Danielle – 00:00:03: Welcome to Email After Hours by Sender Score, powered by Validity. In our day jobs, we work with senders all over the world and help them tackle their toughest email challenges.
Guy – 00:00:14: But once we’re off the clock, we get together to share our experiences and discuss what’s keeping us and most other senders up at night. It’s all part of our mission to answer the single most important question for email senders. How can we give subscribers what they really want? We’re your hosts. My name is Guy Hanson.
Danielle – 00:00:37: And I’m Danielle Gallant. And this is Email After Hours. Hi everybody. Today we have a juicy topic for you we teased at the end of the last episode. We are going to discuss the impact of emails ending up in the dreaded spam folder. How this can drain a sender’s time, their patience, and of course, their revenue potential. And as we’ll learn today, guys, spam folder placement can happen to anyone, even those who are committed to following best practices, right?
Guy – 00:01:10: It can, and I think that’s the exciting part of today’s conversation because we’re also going to delve into what you might call a battle of ideologies. That talk of war that sometimes occurs between your marketing leadership you want to send more to make more, and your deliverability experts who know that this has consequences. So who’s right and who’s wrong? We’re going to find out today.
Danielle – 00:01:36: And let’s start with some guest introductions. We’re lucky to have two guests on the podcast today, both powerhouses. First up we have Kate Adams, who is Validity’s SVP of Marketing. And we’ve also got Jason Crichton, who is the Director of Customer Success here. I’d love to just start by asking, of course we know your titles, but who you both are, what you actually do in your day job. Kate, why don’t you kick us off?
Kate – 00:02:04: Yeah, sure. Thanks Danielle. It’s so great to be here with you guys today. So, as you mentioned, my name is Kate Adams. I’m the SVP of Marketing for Validity. I have been in marketing for, going to date myself here, but more than just about 16/17 years coming up on the anniversary here and throughout that entire time have had connections, obviously with email marketing because it’s such a huge and vital channel. So really excited to be here today and talk about all of the mistakes I’ve made along the way and how Jason always saves me.
Danielle – 00:02:35: And Jason. How about you?
Jason – 00:02:37: My name is Jason, as you had said, I’m the Director of Customer Success here. I’ve been in the email industry and data analytics combined. And I’m going to date myself much like Kate just did, probably coming up around 22 to 23 years for my career. And my job here is to help people like Kate and help educate people on best practices to help get in the email inbox
Danielle – 00:02:55: Not dating yourselves.
Guy – 00:02:56: It’s absolutely fine. I’ve got the gray hairs to prove how long I’ve been an email. So listen, I mean, we’re here to talk about email from an email perspective. And Kate, let me put this one to you first. We run a highly successful email program at Validity, but with success comes challenges. When you think about our email program, what keeps you up at night?
Kate – 00:03:17: Yeah, guy, that’s a great question. We do have a really highly successful email program here, in large part because we get to work with people like Jason every day. But really, when I think about what keeps me up at night about it, the biggest thing that keeps me up at night. And I’ve been doing this marketing to marketers game for quite some time now. And one of the things that I enjoy most about it is that it always pushes me to the top of my game. Because I know that the folks that are receiving it know how the sausage is made on the back end and will hold me to account for mistakes that I make and always push me to be better. Right. And so I always have to remind folks over and over again, there that, hey, look, we’ve got to keep pushing forward. We’ve got to push ahead. All eyes are on us. And so I always challenge our team to think about I don’t just want to have kind of no noise around our program. I want people who are tweeting about our emails, and they always look at me like eyes wide open. I’m like, who’s going to tweet about an email? Shockingly, we have had that happen a few times. And so that’s really what keeps me up at night all the time. I’m always thinking about how are we leaning from the front, right? How are we really pushing ourselves to get better each and every time.
Guy – 00:04:30: I’m with you. And you’re right. I mean, because of who we are, it almost sometimes feels like we’re held to a higher standard. We got to be seen to be drinking our own Kool Aid. And Jason, does that resonate with you.
Jason – 00:04:40: Yeah, very much so. What keeps me up at night is that we’re drinking our own Kool Aid and supporting people like Kate and obviously our clients. Obviously, coming from where I’m sitting, I want us to be successful, but I also want us to be responsible at the same time. And I’m very much aware of the fact, and I don’t discredit the fact that there’s ROI and all kinds of stuff that we have to hit. I totally get that. But we need to do it in in a way that is responsible in a way that will allow us to reach more people. The analogy I like to use a whole lot is would you rather drink from a fire hose or from a garden hose? Most people prefer a garden hose. That’s really the approach you want to take. And there’s a way to do it where you can still make progress it’s, just doing it the right way. That’s what keeps me up at night is making sure we’re doing that.
Guy – 00:05:17: I think that’s absolutely right. So let’s dig into that a little bit. We’ve kind of hinted at it and guess what? Validity generally gets great deliverability with our email programs, but you know there’s the odd campaign where our outcomes are maybe not as great as we are hoping for. We had an example of that late in 2022. So Kate, do you want to set the scene just in terms of explaining to our audience what we were trying to achieve that particular day?
Kate – 00:05:44: Yeah, I would love to do nothing more than that, Guy.
Guy – 00:05:47: I’m sorry. Straight onto the hot seat.
Danielle – 00:05:49: “It was a fateful day, and…” Go ahead.
Kate – 00:05:52: It wasn’t just one day. I mean, certainly we executed that email on one day, but it was months and months of work that was leading up to it. And I know that a lot of marketers listening to this podcast, hopefully we’ll have a lot of empathy with this area that I’m about to talk about. But we’ve been working really hard and when I say our product and engineering teams have been working really hard at bringing a new product offering to market, we are incredibly fortunate to work with some of the largest organizations in the world today who are customers of our solutions. But oftentimes we find that, hey, there’s smaller businesses, small to medium sized businesses that would love a solution but find the solution that we have today just to be far too robust of an offering and really not what they need. To play off Jason’s analogy there, it’s a bit of using a fire hose when really what they need is garden hose at their business stage. And so this was really months and months of work that the organization had invested in bringing this product to market. So there was a lot of focus and a lot of eyeballs on what was going to happen when we brought it to market. And the other key component here and really important component of this story is because we don’t really have an offering or didn’t have an offering that met the needs of small to medium size businesses prior to this, we really were excluding those people out of our email campaigns and not emailing them very frequently because we didn’t have a solution that could meet their needs. So it was kind of an audience that was outside of our, hey, we always have that go to audience. These are the folks that we know we can really drive a ton of business value for. Let’s make sure we’re communicating with them and engaging them and providing them with all of our leadership, whereas these other folks, we really just kind of cordoned out of our constant communications. Jason will get into this much more, but that was probably the first big mistake that I had made, right? Which was like we really didn’t spend a lot of time kind of warming up that audience. But anyways, what we wanted to do is bring this product to market. And one of the key ways to do that is through email. And so we have a lot of these folks in our database that we meet at various events that opt in and consume our research or participate in our webinar programs or anything like that. And so in order to reach them, we kind of took some of our usual guideposts off. Usually we have a sending criterion that we have. We moved that criterion from our audience as we built the audience for this launch. We typically have an active window that we are always very particular about ensuring, so making sure that people have done some sort of activity over a specific period of time or we do not email them. All of the people are opt-in and GDPR compliant. But we took those windows off and said, hey, we really want to tell as many people about this. We’re super proud of the work that our product and engineering teams have done and we want to tell as many people about this as possible. And so that kind of all led up to this email campaign, a number of different emails that were going out over a period of time that then kind of had us setting up and we pulled the elastic back there and we’re ready to get to send out to all these folks. And so as a result of doing that, we ran into a number of different challenges. And Jason, maybe if you want to explain or go through those.
Jason – 00:09:16: Sure. Yeah, Kate did a really good job explaining everything, so she’ll have very little for me to cover here. So I’m just kind of reinforced a lot of what she said. She did a really good job with that. So as Kate had mentioned, yeah, we had a program that was going to be going out and there were a couple of things where and I’m going to caveat everything I’m about to say here, is that we’re all human here. Nobody’s perfect, even us here, believe it or not, as much as we like to think we are sometimes, we’re not. We make mistakes too, but we can identify them, then pivot and make the course correction to get where we need to go. So as Kate had mentioned, we had a segment that we kind of just basically took the guardrails off, as she had said, and she’s completely right. So what that ended up doing that was pulling in people who didn’t have good engagement with us, that didn’t have a good cadence record behind them. And the reason I’m pointing those two things out in particular to start here is that most mailbox providers across the board, there are two things that they care about very, very much, cadence and engagement. And the audience that we have pulled back in didn’t have either of those, which was a detriment to us, right? So we really probably needed to think of a way to very slowly bring them ramped up into a more of a regular cadence with us before we pushed them out to this larger push that we were doing with email here. We didn’t do that. So that’s a learning item here from us. The other thing that we ran into is that the email that we were pushing, we found out that it kind of fell into what’s called this gray mail area, where it’s not spam, but it’s emails that are sent. Over a period of time where the activity may be dropping off and people may not be as interested, but it’s still a relevant email. That’s not technically a piece of spam. So gray mail is something you need to think about. It’s kind of one of those behind the curtain type things that a lot of people don’t really think about. And again, that also comes down to good engagement, good cadence to keep people interacting with what you’re doing. So you’re showing the mailbox providers that they’re, that Jason, Kate, Danielle, Guy, they want to see what that email is. We just needed to probably do a little bit more homework ahead of time to prep that group better, from what we saw.
Danielle – 00:11:00: We know segmentation clearly between Jason and Kate here, but elephant in the room, we’ve said it, we’re Validity, we are in the deliverability space. And you’ve sort of said how it happened in the technical sense. Right. This was a group that hadn’t received email for a while, came back to haunt us a little bit. But how did it happen? Was it a communication issue? Were we forced for timing? Sort of what was the process improvement that could be made there moving forward, I think in terms of what Kate was saying for I hope marketers will feel empathy for you. I’m sure so many do. So how can we fix that process?
Jason – 00:11:42: From my point of view, I feel like looking at something like a reengagement to kind of try and bring those people back in to make them more apt to want to see the Validity name, want to interact with what we’re doing. There are ways to bring people back in once they fallen off from an engagement standpoint, reengagement win-back, those type of things, maybe a newsletter or something like that to get them more used to seeing us and opening our material. Again. The engagement piece and the cadence piece are two big pieces that mailbox providers really care about and they’d like to see. And if you can build that back up, you’ll have a much easier path forward than if you’re just sending people from nine to twelve months ago once a year. That’s usually not going to work out well in your favor.
Kate – 00:12:20: Yeah, from a business perspective, I would say it’s always time. Right. I know, that’s what so many marketers will say. It’s always time, right? And I think when Jason and I go back and forth and have our great debates, he’s like, well, if the launch was in March, we should have started thinking about this in September. So then you could have been warming those people up and built a newsletter, right? He just mentioned the newsletter, and I’m eyes wide open, like, okay, now I have to go build this entire newsletter service that generate all the content for that, figure out how, you know what I mean? Like, build that whole list. But he’s 100% right. Do you know what I mean? But this is the debate that he and I always routinely have where it’s like a constant negotiation. Jason’s like, Well, I would have started in September. And I was like, okay, what about December? Do you know what I mean? He’s like? Well, it’s better than march. You know what I mean? We’re kind of always in that trade back and forth. And so I think from a business perspective, what we could have done was really started what I would have done differently if the deadline was in March and I was really working under the timelines that I really had, which is initial notification in Januaryish that we were going to be ready for March, is, I would have started peeling off smaller segments of that inactive or that SMB audience that wasn’t hearing from us so much. And even if I had done some smaller experimentations around that audience and trying to get them in the mix, we did create a bunch of content. The mistake I made was really just pulling that elastic back way too far on the slingshot analogy I’m trying to use there, because we did do things like warm them up with like, hey, first we’re going to send this ebook that we created for small businesses to know about the best practices of email marketing. And then we created another webinar that was like, these are the basics of email deliverability just to get them in and not really immediately go for the hard sell of, hey, buy this great software solution that we now offer for SMBs. But I would have done that way more experimentally and in smaller audiences and then studied those metrics more and better. That’s the coaching I’ve gotten from Jason over the time. But I think that’s always the trade off that we’re trying to make is like, okay. He’s like, okay, you should start a newsletter. I’m like, There is no way. I don’t even have enough humans to do that. So like, all right, now what else you got, Jason? What else can you do?
Jason – 00:14:33: And I’m empathetic for the fact that sometimes deadlines don’t make things possible in a perfect world, that we like to see a warm-up plan or headcount or something like that. Team constraints. So I want to be empathetic to the point that it’s not always going to be a perfect storm of I have eight weeks to get ready for this. Sometimes you have 8 hours or you have eight days if you’re really lucky, right? So in those cases, it’s just you’ve got to figure out a way within that time constraint to figure out the best way to do things. So if we had, for example, only 8 hours to get ready, maybe we throttled this over a much larger period of time to kind of help with some of the complaint rates or something like that. There are some smaller things you can do, but I’m empathetic to the fact that it’s not always going to be perfect. As much as I would love for it from a deliverability side to be set up with a bow on top and just good to go, I know that’s not always going to happen.
Kate – 00:15:18: From a business executive perspective. The other thing I’ve done was and I know a lot of marketing leaders will have empty on this, but like pushed back a lot on some of the business pressures that were like, hey, we need to get this many customers, we need to get this many within this time frame and pushed back. And that’s not to say I didn’t, but I still should have pushed back a little bit more and said, okay, great, that’s great that you have this amazing product to bring to market and it’s fantastic that it’s going to be ready in March. But given that I have an eight week window to prepare for this, this is what this is going to look like and buying myself more time there. But of course that’s far easier said than done, as we all know, right? There’s many influences above all of us that we can do our best to push back on and negotiate with, but not always there.
Guy – 00:16:01: That’s kind of the next avenue I wanted to explore anyway. I mean, we joke a little bit about the great debate, but the reality is that it does sort of mean that we find ourselves on opposing sides at times. Jason, you’re the custodian of our sending best practices and your primary duty is to protect Validity’s, reputation. And Kate, I know that you care about those best practices, but you’ve also got some big targets in terms of making sure we’re sending out enough messaging to generate leads and hit our revenue objectives. And sometimes those two are in conflict with each other. And guess what? It’s not just us. I speak to our customers all the time and I hear that same story from so many of them. Danielle, you’re nodding, you know that. So I suppose the next question is it poses the risk of creating a bit of professional tension in our organization, but we’ve also dealt with that. In case I’m thinking about the monthly reviews that we have about our own email and the sort of improvement opportunities and they’re fascinating aren’t they? Because we learn so much every time we have one.
Kate – 00:17:03: They are. They’re incredibly insightful, and we actually have a few of them. Right. Not only do we have the time that we spend with Jason and his team every month, but then we also are getting together monthly just as a marketing team, talking through our own metrics and performance. And what are we experimenting with? What’s our key areas of focus for experimentation in the coming months and the months ahead? What did we learn from last time, and then how are we going to roll that out across the board there? And I think the team really values that. We have a marketing team principle, which is fail fast, learn faster, which is probably our most difficult principle to instill across the team because nobody wants to raise their hand when I say who can share a fail. But I think through repetition and many, many months of that, we’re getting better at that. That meeting makes it really easy to share a fail.
Jason – 00:17:55: Right.
Kate – 00:17:55: It’s like, hey, I did this experiment, and we celebrate those fails because on the other side, it’s like, okay, awesome. We just learned something really valuable that we won’t do anymore. And so that’s fantastic. I love those meetings. Those are actually probably in my top five meetings all the time that we have in spending that time together.
Guy – 00:18:16: I agree. And Jason, from your side because, I mean, you do some detailed analysis for us, and you sort of come back with the findings and the recommendations, hopefully it’s an environment for you where you sort of feeling confident that you’re putting your observations forward in a spirit where they’re going to be received with an open mindedness.
Jason – 00:18:34: Yeah, absolutely. And from my point of view, and I love what Kate just said here about the failing part, and something that I tell people, too, is if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to grow. So I understand the fact act that you need to push the boundaries to make progress. And sometimes when you push that boundary, you’re going to trip or something’s going to happen. But if you can learn from it and pivot and then move forward past that, then you’re doing the right thing. It’s great for me to send calls with Kate, yourself, guy, everybody here, because I get to hear from the other side of the fence quite often. I’m getting to hear, like Kate had mentioned, we’ve got to get this out in eight weeks. We’ve got to do this for numbers. We’ve got to hit this many people, blah, blah, blah, right. This is all great stuff. And when not making my recommendations, I’m giving you the, if I were you and I wanted to do this in this vacuum world of it being perfect and great, this is what I would do. Now, that’s obviously not possible all the time, but if we can take pieces of that and apply it as much as we can. We can mitigate some of that fail that I was talking about and still move forward and grow. That’s really where I’m coming from. So when we’re giving advice, it’s really to give you kind of a safety cushion where you can push and maybe you’ll take a hit, but it won’t be something that’s so detrimental that you can’t recover from it.
Danielle – 00:19:40: I think we saw a lot of this over the last couple of years and this exact same scenario where it seems like the intention is good, right? Like you want to share something that people are eager to hear, they’ve opted in to hear it. I’m thinking of COVID when there were emergency services messages that needed to go out to huge audiences and there just wasn’t that time to be able to do it, or even the holidays really, where people just want to get offers out there and just don’t ramp up properly. It’s not necessarily a bad intention here, but to take a step back. Jason, you mentioned gray mail, but we know the audience, we know what happened. What was the actual impact. We saw some gray mail, we saw maybe some spam folder placement. I’ll let you get into that. But I think for a lot of listeners, the next question is, well, what did we do to fix it? Like, did we have an immediate issue that we needed to get out of? And then what would your advice be to senders on how they can I mean, we know kind of how to avoid it, but how to recover?
Jason – 00:20:40: Yes, that’s a great question. So the gray mail that you brought up here, so we send predominantly to the B2B side of the house because we’re marketing other companies, obviously. So in B2B filters, gray mail will be a filter setting that the providers can set up on their side. And what we ran into was after identifying that we were seeing quite a number of gray mail flags come back that we were seeing a much higher spam placement based on that gray mail flag that was popping up on the emails that we had sent. Some of the things that you can do to get around that well, I’m not going to say around, I don’t want to say like, you’re trying to cheat the system here, but things that you can do to try and mitigate that are to look at the content. I really think that this is probably the number one thing you can do if you’re running into a gray mail scenario because the content is not landing the way it should with people. So you probably need to revisit what that creative is, what that message is, what that ask is, et cetera, et cetera. That’s a really good chance for you to kind of audit what you’re doing. And I’m sure this is close to Kate with the marketing department. You want your marketing to be fresh, you want to be vibrant. You want it to be something that people want to take a look at. And I feel like if you’re starting in the gray mail area, there’s a trend of people not doing that. So that’s something that you probably want to look at and maybe reconsider what that creative is and what you’re offering.
Kate – 00:21:48: A couple of things that we did, Danielle, were obviously we understood the impact of what we had done and so then what we did was put those constraints back on our program, right? So the big ones for me were the active constraints that we have. Have we seen a sign of life or have they visited our website or done something with us recently, attended one of our webinars, had a conversation with somebody on our team, any of those things, we put those constraints back on. So said like, okay, we’re not going to go outside of our active window. They have to be defined as active. And so that limited our list down. And so we went back to that. The other thing that we did was we then started really doing some more experiments with that active subset in that SMB audience. And so we started really learning about, oh, what do they like, what are they not like? The other thing that we are still in the process of working on is implementing that reengagement campaigns. We had some but didn’t go as long as I think we potentially should. And also I think we refactored some of the offers that were in there. So really changing those up significantly, I think that also helped, but really it was going back and showing the mailbox provider, specifically Microsoft and Outlook and all B2B senders and all those spam filtering technologies that we are a good reputable sender right. That we had this peak and now we’re back, we’re back down and we’re doing the things that are right and our engagement rates and our complaint rates and our opt out rates all have fallen. And eventually those mailbox providers and filtering companies learn that about us. We’re back to normal levels for us, like incredible deliverability.
Guy – 00:23:29: I think that’s such a good point. And when we did our last state of email webinar, we actually did an audience poll where we asked our audience, is deliverability getting easier or harder? And two thirds of the respondents said it’s absolutely getting harder. Jason, I’ll phrase that as a question for you because I guess we see that with our own email activity. What do you think some of the reasons are?
Jason – 00:23:55: I mean, there’s a couple of reasons that I can think of offhand. One is just Validity is not the only person sending emails to everybody out there. We’re competing against pick your number of people at any given time, right. As well, people’s interests change. I mean, think for yourselves. Do you like the same things that you. Like 20 years ago? Probably not. Things are going to change. So you’ve got to be able to kind of pivot and really read your audience. And I just want to lean back on something that Kate said. She talked about the engagement piece and kind of segmenting people. I am a big strong supporter of if you do not segment your audience or your list, then you don’t really understand who you’re sending to. If you don’t understand who you’re sending to, you don’t know how to send to them the right way. So I feel like things like understanding your audience and really understanding what they want, that’s the best thing you can do for your list. And it’s a little bit of work, but in the long run, it’s the best thing you can possibly do in my mind.
Kate – 00:24:44: Just to build on that piece a little bit more. Jason said it’s a little bit of work. I don’t know that we have the same definition of a little bit of work, but okay. We did two other things, too, that I think were really important. One of them is we got way more targeted with that SMB audience and how we found them. So what we started to do is like, oh, you’re an SMB person who actually downloaded this ebook, and we made it super highly relevant to just that one book. Just in terms of scale. We are publishing probably two ebooks a month to 24. So just to get the audience on one of those is significant. It’s a significant amount of work. But we started to do that and the results were astronomical in terms of what we were able to see, in terms of how we made that hyper, hyper, hyper relevant of a message. We were able to get actually the same results that we wanted to get for that SMB solution, but pivoting in a major way. And it didn’t happen over one week. It happened over many weeks to get there. The second thing that we did was we blew the dust off our preference center. Our preference center, it always gets a bad rap because it’s always that thing that’s sitting in your backlog of like, yeah, we got to get to that. But we have this launch and we have this webinar and we have this event and we have this and there’s so many time-bound things you so rarely are able to get to the backlog and say, okay, let’s do this. So we were able to really blow the dust off that and say, no, we’re going to go way more granular with our preference center. It’s not just in or out, it’s going to be in or out. But if you’re in, what do you want to hear about, what are the topics that you want to learn about? And we’ll send you only emails about those topics and what’s the frequency that you want to hear about them? Because that’s how often you’ll actually hear from us and we can implement that. And so we did those additional items there, and I think that made a significant impact for us, too.
Jason – 00:26:34: Yeah, I want to touch on that. That’s a great point, kate and I didn’t get to that. The preference center. I’m going to cave you at this with it’s more than a little work for a preference center. It’s a lot of work, I’m not going to lie. But the return pays you back in spades because basically it’s free data because your subscribers are telling you what they want to see and when they want to see it. If you set it up that way, right, they’re giving you the roadmap to be successful with them. You would be a fool not to take advantage of this. Fully understanding a preference center can be a large undertaking, but if you have the resources and the time to do it, I highly encourage everybody to have a preference center just for that fact alone. Because you really learn who your clients are and you can send to them intelligently at that point.
Danielle – 00:27:14: I hear a lot of overlap, interestingly with B2C senders, like preference center optimization, understanding your audience segmenting, both for your audience’s sake and for the mailbox provider’s sake. But we know, and even just a couple of episodes, we’ve already addressed that B2B is a difficult channel. Right. There are unique challenges that come with a B2B program. So if you guys were starting from scratch, let’s say we didn’t have a list, we were just getting ready. What are some of the fundamental rules for B2B senders to follow? Maybe some things they should avoid to get away from. As I said, that dreaded spam filter and spam folder. In my own experience, I know data quality can be a particular issue. I know frequency sometimes is a problem, but what do you guys think of that? What’s your opinion there?
Kate – 00:28:09: Don’t buy a list.
Jason – 00:28:11: I’m so glad you said it because I was going to make a lot of enemies if I said it.
Kate – 00:28:15: B2B gets a bad rap sometimes, right? Because we’re like, oh, we’re businesses marketing and tell their businesses that’s, like, no, first of all, there’s no such thing. I don’t just go talk to Amazon. When I want to talk to somebody at Amazon, I go talk to Jeff Bezos. That would be amazing. But you know what I mean. It’s humans. There are humans inside that business. And our team is not made of robots. They’re also humans. And so it’s humans writing to other humans. I think the B2B acronym is so misunderstood and sometimes dehumanizes things in such a way that it just boggles my mind sometimes. I have this entire rant, actually, of how B2B has kind of acronymized made everything an acronym. And it’s like, okay, I work at B2B. And I’m here to generate MQLs from my SAOs so they can drive them to SQOs and we can get to close one. And it’s like, what are we talking about? Right? It’s like the reason why B2B marketers exist is to start and continue and nurture conversations with people within our organizations. That’s why we exist. And so really making sure that we knock that down. But to me, I think it just gets such a bad rap. But my number one tip, like, you’re just getting started is you’re going to be so tempted, right? And we all know it. Every B2B marketer gets these is like, you get those read receipt emails from those shady vendors that are like, hey, Kate, are you looking for a list of Salesforce users? And it’s like what? No. And no, I’m not sending you a read receipt on my email. But that is such a mistake, right? Don’t buy a list. I know it will be harder, but I promise you that buying that list is going to get you nowhere. So build your list from human interactions that you have with human beings. Another big mistake that I see a lot of B2B marketers make is that there are data providers out there like Zoominfo and so many others out there that now make it so seamlessly easy to get their data into your CRM, right? That you can have a team of SDRs who are like, Cool. I’m going to go do my outreach now, and I’m going to bring this data into the CRM, and I’m going to go make some phone calls. And I’m not saying your SDR should not do that. Your SDR is 100% should be doing that. We do that. But then that contact does not mean then that is marketing marketable. And even at our organization, which is always fascinating to me, sometimes I have salespeople who look at me with the eyes wide open being like, what do you mean you can’t market to these people? And I’m like, they didn’t opt in for our marketing. I can’t market to them. They’re excluded from everything we do. And so that’s a huge concept. A huge mistake that I see many B2B marketers make is not to segment that to your point, Danielle, on data quality, not to segment that data out and realize what is marketable and what is not.
Danielle – 00:31:05: Jason, how about you? Anything in addition to what Kate said here?
Jason – 00:31:08: I would say that Kate is my new best friend because everything she said was amazing. I agree with her wholeheartedly buying list is the worse than you could possibly do. I know it’s a popular thing to do. Here’s what I’m going to say to this. This is not the fun answer. It’s not the cool answer. It’s not the sexy answer. Slow and steady wins the race. That is how you make progress. You don’t win the race by buying a list and trying to run that marathon with the list, you’re going to burn yourself really hard. Stay away from that stuff. Really what you want to do, you want to get your leads organically. You want to get them in a manner that is ethical, right? If you’re getting leads in from a third party, Kate mentioned the Zoom, you don’t know where that data came from. It’s not your data. I would be validating everything. If you’re not validating stuff to make sure it’s correct, you’re probably running a 50/50 chance of something blowing up in your face. But largely speaking, just if it feels like it’s too good to be true, it probably is, and it’s not going to work out for you in the long run.
Guy – 00:31:57: Danielle, I wish we could keep this conversation going all day because it’s such a good one, but you know what? We seem to have got to a point where we talked about that creative tension, but we’ve got Kate and Jason in the same camp and they’re singing off the same hymn sheet together. It’s beautiful. So I feel like this is a perfect opportunity to start wrapping up, but we’ve got just one or two more quickfire questions for them, don’t we?
Danielle – 00:32:22: We’ve got your hot takes coming, guys, and I’ll throw this out there. So Jason or Kate, whoever has an idea first, please just jump in. And this has been fun so far to hear the answers, both from Guy and Tom, what is one commonly held marketing belief that you disagree with?
Kate – 00:32:39: I’ll go first. The one that I would say is sometimes marketers are a bit like lemmings where we’ll go see a headline that comes out that is like the best time and day to send your email is Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. And I promised Guy that I would not swear on this episode as he reminded me as we were getting ready here. So I will not say what I usually say about that, but that is just blasphemy. Spoiler alert, the word I usually use is not blasphemy, but it does begin with a B. But, yeah, I just think that is complete and total bogus information. Like, I cannot disagree with that more. Don’t be a lemming. There is no such thing as a golden rule for marketers. Because I’ll tell you right now, if I’m marketing to nurses and Sally, my neighbor, is marketing to high school students, the ideal time for both of those audiences is not the same. So Tuesday at 10:00 a.m will not work. So my big thing is don’t be a lemming. Right? Experiment within your own audience. Find out what works for you. There is no such thing as a golden rule. I just think it’s crazy.
Jason – 00:33:46: I love that. Blasphemy is such a good word. I love that you use that.
Kate – 00:33:50: As is bogus.
Jason – 00:33:51: Yes, bogus. I love it. I’m going to pick something that just happened recently. And again, I’m probably going to not make many friends with this one, but I would argue that the person who hasn’t responded to me in five years definitely cares about what I have going on today. Not so much. People open up their list for holiday. People open their list for pushing numbers, sales, et cetera, et cetera. If John or Jane Smith hasn’t opened an email in five years from you when they bought that widget back in 2012 or whatever we’re at right now, they definitely don’t care what you’re doing right now. It’s time to cut them loose. And that’s not a popular opinion among many people, but I firmly believe that.
Guy – 00:34:29: 100%. And last one from us, and Kate, we’ll put this to you first. We obviously take a lot of interest in everyone’s email marketing, not just our own. We see a lot of great examples. We see some not-so-great examples. What’s the worst marketing email you’ve seen recently? You don’t have to name and shame. If you want, you can just describe the principle if you’re more comfortable with it.
Kate – 00:34:52: Well, I think I alluded to it earlier is that, hey, do you want to buy this Salesforce list? And it’s like, what are you talking about? The other ones that drive me crazy are as a VP of Marketing, you must… and it was like, come on. You know way more about me and I know you know way more about me because I’ve accepted your cookie policy and all these things that you know way more about me than just that I’m an SVP of Marketing. You can do better than that. But this whole idea guy around, I have to say this a lot, is like tokenization versus personalization, which is like, just because you have my title doesn’t mean that it’s how you should design the email that you send to me. You know way more about me in terms of the web pages that I visited or the items that you know are in my cart that I didn’t complete, so many other things I think you can do way better than that. Those are two of the things that really get me most of the time.
Guy – 00:35:47: Absolutely. All that rich first party data we keep talking about, use it. What about you, Jason?
Jason – 00:35:53: So I’m going to pick an example that leans into a comment I made earlier in the discussion here. So I got an email probably about a week ago for solar panels for my roof, which actually was a really good deal. They look nice. Everything looked great on it. Except I live in an apartment, so I’m not your ideal client. So you might want to target just a tad bit better here. So, again, take the time to understand your audience and your ROI will go up at some point. My apartment complex isn’t buying solar panels. I’m sorry.
Guy – 00:36:21: That’s fantastic.
Danielle – 00:36:23: I thought for sure we were going to get our first name named here. Guy, I can’t wait to see who’s actually going to do that. But thank you so much, Kate and Jason. I hope I’m sure that everybody who’s listening to this episode is going to hear just how passionate you guys are about our program and about email. And we just want to say thank you so much for joining us.
Guy – 00:36:46: Been such an awesome conversation.
Jason – 00:36:48: Yeah, it’s been great on here. I really appreciate the invite, guys.
Kate – 00:36:50: Yeah, thanks for having us. I appreciate it.
Guy – 00:36:55: Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.
Danielle – 00:37:01: To all you sleepless senders out there, thank you for joining us after hours, and see you next time.
