A Conversation with Jeff Ginsberg of The Email Company
Do most email editors suck? In a sometimes-calm, sometimes-funny conversation, email expert Jeff Ginsberg shared his perspective on that and related topics. We covered SMTP, real-time content, SaaS, marketers, Subarus, kids, digital natives, rotary phones, analytics and that was just the first twenty minutes.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. And I'm delighted to say My guest today this morning on quite morning in Canada is Jeff Ginsberg. Jeff is the chief email officer at the email company he's also about a 20 something year veteran of email marketing and you're also the editor of the email guide correct Jeff? I am chief cook and bottle washer, Chief cook bottle washer and and also quite quite. yachtsman, and sailor and we'll hopefully have some time to get to that. But maybe a little introduction of yourself in your company just to orient people who are especially who are listening or watching.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yes, so yeah, thanks. Thanks, Matthew. Yeah, so yeah, I have a company and I called it the email company because I wanted to keep it simple. And, you know, for the last 21 years, I've been doing email marketing, everything from helping companies find the right technology to providing professional services, from strategy, data management, creative campaign execution tracking, reporting, the whole kit and caboodle. And it really is, you know, full soup to nuts, email marketing, but it started off in the trenches of, you know, helping companies deliver messages and finding the right technology. And, you know, we started really at the enterprise level. So you know, buying top top shelf technology and leveraging that across all of our clients in the marketplace. And that started at a time where it was so expensive to get into the technology, as well as companies in the Canadian marketplace had such small lists as compared to the US market.
Matthew Dunn
Interesting. And enemy. When you started, you're talking you're talking probably 99 servers in blades and, and and much more buying the building blocks of the rod technology. Right?
Jeff Ginsberg
You know, when I started, I started with this little company in Huntsville, Alabama called Revenant. And they, they sold a license, you would install it on your server, they had a group mail package, as well as you know, a distribution tool. And then they had this idea where they were going to say we're gonna rent it, because it was so expensive. It was, you know, 50 $75,000 a license. Oh, wow. And they said, Oh, well, let's rent it, and get some traction in the marketplace. And it really was the first SAS model that we ever exempted hosted on, they would host it on their servers. And you would literally, like log on and deploy your messages.
Matthew Dunn
So I feel like I feel like I'm on a ship at sea that was crooked, who is driving me crazy. Wow. And now almost everything in the email space is SAS, like,
Jeff Ginsberg
yeah, so from there, like this company, I think they were acquired by message media, message media was acquired by double click, double click was acquired by epsilon, epsilon. sort of let the technology die that we were using, we then switched over to exact target exacttarget became Salesforce. And, you know, it goes on and on. So we've had our fair share of exposure across, you know, the enterprise level. And, you know, from my other line of business, the email guide, there's, you know, 654 different flavors of technology that can all send messages, whether it's, you know, a single tool that plugs into Outlook, or Gmail to a complex SAS model that, you know, is your omni channel platform or, you know, covers every aspect of your marketing.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And there's, and there's not just one of those either, right? There's, there's there's many, many of them. Yeah. It's it struck me for a number of years that, you know, I'm a huge fan of cloud computing in the cloud revolution. But there were a lot of aspects of email platforms that were there before we hung that label on it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And and probably what what's your read is that is that was that a net? Was that a net gain shift for the marketer, as more of the technology pieces being you know, we're basically behind the paint behind the paywall, so to speak, you didn't have to buy servers licensed technology plugged the pieces together, so much as say, I want to deliver this many messages last year. Is it is it? I don't wanna say better now, because that's a fairly shallow question on has it enabled has the shift to cloud based SaaS, based on ditto pay for delivery? versus as you were talking about early days, this technology connected to that technology, and a company actually had to sort of be involved in the technology of email, as it as it as it made the marketing side of it better?
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know if it's made the marketing side of a better it's certainly made the financial side of it better. You know, there's an expression in the yachting business that says if a float sparks or flies rented, and, you know, I bring it back to bring it back to technology, like why would you? Why would you buy it? Why would you build it when you can simply rent it and you don't have to deal with the headache of owning it, of supporting it, coding it, of maintaining it, and like all that other crap that comes along with ownership of technology,
Unknown Speaker
huh? Yeah,
Jeff Ginsberg
you should know that very well. Like you know, you. You write code, you put it out there on the net, you know how challenging it is to like You know how challenging and expensive and like I'm looking? You got a full head of hair? I'm surprised. Great. We're in this business like, you know, they lose their hair over their stuff.
Matthew Dunn
Mm hmm. Yeah, cuz it's not nearly Uh, well, I mean, you're saying you're alluding to something fairly deep there. And it's an interesting, interesting Avenue. Travel, email looks old and stable and almost a bit boring. But it's not like this stuff just keeps working day in and day out. No change, no one has to pay any attention. It's surprisingly fragile, fussy, error prone all that other stuff.
Jeff Ginsberg
But you know, it's interesting, I was listening to I was listening to some of your episodes. And, you know, I think you said it best in your first one, where you talked about the technology really hasn't changed. You know, if the technology in itself is really the same, you know, nuts and bolts. Yeah. But what has changed is the complexity of delivering messages, and the complexity of the message itself, you know, and how marketers are using it. But, you know, pushing the message out to the door really is, is the same concept as it was 20 years ago. It's just a question. It's now harder to deliver. And messages contain more code of more complexity. And I think marketers are using it, you know, back in the day, like, you know, we could do personalization, we could do dynamic content. Marketers were very, you know, scared to do a lot of that stuff. Hmm. Interesting. It's, it's, you know, second nature, if you're not doing it, you're really behind the eight ball.
Matthew Dunn
Well, yeah. Glad to hear you said we back backtrack, to backtrack to one of your earlier sentences that the standards right, the SMTP message body, all the all the pieces, all the plumbing, those are 20 year old standards, which which you go, Wow, and and, you know, but beyond that, there are standards, there are still functional standards, IETF standards in email that are even older than that, and we still use them. I mean, I was not not to not to brag about the gray hair, but obviously, that I was at Microsoft in the 90s. Before email meant internet, SMTP email when email meant stuff running on Novell NetWare, that you ran inside a company, not never Oh, my goodness, email people outside the company. That's never going to happen. Right? It was huge. And we had the debate about is it going to be x dot 400? Or this simplistic SMTP stuff? an SMTP? One? Thank goodness, because x 400. Would now I wouldn't have any here if that had one. But we didn't I nobody anticipated that are that are relatively simple sort of handshake protocol, which scale to 306 billion messages a day as it has like, wow. And I know a ton of technical work from a ton of very smart, smart folks that make it do that today. But still the underlying sort of handshake Hi, my server says, here's a message for your server. That's old. It's been around a long time. Wow. Yeah. It's It's It's remarkable. It, you know, Matthew, what's that? David, like, really? dinosaurs?
Unknown Speaker
I, you know,
Jeff Ginsberg
it takes a long, right? Well, we're three minutes in four minutes in. And now I just feel like decrepid
Matthew Dunn
I think having worked through some of the early period, especially since the standards have stuck around can actually give you an advantage in, in understanding the structure and the plumbing. That someone who just fires up their SAS tool and uses it send message, they may have no idea if they don't bother to learn. Like how the how the bits and pieces actually work. And I would argue, but it'd be a cursory reaction. But this because you've got such a broad view of the vendor market in email. marketers can end up being somewhat prisoners of the box of the tool, right? Well, my email editor does these things. So this is what my emails look like. Hmm. That's limited by the editor. Not necessarily by what email could do. Comments? Yeah.
Jeff Ginsberg
You know, you're absolutely right. It's funny, like you had was a Massimo from be. Yes. They've got a great editor. Your tool in itself does, you know puts a lot of the fancy flowers into a message. I think what I recognize about most platforms in the market there Email editor sucks, great tools out there that either plugin you could plug and play into your sass platform. You can use, you know, I'm not too sure about these, but you know, I'm a big fan of stripe, oh, you know, you can connect stripe out to your your platform of choice through an API and pump your message. Same as you know, like, if you wanted to code and Litmus or yanase, you can pump those messages right into your, your SATs of choice. Yeah. And that way, you're not limited to that platform. And it goes along the full spectrum of anything else. Like you should not be confined by the constraints of your your ESP. Hmm,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, well, well, I'm actually I'm glad to hear you say it. And and it's worth noting it, you know, as we have this conversation, it was what just last week, the taxi for email one another, you know, sort of more capable, enterprise focused email editor got snapped up and acquired by meeting bird as they acquired spark post or vice versa. But like the market seems to be saying who there's some there's some value to more rich or better editor instead of just what we put just what we could put inside the platform. The be proposition, you alluded to that great conversation with Massimo you know, they said in email editor is hard. Let's do it well, and maybe there's a market for that modular piece of technology turns out to have been a good bet. And I and I and I am a huge fan on. But do we are we starting to pull some of the coherence of just how do I say this, just just fire up the tool and focus on the marketing message? Are we starting to pull that back apart and say, you could send better stuff, if you worked in this editor and not the built in editor?
Jeff Ginsberg
I think that's the case with, you know, it's like buying. You know, I drove a minivan, like, so. So I feel like I'm a little out of touch. But it's like, you know, buying a, I'm thinking like a, like a Honda Civic or a Subaru, you know, you can buy the base vehicle, but there's 1,000,001 aftermarket modifications that you can bolt on to make your car better, a better performing car. And it's the same thing. You know, like, we're talking about email editor, one of the biggest, one of the biggest areas that we really save time and money is in workflow process. So it's in testing, you know, multiple variants of a message. So when you have, you know, 20 or 30, different cells of content that are all going to switch up based on user profile, you want to be able to see what that looks like in real life and see all of those iterations and instances of it, then there's a lot of tools out there that don't do it. And then there's some third party tools that do a Well, yes, yeah. I just think there's a great opportunity for whatever the SAS platform is to look at all of the other plug and play applications. And, you know, I think there's a Chief martec that publish that is that yearly infographic of my tech landscape, that one? Wow. I guess the reality is, when you look at all of those platforms, they can all play with each other one way or the other, whether it's, you know, manual or through an API or direct integration. But I think it's up to the marketer to really recognize what's the best tool for the job, and to recognize that the tool I have might not be the best tool. It's the one I have, but you know, for a little bit extra, a little bit of this a little bit that I can augment what I don't have.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. I would confess them in patients as a God take my host dad off for a second as a as, as a vendor providing additional additional functions as additional magic in email. I, I do find myself a bit impatient with email marketers. That personally, it just seems like a lot of them are so flippin overworked, production oriented, and just in this grind of get the next campaign out the door, they're lifting their head up to look at the realm of the possible, as you suggested, doesn't happen that often.
Jeff Ginsberg
Well, it's it's a, I think that's a typical symptom of email. And it's, in my mind, I think it's because email never had, you know, the light of day on anybody's p&l. So, never got money, it never got attention. It was always you know, the orphan child. Now, you know, they say, oh, email is our number one performing resource. source or source of traffic, you know, generates the most revenue of all of our other channels. And yet, they still don't, you know, team it up, like they would team up, whether it be a sales team or a marketing team or technology team, they just, you know, they say, oh, we'll get one or two people I know, look after everything. And, you know, the other thing is, we talk about the speed of business, whatever that really means. But it's like, you know, we're constantly trying to get shit done. You know? And it's, you know, it's hard to say, Okay, I'm going to take a second and figure out what's the next tool? I don't want to deal with the next tool. most marketers will say, it's like, you know, I got enough problems with this tool. I don't want another problem, or I got enough issues or headaches, and I don't need any more work. Yeah, that's, that's a problem of sorry. I just want to say, I think that's a problem of corporate culture. Because corporate culture is like, well, not always, but it's for many years, it's been like, how do we get the maximum out of our employees and work on you know, whether it's nine to nine or eight to 10? Or whatever the hours are? And, you know, I've always been of the mindset like Monday to Friday, nine to five, go home and have a life? Yeah, no, it's like you're here. If you have to provide, if you have to, if you can't get it done within the day, then either you're incompetent, or we're over tasking?
Matthew Dunn
Well, you just you just like, I want to put a marker just like, boom, there's, there's this snippet that I want everybody to hear. Because I, I couldn't agree more. You're also saying that a lot of companies really under invest people time, etc. in their email marketing program?
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, I think I look at it's getting a lot better. It's getting worse. I think so well, from, you know, 510 years ago, for sure. Okay.
Matthew Dunn
Okay. Interesting.
Jeff Ginsberg
Because, you know, 10 years ago, it was really an outsourced world. People didn't even have people internally to do it.
Matthew Dunn
agency or whatever.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah. Yeah. And now they've got at least, you know, one or two or three headcount, some teams have, you know, five and 10. But if you look at, you know, some of the industry surveys, there's very few companies that are pushing more than three people on their email.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, email teams. I agree. You probably have better data on it, but it does seem like email teams, even it's surprisingly big companies. Not talking about a big group. Yeah. Yeah. Which which means they're stressed, overworked, etc, on and and that goes back to earlier note about, it's not quite as robust as it looks on the surface. If someone's got to check that the the sensor working, it's going to be one of those overworked people, and it may be midnight, when they've when they got to login and do that, and I go, Well, that's your job. So go ahead and do it. And then you've got the dichotomy carry this little further, you've got the dichotomy that, that that is the list, it's not just a list, but that that set of people you've got a relationship with, and a connection mech method with your email list is a huge asset, right? If you're selling your company, that's one of the things that's that's gonna get valued. And like the dichotomy is, if that's so important, why do we under invest in the people who steward that asset?
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. The other thing is, I think we're sending a lot more messages, right? No idea retailer that would send one a month is now sending three or four a week. Yeah, you know, if not, every day, plus, then there's the transactional messages. And the list goes on. And then there's the automations. And so like, it just, it's non stop. And then the marketers, like, you know, bucket, me and you in that say, well, you got to do better, you got to make it, you know, more relevant, you got to make it, you know, we're you know, show up on all of these different devices perfectly pixel perfect. Yeah. And it's got to have that, you know, captivating Instagram effect, like, you know, people don't have the time to read their mail. And, like, it really is, you know, one of the notes I was making on the future of email, like, it's an Instagram world, like, if you're on Instagram or Facebook, like this idea, and I know your readers things he does, but I'm like, I'm like fingering through, swipe left, swipe right up, down, whatever you Yep. Yeah. You know, it's like, we have no attention span. And we're bombarded by a trillion messages a day. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And and implicit in what you said about an Instagram world. And I very much agree. And this is, this is a hobbyhorse. I'm guilty of writing way too much. It's, it's, it's a much more visual, Quick, get stalled. Get the idea, get the impression and email in my humble opinion. I have a dog in the fight email is, is just starting to catch up with a more more visual first, more designed first sensibility like, sorry, you can't, you can't copyright your way to success. If people are not allocating time to read it. They're not for the most part allocating time to read every word in your email message.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, yeah. And, and I think the problem is, it was that way, when email was all text based. Hmm. And now that, you know, it's a lot of it's all visual driven. Again, it's really hard to break through that that clutter and that noise? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, it is, it is and it and and it takes book to pieces together, it takes more and different resources to make a more visually compelling, more visually meaningful message, then the email team probably has an it's a different skill set to you. Like if you don't have a dedicated visual designer? How are you going to how are you going to maintain that volume of three or four a week, and make them you know, compelling, and eye catching? And you know, digestible in the less than 11 seconds that people spend? Learning email. So we may see, I'd be interesting to see if we if we see a retooling of email teams to say, well, because Don't tell me the web team doesn't have someone who pays attention to that. the web's a very competitive descent competitive landscape design wise. Now if your website sucks, your brand sucks, to put it bluntly, so of course, you have to pay attention to that, of course, it has to be pixel perfect means you send out ugly emails, and I don't know if you can keep getting away with that. So I think we're agree.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, supported. Yeah. Ugly emails don't generate sales. Like, I don't know, there's some sort of meme happening.
Matthew Dunn
Now, let's, uh, let's dive in from a different direction. You have kids? How old?
Jeff Ginsberg
Oh, my daughter is 18. So she's old. And my son is 17. Okay. They're not like little
Matthew Dunn
kids anymore. Dang digital natives though, right? Yes, ma'am. And what are your 17 and 18 year old? Like? They know you they know that email is part of your life. What's their perspective on email? I don't think they have a perspective on email. It's just part of the landscape.
Jeff Ginsberg
It's so like, yeah, look, I got to ask them because don't have an opinion on Instagram, on Snapchat, on tik tok and look at my kids are not my kids are not techno nerds by any means. Like, my son, both my kids, they don't game. My daughter just got on Facebook. Only because she's going off to university. And there's a Facebook group, specifically for
Matthew Dunn
the new class,
Jeff Ginsberg
specifically for kids of her age, who are going first year to this university. Okay, it wasn't like even to go see the university online or be part of the university. But it was to be part of the group have heard of the conversation of the kids that she knows who are going to that University. My son's not a gamer. He watches people playing I don't know if it's Minecraft or whatever, like on Twitch, which I don't get anyways, like, why would you sit there and watch someone play a game versus? That is a whole? Like, that's a whole industry to itself. But it's it is. I don't think that they realize it. They couldn't do any of this without an email address. And yet, if I wanted to reach him, I sure as hell wouldn't send an email and have to be a text message.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Right. Always off. Interesting. Really? Yeah. I mean, there's always gonna be so because so you just said implicitly, you wouldn't call him you text them. You wouldn't email or call him like it's it goes right to voicemail. I'm like, really? Why am I even paying for voicemail on their phones? I my I have two I have two boys and they're slightly older 2125. And I set them up with email addresses somewhere in the mid teens, not because they asked for it because I knew they'd need it eventually. But I watched them in an email became sort of a conscious piece of their cycle as they hit that applying for college stage because colleges were like, you know, we're gonna email you this and they're like, Oh, I guess I have to pay attention to my email and like, yeah, welcome to the world kid. And now I'm sure both of them manage multiple inboxes get multiple messages. I doubt they think of it consciously which I think was your point about your daughter like yes I have email but it's just like part of the plumbing background noise nuisance
Jeff Ginsberg
it's one of those other channels that like is just and what I wish I want to I got a look at people can't see what I'm doing I'm you're gonna edit this out right
Matthew Dunn
I'll edit with everyone dude we'll put a test signal in or we're gonna do a one shot wonder right? Want to show this to you? like this What's this a picture of? Well, I would see a phone. Yeah. Wow look at that a rotary dial phone. What do you hated people 241 bucks for a rotary dial phone What
Jeff Ginsberg
are forget forget the price of the rotary dial phone. But you know it's so funny. I was I was looking at this thing I was actually looking on. I was scrolling through Facebook marketplace because that's like one of my favorite sites. Forget Facebook itself. I love Facebook marketplace or, you know, a Canada we have Kijiji which is kind of like Craigslist with with nice pictures, lots of ads. And so I saw this, like some guy was selling like rotary dial phones. And I said to my wife, I'm like, we should buy this for the kids. And make them call your cell number. Her cell number is 99086. Like so like it's just like one of those I oh my god I hate I'd have the worst number if that was your if that was your number. And we still had rotary dial was like, you know, if you had to get like some nines and zeros in there, like that was brutal.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Remember that in your finger would get sore? Yeah, exactly that hearken the dial over there, like a pencil pencil
Jeff Ginsberg
to have that little piece that would go on the headset. So they could give this a crank in their neck all day. Like, yeah, yeah, it's it's so the technology has changed, our lives have become a lot simpler. But it doesn't mean that everyone adopts to it.
Matthew Dunn
That's true. That's true. And it also doesn't mean let's let's go back to what you said about text and make an intersection point here. There's, there's a tendency to assume that new channel or device x will replace old channel or device Why? And what happens if you if you look at the history of this stuff, and it's my field, they don't, the old one actually tends to stick around, find a fit for what it does particularly well. And and leave some running room and daylight for the new. We're not, we're not getting net the same number of messages now that we did 20 years ago, we're getting a lot more. We're probably getting more email messages than we did 20 years ago, even though we've got all these other channels competing for our attention on on on top of the mix, right? It's like yeah, crazy. Yeah, crazy. Crazy. I grew up in. I grew up in a town, so rural and so small, that we had four digit mechanical dialing in the town and party lines at the edge of town. And going from that experience to you know, everyone's got a supercomputer in their pocket, and nobody knows anybody's number. Yeah. Like, wow, this is wild. This is something to something to see.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah. And it's funny, like, you know, we're locked down with COVID. Like, really locked down, nothing's open. And so anything you need is curbside. And so I needed something from the hardware store and like, stupid me, like, every time I dial their number, I never save it to my address book. I go back on to Google Maps and look up their phone number. Yeah, and I don't know why. You know, look, I have an Android phone. I don't like Google Maps doesn't allow me to save the contact like that map address as a contact but it's like you know, I could just make it a lot simpler Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. yeah hope Google's that's a great idea. I love that idea. The save save just go for buddy save to contact right. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
yeah.
Jeff Ginsberg
That exceeded the name, save the address. See, you know, Soviet like, like the See their social media channels?
Matthew Dunn
All you have to do is package that up in a V card URL like the pieces are already there to do that, believe it or not,
Jeff Ginsberg
what the hell are we doing talking to email and we could be when we could be doing hard things to come up with a better name than v card. thingamajig. But, yeah, well, we're on to something hot.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, speaking, speaking of old standards there what, you know, texting has come up a couple of times on and, and I and I had a really great conversation with Kenneth Burke of a company called text request. He initially said, Well, why are you inviting a text guy on the future of email? And I said, I, you know, that's an important channel. And there's some aspects of it that are similar enough where it makes for a healthy conversation. What do you are you involved at all in that? The tech stack, SMS, MMS side of marketing?
Jeff Ginsberg
Yes. So we've done some, but I gotta say, for the most part, a lot of our clients have it bridges the gap. Interesting. And it's funny, I'm, I'm now I don't know how I got on somebody's channel, but they keep like, they keep spamming me. Really? Well, it's, they're not spamming me. I used that word. I never smile. I never used that word. Because it's never like word in my vocabulary. Like, you know, we don't you know, people say, why don't you want to send email? Oh, cuz that's spam. I don't want to spam my customers. And I'm like, the next. So, um, but I signed up for something. And all of a sudden, it's like, I'm getting all of these text messages. And for me text messages. You know, my wife, my kids, my friends, I need to speak to you now. Yeah, and yet, I'm getting all of these from some retailers. Like, I have no interest, send me the email all. I'll get to it next month. Right. And the problem is, like, you know, as marketers, we need to break through that noisy place like, and text is a great way to do so. You get the if you get the permission to actually text someone like or, you know, push notifications in their rap like, it's in their face. Yeah, it's not. Yeah. It's not ignorable.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah, it's a hype. date myself against a high priority. interrupt, right. Like, text message goes off you, you will look at it. Yeah. organic milk coming in your inbox? Yeah, cuz, you know, that's a later in fact, the nimble DMA survey says the number one action with an email that someone finds interesting is to save it for later. Right. But Okay, there you go. On. I don't see it, as you know, isn't entertained with the conversation with Kenneth I don't see text message almost for that reason, really doing any supplant in the marketing vocabulary. I think your, your summation, if if you get the permission to text message, someone that's valuable, is really accurate. But there's a really finite number of those that I would say yes to because it's such a high priority interrupt,
Jeff Ginsberg
I think, I think we're will come in and habits playing, you know, it comes along the line of like, one of the other things that I wrote, was not so much about the technology has changed, but how we use it. And when I think about text, I kind of think of transactional, perfect example, I pull up to, I pull up the Home Depot for curbside pickup, I dial the number, you know, and say, I'm here. Typically, they'll send me they should or could send me a text to say, your delivery will be in two minutes or whatever. And that's where I that's where I see it would be beneficial to me, you know, or, you know, a lot of companies are using like airlines, right? We're changing your flight. We're changing their gait. Yeah. So like, when you talk about these high value interrupts, that's where I think it it makes sense. Yeah. But to let me know that, you know, Mick flurries are on for 29 cents. Like, who cares,
Matthew Dunn
right? Where it's where it's timely, urgent, important to you. you'll accept the message on that channel, but important to the to the merchant, and it's a little different thing, right? You may want me to buy a mcflurry but don't text me about it.
Jeff Ginsberg
That's why amber alerts come across on text, right?
Matthew Dunn
That noise I don't know who designed that. But that was a brilliant design job because I still just about jump out of the chair when a dang thing goes up.
Jeff Ginsberg
You talk about that, uh, you know, I A while ago, my wife and I made this pact to turn our notifications off on our phone. Yeah, so so we don't ring like it'll ring if like my wife calls. Or the kids call like my kids are upstairs. They don't need to call me See how bad but the dinging the constant dinging of a phone is so distracted, is so distracted when you get it for not just not just your, your system messages or your calendars, but it's it's everything like every app, whether it's, you know, Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or tik tok, like they're all dinging you every time there's an update, and it's like, it's too much. How do you even like pay attention? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, yeah, yeah. And we turn them off. You did? And are you happy to turn it off?
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, so typically, we'll check. Typically, I like we'll check email, you know, four or five times during the day, my emails pretty well open or outlooks always open. But it's like, you know, to triage and go through, rather than, like, every minute, because you could spend the entire day in the inbox. I've been to some, you know, financial institutions and other huge organizations where, literally, like, it's just rows and rows of people in front of computer screens, staring at outlook. Yeah. And I'm like, is this what they're doing? It's like, their whole world is involved in the inbox.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. And there's, there's there. There's a ton of studies about the productivity cost of that. I mean, depends on what job you're trying to get done. But almost any job requires concentration these days. And checking message after message is the opposite of concentration. I think it's what you're saying as well. Pure distraction. Pure distraction. Yeah. which ironically says that one of the sort of unintended design strengths of email that will determine determinants continued to place on our belts and on our desks is that it's pretty good at I'll get to it later. text messaging is not text messaging kind of sucks for I'll get to it later. It's you know, it's it's memory and organization and search and store design, even on state of the art phones. Right. It's it's the eternal now, and wants to be dealt with. Now. that's a that's a lot of Did you just blanket turn off all notifications? Did any apps make the cut?
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, you know, it's it reminds me back of the days I CQ, right instant chat? Yes, yes. But that like that was great. Like, you could actually see the person typing and you get a now like, I don't know if you've got an android or an iPhone, my wife as my wife and kids are all on an iPhone. Thank God, I'm on an Android. Because I would never you know, an iPhone doesn't have enough buttons for me. Okay. Well, you know, in messenger like you can see the person literally typing same as in like WhatsApp. You can see them Oh, they're thinking or they're tight. Yeah. Oh, they're in ICU. You could actually see letter by letter. Oh, and then backspace. You know, it's a one night. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have that sound. Oh, yeah. Like somebody wrote something wrong. I did not mean to say that.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I watched you type it dude. I know that. Yeah, if if God if email did that, it's like, oh, Jeff has a message opened to me typing a rude. Yeah, take your time. Think about it before you send it please. It's ever emails
Jeff Ginsberg
could only share what we were actually thinking. Or like I CQ was actually. Yeah, sharing before we actually could finish her thoughts.
Matthew Dunn
Right, right. I did tweak the setting on my primary email client. So that it's a 32nd delay before I hit send, and it's 30 seconds before it's actually sent. Oh, yeah, that's cool. Well, it's not like I send a lot of flame mail or something like that. But like, oh, if I forgot something, if I made a mistake, like having 30 seconds to go, oh, forgot the link. Right? Right. Okay, that seems like a reasonable thing to me. I don't use it that often but I'm glad it's there fundamentally.
Jeff Ginsberg
Like we had that in some of the earlier versions of these email tools like I remember double click and exact target had this you know 62nd countdown save your ass timer. You would press send and it would literally like give you the 62nd Timer which you couldn't actually say bypass it was just like 60 seconds
Matthew Dunn
on a campaign you
Jeff Ginsberg
mean it just sit there and watch this this I want to say hourglass yeah this this this the grains of sand dripping through but it's like yeah, it was like literally like watching paint dry but it you know more often than not you would say oh my god, you know, I forgot something or I need to double check something you know would save your ass because there's no pulling those messages back
Matthew Dunn
right there's there's there's no Undo button on that big sin? And then comes your business. Oh, yeah, well, we'll change it will change the stuff in your inbox? Well, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll see. We'll see. If you take all of the companies who, who work in this space, it'll put the label real time around it on 90, I'm gonna guess 98% of email messages have nothing, have no real time content. It's like, we're just getting started. Whether or not it'll take off and go mainstream, so wide open question, but that it's tiny take up at this point, which is, you know, maybe an opportunity, would you mind and again, I'm keeping in mind, there may be people listening on headphones in at a commute or something like that talk about the email guide, a little bit. Cool, cool. Cool service.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, you know, I thank you. So I started at 10 years ago, long before, there was.
See, and my mind is like a blank, you know, long before there was jeetu, crowd and
Matthew Dunn
capterra DOP, and all
Jeff Ginsberg
of those other companies like, I really got to think that I was one of the first in the industry to come up with a directory model. And when I started in, in 2010, or 22,009. Email was a very noisy, noisy marketplace driven by a commoditized. CPM. And you couldn't really tell the difference between all the different players. So what I wanted to do was have a place where people could identify and differentiate the different vendors, and the vendors could come and have a voice. I blew my brains out on publishing, like, you know, in 2009, what did I know about publishing, it was like, it was so brand new, you know, the world of blogging. And so I blew my brains out for a while. And then I said, You know what, I want to give it a second shot, and I rebuilt the tool last year, and I've relaunched it, we've got 600, and some odd different vendors, everything from, you know, a self service or a server based software that you would install, whether it be on your desktop, or sitting on a rack, to you know, enterprise, ESP and technologies, or ESP s, sorry, enterprise, ESP, and marketing automation platforms, to everyone else in between all of the other different ancillary tools, whether it be, you know, for copywriting for Creative Services, for data management and cleansing. So when you think about email marketing, it's not just, you know, taking my message and pushing it out the door, but it's everything from, you know, how do I acquire addresses? How do I cleanse my list? How do I maintain my database? How do I plug and play all of these different tools and the one and what we're trying to do is, is tie this whole ecosystem together for the space of, you know, email marketing and marketing automation.
Matthew Dunn
Right, and, and how happy are you at this point with, with the rebook?
Jeff Ginsberg
You know, I'm never happy mapping, you know, like, like, there it is. Bottom line, I am never happy I suffer from I suffer from the disease of I want more, you know, and what I what I mean is, like, I'm just never happy with what I have. And it's like, it's like that. It's like the website, the website will never be done. Right. You know, we launch it when we think we're close enough, but it's never done. Yeah. So I'm, I'm pretty happy with with the reboot my, my biggest problem in it, like, I hate being honest, my biggest problem is time. You know, it's, you know, like I said, I'm Chief cook and bottle washer. Yeah, it is hard to get everything done in the day. So I have people coming there, I have people searching, I'm having people, I'm helping people find technology. We just launched a free email audit. So if people are actually deploying messages, and they want help, just a second set of eyes, we're doing a free message audit covers 31 points of identification that we need to be looking at when deploying the message. But I think most importantly, is it's so hard to critique our own stuff, you know, it, it really is beneficial to give it to somebody else. And just let them What do you see what am I missing? And it's, it's I love watching people, like putting a website in front of somebody and saying, serve, navigate, do what you're supposed to do. Yeah, look at it, and then you look at through their eyes, they're like, What am I supposed to do? You know, it's like, you know, you just realize, Oh, I'm missing the boat in this area or it's not as clear as intuitive, you know, I switched email technologies from one platform to the other on one platform, the the the like GO button or the enter button or the Save button was in the bottom right. Or in the next one, it was in the top right. Like I'm looking all over the place. I know your readers can see this while I'm looking for a UFO. So yeah. How's that by me? weeks to recognize it's in the top right corner. Yeah, yeah. And I think I suffer from that same thing. And that is, you know, I just want it to be a little bit different, a little bit better. And so, all in all, it's it's good. It's coming along. We're building traffic. But I still want more out of it.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Okay. Well, that's our thought process, not a product. As you said, a website is never done. It's never done. Even a one page websites, stupid things never done.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, I look I look at you've got a tool, right? So user experience is critical to you. And so like, you know, when are you ever done with user experience? And then you bring a new feature? And I'm just like, yes. Like, I wish the readers could see your eyes like spinning around in your head, like a slot machine? Like? Yes, it's dizzying.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and how to put this though, the, the quest to get that, see it through the users eyes. This that's, it's, it's really hard. It's hard to get people to want to provide that time and and input to you on it's hard to make the time and make the priority of No, no, no, we really need to see what this looks like. I had said Microsoft, again, I'm on a binge today. But get a mid 90s. Microsoft had this is desktop software era. They had usability labs with one way mirrors and desks and cameras. And we would before we released a product, it would be, you know, drag people off the street, Brian with a free copy of Excel say, Please sit down and use this thing. What am I using it for? You like, we'll give you a scenario. But we really want to see what we didn't expect to see. We want to see what you'll actually do. And it was it was invaluable. Yeah. And in theory, you can make a product sort of self instruments like, wait, nobody's nobody's clicking the such and such button ever. What did we miss? But that's a whole nother layer of work in the building of the thing and the running of the thing to add to what's already a difficult task. Yeah, yeah. Do you? How closely do you monitor like pageview patterns on the email guide?
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, we're, Yeah, we do. And we see where drop off is. It's actually those very interesting that you say that, because last week, I spent a lot of time just with Google Analytics and upgrading to was a Google for
Matthew Dunn
the new one. Yeah.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah. And look at the insights you get out of it are incredible. I get this great opportunity with my clients that, you know, a lot of times when we work on programs, I want to see the back end. So it's not just show me the email, but it's, you know, show me the e commerce show me the web analyst cycles, they all tied together. Yeah. You know, you can't send an email out without the expectation of they need to come to the web to do something. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So to look at that is really important. And I think the point that I wanted to talk about is you got to be a frickin rocket scientist to really get the full juice of Google Analytics. Oh,
Matthew Dunn
god, yes.
Jeff Ginsberg
No, and it's so funny because it just came up in my LinkedIn I was looking at I don't know how to pronounce his last name. I don't even know how to pronounce his name. So I'm not even gonna say it but there's this guy. He's really smart. He was with Google Analytics and he's now on his own and like he would just really dumb it down for everybody and show like the real simple things what you need to know and yet they do this you know, you can type in these these simple questions like you know, what was my website traffic last month or what's the most important Stan and it will spit up some logical answers Google smart that way. But the biggest problem is is there's just so much behind it so when I look back into my business, I got to say like, you know, I can focus on some of the minute details but then you get lost in the weeds sometimes and you you miss the bigger picture?
Matthew Dunn
Well, and and learning the weed whacker is a full time job, kind of what you just said about Google Analytics on I've seen the nag notices about the new version. Mexico. I scratched the surface and barely know diddly squat about the one It's been sitting there running and gathering stats for X number of years and diving in and really learning the new one. Like,
Jeff Ginsberg
it's crazy what it'll do. It's crazy, but it'll do. Yeah. valuable. Shopify, or WooCommerce, or whatever, plug that in. And yeah, it's like, all these tools are made to plug and play and like, it's, it's mind blowing. Plus, when we do email campaigns, we're all like, peppering our URLs with these, you know, UTM codes. Yep. Yep. Like, it's just invaluable the data you can get from it. But then again, it's like, you know, as an email marketer, we said, this is the beginning. Like, we're overcast, we're under resource. You don't have time for this stuff. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
yeah. Yeah,
Jeff Ginsberg
we need to look at it.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And it's not. Because it's not like this No such thing is an Indian one thing that one does all system. And we look at the number of not just products, but completely separate technologies. we've, we've rift on in, you know, in 1515 minutes here, and the marketer, the business, sorry, that's, that's the new highway, streets, roads, road signs that you're gonna have to navigate. That's just part of how it works. We all got our butts booted online about a year ago, then we're not necessarily going back. So we'll have to navigate that, you know, if someone, if some hypothetical exec is listening to this, the best thing you can do is realize that you that it pays itself back when you invest in the team and the people and the resources to do it. Well, it says 38 130 8x return in your email group, why would you not staff that up?
Jeff Ginsberg
You can't see it, because it's blurred. But it comes back to my note not so much about the tech, but how we use it, right? We use Oh, it's like, you know, you look at Google, I could submit that so much. So it's not about the technology, but it's really about the resources and the people to make it work right. Using it properly. And, and getting those reports interaction on the same as about your email.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And email. We don't really have a Google Analytics for email, per se, do we? What do you mean, when you look at the you look at the diversity and breadth of data that you get from a web page, you just, you know, you just mentioned it in terms of Google Analytics? And then you mentioned putting UTM codes, which are web analytics codes. In the email, there's no UTM code. In the email body, you tend to add best have a tracker pixel that tells you it was opened. Like that's pretty shallow. I know, it's I know, it's a big deal. But that doesn't, that doesn't tell me a whole lot of tweets, the message is a monolith.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, so we actually, we tend to like platforms, like mostly b2b platforms, that will give you the behavior tracking as well. So you know, one of the ones we love is Active Campaign. But you know, at the high end of the scale, you can see it in Peridot. And, you know, a lot of a lot of other applications are bringing this in. But the idea that along each customer profile, we're going to tag and track all of their stages that they serve and where they go and what their patterns are like, the tools are not savvy enough to, to analyze that data. That's what you would need Google Analytics for. They're smart enough to store the data so that when you want to go back and remark it, you get these actionable insights.
I got,
I got a hard stop. I got four minutes left, but I wanted to ask you a question. But that is I don't know if anybody really gets to ask you the question being that you're the question asker let's say you weren't doing technology. Right? You know, closed up business, whatever. What would you be doing instead of making emails look better and be more relevant?
Matthew Dunn
Reading and writing, honestly. Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm voracious learner, and the stack of golly, that looks interesting. I want to read that or Oh, like, what what do you want to read or write about? Like, what? What's your interest? Seriously, I don't have a very I can't put a very good box around that there's a half finished manuscript on character animation that I that I'd like to get done. There's a book for Whoa, you just went black. there's a there's a book for parents whose kids have the arts bugs that I would like to write. I'm extremely intrigued by the sort of broad sweep of history particularly history with technology in it but history period on and I haven't finished the will and Ariel Durant you know, 14 volumes, story of civilization yet. I do want to get to that. So I'm not gonna give you a good coherent answer. But I would have my nose in in a book and I probably come down and write code, just because I want to build stuff too. Yeah. All right.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, look, it's interesting, because, you know, I think one of the best ways to really like find out about somebody is kind of look at their YouTube history. But that that, you know, the reading and the writing about even like the would you say character animation? Like it's Yes, it's a whole different world than what you're in right?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah, yeah. me there's probably probably some stuff a lot of similarities to that creative aspect. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. As I've come from an arts background and found myself in technology, and I think the two fit together, surprisingly well, and you came all you came off a boat, you're doing this. So yeah. Yeah. weird. Weird. And I bet if we had time to do more along the longer conversation a half hour about it, talking about what you learned, as, you know, as a as a hardcore sailor, and scuba diver and so on. And and how that informs what you do now would be fascinating.
Jeff Ginsberg
Yeah, it could be such like, like such a drama. It could be but probably not. Huh,
Unknown Speaker
yeah. You know?
Jeff Ginsberg
Well, it does. And I'll give you the I'm gonna give you the short answer real quick. I think the number one thing that it taught me is to be self reliant, that, you know, I can get anything done that I need to get done. I just need to have the right tool. And I think that, you know, when you're when you're out at sea, and the something breaks, you know, the idea of macgyvering it really does come to life. And you have how do we how do we make how do we make it to come together with, you know, scotch tape, bubblegum and glue? Yeah. And I think what I look at, and I applied that back to business, and I was just writing about this was, I know how to bridge the gap and solve technical problems with simple solutions. Nice.
Matthew Dunn
Nice. That's good, too. Good note to end on. And I want to respect your hard stop. So Jeff, thanks for the great conversation is as I knew it would be for those of you having me. Yeah. Appreciate it. At the end of it. My guest has been Jeff Ginsberg, Chief email officer at the email company and editor of the email guy, Jeff, have a fantastic rest of the day. I look forward to speaking with you again.
Jeff Ginsberg
Thanks, Matthew. Have a great day. Bye. Thanks again, Matthew. Hey, cool, great to see you. Alright, take care. Bye.