A Conversation With Alex Malone and Andrei Marin of CodeCrew

Email is only for people over a certain age, right? Wrong! Both of the email whiz kids from CodeCrew are younger than email itself, but they make a convincing case for the business value of the channel. Alex Malone and Andrei Marin (aka Dr. Drei) and their email marketing agency team at CodeCrew have hit an average of 1,300% ROI across a huge range of clients.

Beneath the modest whiz-kid team demeanor, Alex and Andrei drive results through a clear grasp of marketing fundamentals. Tell a great story. Be useful. Be interesting. Be valuable. You're not fooling anybody — and be yourself.

Steve Jobs has a famous bit about caring how the back of the cabinet looks, even if it's not visible. The CodeCrew crew exudes that same level of craftsmanship and care for detail for their customers and their channel.

Think email is old? Dead? Uninteresting? Stodgy? Have a little fun, and check out this conversation with the CodeCrew.

TRANSCRIPT

A Conversation With CodeCrew

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[00:00:00]

Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. My guest today from Code Crew Alexander Malone and Andre Martin. Welcome Marin Martin. Geez, sorry about that. All good. I'm gonna call you that from now on. And Martin, call him. Call him Martin. Didn't you call him Dre a minute ago when we were chatting?

Yeah.

Alex Melone: Dr. Jay, he's, uh, not really a doctor, but uh, trust me, he's the one of the smartest guys I know. So, you know, might as well just call him that, but it Wait, which to be on the

Matthew Dunn: show, which of you guys is the jack of all, all trades? That's you, right? Right. Alex, I'm the jack of all

Alex Melone: trades. He's the master

Matthew Dunn: of all trades.

The master of all trades. And, and you've, you've teamed up to help a whole lot of companies do more interesting stuff with email at Code Crew, right.

Alex Melone: Yeah, we got clients all over the, the map really doing everything, uh, from what? Selling knife sharpening via mail to fashion, you know, anything you can think of really, [00:01:00] really,

Matthew Dunn: really why, uh, Why email?

Why not?

Alex Melone: Well, I mean, I don't think we have enough time to get into it, but myself personally, you know, it's, it's just a really fun piece of the marketing puzzle. Uh, you know, I've done a little bit here and there with other bits and pieces, uh, but email's just really, I mean, I'm gonna sound nerdy as heck, but it's

Matthew Dunn: fun.

Yeah. It's it, when I saw your bio and I quoted it right, Jack of all trades, and I thought, you know, that seems to be characteristic of a lot of people. Who end up working in email because it kind of requires it Fair.

Alex Melone: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I feel like it's one of the few marketing channels where you really need to use your brain as well to try everything as well.

I, I don't mean in any way to hate on any other, you know, channel. No, go ahead. I, I'm

Matthew Dunn: volume fine with that, but, but you dig

Alex Melone: deep. I mean, you know, it's not just surface level. There is deliverability, which just is its own beast, goes into a crazy, you know, black box of who knows what sometimes. But then there's also just marketing strategy.

There's just the technical. Is on the backend. There's [00:02:00] really a little bit of everything, and that's kind of what makes Email so

Matthew Dunn: much fun. Yeah. And Andre, how'd you end up doing this?

Andrei Marin: Well, you know, I, I think I probably stumbled upon it, uh, a very, very long time ago, actually, quite finally. But, uh, I think we, we have over two decades, Alex and I combined working in the email marketing space.

I used to basically build, uh, themes for CMS back in the day. So programming and then, One thing led to another and I found myself coding emails. I started liking it, and then from there I kind of started learning more about the strategy of it, more about the tech side of it. And I remember a time when, uh, Alex and I used to be kind of the last frontier for, uh, for a pretty big agency with regards to client, uh, questions and the, the deep technical space of what might go wrong with regards to any email program.

And yeah, that's kind of what's. Sparked the interest to maybe try to do things a bit better because we started seeing a pattern of things that could be improved and things that weren't necessarily seeing [00:03:00] enough attention. So yeah, I think that's where we started, but again, it's so long ago that I can't really, uh, tell you for

Matthew Dunn: sure.

It's not the age man, it's the mileage. Um, this, this thing about email, I'd be curious your reaction to this. It, it's simultaneously deep technical space, but also. Remarkably low tech compared to other things you might be doing. I mean, you mentioned coding email templates, and we're talking about a what, 20 year old HTML standard at this point.

Andrei Marin: Oh, yeah. Don't get me ranting on that. Oh, yeah, yeah. The email code basically is so deprecated that it, it needed some love 10 years ago. I'm not quite sure what's happening there and why nobody's actually doing something about it, because, you know, like to talk amp for a second here. Um, like we've, we, we, we've looked into it for.

For, for ages, and we really wanted to make it happen because it has some really, really cool features that can genuinely improve the UI and can genuinely improve the way that people are interacting with email. But then you [00:04:00] go back a step and you try to look at the compatibility and how many email clients have actually, uh, adopted that technology.

And it's so few and far between that. Long story short, it wouldn't ever make business sense to start implementing that, or as part of the process, you would basically be selling overpriced services for nobody to really reap the rewards that AMP could truly get to, to an email program. So yeah, again, kind of a story of how.

Complicated email can be, and then how uncomplicated it can be at the same

Matthew Dunn: time. Yeah, I've got, I've got, uh, I've got, uh, friends and colleagues who, um, among other companies are at Netcore, a big email service provider who built their market base in India and is now, uh, massively trying to move into the US market.

Their experience in India where Gmail is so predominant that AMP is feasible. Is that interactive email [00:05:00] can have fantastic game changing results. They're taking that thesis into the US market and I've chatted with colleagues about it and, and I keep saying a great idea, but Apple. Like, I just don't see it happening.

I don't see AMP as compatible with Apple's privacy stance and that's it. Reactions. Yeah.

Alex Melone: I mean that's, that's, that's, they're such a huge player that, you know, anything they do counts a lot. Yeah, yeah. You know, you, you, you gotta follow them to a degree. So, yeah. With that being said, I mean, I, I, I have to take under stance there as well that I don't, I don't see amp.

Really being able to, you know, be as, as useful as they once hoped and set out for it to be. Uh, it's, it's a bit of a shame cause it's fun. It's cool. It's really, it's fun. It's cool. And we were looking into it, you know, just getting nerdy again. You know, we were having a great time just digging into the details, finding everything out.

But at the end of the day, you know, the use case just didn't really. Pan out in the way

Matthew Dunn: that I think it scratches that itch that, you know, high-tech person stuck in quasi low tech, [00:06:00] 20 year old HTML standard industry. Gosh, I wish we could do this. And if we could just do that, like you can't, not for everybody who's gonna open it.

And that ultimately is probably the deciding factor. I'm, I'm afraid. Take that from a different spin. Are we ever gonna change? The, you know, sort of fundamental working modality of email. Do you see a shot in heck at upgrading the H T M L to something more like, you know, today, well, 50 years,

Alex Melone: something might happen.

Matthew Dunn: Hmm. And, and I think, I think Google's would be a good leader of this, the AMP experiment, which they've led, aop. By, by the numbers. Like no offense technically brilliant, but spark post, what? 0.4% of emails sent. Have a have a, have an amp message body. Oh, that's not a winning number. So, Well up. Uh, changing the HTML platform might seem like a, you know, sort of a more humble goal.

There's still, how do you get, how do you hurt all of the cats, all of the [00:07:00] literally thousands of clients in device combinations along and say, everybody used this now, and it's bothersome because you, you kind of touched on it, Dre, the, uh, proliferation of, of devices. The other places we might. Access that particularly important bucket of information, like they're kind of stuck.

Right? Uh, I guess we'll do it the old way. We'll pull a 20 year old code base off the shelf and make an email client for our classes or whatever else. Yeah. Why, why do we do this to ourselves? Why now you help clients grapple with this? What do you tell them?

Andrei Marin: Well, I mean, you know, I don't mean to, to take things, uh, in a.

Pejorative, uh, kind of fashion. But at the end of the day, anything that the client wants to see is revenue. As long as you're driving revenue, as long as you're careful about what you're doing, as long as the brand is well rep, uh, represented within, uh, every single channel that they're running. Uh, They're not really gonna care about the fact that you can [00:08:00] or cannot implement AMP in an email.

Yeah. And traffics, you might indeed get that kind of one to 2% extra by having AMP in your email and being able to use Gmail to kind of have that whole experience going. But I don't think it's a focus right now. And honestly, to your point a bit earlier, I think that as long as somebody creates kind of a, a platform for broader acceptance, For, let's say it's HTML five.

Uh, if it's not gonna be amp Sure. I think the developers are just in general such a, an excited community to, to get things moving that they will be enough to be a driving factor. You know, we see that even internally with our team. Every other couple of weeks there's somebody from the co-team that reaches out to us and says, Hey guys, I've come across this awesome thing that you can now do, uh, through email.

As of don't, don't get me started on kind of. Chad, G P t and how much we had to, we'll get, hold their horses, we'll get there. But, uh, yeah, [00:09:00] basically we always have them reaching out to us, saying, guys, let's try this out. Maybe client X uh, would benefit from, uh, doing this sort of thing. And yeah, I think it's gonna happen because there's so many.

Young folks that really want to be at the forefront of what's happening and do some really cool things. There's, there's a lot of people that do a lot of research and kind of want to make sure that they're involved with the latest, greatest tech. Um, we just need a platforming. We kind of need somebody that's obviously a higher power than us to come in and say, okay, now this works.

How

Matthew Dunn: about it? The, the standards we're working with now, right. 20 years old, or in some cases more like 40 years old? You know, they, they, they came from a fairly cooperative moment in time when in internet standards and RFCs could, could move forward with cooperation from frequently from competitors, academics, and so on.

It, it seems like in the email space, the pace of new standards has, [00:10:00] has, is really quite slow. I mean, Mimi's the last one I can think of and it's, you know, it's finally getting there, like, oh, global effort to put an icon in your email, Jim Christmas, right? You look at JavaScript by contrast and that language has continued.

As a standard, right? Continued to evolve like dramatically fast. There's, there's new stuff frequently that's really important that really changes what's possible and I don't know how we get the hypothetical committees back together. To say, could we talk about HTML five in email? But I think that's what we'd have to do to really move the dial.

You'd have to have the big players. You touched on Google, but I think Apple for sure at the table saying, you know what? For all the right reasons, Let's move the, let's move this ball substantially forward. Wouldn't that be exciting? It really

Andrei Marin: would. And you know, uh, it's not only that I, I kind of feel like they're, I'm not sure if they're kind of trying to, to stick it to each other.

But, uh, let's take dark mode for instance, because we [00:11:00] touched on amp and Amp not working on Apple. Well try dark mode on Gmail and see how, how much fun that is. So, yeah. Yeah. I just feel like there needs to be kind of a broader collaboration, to your point, people coming to a table and saying, okay, we are dinosaurs now in this industry.

Let's do something about making sure that every single device, and again, moving back to just accessibility and making sure that every single device can render an email, uh, beautifully, efficiently, and everything in between. Yeah. And. Yeah. Uh, I'm not gonna call out any brands, but some of the biggest, most badass, awesome brands out there, if you check their dark mode or if you check their emails from a place that doesn't really offer wifi or good enough internet connection, you are gonna be so underwhelmed with what you are gonna be able to perceive from their, their emails.

Even things like, ALT tags, unfortunately, are still missing in action from these huge brands that should know better and should understand [00:12:00] the fact that if you're in a metro and you're gonna receive an email from X brand, you're gonna want to at least know there is kind of a BOGO going on. It doesn't matter, you're not seeing exactly the SKU on which the BOGO is running because you might remember it for later.

But if you're just kind of. Image not loading. That's all you see. I mean, you're not gonna care for more than two seconds and you're gonna see about

Matthew Dunn: your day. I'm waiting for some, uh, I'm waiting for some lawyer to wake up and realize that the potential for a very big ADA lawsuit, American Disabilities Act lawsuit for noal tags is just hanging out there.

Cuz it's actually the law. You, you gotta have them there, even though people don't. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, there's, uh, there's a, there's a conundrum and I think it affects email in the digital space and probably in other spaces. You know, a, a strong duopoly, even sometimes a strong monopoly can, can move a standards ball forward or a de facto standards ball forward.

You know, take the web, [00:13:00] gee, we're, we already mentioned the company. That's kind of the monopoly choke point on the web. But if you look at how SEO works and. You know what, Google's pushed that forward, right? Cuz everyone's got a got a gen flag to be found. There's no monopoly duopoly really in the choke point for email, which is part of what makes it fun, but maybe part of why it's in stasis as well.

Hmm. So tell me about code crew. Um, what kind of industries, what kind of customers you guys work with? Anyone

Alex Melone: who could see value in email and anyone who we could actually drive that value for them. So, you know, it's been rehearsed a million times, you know, so, uh, you know, as, as we said a little bit earlier, we, we work with anyone from, you know, knife sharpen by email.

Which is a client that we've had for quite a long time holding kayaks, which is awesome stuff as well. Standard paddle boards, I mean, you know,

Matthew Dunn: wait, full boat, you got those guys. Boat Envy. Okay, keep going. But

Alex Melone: really any, anything that can see value in email, you know, it it, we've even worked with, you know, PE defenses, uh, and we still do, so there's, there's always a use case [00:14:00] for email.

Matthew Dunn: Um, yeah. Right. And, and I would guess in B2B it's even more incumbent. Where you've got a marketing department handling the, the, that email cadence, it's more, even more incumbent on them to, to be useful, valuable, interesting. Not just repetitive send. Exactly. And I can think about a few brands that, that I actually like.

Oh, okay. And B2B relationship. Right. But I'm kind of glad I get their stuff. It's positive. I don't automatically delete them. Yeah. In a long time. They are. They're top of mind for that particular service. Maybe it's what you're saying.

Andrei Marin: Exactly. And for instance, we've got an events brand that we work with and they have a D two C side, but they have a B2B side as well, and mm-hmm.

I mean, you're not gonna need the salesperson to reach out to hr. Five times a a month to see if they wanna do anything. But as long as you remain in that HR person's inbox every so often, they're gonna know who you are. They're gonna know about you, and you're gonna be top of mind. They're gonna find out what are the latest, greatest, best [00:15:00] events that they can schedule for their teams.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's a win-win, you know, because again, I think we are now in, in kind of an age where everybody's. So overwhelmed by the amount of, uh, you know, content and messaging and everything that you receive. That yeah, being able to take that half step back and not having somebody actually call in, but having the client call you when they need something is probably, uh, a more organic way of generating

Matthew Dunn: business.

I do find myself not concerned cuz nothing I'm gonna do about it, but I scratch my head about. The attention scale problem that we're all facing, we touched on it, right? How many messages in your inbox from how many different entities and somehow, magically you're gonna keep track of 'em. Think of 'em as relationships and you know, the temptation to commit email su suicide and select all delete.

Sometimes it's there of a Monday morning like, oh, got, I'm never gonna get this sorted out. And we all sold your on. We try new tools, we try new [00:16:00] inboxes and we keep, you know, like, oh, you think, you think AI's gonna come along and say, let me deal with this for you. You think?

Alex Melone: Oh man, I think Andre and I are both, you know, the, uh, the bitter old man in the room when it comes to ai.

You know, it, it's so new. I know we're at a crossroads. There's so much for it to, to potentially become, you know, for good and for bad. Yeah. But I'm just gonna say right now, I, I don't think that it's gonna be the driver that's, people hope for it to be in terms of email. So especially in content, uh, I know that, you know, every time that I see AI on my Instagram feed or just anywhere, Out there, content seems to be the first place people are going to.

That being said, you know, there's, there's a very fine line between. Really providing content that's truly, truly valuable to the contact. And I'm sure AI will get there at some point in time. Potentially in a few years. I, I'll, you know, we'll all see at the same time whether or not it actually gets to that point where it can seem as if it's an actual conversation with an actual brands.

Yeah. Which is something that, you know, we can [00:17:00] do now as humans. Humans are always gonna communicate best with each other. Um, so I, I don't see, uh, really helping in that regard as far as. You know what else it can do. You know, the like, uh, what is it? Mid journey, I think it is, you know, with the photos, so on and so forth, the visuals.

Thank you. Potentially it could help there quite a bit, but that being said, you know, at the same time, if you're a brand, you know, let's look at e e-commerce. You're gonna want to push your product, your image as best as possible, very clearly. And I don't see that really being something that I, that AI has a strength in at this point in time.

Again, you know, I'm also just the cynic in the room. I, we'll see what really

Matthew Dunn: happens. Listen, you, your kids, don't get to play the age card with me, Andrea, are you on the same boat? I really am. You

Andrei Marin: know, let's, let's take a few steps back. What's marketing about like 1 0 1? It's storytelling and we're seeing it as of the last, I think, decade.

Uh, it's not a new thing anymore where brands are definitely positioning themselves. You need to have an angle, you need to have a mission more often than not otherwise. [00:18:00] People simply stop caring about what you're doing. And so when you take that and you take ai, yeah, we have seen people kind of tell us, uh, we're using AI to generate descriptions for our products.

Like, you're not fooling anybody. I know you are. Like I can tell. I've recently actually quite fondly received a happy birthday message that was AI generated. It was too much. It wasn't good enough. I'm gonna be honest. I would much rather prefer, just wish you all the best Happy Birthday men. Uh, and that's it, you know, rather than this kind of resounding congratulate message that was clearly not written by somebody with their own mind.

And, uh, yeah, I'm gonna be honest here. I think that with that whole component of storytelling behind the whole idea of why we're running marketing in the first place, you are gonna need to. Input so much information into that AI for it to actually be able to tell, to tell the story of you, of your brand, of your, uh, company, that it's not gonna be [00:19:00] able to, to do that efficiently.

And, uh, it might be too much to bother in the first place. Like if we are, for instance, at Code Crew to write a blog about the newest technology out there or the newest something in email, we have a very specific snarky tone and a very fun way of making pun and being, being. You know, funny, smart, hopefully.

Yeah. Uh, or just, um, just annoying sometimes. Maybe that I don't think an AI would ever be able to take over that component from our team and, uh, have the same amount of, of, uh, fun and, uh, just engage as well as we can with the content that we're putting out. So, yeah, maybe again, we're, we're too cynic with it and maybe within a few years time we're gonna all be.

Deprecated. And you know, maybe that's a, a talking point and the thinking point as well for us and our team to start learning how to cook or something. But, uh, I don't think it's gonna be that fast. Hopefully.

Matthew Dunn: I'm gonna, I'm gonna argue with one, argue with one thing you, you just said. [00:20:00] I think the reason you have the view, you have an AI.

Is because you're not cynical about email because you actually think it can work if done well, sincerely, it can actually be a channel for connection, brand building, communication. Yeah. And that using a big filler called an AI engine. Yeah. To, to not actually do that job. Is is BS and isn't gonna work.

Andrei Marin: Yeah. Well, you know, I, I keep hearing, uh, people sing, uh, kind of the, the death song for email for the past 12, 15 years. And yeah, here we are. Uh, we brands still averaging, you know, between. 20% on the low side to 45% on the high side of overall e-commerce revenue. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Re replaces Do it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Good. Good luck. Good luck with that theory. Uh, just, just to sort of. Close off on AI cuz I'm sure we could spend, uh, an hour on that. If I were [00:21:00] gonna articulate my concern about AI in the email space, it's that the amount of crap and filler done poorly is gonna climb because people are a cynical about email and not actually sincere about it, as you guys are, that that inbox overload.

Look how how much of your inbox overload honestly comes from crappy mail merge. One of the reasons this is intentional, I'm giving away trade secrets. One of the reasons I put Dr. Matthew in the, in the first name field in LinkedIn is so that I can spot the BS when I get a an a mail merge that says, hi, Dr.

Matthew, delete. Right? Why duh? Because a human being would've spotted it. But the, the crappy mail merch just grabs the first name field and sticks it in the template and sends it to me and expects me to act on it, eh, guess my backside. Right? And we're gonna get that more cleverly tarted up from ai, and I suspect getting your signal to stand out from the noise is gonna get harder.

My concern is that the, [00:22:00] the looks legit noise level is gonna rise and. That is kind of incumbent on us in the field to say that shouldn't be okay. It's like professional standards. Call it what you want, dignity, you know, not being cynical about the channel. We shouldn't stand for that crowd, but we're, but the temptation to cut that corner is always there.

That's why we've got a spam industry. Yeah. Yeah. It, it's gonna be a challenging time. I mean, you know,

Alex Melone: I, I feel like any business out there is always looking for the best way to be as efficient as possible. But that being said, sure. You know, Weigh it out, you know, ma, make sure that it isn't to the point where it's so efficient that it's, you know, just very, very, very low quality.

And I think actually, yeah, tying back to ourselves here at Co Crew, you know, one of our founding, uh, missions was just to make sure that, you know, we, we do as custom, as best as possible. And I think that actually probably will help us quite a bit when AI takes over the world dominates, whatever you want to call it.

And that's, you know, every single email that we do here is very [00:23:00] specific to that brand, that company, that message that they're trying to get out. And I feel like, you know, you will be able to spot the differences between very bespoke emails Yeah. And programs as a whole versus obviously ai, AI generated, or obviously, you know, lower quality, lower key, trying to get more of the mass emails out there without really having the true beauty and value that's in a good email program.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And, and, and then I'm gonna, I'm gonna like take your hand off the mouse and stop talking about ai cuz like I said, we could go on about it for an hour, but we're at the beginning of this. Right. This'll evolve. We'll all keep discussing it. We'll try things, we'll throw things out. We'll say, this is good, this is bad.

There's a whole lot of speculation at the moment, isn't there? There's a whole lot of, there's a whole lot of storytelling to today's point about ai and we're kind of competitive narratives and we don't really know the answer yet, so let's not talk about AI anymore. Let's, let's talk about code crew and customers.

What's, what do you find yourself [00:24:00] with a new, let's say, hypothetical new client? What do you find yourself saying? Oh man, I knew we'd end up having to help them with this

Andrei Marin: deliverability more often than not, you know? Yeah. A bit earlier you actually were, uh, I thought you were gonna go there, but then the, the discussion went a bit sideways.

So often we jump into accounts and, you know, sadly not necessarily a self-managed accounts or team managed accounts, sometimes even agency managed accounts. And you see your kind of regular 25 to 50 K email list be sent. Probably an email every day or an e, definitely five emails a week with no segmentation involved.

And I mean, let's face it, guys, nobody wants that amount of emails. I don't care if you're, if you're selling pans or if you're selling sneakers, nobody wants to receive an email every single day from you guys. We've even seen clients that are sending three emails every single day. Without any sort of segmentation.

I mean, that's enough to drive anybody insane, quite, [00:25:00] quite simply. And we need to obviously come in and uh, and take a look at the, the, the root of the cause. And the problem is that you are fighting with kind of email program that was really successful, let's say a year ago. And they were making X amount of revenue.

Now they're making the same X amount of revenue, but they are coming off of a very dangerous. Peak of sending way too many emails to to, to nail the same amount of revenue. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. So

Andrei Marin: how do you scale back from that amount of emails and then not take a very severe revenue crush when you're doing it?

And that's more often than not the challenge, just beyond. Making sure that you're nailing inboxing in the first place. You know, even like inboxing checked, we're, we're good to go. We are healthy as can be. What are we gonna do now with the immense number of dollars that we were supposed to kind of be able to capture, but we can't anymore because these guys are just through the nose tired of your emails.

And [00:26:00] that's, you know, every so often we get a lead that says, uh, I don't need an agency for email. Email is too easy. And then, Sooner or later you, you kind of take a look in their account. You subscribe just like anybody would, and you start seeing some, some problems that are clearly ones that anybody in the business or anybody following decent benchmarks would definitely kind of recommend that they stray away from.

And, you know, there's always the, the one person that feels a bit too big for, for actual experts and for them to come in and, uh, advise you on what to do. And unfortunately, more. Often than not, that kind of impacts deliverability, which is something that's really hard to come back from. Like once you've screwed up your deliverability and you are hitting so many spam lists and block lists that you can't really understand what's going on where.

And uh, you brought up Spark Post a bit earlier. It's just, there's a lot of work to come back from there. And, uh, it can all be avoided through decency a lot of times through Through what [00:27:00] decency?

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, back to that sort of root thread from you. Um, you, you, you, you touched on it in describing some of the, uh, overgrowth problems you've seen, but there's a funny, ignore the email program and then if it's working, do this back of the envelope math.

Oh. If we send twice as much, we'll make twice as much. No, it actually doesn't work that way. Right? I am not going to buy four pairs of shoes because you send me, you know, four emails a week. It's just not gonna happen. There's a natural limit, tolerance, appetite, market, whatever you wanna call it, what people are gonna do.

Deliverability is such a black art though, Lordy, lordy. What a mess. As unfun as it can, gets as fun as it gets. I mean, I've had some real deliverability whizzes, uh, on his guest, uh, Jan, notorious Sprake, you know, Matt Ver, folks like that. And, and it's like talking to the wizard behind the curtain, like, oh God, but.

Screw it up. And as you kind of [00:28:00] touched on, it takes a long time to recover from the damage. What do you mean no one can open our emails? Uh, no one's even getting 'em. That's, that's the cost of that particular screw up, right? Hmm. Okay. Deliverability assumed problem when someone who comes in the door or, or at least opportunity for growth.

What else? I'd say that that's usually

Alex Melone: the main one. Um, but hand in hand with that, we see list issues. Uh, oftentimes we'll see, we'll see clients coming in the door with contacts just hiding out in their E S P somewhere. They haven't been contacted in maybe two years just because of improper segmentation.

And lo and behold, they say, oh, hey, you know, back of the envelope math as well. We have X number of contacts that haven't been contacted. Yeah, they would love to receive five emails this week. And, uh, we know what happens next. So, you know,

Matthew Dunn: one of the reasons I don't worry about the Terminator AI showing up with a machine gun at the front door is that I have a reasonably good idea how crap the data in the world actually is.

Like everybody's email list. I mean, seriously, we know we work with clients on a variety [00:29:00] of projects and like, here, here's our data. I'm like, oh God, this is so. Bad. It's awful. I mean, this is an industry that still runs on com separated values come on people. So the killer robots are gonna go, uh, this is too much work.

I'm gonna go do something else. Right. The data is data. A couple of, for

Andrei Marin: sure. We, we probably have a couple of, uh, of types of leads. Ones that come in and say, okay, my master list is a hundred thousand users. Mm-hmm. What are you gonna be able to do with that? And then we have lists that come and say, We're actively sending to 50 K users, and you kind of know, okay, so we have 50 K valuable users.

If somebody comes in and says, I have a hundred K list, uh, what are you guys able to do for me? Then you kind of start shrugging and, oh my God, I really need to take a look into your E S P to be able to tell you anything about what we can do with that list, because. I mean, for all I know, 80% of them might be somewhere in the ditch by

Matthew Dunn: now.

Right, [00:30:00] right. Or, or, or, uh, or the, the, the precise ones you don't wanna send to because they're, you know, on a seed list that's gonna screw you. Deliverability. Um, are you guys platform agnostic as far as ESP as an agency? Yeah.

Alex Melone: Entirely. Uh, we've worked with, oh my God, everything out. Well, not everything out there, because it seems like every couple weeks there's something new that we haven't heard of.

Some platform just, yeah, yeah. Using ai, I'm not gonna go using something new, new catch, but more often not, you know, it's, it's the try and true es esp that are moving things forward to a degree. Uh, you know, we work with, everyone loves them. Everyone's sort of, them, you know, bras, so on and so forth. Cordial, you know.

Cordials, uh, a fun one. Uh, we've dabbled in it a little bit. Mm-hmm. Andre's face maybe gives away a

Andrei Marin: little bit of our s very fun one. SF C I'm, yeah, no, absolutely. Salesforce is a big one in the industry and, uh, definitely a reputable one. Uh, cordial is a distant one, not our favorite. Did you ever hear about Lean Plum?

Matthew Dunn: [00:31:00] Yes. Yes. Yeah, but only cuz they're,

Andrei Marin: they're exciting. Uh, is all I wanna say. No, that's good to hear. No, we had a migration that probably, uh, in a previous role, previous life, it probably took us, what, Alex, a year and a half to, to, to actually be able to fully migrate. And it still wasn't kind of an automatic, uh, through and through integration.

It was very manual, very database driven, very. API grossness related. So not to throw any blame to them. Hopefully they've improved massively in the meantime. But that was fun. Let's

Alex Melone: just say it took less time to convince management to, uh, consider other options before it took to finish the migration at that point in time.

But again, it was a few years in past. I don't wanna, you know, talk, uh, talk

Matthew Dunn: anything better about them. But it HARs back to that no controlling monopolies duopolies issue that I mentioned earlier, that there are so many. Email platforms. I mean, I've got a list somewhere that's at at least 180 that are, that are [00:32:00] legitimately ESP of some sort.

Yeah.

Andrei Marin: Yeah. All of a sudden a trigger might be off for a couple of weeks because X coder forgot to get pool or whatever. Yeah. And, um, yeah, you are just in a huge mess and missing a, a big chunk of revenue and not sure where to recoup it from. So that's a big one to think about.

Matthew Dunn: That's where we'll put AI to you is, Hey, would you just, would you keep an eye on this?

Because we don't really know how it works. Right. Hmm. That might be interesting. The, uh, you, you, you touched on it, we didn't talk about triggers and get pulls and so on, but the, the value of the. Other part of your email program, not the, not the steady campaigns that some marketer is sweating bullets over, but the welcome message, the abandoned cart, the sort of regular, somewhat more automated things, which are frequently the most valuable messages.

Someone sends it sort short shrift in many email platforms. They're kind of, oh, you can set it and forget it. You don't wanna forget it. Right. [00:33:00] You really don't wanna do that. Is anyone particularly good at that out in the world? The triggers. I always go back

Alex Melone: to Clavio. I hate to say I love them to pieces.

They nice, they have such a fantastic platform. It's very simple. It, it's simple enough for just the average marker. Cause very little technical experience. You know, it'll, it, it'll let you know when something's gone going awry. And so, It's not a fact, I'd always recommend it to,

Matthew Dunn: you're, you're not, you're, you're praising it because it's earned the praise.

Um, ob obviously, right? Yeah. I, I've said, I was talking with, with a guest the other day about, just about state of the art, of email marketing, and my observation was that I'm seeing, I'm seeing some really cutting edge practice at a surprisingly small. Businesses. And when I try and ferre it down, a lot of times it's like Shopify and Clavio.

Like when, when, when the pieces are talking to each other, you can do your job better with email. Yeah, yeah. Some of the big, the big

Andrei Marin: panel allows you to see, to have very good, uh, visibility into the [00:34:00] triggers, what's happening, when is it happening. Yeah. Profile centric information as well. So, uh, there's a lot to love.

I'm not

Matthew Dunn: gonna lie. Yeah. Well, that's good. What about, uh, what's your, what's your, uh, philosophy at Code Crew on, uh, personalization?

Andrei Marin: Huge. Uh, actually, and you know, again, I hate to, well, let's actually, let's, uh, let's shift gears. Let's not say Clavio or, although, although they are fantastic with this one thing, let's say Iterable, uh, you guys definitely want to make sure that you have kind of zero party data in your E S P that you are then able to use.

To make your emails as custom looking as possible. So whether this looks like, I don't know, uh, Hey Alex, you've got 50 loyalty points that you can use. To buy X thing or it looks like, Hey, Alex, here's a closing item appropriate, let's say a T-shirt for for California. And hey Matthew, here's a jacket that is proper for Alaska.

You know, you [00:35:00] definitely want to be able to have that sort of, uh, flexibility and, you know, for, for instance, we have. Previously worked with one of the biggest, uh, kind of food delivery companies out there in Eatable, and it was really amazing to see how you can kind of show local based restaurants or delivery people and feature them and do all sorts of really cool, interesting things that were now kind of trying to figure out on the clavio side of things as well for our events based client.

Just being able to, to show every single audience, every single demographic. An author of an event that's nearby and way to kind of, uh, get out and about and have some fun. Um, and yeah, uh, definitely something that you definitely want to look into and implement and, uh, I know it can sometimes. Feel a bit, uh, a bit daunting to even take that task on, right?

But start with the small things. Figure out your biggest audiences. So for instance, for our, for [00:36:00] our event, uh, um, business, you don't need to go every single demographic because not every single demographic is gonna be huge on both letters as of the events. So, uh, authors or call them what you may as well as, uh, end customers.

And so we feature on the intensely populated metropolis like. Uh, Toronto over in, in Canada and a couple of others, and then we are able to truly drive those emails to perform really, really well for those specific locales. You don't need to go kind of crazy, and if you're not sure how to insert dynamic code in your emails, well first off, drop us a line.

We can help. But then secondly, you can even start by segmenta, uh, by, by segmenting. Your audience and making sure that only the Toronto based folk Yeah. Uh, receive the Toronto based team. Mm-hmm. It's, it's very easy stuff if you think

Matthew Dunn: about it. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and if you either plan or replan to put the foundations in place to do it.

Right. If you've got, we, we were talking with the company the [00:37:00] other day. I got on a call with 'em and I said, okay, so like, talk to me about your data. What do you know about people in your list? They have a million customers they email almost every day who love their email, and they literally said, we have their email address.

That's it. Those of you who are listening, Alex is just shaking his head silently on the screen here, but that's, that's not, they're not the only ones in that boat, right? All we have is the email address. They're not the only ones in that boat. How do you personalize? You don't know anything about 'em

Andrei Marin: at all.

We've seen the other end of the spectrum though too, you know, with, uh, with kind of workflows that look like there's definitely a factory somewhere that's not only extracting oil from the ground, but also processing it to make. 15 different things. Yeah. From that raw material that they're extracting. But yeah, to your point, I mean, start with a quiz.

Start simple, figure something out. And then, uh, something that we actually did for our, our folding kayak client, they have kayaks [00:38:00] of all sizes and uh, and shapes and cool things, and not everybody needs the same kayak. So we started asking questions through a simple quiz. How tall are you? How often do you go kayaking?

How proficient are you? Do you go with anybody? And then you would start receiving a, a nurture flow that basically shows you, is the product that you need. Not all five or 10 of them. Yeah. And then walks you through the entire

Matthew Dunn: process there, but you're not gonna get a hundred percent even on a good survey.

Here's the one of the conundrums for email marketing. We can do the marketing job better, knowing more about that. Person at the other end, but there's a limit to what they will tell us what, what they'll spend the time to tell us. And, and there's a boundary that differs nation by nation about like what's okay to keep and what's not the pr, you know, privacy, PII zero party, which you mentioned first party data.

And you gotta live. You gotta live, uh, with a really different level of achievement, [00:39:00] record by record. For that particular set of issues, how do you reconcile that? What do you do when someone says, eh, I don't do surveys? That's how they end

Alex Melone: up in that list that, uh, nobody touches for all the years. Huh. You know, there's always a will.

There's always a way. If someone is really, truly engaged enough in the program, you know, they'll want to help you help themselves as well. Yeah. Um, sometimes they're context that you, you understand, won't, don't want to input that data, don't wanna provide you with the information about themselves.

Unfortunately, more often than not, they'll fall into a little bit more of a general bucket. Yeah. Uh, that being said, Again, make sure the emails are targeted to the, the general, just the consumer. Any data that you do have, even if it's scarce, you know, I mean, if it's hopefully more than just an email address.

But again, you know, anything that you have, you can leverage. And so, yeah. You know, if someone doesn't wanna fill out a survey and I can't blame them, uh, you know, I'm, I'm one of those people too. You know, find out any cohort, any kind of associated contacts who could potentially have, you know, data that you could leverage towards that contact.

Sort of like a lookalike audience and Facebook,

Matthew Dunn: I'd say. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like that. Yeah. And, [00:40:00] and it speaks to the value, not need, the value of tying other systems in. Exactly.

Andrei Marin: View of the customer. Exactly. Yeah. I feel like I'm gonna probably drop an email to both cl, both Clavio and Shopify, asking for 5% of any leads that come, uh, after this call.

But, uh, I'm gonna have to plug them again and just say that for instance, an example here would be to, to Alex's excellent point. Just looking at brows data. If Alex only ever searches for socks with. Fries on them. Yeah. Yeah. It means that he probably loves socks with fries on them. Yeah. So give him more.

I'll check it out. My either fries or socks. Yeah, sorry.

Matthew Dunn: So sorry Alex. I, I agree, but I would be pleasantly surprised if I were chatting with an e-comm company who said, oh yeah. We keep track of product browsing and we feed it back into customer profile, c d P, Clavio, whatever. Why? Because I know it's technically possible.

I. [00:41:00] But getting those frequently disparate systems to talk to each other about that is freaking hard. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of cost and, and it seems like it's overkill. It's probably not, but it, but it seems like it. And the fact that an email system is one thing, and an e-commerce system is another thing.

It's kind of the root cause of the, why is this so hard? Uh, cuz they're completely different boxes from different vendors. They weren't actually made to work together. One of the reasons Clavio, I think is kicking butt right now is because, well, to Shopify, a hundred million investment about six months ago into Clavio.

Like, those two companies play together quite intentionally. And I think it's to the benefit of their customers that they do this. I mean, arguably, Hard to do some of this stuff with some of the big iron, traditional, large scale systems. It's harder speaking as a guy who's John e-Commerce for a lot of decades at this point now.

Well, I don't think we'll all be out of a job hanging around the email space. What do you think? We'll be

Alex Melone: good for a while. You know, it's funny, it seems as though from [00:42:00] leads we hear, uh, resurgence at some points in time. Sometimes we'll hear, oh yeah, we've been doing email for forever and, uh, You know, actually I feel like just recently last three or four leads that we've spoken to have said, yeah, I just heard emails this huge thing.

You know, what's going on? How do we get into it? And it, it goes in waves. Uh, as long as you ride the waves, yeah, you're gonna be, you're gonna be good. But, uh, it's, it's not going anywhere and neither is the human

Matthew Dunn: aspect. I think privacy laws in regs, particularly in the US, are actually likely to shove more people to pay more serious attention to email.

I think there's a more than a bit, I'm trying to. Be polite. There's more than a bit of skepticism about some of the large social media channels, both for what seems like never stopping ratcheting of costs and for misbehavior with, you know, with customer data and you go like, Why are you giving those guys money?

Invest in your email program. It's gonna pay off better. Oh, good idea. Right? And not all of the what? Yeah. Here's, here's a simple example. If [00:43:00] Congress banned TikTok, where's that budget gonna go to Code Crew, find them@codecrew.us. Excellent. That was

Andrei Marin: genuine and excellent. As good as it gets. Hold on. Yeah, it's a fantastic point though.

And you know, actually, funnily enough, we tried. PPC in one of the social platforms for ourselves as well. Yeah. Um, and we kind of assigned it a budget to see what sticks and what happens and, you know, the click through rate was through the roof, so we clearly kind of knew how to, to, to po position the ad to actually generate click through rates.

But, uh, that was about it. You know, I don't know if the, the people that clicked through were kind of. 80 year old grandma's, uh, kind of looking for the next thing to need or what. Yeah. But we saw absolute zero interest from some of that generated traffic. And I understand the fact that we are in a very particular space.

We are b2b, we are, uh, looking for brands that are looking to continue growing and better their efforts. I understand all of that, but I still kind of feel like. [00:44:00] There's a big amount of unknown with regards to who your actual end customer is when you're spending money on these platforms, and if you manage to find yourself working with a team that can bring you good enough roi and by any, by any mean, don't, don't, don't hear me wrong here.

Generating traffic to your website and being able to capture their email address in the first place is kind of what. Helps us put food on the table so it's not something that we should be laughing at. Sure. But, um, at the end of the day, once you have the customer, Kind of on home base internally, you are talking with him, but it's not a, a one-on-one conversation.

It's a one to very many conversation. That's a very powerful tool to have. Yeah. So it's kind of funny that not more brands are taking it seriously. And to Alex's point, it's, it's from Stranger Industries. That's. That's true. But we still hear the same kind of approach with, uh, with some, especially on the B2B side of things with some industries nowadays of, oh, do you actually think that [00:45:00] email might work?

I mean, give it a try. See if it works. It's weird. It's 2023 and you're not doing email, but you have this huge list for a while. Yeah. I mean, why have you been collecting those emails in the first place?

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they, they don't do any good. Just sitting in a, you know, in a table or an Excel doc somewhere.

So we should probably wrap up and do, do you know, actual other work. But what are your parting thoughts about the future of email? What do you, what do you expect to see different here? I'm put a peg on it. What do you think will be different in three years? Dre?

Andrei Marin: I think that's an idea. Shameless plug, but I'm gonna let Alex tell you guys about it.

Alex Melone: Nice. For your risk card. Um, yeah. So you know, who can predict the feature? Nobody. That being said, it's one of the most fun things you could do. Uh, I'm not a psychic, but I'd say brand collaborations is probably gonna be a really big thing. We've seen, you know, going back a little bit, just, just trying to figure out any way that you can bring more contacts into your program.

There's, there's always some new way to do it, some ways or better, some ways or worse. We've seen, [00:46:00] you know, platforms that just scrape the internet for email, email addresses. Probably not gonna recommend that, but, you know, if, and going back to brand collaborate. Brand collaborations. If you have a brand that's like-minded, potentially, or hopefully not in the very same space that you're not a competitor, but you can come together and help each other grow, I think that that's gonna be a, you know, a really strong driver to help, you know, increase the size.

Hopefully, uh, you can go ahead and, you know, churn a little bit of, uh, money outta these folks as well. But, uh, I'd say that that's probably gonna be it. You know, we've tried and we've seen so many different ways to go your list to keep them engaged, to have those contacts coming into your list be high value.

And again, I see, you know, brand partnerships probably being

Andrei Marin: the way that that happens. Yeah. And we've been working on it, you know, uh, we're trying to, to get something going here, we call it, uh, lovingly, we call it Tinder for brands. We're trying to get this thing going. It's still a bit in beta, but um, yeah, it's basically gonna be this place where different brands come to us.

We [00:47:00] then pair them together and we try to. Help them help each other out. So Alex gave that fun example of a, of a knife sharpening, uh, brand that we work with. What if that knife sharpening brand comes into collaboration with a wine brand and with a meat sourcing brand? Absolutely. And they do an email together and everybody has a lot to win from it, right?

Not only actual money from, from sending and cross promoting the each other, but. New contacts that they can then continue to promote to. So we've been building this one little thing called cro. Hopefully it starts helping out some more brands than just the, the few ones that we've been, uh, able to work with as code cruise clients, because this is something that's kind of destined more for the masses rather than Yeah.

Uh, for what a, a, a normal agency size can, can, uh, service. But yeah, that, that could be a big thing that we are seeing some brands do, but it doesn't have mass. Adoption yet [00:48:00] unfortunately, just select brands try to do it. And it's probably because it takes such a long time to source these brands and kind of make sure that there's strong enough connection with regards to the, to the scope.

Uh, the moral values are, are there, but then you're not actually competing for the same dollar that that end customer has to spend.

Matthew Dunn: That that's an exciting. Concept. I hope you guys knock it out of the park with that. That's awesome. So if someone's listening and they want to, I wanna talk with these guys.

Where do they find you again? So you can always

Alex Melone: find us at Code Crew, us. All of our socials are linked at the bottom. Uh, that being said, you know, just to make it quick and easy, if you find out it's on Instagram or Facebook, we're just code crew.us. Twitter is code Crew. Us, no dot and LinkedIn. Word Co inc.

Follow us, talk to us. We, we really love always talking to every lead, every contact, even if we're not trying to sell you anything, we'd love just nerding out. So hit us up wherever you can.

Matthew Dunn: Here you go. Which, what we got to do. I'm, I'm so glad that you guys, uh, agreed to come on the, uh, the [00:49:00] show and talk this morning.

I appreciate the time. We really

Alex Melone: appreciate it too. This was a lot of fun. We need to do this. What

Matthew Dunn: weekly can we set up a weekly? Yeah, absolutely. All right. My guests have been Alex and Andre from Code crew.us. We are out.