A Conversation With Brian Minick of ZeroBounce
How email actually flows around the globe, to the tune of 300+ billion messages a day, is a story that may never be fully told. Brian Minick, COO at ZeroBounce, certainly knows a big chunk of the story.
ZeroBounce' lead line is "email validation", but the full range of the things they do for some of the largest companies in the world goes way beyond email validation. Brian joined host Matthew Dunn to talk about the complex back-end world of email in some depth. They cover deliverability, validation, SPAM, Gmail, open rates, reputation, AI and even "known complainers".
Brian has a deeply informed and passionate grasp of his field, which really comes to life in this conversation. If you use email in marketing or service, this episode has some extraordinary insights about how it all works, and how to make it effective for your business.
A Conversation With Brian Minick of ZeroBounce
===
[00:00:00]
Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of email. My guest today from the diagonally opposite side of the continent. Brian Minnich, c o o at Zero Bounce. Brian delight to meet you and welcome aboard.
Brian Minick: Thank you Matthew. I really appreciate you having me today and, uh, look forward to a good
Matthew Dunn: conversation.
Just two, uh, just two email gigs hanging out on Zoom, talking about email and, and tech and stuff like that. Hey, fill people in on Zero Bounce first, like where do you know, where does the company fit and what's it do? Yeah,
Brian Minick: sure. So Zero Bounce. We're a email validation provider and what we're doing where software is a service, we have an online platform where customers would take.
Database or CRM or mailing list, whatever kind of they're collecting with emails, bring it into our platform. We would scan and run through them to see who's got a good email [00:01:00] address and who's got that. Um, and we'll give you kind of an output based on who, if you were to send marketing campaigns to, who would actually receive your emails and who would not.
Yeah. Uh, and so, you know, our goal is to help kind of increase and boost ROI on, on marketing campaigns. And also we kind of, uh, promote healthy and clean. There's just been so much churn, especially in the last few years of the pandemic. Uh, you have to get that data cleaned up and, uh, that, that's really what we do and we help.
Uh, there's a lot of gray area and maybe we'll get into that today. But, um, you know, we kind of help sift through that gray area with you.
Matthew Dunn: So your customers, among other things, are making the investment to work with you so that they can actually get email in the inbox, right? Their deliverability doesn't get hammered, um, or they don't waste a ton of money on addresses that are not not worth sending to and so on.
Brian Minick: Yeah, absolutely. So there's, uh, there's bad data that people continuously pay to store system by system. That's, that's one thing [00:02:00] that's just like instant ROI for anybody who's paying for something like that. Yeah. Uh, auto usually, especially appears in any of the mainstream softwares, pays for itself on month, month zero, really, uh, when you get done with that.
So, um, but beside that, it's, it's more about who, who's actually gonna receive your email. . Um, and getting again, some of that risky data out. No two businesses are the same. And so we kind of really get a, a fine level of detail in between to help guide those people, uh, based on their type of business. So, uh, if you'd like me to go in more detail, I could, but you know, I wanna have a good conversation to you about email.
Matthew Dunn: No, that's a, it's, it's a good top line. One, one of the, one of the pleasant surprises about working in the email space for the last few years for me. Justice started grow. Get a, to get a toehold on how complicated it is. Yeah. We all go send. , it's like wallpaper, right? Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. . It just works. We take it for granted.
Nuh. It's actually a whole lot more complicated [00:03:00] than that, especially at the scale that, you know, that you guys and that your customers
Brian Minick: play out. Yeah. And you know, we've found a lot of different things. One of the interesting things is, uh, we're working with some of the largest corporations in the entire world, right?
So, and they're on Fortune 50. These are companies you would assume, and we have a handful of 'em, I just can't name 'em, but Sure. Uh, you know, these are companies that you, you all know, everybody knows they hold their products and, and things of this nature. And so even they don't get free passes when it comes to getting their emails into the inbox.
And that has really opened my eyes, right? Yeah. It actually, they have, they have, uh, because they send at such large levels, their reputation is even more important. No, I don't wanna say more important, but it's incredibly important to the. Success of how they send those campaigns out. And so when I said there's that gray area, we have clients that have, you know, just lists that are 20 years old.
They've, you know, it's when they started the business and they're just continuously building it, but they're never cleaning it. Yeah. Uh, and then we have other people where they're acquiring data and they don't know who to send to. And so, you know, [00:04:00] those two businesses, while they both contain emails in their database, what they're trying to accomplish is totally d.
The types of emails they would use within their list might be totally different. And so that's where we kind of really helped and sift through it. Uh, known complainers, people who mark you as spam, we can identify those people before you ever send. Uh, so, you know, it's, it's, our goal is to really help make sure you keep and have a good sending reputation.
Matthew Dunn: So known complainers. I quite like that ain't a t-shirt, right? That's, yeah, that's known complainer, , you know, that's
Brian Minick: interesting. I'm going to a trade show pretty soon. We're gonna present. Maybe I should come up with something. Do you know your non complainers? That'd be interesting. Oh, that's,
Matthew Dunn: that's priceless.
Hey, you used a word and, and, and I always try and keep in mind that everybody plays a degree of. Baseball on the particular, uh, field. We're on email in this case. Sure. Um, you used the term reputation that's got a very specific meaning in the email space. Can you delve into that a little bit?
Brian Minick: Yeah. So as a sender, you have a, you [00:05:00] have a reputation that is built, uh, both can be positive and can be negative based on actions and also behavior of the users who receive your.
So, um, by default they wanna give you benefit of the doubt. They start you with a, a decent reputation. Uh, and so they will kind of get you into the inbox and they'll try things and see they're waiting for customer feedback or, or inbox feedback. Use your feedback, right? Yeah. Yeah. And as soon as those people start kind of marking you as spam and things of this nature, they, they start to really heavily impact what your reputation looks like, which affects on the network level, uh, you know, all of your campaigns.
So if Gmail. Starts to kind of say, eh, I'm not sure if, uh, I'm not sure about this, the sender, it's gonna affect everyone who's on Gmail, including G-Suite business users. And so that network is really starting to talk to each other and make, uh, informative decisions based on feedback and actions that are taking place on their entire platform, not [00:06:00] just with you on a one-to-one basis.
And so, uh, people have said to me things like, oh, email's dying. , uh, are you worried about the future? And, you know, and I know that's, that's the topic. It's, I think it's the complete opposite. Um, we've seen, you know, with the pandemic just such a huge shift of people moving towards email and, uh, people with no clue how to even start.
And, you know, so we're seeing a lot of brand new players coming into the game and really, uh, no one has proved to me a cheap. Way of communicating at that level. Uh, and so not even close. And so
Matthew Dunn: anyone's closing email? Yeah. Not, not, not even close. Hey, one of the analogies when you were explaining your reputation, one of the analogies that occurred to me was, you know, when you, when you get a car and you get a driver's license, uh, insurance company's like, okay, we'll see how you do.
Mm-hmm. . And if you get a lot of tickets and dents and things like that, yeah. Your rate's gonna go, go up. Yeah. So you're gonna find it harder to, to just go out for a drive. It's gonna cost you more so to.
Brian Minick: Yeah, I like that analogy actually. That's, [00:07:00] uh, that's, that's, that's good and a good way to think about it.
And there's many different levels and kinda d reputation, so, you know, I don't get too technical, but you have your. Uh, your domain reputation. Mm-hmm. , you have your IP reputation. Mm-hmm. of the sending the IP address that you're sending from, you have the email level reputation. Yep. Uh, and then you have the feedback loops that are coming from the end end users providing reputation feedback to you as a sender.
So, yeah, there's a lot
Matthew Dunn: of levels here. Lot of levels and that, you know, that one's, that one's easy to say, but it's a bit shocking when you, when you explain it a little in a little more depth that the notion. That my behavior with messages in my inbox has an impact back on the guy who sent it to me and can be quite a powerful impact.
He doesn't take a whole lot of people going. Spam for your reputation to get hammered. Am I right?
Brian Minick: Yeah. And actually like maybe a really easy and good clean example to talk about with, with your, your, your audience here is we [00:08:00] see a lot of people that come to us, they have these emails like info sales support at, and they send, you know, that's, that's the email they received.
Right? And that's fine. That's, that's normal. It, it's probably a real email address. I'm not, not, not, uh, questioning the, the validity of the email, but what the impact of sending to an email like. Let's say I sent one email to, you know, support at zero and now 50 people receive that email and 45 of them go, what the heck is this?
Yeah, so you sent one email and got 45 spam complaints. It's very detrimental towards towards your reputation. And so that's kind of. We like to highlight these type of emails and, and again, the, the level of detail is just, is really crazy what we provide back and we kind of recommend moving those into separate segments.
Slowing down using the feedback that they're giving you and working through them. So, you know, you don't wanna, not all emails are the same. Uh, we also have like [00:09:00] disposable emails. That might be a new term for some people. Or I like to call 'em burner emails cause it's basically what they're, but they self-destruct.
You know, it reminds me of Inspector Gadget just always love that show. So as a kid, but you know, the self-destructing messages he was getting, it's the same exact thing with an email box that's a self-destructing email box just to get past your. Or get past your coupon block that you want an email address to get.
And so, you know, they're used all over the place. And people are not really conscious of them is, is, they don't even know they really exist that the concept exists. Huh.
Matthew Dunn: Interesting. It, the email, the email list, a company accumulates over time. It's an, it's an asset, but like any asset, like your home, right.
There's, there's some maintenance involved. Right. You better pay attention. Absolutely. The gutters, um, or the thing will stop working as you thought it was.
Brian Minick: Yeah. And it's, uh, I will tell you, it's been a hard battle to, to always convince people too that that quantity in the email space is [00:10:00] not the indicator you're looking for.
And it shouldn't be the measurement of success. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hit a, I hit a million email on my database Right. Or whatever your number is for your business. Yeah, yeah. People get so excited about that. But then I kind of hit 'em with the harsh reality of like, get ready to trash about 30 to 40% of those emails, uh, depending upon your business, it might be smaller, it might be, could be even larger.
A lot of them are garbage. So you have these bots that go after the signup forms. You have these self-destructing, they have no marketing value. And so if your goal is for marketing value, you really wanna pay attention to this stuff. And, uh, just kind of one thing that we've seen to be really helpful is everything I've talked about so far is reactive.
So I have the email and then, you know, I mean, maybe need to check it at that. We're really trying to help and shift businesses to go towards a proactive approach, which is hook it right up to your signup forms and block it in the first place. Interesting. And also we're catch, we're [00:11:00] catching typos there as well.
Interesting. Yeah, sure. Uh, you know, someone gives you a bad email address, especially on mobile, which is heavily in the usage, you know, heavily where people are, are engaging right now and they type Gmail instead of Gmail, we'll actually say, Hey, this is a bad email, and present the. And so we've seen a lot of people also be able to kind of convert.
A, a good intent, a real person, but typo their email address Right. And convert it and bring it back. And so, right. You know, if you block all this stuff in the get-go, it's much easier to maintain. It's like buying a certified Yeah. Car, right. With a pre maintenance package on it. And you, you just, you just know what, what's common, but you don't have to worry too much.
And so we like the proactive approach as well.
Matthew Dunn: Okay. So this'll be the one with the car analogy. That'll be this episode we'll be doing Car.
Brian Minick: I love it. . I love cars and I'm a car guy. So are you a car guy? What do you. Uh, well, I have two young kids, so now I have a board explorer. Okay. The ST version. I like the sporty subs, but I've always had mustangs and, you know, fast cars.
Yeah. Okay. I
Matthew Dunn: was gonna say you 2, 2, [00:12:00] 2 young kids, you minivan time or something like that, right?
Brian Minick: Yeah. Can't convince the wife. She's still No, no minivans. I
Matthew Dunn: got true story and somehow we'll relate this to email, but when my sons were hitting sort of teenage years, I, I hooked back to my youth and I, and I lucked out and found a 1946 Willie's Jeep Wow.
And, and bought it. And so they learned a stick shift and they learned that under the hood isn't that scary? And that, you know, a, a connects to B and makes it do something and mm-hmm. took a lot of. , it took a lot of the mystery out of, I mean, granted very simple car, but it took a lot of the mystery out of that basic, you know, thing that we use all day, every day.
And here's, here's how we hook back to email. I said, am I wrong or is your generation a millennials? Uh, are they actually not as technically savvy as, as other older people think? They're, and, and my son's both said, oh yeah. Like our peers [00:13:00] don't know a thing about how all the digital stuff works. They, they think it just works.
Yeah. Like email. Yeah. They think it just works.
Brian Minick: Yep. Yep. It's, it's, uh, it's, my background actually started in software development, and so, uh, I went from software development to kind of managing, uh, some, some companies within the software. And so I started to move into operations and then found my sweet spot, which is operations in a software company.
Yeah. It's, it's just, it's pinpoint where I. Um,
Matthew Dunn: and so keeping the trains running on time. Yeah. And,
Brian Minick: you know, it's great. It's, it's really great. But I totally agree with you. I mean, sometimes people just, uh, you know, when you click the button, does it work? And my developer brain always goes back to like, do you know how much actually is into that click?
Uh, and, and you know, it's not, it's not a jigsaw. You just pop it in and it works, you know? Yeah. Everything's gotta talk and everything's gotta work. Right. So I certainly appreciate the, uh, and it,
Matthew Dunn: it's, it's. Wired up in a much more [00:14:00] fragile way than any of us think it. , right? Like, why is this, you know, website not working?
Why is that app not working? I'm like, oh, dang, there could be so many reasons. Yep, honey, I, I'm sorry it's not working a, I didn't write it. B probably don't care, you know? Yeah. Close at restart. Try to get a whatever, but.
Brian Minick: Oh yeah. Has become tech support. Yeah. For all these other
Matthew Dunn: companies. Hardest machine civilization is ever created.
The net if, I mean, if you wanna just think about it in the abstract, this is the most complicated thing we've ever put together and have, have working in an interdependent way. So yeah, it's complicated. Um mm-hmm. and, and email. At the ungodly volume of email flowing around the planet is not a minor part of that great big machine.
Even though we all use it, we all take it for granted. It's sort of like wallpaper, et cetera. Mm-hmm. , like out there are literally thousands, tens of thousands of people involved [00:15:00] in keeping, you know, keeping the roads rolling as, uh, as Heline used to.
Brian Minick: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of dependencies. Mm-hmm. . So, you know, everything is dependent on everything else in a way.
So, uh, you know, we see it all the time. We, you know, something downstream goes, goes offline or upstream and, you know, it affects that service, which affects that service. Yeah. You know, and so it creates that, that ripple effect behind it. But, Yeah. I mean, look forward to more of this. This is the future. This is where we're headed
Matthew Dunn: for sure.
Well, and, and, and email's getting a, it is going along for the right. I'm, I'm, I'm in complete agreement with you that it's not gonna go away. I'm not surprised that we saw sort of a, uh, a bump, uh, during the pandemic in, in, in terms of use. Um, when you talk to someone about generational view. Oh yeah. But kids don't use email.
Yeah, it's 17 and a half. They will, I guarantee I've watched it over and over and over. Like college applications, job applications, whatever it is. Welcome to real life. You need an email address? [00:16:00] Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Right. You probably need more than one. Right. Just no way around it. Yo, you're apply for a job?
Yeah. What's your email address? Right. You're signing up for your fill in the Blanks Bank account, credit card. What's your email address like?
Brian Minick: Yeah, it's, it's the unique identifier for it is a ton of your, it is everyday use that, whether you know it or not, your health insurance, your, yeah. You know, all these things.
It's all, they're all tying all back to email and, and just kind of shows how critical
Matthew Dunn: it's, and, and Lucy, Lucy goosey and open to, you know, open to misbehavior as it is. It, it, it, there's still at least some modicum of the individual. can exercise a degree of control over their email address. Mm-hmm. and I quit both.
I mentioned my sons, I quit both of them with Gmail addresses fairly early on. Mm-hmm. , it's like I don't wanna do tech support for the rest of their lives. They're gonna need an email address. I certainly don't wanna pay for it if I could avoid it. Okay. Here you go guys. I've set you up with [00:17:00] email addresses.
What's that? Nevermind you'll use it, right? Mm-hmm. . And now, a decade later, they're still using. and, and probably have a zillion things wired into it, right? It's their de fact. Identifier their home address, um, on that. And I didn't, didn't, at least I knew not to, not to make it our, our i s P of the moment.
Right. I can't change internet providers. I'd lose my, my email address. Yeah,
Brian Minick: right. . Yeah. We're finally catching on to why they, that. Yeah, we're, uh, why was always free, right? Yeah. Why was always free, like really locked you in, uh, much more than, than people who even understood it. But AOL is a great example mean, so people got locked into aol, their.
And, you know, when you tried to get away it was like, but that's my email address. Right? I, I did the same thing. I created, uh, two email accounts for my, my kids who before they could even walk, they, they have email addresses and actually used to, into a fun way of sending photos for my phone to that email.
They always have a place to [00:18:00] go back. Oh, cool. Uh, and see this stuff. And so, I dunno, I'm, I could be overthinking it. They have a long way to. I don't know. Gmail seems like it's gonna be around for a while. They, they really are kicking down a lot of doors here, so we'll see. They
Matthew Dunn: are a big player. I mean, we can, we can jump onto that one for a second.
I, I, I, I, I've looked from a number of angles at, uh, at the sort of shifts in who dominates what piece of this, uh, ecosystem we call email. Mm-hmm. gmail for. Dominates. The, the, the inbox itself, it's over 60% of, of inboxes, if I remember the last time I looked at the litmus data. But there's this funny Cold War going on because Apple has over 50% of the email clients use to get to those inboxes.
And they don't do things the same way, and they don't have the same philosophy about the world and privacy and things like that. And [00:19:00] you gotta live right at the intersection of all those.
Brian Minick: Yeah, I, I mean, I really appreciate what Apple's done. Um, yeah. And I really appreciate what Gmail's done, to be honest, and what Google has, has accomplished.
They, they have absolutely defined what the interface should look like. Mm-hmm. , I, I still see, like, for me, the Outlook online is awful. I mean, I just like, I don't know anybody who, who likes it, the 365 online. Yeah. Uh, I've supported businesses that used it. It was like, How do I even see my email? I can't find it.
So I, I Gmail's, in my opinion, has done a really good job. Yeah. Making it easy and, and you know, putting it, putting on any of your devices super easy. Uh, very friendly. The snooze reminders, the automated stuff Yeah. The auto replies that they can kind of suggest for you. They've done a, a great job, but I, I really appreciate what Apple's done with some of the privacy stuff, because I see it in a different world too, and how many data breaches are happening and how many people are just, you know, leaking their info.
Uh, when you make the email [00:20:00] unique, which is what they've been able to accomplish, to spin up a unique email, sometimes per service that you're registering with, it breaks that, oh, well, that's the same username on the bank. Oh, that's funny. Oh, that's the same username on their paycheck process. Oh, that's funny.
Uh, you know, and then they, they have access to everything in and everything about you. And so to really start to break that down, I think is, I think it's a good thing, but I don't know, you know, if everyone's taken advantage of it as they.
Matthew Dunn: Um, Apple's big privacy on email shift, what, a year and a half ago now?
The, the June 20, the, the mpp? Yeah. M ppp, um mm-hmm. . , it's been, it's been absorbed and, and it's now sort of the law of the land, if you will. And what I see from email marketers is they're, they're kind of accepted it. They're used to it like, okay, yeah, I guess we can't get measurements of that and we won't know whether or not, yada, yada, yada.
So-and-so is opening our email or not. There's some losses there, [00:21:00] there's some gains there, but for better or. It just is at this point, I, I don't see Apple reversing that just because half, half a dozen marketers are missing their open rate measurements
Brian Minick: or something. I, um, I see 'em doubling down and just continuing to find new ways to make it harder.
And, you know, from an email marketing perspective, which is what all of our businesses and, and that's how people, our customers, they work with email marketing. And so I actually like it and I'll tell you why I like. It's a challenge, but I love change. I embrace change, and actually I'm in our company. I'm one of the people who push for change and push towards towards new stuff.
So why I like it is because it turns a useless metric to even more useless. So open rate, was always, in my opinion, has always been useless because open rate is also, I, I'm on my phone and I opened it and I immediately closed it. Is that a good, it's not a good metric. It never has been. Never has been. Um, and [00:22:00] so, you know, now you're talking about clickthrough rates.
Now that's the next level that you can get to. It's better. Um, but you still have that, you know, oh, I hit it with my finger. I accidentally clicked it. Kill the window, it still pushes back to the ultimate goal, which is what were you trying to accomplish in that email in the first place, and did that statistic get hit?
So if it's converting to a purchase coupon code, sign up webinar, you know now how many people are signed up on your webinar. It makes them really focus on the goal, in my opinion, versus click bait subject learning. Yeah, yeah. You know, and it's like, oh, I had an open, great open rate, but a terrible clickthrough rate.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Cause you're, you're focused on the wrong
Matthew Dunn: thing and not, not all email messages have the goal of getting me to some other channel web or mm-hmm. app or something. It's true like that. Like my favorite email of the day usually is a newsletter I subscribe to. I open it, I read it, I close it, right?
Mm-hmm. , I don't, I don't think I've [00:23:00] clicked on a link to, to the site that's related to it ever. Why? Because I get what I want in the email. And I've been paying the guy for years to get his newsletter, you know, win-win equation for, for both of us from my perspective. Yeah, yeah,
Brian Minick: yeah. I agree. Definitely a different use case where it's more you just own, your intent is to ingest, and so the metric there that I would be looking for if I'm the sender is what's my own subscribe rate.
Right. And I'd be focused on. You know, dropping my own subscribe rate and did I do something differently that really pushed that up? Yeah. And so, but again, it's still, it pushes it past just open, right? It pushes, yeah. Cause that's, that's not the best metric I can fake that. I can show you a hundred percent open rate, like, cares what happened, what, what's the, what's the end result?
And that's always my opinion. What you should be focused on is getting towards the end result and measuring the end result and optimizing.
Matthew Dunn: Are we going to, as, as Apple continues to evolve privacy as [00:24:00] as, as we broadly, you know, policy, government level, continue to push for more privacy? I suspect that's a fair statement.
Are we going to know even less about the people on our list?
Brian Minick: Um, yeah, I, I think so. I, I think you're gonna see much more anonymous type data, scrambled looking data, right? Encrypted, uh, in some sort of fashion. And so again, yeah, it's gonna come with challenges, but I think as we evolve, we always either overcome the challenge and find something better out of it.
or you know, we just, we just have to adapt. And ultimately, I think that's what's going to, what's gonna come out of all this stuff is marketing's not gonna die because they, they killed all ways of your tracking. Let's say a hundred percent of your tracking goes away. I don't see us as a business stopping email marketing.
Sure. And I don't see us stopping our, our ad placement. Yeah. Right. And so, You know, if you, if you think [00:25:00] like that, then of course you're gonna drown your own business. But you know, we have to push through it and ultimately stuff will come outta it, right? Behaviors, behavior can still be measured even anonymously.
So AB testing through your website did that color button. I mean, these things, they're small things that it doesn't matter if that's me or you, and I know it's you or. , it just mattered actually what converted better. And so I think it moves us towards smarter behavioral type tracking. Mm-hmm. And I don't think we're there yet.
I don't think we have all the technology to support that, but uh, that's where I start to see how marketers really start to focus is on what's the behavior. Cuz ultimately your numbers are trackable, right? Your sales, your new customers, your Yeah. The actual is whatever, you know. Yeah. Your, your business is trackable when you have all the data that you need.
um, the fill in the blanks, I think that's where it's just gonna get my opinion a little bit, uh, scary. And then hopefully more colorful if you are creative enough. [00:26:00] Wait, delve into scary a little bit. Well, for the people who don't see it coming, and all of a sudden MPP is released and all the email marketers throw their hands up and go.
What do I do? Yeah. You know, like in, instead of trying to solve the challenge, focus on your goals. It's just my business advice, right? Yeah. And so I, and I've seen this in our own business, our email marketers, what are we gonna do? You know, we, we, we start tracking should we change something? It's like, no, don't change anything.
You know, would you have changed some, like, change for the right reason is, is is how I see things. So, uh, when I say scary, I think it's because. I see it as more, um, I feel more cutting edge. I feel more educated and understand kind of the, the spectrum here. Whereas, um, and there's nothing wrong, but for sure the whole entire marketing world is not as advanced as, as other pe some people are in it, and so I think it's gonna get scary for the people that that don't know how to navigate.
Yeah, yeah. Dark water. [00:27:00] Water, right. And they've never been there and, you know, so scary there. , you know, you gotta push through it and, and get to the right place. Well, also, also
Matthew Dunn: scary in that, uh, let's see if I can articulate this well. Um, we, we had a temporary and surprisingly temporary, uh, sort of set of norms, right?
Oh, I can, let's use email. I can send email and I can get measurements of whether or not people. , um, that was, that lasted for like 10, 12 years. It wasn't forever. And to think of it as, as a fixed north star, you can always use it and it's scary when it goes away. Well, it was, it was temporary in the first place.
And if you understood the mechanisms underneath it, you said it wasn't actually, that couldn't measure in the first place. Why were you using it was the wrong thing to, wrong thing to focus on, you know, the lipstick, not the pig or something like that. . Um, yeah. And I think, honestly, I think the same. of third party cookies now it's a [00:28:00] huge, the advertising ecosystem that spun up around the ability to sort of drop additional trackers.
23 on average. Um, inside my browser session, it looks like it was normal on the way business and marketing were done. It was very temporary and I'll be perfectly happy to see it. Go bye-bye. .
Brian Minick: Yep. I mean, even, even, uh, so I also come from some traditional, uh, marketing where I was part of an agency and we did print marketing and direct mail.
Right. Do you have open rates on direct mail? Yeah. Right? No. Do you have click through rates, right? So what, what's you measure? Right? How many people, you have a tracking number, that's something that usually we'll see, we'll see Unique tracking phone numbers, and now you're measuring that part. Right? And so to me, I see it as very similar.
Yeah. Uh, where, you know, you can't focus on, so for example, you buy a list and it's, it's an abandoned apartment building. You delivered a piece of mail to every single tenant that doesn't exist. If that's your metric is delivery rate. [00:29:00] Then you look like a rockstar. But if you're rock, if your message was to, to book an appointment and you have zero appointments, yeah.
You failed. Yeah. And so, you know, it's, it's again, it's seen past just the fog right in front of your face. You have to dive through that and, and get to your drive towards the, the, the real goal you're trying to accomplish and, and always have in mind stop being scared of the things that come in front of it.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It's a, it's a means it's not, it's almost never the. emails and marketing channels. It means not, not the end. Uh mm-hmm. in, in and in and of itself. Um, so you came from other domains, dev, I think some web dev, if I remember your LinkedIn profile correctly. Yeah. And agency world. Um, and then you , you ended up in this one.
How was it to learn this space? So,
Brian Minick: um, well, understanding email was pretty simple for me because if you've ever built software, you have to send notifications and so you know how to connect to a mail server and [00:30:00] kind of send the commands that way. So that part was actually pretty simple for me to pick up on.
Mm-hmm. , what I did not see coming and what I never had on my radar. Was all that gray area that I told you about, the kinds of email that's out there. So, yeah, uh, you know, you have these complainers, you have litigation emails and domains where they're, they're no litigators. If you email them, uh, they're, they're, they're happy to slap lawsuits towards you because you shouldn't emailed them.
Um, you have spam traps, which are built by the ISPs and the different kind of email providers intentionally made for you. , uh, well, you should never have their, that email is, is the, the fact behind it. But if you do send to it, you're automatically blacklisted on their platform. Right. Uh, and the only way you would have it is because you either scraped data off the web or you bought a list of somebody who scraped data off the web and used that.
Yeah. And so I never really had any clue these types of things existed. And, you know, you just, you're just not thinking about it. And I've been [00:31:00] in marketing my whole. , uh, and, and tech. And so it was just really interesting to see that level of, uh, detail kind of surface. And that's, that's one of the things that I really like educating people on and kind of talking about, because I think people just always assume it's an email, right?
It's, it's you. Yeah, it's me. And, and it's really not, there's unmanned email, but there's probably more unmanned emails than there are real people behind it. Interesting. Yeah. Um, and so, you know, you have. , you should be aware of it, is, is really kind of what I like to, to educate on.
Matthew Dunn: Hmm. Um, am I accurate in saying that email as a, as a whole, the sort of, the, the, the backend, well, many of those gray areas exist is, is a self-regulating industry to a great extent.
Brian Minick: Um, I mean, there's no, there's not a lot of law behind it other than kinda [00:32:00] gdpr and that's subset. Right? But if we kind of stick in the US Yeah. Um, I mean it's, it's really still an, an open concept. It, it's, there's no stopping. , it's hard to to, to track it back to an actual person. Right. And so I would say it's actually pretty under-regulated.
Um, I don't know if regulation would be good or bad
Matthew Dunn: for it, but, but, but I mean, but, but, but, but, and I use self-regulation intentionally. So for example, you talked about, you know, the impact on reputation. If, if, you know, if you do a bad job on ascend reputation as defined by set, by, monitored by a whole bunch.
Participants in the industry, but it's not like there's a law book somewhere, right? That says, here's the formula that's gonna change your reputation. The, the, the big, some of the big players, Google in particular, I think play, uh, play a particularly, uh, impactful role in [00:33:00] that measurement, but, We didn't all get together as a, as a nation or the UN and say, right, hey, let's put Google in charge of that.
Like it's just sort of happened as a self-regulation to keep the channel flowing, to keep the system working. And I'm like, I'm actually, I'm great with it. I actually think that's a remarkable story because there are a lot of digital domains that haven't self-regulated very well. This one has. , the volume in your inbox is the proof, the reduction in spam.
Mm-hmm. , even though I still get some. And so do you Reduction in spam is the proofs. Like that's a heck of an interesting success story to me. I would
Brian Minick: totally agree with you. Um, You know, where, where there has been regulation, not in a formal way, but is on what, what I like is it's actually creating separation on the provider.
And so, you know, Gmail doesn't have to do it. The way does, it doesn't have to do it the way Outlook wants to do it. Microsoft. And so when, when you say, oh, there's no [00:34:00] rule, there's no, there's best practices, but it's an opinion to be honest, yes. It's no, no, no, no one can tell you there's, there's not. A handbook with, you know, section two 13, follow this protocol and this is how you do it.
Yeah. Uh, there's best practices and no one person actually I would think has the best practice, right? It's, it's almost, you gotta kind of collect from everybody and grab the good stuff from it, uh, and, and create a formula that works for you. Because what, what what's interesting is just the type of business you have, the prescription is different.
And so, uh, you know, You can't just follow a Google guide, you can maybe get a good, good idea from it, right? Yeah. And it might work for your business. But yeah. You know, then I have a guy that wants to send to 2 million emails that he just purchased and he is like, what's the best way? And I'm like, throw it in the trash.
Yeah, don't do it . That's the best way. And so, you know, that's a different answer to somebody like you who maybe has been building it with for years and it's organic growth and it's always been great. And so the [00:35:00] prescription is much different for somebody like that. And so, I, I, I can appreciate some of it because it does make the good provider stand out.
Yeah. And the bad ones really are just deteriorated. I don't even think they do anything on some of these anymore. And, uh, I don't wanna name 'em cause I don't have any here behind it, but what are they doing to improve it? Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: Maybe I, I, not a book I'm gonna write you, so, uh, knock yourself out if you want to.
But, um, the email, e. as an example of a self-regulating quasi free market is kind of intriguing because there really is very. what we, formal regulation in the legal sense that defines this stuff. The technical protocols, which were a, a agreed on in standards committees not set externally by, by some guy in Washington dc.
They've defined the landscape to some extent, but it's remarkably open, [00:36:00] remarkably flexible. We've built on top of these 20, 30, 40 year old standards. Mm-hmm. to do the stuff that we're doing and. , there's a remarkable degree of, well, let's, let's try to keep this thing working. That I, that I get from people in the industry.
Like there's a, there's even a quite a passion for doing the right thing so that this keeps working, so that I can email someone clear across the country and arrange, you know, a conversation and not even think anything of the fact that it. Right.
Brian Minick: Remarkable. Yeah, it's, it's remark one. I don't think, uh, so Ray Tomlinson's, the guy who created the first, sent the first email, we, we actually zero bounce, coined and created national email day in, in, uh, in honor of him.
Yeah. Um, and so, you know, we, we, we actually were able to interview, uh, a family member of his because, uh, I believe he's no longer with us, but, um, and one of the things that we kind of came out of it, [00:37:00] No one saw the future of, you know, you look back to when it was created, they did not think it was gonna be today where it's at today.
And so, yeah, how we've kind of compounded it, enhanced it, made it better, made it more user friendly, easier and mobile. Yeah, I mean, again, I, I don't think we're even close to being done. It's, I, I had a friend, a conversation with a friend the other day who's in business and he goes, you know, he is, he's a, he's in the security world, uh, you know, event security and things like that.
High profile. and he said, Brian, I don't, I just don't understand it. These guys email me and expect a response back in, in 10 minutes. And I'm like, yeah, it's business. Text messaging is, is how I see email in almost today's world. And you know, if you don't reply to an email in a few hours, people start ping you in other ways.
Right? It's like, Hey, did you get this? And. . And so it's, it used to be you could send an email in like a, like a snail mail, right? Yeah. You kind of had that patience. Yeah. In the business world, we're not there anymore. It's, I, I really see it as business text messaging. Um, and I kind of see [00:38:00] the, the future of it going more towards instant deliveries and kind of wanting instant replies.
Yeah. Uh, so
Matthew Dunn: yeah, and, and, and at the same time, Technical affordances of the channel, what it does, like, what it, what it's actually wired up to do on protocols and sequence of data. Um, you don't have things like an indicator that I'm typing my reply as you do in fill the blanks chat client. Um mm-hmm I try to stay on top of and I'll bet you do as well.
Try and stay on top. A reasonable business turnaround for responses. Right. I got an email from so-and-so. Uh, can you make it to Keynote in May? Got it last night. Responded to him this morning, felt like, felt like a reasonable pace to me. He didn't know whether I was working on it. , if I spent days and didn't get back to him, he might deli, you know, delist me from his, you know, [00:39:00] future good to work with, right speakers, right?
There's this culture, courtesy, rhythm, habit, stuff like that. But the channel itself, fascinatingly enough doesn't tell him he didn't know I got it. He assumed I did cuz of the thing we talked about all the work in making the channel continue to work. Um, He doesn't know. I'm writing back. I got the response back.
Okay, cool. That like, that's solved. We're both, you know, content with that particular moment. He didn't need the, um, pacifier, of the little bit. Mm-hmm. , this says I'm typing on his email and if that existed, I suspect it would get abused for sure.
Brian Minick: Uh, definitely, definitely would. . So I don't know. I, I like some of these things and, and the, the differences between like text messaging and the email for sure.
But, um, that's just how I perceive where we are in the world of, especially B2B business. Emailing personal email, I think, you know, it'll come back with a text on the side, right? Hey, did you get my email? Right, [00:40:00] right. Business world, we don't have that luxury and it's really. You know, people, I, I think people are just, they're, they're looking for instant replies and we built our support process around
Matthew Dunn: that in, I was gonna say, I was just thinking of support.
Yeah.
Brian Minick: We have, uh, 24 7, 365 live support. Wow. Uh, not, not, uh, outsourced agencies are our staff team members trained on our product. Yeah. Um, and we have a sla, 15 minutes, we've gotta give a response back to a customer through email and not an automated one. And so, Might have not have the answer. Yeah. Might take more time to get through the answer, but because we just, we've seen it.
I mean, if you don't give them something in an hour, the reply with a question mark, you know? Right. Yes. And the reply again, any update. It's like, uh, we just got it an hour and a half ago. Yeah. So, yeah. You know, we've taken it instead of fighting against it, which is what your customers want, they want instant responses from you.
Uh, why fight against that? Go with it. And then, you know, I encourage [00:41:00] anyone, go look at zero bounce reviews on any platforms and systems that would do it. We have thousands of five star reviews on how awesome our support team is. And so
Matthew Dunn: partially from leaning into that, like mm-hmm. , the expectation that, you know, emotional load of reasonable thing.
If I email this company, particularly if I'm already a customer, I would expect them to get back to me. Why? Because I'm already a customer. Because that's what they're supposed to be there for, right?
Brian Minick: Yep. Yeah. Can we use, um, Just, just to get a good laugh with you here. I don't know if you, if you've heard of Zendesk, I assume you have, it's a ticketing or Sure.
Uh, software to, to manage ticketing and they, they're an email platform. It started as, you know, support at your domain would come into Zendesk and you'd kind of deal with your, your customers issues and they no longer support. Email as a way to get support for their product. And it's always bothered me to the core.
Yeah. That you built a product for email support. Yeah. And [00:42:00] then you don't do email support. Yeah. And you do your email support. Wow. It's, it shook me to the core and I can't believe some board approved this. Um, they used to have it and they took it off, and so I just kind of laughed. You know, again, to me it.
You're not focused on your actual customer goal here and, and you're providing an email support platform, but then you don't provide email support. Yeah, yeah. It, it's mind blowing me. Well, you can, you can
Matthew Dunn: flip it on his head and I'll, and I'll probably show the, you know, the gray hair at the temples with his comment, but to me it's actually a competitive business advantage.
to bother to get back to people in a timely way, to show up to meetings on time and, and other like old-fashioned things like that. Like, come on. Mm-hmm. , like, that's, that's why you're doing what you're doing in, in your business. Like, don't, don't be rude. And it's actually, it's good for everybody. I, I, if you mm-hmm.
go ahead and stay on top of it. Respond. I, I
Brian Minick: call it the basics, the one oh one, but you know, for some people they're like, oh. That sounds like a lot of work. And I'm like, how were, [00:43:00] you know, I just start to think like, well how were you raise and you know, like, and these, all these types of things. It's like, well you want, you want a good business with a good reputation, charge high prices cuz you're quality provider and you're this and you're that, but then you don't wanna do the Yeah.
And so, yeah. Uh, you know, good support goes a really long way. Definitely encourage if you have support and it's, it's on the defense of good or bad. Or you, if you don't feel like it's. and I say the word great, not good. Great. Fix it. Uh, if you have a customer facing product, fix it. Goes a long way. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It's like, it's like answering the phone. What a crazy idea. Actually answering the phone. .
Brian Minick: Yeah. Yeah. Who, who would've thought you, you put a phone number out and someone actually picks it up? Uh, I,
Matthew Dunn: yeah. We, I, I, we have to go there even though we don't have that much time left, but we have to talk about.
AI in this context or in the broader email context a little bit. So where are you as we're in the early days of chat, GT G [00:44:00] P T exploding into the public consciousness?
Brian Minick: Yeah, so I mean, love the tool. I absolutely embraced it. I pushed it and helped push it across our organization for, Hey, the marketing team, you guys gotta look at it.
And I immediately got pushed back, eh, well, you know, it's not a human, it's be, it's natural though, right? And so, as a leader and someone who's running business, you have to be okay with natural responses, right? They people. I think it's gonna take their jobs and they're, they're going to maybe lose it because they had this cutting edge way of thinking and writing a, again, I have no issues with it, but embrace what's also available to you.
Right? And so I see it as, uh, I see Chachi p t as absolutely amazing. So between the replies that it can give you the plans, it can build for you an SEO strategy, it can build for you, uh, a series of emails for your welcome campaign, right? That you otherwise, Would have, you know, if you're anything like me where you can talk, but you can't write, I hate [00:45:00] writing.
I just, I just don't put the words together as, as properly as I'd like to. This is a lifesaver for, you know, for people like this. And so Interesting. Um, you know, I can give you a couple sentences, but if you can turn that into, uh, yeah. Uh, 10, 10 emails of step by step guides. Yeah. I, I don't even know what to do.
I'm like, holy, you. What do I do with that? Uh, this is, this is, it's like too quick, right? You, you kinda, so I love it. Um, I think that we will get more into this as far as the, the replies and the sentence of email. I think it's gonna start to play some more roles here. Females started it, but it's not nearly on a ta e p t level with those kind of quick replied bubbles.
So they're kind of ingesting keywords on the message and then suggesting some real. great for mobile. Yeah. Um, but, you know, I do see, hey, what do you think about this idea? And then a slapped chat, g p t like response right next to it [00:46:00] to feed your brain while you think of a reply or just say, wow. Mm-hmm.
that killed it. Send that one. Mm-hmm. , you know, I do see that type of stuff. And, and the, the, the thing that I see as taking advantage of is time. To me it's just, it's the time and quality is so good. To not embrace it. I think you're doing yourself a, a major disservice. Uh, you know, but for, again, for anyone that can kind of, I don't know if people write that fast, but you can't possibly write that fast, that good, that quick.
Uh, it, it just, I don't know how that's possible. So I, I'm actually really excited towards the future of it. I don't really know what it means for email. But I do think it's going to continuously kind of improve it. I could see it great from an email marketer that, uh, is intelligently sending the emails at the perfect time for each one of those customers.
Sure, sure. Uh, automatically or intelligently selecting the type of content they like. Uh, [00:47:00] these type of things I could see it being very useful for, but how it particularly gets in there, it's gonna be really a big challenge. And they're gonna either have to partner. Yeah. Or by licensing type thing. Uh, or kind of if everyone creates their own, that's gonna be interesting also.
But then if everyone's using the same thing, is it repetitive? Is it repetitive? So there's, there's challenges. Yeah. There's gonna
Matthew Dunn: be challenges for sure. We're gonna have just, just on the math of it. Okay. We're going to have, we're gonna have multiple. AI engines to choose from, but not an infinite number of them.
Cuz currently it costs a billion dollars to train one of those bad boys. So it's the sport of kings. You and I are not gonna lo, you know, we're not gonna tee up our own, uh mm-hmm. AI model. Why? Cuz I don't wanna put a billion dollars into that if I can use the API to talk to someone else's. Thanks very much.
Right. Good. But mm-hmm. the number of ways we'll experiment and try and figure out what's this useful for? How does this make business or. Better, practically infinite. I [00:48:00] mean, I, I love your response. Like, play with it. Try it. I don't know if, and if you don't like the pros, don't send it Right. Or rewrite it or something like that.
Yeah. And I, and I, I keep thinking people, the, the concern about it'll take my job fascinates me. Cuz my reaction is if this'll help me do my job better, I've got that much more of a competitive advantage in doing my job. I, I was fighting with. Confessing on myself here I was, I was fighting with learning Java, learning more JavaScript, more in in-depth JavaScript for our project.
And I was like, I don't get how this freaking works. Like, ah, frustrating language. Look for answers. Look for answers. Google Stack overflow, like I still don't get it. And went, right, went to Chatt p t and I'm like, Hey, yo, Skippy the robot. Explain this to me cuz I don't get it. Mm-hmm. , perfectly lucid response with, you know, with sample code that helped me make sense of it.
Just [00:49:00] snap. I'm like, just as a paid teaching assistant, they can have my 20 bucks a month. . It makes me faster. It makes me smarter, and I'm not substituting the output of the. For, you know, what I'm responsible to get done. I'm just using it as an even more refined tool to get the job done.
Brian Minick: Yep. Yeah. Yep. I totally agree.
I totally agree. I'm, I'm actually, I'm really excited about it. It's, uh, it's something that, uh, you know, the second I heard about, I was like, oh my God, how do I get an account? Yeah. Uh, and ran towards it. And they weren't even accepting people that got overloaded like first day or first two days, something like that.
And so it was like, I'm in the middle of the night checking. I'm like, I think , everyone's sleeping. , you know, and just, uh, I, I really like it. I'm, they don't really wait to see what they figure out past it. Uh, again, there's always that scary part of it, of what it could be and what, what we hope. It doesn't go down a path though, cause everyone's, everyone's a little unsure of what that [00:50:00] means for, you know, generational type things, but, yeah.
Um, but
Matthew Dunn: that, that always happens with, with, with sort of a large scale wave. There's always a, a freak out moment. Call it Luddite, call it, you know, whatever. and then you go, Hmm, okay, well what? What good stuff can we do with it? What constructive things can we do with it? And ultimately, you're making a bet on good and constructive being better business than destructive.
No one's gonna say, I'll use an AI to take away your job just for fun. Right, right. Yeah. And you know what? If you were in the buggy whip business, A few decades back, I'm really sorry. I suspect you're in another business now, right? . It just doesn't
Brian Minick: work. Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Matthew Dunn: With all of the large data challenges of a business like Zero Bounds, I suspect it'll end up being some amazing opportunities as as we start to be able to harness the capabilities of AI engines for [00:51:00] even more specific use cases.
Brian Minick: Definitely I, I, I can even see that too, where they start to build certain engines for certain types of things, so Yeah. You know, a marketing engine and they, they kind of box it into a marketing side. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I could argue the pros and cons of things like that and, you know, why do that when I can do it for everybody and have one product and dominate, I, I could argue all of that.
but maybe it's what also creates kind of the differentiation between people using the product and, you know, so who, who really knows. Definitely an interesting, I'll tell you what, I'd love to be, uh, you know, involved in it in some way. Cuz if you're worried about any sort of job security, you shouldn't really be too worried over there.
That's the future. I mean, everyone, everyone's paying big bucks for us. I, I, I love it and I hope you don't remind his name, but I saw meme on LinkedIn and it was post a job application, like a, a listing. And it said, uh, three to $500,000 a year salary. Uh, your job is to sit by the chat G p [00:52:00] t machine and unplug the damn thing if we ring you , and that was their job.
you, it like you, you single handed person in front of the machine, you are the one who has to kill the power. Right. Um, and it's, I, I don't know why, but it gave me lots of laughs and just kind of was like, this is the way, uh, you know, people are thinking like this though. Yeah. Is, is, is the truth is they're, they're.
Especially, you know, generations that don't even understand computers, let alone ai Yeah. Are, are, you know, so, and, and the young people, I think they love it and they're gonna, they're gonna triple down on this stuff as they get more into it, and it's just kind of compound in my opinion.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. I, I do think, I do think that the flood of text and imagery vying for my attention is only gonna get.
Um, and I suspect one of the ways I'll want Skippy, the robot to work for me is, Hey, Skippy, would you go through my [00:53:00] inbox and find all of the crap from your friends? and delete it for me cuz I really don't wanna read it like, and learn what I mean. Mm-hmm. by crap there. Skippy . Right, right, right. Because content marketing webpages, et cetera, like the volume's just gonna go bananas and the quality's not necessarily gonna go up.
Kind of what you were saying about quantity, quality and an email list, you know, quantity, quality and prose. Uh, more typing's, not a better paper. Fair guys. Um, yeah, and the value of actual. , you know, the value of the actual lateral thing that that people are good at. I suspect creative artists who collaborate with AI are gonna surprise that bit cheaper's out of us.
It's gonna be fun to watch. Yeah, I
Brian Minick: actually, I'm, again, I'm really excited. I, I can't wait to see what they come out with it. Me,
Matthew Dunn: me too. Well, Brian, we wandered, uh, we wandered away from email a little bit, man. You okay with that?
Brian Minick: Yeah, I'm okay with it. I like, I like good conversation and, [00:54:00] and, uh, you know, if anything, I hope some of the listeners got some, got some good, uh, insight towards some of the complexity of, of the type of emails besides your use case of sending and receiv.
there's a whole area in between there that just, you know, for us, we just wanna create visibility around it and make people aware of all the different, uh, complexities. Well, and
Matthew Dunn: especially, especially where it's, where it's a, a marketing channel, which is, you know, major use of email these days. Um, don't just hit.
Send, especially at scale, don't just hit send, like mm-hmm. take a little time. It will pay off. It's like, like driving without car insurance or something like that, right?
Brian Minick: Yeah. What, what's the saying? People always say, what's the worst that can happen? Right. Uh, in email space it can be actually a pretty bad thing and pretty catch, create a whole bunch of work.
So, yeah. You know, slow down the thought, you know,
Matthew Dunn: and it costs you messages, Taylor doesn't it? To make
Brian Minick: a mistake. For sure. Uh, it's very easy to make a mistake. I'm trying to think of a [00:55:00] good analogy here of how simple it's to break something and how hard it's to fix it once you've broken it. Right? Uh, you know, like a transmission.
Very easy to have fun in a car and you know, do some donuts and then. Blow the thing to pieces. That's not the, that part's not fun. painful time, money, energy, focus questions, calls, all these things. And, uh, you know, this is what we see a lot from the, from the reactive people that come to Zero Bounce because they come to us with problems and we help them with solutions.
But that solution is not an overnight thing. Uh, you know, and so don't try not to get there. If you, and if you might not, you might also be there and not even know. . And that's another thing. So just, you know, for anyone who's like, oh my God, is that me, I, I do encourage you to kind of come to our website and check some stuff out there cause we can give you some analysis and stuff, but, uh, you know, that can be you and people sometimes don't even have a clue that, that it is them.
Matthew Dunn: Cool. Well, if someone's interested, which I'm sure they will be after this conversation, [00:56:00] uh, zero bounce net is the start. That is it. Yeah. Cool. Well, my guest today has been Brian Minnich, c o at Zero Bounce. Brian, it's been a slice. I knew it would be. Thank you. Thank you very
Brian Minick: much. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.