Why is email so damn hard?

Summary
Andrew Bonar welcomed everyone to the third Inbox Expo and thanked the sponsors. Ricky White then introduced Kieran Cooper, the title sponsor speaker, who discussed SparkPost and their product offerings. Kieran then discussed the challenges of enterprise email and how to approach them, suggesting to rethink reporting, embrace privacy and invest in system improvements. He also discussed how metrics should measure the actual goal of the email, such as generating sales or driving traffic, rather than just measuring inputs like opens and clicks. Kieran discussed the importance of tracking metrics, embracing privacy, and production improvements in order to become a successful email marketer. We should look for ways to track information that matters to stakeholders, and use qualitative research to get an outside perspective. We should also embrace privacy, by presenting ourselves in a transparent way and sticking to our promises. Lastly, we should look for process improvements to save time and money, and use resources like conferences and blogs to get support and advice.

Full Transcript
Andrew Bonar 0:00
Right Okay. The microphone Yes. Hi, hello everyone stands the left here. Good morning everyone. When being when these us and this there’s a little less people in the room this morning I think a few people went out drinking rather late or early into the hours of this morning so hopefully they’ll be joining us in the next hour two of them have themselves on coffees and got themselves together. I just want to thank everyone that has come and made it last thing in the morning. There’s some great sessions this morning. I wanted to say thank you to everyone. If anyone hasn’t got Wi Fi passwords in these Wi Fi passwords just come to me and ask if there’s any other questions. Please keep an eye on the agenda if you’re a speaker, and make sure that you come up and find myself or nearly at least 20 minutes before your session if you haven’t provided PowerPoints or reading them yesterday. I am very, very glad scans day two of the third Inbox Expo this one spot, titled sponsored by SparkPost smartwares has been extremely generous in sponsoring spotless Cafe downstairs. Anytime anyone feels that they need a coffee cola snack or what have you. Go downstairs, grab it, bring it upstairs. There’s no reason why you don’t have to be downstairs to drink those. But the cafe is downstairs anytime you need us open all day through to lunch at half one we are going to have lunch just downstairs on the floor below us. So without further ado, a final thank you SparkPost and the other title sponsor spotlight NET Core, of course human expert, the organizers. And please do check out the other sponsors. They all have something amazing to share. And yeah. Without further ado, I’d like to bring up Ricky white. And Kieran Cooper, Ricky White is our emcee for the day. So he should be a little slicker than me.

His presentation style, maybe. And yeah, he will introduce Kieran, our title sponsor speaker. And welcome. Thank you everyone.
Rickey White 4:04
Hello. Hello, everyone. And thank you for visiting Valencia, Spain and attending our third Inbox Expo the Winter Edition. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Andrew and Nely all three times and it’s been absolutely amazing. I tell everyone, this story about attending conferences. My first conference I went to in 2008. And it absolutely changed my career. So if you’re new in the email space, I encourage you to network with the people around you. Take the time to listen in on these sessions. They’ll be extremely powerful and extremely valuable to your career and your career path. And just take it all in take the time to take it all in. This is a really really good crowd. This is a really good crowd of people that are open to talk to you. And that’s something kind of new to the industry. We’ve all hoarded information for very long and I think Andrew and Nely have done a good job bringing and people together that are open to sharing their experiences, and sharing their knowledge in the industry. So thank you to Nely and Andrew for putting this all together for and for inviting me out. And with no further due, I’ll invite Kieran onstage, who is with our title sponsor SparkPost.

Kieran Cooper 5:19
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I have a two roles to I wanted to introduce a bit about SparkPost and say how pleased we are to be sponsoring the event. And then I have the delightful job of giving the first presentation and setting the scene. For those of you who don’t know us, the SparkPost family started more than 20 years ago now with when we would call message systems and our product was momentum, an on premise, MTA email sending software. And then in 2015, I think we acquired port 25 and power MTA. And so we have this on premises software, business and power, MTA powers, an awful lot of email service providers and big businesses around the globe. Then, in 2019, we acquired a data source and their two products inbox tracker, and competitive tracker, and lots of people in the email delivery space have used those products over the years. And we’re very happy now to have them as part of our family. And we’re working on on kind of integrating those two things. And then earlier this year, we acquired taxi for email, small company in London that produce a great tool for email production. And I’ll talk about that in a bit. So at the moment, we have those those four brands and different types of products and all associated with with supporting the email infrastructure. And then since May this year, we’ve been part of the Dutch company message bird, who began life sending SMS messages. And they’ve now developed into a big omni channel provider both for for sort of bulk messages and also an inbox product. They’re the whole ethos is that to enable customers and companies to communicate in whatever means the customer wants to. So you know, maybe not not fixing ourselves into channels based on our technology or our capabilities, but using whatever channels the customers are best suited to. And mixing and maximum matching messages. A cord whether they’re inbound or outbound according to the right channels. It’s a very, very exciting company, grown it 10 years old, but growing massively. And we’re extremely proud to be part of their family now. And over the next few years, we’ll we’ll see those products coming together and more and more customers adding email to their existing multi channel offering on buy and vice versa. So yes, that’s a really an introduction. We’re very pleased to be sponsoring this event. Spark posters has always been cared passionately about the email ecosystem, we’ve been sponsoring events and supporting the wider world of email since our very beginning and sponsoring events like this. And because I’m such a key to helping support people who are doing conferences and bringing new people from the industry in to learn more about what we’re doing. Cool, thank you. So let me

just want to make sure I was within the rules.

Brilliant. So I wrestled with this title to decide just how strong an adjective to put in here. I thought maybe from 930 on a Wednesday morning down was probably strong enough. But it’s I wanted to talk a bit about why is Enterprise Email emails so challenging. I should introduce myself, I guess I my first career was in marketing for arts organizations. I did a music degree and like lots of people fell into doing marketing. But it was in the last century, the Internet was kind of getting going. And lots of arts organizations at the time were buying ticketing systems that enabled them to do direct marketing and you know, we really got into using in those days print to contact people and say, you know, you’d like this event. Why don’t you want to come to this event or, you know, we see you spent this much on tickets. And how about becoming a donor? Those sorts of things. It was really exciting time. And then when I found about out about the internet in about 1994 or so, I really saw the possibilities for what arts organizations could do. And at the time I was working in Cambridge in the UK, we were able to work with an Internet service provider in Cambridge who was starting up and we built one of the first arts websites, you know, incredibly basic now, the sort of thing that eight year old could probably knock up. But at the time, it was, it was really important. And we started doing developing, we had an arthouse cinema. And so we started developing weekly listings that we were emailing out to people that little did I know at the time that this would end up being what I was going to do for a living, I moved into working for an email service provider lyris in the UK in 2015, no, 25 2005 Gosh, I’ve missed out 10 years. And so I’ve been in email now for a long time. And I’ve been with SparkPost since 2014. I’m a technical account manager in EMEA. So I look after a number of our enterprise customers in this neck of the woods, intercom, booking.com Financial Times revolute emailing network play ticker in Israel, just to name a few. So from that, I get quite a good overview of of what customers are doing and what the challenges are. So I know that for an email marketer, you’re our days can be really full of challenges. You know, in any particular day, you might have your managing director coming in to ask you to make a change to the email that’s due to go out today. And you’ve got five different language versions to do and they want to, she wants you to make an instant change. Or you’re you suddenly discover that your open rate at Microsoft has dropped by 20% Since yesterday, and you’ve no idea why. Or the security team in your company wants to enforce single sign on for every external app you use. And you’ve no idea how to work with your email, multiple email systems that you’d use to work out that, or suddenly your marketing director wants to spend more on PPC, because that’s, that’s the glamorous thing. But you’ve got to argue why your email budget should be bigger. Or you’ve just decided that the company has just decided there’s a terms of service update, that’s got to go out to all users. And there’s some legal reasons why it’s got to be sent to everybody on your file, even if they’re shown as unsubscribed or some non exec director wants to know why the images in her email don’t load in Outlook Express because he’s still running Windows 95. All of those kinds of challenges. And that’s probably just before lunch. You know, maybe afterwards, you can have people asking what metrics you should should use what the effect is, is mail privacy, protection, good to have, how do you deal with right to be forgotten or subject access requests? Why can’t the custom font that the company designer is has come up with why is it not working in emails? All these are great challenges. And it’s these sorts of things that we face every day, he can make a scream those of you who know me, well know that I’m, I have a reputation for being a bit of a Pollyanna a bit of a glass half full person, although it’s nicer to have a glass half full of beer than water, I guess. And so I’d like to wander around thinking about every problem being an opportunity. Now, there’s a phrase in English, don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs, apparently comes from Spanish, but it’s a phrase meaning

trying to teach somebody something that they already know much better than you. And I definitely feel that standing in front of this audience today. There’s an awful lot of knowledge in the room, a various thoughts and and so I do feel like, you know, lots of people know more than me about these things. And and we could go into a huge amount of detail on all of them. But I wanted to just think maybe about three different aspects of the challenges just been maybe to set the scene for the day because I know there’s gonna be lots of great content about how to address all of these challenges in in great detail. But just to set the scene, I wanted to talk about three different things. Rethinking reporting, embracing privacy, and looking at investing in systems improvements, production systems improvements. I read a great book recently called measure what matters. It’s one of these discussions about companies that that set up reporting systems and objectives and key results and looking at how you can use data and metrics to all the way through the organization in your planning and delivery and measurement. But I also think it’s a great mantra that all all of us should have an awful lot of challenges with all kinds of metrics and reporting, and particularly in email, where we get very hung up on different kinds of metrics that we should be looking at, but not really thinking about are those actually the right metrics. And I think it behooves us as marketers to rethink about what reporting we’re doing and how, how we’re using the email data. Now, this has come a lot from the latest kerfuffle, because of the mail privacy protection that we’re going to talk about, with Alice from change.org. Tomorrow, and I’m sure it’s going to come up. But it lots of people have have worried that this new thing has affected the way that we report on open rates. But my line has always been, most people don’t send email, just to get it read. In the in the email clients. In most cases, that email is designed to trigger some kind of action, it might be an E commerce email, that’s that’s looking to generate sales, it might be a newsletter that’s looking to drive traffic and stickiness on a content website. All of those things are the reason why you’re sending the email. And if that’s what you’re sending the email for, then it ought to be that that you’re measuring so rather than measuring inputs, and essentially opens and clicks are kind of input measures, what they they it kind of the things that happen on the way to the process. So what’s the real reason for sending this email? And is there a way we can measure that, and it’s often much harder to do than opens and clicks that you can get out of your email service provider. But you know, that the those kind of metrics are not potentially that useful. And, and particularly when something like mail privacy protection comes along, or the the Gmail proxies server a few years ago. So do focus on on outputs and inputs, but also thinking about the cumulative effect of that coordinated messaging can bring, I think, too often we measure our marketing stats in silos without thinking, Well, how does this email campaign, for instance, help drive traffic, you know, organic traffic, how, even if our attribution systems aren’t necessarily tying those things up, you know, how we, if we’re just reporting in kind of siloed ways, we forget that the these things work together, and that if you take one pillar away, the other things that you’re measuring may may suffer.

It’s also really useful to use what I might call hygiene metrics. So things that are about the performance of a particular system. And then box placement is one of those, I mentioned that we have our inbox tracker, product, and we’ve now just launched a thing called deliverability. Analytics, which is taking that inbox placement and putting it into the SparkPost sending interface and, and allowing automated seed listings, so that you can set a campaign and get it sent to the to the seed list. So you can check inbox placement in the seed list. Those are not, as it were reportable metrics, but they’re really useful things to make sure that you have that you keep an eye on, you know that if your inbox placement is 90%, normally, and then suddenly, it drops, you want to know about that sooner rather than later. Even if that’s not something you’re reporting on, you want to know about it, because it’s, it means that something has changed and something you need to change. And also think about what numbers matter to stakeholders. So all of us who are working in email, are working with other people in the organization to who who care about what these emails are for, you know, whether it’s the wider marketing team, whether it’s growth, marketing, whether it’s, you know, sales, financial, meat leaders, all of those sorts of things. If you can find out what kind of information they’re looking for, then you can find ways to try and develop tracking metrics to be able to to give those people the information that you need, rather than thinking well, here’s the data I’ve got, this is how I’m going to report it and then they’ll have to take with it from they’ll have to make a bid what they can. I think it’s also useful to think about using qualitative research, you know, is it possible to get together have a group of people who receive your email or a group of customers who maybe aren’t that active and email and talk to them about the kinds of emails they you’re getting? Can you try out? designs with them? Can you ask them, you know, show them an inbox and ask them to talk about what their feelings are when they see these different kinds of content from you. I think we’re, we’re so focused in digital marketing on quantitative measures simply because we’ve got this wealth of data. But I think we sometimes ignore that the fact that it’s possible to add qualitative research to that too, because that will really help us get an input and also help us to, to look outside our own blinkered view of what it is that we do. When I worked in arts organizations, that was one of the real challenges that the people who are producing the artistic work, often only talk to other artists, they work, they live in a kind of their own little bubble, like most of our bosses do. And so it was quite hard to get them to understand how their product was perceived by a wider audience. And qualitative research is really useful for that. The second thing I wanted to talk about was the idea of embracing privacy, as email marketing as digital marketers. So the recent Apple changed with iOS 15, which say, Well, we’re going to talk about tomorrow in more detail. It demonstrated that Apple really see privacy as a differentiator. This has been we’ve seen this in other products that they’ve developed through the years, they’re there Apple sign in, which provided a anonymous email back to the to the app providers so that there wasn’t the users weren’t sending their actual email through to apps. And the way that they’ve positioned the iPhone and the Mac’s as as secure and more secure than their competitors, as has always been a driver for them. And now, when you think, you know, we’ve seen the adoption rates of this mail privacy protection amongst iPhone, iOS 15 users in as being incredibly high sort of 96 97%. And you think, Well, yes, of course, because when those people are presented with an option that says, Do you want to protect your privacy and stop being tracked? People are going to say yes, and we’ve had a lot of ranting and raving about why that should be. But I think, if you look at it from the customer’s point of view is clearly attractive to them, it’s clearly a good prospect. So we need to, rather than seeing that as, as a challenge, I think we should see it as an opportunity. We may and maybe we should be looking at

trying to present ourselves and the way that we collect data in a much more transparent way. You know, maybe having better transparent signup options, granular preferences centers, using better tracking then opens as I was talking about before, and being more customer focused about the way that we use data. I feel like if we can, if you say to someone, do you want to be tracked so that we know everything about what you do? People will say no, if you say, Would you like offers personalized according to your preferences and the things that you buy so that we can give you offers that are more targeted to you? Most people will say yes, if so it’s kind of finding ways to to words that when we’re collecting data, to demonstrate that we understand that customers will be cagey about their, that what data they give us, unless we can explain to them exactly why we want to do it. And then having done that, we need to stick to our promises. If we’ve signed people up for one brand, we need not to assume that we can mail them for another even if it might be legal. I think there’s an awful lot of argument that email marketers have to make for a kind of moral principled stand about data collection. And again, I know that I’m I’m probably preaching to the choir in lots of respects here. But I think it’s one of the great challenges that we’ve got an opportunity to be able to differentiate ourselves like Apple have done by talking about the ways that we collect data. And then the final thing is about production improvements, improvements to the processes we can make. Again, this is I have the great privilege of being able to stand up here and you know, pontificate about how things should be and I know full well that that day to day. Most people don’t have time to stop and think about To improve process improvements or, or to be able to actually make those kinds of improvements happen. But it’s, it’s, it’s like all of these things if you can, if you can realize that you’re spending, you know, a certain amount of time on a same kind of tasks that gets repeated over and over again, you can work out, well, if I could, if I spent even five times that amount of time on producing a process improvement, that’s going to save me time, you know, if I can save half an hour a week, in some kind of process, you know, maybe I have to import some piece of data into Excel and then filtered to take a column out so that I can import it to my ESP. And that may be takes an hour a week, if you could find an automated process, even just an Excel macro or something that could save that shave that down to half an hour a week. That’s, that’s, you know, like, that’s a huge amount of extra time that you could potentially save. So analyzing existing processes to see what time and money can be saved is really useful. And I’d say it requires a bit of stepping back and looking at things you don’t need to bring consultants in to look at the process. I think everybody in the team will know where the time consuming elements are the annoying things that could possibly be automated, but people have never made time, or had time to be able to consider about how to do that automation. And say, small wins can have a big cumulative effect. And it’s great to be able to, when you make those wins, you can make lots of people really happy you You save time you save annoyance from staff.

So often companies and you know, we’re as guilty as this as anybody, but we, we make process improvements by throwing people at it, because we’ve, particularly if you’ve got people around. But and that’s a great way, but it’s a much more expensive way than using technology. And that’s one of the reasons why production systems like taxi for email can make such a big difference. This is a system that makes it a lot easier for people to generate emails without needing HTML code just to make everything you know, to build every single email before it can be sent. But also to do it within a framework. So a company can can define a design system and say, Well, you know, you can do these things. But not these things, you can change these colors, but not these colors, you can use only use these fonts, you can only use this type of design, giving flexibility. So it’s not one of those hideous restricted templates that used to have in the olden days. But still making it easier for more people in an organization to generate content themselves with but making it then email friendly. So you know, with with HTML that works in email, and all of those kinds of challenges. And taxi did a lot of research about just how much time that saved. And the the lead time for producing emails was often cut from 14 Days to a matter of hours in lots of places. And I think those are really important things to look at. My final point, feel the force, the force of the network, and of the ecosystem of email. One of the as I said earlier, one of the great things that’s that the reasons why we wanted to sponsor a conference like this is to, because we encourage people to get together to share knowledge to help each other. And over the years that I’ve been working in email, I’ve seen that really open up it used to be quite closed until you were in the the right clique at morgue, you didn’t necessarily have anybody you could talk to lots of people had to work things out for themselves. But now there’s much more information sharing those conferences like this, there’s great blogs, there are huge numbers of people writing and producing information about everything from, you know, email strategy, through design, through coding, you know, through to helping with the, those naughty tables questions, or you know, CSS questions. Email geek slack is a fantastic resource if you haven’t had it. Women of email is a great organization really supportive. conferences like this, and ESPs like SparkPost have been running events and producing content themselves too. And I think it’s really great that we’re all growing together through this kind of mutual support. And we’re very much happy to support it. And I’m very pleased to the for that network for lots of things that I need to do and particularly for my customers day to day. So we can convert our half empty glasses into full ones. And, you know, really let’s take the learnings from today and tomorrow and hopefully go back to or our organizations and become a more successful, cool, thank you very much