Danielle Gallant – 00:00:03: Welcome to Email After Hours by Sender Score, powered by Validity.
Guy Hanson – 00:00:08: We’re your hosts. My name is Guy Hanson.
Danielle Gallant – 00:00:11: And I’m Danielle Gallant. And this is Email After Hours. Hi, everybody. Today we’re going to be talking about those wonderful messages that reach the right subscribers at the right time and with the right content. And those are, of course, automated emails. We’ll be looking into how to use automation, how you can leverage it to achieve the best possible results. And Guy, we’ve got an expert here to chat with us about this, right?
Guy Hanson – 00:00:42: We absolutely do. I’d like to think we’re experts, but this one puts us in our place. A real pleasure to welcome Jeanne Jennings to email after hours. We’ll start off with some quick introductions, but almost feel for a lot of our audience. They might not even be necessary. I mean, what can I say? You’re a consultant, you’re a trainer, you’re a speaker, you’re an author. Everybody knows you because you’ve been a role with only Influencers and Email Innovation Summit and more. But just in case there’s a few people listening in today that haven’t come across you before, who are you?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:01:16: Well, thank you. I’m blushing now. Thank you for that lovely introduction. My name is Jeanne Jennings. I’m an Email Marketing Strategist. I’m an avowed email geek, as I bet you guys are too. I have my own boutique consultancy, Email Optimization Shop, and I work with medium enterprise size companies, helping them optimize their email, basically improving their bottom line. And then the other hat that I wear, which I was doing last night, is I’m actually an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in the graduate program. So that’s actually where I got my master’s degree from, my MBA. And I teach typically one or maybe two classes a year. It’s digital marketing, so we only get to talk about email for one of the classes and then we cover all the other channels.
Guy Hanson – 00:01:58: That’s awesome.
Danielle Gallant – 00:01:59: When do you sleep? Sorry.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:02:01: I know, a lot of people say that.
Guy Hanson – 00:02:04: And now you’ve been in the world of email for about as long as I have. I think the only difference is I’ve got the gray hairs to prove it. But you’ve worked with clients ranging from AARP, Capital One, Hasbro, Mayo Clinic, Verizon, Weight Watchers. I think great for Danielle and myself is a lot of those are validity clients too, so we’ve clearly got a great overlap there. What would you say are some of the most common challenges that you’ve had to encounter and help them to solve for as you sort of worked with all of those big names?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:02:35: Yeah, I think it’s interesting when I go into a client, what we’re really looking to do is bottom line performance. So it’s more sort of looking at what they’re doing and figuring out what they’re doing right. And then how can we do more of that, looking at things that aren’t working real well and then figuring out there’s ways we can make them work better or sometimes you just need to retire them and then figuring out what they’re not doing and helping them implement that. So it’s really kind of those things. The companies that hire me, it’s not so much that they hire me because they have a problem. It’s more that they hire me because they’ve reached a plateau with their performance and they just don’t feel like they’re able to get more out of the channel. And I come in and show them how to get more out of the channel. And there’s a great quote from, I think it’s Joe Torre who’s like a baseball player and pardon me not to be weird, but it’s like sex is like pizza. When it’s great, it’s really great. And even when it’s not so good, it’s still pretty okay. And I think that email is kind of like that. I think a lot of companies are like, hey, our email program, it’s making money, it’s profitable, we won’t invest a lot more there because it’s good. And yet when you actually do start investing a little bit more in email and it’s not even money so much as it is just bought, all of a sudden it becomes supercharged and then you’re seeing 50% 100% increase in the revenue that it’s generating. And so that’s really what I do for my clients.
Guy Hanson – 00:03:58: I really love the idea of let’s start with what you’re doing well and amplify it, let’s do more of that. And I think one of those tactics is today’s big topic. So how about it, Danielle?
Danielle Gallant – 00:04:10: That’s absolutely right. Speaking of amplifying it and ways to just maximize what you’ve got, let’s talk about email automation. So it’s 2023, headcounts are smaller, budgets are tighter. What makes email automation a particularly important part of the marketers tool set right now?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:04:29: Email is great because it allows you to do more with less. It helps you be more productive, especially in recessionary times. Because if you think about it, the time that you’re spending and so many companies are in this sort of got to get the email out, got to get the email out. I talked to especially junior email marketers and they’re just on this treadmill and they’re just trying to keep up. And so what automation does is you put the work in once and then it just goes and there’s benefits on both sides. There’s benefits to the team because once it’s set up and it’s going, you don’t have to spend that time every send. And there’s also benefits for your customers and your prospects because automation done properly lets you deliver more relevant content in a timely manner and so it’s better for the people who are receiving it as well. I think the key is automation done well, which is what we’re talking about today. I think in the last couple of years there’s been a real push to automate but it hasn’t necessarily been as strategic as it needs to be. There’s a famous Bill Gates quote about automating something that’s efficient increases the efficiency, but automating something that’s inefficient increases the inefficiency. So that’s really the key, is making sure you’re automating the correct things and making sure you’re doing automation in a strategic fashion. If you have an email that just doesn’t work, automating it’s not going to make it work better.
Danielle Gallant – 00:05:46: And I’m going to move into a topic or really even a phrase that I think for me it makes me cringe. And I’m sure for a lot of marketers it also makes them cringe. That is batch and blast sends. So why is automation more effective than your traditional batch and blast send?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:06:06: Yeah, it’s really the relevance. If you think about automation, if it’s done properly, it is the ultimate in segmentation targeting and relevance. Think about an abandoned cart email for instance. You’ve got a segment of one, literally one, the content you’re sending them is the product that they left in their shopping cart. How relevant is that? I mean, that’s perfect targeting and so it’s kind of the perfect storm. So that’s really the key to success. I actually back in 2015 was working with a client and they were a test prep company. So you know how your children take the sats to get in the college and then you have to take like the MCAs to get into med school. They’re providing preparations that you’ll do better on those tests. So they know when those tests are being held, they know which one you’re planning to take and they have this limited window to market their services to you because at some point it’s too late. And so literally we mapped out a plan for them where we were going to automate everything they sent because we could, because we knew the timing of it and it was months, not years. And so that is really the key. And by doing that, it freed time up. It’s not that we were looking to cut staff, no, it’s that we were looking to free the staff up. So instead of being on this constant got to get the email out treadmill, they were on a let me look at this automation and figure out what we can a B split test to optimize it. Let’s see how we can get more out of this. And so it makes the work for the team much more interesting. And again, it’s a better experience for the recipients. So not every business can do that. But we literally had, here is the life cycle, here are the things that they do and then here’s how we’re going to automate. And we had all these different threads and some of it was based on the actions they took and some of it was based on the timing we knew we had. It was interesting because when we did the analysis, we found they used to do these informational webinars to talk about their services and the tests. And we found that people who attended those informational webinars were much more likely to buy and we knew when was the right time to do those webinars and so we automated all of it. We made sure that every person who got into the funnel had two chances to hit a webinar and then we did a lot around trying to get people to those webinars so that was like really cool. And again, literally automating all of the communications. They still do some one offs once in a while but it’s pretty much automated and it’s like you’re just creating a money machine, right, because you know what you need them to do and you know when to do things. And if somebody signs up for the webinar but they don’t attend, there’s an email that gets sent. If they did attend, it’s different and so it was just really cool. And again, not to take people out of it, but to elevate people so that they’re doing more interesting work.
Guy Hanson – 00:08:54: I was speaking to one of our clients on a webinar recently and he’s introduced a load of automation into his program over the past month. And he told me such a funny story because he’d been talking to his MD about all of the automation and his boss said words to the effect of anything which makes money for me while I’m fast asleep is good in my book. And that made us laugh. But more seriously, especially when it comes to marketing emails, I think one of the big attractions of automated emails is that there’s plenty of research to suggest that the average revenue per email is a load higher than your sort of business as usual emails for all of the reasons that you just outlined. But do you think there’s sort of one particular type of automated email which maybe sort of stands head and shoulders above the others when it comes to revenue effectiveness? Is it maybe those boss could abandonment emails that catch those almost buyers in the moment, perhaps?
Danielle Gallant – 00:09:54: So tempting.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:09:55: Yeah, no, definitely. Whenever I work with a client there’s a couple of things that we look at to figure out where to start with automation. But the first thing you want to look at is you want to look at your sales funnel. And when you’re automating things you want to start at the bottom and work up because the closer you are to that sale, the more revenue you’re going to bring in. Like card abandonment emails are a perfect example. If they were interested enough to put that in their cart and then they walked away, you have a good chance of a conversion. A conversion there means a lot more because that’s actually literally a sale. I’ll never forget this. I always interview everyone on the team to try to understand what their pain points are and the challenges and ideas that they have and one of the things on her to do list when she had time on a Friday, she would go in and manually send card abandonment emails because the systems didn’t talk to each other. So she would literally download the data from one system uploaded into the ESP. I don’t think they had any information on what was in the cart. She just could identify people who had stuff in their cart whose email addresses they had uploaded. This generic cart email that just basically said you left some stuff in your cart, would you want to come back? And she only did it on Fridays when she had time, so it didn’t go out all the time and she did it for everyone, like since she had last sent it. So some people might have been 3 hours from a cart abandonment, some might have been three days, some could have been three weeks. We found out that that email was generating $18 for every email that they sent.
Danielle Gallant – 00:11:21: Wow.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:11:22: $18. Can you imagine if we each had $18 for every email that we sent? I mean, we would be rock stars.
Guy Hanson – 00:11:28: Wow. We almost need more time on a Friday afternoon.
Danielle Gallant – 00:11:32: I know, a casual Friday task is really pulling away there.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:11:34: Yeah, so that was one where it was just like this is a no brainer. I don’t even care what it takes to get the integration in place so she doesn’t have to do it manually anymore. We just need to get the integration in place. And again, this is without any personalization on product types. Get the integration in place so that this goes out. And again with a card event. And it’s not one, it’s usually at least three and set it up. So that 3 hours, 24 hours, 40, whatever. Every cadence is different. But yeah, there’s stuff like that that people are doing and then when you dig into it so yeah, that’s really important. And that’s the other thing I take a look at. What are you doing manually that we could automate that would take that off that person’s plate? Follow up actions are really great. So that would be like a browse abandonment or someone downloads a white paper. I don’t know about you all, how many times do you download a white paper and you never hear from the company again? Or if you do hear from them, they don’t mention that they know that you downloaded the white paper. So there’s a lot of things like that. Any action that someone takes that is a perfect place to look at automation. When we do automations, we take a look at what the potential return is and typically closer to the bottom of funnel is typically a higher potential return. The number of emails that would be sent typically factor into that. But then we also take a look on the other side of what’s it going to take to get this in place. Do we have to do data integration? Do we have to, what do we have to do? Do we have an email we’re already sending or do we have to create an email and then ranking that? It becomes very clear you want to do the things of high potential and low time and resources to implement and then you rank them like that and kind of go down the list.
Danielle Gallant – 00:13:05: You mentioned starting from the endpoint and then moving back up. But in working with clients, I know that for senders who don’t have automated messages as a part of their email program, getting started can seem really daunting and like a huge task that needs to be tackled. So as senders start building out campaign automation workflows, what are some of the most important elements that they should consider in terms of maybe you’ve already mentioned data quality, technology integration, what else, where can we start with this?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:13:39: So it’s really important to start simple. I think that’s one thing a lot of people often miss and start simple in a couple of ways. Start simple by having one goal. One thing I often do when I do automations is I map out the workflow and that’s very important. Working on an automation doesn’t start in your system. It literally starts with a piece of paper and a pencil. I like pencils so you can erase and figuring out what your goal is and how you’re going to get there. And that’s really important. One thing about automations is they have a much longer shelf life. They’re going to be running longer than a single campaign that you send, than a business as usual campaign. And so you want to put the time in on the front with the strategy to really make sure that it’s going to shine. I like to start with figuring out a what do we want them to do and then what are the features, benefits, advantages associated with that that are going to get them to take that action? Once you understand what the features, benefits and advantages are, what I do is I use those to create a message map. So a message map basically says what are we going to talk about? Because having one email and sending it six times isn’t really a great automation. You want to think in terms of a series. So for instance, I did a series for a government entity a while back and we were like, well we can help you with transparency, we can help you with this. So figure out how you’re helping them. And then typically what I do with my automations when I’m starting is with the message map. I figure out what are like the key things that I need to mention. So it might be here’s a benefit and there’s a white paper you can download associated with that. Here’s a different benefit. Everybody has different hot buttons. So you may be looking for cost savings, somebody else may be looking for additional features by giving each of those a little more in depth treatment in an email and stringing them together. Maybe the first one doesn’t hit strong, but the second one is exactly what I’m looking for. So once I get that message map of features of typically advantages or benefits, then I actually bookend them. So I like to start with one that touches on all four or six or however many we have and then each of the next ones goes into detail and then the last one kind of wraps it up. That’s really key. Each of those emails should stand alone, but together they should be greater than the sum of their parts. And so that’s really important. So figuring out not only what you want them to do, but what the advantages and benefits you want to mention to drive that action are and then putting that together in a natural series. And I think that’s the key that I see a lot of people missing and yet takes a little time. But that’s really what’s going to drive your success, is really starting there and again, trying to keep it simple. Oftentimes I’ll go to a client, we’ll have an automation. They’ll be like, oh yeah, for the people who don’t do that, we should do this with them, we can do that with them. So always have little boxes that say to come, to come, because it’s easy to build this big huge monster. But it takes a lot of time to develop that. You really want to work in an agile fashion. So build something small, build one piece and then build another piece. And maybe they connect and maybe they’re separate. But that I think is really important too. A lot of people try to, what do they call it? Boiling the ocean. Don’t do that. Start really simple and there’s no reason, let’s say, that you think you want to have a ten effort series. There’s no reason you can’t start with a three effort series and then add efforts as you go and add efforts as you learn. So I think that’s the biggest key is keeping it simple, but having a real strong feeling for what the content is going to be and how that’s going to be successful. The other thing I think is really important, this is one of the biggest mistakes I see people making is they don’t have their bottom line call to action in every email. And that’s a real problem. I just read one yesterday. Somebody sent me a document from one of the ESPs and it says one call to action per email. And I’m like that’s. Not really. It because just because you’re asking them to download the white paper. But maybe your end goal is that they talk to a rep, make sure both of those things go email because they might download that white paper, but they also might actually be ready to.
Guy Hanson – 00:17:34: Talk to a rep. We’ve presented automation so far as this fabulous good news story, and it is. But if it was that easy, everyone would be doing a load more of it. But it’s kind of like you said a little bit earlier in the conversation, you’ve got to start from the right position. It’s kind of like feeding bad data into your AI model. You’re going to get a bad AI model. If you sort of build up a bad premise, you’re going to get a bad solution. So what are the pitfalls that an email marketing program needs to think about when it’s starting to build out some automation? What are the things that could potentially go wrong if they don’t think about it carefully enough?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:18:14: Yeah, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong. I had a client that was sending an automated email. When I looked at the analysis, I found that the unsubscribe rate was higher than the conversion rate.
Danielle Gallant – 00:18:26: No.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:18:30: I think a lot of these fall under. You can’t actually set it and forget it, which I think a lot of people sell automation as you set it up and you forget it and it just throws off money and you’re all good, but you really need to be looking at it. It’s funny. I remember I called them and I’m like, look, I’m not not going to give you readouts until a week from now, but you need to turn this campaign off today. It was a global unsubscribe. So if they got off, they got off. So that’s a big one. The other thing, I think automation has gone wrong. There was a b to b company. I think I downloaded a white paper and then I got in this horrible loop. They were sending me the same email about that white paper every day. And I actually reached out to someone who I knew at the company and I said, I think there might be a problem. And he was like, Holy moly. And he fixed it. The other good one is there’s a hotel chain that I really like. It’s where I always stay. Any of us who travel a lot? You kind of I like the points. I’m a point person. But it got to be kind of a running joke. I typically will browse and take a look at hotels in the region and then sometimes I just have to think about it. Sometimes I need to actually submit and get approval from the client if they’re paying, which isn’t usually a problem. But I don’t like to book before I have approval. And I would check into the hotel and I would literally get an email saying, hey, are you still considering your trip here?
Danielle Gallant – 00:19:51: No.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:19:51: Do you like to book a hotel?
Danielle Gallant – 00:19:53: It is so funny that you mentioned that because last week I was speaking with Guy— I opted into—I purchased like a part of a monthly subscription company. I won’t name names here. But I just opted in, was really excited, got my first whatever monthly package and it felt like there was no interplay between the automated emails and the promotional messages that were going. I was continuously being promoted to for something that I already purchased. And we’re talking like a long time. It’s not just the day after, it’s like weeks after. So sometimes there is that disconnect even within one program.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:20:32: You need to think through it. And I could look at that and again, it happened for like a year. I knew exactly what was happening. They didn’t have any logic in there to say so they browsed and they didn’t book in that session, but there was no logic in there to say but did they book at a later session? So I understood what was happening, but I mean, it was just, I ended up writing a blog post about it because it just kept happening.
Danielle Gallant – 00:20:54: Take it to the blog.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:20:56: So again, another reason you want to think through the whole process and I get it, a lot of companies like, well, those systems don’t talk to each other. Well, okay, but you’re looking silly and that’s another thing, right? Like if you as a recipient get a lot of irrelevant emails, especially automated ones, you’re going to stop opening because after a while you’re going to figure it’s not relevant and you’re just going to stop opening. So there’s a lot of mistakes that can happen and that’s another reason it’s not set it and forget it and it never should be. And you should have people on your staff who are testing that and you should be looking at your automations. If you’re doing a B split testing, you should be looking at your automations. But in general so for instance, with that subscribe rate that was so high, you should be looking at all of the metrics for your automations, at least on a monthly basis. There should be a monthly report that happens and then I really tell people you should really check your automations at least every three to six months and make sure everything’s running right. Typically what I do with my clients is we put together a schedule. And so in January we check these three, in February we check these three. And in addition to checking to make sure they’re working, it also gives you an opportunity to look at them and come up with hypotheses about what you might test to boost performance because that’s why we’ve automated them, right, to free up time for testing. So yeah, it’s very easy for automations to go wrong. And again, like with that company that was sending me the email every single day, the damage can be much greater than if a regular business as usual email went wrong.
Danielle Gallant – 00:22:23: Absolutely. And I think you’ve given us the perfect segue here in terms of just monitoring and making sure you have a schedule to check these things in working with clients, we’re often monitoring deliverability or inbox performance for those bigger promotional campaigns, the ones that have all eyes on them within a company. So what is the role of good deliverability when you are sending campaigns that aren’t really being monitored every day? Some of my clients ask like, should I really be testing this? This is a small audience, we’re only ceding it to Everest once every couple of months. Is this something that we should be paying attention to?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:23:00: Definitely. Because automated emails have an opportunity to get very high revenue per email generation and so deliverability is even more critical. Imagine if that $18 per email sent card event email suddenly went into spam or just disappeared. That’s a huge chunk of revenue that your company is missing. The deliverability is really critical. I think it’s so important and I think that there’s a lot of misconceptions out there about deliverability. I mean, I’m sure you’ve all seen it. I say to people, I think we might have a deliverability problem and taking a look at this and they’ll be like, no, don’t you see? In the ESP we have 97% deliverability, only 3% bounced. And I’m like, it’s a problem. We really should have different words because it’s a different thing.
Danielle Gallant – 00:23:40: You’re preaching to the choir on that one.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:23:42: Yeah, you understand? Times have really changed. I’m showing my age. I’ve been working in online since 1989. I’ve been working in email specifically since 2000. And I remember I worked for a big toy company back in 2003. They were my first really big client and RESP, god blessed them, had a relationship with the places we’re delivering to and we got a call, hey, AOL is blocking everything in the send. We found out about it pretty quickly. We stopped the rest of the send and it’s something quirky in the code. We’ve talked to them, they understand it’s not malicious, but they’ve asked us to change it. We’re working on that now and then we’re going to resend it. And it was just proactive and they were great. And I don’t think having just an ESP isn’t necessarily enough anymore. Things have really changed. It’s really more of a commoditized product. We pay a lot less, which is great, but the service levels are not there. And especially I’ve worked with clients that are doing things that are risky. Anytime you don’t have 100% opt in list, that’s a higher business risk for deliverability. And so you really do need outside help, someone like a validity and it’s not just those people. But honestly, if your list is not 100% opt in, I can pretty much definitively say you need someone like validity because you are at a much higher risk to have these problems.
Guy Hanson – 00:25:03: This has been such an awesome conversation. I think you’ve given our listeners so many fantastic tips. If you’re thinking about starting out with email automation or sort of building on your initial efforts and I’ve just. Been writing down the notes as you’ve been talking. But common sense principles start simple, build from the bottom, make sure that you don’t sort of set and forget because you’re going to get tripped up by that. But do you have maybe one more automation gold nugget that you could share with our audience? If there’s absolutely nothing else you do, do this.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:25:36: I think I would just say just get started. As you said, Danielle, it can be so daunting to think about. People think it has to be big and fancy and 20 efforts and no, just kind of get started. And that is really, I think, the most important thing. But again, be smart about it and you know, if you need to. There’s a lot out there. When I started an email in 2000, I mean, I was writing for ClickZ and there were a couple of us who were there wasn’t a whole lot of information out there. And when I started online in 89, gosh, we didn’t even call it the cutting edge. My colleagues used to say we’re working on the bleeding edge because we don’t know what we’re doing. And in 2000, even with email, right, like we didn’t necessarily really know what we’re doing. And the nice part is now there’s a roadmap. We know what we’re doing, we know how to do these things, we know what works. And there are amazing people. Many of them are OI members. Chad White, Ryan Phelan, and myself, Kath Pay, Karen Taravera. We’re all writing about this stuff. It’s out there. There’s the OI blog. There’s so many blogs. You guys I’m sure, have a blog and just don’t try to go it alone. Google email marketing automation. See what comes up or read what people are doing. There’s a lot of case studies on automation on my blog. And learn from those of us who have been doing it because that’s going to help you get over some of the initial challenges and the initial humps. And you’re not on the bleeding edge anymore. With email, there’s a roadmap. So that’s the only thing I would say, leverage the content that’s out there. There’s so much good content.
Guy Hanson – 00:27:00: I feel like it’s quite a while since I’ve heard anyone use bleeding edge. But I think everyone’s going to know exactly what you mean. Now listen, we like to finish up with a couple of sort of quick fire hot takes. Danielle’s, got a question for you.
Danielle Gallant – 00:27:16: We do, we’re switching it up from our past episodes. Everybody. I thought about this question and I myself was cringing because I was thinking about my own example here. It’s bad. Jeanne, what is the most embarrassing email address that you’ve had in the past?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:27:34: Yeah, so I’m embarrassed because I can’t really think of one.
Danielle Gallant – 00:27:40: You’ve survived it then? Because I swear all of my friends and I, we had some brutal, brutal issues.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:27:49: Well, I can think of one actually. Earlier, I was like, I haven’t had any of those, actually. Oh, God, this is sort of embarrassing. So I’m a big hockey fan, so one of the emails that I’ve got that I don’t use it much anymore, I’m sure it’s still out there in the ether. It was Zamboni Babe. Yeah, it was an AOL.com. I think it’s that old. Yeah. I was like, oh, yeah, that’s my handle, Zamboni Babe. So that is pretty embarrassing. I don’t really use that anymore. Thank goodness I’m with you.
Danielle Gallant – 00:28:19: My most embarrassing one was Dancing Barbie, but there were two underscores in there, so I thought, how cool, right? I’ve got two underscores. Oh, man.
Guy Hanson – 00:28:33: We’re going to throw one more at you just because we want to. This one’s not quite as quirky, but you talk about all of the different trends which get written about on our blogs on Only Influencers, and some of them are on the money and some of them are really overhyped. What do you reckon is a big overhyped email trend right now?
Jeanne Jennings – 00:28:53: Oh, you know, I think that the big one right now, and I’m sure you’re all feeling it, too, is AI ChatGPT. You know, we’re not going to need copywriters anymore. Well, I think if you’re a copywriter, your job is safe for at least five years, if not more. I think that’s a big one for me right now. Yeah, don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for it, but it’s not always right. And I had a friend whose son wanted to get into Georgetown, where I’m an alum and I teach, and so I wrote him a recommendation and I actually had ChatGPT write the first draft of it and it was fine, but it was a little generic. And then I wrote what I was going to write and I sent them both to him and asked him which one he’d prefer, and he chose mine. I’m very thankful for that. And I did steal a few turns of phrase from the ChatGPT. There were some things I’m like, oh, that’s an interesting way to state that, but yeah, I think there’s still a need for human touch. The other thing, and I’m sorry, I can’t believe we’ve talked this long and I haven’t mentioned it, but the other real problem we’re seeing with automation these days is what MPP did to open rates. And MPP, now, if it goes to an Apple device, they’re automatically going to open it. You’re going to get an open there was always a margin of error in open rates, but now it’s much larger. But I was recently working with a client and they had some automations that were based on people who had opened but had not clicked. And the problem we were getting is there’s so much static in that metric now because it says that they opened, but a lot of them didn’t open. A lot of people’s metrics went up, open rate went up by 50% 70%. So that’s another thing. If you’re running automations, you should check anything that has anything to do with an open as a piece of logic because it’s just not relevant anymore. And that’s something that we really need to take a look at and that’s something you need to think about when you’re putting your automations together. Not that it was ever a perfect metric, it wasn’t, but it’s way imperfect now, especially in the deliverability space. If you’re taking those open as a sign that there’s a person there and they’re interested and engaged, that could not be more wrong these days. Sorry to go out of sequence.
Guy Hanson – 00:30:58: Oh, not at all. I think you’ve just served up a topic that’s going to bring you back for another episode of email after ours in the weeks to come, but I think we’re going to have to tie it up for today. Danielle, you want to see us home?
Danielle Gallant – 00:31:11: This has been such a pleasure. Jeanne, you are such a wealth of knowledge. Thank you so much for joining us today and we can’t wait to have you back to chat MPP.
Jeanne Jennings – 00:31:20: Thank you so much for inviting me, this has just been such a pleasure. So yeah, I hope to see you all in Vegas this summer in June at the Email Innovation Summit. And if you ever get to DC, let me know. We’ll grab coffee and talk email.
Guy Hanson – 00:31:32: Sounds great. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe live so you don’t miss any future episodes.
Danielle Gallant – 00:31:42: To all you sleepless senders out there, thank you for joining us after hours. See you next time.
