A Conversation With Melanie Balke of The Email Marketers

Like most people “in email”, Melanie Balke, the CEO and founder of The Email Marketers, found her niche in email along the way.  The Email Marketers is an agency focused on email and SMS marketing for ecommerce and B2B SaaS companies. They function as an outsourced email department, and also help companies build in-house email teams.

For Melanie, good email marketing comes down to being a "good sender" - providing value to subscribers, building community, having a strategy, thoughtful segmentation and targeting. Bad senders spam, blast everyone, and ignore feedback.  

As is common these days, Matthew and Melanie end up talking about SMS and messaging. As it grows, restrictions will come just like email has faced, and brands need to use it to actually add value to consumers' lives. For now - Wild West!

Melanie has the experience marketer’s take on personalization — it’s TOUGH!  Personalization and segmentation is best when tied closely to a company's own data about customer behavior and preferences. 

Because of the ecosystem (Shopify + Klaviyo) used by so many of her customers, this conversation goes farther into how effective email marketing can be when “all of the silos are connected.”  Want an invigorating look at best practices?  Check out this conversation!

TRANSCRIPT

Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. My guest today, Melanie Balke, CEO and founder of The Email Marketer. Marketers? Marketers. Marketers. Marketers. I didn't tell you this in advance, Melanie. You are guest number 100. Wow. Lucky number. This is episode, episode 100. So I'm kind of, kind of fun.

I think it's almost three years we've been, uh, we've been doing this. So, uh, nice to have you. So you're an email person, I think. Yes.

Melanie Balke: Yes. I think so too. I hope I

Matthew Dunn: am. Phil, uh, just top line your agency, what you focus on, who your customers are and so on.

Melanie Balke: Yeah. So we're the email marketers. Um, as the name says, we do email and SMS.[00:01:00]

We started predominantly focusing on e commerce. That was really our bread and butter. Well, we've expanded to doing more B2B SaaS businesses as well. Um, yeah, we really help companies in two ways. One, we function as our outsourced email department. Yeah. Well, if you don't want to build an email department in house for whatever reason, it's too expensive or you don't want to deal with it.

We do that full thing from A to Z, or we help companies actually build an email team in house with a done with you kind of service. Gotcha.

Matthew Dunn: Gotcha. And yeah, I read about the, the, the done with you service. I thought that was a, a droid and a very, actually a very interesting move just because you'll hear that debate.

Oh, we should totally do this in house. Oh, we don't know how to do it. We can, we can help. Um, Germany originally? Yes. Yeah, and as much a seems like as much a junkie of higher ed as I am like for I think I saw four different schools on your LinkedIn profile. I'm [00:02:00] curious, how did you go from I think you read an influencer marketing, like an agency.

And you got sucked into email specifically and you're darn well younger than I am. Why email?

Melanie Balke: Well, total coincidence. It actually happened pre agency. We, um, I, you know, in Germany I, I worked in consulting, so I had a consulting background When I came to the U. S., I joined one of the first, if not the first, e com furniture businesses to sell made to order sofas online.

Okay. When I joined them, I was their first marketing hire, and like a typical consultant, I joined and I did a full analysis of everything. Okay, well, one of the big pieces they were missing was email because they were selling these 2, 000 sofas online and never bothering to think about cross selling coffee tables, nightstands, bed frames, or even just pillows and throws, which is all products they had.

And so I said, okay, I'm going to do this. And like in a typical [00:03:00] startup, it's not like you get a team to do it with. It's like you figure out how to do it and you do it. And so I taught myself email marketing. I consumed about every blog that exists in, in the worldwide web and just rolled out what I thought would be a good strategy.

And it was a good strategy and it was kind of neat to see how much money you can actually make with email marketing. And that made me fall in love with it. Um, Then when I left that brand, I went in house for an agency and originally in a very generalist position, but they were selling email to their clients and realized they had no one who actually does email.

They don't have an email department. There's one person who knows how to email and it's me. And so, um, that was part of why they had hired me originally more generalist, but then eventually just kind of like leading the email department.

Matthew Dunn: Right. Okay. Okay. And there's a bunch of stuff I want to unpack or sort of delve into there.

Um, when you say do email, [00:04:00] let's, let's assume that some of the people might be listening to or watching this are, are not as involved in this as maybe you are. And, and to some extent I am, you're not talking about. Like the bits and bytes of, of, of send those for the most part are handled by platforms these days.

What is someone who does email focus on do pay attention to like, tell me about the game of doing that.

Melanie Balke: Very good question. Um, I think it boils down into a couple of different pieces. One is strategy, right? You want someone who looks at the data, who looks at your customer life cycle, who looks at your customer and understands what their pain points are and whatnot and builds a strategy around that.

So both for your automated life cycle, which is like person comes to my website or person booked a call or somehow they turn into a lead. How do I hit them with automated messages to turn them into a customer? And the second thing is your campaign. So if you're [00:05:00] an e commerce, your Mother's Day campaign or whatnot, or Black Friday campaigns, like more time sensitive things.

So building a strategy for that, and then writing the emails, designing the emails, if necessary, not all of them have to be designed and actually implementing them in your ESP. Segmenting what segment you're going to send it to, which has become so much more important than it used to be. Even, um, I mean, like back in the day, you could probably just go send to everyone and you would have been fine.

How post iOS 14 and with the new deliverability, I don't want to call them restrictions, but guidelines that are coming next year, especially. You know, you have to be really good at like segmentation for deliverability as well.

Matthew Dunn: Gotcha. Gotcha. And, and the iOS 14 reference for those of you who don't play email baseball all day on Apple is essentially said.

We're going to auto open every email as far as the loading signal that was [00:06:00] used for 20 odd years to say, Melanie opened this email. Matthew didn't. So we lost that. Who's opening? We don't know. Um, and come February. Uh, the big, the bigger inbox guys, the Gmail's, Yahoo's, Comcast, and so on are going to go, Hmm, you're sending a lot of email.

Uh, we want you to be authenticated, valid, legit behavior, et cetera, et cetera. Because frankly, fighting spam is the constant battle that they're facing. They're just trying to keep up with that flood, I think.

Melanie Balke: Yep. And I think it was iOS 15 actually that hit, you know, iOS 14. I made a mistake there. Yeah.

It's okay. Yeah. And I think that battle is only going to become more intense, right? Because Email's been around forever and everyone always says email's dead. I have this funny sticker here somewhere.

Matthew Dunn: You've got the email is dead sticker. Um,

Melanie Balke: but I do think, you know, because it's not dead and more people are getting into the inboxes, deliverability restrictions are just going to [00:07:00] get higher and higher and more, more strict.

Matthew Dunn: Agreed. Um, let me give you a couple of things to see what you think of it. One, because email is still an open channel, not really owned by anybody, the, the potential for abuse of that channel is, is always part of the landscape. I don't actually have to ask permission to send someone a message. So there are guys who do that by the millions a day without asking for permission.

That message, that interruption, that storage space, all that other stuff, unwanted. Yep. And so we're all playing this constant keep up game. I gotta tell you, I noticed that you use Superhuman, which we might want to discuss at some point. The, the um, very cool email, email client. Thank you. I do a lot of delete based on who sent first thing in the morning.

Like, they don't even get read because invariably, especially if you're at all active professionally, you end up with, why am I getting email from like this guy, this guy, [00:08:00] that list, that list, that list, and reading it to screen it. I don't have time. Unsubscribing? I should, but I could spend all day getting unsubscribed.

So this is like, oof, gone, right? Never even seen. And some will be back tomorrow and I, you know, kind of easier to deal with that in five minutes than to spend a day trying to winnow it down. Um, so the, the, the, the inbox guys. having to grapple with that and try to get some return on the fairly amazing infrastructure they provide for inboxes.

Um, it's a reasonable thing to do. I'm actually, I appreciate that, that they're continuing to fight the good fight saying we want legit stuff. We don't want unwanted, not legit stuff. But as a marketer, how do you tread that perilous dividing line that says stay legit, be seen as legit, make sure the signals say should be delivered, not should go into the bit bucket.[00:09:00]

I mean,

Melanie Balke: I think, you know, it's almost just be a good sender. This is what I tell people. I mean, like, it sounds so simple, but it really is like, just don't spam people and actually ask yourself. You know, does my email have reason for existing in this person's inbox? Like, is there any value add that I'm providing?

And I think that's really the crux of it, right? Then you can get into the technicality of like setting up your, your technical side of the inbox and segmentation and whatnot, but like at the core of the value is just like, am I being a good sender? And I think what people forget to with email, which is something I always harp on is.

Email is a really great way to build community. Email is for a lot of personal brands. You see this, right? They sent emails. Those are the emails that always get open. That's where they get their leads from for their coaching business or whatnot because they're focusing on [00:10:00] value. They're going, I'm going to send an email and this person is going to love my email.

It's going to be so helpful. That eventually they're going to want to be a client. And I think that's a really good way to look at email and other brands, even e commerce brands should look at it that way more. Like how do I use email to build community and provide value for my customers or even my prospects who are not yet customers and layer that on top of the transactional stuff where you'd want to generate the sale, I think will allow you to have a solid email system.

Matthew Dunn: Well put. Yeah. Yeah. Very well put. And it's a good, that's a good synthesis of. Of all of the, uh, advice and blogs and so on, uh, that you read. And it's not hard over a, you know, a cup of coffee or a beer to say, what would a good sender do? You're like, don't be a dork, you know, think of them first, like, Oh, like all that kind of stuff.

But don't companies struggle to keep that in mind and keep that staffed and resourced [00:11:00] versus Oh, crap. Sales are down. Can we just blast everybody and goose sales a little bit? For sure.

Melanie Balke: I think that's also the common misconception people have, that they think if they just blast everybody, sales will go up, right?

I have yet to see that, like, come true. That someone was like, it's like some C level executive. They're like, we have a million emails. Just sent to all of them. And then there is some poor email person who's like, no, no, please, please don't. And he's like, no, no, we're going to send to all of them. Um, or they just have, don't have an email person.

And there's some poor marketing coordinator that does, has no experience with email that goes and does blast everyone. And people don't realize like one that doesn't work. Right. It's like, It just does not work to doing that over a long period of time will absolutely crush your email program. Yeah, there's so many accounts I go into and I'm like, Oh, my God, you guys have been sending like, for months, if not years.

To everyone, right? You haven't [00:12:00] segmented anything and you are getting the data that no one's opening because your open rates are like 5%, your crit rates are like 0. 1 percent or something ridiculous, like you are getting that data, but you're just ignoring the feedback, right? If you look at the feedback, we actually able to understand like, Oh, something here is not working.

And, and I get it. Listen, like if I had a million people email list. It would be really hard to accept that 30 percent of those people will just naturally churn every year. Not, churn doesn't, doesn't just mean unsubscribe, it like means they stop using that email address. Or they just auto delete your email like you do.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, or they, you know, or life moves on and you're like, Ah, I don't have time for that right now. You know, easier to, easier to get it out of my face. Um, I want to, I want to hook over to B2B and then come back to, uh, back to the good sender thing in a minute. But you mentioned that you've expanded from e commerce to, to B2B.

You know, as a B, as a business, I find B2B, uh, you know, business outreach, To be [00:13:00] harder and harder and just aggravating as heck these days. Like the blast screens people have up professionally are very, very hard to get through or to get around, but just like, hi, I've got a gold brick. I want to give you no, seriously.

Nope. Sorry. I don't have time. Can't get it. What do you, what do you advise your B2B clients? What's a good sender in B2B?

Melanie Balke: That's a very good question. Um, I think, think about the types of emails you would want to receive. So what we send, like, let's say B2B cold email, that's a really good example, right?

Because cold email is so inundated for B2B. Like everyone wants to sell me cold email.

But like everything, right? Video production, yada, yada. And I'm like, with cold email, I think a lot of it comes down to what can you do for me? How are you different than others? And don't waste my time. I actually don't think those cutesy [00:14:00] long, cold email outreach emails, like I'm not even going to read that.

I don't have time to read emails from people I know, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So keeping that in mind, I think, what are the types of emails you would want to receive as a, as a business person? And then for like warm email stuff, you know, I think in B2B education is really big. So. Education around subject matter is huge because usually what happens is people go, okay, now I have all this information.

What do I now do with it? You know, where do I go with this? Like, let's say you're an HR platform, right? And your whole thing is an HR platform is you help businesses stay compliant with all the different regulations. Well, here's the thing. Most people have no idea what the different regulations is. They don't know.

And I I've just learned about more regulations and I'm like, Oh my God, this is like Insanity. And I have to do something different for every state, right? So go educate the people that somehow got on your list for HR [00:15:00] platform around these regulations, because what happens is you make them understand the gap, the gap of like, I didn't know I needed this.

Now I know I need this. Now I have all this information, but I don't have the skills or time or resources to do it in house or myself.

Matthew Dunn: Gotcha. Gotcha. That's good. That's good. And, and that's the kind of, that's the kind of message I, I might open. It is, it is difficult and understandably difficult, um, to know who's got the problem that you can help educate about.

I get, I get some cold outreach emails that are, they're pretty darn comical, but what people are offering to do or thinking, you need our, uh, you know, telephony over IP. No, actually I don't like, seriously, just don't. A million reasons why, but delayed, right? Um, so the time it takes to [00:16:00] narrow down, niche down, research, you know, like be reasonably sure Well, if you do business in California, you definitely have regulations to be educated on.

So I got to make that joke. There you go. But like that upfront investment of time, I think pays off. What do you think? I

Melanie Balke: do think so too. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I also feel like positions use the expert, right? It is your way of marketing

Matthew Dunn: too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, uh, no question about that. And, and everybody appreciates getting some, everybody appreciates getting some, getting some, um, free help.

The, the compliment to that, and we'll get off the cold email B2B thing. Cause boy, we could beat that up all day. Yeah,

Melanie Balke: that's also just numbers game, right? Just to add to that, Matthew, like, yeah, the reason we get so many like cold emails that are not relevant to us, because all they're looking for is like, are you a business that has this [00:17:00] much in revenue in this kind of industry, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's a timing thing. And it's a numbers game they're playing.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It is hard to get substantive information, uh, at scale, right, like going through a list of 100 potential companies who might want the, you know, widgets that we've got, like, it, it, it's still messy. I, I have to say one of the. I've started finding for, you know, we'd end up talking about AI, right?

One of the uses I've started finding as, as, uh, uh, Claude and chat, GPT, and so on, start getting hooked up to more live information sources is like, it sort of helped me narrow faster because doing it manually on the unstructured web and LinkedIn. It's so flippant, time consuming that it's easy to just blow it off and say, got the right SAIC code.

Cool. Let's hit send. Yeah, which may not be the right thing to do, but there's only so many [00:18:00] nanoseconds in a day, stuff like that. Um, back over to good sender for a second. And, and I wanted to introduce another loop there because you mentioned that you do SMS as well. Apple announced a couple of weeks ago.

That in some shape or form, they're going to jump on the RCS rich communication bandwagon. I don't know how they're going to do it. I'm going to guess it's not going to be exactly how Google wants them to do it. But I think we're about to see the messaging app that, particularly in the U. S., people use all the time.

Um, start to become richer than it's been. And I suspect that there's going to be a bit of a gravitational pull towards marketing on that channel. What do you think? So this

Melanie Balke: is what I've said for SMS and I've actually said it since 2022. I always go, we're still in the wild, wild west of SMS. We're still in that period of time where an email, there was no promotions folder.

There was no spam folder. As long as they had someone's email address, your email would go [00:19:00] into one little inbox. And that's what SMS is right now. We don't have promotions or spam folders per se yet. That is going to come. That is going to come. And SMS is going to grow as a marketing channel. And it's going to get more annoying for us consumers.

Yeah, I mean, like brands are going to have to figure out, okay. How do we make this less annoying again? And then there's going to be an SMS promotions tab, and then there's going to be an SMS spam folder. I mean, it's going to happen. Even if you just look at the amount of scams, I feel like scams are always a good indicator.

Yeah. Like, you know, when the email scams happened and everyone was trying to wire money because they were a royal family somewhere. So that's happening on SMS now, right? People are texting you like, Hey, gorgeous. Hey cutie. Like, so someone sold my text number to some person in. China or India where in, you know, sometimes it's actually really sad because these people are actually forced in like slavery to go scam people.

Right. Wow. Um, but that is [00:20:00] happening.

Matthew Dunn: So you're, you're, you're, you're, I agree with you about the, um, It's actually scam, crooks, porno. Like there's, there's the signal early adopters every time a new communication channel shows up and like, yep, yep. Okay. So that's going to work. Because you can see that they're there already.

Um, and there are no folders. In my message client yet. It's flat. You're right. No wonder it's such a pain in the butt. Um, uh, we'll talk about the richer media in a second, but talk to me, give me your take on the, how the coexistence of SMS email works now and how you think it's going to evolve.

Melanie Balke: I think it's a both and like they're not substitutes for each other.

They're very different channels. I mean, sending someone an email and sending someone a text, even in your personal life, those are two different purposes. [00:21:00] So I, the, the main mistake I see people make is they treat SMS like a, um, copy of email. Yeah. Like basically like, oh, okay. I'm going to send this to you via email.

I'm also going to send you a shorter version via text. And I think that is so wrong. And I have like my favorite example. I always bring this up. There is ease, which is a cannabis delivery company. And they're in kind of hot waters because they bought a bunch of email lists, SMS numbers and started texting people that doesn't go over as well as it does via email when you do that.

So there's like a class action lawsuit going on, but. They would send me every Thursday, like here's 20 off, here's 20 off. And granted their copywriting was always good, but like as an email marketer, you know, I look at that and I'm like, Hmm, they've sent me the same offer and texts basically for five weeks.

And I have not taken any action. [00:22:00] And they're really missing out on using this channel as a, again, a value add. Complete opposite example is we're not really strangers. I don't know if you've heard of them. They're like an intimacy card game. You play with people and you ask each other deep questions and you build connection that way.

So it matches their brand, but they would send texts. Like one time I was working and it was like 10 PM or probably like 8 PM. And I got a text and it was like, Oh, Hey, bestie, I'm proud of you right now. Just wanted to let you know that I was like, who's from, but I had such a positive emotional reaction to it.

But I remember that. And I tell people on podcasts now all the time, you Google ease SMS. All you see is the class action lawsuit. If Google were not really strangers SMS, they've gone so viral with their SMS that it's all over Twitter and they had to make it a whole separate service. It's a whole separate paid service now because their SMS list grew so fast.

Matthew Dunn: [00:23:00] So they really honored sort of the social, cultural, personal attributes and dimensions of the channel, which are different

Melanie Balke: from exactly, which are completely different than email. Right. And they're complimentary,

Matthew Dunn: but they're different. Yeah. Email emails. I'll get to it and later and file and folder and all of that stuff.

And inboxes. I'm sure you don't. Uh, SMS. Again, particularly U. S., we should talk about other, other, uh, domains a little bit, but particularly U. S. Canada, like, that's the most personal interrupt. From a message perspective, like being, if that, my phone went off while we're sitting here talking live, I'd look at it.

Darn it. I'd look at it. I should lay it down flat, but I'd look at it and I have the screen up where I can see it. There's one brand I've continued to subscribe to their SMS. Cause I really liked their t [00:24:00] shirts. All they're doing is training me to wait for the sale. Yeah, there's a sale after sale. I know.

I know. Oh, I like the blue one. Yeah. Wait, in a month, it'll be 80 percent off. Right? Are they really gaining with that? And SMS is flipping expensive compared to email. Oh, so expensive. Yeah. So, so that like the, the cannabis company you mentioned, like just continuing to pound you. That's an expensive hobby.

And there's

Melanie Balke: like, you know, there's a reason I'm not converting, right? And for a lot of times, it's just maybe the desire isn't there. Maybe I don't trust this brand enough. And you know what this, I like the cannabis example, because I think it's a really interesting customer. You have so many different angles you can go.

You can go to health route. A lot of people use it for health, right? And then they self identify as that customer. Why don't you give them value added content around health? Yeah, they can be like the funny whatever recreational user if it's that customer, why don't you send them an SMS on Friday night and say like, you're, [00:25:00] you're, I don't know your stoner movie picks for the weekend, right, whatever you want to do.

But it's just like, identify your customer, figure out what they like, and then add some value to their life, and then you can sprinkle in your sales. Yeah, yeah. When you sprinkle in your sales, people will actually want to go and check out your sales. And for a t shirt company, even if you don't have like, what value are they going to add, right?

Like, that's a different audience. But just like, talk about new product launches. Talk about like, an interesting fact about the fabric that you use. Not every text has to be,

Sell,

Matthew Dunn: sell, sell. Sell. Sell. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting one because, I mean, you're in California, right? I'm in Washington state.

Washington was the second of the U. S. states to legalize cannabis. So we've sort of, we've, we've, we've ridden through that. It's just part of the landscape now, just like a gas station, so to speak. If I got on a list like that and started getting those texts, It irked me because it's like, it's just not something I, I do.

If [00:26:00] someone asked me up front, do you want this or not, I'd appreciate that. Or, you know, are you interested in, you know, we're keeping track of cultural impact or adoption or whatever else, like maybe there's a business angle where I'd go, yeah, keep me informed. Right. Um, doesn't mean I'm going to buy any, but keep me informed.

But, but here's one of the dilemmas I see, and I see this in email and text.

Getting enough input back from, from the always busy consumer or customer to be able to bucket segment group and be more targeted is, it's hard. It's very hard. You got most companies, email lists have email addresses in them and not across the board. Not a hell of a lot else. Yeah, that's like, that's a, that's a mighty slim branch to be standing on when you're trying to segment, group, be meaningful, be specific, et cetera, it's like, [00:27:00] wow, it's a bunch of guesswork sometimes.

There's

Melanie Balke: not a lot going on there. I mean, that's why for e commerce specifically, I love Klaviyo.

Matthew Dunn: We're going to talk about Klaviyo, I knew that. Yes.

Melanie Balke: That's why I love Klaviyo for e commerce and, you know, Sendlane kind of as the incumbent has very similar functionality, but what they do well is, Yeah. The data.

It's not really anything else but the fact that they're so good at putting together the data, which is like, I can go into Klaviyo and I can say, show me everyone who's bought the green shirt. Cause I'm going to go on, I'm going to cross sell them the yellow pants. Yeah. Yeah. Don't judge my fashion sense in this case, but as an example, right.

Um, I can go and I can say, show me everyone who's been on the website in the last 30 days. Show me everyone who's bought more than three times and spent more than 150. Um, so that's, what's really, really cool. And then I can have people self identify too, right. Via the pop up one. Hey, why are you interested in cannabis?[00:28:00]

medicinal, recreational. I'm actually just here for business news. I'm not a user. Um, or I can have them self identifying the email. So one thing we did is we sent an email, um, where we were just like, Hey, why are you, for example, like, what is your main concern with your skin? It's dry or it's oily or I'm breaking out one button, single buttons.

And you can just click in the email and when they click in the email, their profile gets tagged and now I know this person's concern is oily skin. And then I can build that segment and target the emails

Matthew Dunn: around that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you're, um, I kind of, I would have guessed that that was one of the things that, that would make you a, uh, you're, you're clearly.

Klaviyo Phan, even just from your LinkedIn profile, as am I, um, they're, they're better tied into the other systems involved in commerce. And so many, uh, so many marketers are kind of hamstrung. It's like the cash [00:29:00] register is not talking to the kitchen, is not talking to the head waiter. And they're kind of guessing over and over because they're not necessarily getting the data.

of those other touch points back where Klaviyo, particularly with Shopify, let's be, let's be realistic. Klaviyo has, has done the work, wire those things together. 100, 150 million investment from Shopify probably didn't hurt, um, the motivation to get that done, but okie dokie, um, not everybody, it's not, it's not the right choice or the available choice for everybody.

And I find it interesting that some of the Big, expensive ESPs are way the heck behind on that particular dimension, my humble opinion. You know, you work with the tools you've got. I'm just curious because I want to, while I've got the time talking with you, um, how much attention do you pay to behavioral and marketing practice differences [00:30:00] between where you live and work now and Germany where you're, I think you said you're from?

Melanie Balke: Good question. A little bit. I mean, we have clients in Europe. We work with German brands, so we have to pay attention to GDPR and all this good stuff. Okay. So we pay attention to it. Um, is it like my main focus every day? No, not at all, but we definitely pay attention. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're, it's easy.

I'm sure it happens in every country. You sort of think the way you do things is normal. You know, it's normal for that place. It's not normal for this place. Um, is it WhatsApp that's so dominant in Europe that no one uses here? Yeah,

Melanie Balke: it's dominant in Europe for like personal chats. Personal chats. Um, I know like China, WeChat and stuff like that.

WeChat is, yeah. Really dominant for like marketing

Matthew Dunn: stuff. Yeah, well, yeah, it's like, it, it's the, it's the, the, you know, the one app, the Uber app, uh, the thesis, which is, which has worked like in, in, in China for sure it's worked and it's sort of de facto seems to have stuck [00:31:00] in Europe. I don't think it's gonna happen here.

If it's going to happen, it's going to sneak in under the guise of RCS. Yeah. Because my, my sort of. The relationships I care most about are already on that channel, right? And if I said to my wife, Hey, let's use WeChat, she'd say, yeah, sleep in the basement, shut up, right? It's not going to happen. Yeah.

Because she's just used to it. And that gets wired in as technology has evolved, and it's very hard to unwire. Yeah,

Melanie Balke: I want to say like we do use WhatsApp like personally, interestingly, and it's because I'm European, but I do use it with a lot of friend groups when it comes to group text messages.

Interesting. People don't have an

Matthew Dunn: iPhone. Right. The green bubble thing, sort of. Yeah. And you'll get professionals who will sort of. If, if they have enough stuff in common, I've seen people adopt slack for that. Yeah, there was a, there was a group texting app called Orca, [00:32:00] uh, six, seven years ago, and I made a pod.

That was their term for, uh, the relatively tight group of, of friends that we've got, and they liked that, but it didn't, it kind of didn't stick. And now the green bubble penalty of. Android people in your iPhone world and so on is it's like, it's, it's a very big deal back to the messaging thing for a second.

One of the changes that likely to happen if Apple is, is pretty, uh, aggressive in their RCS adoption is much more, uh, interactive media, et cetera, much richer messaging experience. And that's a domain that email will never. Be particularly good at. What do you think?

Melanie Balke: Depends. I have a lot of hope for AMP and email too.

Matthew Dunn: Not going to happen. Sorry. No, it's not going to happen.

Melanie Balke: We're playing around a lot with it, with some platforms like Stripo, mail Modo, some stuff that's [00:33:00] working. Yeah. I have hope. Yeah, I will say I would love to hear why you think it's not gonna happen because I've had hope for a long time. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah.

And I, I, I, I get, I get, I get in touch for this one, but I'm like, I'm, I'm actually blunt about it. And Dimitri Kudrenko, CEO of Stripo was, was a guest on future of email about a year and a half ago. Um, so I'm, I love what the platform is doing. I think AMP is. Is a valiant attempt to do a partial job of making email interactive, but Apple will never support AMP.

It is incompatible with their privacy views. And that's 60 percent market share of email clients in the U S. Well, what I wonder

Melanie Balke: too, I mean, I think about this a lot too, because Apple's privacy move, in my opinion, was very self serving. I don't think it had anything to do with actually wanting to protect people's privacy.

Right. Tend to agree. Yeah. Um, But I do feel like with Apple, and [00:34:00] this is just an overall sentiment. Okay. There's still definitely the market leader, but like, I look at their new Apple phone releases and I'm like, cool. So absolutely zero

Matthew Dunn: innovation. Yeah. Same, same, same thing over again for years,

Melanie Balke: three years, no innovation, no innovation, and like Android phones really are actually like better hardware wise.

And.

Matthew Dunn: Except for the chips. Yeah, and

Melanie Balke: listen, I'm a hardcore Apple fan. I have a Mac, I have an iPhone. I love that brand. My mom used to joke that she should be banned at Apple because for some reason she doesn't know how to use any of their products, but she loves going to their stores. Um, and I've been a Mac adopter, like, way early.

Like, I was one of those people. I had a Mac when, like, none of the software I needed was actually available for my Mac in high school. I just, cause they had like a cool deal and I don't know how, like how it happened, but I do wonder if like, there's going to be bigger shifts, which means like Apple will lose their market lead, like someone will come in and will [00:35:00] disrupt like the way Motorola was disrupted, the way Nokia was disrupted, who are all the incumbents at that time.

And that can make AMP possible. Um, I actually don't even use Apple mail anymore. I use Gmail

Matthew Dunn: on my phone. Yeah. Yeah. I actually do. I do as well. Yeah. But that's me. That's you. Market share wise. Sorry. It's 60. There's actually a cold. I did a paper about this. There's a cold war in email that's, that it's very difficult to see unless you look in the right place.

66%, give or take a market share of inboxes is Google's. But 60 percent or so of clients used to touch those inboxes are Apple. And that's a funny locus of control to duke it out like this. And, and I tend to suspect that the footprint of [00:36:00] mobile operating systems is not a landscape that's as likely to get disrupted for the sake of the device.

I do think how Google. and Apple navigate the introduction of agent, agents in artificial intelligence, um, is could make or break their foothold there. Like, am I going to have a square device in my pocket for the foreseeable future? Yes. Honestly, it's too damn useful not to. Yeah. What's the core purpose of that thing?

That may shift. That may shift because it's been, it was phone calls and now it's not. And now it's sort of the digital Swiss army knife is the reason I carry it. You know, it's got, it's, it's my wallet, it's my this, it's my that, etc. If Apple bobbles the ball of making it my best friend, professionally speaking, personally speaking, they, they, they could be in a world of hurt.

They better be [00:37:00] looking at that really, really hard, but so should Google. Did you

Melanie Balke: see the new, um, I don't remember what it's called. It's like this little square device you can put on your

Matthew Dunn: shirt. Yeah, the

Melanie Balke: pin. Yeah, the pin, the AI pin or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was an interesting attempt at the vision.

Yeah, the vision. I'm not going to buy it. I still think there's a lot missing there. But I do think, you know, speaking about the device thing, I do think it's interesting and it's important for email in the larger scope. Because what I am also noticing as a sentiment in consumers is They actually want to be away from their device more.

They have their device with them, but it's almost like, no, you're a smoker and you're trying to stop smoking. So there has, like, there has been a negative connotation to consistently being on your device and connected. And I wonder how that is also going to, um, decide the [00:38:00] development of, of our connectedness.

Yeah, interesting question. Now

Matthew Dunn: we have social, via our phones. Yeah, yeah, interesting question. I mean, we are, we are, we are not done with, with, uh, this set of adoptions. Uh, going back to the amp and smartphone thing for one last time. The other issue that is going to shape email's place in that, in this evolving landscape, pretty fundamental, it is fundamental, is that email is, is one of the few dumb, D U M B, dumb, um, digital endpoints in our lives.

There's no scripting, there's no programmability in email. That is a very big difference. Every other channel we look at, including messaging systems, unless we end up with Like a sort of full scale, um, actual, you know, compute capable von Neumann machine in email, which I don't [00:39:00] see on the landscape, and I don't see backed by any standards bodies.

Email will remain the dumb endpoint. That may mean it's trustable in a way all the others aren't. Yeah. Um, which, which, like, it could be kind of his virtue in the long run, if you work much with lawyers, which I do at the moment for some interesting reasons, um, they think of email as, as like this fixed entity.

Well, do you have the emails? I'm like, what do you mean the emails? Like I can actually change what's in your inbox, which freaks them out. Um, cause they think of it as a static fixed thing. It's hard to think, you don't think of a webpage as a static fixed thing. You don't think of an app. As a static fix, and you shouldn't think of text messages as that either, although judging from recent lawsuits and government activity, maybe text messages are kind of there as well, but email's dumb, like your Gmail client does no scripting except for AMP.

So.

Melanie Balke: Well, it is interesting, right? Because I can [00:40:00] send a text message via Apple and then go and edit it later or unsend it. There you go.

Matthew Dunn: Good example. Yeah. Good example.

Melanie Balke: I can't really do that with email. You can't really do that with email. Lawyers are a funny example because lawyers send emails like, I just had one from a lawyer too.

It's like confidential, like it's very It's like they took email and they basically made it what, what like really confidential documents used to be. So it's funny that you mentioned Lori's because they do, they do view email that way. They

Matthew Dunn: live on it, man. And like some of the email threads from it goes, I was just looking at one this morning, it months.

And thinking of it as a confidential channel, like, God, I hate to tell you guys, but it's like, leaks like a sieve. I don't want to, I don't want to send you that as a doc. I need to do it confidentially in email. Whatever, whatever you think there guys, but, uh, yeah, not, not, not necessarily an early adopter.

But I am

Melanie Balke: curious to like with phones, um, something that I've been going down the rabbit hole of is [00:41:00] I keep getting calls. And then these calls are duped under like, like my, my boyfriend's brother, he's called me twice and I call him back and then he goes, I never called you. And I'm like, I had a missed phone call on my phone

Matthew Dunn: spoof

Melanie Balke: number, their spoofing number.

So I wonder like how that's going to happen with texts as well, if that's a danger. Um, so

Matthew Dunn: yeah, really good. The texting and messaging world, I mean, we've got this odd interleave again, especially in the U. S. with the phone number. You're in much more regulated territory there than you are with, with email.

I mean, government technical involvement in email is darn near nil. Government technical involvement in phone numbers? Eh, yeah. There's some, there's some laws and regs and infrastructure with big nasty teeth there. So your company that bought a bunch of. Phone numbers have started dumping messages on them.

[00:42:00] Yeah, of course they got a class action lawsuit facing them. Yeah, I, trust is, trust is gonna be a hard thread to hold on to between the explosion of channels and the explosion of credible looking content that we're already seeing from AI. This is going to be a bit of a messy world. Very. Yeah, very. Um, one last hook back to, to back to email marketing.

Um, because you talked about the importance of segmentation and we touched on the difficulty of sort of acquiring enough data. To segment meaningfully. I'm uh, I'm kind of on record as saying first party personalization thing is ridiculously difficult and in most cases no one's actually doing it successfully.

Gartner even agrees with me. What do you think?

Melanie Balke: First party personalization like an email? So saying for example, Give me an example of what you think's

Matthew Dunn: not working. [00:43:00] Well, if you're, if you're, you know, if you're a furniture company, you know, selling custom furniture, was that your example early in your career?

Yeah, totally. How long did it take before you knew enough about somebody to put them in a segment other than General? Uh, not very long, actually. Did they have to purchase to get there?

Melanie Balke: So, it depends, like, yes, yes and no. Um, There are parts, and again, this is Klaviyo Shopify integration that I get very easily.

If you do sign up, you obviously have to, for email, you have to sign up, right? I have to get you to sign up. Um, if you do sign up, there's a data, like for, for not purchasing, like I said, there's a data point that I can get that comes from the pop up. What we've seen with the pop ups is the more questions I ask, the more the conversion rate goes down.

But the more questions I ask, the higher is my conversion rate and the welcome flow I send you after, because it's more

Matthew Dunn: personalized. Okay, so, so you trade off the, you trade off the friction at the front end for the return on the back end of higher personalization. [00:44:00] So the

Melanie Balke: first party data there is really first party because they know what they're selling.

Yeah. The other thing that we can see is like site visits. Products they looked at if they added to cart what they add to cart, right? So we get behavioral data from them, which is pretty cool with that. We can do a lot of segments too, right? Cause I can go and I can say, show me everyone who has been on the website in the last 30 days and viewed more than five products as an example, or show me everyone who's been active on the website, but has not walked like looked at a single product.

And then I can say, okay, now my goal is to get them to click to the products. That first party data works. Other stuff like email behavior works, right? Like, show me everyone who's clicked on an email in the last Black Friday Cyber Monday deal series, and then I can market to them now with a special discount code.

That stuff works. Now if we're talking about like, who they are, what they do, When they purchase, we get more stuff on like predictive gender, [00:45:00] which is something cool that Klaviyo does. So they can predict the gender with AI. We get a predicted purchase amount. We get a predicted customer lifetime value. We get all that from AI once we have more behavior on their end.

So once they do purchase, we can build a little bit of a better profile. But listen, is it complete? No, not in any means. Absolutely not.

Matthew Dunn: And it's skewed towards. The brand specific interaction, like the brand that says, you know, you bought a lot of. Fishing gear, you must drive a pickup. Yeah. They're judging from the fishing gear, not from me.

Yep. Right. And, and maybe it's a reasonable stretch, but it's a, it's, it's like, I call it like, look, you're looking through the slit in the fence, right? Like it's, that's just your stuff. That's not my whole life. A

Melanie Balke: hundred percent

Matthew Dunn: assumptions. Well, although Klaviyo Shopify, and you're working in a richer ecosystem from that perspective than most email marketers, a lot of the examples that you just ticked off.

Are very hard to get outside [00:46:00] of that, that tighter knit ecosystem and Shopify. I believe has, they're building quite a segmentation data set on Shopify interactions across their network of stores. And I assume that a lot of Klaviyo customers probably tap that.

Melanie Balke: Yep. Yeah. I mean, that, you know, that would be insane if we can get access to all that data, like if they can go and they look at my email and they look at every single Shopify store I have purchased that customer profile like that.

Yeah. I don't know if I want.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, we end up in the privacy question, don't we? Yeah, I

Melanie Balke: don't know if I want that to be released to e commerce brands, but I do know that if it were, they could build a much more accurate profile of myself. And again, listen, I think about this all the time because when Instagram, for a while, when they were like, you know, ask app not to track, I would just say, yes, don't ask the app to track.

And then I was like, I am not getting ads that I care about. Now I'm just getting shitty, [00:47:00] excuse my language, now I'm just getting bad ads. I'm with

Matthew Dunn: you, yeah, yeah, I'm with

Melanie Balke: you. So now I just tell you, you know what, it's fine, track. So at least that the ads I get are interesting

Matthew Dunn: to me. Yeah, interesting, and that is, that's a great laser on example.

I mean, when, when, when, uh. When Apple, back to Apple, when, when Apple threw that monkey wrench in a whole bunch of business models, particularly Facebook's, with the app tracking transparency thing, like it, it put a lot of hurt on, on Facebook in particular, because they, they lost the data flow that had been there for a decade.

Some people, and I'm, I'm partially with you there, like, ah, there's ads that I just don't need to see, like I'm never going to buy, et cetera. Should I surrender a bit more of my data to get more relevant stuff? You know, I do. I, one of the reasons I, one of the reasons I buy things on Amazon is to stick with a channel that already knows a lot about me.

I might as well go there, right? [00:48:00] Um, you know, it's faster, it's easier, you know, preferences, purchase history, all that other stuff. But what we're trying to, we're trying to figure out this bouncing act. As a culture at large, now, you know, you're in California, privacy regs, Washington, unusual, surprisingly, uh, uh, important privacy reg under the guise of health.

About nine other states have done this. We don't have a national policy or national law, and I think we're a couple of years away from that judging from my conversations in that space. And I'm not sure that you could get 100 people in a room and get them to agree on, on where that trade off should lie.

Yeah.

Melanie Balke: Yeah. I don't know either. I think it's difficult. Um. Like I said, I mean, you saw my personal life. That was, that was a back and forth

Matthew Dunn: decision. Well, and it's, it is one of the things that makes the like marketing domain kind of interesting because we do have to live. Right. But we do have to live right, right on the knife edge of that stuff.

Do you ask me [00:49:00] eight questions so you can send me a better email? Will I, you know, will I answer eight questions or will I bail? Yeah.

Melanie Balke: But it's also interesting. Like, did you hear that they were going to roll out like personalized pricing for flights? Essentially, if they know based off of your data that you're willing to pay more, they're going to make your ticket more expensive.

If they know you're not willing to pay more, they're going to make it cheaper. And like, listen, if I could do this in my business and someone has a huge budget and they don't care and I can't sell it to them for more, sure. But then ethically, I'm like, that just seems wrong. Okay. You know, and yeah. Yeah.

And as a consumer on top of that, I'm like, no, now, now I'm actually mad. So,

Matthew Dunn: well, let me give you a hypothetical question. We may have to, this may have to be a follow up, uh, not a podcast conversation. If I could, if I could put a signal in your signup form. that, that gave you strong indicators about, you know, household income or interest or whatever else, would you be ethically okay with [00:50:00] differentiating what products or offers or whatever went out in the welcome email to those segments?

I think

Melanie Balke: what I would be ethically okay with is tailoring it to your needs. So like, if I see your company with a big budget, I might send you our larger package, this many emails at this price point, I don't think I could ethically send you the same package at different price points. I see.

Matthew Dunn: I see. Yeah.

Yeah. That makes sense.

Melanie Balke: BMW made me feel weird. You know, I'm like, you're getting the same service. I'm just.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, we're easy example to drag in because it's fun to beat them up. But that bobble that, that BMW had about six months ago with charging for the seat heaters to be on or not like they're already wired into the car.

Are you insane? No way. This is not good. No way. This is going to end well for BMW as a move because it just feels. Unfair. It feels wrong. It feels stupid. It feels like a gouge, right?

Melanie Balke: And I think planes have done that too, Norm. Like, if you [00:51:00] fly spared airlines, I'm like, you know, the next thing you're going to have to pay extra for is to breathe air.

Yeah, yeah. So you have to hold your breath the entire flight. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think people are, you know, companies are trying to maximize profits. Also, because in a lot of times the landscape has gotten harder for them, I'm sure, and I think there's going to come a point where consumers are going to be, you know, feeling

Matthew Dunn: scammed.

Yeah, well, I think, I think we're, maybe we're getting there already. I heard someone of a much younger generation may say, you know, something like, yeah, late stage capitalism, we're monetized everything. And I was like, I could certainly see why there was such emotion behind that statement. Because it feels like you get pecked to death.

Melanie Balke: Yeah. I mean, gen Z especially Yeah. Is very, very anti-capitalism. Um, it

Matthew Dunn: feels like if, yeah, yeah, it did. Yeah. That, that, that, that's a whole nother interesting conversation. And Gen Z and email is an interesting one as well. Yeah. They don't [00:52:00] like email. That's that's what, yeah, they do. Right. That's cool. Well, we're at the top of the hour, and I promised I would not title.

In fact, someone else is going to jump on another zoom here, so I should probably bail. But Melanie, I'm so glad you made the time. This is one of the more rabbit hole conversations we've had.

Melanie Balke: Yeah, thank you, Matthew. I know we went, we went a lot of different routes, but a lot of different stuff happening that will affect, I think, email and SMS.

Yeah, bigger picture conversations to think about.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Hey, if someone is, uh, Interested whether it's getting your help setting up their email department or getting you to, you know, help them with their marketing period. Where's the best place for them to reach out and contact your company?

Melanie Balke: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, Melanie Balki, or just go to www.

themailmarketers. com. You can book a call with me pretty easily through that website as well.

Matthew Dunn: Cool. Well, I look forward to our next conversation. Thanks so much for making the time.

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