A Conversation with Kristen Haines of Mailcon

The people that make conferences work are like ducks — calm on top, paddling like heck underneath to keep the momentum up. This is a conversation about conversations, in a funny sense. Kristen Haines, CEO of Mailcon, is in the business of creating events that provide opportunities for meaningful conversations. She’s extremely thoughtful about how to do that well, and her insights don’t stop at the conference business.

Case in point — Kristen -is- Mailcon. She’s the highly-visible, public face of the conference. (As she shared, someone said “Hey! Mailcon!” to get her attention!) It’s more typical for conferences to be ‘their own brand’, and the people who run them to be a bit more anonymous.

What does that have to do with email marketing? Well…is there A Person who’s the voice of your company emails? Or are your emails — like most conferences — corporate and kind of anonymous. Kristen notes (by contrast) how Hubspot handles email. Every email is from a person at the company; their name, picture and phone number are on the bottom of the message.

Will companies eventually ‘hire’ an AI to be the face of the company. Good thing to speculate on — As it inevitably does in mid-2023, AI came up. What’s really refreshing about this conversation is hearing about Kristen’s willingness to push the envelope and try things. She calls out a few things that have worked well, and others that haven’t.

If you attended Mailcon last year, don’t expect next year to be identical. With Kristen Haines at the helm, expect some authentic and fun surprises. Planning to go to a conference this year? This conversation will make you appreciate those calm, poised folks who are paddling like heck to make it a great experience.

TRANSCRIPT

Matthew Dunn: Good morning, this is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of The Future of Email. My guest today, who I had a chance to meet once before, Kristen Haines, CEO of MailCon. Hey, Kristen, we finally get to connect on the podcast. Hi.

Kristen Haines: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Matthew.

Matthew Dunn: Hey, fill in people on MailCon first, because that's where I first got to meet you.

Kristen Haines: Yeah, absolutely. So Mailcon is one of the largest in person events for email marketing. We host conferences in New York, Las Vegas, and we also have a virtual webinar series that we we host as well. So the whole goal of Mailcon is to bring together the greatest minds in the email industry to provide education access to new technology and to empower people in their careers.

Matthew Dunn: Events. Not an easy business. High wire act. I've had friends who work in this space. So I'm like, [00:01:00] Oh, geez, how do you do it? And how do you do it?

Kristen Haines: How do I do it? Oh, gosh. I mean, it takes being organized, I would say is one of the, the, The key qualities that you have to have and running, you know, organizing anything for multiple people.

I work with a very small team. So I've learned to you know, have my hands in multiple different things. But in order to be a leader in leading events, you have to be willing to do the work yourself. You can't rely on delegating to other people. We have a very, very close knit team. And then also relying on like community feedback, getting out there.

talking to the people that are attending your events, finding out what it is that they really want, what's going to be valuable for them. So that's how we try to, to shape our events and then also shape the the initiatives that we plan outside of MayoCon as well.

Matthew Dunn: So I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this.

So here you go on the spot. What'd you guys do during the pandemic?

Kristen Haines: That's [00:02:00] a really good question. So we we acquired MailCon at the worst possible time. We did two events. We acquired it in December of 2018. These owners ran our, our Las Vegas 2019 event, which was in January of 2019. The first event that we oversaw was.

August of 2019. And then we had a Las Vegas event in January of 2020, which was right

Matthew Dunn: before the curtain went down.

Kristen Haines: Yes. Yeah. So we we as in Finexa, we're a performance marketing automation platform. You know, we didn't really have experience running events. We've attended a lot of conferences.

When we acquired that, you know, I was tasked with growing MailCon and, and figuring out, you know, what are we going to do with this? And immediately after our first conference, the pandemic hit we bought this event and it was like, well, what are we going to do? So what we decided to do is try out hosting a virtual event, which turned out to be very [00:03:00] successful.

It actually went to our advantage because we were able to move MailCon outside of primarily the performance marketing space and make it for a more broader. Marketing audiences. Okay.

Matthew Dunn: Okay. So it actually helped him that perspective.

Kristen Haines: It did help in that perspective and making our brand, but a more well known because we're able to reach a much larger audience virtually and we were through our in person events, which were always hosted alongside the affiliate summit

Matthew Dunn: conference.

Right, right, right. And, and now post, yeah. Because I, I got a chance to attend your conference this spring. What, what's the mix now? Is virtual still a piece of it?

Kristen Haines: So we do have a webinar series that we host and we do monthly webinars with we have one coming up with Ferguson. They're going to be talking about modular email design.

We have we've launched another initiative through Phonexa called Amplify, where we're hosting speakers from Google and Hawk Media. [00:04:00] On that webinar series as well. You know, so we continue to do that monthly to provide thought leadership opportunities to people for our in person events.

Currently we are hosting one event a year and we'll be announcing what our 2024 event strategy is

Matthew Dunn: soon. So that's gotcha. Gotcha. All, all of their pre planning that makes it look effortless when you're actually there. I remember being scheduled. Not scheduled. I was scheduled to attend a virtual conference right when, right when the pandemic hit.

It was an email conference in the UK, I think. And it was a little later than the one you described. It was March, maybe April. And they had to turn on a dime and turn the whole thing virtual in, with less than a month's notice. And what, what I remember from that, from, and I'm, I'm, I'm hooking news this morning.

They happened to host that conference on Hopin. Which a lot of people seem to jump on early in the pandemic. Hopin just got acquired. Like, I saw the news this morning. [00:05:00] Really? Wow. Yeah, right? I was like, dang, they went up like this and I don't know if they're going to continue to go up or not. But I was a little surprised to see that because it seemed like they got a bit of the same kind of lift that that Zoom got.

Right. When everyone's like, oh, crikey, I need a solution. Right. We'll use that one. Fine. Great. We'll use that one. Yeah,

Kristen Haines: I actually attended that conference myself and that was my first.

I liked the aspect of having the attendee chat. Yeah. I thought that that was a very valuable that's one of the very valuable elements of the platform.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. It, it's been interesting watching us go through this massive social experiment of No, no live gatherings back to live gatherings, but what's the mix now?

Right. You see, you see live work return to office. Is that phrase RTO still it's never going to be the same. And I'm [00:06:00] not sure that events will ever be the same, but I found myself really ready. To go back to live events by the time we were, we were done with the lockdown and stuff like that, which I never thought I'd say like, no, you know, I kind of want to see that guy and see those people and hear what they have to say about this topic.

So maybe it was a healthy thing overall. And it sounds like you managed to navigate MailCon through it, which was, I'm sure not simple to do.

Kristen Haines: It was challenging. Definitely. I'd say one thing that's changed in events since. The pandemic is people were very eager to get back to in person events. As soon as, as soon as organizations started hosting in person events, everyone was going to them.

And I think everyone kind of got that initial rush out of their system. At least on the corporate event side, like what people are finding more valuable is to host smaller events within larger events. So like pictures or dinners and things like that [00:07:00] because it's easier to connect and build meaningful relationships and more in a smaller setting.

And a lot of times like I mentioned initially before our call, like I just returned from a large conference in New York. It's very, most of the the items that are, the agenda items that are organized by the event. It's very loud. There's a ton of people there. It's hard to actually, like, have a conversation with somebody when you're screaming in their ear.

What we did for this event is we did a couple dinners. We did a wine tasting. We did some other things alongside the event and had a very tailored list of ideal prospects that we invited to those or people that we're looking to connect with or people that are looking to connect with each other. And that was very valuable for us.

And a lot of the partners that we work with they're taking the same approach by attending these large conferences and then hosting their

Matthew Dunn: own little micro events within the conference. Yeah. That's, that, [00:08:00] that, that's interesting and it actually makes a ton of sense. I have to say in returning to events in the last couple of years, you know, post pandemic, my tolerance for show floor has gone down, right?

It's like, Everyone's doing drive by shooting. You don't really get to have a conversation. As you said, it's ridiculously loud. I don't want to get pounced on. No, we're going to have a real conversation. We'll have a real conversation. I don't want to pretend to have one, you know, standing here in front of, in front of your booth and getting brochures that I'm going to chuck before I get back on the airplane.

So, so our appetite or a hunger, if you will, for. actual connection, actual conversation has led to at least that reformat. Inside of events, the micro, the more intimate, the more actually, you know, time to connect, not agenda driven show for conversation. [00:09:00] You going to change anything about MailCon next year to take advantage of that, to do more of that?

Kristen Haines: Absolutely. So one thing that we found the recent event that we hosted in Las Vegas is there was there's a lot less interest in exhibiting. The other events that we host, even within our other companies. Oftentimes the executives from those companies will say we don't want to exhibit. We don't want to be stuck on the exhibit floor. We found the same thing when we were hosting MailCon is that it was very difficult to get sponsorships that are a lot easier to sell because companies still want to have a larger presence, but they don't want to have 13 members stuck in a booth.

And also traffic on show floors unless it's like very, you know, [00:10:00] that the exhibit hall is like one of the key focal points of the event. There's a ton of foot traffic. Most people are going to be off doing their own thing or engaging in meetings. And a lot of times companies don't even purchase tickets to events.

They'll just go to the event and then set up meetings outside the event. So it makes it challenging for event organizers. We really have to kind of re... Think our whole strategy to make it more valuable for people to ensure that they're getting what they want out of it and they're not having to incur the cost of Sending somebody to stand at a booth for the event.

And then also, you know, if you are sending somebody to stand at a booth and you don't have a lot of foot traffic, then they're, they're gonna not find as much value. So we have to really get creative. There's a couple of different ways that, you know, I've seen events do this where they have like round table meetings or they don't have an exhibit hall at all, or they just have very small exhibit [00:11:00] halls you know, or.

You know, like I said, no, no exhibits and just more, more sponsorship opportunities. But the value people are finding is mostly like in the networking, the one to one conversations the more intimate settings.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And, and something beyond five minutes, you know, Hey, nice to talk to you. Next booth.

I I'm just throwing this out for, for reaction because it's kind of a fun story. I was on a. When I was a senior VP at the biggest ski company in the world at the time, CIO, I went to a conference and the format was, it was on a cruise ship of all things, and it was pre scheduled 20 minute, I think 20 or 30 minute sit down with vendors you wanted to talk to.

The vendors were, vendors were paying the, you know, CIOs like me got on for, got on the boat for free. And I actually found it effective because like, Oh yeah, I really want to talk with those guys were looking at, you know, that area of technology and sit down, not [00:12:00] stand up, you know, half hour conversation.

I felt like we really made progress. So maybe you can steal that punchline on that one though. Is that the second morning, very first meeting, the captain broke in and interrupted and announced that New York had been attacked. We were floating off Atlantic City, New Jersey on a cruise ship the morning of 9 11.

Wow. Yeah. And they made us, they made, it was a British flagged vessel, they made us go out into international waters. We didn't have a news feed of what was happening when the second tower fell. We were out at sea, literally out at sea, cut off. From everything. So yeah 9 11 is a vivid memory for a lot of people.

It was a particularly weird and vivid way to experience it because we sailed ashore past deserted Logan airport into Boston the next morning. Wow. Yeah. Right. But that format, that sort of forced relaxation, [00:13:00] if you will, you know, cruise ship, I'm going to guess it was not busy cruising. So that was, a floating hotel, but, but there was more breathing time.

Yeah. For those conversations, and you know, ignore post 9 11, because obviously the conversations were completely different after that, but even that one day of that format, I thought this is actually kind of effective. And for the vendors, they had to send people who knew what the heck they were talking about, not low man on the totem pole doing booth duty, because I'd shred those guys.

Right. But so they had to get smart people at the table, otherwise I wouldn't waste a half an hour talking to them. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. You may, there may be a whole emergent business model for conferences as we start, as we keep readjusting to, you know, what, what things are like now and what people have an appetite for and what they won't, won't necessarily do.

Kristen Haines: Yeah, and I think a lot of it for event organizers is experimental as well. You know, you have a whole bank of ideas and you try [00:14:00] it. And you can't, the one thing I've learned from working in events is you can never make everybody happy. There's always going to be somebody who finds something to complain about.

So as long as like you are addressing and catering to the majority majority's needs, I'd say that Ed. It works out beneficially. And you know, there's various ways that you can get feedback from people and what may be a great experience for one person is not a great experience for another person. So it comes down to ensuring that the right people and the right sponsors, the right exhibitors are at the event.

You know, I'm, I'm of the mindset that I would never want to sell a sponsorship or booth just to sell it because if they're not going to get value, then it's They're not going to come back. The attendees aren't going to get value either. So we'd rather have people that are people at the event that are actually going to find the most value

Matthew Dunn: out of it.

Yeah. Yeah. And you have an opportunity in your [00:15:00] position to do, but try this here. And if it works there, try it at a different place, right? Since you oversee multiple, lots of events. Yeah, we

Kristen Haines: do in a sense. I mean, for our other companies, most of the events that we do is it's either hosting smaller micro events with our clients and partners, or I oversee all of our sponsorships and media Like media engagements that we do as well.

So for the most part, it's we're sponsoring other events with our other companies, whereas one is the only conference that we currently organize fully through and through ourselves. But we do take a lot of the ideas that we've seen and things that we've sponsored at other events and see how we can either improve them or implement them and how valuable it would be for our community.

Matthew Dunn: Gotcha. Gotcha. That's that's a, that's a, that's a fun straddle. And you said that you'd spent time before, before you got all these hats in e commerce yourself.

Kristen Haines: I [00:16:00] did. So I actually worked in scent marketing and most people are like, what is scent marketing? So basically scent marketing is like when you walk in, especially in Las Vegas, is a really good example.

You walk into the. Sino, there's this aroma that you sent. It comes through the HVAC system. So what we would do, I worked for a company called Aromatech. That's very successful now. And during the time that I joined, it was very small. It was just a small B2B company. We built out an e commerce website and started selling our B2B products to consumers so you can actually, but scenting through your HVAC system in your home, I'm using commercial grade scent machines. Wow. So most people are like, you know, what is scent marketing? So we have custom fragrances for businesses. Our customers were like Mercedes Benz, BMW the, some of the casinos, the well known casinos in Las Vegas, the additional in New York.

So there was quite a few quite a few on that list. It was very exciting. You know, prior to that, I [00:17:00] worked at a non profit for the American Heart Association for eight years. So my, my career has kind of been navigating through quite a few different industries

and

Matthew Dunn: models. Yeah. Mix of things and, and, and scent marketing and e commerce, like you can put pictures on a webpage, you can't put smells on a webpage.

So that's got to be a particular challenge.

Kristen Haines: Maybe one day in the future.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, we'll, we'll see. Did I see Vancouver somewhere in your background as well? Vancouver, BC? Yeah.

Kristen Haines: So that's where Aromatech is headquartered. I lived in Vancouver for two years and at Aromatech, I oversaw the sales and marketing team.

It was a very small startup company. We had about five employees and myself and the CEO, we oversaw pretty much the entire company globally. And we had customers all the way from Australia to down in Panama. So we were always traveling and it was a very exciting time. And that's kind of where I learned a lot about operating startup companies.

And we had a [00:18:00] very. Lean startup. We ran the business with a very lean startup approach. So we were very, very resourceful. And my experience with email during that time is we ran all of our campaigns through Klaviyo. Klaviyo was a really, really changed our business. Yeah. You know, it really helped us scale and grow our e commerce business that we had set up on Shopify.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, I know. I was, I was expecting to say Shopify Vancouver caught my eye, by the way, because I literally can see Grouse Mountain out that window. I'm that close to Vancouver. Wow. Yeah. 60 miles away, but still Bellingham, Washington. So other side of the border. But I used to work in Vancouver as well.

So great, great city. Shopify, Klaviyo. It's funny how often that combo comes up in, in my conversations with people. In the email space, because they're, they're, they're really innovating. That tight knit relationship between the e com side and the email side is a, is a [00:19:00] winning, it's a winning move and treating them as completely separate.

Makes it makes your life harder. Sounds like you got to experience that firsthand. Yeah.

Kristen Haines: Klaviyo is very customer centric and they have you know, they're, they, they have a very easy, it's very easy to integrate with other platforms and they work, you know, cross functionally with all of these other platforms.

So it's probably one of the, it is the number one go to ESP for e commerce.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially, especially in Shopify has done such a terrific job. Of making e commerce a thing that you license rather than a thing that you do. Yeah, that, that, and they invested in Klaviyo about a year ago, I think about a hundred million dollars, which was like, Ooh, that's a big bet.

So I expect that relationship to continue. And I do think. I do think other domains where email marketing is important could learn a thing or two from seeing how that partnership plays out [00:20:00] for the customers on those two platforms. Because everyone I talked to who's been where you were like, God, that was great.

And it helped us. And what'd you say? It actually kind of transformed. The company.

Kristen Haines: Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge advocate for Klaviyo. I think we don't use Klaviyo for mail cons specifically. We work with MailChimp, which is more geared to smaller businesses and more geared to B2B. But from my experience, it was very easy to use.

You know, and it was very scalable as well. Business. Now, one thing that I learned. From e commerce that's kind of that I've taken into more of the B2B space is and that we are seeing trending is like a lot of companies are using e commerce. Marketing tactics now for B2B marketing, and the reason why is it works.

And, you know, I'm a huge advocate for adopting B2C marketing practices into B2B. People don't really want to, especially on the business side, I think, you know, a lot of times what I see is [00:21:00] it's always company facing where people want to have a relationship with the person as opposed with a person in B2B as opposed to a brand.

And I think companies that take the approach of, you know, putting a person as the face of their, their company will have more success than companies that are, it's more of just. B2B branding is in like this product. This is what we do. Put your sales team, put your CEO, put your marketing person or your, your CMO on the front of, you know, all of your marketing campaigns and help them to build a relationship with the, with the people behind your brand as opposed to just the brand itself.

And I think there's a few you know, B2B companies that are, that have kind of adopted that approach. You know, and they're very successful HubSpot being one of them. They take a really good approach of every email is this person from HubSpot, their picture's on the email. Yeah, yeah. And it's very, it's a lot easier to engage than it is just [00:22:00] the brand name, the company name.

Matthew Dunn: I can see that working, I can see that working especially well at a smaller scale. I mean, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the face of MailCon for sure from my perspective. The challenge with the larger, the HubSpots of the world. I almost expect the intro mail once a year from a new HubSpot guy saying, I've taken over and dad, and he's trying to restart it.

I'm like, eh, here we go again. Right. It, it, it, you don't necessarily get to hang on to people forever. I had another guest on, on, on the podcast here who was advocating almost. How do I say this? Almost like creating a synthetic person and having them be the face of the brand so that as actual personnel change, you don't necessarily lose that.

I'm like risky. Having a deep fake .

Kristen Haines: What's that? [00:23:00] Having a deep fake .

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, or or, or you know, companies will invest heavily in understanding their customer persona, but they don't balance that with an investment in their company persona, which is kind of a, hmm, interesting. And at the same time, I think we'd all smell a fake about a mile away.

Kristen Haines: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's very interesting because, I mean, look at how well influencer marketing works for GCE companies. Yeah. If B2B companies. Also start to rely more on influencer marketing as well. And we've been kind of exploring this this initiative of looking into B2B influencers, and that's kind of a new term, like LinkedIn influencers, B2B influencers.

And it's really interesting because. You know, some, it's not really a well known term and it's not really like, obviously a lot of people are working on building out their own personal [00:24:00] brands and building your own personal brand. I think every single executive or anyone who's diving into an industry they should build their own personal brand.

It's going to make you way more valuable to, you know, a certain company, but at the same time, I think it can also damage companies reputations because if that person leaves, you know, they're taking their entire network over. Another organization. So I can totally understand why, you know, having a synthetic person would be a value to a brand.

Yeah, at the same time, like you mentioned, you can you can kind of It's not authentic.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, it yeah, it's not authentic and well, I'm not sure I'd say a lot of influencers are particularly authentic But let's leave that one aside Right Yeah, b2b influence. It's kind of it. That's kind of an it's an intriguing thing.

I mean I can think of people In the email industries that I, that I've been [00:25:00] around who, who are definitely influencers in their way, you know, they don't necessarily get paid to do it, but they're influencers. And if they say such and such has a great solution for X, I pay attention to that, which, which may be going in the direction that you're talking about.

But if they're a spokesperson for a brand and then they leave, right? Tilt. I had a friend who sold a. He actually, of all things, an events company just before the pandemic and we were chatting afterwards as he was going, dodged a bullet. And I said, you kind of built this with LinkedIn, like you have 20, 000 LinkedIn connections.

Did the biocontract say anything about that? And he said, Ooh, no, they didn't say a word about that. I'm thinking that was a miss just in terms of business assets, right? Cause he could hit post. And get 20, 000 people in their industry, more or less, like this. And the acquirer did not think to look at that as an asset.[00:26:00]

Wow. Yeah.

Kristen Haines: I mean, that's huge.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Like they should have said, we're going to take that. There will be a synthetic, whatever your name is, running it from here on out. But really it's not a personal asset. Yes, it's your LinkedIn account, but really it's the company asset. And I suppose you could argue back.

I don't see anywhere in my contract that says this is right, that weird, that weird tension between personal, professional, commercial assets as, as we're still navigating what social, social and media mean as they collide. Huh? Huh? It's like if you left and jumped somewhere else. Right. You personally left and jumped somewhere else.

You're taking a, you'd be taking a big piece of mail con with you. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and hard. What's that? I

Kristen Haines: said, at least I'd like to

Matthew Dunn: think so. Oh yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. For sure. So, and the, and [00:27:00] the personal brand in the business space, you're, I mean, you, you're right. You said it right.

Everybody invests in doing that. I I have, I have reservations about. Trying to fake it, because I think that there are any number of, it's almost a trend, you have to have a personal brand, you have to publish a book, if that's not who you are, don't do that. My reaction, right? I, I, yeah, because, because you can't, you can't keep the high wire act.

I don't think you can keep the high wire act going forever. If it's not like sort of, I hate to say it authentically, who you are, who you are, don't pretend to be that because it won't work forever or if it's exhausting. That's

Kristen Haines: very true. And I think that you know, within our organizations, one of the initiatives that we've been working on is to build our help people in our company to build their own personal brand and it's because a lot of people want to do that, but they don't even know how to, don't even know how

Matthew Dunn: to, yeah.

Kristen Haines: Yeah, and I think [00:28:00] that the one, I mean, social media, even LinkedIn now is becoming so cluttered with all of the posts everyone's posting and everyone has an opinion to share. And while all of that is great you know, for myself personally, I find it difficult to kind of authentically post things on LinkedIn in the sense of not that I don't have a perspective on things.

It's just. How is it unique from everything else that how is it not adding more noise, whereas I would prefer to, you know, not have an opinion at all on a social media platform that to the noise that all of the different content that's out there. So we're developing a couple different approaches of how to do this and how to help our employees.

Really build something that's authentic to them and it's not necessarily an opinion that's You know has to be relevant to what they're working on but just even [00:29:00] You know in life in general like the different things that people deal with like some people have a lot of kids Like how do you balance that with your work life and speaking to things that are more?

Relatable and authentic to what they actually want to share and to their personality and to their experiences. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of been exciting. We started doing this a few months ago. You know, not even a few months ago. And so it's exciting to kind of see people grow into their personal brand and explore

Matthew Dunn: and to hear that, that, that that's an initiative. The company's taking because younger employees, I suspect. Have this vague awareness that they should do that, they need to do that, and then how do you do it, as you, as you pointed out. It's not like there's a turnkey formula. I, I'm sure you do as well. I, I'll get the inbound email, in, inbound messages, pick a channel, any channel, with people saying, you know, we'll, we'll help you be a thought leader, we'll write stuff for you.

And I just want to [00:30:00] smack the keyboard and go like, how would you know what I have to say? That's like, that seems like a, the dumbest proposition. In the world for me to outsource the stuff that's supposed to be coming out of my noggin. Yeah

Kristen Haines: And I think one of the things that you know is challenging with that is a lot of the Like a lot of content creators that I've seen they kind of take the same approach of posting like there's all there's trends and how people post how they talk in their posts, what their posts consist of, and it all starts to become it starts to seem inauthentic.

Yeah, because of the fact that it's like this is exactly how people every other person's talking. The content is different, but it sounds too formulaic. Yeah, rinse and repeat on a lot of different content. And I'm not saying that I'm not discrediting anyone who's who, you know, takes the initiative to be a content creator.

I think [00:31:00] that's great that you know, people have the confidence even to you know, and they take the time to do that. That's fantastic. You know, but really being authentic and not trying to conform to social media trends, I think is what will help people stand out. You know, with their own personal brands, because there's a lot of different you know, just trends that I observed, even from scrolling, scrolling through my own LinkedIn, when it comes to people trying to promote their own personal

Matthew Dunn: brand.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are people who seem particularly gifted at humble brag and I want to smack them like, Oh, I'm so honored to do X like, Oh, geez, you just wanted to post. Don't do that. And, and yet this is recursive though Kristen, because. This conversation is going to end up being on LinkedIn. And I'll say, Hey, I had a chance to talk with Kristen Haynes.

Here's what we focused on. This was fascinating, et cetera, et cetera. And people will probably end up watching this conversation. And I don't think of it as inauthentic to [00:32:00] take because we didn't, we didn't plan where we were going with this conversation. I don't think of it as anything but authentic to say.

Here's the conversation. Here's what I thought was valuable about it. Someone else will get something else out of it. And, you know, X number of people will watch it, giddy up and go, right? And taking the same amount of, you know, the same, whatever, 45 minutes to an hour we're spending on this, you wouldn't, you would not write a post the length of this conversation.

No way. Right. So in some ways, sticking to the face to face verbal struck me as a way of, you know, getting more. More authentic content more quickly than trying to sit down and hammer out posts on topics. Plus, you put two brains together, you always get a different result. Exactly. Yeah.

Kristen Haines: And I like this conversation because it's unique to anything I've done so far because I don't have a list of questions prepared of what I'm going to be asked.

Matthew Dunn: I'd [00:33:00] apologize, but no, I figured it would be more fun to do this. Let's, let's switch gears a little bit, and this is going to be an intellectual pivot if I can pull it off. I'm concerned in the marketing space generally, and we can, we can narrow in an email from there, with AI.

Of marketing content to become even more fake and even more inauthentic. What do you think?

Kristen Haines: I agree in the sense of, and that wasn't, it's interesting that you say that's because we just hosted a webinar with Fenexa with Eric Huberman, the CEO and founder of Hawk Media, and that was one of the points that he said.

He, he said that, yeah, ChatGTP is great and all of these tools that help you create content but people can smell in authenticity. You know, it, you can only fool so many people [00:34:00] with it. And I think chat GDP is great for writing your own content and saying like Write this in a few different tones for me or you know Is there a better way to say this like I think that that's a great way and then being able to pick out You know pieces of what you may not have thought of how to word something Yeah, but using your own original words to to create it as opposed to just saying like How do I tell write me something about this?

Yeah. So I think it can be effective as long as you know, it's something that's created from, you know, the author's original original words that can be helpful and, and, and, you know, rewriting things. And then it also comes down to, you know, there's, it can appear inauthentic. You can, you can already tell when somebody has basically created a LinkedIn post or some, or an email where they just kind of typed into chat GTP because chat GTP does have a style of [00:35:00] writing.

That's very unique, but you can also have. You know, and I'm using chat GTP as an example. You can also have to be right in different tones and perspective. So I think it's very useful. I think it's very it's going to help marketers to create you know, more content at scale. You know, but, you know, with that result, we might lose the authenticity of it as well.

Matthew Dunn: And if not authenticity, it's funny how often we've hit that word, isn't it?

Coherent, coherence. One of the things, this is a sidebar, but I think it'll hook back in. One of the things that struck me in observing, thinking about, talking about the, this Sputnik moment that AI has had. is for me, and I think this is true for a lot of people. I don't know what I think until I write, right?

Like, Oh, I need to do a blog post on such and such. Cool. Start writing like, Oh crap, I had no idea where that was going or how to [00:36:00] say it well until I put it down, structured it, reformat it, restructured it, et cetera. And same thing is true for someone whose media may be, I don't know, ink and pen and, and drawing until you've externalized it, looked at it and then, and, and then encountered what.

You thought you were going to say. I don't think it's that clear, writing a one line prompt, copying and pasting out of chat GPT. That's not thinking. Even if the prompt is ingenious, it's not the same thing as sitting and thinking the whole thing through. And, and my concern is that in the productivity rush that marketers like everybody else are in.

The temptation to cheat and shortcut and go, Oh, you know, it needs to be two paragraphs. I don't feel like writing two paragraphs and I'll put a prompt in and I'll pull this out, reword it a little bit. I'm done. Right. And I suspect the Hawk media speaker you had was probably saying we're going to see a flood of this stuff.

And I don't know how we stop it. Exactly.

Kristen Haines: Yeah. [00:37:00] Now there is a couple things that it's very useful for from an event planning perspective, coming up with names for smaller events. There you go. What would you call an event that has these features and they provide a list of like, because we also oversee.

I also oversee all of our internal events. So when we're doing internal events where we don't have as much time to invest into, if we're trying to come up with creative names for some of our internal corporate events. It's really, really helpful in that regard, or creating like quick descriptions for, you know, let's say that we're having, you know, a breakfast or something, and we wanted to describe what it was that's really helpful in a sense from an event planning perspective, but, you know, I completely agree.

That's exactly what Eric was mentioning is that it is difficult to stop it. And then it also becomes, You know, it's kind of this like oversaturated, same tone, voice, yeah. Yeah. Across marketing. [00:38:00] Yeah. Because people are taking shortcuts

Matthew Dunn: and, and even if we get better at varying tone, right. Like a, you know, use Chad g p t and use gosh, I forgot the name of the other one.

I need to, I need to spend some time on or, or tell what's. You cut out. Could you repeat that? Yeah. Even if we start getting varied tones from large language models, we were all, we're already, go back a year, I was already inbox overloaded. So were you. I was already LinkedIn overloaded. So was you. So were you, right?

And that was more or less human production coming our way. Because in the digital domain, making a copy of something is easy. So sending the same message to 10, 000 people is relatively easy. Now we're going to have machines cranking out more of that stuff with the same multiplier we already had. I'm like, Oh, crikey, my inbox is going to be buried.

And I don't just mean my email inbox. Like the overload is [00:39:00] going to be so difficult that finding the actual message from a person that I give a toot about. It's going to be harder and harder and harder. We're going to end up with AI helping us sort out the crap that the other AI's are generating. And that's a bothersome equation to me.

Kristen Haines: Yeah, that's a very good

Matthew Dunn: point. It's like mind pollution, right? We're just, we're just going to keep spewing it out there and our brains are going to go like, and I think live events to hook it back to the business you're in the live event, actual conversation. I know it's authentic. Cause I was standing there talking with Kristen, the value that's probably going to go up.

Because that you can't, there's no fakery involved, right? You don't have someone having an AI tell them what to say in the conversation. They're actually conversing with you.

Kristen Haines: Absolutely. I mean, I think it's all in, it's all relevant in the sense that everyone has different learning styles and, you know, some people prefer to read as opposed to [00:40:00] watching, you know, live events, but even, even talking about live events, like there, one thing that I've seen from an event organizer perspective is that everybody has.

Podcast now. It was like there was this huge. Yeah, the podcast for everything. And, you know, I'm an audio audible learner. I have a very difficult time concentrating on reading anything that's very, very long. So I, I. Prefer to watch videos or to listen to audiobooks. Okay. Okay. I learned so well from them But at the same time like there's so many things I want to listen to but there's so much content out there so really, I think a an approach that we're going to probably start seeing people take that have You know, live sessions or podcasts is cutting them down into shorter segments.

Not everyone has the time to listen to longer, longer events and 30 minutes has kind of been the sweet [00:41:00] spot. 30 to 30, 45 minutes is kind of the sweet spots for, you know, at least. You know, but go to webinars data says at least what, you know, any type of virtual event says is like 30 to 45 minutes is typically the sweet spot for hosting it hosting events.

But then when you're walking to work or something, and you want to listen to something and you want to digest it fully, I think it's easier to actually retain knowledge when it's segmented into shorter. When it's segmented into, to shorter bits of information for people. Yeah. This was something that we were going to start to experiment with is cutting our content down even shorter because people's attention spans are getting shorter as well.

I mean, even with the, how long is a reel on Instagram seconds. People don't even watch those full reels.

So I remember back in 2020. At our Las Vegas event the CEO of lemon light, which is [00:42:00] a they create film for, for brands. She said that the most important thing that you can do an email is put the, or when you're sending out video content is make sure that the time duration stamp is on there so that people know how much time that they're going to invest into watching the segment, which is why people put real, like.

Cut their content into these little reels. But if you can actually get a very valuable tip, which then 10 to 15 minutes that you have the time to listen to it, you have the time to take notes on it, or even have, you know, virtual note taking on it so that you can actually retain that information, I think that's a lot more valuable than hearing you know, all these different, all those different content all the time that it's difficult to remember and retain the information.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah, turning into goldfish, what is seven, seven seconds is the length of time a goldfish remembers something or some words like, but if 15 [00:43:00] seconds is too long, which it is, and you're going to hit the skip ahead button, which we've all done, like, wow, 15 seconds is pretty short chunk of time. And we're still, we're still protective of that, that chunk of time.

Kristen Haines: Exactly. And it really comes down to, you know, what people are looking to learn and they're looking to retain because repetition obviously is how, you know, you retain information, how most people retain information and and being able to have like a small piece of content. In different various learning formats.

Yeah, you know, I think it would be helpful and really providing more impact for people to retain and to actually remember the information because we digest so much content on a daily basis. We constantly have, you know, stuff thrown at us all the time, advertisements [00:44:00] to, you know, this and that. And really you know, not everyone has so much time in their day to be able to invest into it.

And you really have to kind of pick and choose. You know, how, what you're gonna, you're gonna invest your time into, and I'm sure we've all gone down the rabbit hole of you know, on various different topics, too.

Matthew Dunn: David, David David Schenk wrote a book called Data Smog, and I'm pretty sure it was 2003, so it's 20 years old now.

And in that book, 20 years ago, the measure he came up with was the average consumer is exposed to 3, 000 commercial messages in the course of a day. Made sense then, good research behind it, and I'm thinking the number now must be, like, I don't even know what, right? I've got four monitors in front of me.

If I look around, there's 20 commercial messages in my iSpan right now, and I'm ignoring them because we're [00:45:00] talking, but like, there's an icon, and there's a logo, and there's this, and there's that, and we're all getting good at filtering those, because for survival, we have to. But they're still, you know, they're still hitting us.

The eye is still processing it. The brain is still processing it. And then saying, ignore, ignore, ignore. And like that, that keeps going up and protecting our 15 second thresholds because they're precious. And we want to learn something, you know, get insights grow, change, et cetera, from the stuff we encounter.

And it's, it's a, it's an act of will to focus on something like you do on, on a podcast. You know, for half an hour walking to work or something like that, you really have to decide to invest the time to get there. Don't you?

Kristen Haines: Exactly. Yeah. And I think what companies could B2B companies specifically you know, could, could an approach that they could take to offer more valuable or value to their customers if they're trying to create content to [00:46:00] really make it specific and tailored to their, their ideal customer.

Just focus small pieces of content. You know, like I said, 10 to 15 minutes on answering the questions, the burning questions that people have and then providing different types of content around that. So you have like a 15 minute segment answering one question. It's very specific. It's very detailed.

It's something that that person is going to take away and they learn something. They have an actionable tip that they can take away. Okay. If they learn through reading, they have, it's transcribed for them as well they have the audio version, they have the video version, and then they have a transcription and they have maybe a white paper that they could take away from it, or, or something that's downloadable and actionable, but, you know, basically making reels, and I, and I, instead of 15 seconds, like 15 minute reels for B2B content you know, I think would be a more valuable approach because, People are so busy [00:47:00] with their jobs, and they don't have time to digest all this, and if they're really looking to an answer, they can kind of get a 15 minute master class on, you know, a question or a topic that they're looking to learn on.

Matthew Dunn: There's a there's a practice, and I think it emerged in the world of architecture, I think I'm right, pecha kucha, and it's It's a super short format. It's like 10 slides, six minutes or something like that. My, my brother in law, the sculptor was telling me about this and he said it emerged because you, you know, get architects in a room, they'll talk all day long about stuff.

And so they forced themselves to focus and go very, very discreet counter visuals, very short clock. To get to your point, kind of what you're saying about the 15 minute reel. Would, would you ever consider in an event, MailCon or something like that, sort of really blowing up the format and saying, Hey, you want to come in and talk [00:48:00] about X, whatever it is great.

You got. 10 minutes period. That's it.

Kristen Haines: 100%. Yeah. I mean, I I'm open to all different types of experimental event programs, experimental marketing. And the reason why is because I don't think there is, especially in the event industry, there is no one size fits all solution. When I came from e commerce to events which I was completely new to I started doing all of this research and all of this self education.

And the one thing that I found is it was like the answer to my. You know, what's the best way to market events was nobody really knows go to other conferences. That's the best way to acquire new customers for your conferences. You know, so it was kind of this, like, there wasn't any definite answer of like, what are best practices for marketing events or for, you know, growing events.

[00:49:00] So I think. Especially since we had the pandemic, it completely changed whatever, you know, that was previously. So I'm always open to trying new things, implementing what, you know, people find is most valuable. And like I said, I just returned back from a conference in New York. That was probably one of the most beneficial events that I've attended because I was able to with the email marketers that come to our conference and have conversations with them and ask them, you know, what do you like?

What do you don't like? What is going to help you really help you? And the answer that I got back from most people is that we want to talk to the people that are actually sending the emails. Like I want to just have time to talk to other people. That are sending the emails and there's no there's no solution providers in my face trying to sell me stuff like we want to have you know, conversations around this.

So you know, getting people's opinions and really [00:50:00] sending out surveys. We take all of that into consideration as we plan our next events, and I think that the mail con that we're going to the next mail con that we're going to have is going to be a lot different than the one that we've seen because we've taken, we decided to not host our New York events so that we could take time to restrategize and really find out what is going to add more value, value to email marketers and to the email industry as a whole.

Matthew Dunn: Wow, that's that's awesome. Yeah. Okay. And it has me excited to go to the next one. Wow. Good for you. I, because doing it the same way over and over, which, and I understand the reasons why a business will do that, but you know, as, as, as the market, as people change. You know, everything's a half hour.

Everything's an hour, maybe not, not the best thing anymore. Or pre presenter and audience may not be the best format anymore. It sounds like you're actively looking at more [00:51:00] conversational. Formats, which is kind of fascinating. Huh?

Kristen Haines: Absolutely. We'll see. We'll see where it goes to be announced

Matthew Dunn: to be announced.

Well, cool. So you got to, you got, you got to tease people at least a little bit. So we'll, you can pull this one little snippet out and reuse it as a, as a teaser for MailCon next year, as you get closer and closer. Quick rundown. What are the, before we wrap up, because I'm trying to respect the clock here.

What are the other broad businesses that Finexa is in?

Kristen Haines: What, what clients do we serve? Yeah. So we have currently we have five companies that are marketed publicly, which is Finexa, which is a performance marketing automation platform. Yep. Our ICP is the insurance space, financial services, home services automotive industry, travel as well.

So we work with mostly publishers and affiliate networks. So we provide an all in one solution for email, [00:52:00] SMS, call tracking, call distribution, lead tracking, distribution, click tracking. It's basically A suite where performance marketers can basically do everything and track everything in one place.

And then we also have a variety of different partners that we work with so that we can refer publishers and buyers to each other. We have a connect to save program so that if they are both using Finexa, they don't have to pay for outbound pings. A ping post model. Our other companies are Zero Parallel, which is one of the largest affiliate networks in the personal loan space.

And then we also have Profitize, which is an affiliate network in the insurance space, as well as TDOT UK which is based in the UK. We also have Finexa offices in the UK and in Canada as well, and in the Ukraine. About 50% over 50% of our employees are based in Ukraine in

Matthew Dunn: Ukraine. Oh, wow. I had Dimitri Kudrenko from Ukraine on as a podcast guest.

I think he was at MailCon. In fact, [00:53:00] he was many times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go, go, go Ukraine. Those guys are hanging in there. Well, I knew it was going to be a blast to talk with you. So hopefully you had some fun as well. Yes,

Kristen Haines: absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's a great conversation. I appreciate the opportunity.

Matthew Dunn: I knew it would be. My guest has been Kristen Haynes, CEO of MailCon. We're out.