the agency life I've been on the brand side, I've worked in Mar tech for almost a decade now. And so if I have like advice that will empower someone else and make them feel confident in progressing their career, then I'm going to do it. And I I'm sure a lot of you are already mentoring. But this is something that I think would help the industry move forward. A lot of people in the space are self taught, let's help them let's lift them up. And another thing I want to focus on to help our industry is inclusivity. I think this is something you know, diversity and inclusion is very important. Back in 2017, I was terrified to be at on the first diversity panel for the industry, I didn't know how people would respond to it. And it turns out, people were really, really excited about the topic of diversity back in 2017. It was the only time in my career where there was spontaneous applause during a presentation or it was a panel. And I thought, wow, there's definitely a need here. There are a lot of people in the industry that maybe don't feel supported. And we need to do something about that. So and women have email we've actually been when when groups reach out to us different companies or industry groups reach out to us and they say, you know, we want to do some kind of top 10 list or something like that. We're like you should talk to people who maybe are lesser known or are from marginalised groups to help lift them up and start to give them a voice because they'll bring another perspective and and make our industry even better. And it'll represent the voices of people from a variety of backgrounds which will ultimately help not just our industry, but also the campaigns we develop and the voice that we use in our campaigns and, and just everything it really pays off for for many people. The next one is respect your colleagues. This is like a really big one for me, because I know email is a super frustrating. It can be a very frustrating job. I'm going to use a little humour here a little dramatic humour. You know, it's, it's hard when you have a client or a colleague that wants more changes after you've been through the very painful process of developing your emails. It's super deflating. It's very deflating. And

we found it sparkpost, we did a 2021 benchmark report. But we also had a bunch of survey data and things and that sort of put the link in here in case you want to check it out. But we found that 60% of Global Marketing Leaders said that their email team's workload increased, but we found that 72% of the people who are actually building, say their workload increase, so there is like, not quite a clean view of like the workload of email people among manager. So if you manage a team, and you're listening, check in with your people and see how they're doing. Things have been really hard over the last year. And and I think we have to be able to bridge the understanding between the CMO and VPS, of marketing, and marketing directors, with the email specialists and the email managers that are doing all of this work that that, you know, it takes hours and hours of time. And I'd like to see the practitioners get more credit for the work they do. And I got to give a shout out to Elliot, he gave me permission to use this image from his Instagram feed. He has talked about this, how you know, there's all these different rounds of feedback in the email process. So you have to like get along with your colleagues, and you have to have respect with them. Because they are intrinsically going to be involved in the process. And you probably can't see this, but they're this this actually made me laugh out loud. When I first saw it is he has like, final final or final this one, or like Final v2. That's hilarious. I've literally done that before. And this is this is very truthful. And as an aside, Elliot is going to be DJing in a bit, you must see it, I joined his DJ session last Saturday, so good. So stick around, he's going to be great. Coming back to email process, so I decided to document the email process for enterprise email people, for inside sparkpost. For my for my colleagues, I'll probably create some kind of content piece about it at some point. But when I talk to different marketers, first of all, I've done this before on the enterprise side, but I also wanted to see what's happening today, it's been a little while since I've since I've managed enterprise programme myself. When I documented the process after meeting with several different marketers, I found that there were 23 or more steps in getting an email out the door, I found that six of those steps can be endless loops. So going back to Elliott's image of, you know, the all the people that have to like continue to make changes, and then it kicks back to the prior step. It's done across 10 or more systems or tools, which sounds crazy. But when you actually start thinking about like, okay, I write my copy in Google Docs, and then I load it into my workflow system, and then I use my ESP, and then I have a bi system, and then I have analytics, and then all of a sudden, you start to see that there are like a tonne of tools in the process. And also there are seven or more people in the approval process, typically. So this is really freaking hard. So I just wanted to recognise that. Because I think our colleagues don't always understand how hard it is. And we'll talk about that in a second. So how can you impact better understanding with your colleagues so that you can respect them so that when they ask you to do something that you know, is just the stupidest thing you've been asked to do? Or is going to destroy your deliverability reputation or is going to make people unsubscribe? rather than be upset. It's better to approach things with a spirit of education, and approach it again with that authentic heart at the risk of sounding very pollyannish. So one thing that I used to do I work for a large enterprise financial services company was I did a monthly luncheon learn. Now that sounds kind of funny that I don't know if the global audience knows what I want you to learn. Maybe that's a global phrase, but just in case it's not. Lunch and Learn is when you bring your lunch to the conference room, and you eat it while you work, or while you're learning something. And we would do lunch and learns. And we talk about one aspect of of the email strategy creation process reporting, whatever it was, and we would just start to educate people in those things. The conference rooms were packed. This was obviously pre COVID. You could do this on video now and people would ask Questions and they were excited. And they were like, wow, I hadn't. I showed the How to like code an email once to my IT team, they came into the room once. And they were like, oh, wow, like you, like legit a developer. I'm like, yeah.

So it's really good to like, explain the process to people, but do it with a kind heart and a kind spirit. And all of a sudden, you'll start to realise that people have a little bit of empathy for you, they have respect for the process. And all of a sudden, your life starts to become maybe a little bit easier. And then you don't have to be upset with your colleagues. In the last one, and this is a big one. And I will be authentic, as I said, that you should be at the beginning, my authentic situation is that I don't always respect myself, I'm not always doing the things I need to do to take care of myself, but I'm working on that. So I'll tell you the things that I have on my own wish list that I need to follow through on in the hopes that it will help some of you. So first of all, when you hit that send button, that is a big moment, and no one I've talked to like in the different industry groups, in clients I've worked with myself, because I have sent some mistake emails in the past, you never stop sweating, or being just a little bit nervous and maybe sweating in your palms right before you hit send. But there's also the wave of excitement that hits you after hitting send. And I would love for us to like maybe give ourselves a little bit more credit at the point of hitting sin to celebrate the little moments. Like I No, like so here for the the memes that were going around. I'm Mindy kailyn shared me after I send one email, this is Dolly Parton, in the movie, nine to five, it was all about the workplace like I'm on top of my day, I'm a boss. I'm this hilarious. One of Brad Pitt on the set of them probably on a movie set smoking a cigarette, like, you know, like, I've sent an email into that and say, You know what, celebrate that, because that is a big moment. And every time you send an email, you're sending some kind of small web page that also has backend data attached to it. We're doing big things. And so a little rah rah for yourself. The next thing is set some boundaries. I do this on my own, I'm showing you my slack. Set yourself as a way, I don't always do this, I will admit, but I'm noticing that more and more of my colleagues and also in the mail geek Slack, I noticed more people are turning off their notifications in the evenings. And I appreciate this and and I should really do it more myself. But make sure that you're setting boundaries, not just with your time, but also with the process. If if people know you're how you want to operate your email programme at your company, or your clients, you know, you're maybe you're working with clients, there's a process and they need to respect those boundaries. And that's where helping them understand it better helps.

In this one is a little bit kind of little Juju, um, the practice intentional self care. So one thing that I am aiming to do, haven't done yet, but it's been it's been a hard winter, I'm sure it's been a hard winter for everyone, no matter where you live in the world. Take out sidewalks, I am going to start taking more of my calls. I have 40 plus meetings a week, my meeting schedule is very intense. And I have recently like come to the realisation that I don't have to be tied to my computer, that some of the the video conferences I do could actually become phone calls where I take a 30 minute walk. The next one is getting exercise. I have been doing this probably for the last four weeks. And it's more just because it makes you feel really good. And it's like moving your body or a lot of us are stuck in our houses or we're just now starting to emerge. This is a really good way to just like helps your mind it helps your body. Another thing I've been doing, you could picture me I'm wiping down my kitchen counters, organised in my house a bit. I don't have a lot of time for that. But when I do, it's like it's boring. I don't like cleaning. I don't want to be doing that stuff. But everyone has to, as I say adult every now and then. And so I've been actually listening to my air pods. I actually have air pods and I'll put them in and I'll put my phone in my pocket. And I'll just walk around listening to really cool music or Some kind of cheesy audio book or even like a serious audio book, I am constantly like, able to kind of check out of my environment, even when I'm stuck in my house and feeling like my world is really small. Another thing is, is turn off the video, something that I'm going to start practising a bit more because I've learned that when I'm staring at, you're not supposed to have to stare at your own face on a screen all the time. And there are all these studies being done that tell that have told us that it actually exhaust people and I find it. I used to travel all over the world, or different time zones here in the US, I was a very active traveller before COVID hit. And even with jetlag, I'm more tired now than I've ever been. And I'm like, why is that? And I think it's because we're staring at video all day. So give yourself permission maybe even I've thought about maybe even talking to my own company about could we do a no meeting friday so no one feels weird about cameras being off because I also I understand the connection that we have it is nice to be able to look at other people but you know maybe play around with with turning off the video every now and then and that could also come into the takeout sidewalks, you're not going to be on video if you're just dialling in and get rest. This is what I'm working on. I'm I really struggle with that. It's hard to sleep. It's hard to do all these things. But like I'm working on it, I'm never going to stop working on that one. And I hope you will, too. So with that respect, we'll come in coming back around to where we started with Aretha Franklin. And I want to end with one last quote from Aretha that I really love that I hope will help you approach the world with a pure heart and mind, in love in your heart for the people around you. And it's you cannot define a person on just one thing. And that includes yourself by the way. You can't just forget all these wonderful and good things that a person has done. Because one thing didn't come off the way you thought it should come off. So with that, I thank you so very much for having me. Thank you Inbox Expo. What a great show. And I'm really honoured to have to have been here to to talk about respect. Thank you so much.

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