EP48 - Is Email Dead with Brad Bettinson

Speaker A: Are you looking to fine tune whether for your business, your job, your team, or yourself? In each episode we will be discussing different ideas and opinions, using real world examples to help you see opportunities, innovate and succeed. Hi, it's Corby Fine and welcome to finetune. So I can remember for many, many years thinking about all of the things that we used to use and now don't use anymore. My grandparents were really great future tellers. They bought a Betamax. That should say it all. I literally remember going to their house, vhs, putting in tapes. That was a loss. Now that's a little different than other things like let's say the fax machine, which ultimately was the mainstay of communication for business and sometimes personal. The pager. Those were things that had utility but ultimately lost to other technologies. And with me today to talk a little bit about one of those potential technologies, and I think this is going to be a nice little debate, is Brad Bettinson, who is the VP of Enterprise Solutions at JAM Direct. Jam is a Toronto based agency that specializes in CRM marketing. Brad's got over 20 years of experience. He's an email and marketing automation expert. He helps clients achieve customer centric transformations. He's part seasoned marketer and part technology solution developer, leading the design and implementation of enterprise scale marketing automation solutions. He's also a great speaker. I've seen him speak, sharing his insights on personalization and automation at all kinds of conferences like Salesforce Connections, Dreamforce, Martech Conference, et cetera. Brad, welcome to the podcast today.

Speaker B: Thank you, thank you for having me.

Speaker A: Uh, the technology, which I haven't yet said by design because I want to get your take, it's email. Is email dead? Is it becoming sort of like that fax machine that had its utility and then just sunset off into the horizon?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I've heard that question a few times and, and funny enough, it was like five years ago, I was presenting somewhere and someone said, you know, his email dead. My kids don't use it. And it was pretty funny. It caught me off guard. Cause I'm like, well, it's such a mainstay. But yeah, I mean, at some point every technology does get replaced by something newer and better. So at some point it will happen. But I think it might be better to think about email in different categories, like how do we use it? Um, um, so for example, peer to peer email definitely is becoming a fax machine. Like the older you are in the spectrum, you may, if you're gonna, you know, go to the restaurant with your friends next week you might email them and say, hey, let's go up. But you go younger on the spectrum and it's like, no way. They're not using email to, to communicate with friends. They're using one of the myriad of other better, more instant tools. Um, and on the peer to peer side, it's pretty funny. I'm a WhatsApp person myself and so I have a friend coming in from out of town. We WhatsApp every day. But when it came to their itinerary, they emailed it to me because they want to make sure I actually show up at the airport on time. They don't want that important information of when their flight arrives to get lost. You know, in that thread that's constantly kind of eating its own tail.

Speaker A: So to that point you mentioned the myriad of other more instant tools. And so I think that's one of the key things, email. While I think those of us who are a little older to your point, think of it as fairly instant in comparison to the things that we grew up with. There are way more real time pinging, notifying, buzzing in your pocket all the time kind of tools. So how has email marketing and email as a tool evolved essentially over the last number of years to stay relevant in a world that is dominated by these more instant gratifying communication vehicles and digital channels? Whether it's Snapchat, whether it's Instagram, like what is it that says, hey, email has evolved to stay relevant?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's the way we prioritize all these channels and what we use them for. I myself am not handing out my WhatsApp to any companies. I only want to hear from friends and my intimate group on WhatsApp. Uh, I don't want a company joining that conversation. So I think people will go out to social channels to do a lot of things and brands can have a role in that conversation. But when it comes to that like one to one communication data and the uh, openness to receive that super personalized onetoone communication, like imagine you're on a website and you're about to purchase, but you leave and you go to YouTube now, uh, you understand you'll be retargeted. But if the video and they just stopped in that teaser and said, brad, I know you just left the website, go back and finish your purchase. Like that's sort of crossing a line that's you're out in YouTube land because you want to watch videos, not because you want to be communicated to. But email is very different. Like that's your digital passport, that's how you engage with companies, services, businesses. So email, I think has got a resurgence, especially during COVID because of the data driven nature and how personal it's become. So the, the old style, hey, email, the marketing channel, I have a million customers, I'm going to just blast the same message to them. That is definite. The fax machine moment that's happening in email. Now what is going to let some companies continue to be successful is that data driven aspect. And that's hard. Stop. If you can put relevance in someone's inbox, they're open to that conversation.

Speaker A: So I think one of the key things you're saying here is there's a difference between the personal one to one use of email, which is ultimately being replaced by social tools, social channels, more instant gratifying enablers. But from a business or a marketing perspective, on behalf of an organization, a brand, a product to an individual or a group, we're still going strong. But you, you've referenced the word data and personalization or relevance a couple of times. So that's obviously really important today given the fact that all of us, from individuals to organizations to governments, are really putting a strong emphasis on privacy, on data protection, on uh, personalization, but done so with the consent of the individual. So how do you see the strategies that organizations are putting into place, adapting to make sure that uh, they are taking into consideration what the individual wants, but also staying regulatory compliant in that whole process? And is it limiting anything? Are there things we can't do now as brands and marketers because of these, I'm going to say tighter restrictions, but let's say guidelines and rules.

Speaker B: No, um, the rules are great actually and the data privacy is great. And I think back to when Castle came in, like everyone was like concerned about Castle and all Castle did was it helped cut out the junk that was going to people's inbox. Like you have to have permission, you have to treat their inbox with respect. Essentially you have to give them the right to opt out. And so those rules actually helped email as a channel continue to be relevant to the consumer. And so data privacy is big, but also phishing is a big concern. Like a few years ago, you'd get these laughable phishing emails, like, oh, you forgot your password and you need to log in and give us all your details. But they're getting really sophisticated now. So we're helping our clients thread that needle of putting emails in front of customers that are clearly for that customer, they have enough personal Identification information that they know, hey, this is for me. There's no way a phishing company could know this and this and this. But we're also not crossing that line. Which, you know, a few years back you could put a ton of personal information in email, but now we're doing a better job of handing off to more secure channels. So email might start the conversation, but we'll quickly pass them to the mobile app that has a logged in state or the customer portal that has a logged in state. And that's the uh, that's the line we're staying ahead of phishing and being super relevant and making sure we, we hit that. Just for me, Mark is what we call it. But we're not going so far that the customer is like, wow, you put that balance in my email. And that's kind of embarrassing if someone else saw that. And so that's how we're staying in the middle of it.

Speaker A: I always used to think that the sort of litmus test of too much would be if I was sitting on public transit and my phone was open and somebody was sitting behind me. Would, would it be bad or detrimental or embarrassing to your point, if someone actually saw something? So health information or bank balances or things like that that you really don't want anyone else to see? Of course, limit it, don't put it in. But you know, one of the things that when I gave your background, we talked and I use the word CRM marketing, so maybe just your perspective on what is today the definition of that because we're talking so much about email but then you dropped in. Well, yeah, but that could start the conversation and it could lead to other channels. What do you see in the definition of CRM marketing today that an agency like Jam or others who specialize in that kind of area would consider within their purview?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good example or a good question because we talk email a lot because that's tends to be the alpha channel for the clients. If they have really good penetration then that might be. But in most cases it's still email to start the conversation. And we're really not an email partner so much these days. More of an omnichannel, one to one journey partner. So we'll help clients, the customers will come into the journey and then it's like, okay, do we even have email? Most we do. So we're talking email if we don't, okay, maybe it's direct messaging or direct mail, maybe it's sms, maybe it's sharing, maybe they're in our journey but we're not serving up the right content or they're just not uh, passing that threshold. So we're gonna share that audience with other social platforms, we're gonna share that audience with uh, the SEM team so that they can increase their spend on this customer. Cause they're interested but they're not crossing whatever threshold or goal we're looking for. So yeah, it's a good point and it's, we're talking a lot of email but all these things apply to good one to one across whatever channel that happens to be. So meet the customer where they are essentially.

Speaker A: So given that and all of the experience that you and, and your agency have had, what are you seeing now as some of the uh, emerging trends, some of the innovations both in email marketing, but even more generally this one to one marketing that organizations, brands and marketers should actually be aware of to stay ahead of the curve and at the same time make sure they are compliant and following the sort of data protection and regulatory rules. Yeah.

Speaker B: So before I talk about the trends, I'll back up a second, I'll talk a bit about the challenge that we're all facing. And so Covid hits and every Google has a great sat. I can't remember but it's something like there was a nine year advancement in people's digital savviness that happened in one year because everyone was forced to get on Zoom, everyone was forced to download the app, everyone was forced to do things in a way more digital way than they were before. And the same thing for companies. Your customers weren't coming in store, they weren't coming into the gym to that service. So everyone switched and reinvested in email and included data in that mix. So what happened was email had a resurgence but it's also had because of automation, because of all these tools, just way too much email. So generally companies are most likely sending too much emails. They're seeing emotional unsubscribe from customers. The tools helping, uh, you skip messages that you don't want to see are improving. So the companies that are sending generic stuff and just I'm going to try and win the volume game, they're going to lose out. And the trends are all around how do I win the relevance game? How do I win the right to keep top of mind and top of inbox with my customer? And so all the trends really work backwards from that problem, which is there's so much noise in your inbox. How do companies make sure that they can increase their Signal strength.

Speaker A: I woke up this morning as I do every morning, and even though I swear, I swear that I unsubscribed to like 5 things yesterday, I have another 40 things in my inbox today. It's just, it's remarkably insane how it just happens.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I uh, do think in the near, near future we are all going to have AI assistants that are watching our eyeballs, watching what we read and then sorting our inbox for us. And that's going to be a real reckon where the AI is going to look at your email and be like, I don't see anything in this for my user. I'm not even going to show it to them. I don't care about your awesome subject line. They're not even going to see it.

Speaker A: So I want to talk about AI, but let's nail out, you know, give me the two or three trends because I, I do think it's important because AI could be a whole other podcast episode.

Speaker B: Yes. So uh, before I talk trends, I do say nail the basics. So many clients when we onboard it's like we're just through a B testing. We helped a client the other day, we just improved their UX a little bit and we saw a 10% lift and click. So it's like nail the basics, then move to things. One of the ones that we like is called Ask, Learn, Optimize. So we think of email as this one way channel, but it doesn't have to be. So we had a banking client and they had a cohort that looked like they were about to um, try ah or leave. And we went with an email that says, you know, is this the right service for you? And it's a very bold question. And then there's three buttons. Yes, no. And then like I'm not sure, I can't remember exactly, but we saw a huge click rate. So when you ask a customer about them and you ask a really important question, they're not afraid to say no, it's not the right service. We land them on a personalized page. We say, here are some other options and handle that customer moment in the most helpful way possible. So if you're not asking questions in your emails, you should be the other one. It's not a trend so much as it's this North Star we're always trying to get to, which is just for me. So if you look at your emails on a spectrum, are they mass marketing or is it something that was a send of one? So when the customer receives that, they're like Oh, I got this because it's clearly for me it's triggered off that data event. It says why I'm getting it. It's just super relevant. So look at your emails on that spectrum. And then again, not so much a trend, but really I think having its moment in 2024 is the omnichannel orchestration we talked about earlier where if you have your email team head down with their content calendar and they don't know what the social team's doing, they don't know what the DM team's doing, they don't know what the app team is doing, it's like, no, no, back up, put them all in a room. Their content calendars should be one big content calendar. We actually learned that from Toyota. They do that really well. And it's not some big AI solution. It's a giant cheat with every agency partner putting in their content calendars and we all work together as one big unit. Um, and then the last one, which is an AI thing as well. But a lot of clients own these massive platforms that just keep adding tools to, but they can't keep up. So sometimes the trend is right under your nose. And one of my favorites is in marketing cloud, it's send time optimization. Um, I think they had some issues with it when it launched, but it's really come into its own. And even we have clients with smaller audiences where instead of us as marketers going oh, four o' clock's the best time to send, you give it to the AI. The AI looks at the last six months of data and then it'll pick a personalized send time for each or it'll crowdsource for the people that doesn't have enough data. So that's a, a bit of a trend. But also a note that you may have the next, you know, clawing forward a percent increase on your click through rates. It may already be in the platform you have.

Speaker A: So that's a, uh, leverage the technologies you've already invested in. And I think to your point, a lot of the large, we'll call it marketing cloud type platforms. And again, I know listeners here are going to say, well there's Adobe, there's Salesforce, and we're going to have competitive battles of opinion of what's the best. But irrespective, I think what you're seeing is the large organizations have the money, the money's being spent on innovation. The innovation is obviously focusing on AI implementation into the platform. So I guess one is what you're saying if it's already there. Why don't you try it and use it? Because it's faster, better, cheaper than having to do it on your own. Um, but then what else are you seeing around? You know, you mentioned it a couple of times. You talked about, you know, AI monitoring and making sure that only the things that are most important are prioritized in your inbox. You talked about AI being used for send time optimization to make sure that you're getting emails at a time that you're going to be responsive to it. What else are you seeing around the potential impact of AI and machine learning in both email marketing, but also this journey design one to one marketing that goes in an omnichannel ecosystem.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean AI is absolutely a game changer. There is no doubt about it. And I'm at these conferences and everyone's sort of running around with imposter syndrome like does everybody have AI everywhere? And I'm behind the curve. I had lunch with a friend the other day. I'm going to steal their story. It's not mine, but they built a whole campaign with AI start to finish and then they had the human team do it. And so they launched both 5050 test split. Now in the end the human campaign performed better but the AI campaign did not perform badly and it was a lot less expensive. So there's sort of two important levers. We want results, but we want efficiency. And you know, I would love to have seen a third group. I mean obviously, uh, time and resources are finite, but a third group that's using AI and humans, the best of both worlds because I think that campaign would have performed the best and also had, you know, those efficiencies mixed in. So that's the way, you know, as an agency partner to our clients, we're looking at AI is sort of more better, faster. And there are definitely some leaps ahead in terms of how AI manages data, how AI will help you find opportunities in your data. So I think that's a big one. We've helped clients implement AI solutions like I think eight years ago we helped the source implement predictive intelligence because you had humans trying to figure out what recommendations, but then you had this AI machine learning that could watch what people serve, watch what they bought and just nail it in terms of recommendations. For Petco, for example, they were using marketing clouds, predictive intelligence or Einstein product racks. But it had a bit of a blind spot because AI can be a black box. And that's the point I'm trying to get to, which is black box. AI can be difficult to work with. And they were having some really good success but some really bad recommendations in the mix. And so we went in and we created a dashboard so the humans could see and demystify, so we could see about 200 recommendations at once with the customer data behind it. And then we saw 90% of the time is bang on. It's got all the data it needs, got in store data. But this 10%, it wasn't an A.I. uh, problem so much as a data problem. But it's like, hey, AI is going to have this blind spot and that's where we would build in some controls and do some manual recos or have some fallback logic. So I think that's a really good metaphor for the future of how we're all using AI. AI is going to do more and more, but the humans in the hot seat are still required to apply that accountability, that oversight and that, you know, finesse to really bring it to the next level.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think a lot of where people are starting with AI is on the more side as opposed to faster and more begets its own issues, which is in a world where we're trying to create relevance, more stuff in theory means less relevance. And so whether it's legal and compliance, whether it's validating that it is the right message or the right product or the right recommendation, the human element still needs to be there. And I do think though over time you will see more AI on the process enablement for speed as opposed to like let humans come up with ideation and creativity and maybe automate the process and the speed at which it gets to market through legal, through compliance, through reviews, through automated checkpoints between agency and client and creative director and whoever. But it is an interesting point, uh, that this black box AI, when developers of platforms don't even themselves fully understand how the outputs are coming out of the system, it's a little scary, but I think that's where the human intervention is still going to be required.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think we've all who are using AI have those odd moments where it hallucinates or it, it just comes up with some answer out of left field that would be a disastrous customer experience. So companies are faced with, I want the speed and efficiency of AI, but I need a hundred percent in market accuracy and I really do care about my customers and my long term relationship. So we're kind of coming full circle to that. The beginning challenge of email, which is too much, there's too much in the inbox and AI is going to Accelerate that problem. So I think the companies that can use AI to push customer centricity, to push that, just for me, emails on the spectrum. So as an example, part of our role with clients is we enable internal teams and we help them build what's called a playbook, which is better emails faster with a hundred percent in market accuracy across enterprise organizations, which is easier said than done because they have so many teams and so many stakeholders. So we're looking at this from brief to analytics process and we're seeing the value of AI at so many steps, but it's taking the people and the expertise that are in the steps that are owning it and empowering them to do more. And for us, more typically means more versions. We want more dynamic content. We want to get more personalized. So we're not going to say to our clients, oh, good news, you can now send 10 campaigns a day. We're going to say, good news, those two and a half campaigns you send a week, we can now go wider. We can use AI to get more versions, more personalization, increase the relevance of what we're offering the customer so that we win the right to continue that conversation and get that next open. I'll close with something we've learned from Toyota, which is omotenashi, and that saying is treat a, uh, customer like a guest in your house. And the work we've been doing with Toyota, which we presented at Dreamforce, there's probably a video of it online somewhere where instead of sending seven campaigns a month, like each department sending their own campaign, we put them together into one larger campaign and made it super relevant. Something like 6 million possible permutations that can come out of this. And they see a month after month increase in engagement because Toyota guarantees you will always get something of value in their emails. Like that's their promise. And by doing that for the past X number of years, they're not suffering from the same issues we see other companies suffering from, which is they're trying to win the volume game and Toyota's trying to win the relevance game.

Speaker A: That's a good example. And Brad Benson, VP of Enterprise Solutions at JAM Direct, feeling like a guest in my house, I guess through this I do have to caveat as I have the last few episodes when we talk about AI. This podcast is 100% human generated, so trust, uh, me on that one. No AI on this. Brad, thanks for joining me today. I think there's some, some great tips and some great forecasts and I think we can both agree that email is not a fax machine. And it's just part of a omnichannel. Multi point, multi touch personalized. Soon to be AI enabled and enhanced communications channel. That's the best way to put it. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Speaker A: Take care.