A Conversation With Luke Glasner
News flash: your email team is overworked. Not because they're not really good at the jobs involved (they are), but because email marketing is NOT "hit send."
This conversation with industry expert Luke Glasner goes deep into the details of what makes email marketing so tough — the technical details (15,000+ email clients), the data details (opens and clicks aren't what you think), and the organizational alignment. Luke says it well — email marketing is really a software development job.
Every email that lands in an inbox is a complicated digital artifact. Creating millions of those a month ain't easy! If you're involved in email marketing, and are feeling that burn, this conversation will give you some ideas for moving forward and making the job (and results) better.
A super conversation with a passionate expert, for anyone in email marketing.
A Conversation With Luke Glasner
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[00:00:00]
Matthew Dunn: Well, good morning. It's Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. My guest today my, my Zoom and Conference buddy, Luke Glasner, principal of Glasner Consulting. Hey, Luke.
Luke Glasner: Hello. Thanks for having me
Matthew Dunn: on today. Oh, man, delightful. Uh, good g. Good to get, uh, good to get some one-to-one conversation time instead of, you know, literally zooming past each other in other formats.
Right. Uh, give people the umbrella of like, of Glasner Consulting and your incredibly long, deep involvement in the world of email.
Luke Glasner: Yes. So I've been involved in email since 2005 where I started out as a database administrator that launched an email program at a company called Robin Publishing, and we made.
12 trade magazines [00:01:00] and I would make our newsletter every week as well as our other emails. And then after doing that about five years, I um, decided to start doing consulting basically, cuz a bunch of other people in the industry had encouraged me to. Go out on my own. So I did, and I started Glasser Consulting in 2009 and uh, my first project was in August of that year, and I officially launched a coup like two months later once I got paid.
And you know, so for the last. 15, 17 years or so, I've been neck deep in email. It is truly my passion. Yeah. And I've done pretty much everything you could do in email. I've done deliverability, I've done a lot of coding. I'm big into doing production of email. Um, I like doing that. So that's a bit different than what most people probably think of when they see the speakers.
I do sit in the cube and send the emails all the time, [00:02:00] although, I have a nicer cube. Now. You're
Matthew Dunn: being, you're, you're being unduly modest because among, among the high points of your LinkedIn bio, you've sent over 10,000
Luke Glasner: campaigns. Yes, I have, I have coded and sent over 10,000 campaigns. I typically averaged e even as a consultant, I was averaging three, four campaigns a week.
Wow. And, you know, I've done all kinds of things with that code. I've, I've. I started out with getting into responsive design for mobile. I've done what a lot of people call kinetic or interactive emails. Mm-hmm. So like in the past year, I did, uh, A campaign with a picture of a champagne bottle opening for New Year's Eve and made little bubbles float.
And then I did the reverse of the technique you normally see online for snow where it comes down. And I made the little dots go up. So I had bubbles for Christmas. We had a snowstorm in the email. I've done a bunch of rollover [00:03:00] effects and other CSS effects that you can do. I
Matthew Dunn: was gonna ask if the bubbles were css.
That's uh, that's pretty tricky.
Luke Glasner: Yes, I've done that, and I've even done make the email and see with the CSS effect, which won't play well across clients. Like, for example, Google, Gmail won't play that. So after I made it, I actually took a screenshot of that to make an animated gift that I used in the other versions of the email.
Matthew Dunn: In the other versions of the email, one of the things that I think John Q Public doesn't, uh, appreciate or care about and justifiably. Now darn complex. The end points for email are the, the technical and design considerations for how do we make this look right for, I believe the number is 15,000 different combinations of email clients in operating systems.
It it's like it's a hairball.
Luke Glasner: Yeah. It's, it's, it's everywhere there and there's no real standard. [00:04:00] And, um, that makes it a lot harder than coding for like web design where Oh yeah, yeah. We typically have like a standard for the browser and there's like four or five of them. We have, you know, 17 flavors of Apple iPhone and 15 different screen sizes you gotta worry about.
Yeah. And all kinds of things going on and. One thing I've noticed with the, with the client, my retail client that I make emails for every week, we've been tracking with Litmus and I've noticed that his group has gone up to 55, 60% used dark mode. So there's another wrinkle. Now you have to have a dark mode version.
Yeah, yeah. And he's also heavily Gmail, cuz it's b2c. So then you need an annotations or amp. Right, right, right. To take advantage of that. So yeah, it's a complex coding world out there and it's definitely something that is, requires some real skill. And I personally, I write [00:05:00] my emails, I usually use Litmus.
Um, before that I use Dream Weaver, but I write mine from Code. I don't use editor. I've never liked that.
Matthew Dunn: What's your, what's your code editor of Choice? Um, well,
Luke Glasner: litmus is, Have used primarily because it's basically just like Notepad, but it shows me a, a picture. Right. I've also used, uh, what is it? Coffee Cup html is a pretty decent editor.
Yeah. I like Dream Weaver and used that for a very long time. I never upgraded my dream weaver. I kept it in old version so that it stayed with that email 1999 mentality of coding, you know? Um, yeah. For me, you know, when you've written them this long and this many times, you, you, I, I could write the email in Notepad.
It doesn't really matter anymore. Right. I memorized them all.
Matthew Dunn: Right. And you probably have a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts to do. [00:06:00]
Luke Glasner: Yes. I have all my library and all my past emails. I honestly never, I really never make an email from scratch anymore. I just find, oh, I used that layout two months ago and yeah.
Yeah. When you pick up that and. Edit the structure from there. Um, but I'm also always improving it, looking at things, you know, does it, does it look right in dark mode? For example, one of the things I've done there is we all, our product images usually had, like, it's the product on a white background, right?
And that's pretty standard. Yeah. But on dark mode, that looks like a white box. Yeah. So I. Editing those and just using Magic Erasor in Photoshop to just take the white background off and then use the transparent. So I don't know if to code like whole new versions of the thing. I can get away with that.
It will look right in either one. Right. Um, so that's one quick hack trick that I could share about getting into dark mode. Wow.
Matthew Dunn: You just gave me a good idea. We should, we should. [00:07:00] Licensed one of the AI background removers in, uh, rapid tool around that for, uh, for images in, uh, in campaign Genius. Just because that job, you know, it's a very manual job.
Yes. And you do it once and it's interesting and you do it 20 times and you want to just hit yourself in the head.
Luke Glasner: Yeah. Yeah. I've been just, you know, I, I do the products as we go along, and I've been doing it for about two months now, so we've cycled through most of the products at this point. Yeah, there you go.
At least most of me feature in email. There's plenty that we don't normally feature, so you, uh, I need them.
Matthew Dunn: You've also, you also help clients a ton, and I know that you're like, you're an industry expert, I'd say on uh, on email and metrics. Yes. Kind of a passion.
Luke Glasner: I have a long history with email metrics and that's really where my passion in email started.
Yeah, I mentioned I used to work, uh, you know, at a publishing company. Yeah. Back then, that was when we started the same project, and it was because [00:08:00] we changed vendors and my open and click rates. Radically changed because of a different counting methodology. Right. So I felt that burn personally, that's why I volunteered.
And um, you know, I ended up. Working and contributing a lot with the, with what was first the round table and then the advisory board, and then it has another name now, um, at the EEC for the same project. Yeah. Actually ended up leading a lot of the same project because I was the client side person, so I didn't have any, I didn't represent any vendor.
Right. Um, and I represented what, what the email marketers wanted. So that's really what I got into. And opens was like a big thing with me. And, uh, you know, um, we came up with the standard for opens, metrics measurement as well as clicks. And we also delved into delivered, which isn't really delivered. It's more like accepted.
That was. Term that we put forward, [00:09:00] and that all culminated in the same project standard, which was released in 2010. Mm-hmm. And at that time we had about 30, 35, uh, different ESP involved in the committee over time. Yeah. All the big ones that you would remember from back in the day, like Silver Pop, Lauren was very involved in that project.
Um, exact target was on there a a ton. You know all the people that you, you would've thought as the big names and who you would see at the conferences. They all contributed and had their say. And then when we launched, we had adoption from some of them, but also a bunch of other people. We used to have a seal that we gave for them, the display on their website, and.
You know, I said it, I tried to make it a truly global effort. Mm-hmm. Um, and get the input from esp, not just in North America, cuz we were the e E C and, and then by then we were part of D M A, you know, but not just there, but around the world. And we [00:10:00] did have ESP adopt our standard from, uh, from different countries.
Not only the US but also Canada, uk, Italy. Belarus New Zealand, you know, so when I say it's a global standard, I would say New Zealand is about as far away as you can get from Midtown Manhattan on the globe. So we definitely went around the world and over 1000 marketers got involved and nice commented or, you know, signed to do things over, over the course of the life of the project.
So, so I, I think we did good work and. You know, while I don't really see the same seal on people's sites anymore, I do notice that most ESP I've worked with have adopted and used that standard for their own metrics measurement.
Matthew Dunn: You know, that's a, that's a, a, a great brief story on a, a fairly important and I think underappreciated aspect of, uh, the internet set of [00:11:00] technologies like the, the hard work, the collaborative hard.
In involved in standards and standardization and adoption of standards. I mean, arguably it's really transformed the world we're all working on, talking on, you know, standards, right? Um, and we kind of take it for granted or think of it as wallpaper and, and at the same time, uh, it's not, it's not, it's hard to get there for.
Luke Glasner: Yes, it definitely took a lot of work by everyone involved myself, John? Yeah. Uh, Caldwell was my co-chair in that project, so shout out to him. Warren McDonald led the project for a while and so did David Daniels. He's the one that originally started, so I wanna make sure that I, you know, mention all of them.
Nice. But I used to say when I was arguing for that, for this adoption, that the standard showed, having a standard showed that as an industry email had reached maturity that we. Just some [00:12:00] fad thing or whatever. And email had been around, you know, a good 20, 30 years. Yeah. By that point, right? Because it started long before that.
But what we think of as like the email industry had probably been around 10 years at that point. I would, you know, I don't know that there was really that much of an industry before we had the worldwide web. Mm-hmm. I mean, there were certainly ESP and, and there's people that I know that. At them at that time, and were already doing email at that time.
Mm-hmm. Um, but to me that was a big part of showing that we had staying power as an industry and that we were here to stay. Yeah. And then we had reached maturity and that we were something marketers and, and higher up the executive level, the CEOs, the CMOs needed to pay attention to. And that we had a real standard for measurement that it wasn't just, The Wild West anymore, this was something you could worry about.
Yeah. And, um, and, and have [00:13:00] a real answer to.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And that's, that's worth unpacking in, I think in contrast with other digital channels. I, I, I've said before, and I'll stand by, one of the things I like about email is that nobody owns it. And when you get something like, uh, standardized and widely adopted, uh, metrics for key things, marketers care.
That means that that marketer can change platforms without blowing up all their measurements. Look at other digital channels, particularly a lot of social media channels, and that is not true. It's like right, you're, you're captive and, and you're captive of the way the dominant vendor defines things, um, and the audiences that they've got captive and the told that.
Put on the gate. And that's one of the things that's cool about email is you don't actually, you don't have that, uh, lock in. Um, and I, I agree with your point about maturity as well.
Luke Glasner: Yeah. And, and you know, [00:14:00] one of the things I used to say is, is, you know, at the time there was a lot of ru haha in the industry about benchmark reporting cuz everyone was making one.
Um, And but the problem was, was that if there's no standard, every benchmark report Yeah. Defines what it is. Yeah. Differently. Differently, yeah. And so there's no real way to compare yourself to a variety of them where you could get some kind of fruit consensus. You're always just looking at whatever the one available in your own vendor is.
Yeah. And the other thing I used to say is about the standards was imagine if your GPS signal. Where your GPS in your car had no standard. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes a mile was 5,200 feet. Sometimes it was kilometers, sometimes it was something else. Yeah. You might get to the street that you're going to, but you'll never get to the location you're going to because you're always gonna be off a little bit.
Yeah. It's like using a competition map [00:15:00] and not bothering to account for magnetic. Yeah. When I did that at, you know, at a scout meeting a couple weeks ago, I showed them only going five miles on the map. We were half a mile off from what we were trying to get to. Right. So that's a very real thing that happens.
If people don't have this, then you end up going the wrong places with your program. Yeah, and I feel like part of the reason why I've started talking about this again is, is because I'm beginning to see a return to what I saw. 10 years ago now. Yes. Which is open rates are shot from Apple mpp. We did webinar on that with, with oi.
And um, the other thing I've seen a big rise in the last few months and some talk I've, uh, about it around the industry is inaccuracy in click reporting. Yeah. And this is something that I've been starting to. Get into and, and look at [00:16:00] is that I go into my reports and I look at who clicked on the various links, you know, and you see a lot of people talking about, well, they're all clicking on the logo at the top or the whatever the first link is.
Yeah. And when I look at that, and then I look at the timestamp from when I sent the email and when they clicked. Yeah. I see people that. I've literally clicked every email I've sent for 90 days. Yeah. Well, within one minute of delivery. Yeah. Little suspect clicked every link in the email. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's not a real person. That's not a real person. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so now we are back at the same place where we have big inaccuracies in open rates. We have big inaccuracies in click rates. Yeah. In, in one client I saw. The, the vendor had, uh, their e S P had a tool to like programmatically just filter it out if it happens within like 30 seconds or whatever, however they determine it.
Yeah. Um, and yeah, our clicks [00:17:00] hald Yep. When we turned that on. Yep. Which shows like how much really, like, and I knew there was a problem and, and I, and I knew it was a decent size problem, but I didn't think it was really half of everything reported. That's a huge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To be misjudging your inactives and you're engaged by, or the, the quality of your, of, of your creative and Coke, right?
Like that's a big problem. And I'm honestly surprised when Apple MPP was announced, people ran around like chicken little and said the sky was falling. This problem has been around at least three years and I've never really seen anybody make a big brew haha, about it. And I don't think most marketers realize this is happen.
Matthew Dunn: Well, I mean in grappling and we campaigns genius, we had to grapple with MPP from a, from a different perspective, but we took a fairly deep dive and in looking and trying to make sense of the, the signals and the [00:18:00] data there, we ended up bumping into exactly the thing you're talking about. The, the, the clear robo repeat automated.
This is not a human. Stuff. And as I've talked with, um, as I've talked with vendors and marketers in the email space, I, I'm a little frustrated because it does seem like marketers are, they're, they're prisoner of the tool that they happen to be using. Not all tools have addressed either the MPP set of issues or the the robo opener, robo click set of issue.
And if, if you're a marketer, you're like, I don't wanna have to go that deep. I don't know how to do that. Which is fair. So how do we start making some headway with being more accurate about what's actually happening? Is it metrics 2.0?
Luke Glasner: Yeah. I think we need to do basically what we did last time, which is for the marketers to put pressure on their vendors.
Yeah. To account [00:19:00] for this, or at least. Make it known. Does your system account for this? Yeah, I've, I use a lot of different ESP as a consultant, so I use whoever the client has. So you know, some IC do basically nothing on this. Yeah. And just report it all others I see have tools built in. Yep. And um, some, it doesn't seem like I see nearly as much, so they're obviously doing something, but there's.
There's no visibility about that from them, right? Yeah. There's no communication about that, or it was communicated a few years ago when it, when it first happened. Yeah. Right. But most, but today you don't really know that. It's just up to you to go look at your reports and see, yeah, yeah. Does this happen all the time?
And how big of a problem is it?
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And if there's no, uh, if, if there's no drill down and go, okay, wait a minute, how did you come up with this number? What did you throw out? Why did you throw it out? Can I [00:20:00] adjust the, the throwout parameters, for example? Then you're still kind of a prisoner of the glass dashboard in front of you, and.
It. You know, there's only so much time in the day, only so much expertise to go around. I can understand why marketers can be a bit defensive about what their tools say, but it's a tough problem to fight. It's like, I know your tool says that, but that can't be right. It can't be right. Something smells funny here, kind of, kind of what you said, and it's a tough one to com a tough one to combat.
It's like, as an industry, our standards haven't kept up with. No. Um,
Luke Glasner: you know, the, the, there's been a lot of change in the past one or two years. Yes. And it's probably part of why I see people talking about that again, is, is because we need to update it. Yeah. And we need to. Push to have accurate metrics to make decisions.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, and this isn't a new problem for [00:21:00] the internet, right. We, we can look to other channels. Yeah. Like search has had a huge problem with click fraud for years and years from the beginning. Right. Right. And by now they have some pretty good solutions to address that. Yeah. Or at least they've been trying to make good solutions for the last 10, 20 years.
Yeah. Um, You know, we can look to that and start to say, okay, can, can, what? What did they do to combat this issue? Can we also do the same thing? Yeah. You know, my simple thing is if the person clicks every email Yeah. You know, I get to emails and I click in them because I get a point if I do right for their.
For their day, uh, for their loyalty program. Right. So I'm actively trying to click that just to get that point. Cuz I, I like to play these little email games and I get on a good month, maybe 20. So to see somebody click literally every email, no, [00:22:00] nobody does that. Nobody does that. Even people attempting to do that, don't manage to do that.
Yeah. So if you see. You know that that's really, that person's got a filter. Yeah. Or, or something that's, you know, usually it's like some kind of spam filter that's prefetching the link check for antivirus. Yeah. In case anybody's watching and wondering why do they do this? Yes. So that's what they're doing.
They're checking, they're prefetching links and checking it to make it load fast and all the other reasons why we prefetch things. Right. Yeah. Um, but it's being recorded and then, Because the e s P doesn't know, you know, it, it, it, it, the redirect was hit and it counts the click. And so maybe it's time to look at how do we actually, what are the methodologies we use to measure things and is it time to think about better methodologies?
Yeah. Right. Opens was measured traditionally with the pixel. Yep. We've shown that that doesn't, that's kind of blown out of the water. Yeah. That's not a viable [00:23:00] long-term thing. Yeah. So we need something. You know, and maybe that's, you know, and this is probably a pie in the sky dream, but maybe that's getting the big highest piece to come together because they don't use a tracking pixel to tell whether you, you do it, they mark it as when it's marked red in, in your inbox.
They know you opened it. Yeah. So they have it. They could share it. Yeah. But they probably won't. And I, and, and you know, or at least like kind. Not looking for like, tell me specifically who it is, like an open Textel bus. Cuz I know they'll never share that. Right. There's no point in fighting that battle at all.
But postmasters tools, for example, will give you spam complaints without actually telling you who it is. So you know, I have a problem or I don't. Right. If they would do signals like that to us, that would be helpful for market. And for them, cuz we will stop emailing people that don't want to hear from us.
Matthew Dunn: Right. Right. One of the inadvertent, [00:24:00] uh, uh, misfires of apple's, uh, approach with M P P is we now don't have a, a way to distinguish who's interested, who's not. So we w may, we may well be, uh, sending them more rather than less.
Luke Glasner: I know, I'm, I'm sending. At least for recent more because I don't have a signal and Right, right.
You know, um, I can't take it down and just click because that's, that's, there's not enough. I'll lose like 90% of the list and Right, right. So will everyone else I've spoken to, yeah. Like that's not gonna work.
Matthew Dunn: I mean, average, average click rates on emails or something like 4%. Like that's, that's just not, this is not enough to work with to.
Broad list based decisions. Yeah. You can't say segment based on click. I'm only segmenting 4% of people.
Luke Glasner: Yeah, yeah. You know, you're, it, it, it's, it's, you won't have the volume necessary to make, to make the conversions and the sales you need to keep the [00:25:00] program running, you know? Yeah. And you won't
Matthew Dunn: have, uh, you certainly won't have subscriber level of, what's the phrase?
I despise it first. Data, if that's your only signal, because you are not gonna accumulate enough to be really particularly meaningful. I don't, I don't think how, how do we take this in a different direction though? How we, we've got this continual, um, challenge that I think we're recognizing at a broad cultural level of reco, reconciling, reconciling privacy with, uh, you know, clarity and effectiveness.
Hey, I want you to tell me about stuff I'm interested. But I don't want you to know anything about me. Okay? How are we supposed to pull this up, right? How do we, how do we make those two things marry up? No, that's difficult.
Luke Glasner: And I think it's that in some ways you need to give the controls to the subscribers, and that's not necessarily easy to do.
Yeah. Stuffy. And the other problem with that is, is that in my experie. [00:26:00] Even trying to give the control to the subscriber over things like frequency. The reality is, is the majority of subscribers don't respond at all. Right, right, right. They don't go mark a preference for their frequency. Right. Right. Yeah.
When I send out, Hey, come update your preferences, I get like 15% that actually update their preferences. Yeah. That means 85% eating. Right. So on my list of, you know, usually well north of a hundred thousand, Thousands and tens of thousands of people who didn't bother to give me their preference. Yeah, yeah.
You know, maybe you could ask it when they opt in, but that will decrease your opt-in rate, so you're not gonna do that. Right. You're not gonna add fields to that form cause that's gonna make less. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's, and, and I, and I have always been. On the side of, of the subscriber having their own preferences and their own privacy.
I, I would want that too. On the same time as someone that owns a domain name and I've owned a domain name since [00:27:00] 1996. Um, you came to my site, you came to my server. You basically, if this was the real world, you came to my house, yes. I have a right to know who's coming in my. Right. So that's kind of, I get the other idea too.
It's like, well, you chose to do all this stuff. You gave me the data. I don't, I don't, I think people often don't think about the ramifications of trading off privacy for convenience, and that has happened too much. Um, on the other hand, you want us to target the stuff to you. You don't want me to send you the relevant stuff.
You don't want me to send you kid clothes when you have No. Right, right. So you don't want me to send you Ja Winter Coast. If you live in Florida, you want me to send you things that are relevant, right? And in order to do that, you gotta tell me what's relevant to you. Yeah. And you know, so maybe it's just a bigger education of the [00:28:00] populist to get them to do a little more.
But again, as someone that's fought for a standard before, I could tell. That will probably not happen. Yeah. I mean, we'll make strides and we'll get a good amount, but you're never going to get the, the scale that you need, so it's well
Matthew Dunn: and practically speaking. Right. Put on your, both of us. Put it on a, you know, consumer beanies for a second and go.
Yeah. How long of, how long of form will I actually fill out? Answer, not very long. How often will I click the link to go update the, because it's, You asked me to answer? Not eh, not all the time. Right. Email folks. Talk about you need a preference center, not an unsubscribe. I'm like, eh. Yeah, not I don't care.
Right. Make it easy for me to do whatever because my attention span is a 21st century consumer cuz somewhat goldfish like and Right. And if I don't see a real reason to invest in it, if you know. [00:29:00] I'm gonna go ahead and say it. If Amazon said, here, spend four minutes doing this, this, and this, so we can do an even better job of sending a truck to your house just about every day, I might do it because I can sort of run the math of is, is that four minutes gonna pay itself back?
Yeah, but how many lists are you on? How many lists are high on. Where I don't actually transact in the course of a year. Why would I invest time in making it better? I, I'm staying on the list probably cuz I'm too lazy to click the unsubscribe button.
Luke Glasner: Right, right. You know, you, you, you have what I like to call the emotionally unsubscribed.
Those are those 50% of people that are basically apathetic to your mail. Yeah, yeah. And I often look at that and it's kind of like when you start to think about this, right. I am so indifferent to your email. That I wouldn't bother to unsubscribe. Yes. I wouldn't bother to mark you as spam. I wouldn't bother to do anything.
I have a rule, you go in the folder and I never look at your stuff. Right. Right. [00:30:00] You don't exist however,
Matthew Dunn: and you don't know that I don't look thanks Apple. Right.
Luke Glasner: And but if you stop sending to me that day that I actually wanted to buy that thing from you if you weren't there, guess what? I'm going to the next guy on the list.
Yeah. That is there. Yeah. It's quite the balancing act, but the idea that people are going to, when do people update preferences or, or do anything like that when they do something major where they change their address, like, Hey, I had my identity stolen, so I'm changing my email address everywhere. That's when they'll look at it.
Right. Or some other major thing. I changed jobs and this is no longer my work email, so I'll Right, right. Let people know I'm over here. Right. Right. Um, but other than that, very rarely do you see people that aren't email marketers themselves actually do these things. Yeah. Um, unless there's some kind of [00:31:00] benefit to the subscriber.
If it was, Hey, update your preferences and I'll give you five bucks, then maybe I would, yeah. If it was five bucks off my order, that's a lesser, maybe if it was $5 cash that you'll send to me that, that's, that you just went up the thing. And would that be worth it? Mm-hmm. Probably. Probably. Honestly. Could you acquire a subscriber for less than the five bucks?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you can get them to come click and show some activity Yeah. And get back into actually reading your mail. Yeah. Right. Then you know, that was well worth it. And I find that, you know, and, and the engagement stuff that I often see people wait a few months. After they stop engaging.
Yeah. If the person already stopped engaging with you, they're not gonna read the re-engagement email either. You need to figure out where that drop off is beforehand so that it becomes a habit. Yeah. And I know that where that time is, [00:32:00] habits typically take 90 to 120 days to form. Uh, you know, my, my wife is a psychologist and she says if somebody does something for three months, they'll probably keep doing it right.
At the end of three months, if the person is opening your emails fairly consistently, say one out of four or one out of five. It's not gonna be like every, but like not never. Yeah. They're probably gonna continue to do that. Yeah. If they've already started to drop off a lot. Yeah. Trying to hit them with that re-engagement before they, before they're emotionally unsubscribed and just don't care about you at all.
I like that. And how many of those will just, when they go in and see all those emails from you? Yeah. Even though they didn't unsubscribe. They'll still mark, and they did sign up and they did interact with you. They'll still mark Yes. Span, because that's the easiest thing to do. Yeah. They're going to do the easiest thing to do every, every time, every,
Matthew Dunn: yeah, every cotton pick in time.
There's another, I think there's another driver of this disconnect that's, uh, it's [00:33:00] inside baseball to talk about, but I, okay. We're having an inside baseball conversation. Email team. Web team. Not usually the same. No. So when you, when you think the logical thing to do would be, Hey, he's in the middle of checkout.
Ask him just one extra question about email preferences. I've almost never seen that. Why? Email team, web team, separate teams, separate priorities, plans, et cetera, et cetera. It's like they're completely dependent on each other from in the business context. But it's not the same folks. And so if the email guys say, Hey, we want our preference thing, and you know, the web team's good, look.
Yeah, we're busy. We're we're, it doesn't work that way. It's not, and they're separate systems as well. Right? The number of email platforms that do webpage is pretty damn small. Yes. Yeah. Nonexistent.
Luke Glasner: Yeah. I mean there's, there's a few, but there's not many. And the ones that do do it usually [00:34:00] lock into their like editor.
It's not like Yeah. A real website.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. I, I have seen some signals of, of like a better interop story, particularly out of Shopify Plus, plus Clavio. Seems like those guys are playing together at a higher and higher level all the time, and. Promising in a sense, especially because the customer base for Shopify Plus Clavio is a small, medium sized business who does not have time or a team to do this stuff by hand.
So there's, there's a vendor sort of raising the game. Cool. But then we get back to are they measuring things the same way everybody else is? You know, is there, is it standardized or is it just a proprietary advantage? And, uh, I don't know the answer to.
Luke Glasner: Yes. One of the few that I've seen that have done a very good job on that was do digital and their magenta, which is now Adobe commerce integration.
That's super [00:35:00] tight. Yeah, and it really reads like right off the stuff when I, yeah, nice. When I look at the number in there, in the one system, when I look at the number in the other system for like orders and revenue and stuff, they actually match. Wow. They match because they get their number from the commerce system.
Yeah. And that has been a huge thing that I've also thought metrics related is how much money did email make? Yeah. Gmail says one thing, the E s P says another. Yep. And, and the commerce system sends a third. And which of those is the real number? Well, and
Matthew Dunn: your website analytics is a.
Luke Glasner: Right. And I know that out of those, if I have to pick a number to live and die by, it's the one in the commerce system.
Sure. They took the charge. Yeah. Yeah. That's who collected the money. However much money they collected is the money. Yeah. Right. So forget about all the other ones, cuz that's the only one that really matters. Yeah. When it really comes down to making the decision. Yeah. Yeah. And you need to be able to get to.[00:36:00]
And you're not gonna really be able to get to it usually through your E S P. It's very rare that you see something like digitals. There's the only one that I've seen that did that. Yeah. Um, but that's what marketers need to know because you need to know, not fuzzy math money. You need to know how much money you made.
And another thing I'll throw out there for marketers, revenue with demand generated is not how much money you made. If you think. I ran this campaign for email and it costs a thousand dollars and it made a thousand dollars. It did not break even. Right? The products you're selling costs money. The producing of the work costs money.
Shipping in them costs money. Yeah. People. I often see this and marketers do not take account for things like cogs, cost of good sold. So when they're saying they got this return, no, you didn't because the return isn't on how much money you generated. Right. It's on how much money you actually made. The profitability.
Yeah. [00:37:00] Revenue
Matthew Dunn: discount. Income. Enough income, not regular revenue.
Luke Glasner: Yeah, yeah. You, you, you reduced the amount of money that came in by 20% to make the sales, so now you're only making 10% of that number. So if it was a hundred dollars and you were making. 30 bucks and then you took off 25. Now you're only really making five.
Yeah. You gotta make a lot more of them. Yeah. To do that. And I don't see many people they, they look at it and said, we generated $2,000 and they stopped there, but go beyond that. Yeah. The CEO wants profits. Yeah. The business wants profits. They don't want demand generation. That's why we use these firms.
It's dollars. Nobody cares about any other fancy term, it's money. Stop talking about things in ways that
Matthew Dunn: they're not. Yeah. Our, our mutual friend Jean Jennings will always drive back to what, like, what's the business outcome you're measuring? Not all of the other Yeah. Digital things that can be captured and which are [00:38:00] usually suspect anyway, but what's the actual, you know, ringing of the cash register, um, bottom line profit kind of stuff.
Yeah. And, and it's on a business. To have that discipline top to bottom and communicate those numbers top to bottom. You can't stick the email marketer in the closet and say, you're supposed to know this. You gotta make sure they have access to the data to know it, to be
Luke Glasner: fair. Yes. Yes. It's not, it's not, it's often not fair to the email marketer cuz they don't have access to the real number.
Yeah. They're, they're going by whatever we did, you know, and or the company just picks like, we're just gonna all use Google Analytics number. Right. No matter what. Right. So that we can have some standardized thing. But the fact is, is they should probably share the real numbers. And, and I, I understand where marketers come from because in my experience, those numbers are the last five years, those numbers are shared pretty commonly.
Prior to that, they were not, and they were never in the E S P, you know, it's [00:39:00] couldn't be, they were, they were like fairytale numbers. They weren't real numbers. Yeah. You know, so marketers need to demand. But the people above them need to be interested in sharing that and, and in my experience, they're not.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's almost an hr and org org structure problem to begin with. My, I have fair number of conversations with email marketers, and they tend to spend most of their time inside the, the E S P and a couple of. Tools like Yes. That broader view, it's like it's not on their screen and it's hard enough to do the job they're doing now.
Um, so yeah, they get kinda like, Nope, this is what, this is what I get, this is the measures I get. This is what defines success. Not really, but Okay.
Luke Glasner: Yeah. Well, that's what they're, that's what they're graded on to a degree. Right? Graded on Those are the of numbers. We come in and we report on [00:40:00] them, and you're judging my job based on that.
Yeah. Yeah. The problem is, is you're not align. The email teams reporting and goals to be judged on with the business ones. Yeah, and this lack of alignment causes a lot of problems, and it's not just email. It's virtually every function within the business. Sure, sure, sure. Many businesses, if you could perfectly align all the teams and processes in your business, I would, I would say you have achieved a competitive advantage that will be hard to match.
To do that. Yeah. Is such an endeavor. Yeah. And by the time you get it done, it will have changed. Right. There'll be another tool, another measurement system, another thing that had to be added in. Yeah. Yeah. I remember for a while people did try to do that and most didn't. Get there, because by the time they managed to actually complete all that alignment, either they were 86 in one of the vendors or they had brought in a new channel, oh, now we're gonna bring in social and now we're [00:41:00] gonna bring in mobile.
Or now we're gonna bring in chat bots or whatever we're bringing in. Yeah, yeah. But by the time you finish that alignment project, yeah. One of these has arisen and now it's no longer aligned. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn: yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a tough, tough sort of systems thinking problem, and it's not like, It's not like you can buy a, a, a genuine business blueprint that says, here's how to make all this stuff work before you even start.
You can't buy a blueprint to run an email department either. No. Yeah. You do a lot of audits, like when you start with new, uh, consulting clients, you'll, you'll do, uh, essentially an audit to figure out where they are, don't you?
Luke Glasner: Yes. That's actually. Most popular project is full friends program audits and smaller deliverability audits.
And what
Matthew Dunn: do you expect to find based on, all, based on, you know, 10,000 plus campaigns worth of experience? What, what problems do you kind of expect to find most of the time?
Luke Glasner: [00:42:00] Um, the things that I will often find are, Outdated automated programs that if you simply updated them or did some testing with them, would, would really sing a much nicer song for you.
Mm-hmm. Um, not great list management. Uh, that's another one. It's like, you know, we're, we're, it's not necessarily that we're hitting lots of inactives or now segment and whatever. We are doing those things. Mm-hmm. But usually they're taking so much time that there's a whole bucket of people in that list that you're not really reaching, you're not really communicating with.
Mm-hmm. And you can find ways to revive them. And I saw a lot more about that on the pandemic, um, because we were trying to reactivate a lot more of the. Because there was no physical store and things like that to go to, right? So that's another one. Um, what I really look for [00:43:00] is two things and, and of course reporting.
Is the reporting accurate? Are we really reaching the inbox? Do you have, are, are you using the tool? A lot of people spend a lot of money on advanced email systems, tools, and really all they do is make a couple segments and hit send every month or every week or every time, right? Are you using the tool?
Do you have the resources that you need to use it? How many of those things that you wanted to integrate with that IT team that just never got done? Yeah. Um, you know, we got like 95% there. Basically, what I find is, is that a lot of people when they move B S P does a bunch for them. They get, they're gonna do the rest.
They get about three quarters of the way through that and a bunch of stuff just. Yeah. Really completes. Yeah. Because once we start sending emails, yeah, we're back to business as usual. That's it. We're out of time to do anything else. Yeah, [00:44:00] yeah, yeah. Another big thing is, is that I find is, is that I often come in and one of the first things I do is sit down with the email team and I said, so tell me all those ideas that you've been pitching to management that they've ignored for the past year.
And then I'll pick a few of them because I don't really need to, they know what's wrong with the thing. That's, that's one thing I would. Trust your own team, and if you don't, then the problem isn't. The problem is, is who you've selected to be on the team. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. Like you put them in the job, you have to trust 'em to do them, give them the authority and the power necessary to do that job because mm-hmm.
Often some of the best ideas that I put in my recommendations came directly from the team, and the only difference between why it got implemented now, verse when they asked is I. Right. Right. Right. And and that's another thing is they don't often ask. Right. They have great ideas. Don't be afraid to share them.
Don't, don't, don't wait for someone [00:45:00] like me to come in and teach
Matthew Dunn: your idea for, you need a consultant to tell us what we already know. Well, yeah. Sometimes.
Luke Glasner: Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes that is a lot of what I'm doing in the program is simply validating the things that they knew. Yeah. With an outside perspective.
Yeah. Another thing I look at a lot, and I, I've done some big projects on this with big retailers, um, is the process and how the team actually works. Do you have some like ridiculous 50 million changes on the an hour before the thing goes out? Process? Yeah. Does it take weeks to get one email approved and out the door?
Yeah. Like I worked with one big retailer. It took them like four to five weeks to make one. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, as a coder, I make 20 a week. Yeah. If I pushed it, I could make 30. That'd be long days, but I could, I could do that many and, you know, um, so to take [00:46:00] weeks to get this done, like I get there's stages and it's a big company and like I do understand all that, but look at your process of where can you streamline that.
Yep. And And does your QA process really hold up a lot of places where people fall down as QA process, right? Hmm. They're so rushed that no one's really taking the qa. Yeah. Or no one's really dedicated to qa. Hmm. Right. We supplement with things like a litmus or a checklist or a whatever. Yeah. But when you're cranking out four or five emails every day, You're, you're, you need a different person to QA that.
Yeah. Yeah. And it can't be someone that already looked at the email like 50 times too. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: It's, uh, from that perspective, it just occurred to me as you were describing it, it's, it's, it's very much a software development process, even though it doesn't get labeled as such. Yeah. Because you are sending a digital artifact out the door.
It's [00:47:00] released, right? It's going to, it's gonna leave your control the minute the send button is pushed by, by the thousands or millions, and, uh, get in front of your
Luke Glasner: customers. Right. And the only time that the, that the boss is gonna actually open your email and read it is gonna be the one day that you won't, you sent 101 campaigns in a row that were perfect, but the one hill open would be 1 0 2, where you have the typo online one.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's always what happens. Um, but it is very much like a software process. And once you start adding in different responsive. Different dynamic content. Now you might bring in dark, in ai, dark mode, all these things like Yeah. You're, you're basically making a software product every campaign.
Yeah. And testing and checking it becomes very difficult. Right. It's one thing to make two or three versions. Yeah, and I can check those. It's another, when I get to like one-to-one person, how do you check [00:48:00] the display? 1.5 million emails Yeah. Answer that are all different. Yeah. You're, you can, you can't, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's right. Once I find, once we get beyond five versions, it becomes very difficult to actually QA it. That
Matthew Dunn: makes sense. Are, are email marketing team slash departments are, are they frequently under-resourced? Yes.
Luke Glasner: They're under. Usually on multiple fronts. One is budget. Yeah. They don't have the money to get the tools.
Yeah. But the biggest one is headcount in time. Yeah. People, people think that putting together an email campaign is gonna take a half hour, an hour. I actually had someone complain to me that turning a email from scratch around in under an hour was taking too long. I'm like,
Matthew Dunn: you don't know how this works, do you?
Luke Glasner: Okay, could you, Cody, I'll give you the whole [00:49:00] day. Let's see if you could do it. You know, like, yeah. So yes, the amount of campaigns, and this is, and I work with a lot of big retailers. When people ask me who my clients are, they're the stores at the mall, right? Yeah. Those people put out through sometimes three emails a day, every day, 365 days a year, and they have a team of three people.
One of which is on the way out the door. Right. And we've had the fourth guy bacon for at least four months. And you know, like they're always understaffed and too pressed for time, even if they have the staff. Yeah. It's like, oh, well we added that fourth person that we were supposed to have had. And now we're gonna add another campaign every day or five more a week or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah. Like, because they think like they have more benefit. No. What you achieved was a nine hour a day job as opposed to an 11 where we're supposed to be working eight. [00:50:00] Right. Like you need, they need to put more people behind it and they need to recognize that it is a, it is a skill It. Experience, skill and talent to be good at email.
It's not easy. Yeah. That's not even weighing into what people consider the hard or tech stuff, right? Yes, yes. We didn't even mention any deliverability things, that that's a very complicated technical thing. Yeah. Um, but even just being able to make good email design, that's hard. Yeah. Yep. Coding a good email is hard.
QAing emails is, and really thinking it through is, Um, and all of those things take time. So yeah, that is the biggest thing, and that's usually why I'm very successful in those program audits is, is because at the end of them I will come back with, these are all the short-term recommendations and these are the long-term recommendations.
Long-term recommendations are gonna need, like it or to buy [00:51:00] something or they're not gonna happen quick. Right. Short ones are, here's a bunch of things that the team itself could knock out if you gave them the. Yeah. And usually they come to me and say, do you know how to do these things? Can you come in and manage the team for a couple months to do them?
Yeah. And that's usually how I get my next project from them. Wow. Because yes, I only recommend things I can actually do. Because yeah, you're gonna look to me and say, well, how do we make that API connection? How do we do the whatever? And I need, I need to have an answer for you. Yeah. You know, like, I need to be able to show you.
Yeah. And that's actually how I usually get in good with the team, is I teach them along the way. Yeah. Look at these things that I've learned that will help you do it faster or up your game. Or have a meeting where we talk about email between us and share different aspects that you don't. So that we can get that alignment again.
Right. Always comes back to the, the, the time management, time [00:52:00] alignment. The management and the team. Yeah. Yeah. And, and budget to buy the tools needed to do the job. Yeah. And, and, but honestly number three is the one you hear about, but that's actually usually a distant third. It's really the headcount and the time.
Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: I, I and I, I, I kind of figured, and you got a whole lot more experience in this space than I do, but I kind of figure. That, that was the lynchpin because I, I see the sort of look in the eyes with all the email marketers that I, that I get a chance to speak with and it's like, oh God, I'm tired. Right, right.
Ugh, Atlas. Um, and there, and it is, it's a complicated fragmented, it is not just push a button and hit send to do, to do the job.
Luke Glasner: No, no. And you, you know, you also think about, oh, we could drag it, drop it in the. That's still not easy. Yeah, that's still, there's a lot that has to be adjusted. No editor really makes an email, right?
That's right. Like what it makes is a temp, a framework for the marketer to come in. You're still gonna have to move this over because [00:53:00] the editor shows you one screen and then you send it to that, uh, tool or like an email on acid or litmus or any of these rendering tools. And then you're like, Outlook. Uh oh yeah.
Oh, Gmail. Put the white line in my picture thing again. And I see a lot of criticisms of retail emailers that just make image only emails. They make image only emails cause they don't have time to make the call. To do much. Yeah. To do much else. Right? It's not, it's not that they don't realize it or they don't want to do that.
Start talking to them and you'll see their lies, their face light up, the eyes sparkle about the ideas that they would love. To put into place, many of which would be good. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: Right. And return. Return. Some of those dollars that you talked about,
Luke Glasner: they don't, they don't have the ti again, they don't have the time to do it or they don't have the permission.
No one's willing to take some risks. Yeah. You know, you gotta be able to do
Matthew Dunn: that. Yeah. Well, Luke, we should wrap, but hopefully this last part of the conversation has, [00:54:00] uh, uh, more than a few companies going, oh man, we need to talk with this guy. We didn't realize we're creating our own problems. Where does someone hunt down Glasner Consulting?
Well, you
Luke Glasner: could find me@glasser.com on the web or, uh, D l
Matthew Dunn: a s n
Luke Glasner: E r, right? Yes, one s g l a s n e r com. I'm on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message there or email me at l glasser glasser dot. There you go. Terrific. Hey, on the first three pages, uh,
Matthew Dunn: I like it. Thank you. I knew this would be a fun conversation. Yes.
Right?
Luke Glasner: Yes. I had a great time, and I, my guest
Matthew Dunn: has been Luke Glasner, one of the, uh, one of the hot guys in the email space. Luke, we're out.
Luke Glasner: Thank you. Have a great day. Thanks everybody.