A Conversation with April Mullen of Sparkpost
April Mullen is Director of Brand and Content Marketing at SparkPost - the company that sends over 50% of the world's email messages.
She's a Renaissance figure, with a background in art history because, y'know, art history and email. April is also a Co-Founder at Women of Email and member of the Forbes Communications Council.
She brought a balanced perspective to this conversation — informed about the deep technical side of email, but cognizant of the goals of email marketing. Topics include email, SparkPost, marketing, St. Louis, newsletters, AMP for Email, real-time content, data, dogs and more.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn host of The Future of Email Marketing today. And my guest, I'm delighted to say is April Mullen. April is the director of brand and content marketing at SparkPost APR. I'm so glad we finally get to connect and have this conversation. Welcome.
April Mullen
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Matthew Dunn
And you're you're talking from St. Louis. Is that correct?
April Mullen
Yep. I'm in flyover zone.
Matthew Dunn
hardly talk about a historical city. For orientation for starters, April. If if people are not in the middle of email, they may not have heard of SparkPost. And anyone who's anywhere near email goes, Oh, yeah. SparkPost because it's it's this unimaginably large entity. talk a bit about the company just to orient people.
April Mullen
Yeah, so we've been around since 1999. We started as an MTA, essentially. And now we've grown into deliverability analytics products. So we plan to expand our product suite. We now consider ourselves a delivery optimization, platform delivery optimization. So we work with some of the world's biggest brands, we work with Zillow, Pinterest, a major US newspaper, which I cannot name, but lots and lots of big logos.
Matthew Dunn
And lots and lots of big email. I was browsing the SparkPost. Site just to update myself. And of course, it's gotten even bigger since I last look at 40. Is it 40% of the email the world goes through spark posts like, yeah, four to 5 trillion. Was that the number?
April Mullen
Yep, that's exactly right. Yeah. We sent we send a lot of email. And what a lot of people don't know about us is that part of the reason that volume is so high is obviously we work with some big senders, but we also are we power a lot of the cross channel and email marketing clouds that you know, and love. Most of them work with us. And so we service is the infrastructure to actually deploy their, their emails.
Matthew Dunn
Well, I was gonna I was gonna make a note about that, cuz you said MTA and my brain hadn't interpret that, but for people watching who are in the middle of email marketing are particularly listening message transfer agents handle the job of actually getting the message to the recipient. But that doesn't mean that the program you're using to set up an email marketing campaign, is that MTA correct?
April Mullen
Yeah. So think of it like a car were essentially the engine, okay. versus some of the other technologies. They're using us as the engine, but they're putting all of the beautiful features for the driver and the cupholders and the tech in the dash. And essentially are just telling us when it's time to go when to hit the accelerator,
Matthew Dunn
right and I'll take your analogy and run with it and Ford at some point, GM at some point found that they didn't have to build a different engine for every car. It's like Oh, look, same v eight and that car that car, that car, that car, you guys are for sure the big the big VA of MTA. tell tell tell folks a little bit Tell me a little bit more about your role. Specifically at spark post, because spark puts, puts out all this beautiful stuff, and I assume that you're completely responsible.
April Mullen
I wouldn't say I'm completely responsible. There's a whole team. But I definitely as the leader of branded content, I'm in charge of ensuring that we grow our brand awareness. So we were working on that we just developed some new messaging that's going to be coming out. And we're going to be coming up with a new visual identity for the brand. So you're gonna Yeah, you're gonna see some exciting things.
Matthew Dunn
I haven't had the keeping the orange right.
I don't know. We'll see.
Matthew Dunn
We'll see. You're still working?
April Mullen
We're still working through it. But I mean, orange definitely does stand out. There will probably be some
Matthew Dunn
some orange. Yeah.
April Mullen
And I just took on the brand role that I've been, as I'm subject matter expert here. So a lot of my job is to develop content and copy that will resonate with our end consumers and the people that we're we're trying to attract to the business, but also our existing customers to make sure that they're getting the most out of email.
Matthew Dunn
Well, you've got a, you've got a very sophisticated customer base, is that a fair statement?
April Mullen
It is, and in there, kind of a lot of different personas. So we have the marketing persona, the traditional, you know, email marketer, senior level, people in marketing, that are signing the vendor contracts, but maybe don't understand email, they probably oversimplify email, they think it's easier than it is. We have technical buyers, especially on the sending side. So we're talking to a lot of director VPS of it. And then in the mid market, we primarily focus on enterprise, but we do still serve mid market. So then a lot of times in the mid market, you might even talk to a C level person. Yeah. So it's it's kind of complex to like, try to figure out what the needs are for the different groups. But I feel like we're finally getting some traction. I've only been in the company for but a lot of year and a half now. I think
Matthew Dunn
that recent okay. Yeah,
April Mullen
yeah, I haven't been here too long. And then my role is evolved even since I got here. Yeah. And so you know, we're definitely trying to get the the marketing engine fired, have a really solid content strategy. And to also enable our sales teams with the right talk tracks for the various people. Because I remember when I was on the buyer side, I was on the brand years ago, purchasing solutions, and nothing made me cringe more than sales, people that would try to sell me solutions and over simplify what I was buying and what my job was and what my needs were. So we're definitely working on all of that. There's a lot of job security to make sure that we're all up leveling, I would say that for anyone in email, really,
Matthew Dunn
what what are the things about SparkPost SparkPost, in particular, me the bmta sector in general, but SparkPost in particular, partially because of your scale. You know, cloud computing is seems like a recent buzzword. It's not that recent, but SparkPost was a cloud entity before anyone use the word fair?
April Mullen
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we definitely had a lot of on most of our stuff was on premise for a long time. But yeah, then we did move to the cloud. And we brought the scale of on premise to the cloud, because we found a lot of a lot of companies were, you know, they didn't want to manage on premise. They're like, I don't want to own this thing and have to update it and all of that. And so that's where cloud really gives companies a lot of scale. And we have an interesting intersection of the two actually, a lot of people don't know this, but we actually have for our on premise customers, they can actually scale up their volume using the cloud capabilities. So we call that hybrid. And then we bring all the data together through our analytics products. So it's not it's not like you're like have your reporting over here in the on prem system. And then you have your reporting in the cloud, we bring it all together. So it feels like it's all kind of one consolidated interface for the tech people. Yeah. And that has really helped a lot of companies, especially during COVID. Yeah, because a lot of companies are like, well, first of all, we're not on site, you know, a lot of it. We're working from home, just like everyone else. Yeah. And some verticals, their email volume went up dramatically. And they needed to scale quickly. And they needed to scale without actually having to go on site and put racks in their server room, and be around other people. And so, you know, we found that actually, this hybrid capability really helped these these customers that were on prem scale, it's kind of exciting. I feel like we need to be talking about that more actually.
Matthew Dunn
Well, I you know, I've watched I've watched the cloud computing you know, the sort of generic cloud computing sector pretty careful in and Amazon then as your and now Google, have have all come out with Oh, here's the box you can put On site, which you guys already had, here's the box, you can put on site that, you know, bring some of the capabilities. And it becomes essentially a smarter connection point to the cloud. And you're saying the the on prem pieces SparkPost became that or has become that. Clever, clever, and and some of your longest running customers, I'm guessing. We're, we're on prem folks. And now they're starting to migrate more to the cloud. I had the opportunity Akash, a couple of years ago, back when we went to live conferences. Remember that? By the way?
April Mullen
Yeah, desperately missing. Yeah, yeah, weird. I
Matthew Dunn
never thought I'd say Miss conferences, Miss conferences. I'm a campaign genius. Our Booth was next door to the SparkPost booth at the last live, etc. So I got, I got to hang out with some of your colleagues and talk major email geek with them. And the thing that struck me as they were explaining was, was the, the analytic side of SparkPost is just, it's ungodly, big. And it's almost impossible to wrap your head around, talk about talk about how smart smart folks is,
April Mullen
Oh, my gosh. So we say we have the deepest and broadest data set of any analytics provider in the space. And so we we actually have analytics that go across not just like our actual sending infrastructure has really deep analytics, it was built that way. Actually, we probably have more data than our customers even use. We have something like 40 plus different types of data points that that customers can pull in, in real time.
Matthew Dunn
Wow.
April Mullen
Um, via web hooks. So they can like actually, you know, get a read really, really quickly. But through some of our analytics products, we have, you know, like we have our panel data, which we've done a lot of investigate. I know there have been some negative talk about panels that the data is not really accurate, but we actually looked into it, we compared it with some data that we have from one of the ISP is, it's actually scarily accurate, because that for me panel is what consumer panel so people who opt in to allow for their emails to be monitored. And we anonymize their identities. We don't you know, if there's any personalization email, you'll see on the creative in the reports that it's fuzzed out. Yeah, but it's scarily accurate. So we see real consumer data, we also have some artificial intelligence that looks at modeling what potentially could happen with your son before you send it. We have the the deepest set of spam trap monitoring. So it goes on and on and on, we have something like eight to 10 different types of data. We're kind of arguing internally, if it's eight or 10. But it's a it's a really deep data set that will tell you a level of detail on what happens to your emails after you hit send, that you just won't find that depth anywhere else.
Matthew Dunn
Wow. Wow. Fascinating. The panels. That's interesting. I didn't realize you did that. I mean, so this is, this is for email, what? You know, what a Nielsen household, Nielsen household for TV in in their day. And you said, you said you've looked into it, and it's actually quite accurate.
April Mullen
It's quite accurate. Yep.
Matthew Dunn
Fascinating. You know, we all we all get emails, so we're all experts on email, right? Haha. But that's extraordinary for a large, particularly large company to be able to characterize what might happen before they hit a billion sends. Yeah. expensive hobby that Yeah. Oh, fascinating. Now SparkPost technologically sits at least in part on top of AWS as well. So yes, I was next year. Yeah. So this clouds on clouds.
April Mullen
There's clouds on clouds. Actually. Amazon recently did a case study on us. Oh, really?
Yeah. Yeah.
April Mullen
I think it came out like two weeks ago. So yeah, it talks all about how that how that infrastructure is set up. But yeah, we do work with AWS happy customer.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And and as I recall from the conversation highly, like highly specialized what what you guys had built on top of AWS is like, couldn't probably couldn't be done any other way. Now, it's, it's evolved that much.
April Mullen
Yeah, exactly.
Matthew Dunn
So as a as a marketer, when you're working with a, you know, highly technical company and highly technical, highly technical customers, and at least some cases and you've got the technical chops yourself. You've got to be in a translation job to to a great extent to bring this into content form.
April Mullen
Yeah, definitely. And I will say I do rely on subject matter expert. George Schloss Nagel are one of our founders. Yeah, he is brilliant. And, you know, he, he helps. He'll tell me the facts, like, here's how it works. Here's what it does. And, and even sometimes our head of engineering will jump in. And we'll kind of talk about, like, how does this work cuz I have to my team, we have to create visuals and infographics to explain how these things work. We recently worked on a client deck, and I had to work with our designer to visualize how our environment is set up. And, and I feel like the team does a really good job of like, we talk about it, and then I'll say it. So if I'm hearing you, right, this is how this works. Well, I never thought about it that way. But yeah, that is how that works. I'm like, Okay, I have the visual for you. So the team works really well together to like, we really hash things out and collaborate really well over here to make sure that we're explaining things in in the best way possible. So that, you know, if your technical audience, you'll respect it, and you'll be like, yeah, this is really cool, I get what's going on here. But if you're a marketing audience, you're you also can understand it and not, you know, not that marketers are dumb. They're not, they're brilliant. But I actually think marketing is harder than ever. But it's in a way that's explainable. So they can put it in front of their, their C level executive who may not go into the depth of detail, it could explain it to them. And that's really the point.
Matthew Dunn
Let's come back to marketing is harder than ever in a second. But, but a quick side trip. Prior to prior to the launch of campaign genius, I spent about seven or eight years, creating explainer videos for a living, oh, wow, I've done I've done that job that I just described, of talking with the tech, you know, the highly technical or the highly strategic, or whatever the subject matter was, and saying, you know, you need to explain it again, because most people are not going to spend, you know, the two hours to understand this feature, and we've got to boil it down, simplify, simplify it without losing the essence of it. And that sounds like that's the job of the internal marketer gets to struggle with at a company like yours. Wow. Yes. Not easy, is it?
April Mullen
No, it's not. I've actually found in writing and visuals and everything, that taking something complex and making it simple is one of the hardest parts of
Matthew Dunn
the job. Yeah, it's not it's not well, and and, and getting it getting a true right getting it accurate and true enough to catch the the essence of the thing. Now, I'm curious, your reaction to this, what I found in doing that really wide range of companies was that the subject matter experts tended to be rotten at explaining their subject matter. In in that succinct, understandable to the other person form. They're like, they're they're too deep in it, they see all the pieces of it, they can't really step back from that very well.
April Mullen
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I think that's an I think that's why, like, it's good to have a cross section of people that can collaborate on these things. And like I said, I'm really fortunate to have that here. Because we can, we can ensure that, you know, through our various skill sets, we're coming up with something that's accurate. It's, it goes deep enough, but it's also high level enough. And yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, to get to get to get to the, you know, the the heart of the matter or the heart of matter for particular audience particularly.
April Mullen
Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. And, and you touched on, you touched on visuals SparkPost got nice, nice visual element to the brand already, at least to my mind, but with the scale of data you're talking about, visualization must be key across the board, marketing, actual product, you know, internal communication, everything. Yes.
April Mullen
Yep. So we did on our on our cloud sending product, we actually just redesigned the UI, because we found that as like, as it became more complex with all the data and reports and things that we were able to provide that the UI was getting more complicated. So we now have a we have an amazing user experience team. And they've taken a lot of that really complex data. And they've now harnessed it into like, very easy to use intuitive reports. It's visual, it's, it's actually really pretty. There's a lot of whitespace it's also like modernized, I mean, that's important too, in technology, you have to make sure your interfaces are modernized and easy to use. And so yeah, we've we've definitely, um, we've definitely put a lot of effort there.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, well, and you've got you've got a background in art, so this must be pretty resonating thing for you. Yes. Yeah.
April Mullen
Do I actually studied art history and undergrad?
Matthew Dunn
I knew this was gonna ask you about
how did you get from there to here?
April Mullen
Oh my gosh, so well, the simple answer is I graduated with an art history degree and realized, Oh, I like I don't come from a wealthy family like me, I have to make a living. So I thought, you know, I really like observing the world around me. And in a lot of what you do in art is just writing about what you see, and what the artist was intending. And context of the time that it was created. And I'm like, I feel like I could do marketing. And this was like, early in the, in the, in the digital age where, like, no one was really learning about digital in school. So I interviewed for like a junior level coordinator role, and I was supporting an analyst on email. I set up bazaarvoice site reviews, I worked on comparison shopping feeds, I worked in affiliate marketing, and supporting all of these various people on my team, I learned so much. And then that's when I was like, I really want to do email and then it kind of went, went from there.
Matthew Dunn
No kidding. What favorite art history like period, or form.
April Mullen
I really like 19th century French, because it was just such a crazy time in Paris in particular. With a lot there's actually a lot of Americans that were over there, having like this cafe culture, um, it was a little bit, a little bit of a naughty time to a lot of partying on Mon Mar Montmartre district was, you know, was just swarming with all these amazing artists. So I'm a huge fan of Henley, probably hung Lee to loose little track.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, yeah.
April Mullen
He was actually not considered a fine artist at the time streaming. This is a signmaker. He, like companies were like, I need to sign for my theater, you know, my theater debut or my store, and he created all of these signs. But I am fascinated by his work. I just absolutely love it. So animals, so he's
Matthew Dunn
here himself, he himself was oarfish.
April Mullen
He was it was dwarfish. Um, and yeah, he was he was a little person. And he had a lot of health problems. Yeah. Some of that came out in his work as well. Yeah, he's an interesting, interesting character. But I love that. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
The people in his work his portrait portraiture, I don't know if he's intentionally portraiture but very wide span of walks of life. Yeah.
April Mullen
Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Oh, interesting. interesting one to focus on. Yeah, you're not not in the not in the fine art Pantheon. At least not at the time, right.
April Mullen
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, strong narrative sense in very much tied to the culture of the time. So you know, you walk around the marsh part of Paris. You can almost feel the energy of that time, even today. So it's, yeah, it's fabulous. It's fascinating.
Matthew Dunn
You get to bring that back to bear on what, you know, things that would be unimaginable. For then, and we you know, we do it all the time. Oh, you send a message across the planet. sand. Right.
Right. Exactly.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, nice. But I like I like that. And and I think the way you articulated it, right, they they did just observe and understand no context and the times in the culture as a great background for for marketing, and in actual business MBA time as well.
April Mullen
Yeah. So then I went on to get my MBA. I didn't really have to, but I really wanted that business acumen. And I wanted to, so I, you know, took accounting and finance and funny thing, I took all of my accounting and finance courses first because those were the things I was most concerned about. And I said, If I can't finish accounting and finance, then like, I'm not going to sink all this money into like, the whole program. Yeah, I did well, in both finance, not as well as accounting, but accounting, I got all A's, which I was, I was I surprised myself, but I had to work very hard at it. Yeah. And then I was able to go on and finish the program and I was glad
to have that background. Nice,
Matthew Dunn
nice. My, my my wife got in, got an MBA. In fact, we met and hadn't weren't married at the time. She went off in Didn't did an MBA so I got to, I got to sort of hear what that was like, ya know, work work, you work your tail off on those. And you're right, the financial accounting for her. That was the I think that not her favorite part as well. She liked the operation stuff for some reason. That's fascinating.
April Mullen
He's like big operations was great. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I actually like statistics as well. I learned. Because it means what
Matthew Dunn
you're doing. Yeah. Big Data statistics.
April Mullen
Yeah, exactly.
Matthew Dunn
make sense of the world. Right. in a different way. Yeah. Have you stayed career wise in in in the Midwest? You call the flower? I love the Midwest. But if you stayed, stayed in the Midwest, like for a long span now?
April Mullen
Yeah. So I'm from here. And in my 20s I met you know, as a lot of Midwesterners, do you meet the person that you're going to spend the rest of your life with and your 20s? We'd marry young here. Yeah. So I married an amazing guy here in St. Louis. And so we decided to stay here we had talked about potentially going to California, there was a period of time where I was trying to get him to go to New York, because I was doing a ton of business up there. And we decided to stay here because how cost of living is affordable families here. And we're really not, you're really in the modern age, like a just an aeroplane away from wherever you want to go. So we are, when COVID is not a thing. We are active travelers, we are not afraid of going out and getting passport stamps and like jetting off and going to some faraway land we we love adventures. So
Matthew Dunn
now I usually do the speed round at the end. But since you brought it up, and since you're a traveler, favorite place. Oh, gosh,
April Mullen
that's a hard one.
Um,
April Mullen
I think I think I've really liked probably Hong Kong the most.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, wow. Interesting.
April Mullen
Only because I was expecting a city like New York. And I didn't realize I didn't I hadn't read up on it. I didn't really know a whole lot about Hong Kong before we went. Um, it's actually quite beautiful. It's silly. Yeah, the way it's positioned against South China Sea, spectacular harbor. It was actually cleaner than I was expecting. And then the it has like this peak. That is, you're literally over the clouds when you get to the top. It's just stunning. And then and then like the distinctiveness of the Kowloon side versus the Hong Kong side and how they like it feels completely different than the food and the people in the market. Wow, it was a blast. It was a real blast. Oh,
Matthew Dunn
that's how I was expecting you to say Paris honestly. So well.
April Mullen
I love Paris. I've been to Paris multiple times. Yeah, I do. I mean, I do love it. But I know it's kind of cliche to love. perelson doesn't love it,
I think. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Well, great dating. And, and, and, and the city that's up for some major change right now. So I mentioned by the time you get to go there, it'll be even a different field. Not that the setting will change. nessus. Yeah. Wow. Good for you. Well, they the the pandemic, you know, we're Yeah, as we're talking here, end of March. And hopefully we're on the wind down side in this thing. And we'll see what how we reinvent the world after this. But I do think the handcuffs have place in work have been snapped. So I don't think you'll have any problems remaining in remaining in the Midwest and continue to do stuff all over the country. That's a seven caught up with you. Basically, it's what I'm saying. Exactly. Let's step topics for a second because I want to focus most of the conversation on on email. I love the side trips even more on women of email, you're a co founder.
April Mullen
Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
To explain about the organization and what it's done and where you should go next, if you don't mind.
April Mullen
Yeah, so we founded it, because we saw that there were not that many women on conference stages. And we're like Why? Only influencers several years ago had done some research and they showed that the split was about 5050. It was like 4951 men. And so we're like, there are a lot of women in email jobs. Why aren't more of them on conference stages. And so I'm actually over an email, interestingly enough, Gen cap straw, email B, Laura Atkins, Kristen bond, and said, Hey, what are we going to do about this because Kristen had written an article for only influencers and talk. I think it was titled something like where all the women email marketers and So, over an email Jen's like, what do we want to do about this, and that's when we decided to form women of email. And since then we've we've placed I think, at this point, probably hundreds of women at conferences that it's hard to, like, go to a conference and not see more gender parity. And now we're we're trying to focus more on also having more racial diversity. We realized initially, that we weren't as intersectional as we needed to be. So we definitely have a lot of emphasis on making sure that other marginalized groups are also represented in the space. So where we see it going, we we want to broaden to elevate, you know, not just women, but but women that come from other marginalized groups as well. And, you know, we've grown we're, we're about I think we're over 5000 members at this point globally. Wow.
Matthew Dunn
That's terrific. Wow. And and you do the digital, the whole creative nonprofit, you know, you've got a board like, like, there's there's some organization, it's not just, yeah, it's not just an email thread. punting.
April Mullen
Exactly, exactly. We are, we are a 501 c three, excuse me. Cool. I want c three nonprofit. No, that's us. So it doesn't really help us in other parts of the world. But maybe at some point, we could get organized and other other countries as well. We have members from all over the world. We're actually on six continents, we have members from six continents, which is crazy. Nice. So if you know anyone in Antarctica, let us know. We can say all seven.
Matthew Dunn
That's probably vital in Antarctica, think about it, right?
You don't want to go inside,
Matthew Dunn
right? You don't go outside you it's not like you got a net connection doing sit and watch Netflix, you're probably communicating via that the good old fashioned async beast that we all know, know. If you were, if you had a chance to talk to the, you know, the young April molan and say there's there's a career track in email. What what what would you say?
April Mullen
I think I would have believed it. Because in college, remember, well, listservs are still a thing. But remember when listservs were like, like, referred to by name is listservs. And it was like the thing to do but like back in college, my I was a part of a social organization that had a listserv, and I was actually voted the biggest listserv geek. And so like, I've always been fascinated by email. So I, I probably would have been surprised that I would go into email. But I also wouldn't have been surprised if that makes sense. Like I would have been like, Oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. I do love communicating. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And it's a it's it's, it's the oldest, oldest in still some ways One of the more stable on digital channels for for Marketing Committee for for communication period. But from marketing, in particular, one of my constant theses about email, one of the reasons I still really like the space is that it's not owned by somebody. There's not a there's not a Facebook or a Google parked at the front end saying all roads must go through us and you must pay a toll, or you can't use this. It's it's an open, set open standards, and anybody can jump on board. I mean, Spark, I've got their own, carved out their own path through this thing without having to be beholden to another entity to do that.
April Mullen
Yeah, exactly. I call it the channel of the people
Matthew Dunn
for that reason. You go I like that. I like that. Yeah, I always joke with some of the data and I said civil media, we've got enough social media email you got it's got to be civil conversation, or I'll just unsubscribe. Right? Yeah. I stay in control of who I hear from and that's that's still true even at this scale. You guys are sending email for your customers like it's still got to be a meaningful message or snip away it goes yeah. You mentioned listservs let's talk about what's happening now with email like Twitter acquired What was the name of the company started review review Thank you. Yeah, the email newsletter old fashioned is that sounds Yeah, he's having a day in the sun. What do you think?
April Mullen
I'm excited about it? I think it's it's super fascinating. And it shows just like how important email is and how it will have longevity. I believe it Well, for one of the reasons was what you just said about it's not owned by anyone. But for two, it feels like there's a situation happening. So So Twitter bot review, Facebook, supposedly developing some kind of newsletter tool, or maybe they've launched it, I don't know. But I heard a couple months ago that they were developing something to meet Twitter's review. And then morning brew a is basically just a newsletter sold for 75 million in q4 last year. So it feels like there is a intersection of people wanting content from sources that they trust. So if you look at like, a lot of journalists have gone independent, and they are selling access to their daily substack. Yep, where they're just sending out like communications as they write things. You've got all this stuff happening with Twitter, with Facebook, with newsletter companies being bought up for crazy amounts of money for just being a newsletter. Um, it feels like, there is the intersection of people that want content that is curated by sources that they trust. So I think the algorithms of Facebook of Twitter have, you know, that those algorithms are I think people are starting to be skeptical of them. And they, they want just pure human to human content that feels organic. And so I think we have that, combined with the fact that, um, the world I feel like is moving toward kind of a publisher model. So I like to tell marketers, like you need to think of yourself as being a publishing model. Even if you're not, you know, speaking on the business side, even if you're not, you know, a publishing company, you have to think of yourself as a publisher, and organizing your content and newsletters, often the way that you, you drive that. So I don't know, I'm pretty excited. And when you think about how, you know, there's a lot of mistrust in the media and news, it's becoming even more important for consumers to have information provided by sources that they trust, and email seems to be the right vehicle to deliver that. And the cool thing about email, because you could say, well, why aren't they? Why can't they just use social media to deliver this news? When you look at some parts of the world, like I think, I think Facebook in Australia, you can't even get news on Facebook. But for to, again, the algorithms there. But also, people want to be able to like if you if you see something on your newsfeed in Facebook, or you see something on your Twitter feed, if if you see it, but you don't have time to engage with it and you want to come back to it later. It's really hard to do on social media, it's hard to like go back and find it. Like how many times have you scrolled through something and be like, dang it? Where did I see that?
Matthew Dunn
That's good point. Yeah, and
April Mullen
you can't find it nurses. I feel like the mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo have done a fantastic job of making it Oh, obviously, especially Gmail, of like organizing your emails and making it easy for you to come back to it bare minimum you just come back to your inbox and you scan it until you find it but you can also organize and folder
in folder Yeah,
April Mullen
yeah, so it gives you the opportunity to like get it see it triage it come back to it, it's kind of like on your time in your way Mm hmm. versus other channels? It's very like disruptive in the moment you got to act on it now and if you don't you'll use it or lose it kind of attitude
mmm
Matthew Dunn
Good point.
April Mullen
I think that's part of the reason why email is having such a day and in particular newsletters.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. let's let's let's riff on the on the newsletter thing for a minute because I agree with you and I actually think I think it's an what's the word I'm looking for? It's an intersection of of a more than a few important things. And it's popping up in this you know, humble looking channel called newsletter, you mentioned, you mentioned sub stack and and for for people listening who aren't familiar with sub stack sub sub stack is essentially a infrastructure for a writer to go into business for themselves via email. Right? On the most famous recent case, a journalist from I believe Vox got up and left. And Vox is waving goodbye to one of their star reporters. He says, Look, I write enough and I write well enough and I have enough people who follow me to say, I'm going to go hang out my shingle as me and people can subscribe directly to hear from me. And he's actually he's doing just fine. As as substack is kind of the whole emphasis For him, he doesn't have the technical headaches of setting all that all of that up, like kind of fair description of this. Yeah, newsletter engine thing. I mean, fake Twitter bought a version of a business like that, right. And we get that we get the long form, you can take the time to think people can come back to it later without someone else moderating content in their faces you met as you mentioned, critical point on it also seems like it also seems like an end run for what we used to call journalism. To me. Yeah.
Yeah,
April Mullen
absolutely. big
Matthew Dunn
shift. That's a very good shift.
April Mullen
It's definitely a big shift and I'm excited to watch it I'm going to continue to keep an eye on this because I think it really is a it's a big moment for email because of all of these changes happening
Matthew Dunn
there's there's a not minor primary I think there's an ally only influencers discussion and for listeners who aren't familiar with only influencers quick plug only influencers. com April and are both on that list. It's a it's a it's a another terrific community kind of at the heart of email on someone posted a question about pay walling content on on OAI and someone else responded that the fascinating thing about an email newsletters, it sort of combines the paywall and the delivery. Oh, you April are on my paid subscribers list. Bam, you get your delivery, you don't have to go sign in. You don't have to remember to go do it. You've already said I want it. You might have already said substack I'll pay for it. You'll get it. I start my morning almost every morning reading Ben Thompson streets hackery, which is a paid newsletter. He's been at it for a number of years had to build the infrastructure himself initially, but I shell out money to to hear what Ben Thompson has to say just about every day happy because he's really smart. And he writes, he writes great stuff. And it falls through my areas of interest. And I don't have to sign in and all that other stuff just shows up in the inbox. I can go back to them later, as you said, like, yeah, it's the the virtues of email that made it look old fashioned, um, have have become distinctive values again. Yeah. In a noisy world.
April Mullen
Definitely. Definitely. And, again, shout out to the mailbox providers that have made managing email easier. I think that has really helped with all of this. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, that's true. That's true. Back in the day, Oh, my gosh, my Outlook, Outlook PST is going to explode. You'd never do that. It's got to be easier. And we everyone's stack of saved emails is completely distinctive. Yeah. Fascinating. Right. And it definitely is, we've also gotten rid of the storage problem, which is a big deal. Yeah. In the inbox providers, and you know, Gmail office 365. So like, you don't sit there worrying about, Do I have enough space for my email anymore? I just like, Yeah, whatever. Yeah,
April Mullen
I just pay a buck 99 a month to G Gmail? And yeah, yeah, basically, I mean, if I'm spending more, if I have more emails in my inbox, then the dollar 99 will cover, I have more problems.
Matthew Dunn
I love it. So look forward a bit prognosticate a bit. And I do want to touch on your notion that that that, that every company or every marketer is a publisher, because I think, I think that relates to this, where's where's where's marketing? And particularly email as a marketing channel, going from here? What's the, you know, what's the cutting edge going to be? what's what's?
April Mullen
Well, you know, how I feel about amp. And it may not necessarily be amp as the technology but I do. I am really passionate about this idea that email, being the preloaded app on your phone, everyone already has it on their phone, they just enter some credentials, and everything kind of floats in. I'm really passionate about this notion of emails becoming more apt like themselves in the conversion being able to take place right within the email itself. So I hope I hope we solve that as an industry. And again, it doesn't have to be am I actually have a friend in Europe who's developing a product right now, that will actually have a lot of the capabilities of amp, but is not amp. So I'm excited to see where that goes. I try to like keep a pulse on what's going on. Yeah. There. So I think marketing is gonna have this big shift where the, you know, if you think about, like, the way that digital works, it's a lot of like channels driving to the website or an app to be the home base and like, like, like, people are like, Oh, well, what are your email conversions like? Well, email conversions don't actually happen. The conversions happen on the website, though, for all sources email.
Yeah,
April Mullen
I think there's a world where just like has happened with payments and shopping, I see a future where in channel conversions going to be a lot more prominent. And I think email could be a strong place for that we're already seeing it and social feeds where you can buy right from your social feed. I think that will come to email at some point, I just hope it's a technology that like can be widely supported. I also hope that it leads to some email standardization. So like not having all these different disparate code bases and finicky rendering and all that so yep. Um,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, so I think more than overdue for that.
April Mullen
Yeah. So I think the I think the we will move from having this mindset of selling clicks in channels, yeah, as marketers to optimizing within the channel. But our challenge is going to be used to say, you know, just give enough of a teaser or content or imagery to get them to click through and then let the landing page do the work. I think our big challenge is going to be how do we get how do we get them to do the work? Right? How does the the channel in front of them do the work with minimal words and copy? And I think that's where things like interactivity, like things that you've been really good at, you know, making sure that that interactivity is there, but it's still it's not too much, but it's enough. I think that's going to be our our challenge. That's going to be the dance. We're going to have to, to do.
Matthew Dunn
I yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. It's like there's there's such an exciting opportunity there. The The thing I find myself and this is like separate from the particular things that that we're doing a campaign genius. I hope that we can take that forward, expand the possible in email, but do it on a standards basis. Yes, that we raise all all of the boats, including the big ones stuck in the Suez Canal, there you go had to work.
April Mullen
timely.
Matthew Dunn
They just got a free by the way.
April Mullen
Well, well, it was like it was free, then it got stuck again. And then and then I think it's free again. Yeah, the winds like push it back on the bank after they freed it.
Matthew Dunn
But anyway, oh, yeah, the winds got to be horrible there. Abraham Lincoln had a patent. I'm not making this up. Abraham Lincoln had a patent on what essentially called a camel on a rig to put floaters on the outside of a boat to raise it up in the water was shallow. And as soon as I saw that, I'm like, why are they not putting camels on this thing? And basically making it float more? And yeah, I'm sure there was a lot of high paid talent working on and I'm just convincing this side. But now back to back to the standards thing. Yeah, on email. And we talked about this. And we had an opportunity to talk about this CAUTI almost a year ago, on that we've got you've got some motion forward with with much, much richer interactivity, but specifically only in some of the inbox providers. So the thing I'm hoping we can get back to working on and agreeing on is how to do that, like across the board email. Yeah, one of your old HTML. If we update it, let's update it universally. It's import from like from everybody. And here's the critical thing in that mix, not lose the not lose the civil not lose the privacy, and I'm in control. Yeah, I do not want my inbox. spying on me.
April Mullen
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And that's gonna take that's gonna take work it from, it'll take it'll take work from how do I put this, one of the one of the not visible things you're paying a really good vendor for, is to get people to participate in things like standards committees to participate in things like women for email, you know, that the, you know, the industry broadly, gets better, gets richer, gets smarter improves, it's like, that's part of the cost of running. The thing is we used to continue to move that capability set up and forward, not just not just deliver that one message, but think about what the messages need to look like in 10 years.
April Mullen
Yeah, yeah. So I'm hoping in 10 years, they're going to the the experience will be very different. We shall see.
Matthew Dunn
We shall Yeah, we shall see we shall see. Yeah, it's like and and it's interesting, that newsletter, we're talking about the newsletters, like that's just writing writes ASCII text. There's nothing about that, that we couldn't have have done every 20 years ago.
April Mullen
Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
But now the forces and factors that are to make that valuable in a new and different way.
April Mullen
Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
what I pay for you know what I pay for a visual every day? Absolutely. Yeah, pay for a video every day. Well, right now email can't play video so I won't do that yet. I can't through to a website. Wow. Okay rest of the speed round. I know the answer to the first one. I asked people dogs cats both or neither. And you're gonna say dogs. Am I right?
April Mullen
Yes, I have two dogs.
Matthew Dunn
You are involved with a nonprofit that helps dogs if I recall. Right?
April Mullen
I've been involved with several Yeah, I was on the board of a group that advocated for mixed breed shelter dogs. I've volunteered at a couple no kill shelters in the area. Yeah. I send them money. Like Yes,
Matthew Dunn
I pay for dogs
April Mullen
and love the dogs. I love cats too. But I've just my mom's allergic so.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, is that your guitar hanging on the wall?
April Mullen
It is my guitar but I do not play. I'm not a musician. I am a music appreciator.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, okay, well we can we next time we're in a live conference. We should. We should have a chance to go listen, at least listen to some live music. I heard karaoke is a thing in the in the email conferences. Is that true? I don't know
April Mullen
that. I have seen that. Okay, but I'm not surprised. So I think that would be hilarious. And with a couple cocktails, I might be convinced to I don't know that people would be entertained in a good way though.
Matthew Dunn
We already hit we already had favorite place. Hong Kong, I'm gonna you definitely raise that went up on my list with your rave review of that favorite book or author?
April Mullen
Oh, gosh, right now I, I really am. I'm into very practical knowledge of, of marketing. So I really am loving the book right now, obviously awesome by April Dunford, where she talks about product positioning. She's just fabulous in the way that she positions it. Obviously, being a product positioning expert, is just so great. And very, she's very, she teaches you how to be very user focused. So
Matthew Dunn
nice. Nice. Yeah, cuz it is it's harder and harder to get in the head, isn't it as a marketer, it's harder to get through the noise and, you know, finding, finding engagement that turns into a conversation in a relationship. Absolutely. Especially at the kind of big scale you're playing at. Yeah. Wow.
But
April Mullen
But personal. Not not professional. I'm a huge fan of audiobooks, auto biography, audio books read by the writer. Oh, so I just I can't pick a favorite console. Yeah, I just constantly listen to auto biographies that are recorded, and, like read both of the Obamas and, you know, lots and lots and lots of authors that have written their own biopics and they're reading it. It's just, it's just lovely, like hearing them tell their story. But I like
Matthew Dunn
listening to this. There's a there's a whole nother rabbit hole to go down. But what you just touched on like the, you know, the value of the voice, right as clubhouse is sort of exploded and people are clamoring to get in and you know, listen to someone talk fundamentally. Yeah. Wow. Huh?
Yeah,
April Mullen
I actually really like clubhouse, but I see that Facebook's version of that. Call it it's actually I actually like, or the Twitter version at Facebook, Twitter, the Twitter version I like because it's everyone can access it. Not everyone can access clubhouse right. It's like iPhone only right now.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And and invite I think it's invite only at least at this stage, it's invite
April Mullen
only
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I the same. I'd say my role for me like, Oh, come on.
Right. Right.
Matthew Dunn
We did a clubhouse panel for a lie on something and someone someone wangled and it had an extra invite through it my way. But literally the thing you said gathering dust on my phone Since then, the fact that Twitter's headed there so quickly, which wonderful, nice to see something new out of them. Yeah. tweets been around for a few years. Is there? Is there a Is there a voice publishing, play for marketers?
April Mullen
For sure. We're actually seeing a lot of podcasts really taking off. They're actually a lot of email me This is obviously an email podcast. Um, yeah, I think there is a place for people because I actually, it SparkPost we did a couple of like video series, but we didn't enable them as podcasts, and I have people reaching out to me, so we plan to eventually, like turn this all into a podcast, okay, um, because people want to be able to, like, do other things like work out on the treadmill, or you know, wiping their kitchen counters. Like, that's my favorite thing to do. And I'm like, cleaning up my kitchen is like listening to a podcast. And so I think the portability of podcasting and listening, it's something that people really like, especially when we're staring at screens all day. It's nice to like, Listen, just listen. And to be able to multitask while listening. I actually listen to podcasts. Also, when I'm gardening and working out in my yard, I love doing yard work. I'm a weirdo. I don't want to pay somebody to do it. My husband's like, we should just pay people I'm like, No, I like to be outside. This is my my outside time. So that's my podcast.
Matthew Dunn
interest. Well, we've got the you know, as you said, portability. So the delivery part of it is pretty easy. And you know, your earbuds in Bluetooth ubiquitous so that that part is pretty easy getting getting the signal in there. But the the luxury of a longer engagement, right, actually listening to Barack Obama reading his book for my wife was listening to that, and I can I, you know, that distinctive voice? It's like,
yeah,
Matthew Dunn
look around. It's like, Oh, that's Obama talking.
April Mullen
And then to hear him curse, like, oh, my goodness, like, you know, like, it's just so authentic. I love it.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, that's it, then that that you hit the keyword? Right there. Yeah. the authenticity of that, and maybe why you specifically singled in on on autobiographies and authors reading their own work, didn't you? Yeah. Cuz sort of the authenticity of I wrote this, and I'm reading it. Yeah. goes way up. It's not faked. Fast. Yeah. Fascinating. We'll see. We'll see where that goes. I wouldn't be surprised to see a an audio newsletter kind of format. For the same reason we were talking about the Yeah, letter take off. You know what I listen to Ben Thompson, you know, rant on some minutes in the morning. Yeah, absolutely. I would.
April Mullen
Absolutely. And I think when you think about accessibility, like some people want to need to have things read to them. And like this would open up other avenues of ways people could experience your emails. Yeah, I think that could be exciting.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And you know that the speaker brings more to it than what's in the text. Right?
Yes.
Matthew Dunn
The emotions, emotion, emphasis, meaning structure, all that all that stuff. Yeah, it's, it's a whole nother whole, a whole set of set a set of layers on top of that. Well, we should probably wrap since I got to tell you up for almost half an hour more than April, it's been a delight to speak with you. If you were if you had someone who's like emails kind of interesting. Maybe I should, where would you tell them to start?
April Mullen
Oh, gosh, if they think emails kind of interesting, where would they start? Mmm hmm. Actually, I probably say email geeks. I feel like there's something for everyone in there. Yeah. Because it's like it's segmented by like the types of things yeah, it's kind of like a way to like, you can go you can go into depth but you can also kind of dip your toe in there's also Yeah, and there's also a ton of like different courses and things out there that are really interesting, you know, SparkPost we have send at school so
Matthew Dunn
yeah, there's there's a lot of information out there so well cool. Once again, my my guest this morning was April Mullen director of brand yay and content marketing at SparkPost. April. It was it was delightful to connect with you again and have a nice far ranging conversation as I expected.
April Mullen
Thank you so much, Dr. Dunn. It was great to chat with you and nerd out on things email and beyond.