A Conversation With Jenna Devinney of Webbula

In the connected world of email marketing, Jenna Devinney of Webbula is, as they say, "well known." Her innovative content has helped spread ideas and innovations globally. It took a bit of coaxing to get her out from behind the camera, metaphorically speaking. Host Matthew Dunn asked her about the excitement and challenges of a relatively new job in a brand-new industry. If you're early in your career, or feel a bit overwhelmed...you'll find this episode fun and uplifting.

[00:00:00] What The Robot Heard…

[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: my guest today, one of the best known faces in the world of email marketing. I've got to say janitor, Vinny from Webbula, Jetta. Glad I could talk you into this and welcome.

[00:00:21] Jenna Devinney: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited.

[00:00:22] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, tell people a little bit about Webby live first, just for context.

[00:00:27] Jenna Devinney: Sure. I'm at Webbula for the email side of it is a email hygiene provider. And, um, it's as simple as that, we cleanse email addresses and on the other side of our business, we have a data enhancement side where we append information to your database. So if you have any gaps that you need to fill, um, give us some sort of information and we will append, uh, any sort of PII or demographic.

[00:00:54] Matthew Dunn: Yep. Yep. Now I'm not joking. When I said you're one of the, uh, one of the better known faces in email marketing, because your role at web plus you, you had a content marketing, correct?

[00:01:05] Jenna Devinney: Yes. Yeah.

[00:01:08] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And you've done an incredibly effective job, corralling people, getting, getting them to talk, getting their thoughts and opinions, and then sharing that out with the world, like really.

[00:01:19] Thank

[00:01:20] Jenna Devinney: you. I appreciate that. It's, that's actually one of my favorite parts of the job. Yeah. I came out of college three years ago. Penn state. We are, um, and I didn't even know the email world existed shocked that there's just one little industry for all of this all email, um, and coming in young, I'm sure we'll get to, that was a little intimidating, but with the help of.

[00:01:48] Biggest mentors, Jean jetting. She's introduced me to a ton of influencers in the industry. Yeah. That's how it

[00:01:54] Matthew Dunn: started. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you weren't booking through college saying I can't wait to go into the email industry, right? Not

[00:02:02] Jenna Devinney: no idea existed,

[00:02:06] Matthew Dunn: you know, it's true. Truthfully, in any industry. There's always this iceberg to it, right?

[00:02:12] You go, I didn't realize what an enormous business. And then there's there's players and influencers and et cetera. But you said little, you know, they're 320 billion email messages sent at day. It's little, but it isn't right.

[00:02:30] Jenna Devinney: They need to have a crash course in college about email.

[00:02:36] Matthew Dunn: Oh, I would, I would, I think I'd say the crash course on a, on a whole lot of things, know one they'll change any way by the time you're out into, um, you couldn't take it all in, right?

[00:02:47] Every, every industry truly is just a sort of this enormous complex thing. I have to say. Having worked in multiple industries. It's funny because everyone who's within a space Linder talking about blah, blah, blah. Within the industry. It gets really self-referential no matter what space you're in, it's, it's kind of comical, but I take it.

[00:03:09] You like it? I do.

[00:03:11] Jenna Devinney: I love it. And I'm learning every day. Um, it's a lot that, I'm a true email marketer. I'm just in this space, a content marketer. I'm just in a small piece of the industry thing sides, but it's fascinating how much.

[00:03:26] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is those 300 odd billion things don't just fly around accidentally.

[00:03:33] And there is a lot, you know, both technically structurally business wise, um, underneath what lands in your inbox. Right. And it's quite a, I'm guessing just from the conversations that I've seen on the, on the content that you share on behalf of Webbula, it's also quite a global, um,

[00:03:55] Jenna Devinney: Yes. Yes, for sure. Um, I, I work with a lot of people all over the world.

[00:04:02] Uh, Gavin, uh, log weenie. I always butcher his last name from digital. I tried at cafe deli. Yup.

[00:04:10] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. UK, UK, uh, Antigua. Yeah, kind of a foothold or kind of a stronghold or whatever the word is. In, in the UK of, in email. Is that just my impression? It seems like it, no, I agree. Yeah. Like a surprise. You and maybe cause they, they, they speak English and the rest of us are just imitating or something.

[00:04:34] I don't know. Okay. So first, uh, about a school and yet you've taken you, you know, you've taken to the, uh, content marketing, like, like an old ham pro, how come.

[00:04:47] Jenna Devinney: Email marketing or content

[00:04:49] Matthew Dunn: marketing content marketing specific. Um,

[00:04:52] Jenna Devinney: I'm just going to have to give props back to Webby lab, the huge support system. Um, they have been a huge help with growing and just allowing me to learn. And once again, gene Gettings, um, just helping me. Be a mentor and not just her, but other, other mentors, you know, you cath pay.

[00:05:13] Everybody is so welcoming. And, um, I had a conversation with the auditory. Yes Baraki I don't, I don't know exactly where she is at the moment. Um, I know that she's in another lens, but, um, she's around my age. She's another younger email marketer who just kind of helped me. I feel comfortable. Um, any industry, I had a lot of questions when I first came in and she's like, you don't have to know everything day one.

[00:05:38] You're going to learn every day. So I have a lot of people to think I'm just, you know, To help me learn throughout the past three years. Sure. Because like I said, it is very overwhelming. Um, but maybe law and all these, it's just a very nice community, very welcoming. And I wouldn't be without all of these people.

[00:06:00] I wouldn't be where I am today.

[00:06:01] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Did, did you find, did you find, cause you've been at this for a couple of years now, did, did, did you hit a point in there where in the last year or so? Where do you not, you said I've got this down, but sort of. Oh, oh, okay. I'm starting to have a handle on at least this piece of the, the job in the company and the end of the.

[00:06:20] Jenna Devinney: Yeah. So when I first, um, just came out in the working world, wasn't exactly like anybody else. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to be marketing. Um, I had this creative side of things. I loved doing website design for media, and then I just started like falling in love with content, um, and, and talking to all these industry experts.

[00:06:41] And I think this year when the metric series started to become very popular in the Astia. It's just started to click and I just started to get really easy. Yeah,

[00:06:50] Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah. A lot of, well, a lot of work goes into making it look easy. Right. I know. I'm sure we only do a fraction of this stuff that you pulled together, but did, did you, um, did, do you feel you had the.

[00:07:07] And it's not the right label for, uh, you know, technical and production skills that you needed already under your belt, or did you have to learn a ton of stuff, video editing and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Uh,

[00:07:19] Jenna Devinney: definitely definitely learned, yeah. Everything that I've been doing. It's just been learning on the job kind of thing.

[00:07:26] Cool. Video editing. It takes some time, but you get better as you go. Yeah.

[00:07:33] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. You do get better as you go. And, and the tools will keep evolving and stuff, but, uh, I think it's, I think it's easy to underestimate because we sort of swim in a media ocean. It's easy to underestimate how much work goes in to those snippets that you see

[00:07:50] Jenna Devinney: there is, there's a lot of work.

[00:07:52] Um, I have a wonderful team and a wonderful boss, Melissa. Who's always helping, but, um, as you know, teams are small, you end up taking on multiple tasks. Metric theory is I'm, you know, writing, editing, making the emails. Yeah, there's a lot. And then after the, after the video is done, you have to. Edited send out an email.

[00:08:15] There's just a lot to it. So it's kind of a one man show.

[00:08:20] Matthew Dunn: Um, I'll bet. How do you, how do you, how do you keep track of all of the pieces both before they get assembled into content? And then after you start disseminating things into the world saying like what's working, what's not, what do we need to do more of?

[00:08:32] How do you keep track of everything?

[00:08:35] Jenna Devinney: Um, as far as tasks. Um, I'm, I'm a good paper and pen person. I just like writing all that stuff down and, uh, we, we have. Resources inside click up that we, we have that all like pre ready to go for us, pops up on our timeline. But a lot of it, when we figured out what we want to continue on doing, obviously that's looking at metrics, see what works and what doesn't work.

[00:09:01] Yeah. I find it's obviously the open rate topic was super hot for someone's. Now it depends on, on the guest who is on our shows, how popular they are.

[00:09:13] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. I, it, it we're, we're in an age where every company in some senses in media production, I mean, you're the, you're, you're, you're on point for, for Webbula for that, but you know, companies in the, uh, I'll make this up to make the point.

[00:09:29] If you're a bike repair shop, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you're a bike repair shop. Now you're like a bike media company, as well as the repair shop. If you want to get people in the door, which is. It's bizarre. Right. It's just bizarre and being really good at, and I'm not a bike guy being really good at bike repaired and video editing not necessarily found in the same background, right?

[00:09:53] Yeah, no,

[00:09:54] Jenna Devinney: I agree. Absolutely spot on

[00:09:56] Matthew Dunn: that. That mindset was. Were you ready for that? Getting out of school? Like, like, oh yeah. That's the way the world works narrow. Is it like, oh crap. What?

[00:10:09] Jenna Devinney: Yeah, that's a good question. Um,

[00:10:15] I don't know how to answer this. This is a good, this is a good one. I, I was never, ever overwhelmed. Um, with anything. I was really eager to learn. I knew, I think I knew coming into this world, like working world. Everybody always said, you learn on the job and that's a hundred percent accurate. So, I mean, like I said, it was very flexible.

[00:10:35] They were willing to give me the necessary tools to learn. So I was very comfortable making mistakes, you know? No, I was never uncomfortable. I was always eager to learn and try new things. And I'm in a really awesome role here to where I got to do different things all the time. I never got to just come in and do the same thing.

[00:10:53] So my, my skillset was just all over the place. I enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, marketing one day, come in and do social. I do content. I do web design. Like I loved, I love

[00:11:04] Matthew Dunn: it. Oh, that's excellent. And that is the reality. I mean, I've been working at least a year or two longer than you have and you know, every day, every day it's like, wait a minute, I've got to figure out what.

[00:11:18] Okay, well, that's I, that's the job, honest to God. That's the job now? I say like, uh, yeah, I guess I better figure that out. Um, you know, the, the learning resources just staggered me. You know, Hey, you go, Hey, how do I do that? You know, stack overflow, Google search, you know, forums, whatever, or reach out to experts or, you know, our mentors and say like, oh, that's how that works.

[00:11:44] Okay, cool. And then, you know, two months later you're doing it without even thinking about it, right?

[00:11:49] Jenna Devinney: Nope, absolutely agree. Um, I think when I first started. It was balancing, um, how to do your job and also how to understand what's happening in the industry. Because once coming out of school and I'm like, what the heck is authentication?

[00:12:06] What is deliverability? I had no idea. And then I'm writing about this and you have to be. You know what you're writing about. So you had to keep up with your task and your, and your job, but also like learn the industry. And I mean, I'm still learning every single day. So trying to find those resources to go to like, what the heck does litmus do?

[00:12:26] Like I had to like, learn that, like where to go to learn certain things. Yeah. Um, so

[00:12:30] Matthew Dunn: yeah, and it's not like there's a guidebook for any, any industry, any niche there's not. Oh, here's the blueprint because frankly it got reinvented somewhere in the last year. No matter what you're talking about pretty much,

[00:12:46] Jenna Devinney: you know, I, I, a hundred percent agree.

[00:12:50] I always found it. How do I say this?

[00:12:59] Uh, like things change all the time. So I was always very scared to like ask in these communities, like, what does this mean? Because we're like, people, people like experts like. Not, not that you would ever do this, but it would be like, you don't know what that means. Like, I don't know that, like when I first came in, it was very intimidating

[00:13:21] Matthew Dunn: to

[00:13:24] Jenna Devinney: right away. Yeah. You're so much. And truthfully, I don't know anybody around my age, um, to, to really talk to about that and have those kinds of questions. Um, I'm, I'm actually, okay. I'm comfortable. I think I have enough. Expert friends that where I could go to and talk, but people who don't, it very, it's very hard to, to find a group or young.

[00:13:50] Matthew Dunn: You know, experts. Are you, did you join there? There are a number of industry groups. You've mentioned Jean Jennings, and of course we're talking about only influencers there. And if you're not, if you're an email and you're not Knolly influencers tip number one, join only influencers, but a women of email.

[00:14:06] Are you part of that group as well? Is that been helpful in terms of learning, learning this.

[00:14:12] Jenna Devinney: Absolutely. I think they're a very supportive group. Um, I think email, the email geek slack channel was also very good. I started a group with and Tom bleach blonde from. Um, Flo mailer, uh, next gen email group for that specific reason of greener newer email marketers who just wanted a safe community, just to ask those so-called stupid questions and have a place to find resources wherever you needed to go.

[00:14:46] So. You're still in the midst of launching that. And hopefully that helps people feel a little bit more comfortable, like how I wish I felt when I first came in

[00:14:56] Matthew Dunn: now it just struck me. And I really didn't think about this until this moment, but a substantial amount of your time in this job, this company, this industry has been in the middle of this pandemic.

[00:15:13] Holy cow, you know, those of us who are those of us who remember going to offices are just delighted with the new, sorry. Yay. Yay. Yay. For working home. Yay. For remote, I'm waiting for you guys for 20 years to catch up with me here. Um, but that, that is a really different experience base. I'm guessing you navigate.

[00:15:38] You know, zoom calls and phone calls and international, et cetera. Like that's, that's normal for you. And it wasn't normal that long ago.

[00:15:46] Jenna Devinney: Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to say that, I mean, a young we're younger, we're used to technology. We can do anything when it comes to tech.

[00:15:55] Matthew Dunn: Well, I actually, I agree, and I disagree.

[00:15:57] I came here for you and I talked about this, but, uh, um, having a couple of millennials of my own, um, or whatever, what are Brecht full, roughly your age? And I've talked to them about it. They're like I say, like your generation is actually not that tech savvy and they're like, yeah, you're right, dad. They're not, they think it all works.

[00:16:16] It's kind of what you discovered about email. It doesn't just work. You don't just hit, send. People decisions, infrastructure, technology, mistakes, hairballs, all sorts of stuff behind the green button that you click to make the thing work.

[00:16:33] Jenna Devinney: Yeah, no, I actually do agree. I'll take my statement back. We are like this, I think the people below us or who was born straight into technology.

[00:16:41] I know I had times growing up where I didn't use technology. I played, I played outside, so yeah. No, I, I do agree. Um, the transition was fine. Um, I, I think I was already working in the space about

[00:16:56] Matthew Dunn: a year before, before the,

[00:17:00] Jenna Devinney: so, I mean, not as long as most, but, um,

[00:17:04] Matthew Dunn: had you gotten to at least one live conference and actually face-to-face met other people that, that helps. Yeah,

[00:17:12] Jenna Devinney: I actually, that's the one thing I missed. I really enjoyed going to shows before. Um, COVID hit and I'm heading to my first one since COVID here. So

[00:17:25] Matthew Dunn: yeah, no, it's, uh, I, I was, I was, I was a long time non-fan of, of live conferences, but the email space in particular, having a lot of, uh, just wonderful people and relationships in it, I'm really looking for.

[00:17:40] Yes to life conferences again, just like just to, just to see, you know, see those folks and, you know, have a beer, have lunch, whatever with them. Um, oddly that we're all, we're all kind of hankering for that. And this far side of this lockdown stuff, but we're not, we're not going to shift the workstyle back to exactly what it was.

[00:18:00] I really don't think.

[00:18:04] Jenna Devinney: I like the mix currently here at Webby low, we come in once or twice a week. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. And then working from home, I could, I would say I'm probably more productive at home. I'm just straight focused, but it's nice to come in and just see people that we work with. Um, we're big on culture here.

[00:18:21] So we like to have food challenges. We just have Crock-Pot chili challenge. We're starting Smith county. So it's fun. It's nice to like, make that.

[00:18:31] Matthew Dunn: That's good. How many, how many, how big is the company in terms of number employees?

[00:18:38] Yeah. You know, everybody, we know everybody.

[00:18:41] Jenna Devinney: Yeah. That's a really. Country. So yeah, sometimes we have our Friday meets online. It's nice to see everybody's face. Uh, that's something we started during COVID just to have a check-in every Friday. Yes.

[00:18:57] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah. That, that, uh, Oh, I'll age myself with the joke here.

[00:19:03] So Hollywood squares are Brady bunch wall of wall of faces, but it, it does, it does matter. And it does, it does actually help. I have to say, I think you've been on a number of as well. The only influencers group, Jean teed up the live Thursday calls. And I, and I feel like that's become real. Like I've gotten to know a lot of people in those conversations and it's been, it's been incredibly, uh, it's been, it's just been a wonderful piece of life and on.

[00:19:37] Before that I would not have, I would have said a couple of years ago, casual zoom call. Give me a break. No, it's actually usually really good conversations. A privilege to sit in and listen to a lot of. I

[00:19:50] Jenna Devinney: do. I do agree. I that's where I met you, Matthew and the arrive on Thursday. So definitely, you know, before this, I was never big on any of the zoom calls, but I felt a little more comfortable with the community was very welcoming and it was just a really relaxed conversation about blog.

[00:20:07] And

[00:20:10] Matthew Dunn: yeah, so as the content marketing, one of the content marketing experts in this space, Where do you see content marketing shifting, as you look ahead with what you're doing in your role, like, what do you, what do you think you're going to need to start doing differently to help your company get where it wants to go?

[00:20:30] Jenna Devinney: Well, I'm noticing utilizing experts has been very, very big, but, um, I just. I know you've heard this a lot, but video video is just something that's going to be continue to rise and I need to utilize more, um, on, so, um, try to incorporate, uh, we surprisingly just started true email marketing last year. So ramping up on email marketing a little bit more.

[00:20:57] Matthew Dunn: So. Oh, you mean just in temperature, your own, your own outreach and upkeep it it's it's, it's a lot of work. Isn't it? There's a lot of

[00:21:07] Jenna Devinney: work

[00:21:07] Matthew Dunn: like, oh, you vape? It's like, oh, you're just to put a thing on your website. Email will magically go out. Not it's it's having something to say and say regularly. Um,

[00:21:20] Jenna Devinney: Vamped up Webelos website very nicely in the past two years, as far as content.

[00:21:24] But my next goal was to like really get out there on just like, not just our website, but just get out there and talk to as many people as possible,

[00:21:33] Matthew Dunn: really, and, and, and transform a lot of that into, into video and from a content perspective

[00:21:39] Jenna Devinney: video internally, you know, of course, but just getting out there on other blogs and partnering webinars, you know,

[00:21:47] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, it is.

[00:21:48] This'll be, this'll be an esoteric, uh, road to go down, but you and I both do a bit of this. Um, I go back and forth about some aspects of video and, and asterisk. I've been championing. Video online for a lot longer than a lot longer than most people have. Um, 2009, I launched a explainer video company. Like YouTube was YouTube, was a little baby at that point.

[00:22:19] Um, and there's no question about how engaging the form is and how, how different the attention and engagement is when you have a serviceable useful piece of content. I do feel myself thinking a there's no way in heck I could watch everything I should. There's just not enough time on the clock. And I find myself impatient with, um, sort of impatient with.

[00:22:51] Video that doesn't try to maximize my viewing time. Like this is going to sound finicky, but when I watch an explainer video and the first 15 seconds, or someone's flying logo, I'm like, stop next. Why? Because you just wasted 15 seconds and getting didn't get to the point. Yeah. And it it's, it's a tough, it's like, we're, we're, there's more than we'll ever watch, which is kind of a funny thing to think about,

[00:23:17] Jenna Devinney: you know, I agree.

[00:23:20] Would you rather watch a video or read like a blog post in my eyes?

[00:23:25] Matthew Dunn: Truth. Truthfully depends on the topic. It depends on the depends on the context. Um, mean I'm an avid reader and I read fast. So scan, skip, skip. Behaviors are useful. Um, and video doesn't a video and audio don't afford that very well.

[00:23:46] Right. Um, yeah. And, and, you know, videos closer to being experiential reading, obviously reading and text quite, quite, uh, quite abstract and the way we, uh, the way we process them, uh, is different. Um, so, so I don't know if that answered your question, but keep going with your. No. I

[00:24:08] Jenna Devinney: mean, I actually have to agree with you, I guess it just depends.

[00:24:11] But most of the time I'm going to be honest. I, you, right. I skim, but I think video appeals more to me, um, when I'm scrolling through LinkedIn, when I see videos, I'm more likely to watch it, then read up a long post to

[00:24:25] Matthew Dunn: be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or sometimes both. And, um, do you, do you get, do you transcribe or have transcriptions of your expert panels, videos done?

[00:24:37] Jenna Devinney: I actually don't know that's actually you good?

[00:24:41] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, for what it's worth, um, this, our conversation will end up being transcribed, but, um, the balance, the balance we've struck with it is, is AI machine transcription partially with comedic value. Cause you know, it's going to get some stuff just comically, awful, but.

[00:25:01] You know, if I, when I take this conversation and we've edited the video, we get the transcription, we put it on a page on the site and we put the transcription below. I mean, I hate to bow to the mighty goop, but the value of that piece of video content goes way the heck up with all of the keywords that we've unconsciously been using in the course of this conversation, they're in a machine readable.

[00:25:29] Jenna Devinney: I a hundred percent agree with you. I think that's something we'll have to tackle in our deliverability series

[00:25:34] Matthew Dunn: next year. Wouldn't it be a bad idea? You do have to, you do have to, uh, uh, get a pair of handcuffs or sit on your hands. If you have any, any kind of a perfectionist streak, because transcription is awful, you know, it's like it's oh, it's amazing.

[00:25:49] It's this. Oh, that's awful. Do I say that much? Oh my God.

[00:26:00] Jenna Devinney: I hate watching myself on videos. Yeah,

[00:26:02] Matthew Dunn: sure, sure, sure. And if you go down the rabbit hole of trying to correct a transcription yet three hours later, you realize how much, how much, how much text we make when we're just conversing with each other and how. Poorly structured, the sentences, paragraphs thoughts, et cetera.

[00:26:21] Connections tend to be. Yeah, no,

[00:26:24] Jenna Devinney: I agree. And we're all fine with it. Thank you for the idea. I got to get on that for next year. I

[00:26:29] Matthew Dunn: will. When we finish this out, you know, like when I clicked a little pausey button, I will, I will send you a couple of recommendations because we've, I've run the, run the geek gamut on that.

[00:26:40] No, one's perfect at it yet. It's getting better and better. Um, proper nouns. You know where below will probably trip up in a. Sure. Sure. Um, and you know, name named mistyped once we'll be mistyped, many times that's relatively easy to correct, but terms of art, acronyms, um, industry terms, those things tend to be kind of a stumble because they're very general case models at this point, but getting better and better and better at a scary, fast pace.

[00:27:10] I had read reading and I was curious to talk to you about this. I, I had. About sort of doom and gloom, prognostications that we're all about to get swamped by a tsunami of AI generated content where you say, gee, I need an article on di deliverability. Oh, Hey computer, go write an article on deliverability for me.

[00:27:30] Yeah. Which just pisses me off to think about. Did really did, did someone actually say something or was that just words that got put together?

[00:27:41] Jenna Devinney: I be curious to see how that actually works. I mean, how, how good those articles like good quality articles. Those would be even be

[00:27:49] Matthew Dunn: second word there. Quality, quality.

[00:27:52] Yeah. That's a dodgy one. Do you get reproach? I get approached by, well, if you're on LinkedIn, you're going to get approached no matter what, but get approached because, oh, Hey, well, we'll write articles for you. All the time and I want to go, how, how would you have the slightest idea? What to say? It's irksome.

[00:28:13] Jenna Devinney: And you can think they know what the business is half the time. Like there doesn't even make sense for us. So

[00:28:20] Matthew Dunn: does it, I, I would, I would argue in some sort of philosophical sense. It doesn't make sense for anybody because if, if the value, like the value of what, what you've done with your experts series is this sort of enormous compression.

[00:28:35] Get people who do know what they're talking about, get them to talk about it, you know, cut it well, put it together in a really presentable format, make it available. Boom, done what? That was a really valuable five or 10 minute or whatever. Watch cool. Some guy writing a generic article and topic that he or she has no expertise in may meet, meet the content marketing bar, but all it really does is lower the bar.

[00:29:03] Jenna Devinney: Nobody really knows who they are and it probably won't help your, your SEO efforts either. If it doesn't really

[00:29:10] Matthew Dunn: well. Yes or no, we're in a battle, we're in a battle there for keyword keyword. Who's got enough of them.

[00:29:17] Jenna Devinney: We get a lot of people come and ask for backlinks too all the time. That don't really make sense for our industry.

[00:29:25] Yeah,

[00:29:26] Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah. I, it w it's going it's, it's going to be. It's going to be a problem. And it's a consequence of, or cost of, of the gains we're getting from, from disciplines, like a AI that, um, what's the AI that's sort of buzzy and famous radio. LPT three, I think like really darn good writer. You say, Hey, I need a, you know, I need a, I need six paragraphs on email hygiene, but it a little bit.

[00:29:56] And it it's ingested, you know, enormous Corpus. Core by of text and it all looks really serviceable. No one had that thought. No scary, but we'll be competing with that sucker.

[00:30:11] Jenna Devinney: I know. And we're already, you know, con you know, the email industry has changed throughout the years, obviously, but I mean, there's so many people already out there, like true people who are writing every day.

[00:30:22] I come across like tons of articles on one topic. How do you truly know. What article is really telling the truth. Do you ever come across that? Every once in a while? Every once in a while, I'm like, I see two, two different, like, what is the true?

[00:30:37] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, there, there, there isn't one. No, it's that, it's almost an existential.

[00:30:48] Issue when it, when, when it comes to knowledge, knowing decisions like our business needs to do X let's pick on let's just to be recursive, we'll pick on SEO. We need to improve the SEO on our site. You can find 5,000 different people who will offer to do it for you. Claim their experts say they're going to re change.

[00:31:06] How do you know which of them knows what in the heck doing? It's a tough call. And, and there's no up for that either. You know, sometimes the cream sort of rises to the top. Like there, if you spend enough time in a given niche, you go, ah, that person has said stuff often enough, or their prediction has come true or they're backing it with data or facts or whatever else that we'll trust them on it.

[00:31:35] But it's an astonishing amount of. To do that verification side of things, a former, former business partner of mine and observed once that he just watched himself, he said the amount of time he would invest in deciding to buy a $15. Was just ridiculous. I'm like, you're right. You're right. You know, read the reviews and check the stars and read the other reviews and gussy.

[00:32:00] And I wait a minute. What happened to just, yeah. Yeah. Cause there's, someone's waving a book. Business books, particularly. Oh, buy my book. Wait. Yeah, it's going to be this, this domain marketing and content. It's going to be tougher because we're going to have more buyers. Pretending to do the job.

[00:32:26] Jenna Devinney: Yup. And I'm curious to see how that's going to work.

[00:32:32] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. We don't, we don't know. And I mean, run the clock back a few years that the amount of available sort of text and knowledge in the world unfathomable now compared to 20 years ago, and you know, we're navigating as best we can, but. You ended up with this. I mean, there's a funny, funny through line in our conversation so far where a lot of the key learning is very personal, very community, very kind of seat of the pants.

[00:33:02] Um, and that's part of how we navigate the complexity. You know, I trust so-and-so to tell me how to do that. So they're kind of helping me ignore the. And where do you meet the people and get to know and trust them conferences, conversations enough, repetitive exposure. Yeah,

[00:33:27] Jenna Devinney: yeah, exactly. That, um, when I first started, I started to see a trend of people who popped up on my, on my time.

[00:33:34] I started to get familiarized with the experts and the companies. And that's just kind of how I knew the trusted sources. So,

[00:33:40] Matthew Dunn: interesting. Interesting. You keep eating to keep that file, you know, I'm does that, does that ranking tend to sort of exist in between your ears or your super methodical and the CRM about it or what?

[00:33:54] Jenna Devinney: No, it's pretty much the

[00:33:55] Matthew Dunn: same, you know, you know who, you know? Yeah.

[00:33:58] Jenna Devinney: I know who I know. And I'd like to obviously. Sometimes, I feel like I'm blinded. I feel like I need to get out there and more people too, obviously. But, um, you know, every time somebody new comes here, I have like a long list of experts to follow places, to, you know, websites to go to.

[00:34:17] And everybody that comes in is like, this is absolutely awesome. Like this was so helpful and it, cause I wish I had something like that when I first came in.

[00:34:25] Matthew Dunn: Okay, that's good. That's good to hear. What's what's what's your advice going to be? There'll be some point in the near future when you're just going to, you're going to get some youngster working for you or joining the team or something you go like, Ooh, I'm kind of passing the torch now.

[00:34:39] What are you going to tell?

[00:34:42] Jenna Devinney: Uh, everything will be okay. You do thing. Okay. Um, you will start to become more comfortable as the days go on. I know when I first started going on these calls with these experts, I'd be like, oh my God, I'm so excited. You're talking. If you took the time. Out of your day to talk to me like, you know who I am.

[00:35:03] It's a cool feeling, um, to build those relationships and people say, people will talk to you so that you get better. You learn every day. I was so overwhelmed when I first started, um, The industry and keeping up with the conversations. I was very intimidated coming on these calls with experts and I was scared.

[00:35:22] I was scared of like, I don't want to ask that dumb question. Cause you guys have been in the industry for 20 plus years and I'm coming in here asking what's authentication. You know, that's how I felt, but it gets easier. That's that's my advice. It gets easier if you're, if you're willing to learn and follow those.

[00:35:39] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and if there are experts, I would, I would argue if they're experts, they're probably pretty darn good at learning.

[00:35:49] So you the constant keep up. I mean, you referenced it, but we can pick on it at least a little bit. Um, you know, the, the, the upset of the apple cart in the email space, by the, by apple, themselves in this case, right. Uh, we changed, changed the key metric because Apple's handling pixels differently, like watching that conversation unfold, which it still is, and, and, and trying to figure out what.

[00:36:15] Impact what the impact is going to be gone. And nobody knows we're going to have to actually pull back the covers and look, and watch pixels and requests and stuff like that. And then add a bunch of them up and go, oh, this is good. Or no, it's not that big, an impact like completely, uh, completely Virgin territory for someone to figure out in the last six months.

[00:36:37] And no one, no one stuck.

[00:36:39] Jenna Devinney: No, I'm somebody like me, who, like I said, I'm a content marketer. I'm not necessarily an email marketer who knows all the ins and outs of this stuff. So when the news came out, I'm kind of like, all right, I'm learning. What does this mean? You know? Um, and then interviewing experts for far as the experts series next year, that's going to be a question.

[00:36:59] Um, the impact had, it's interesting to hear that there really hasn't been much impact yet. I think we all kind of panic. Um,

[00:37:09] Matthew Dunn: yeah, not, not, not yet. I, I think we talked about this, like, like that number, the number could spike the impact could be. Worse, um, fairly quickly. And nobody has any control of that throttle except apple, um, in this case.

[00:37:24] Cause just take up right now is, is, is fairly low. We keep seeing sub 20% numbers in the stats that we're running. I'm like, Hmm. Interesting. But, you know, as I said, when my wife says, should I, should I do this upgrade that my phone is telling me to do, then I'll know the number's about to go through link and jump a bunch.

[00:37:43] Right. I

[00:37:45] Jenna Devinney: think it was just quiet up in there for all of us, you know, the open rates there, but you shouldn't be relying on it a hundred percent.

[00:37:52] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the, one of the things that happens in any space is, well, let me, I'll do this in an analogy. The college campus you went to was airy Erie,

[00:38:06] Jenna Devinney: Penn state.

[00:38:06] There

[00:38:08] Matthew Dunn: were there were there spots on, on the commons or on the grass where there was essentially a trail worn in the grass? Cause people always cut that. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and it's because that's the shortest way to get there, et cetera. And someone else walked on it. So I'll walk and Emmy, we end up with that in any space was sort of, oh, well this is, this solves a problem.

[00:38:28] Or this gets me from a to B better. So we all ended up doing it and using it wasn't necessarily designed for that. Right. Open writes an email or an accident or an accident. They were not designed. They're an actual. And now we're a little like, oh, someone took my accident away.

[00:38:47] Jenna Devinney: Exactly. Right.

[00:38:53] Matthew Dunn: Okay. And she'll have to adjust one shoe. Yeah. Yeah. You know, web websites and search optimization, a bunch of accidents there. And one, you know, one company in particular did a really good job of going, Ooh, we could actually do something with that. And. They took, I'm talking about Google here. Google took enough control of the sort of accident about website structure, where they flipped it over.

[00:39:19] And now you really tailor your website to make Google happy. They're more the gateway to your traffic than the site itself for our state. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty fast. It's pretty fascinating to watch.

[00:39:38] Jenna Devinney: I think I want to go down a rabbit hole. SEO was a very interesting, it's just a whole different world to, um, you know, just getting website pages, ready and blog.

[00:39:46] And sometimes you feel like you're writing, like for a robot, you are writing for a robot because you want to be ranked, you are

[00:39:51] Matthew Dunn: writing for a robot. Yeah. I worked with a service to do a press release a couple months. And I, you know, it was one of those, I, you know, they got paid to do the release and I sent them the key bits of the subject matter.

[00:40:05] And the article I sent back was it was just awful. I read the, I read the release and like, I'm not putting my name on this pros, this sucks. And they said, it's like, we're really good at writing stuff for.

[00:40:25] That's really depressing keywords stuffed and ah, just awful. Right. But that's, that's a very human metric to put us not why the press release is not for eyeballs to read, dude. No, it's for robots to read, to eventually get some. To whatever the thing is like, wow, that's just flipping bizarre. That sounds like a good use for AI.

[00:40:52] Right, right, right, right. Boiler plate. So all the robots can write for each other. You guys just go talk to each other, like leave us alone. We're going to go to conference and have a beer.

[00:41:10] And at the same time, are you on top of your Google analytics for your site? Um,

[00:41:16] Jenna Devinney: I that's more Melissa. She tracks stuff every day. Yes.

[00:41:21] Matthew Dunn: I look at, I look at Google analytics for our, our, our website properties and it's just like, it makes me want to, makes me want to go have lunch or like, just anything except trying to understand.

[00:41:34] It's a whole discipline. It's a whole science of its own and I'm not interested enough to try and get on top of it. To be honest,

[00:41:40] Jenna Devinney: I actually have to agree with you on that.

[00:41:42] Matthew Dunn: It's like insane. Like that's, that's a free service, right?

[00:41:52] Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Did you, uh, did you feel like you had to, you had to sort of way amp up the technical skill sets, the wrong label. Tech and data and just facility with digital tools. Did you have to, did you have to, uh, increase your time spent on learning the tool set or the job, or did you feel like you kind of had enough grounding to make that easy?

[00:42:19] Jenna Devinney: Absolutely. You have to learn everything on the job. Of course. Um, yeah. Not technical, HTML. You can't just go in and drag and drop anything anymore with website. You got, you got to know some code as far as metrics and understanding. Yeah. You had to, it took time that stuff before this job,

[00:42:39] Matthew Dunn: so. Well, even if I had, we had someone on the team here with a fresh out of college comp side degree, and it was, uh, I'm picking on you, dude.

[00:42:50] So if you watch this, you know, I'm picking on you like took him six months to start being useful. Like don't do theory, right? I need results and you're not going to write an operating system, like, you know, solve this little problem with this tool set as fast as you can and move onto the next one. Why?

[00:43:08] Because that's the job. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, the base knowledge was there, but that, that really specific solve this thing today. Domain knowledge that you, that you have to do everyday, that I have to do every day and learning to do that as quickly as possible and sorta start accumulating those pieces as you go along.

[00:43:29] That's, that's, that's more the nature of work.

[00:43:32] Jenna Devinney: No. Yeah. It's, it's tough because you, everybody sees all the fun stuff of your job, you know, the content and creating, and that's the stuff that I enjoy the most is the dirty work you gotta, you know, you've got an understand the metrics what's working, what's not working.

[00:43:46] The tool was like you said, so I mean, as much as you don't enjoy it, you have to do it.

[00:43:51] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and the, the, uh, the sort of organized the, keep, the bits and pieces and parts organized. So you don't make yourself crazy.

[00:44:02] Jenna Devinney: But it takes just as much time as everything else just organizing and keeping track of things.

[00:44:08] Matthew Dunn: I read the other day. Not I'm not picking on you, I'm not picking on your generation, but I read the other day, someone said like, it's shocking. There's a generation, you know, below a certain age, they don't do folders. They're used to. Sort of flat structures and I'm like, what? Like yeah, you say that when I think it was a college prof said when he, when he said, you know, put the such and such in that folder blank look like, what are you talking about?

[00:44:38] Um, I think it's more everything's in the search engine, so. As an alternative,

[00:44:45] Jenna Devinney: I have a little old school in myself, so I would say, I mean, I do folders. Yeah. I think

[00:44:49] Matthew Dunn: if you do content and you don't do folders, you're dead.

[00:44:53] Jenna Devinney: You have to come back up some backups. Yeah.

[00:44:57] Matthew Dunn: Yes, yes. And you get it kind of, you get kind of anal about your you're naming.

[00:45:02] Structuring and stuff like that. Cause otherwise you just can't like you make more work for yourself. If you, if you don't kind of get on top of that stuff.

[00:45:14] Jenna Devinney: That was the wrong question for somebody. Yeah. Folders,

[00:45:16] Matthew Dunn: absolutely boulders. Absolute. Okay. Glad. Yeah. Glad to hear. And, and you know what? You can get more than one college degree, not know how to, how to make a proper folder structure, which should be illegal in my humble.

[00:45:30] Yeah, because, and then when you get someone else's name.

[00:45:37] Why is it panic? Where is everything whereas anything? Well, I mean, we're all, we're in a funny way. We're all writing code. Whether or not we think we are, we already code there's a whole bunch of like symbol manipulation and reference stuff going on. In Excel in a folder on your hard disc and your Google drive, whatever it is like there's, there's, there's actual development work there and we don't necessarily know how to do it.

[00:46:11] Or some, some people are naturally better at it. Some oh,

[00:46:15] Jenna Devinney: files, you can't find, you need the actual editable file. It can't find it. You got to recreate it. It's just, there's a lot.

[00:46:22] Matthew Dunn: That is one thing about video to go back down that rabbit hole. And I learned it the hard way. Like video kinda sucks in, in terms of its searchability.

[00:46:32] If you're not really good at keeping track of stuff, you're like, where's that piece of footage on, you know, talking with boy, if you didn't name it the right thing, you're never gonna find it. Africa. That's actually another reason why the transcription thing is surprisingly useful.

[00:46:51] Jenna Devinney: That's a good point.

[00:46:53] Matthew Dunn: Thing. It's like, even if it's sloppy, you like put the transcription in the folder with the footage, why then you have a chance of finding it. Yep. There you go. Well, there we go. We've managed to chat away 45 minutes and know it'd be fun to talk with you. So do I understand, congratulations on homeownership or an order here?

[00:47:14] Jenna Devinney: Yes. How's that feel? It's fun, the boating

[00:47:23] Matthew Dunn: adulting. And as we were talking about before we hit the record button moving,

[00:47:27] Jenna Devinney: I will be 26 on Friday. So I will definitely be adulting, uh, with health

[00:47:33] Matthew Dunn: over the quarter century mark. Here you go. Well, yeah, that's right. That's a big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've got an, I've got an almost 26 year old and he's keenly aware that that threshold is coming as well.

[00:47:48] You're like, Ooh, I better have a plan for that when the night, but every plan for that one, right?

[00:47:53] Jenna Devinney: The parents'

[00:47:53] Matthew Dunn: nest on that one. Yeah. That's okay. That's okay. You're you're well at your, well at of that one. Well, you prep the promise, you sticking around this industry for a long time. Cause it's delightful to have you doing what you're doing.

[00:48:07] Jenna Devinney: Well, thank you. I, you know, I wouldn't be where I am in this part of my career without why the law and a lot of these experts, like you, I'm just being very supportive and having open arms, making fun.

[00:48:21] Matthew Dunn: So I say this, and I think I've touched on it with you before, but not all industries are like, I've worked in a lot of different spaces and emails, unusual, unusually supportive, unusually inviting.

[00:48:37] It's like it it's my favorite of, of, of many different, uh, industries that are kind of tech centers like, wow. And I don't know why I don't care. I just like it's cool. Yeah. So yeah, you, you landed in the right spot. Not accidental, but like, were you hunting in the email space or did you happen to land at Webb?

[00:48:59] You let go. Ooh, look, I'm lucky me look where I

[00:49:01] Jenna Devinney: landed happened to Atlanta and Miami, that I was just out of looking for marketing jobs. You said you really like, you know, content creating and it just happened to land on them. And I'm like, what the heck is this idea? And just really excited. Yeah.

[00:49:17] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Oh, cool.

[00:49:18] Cool. Cause you know, all sorts of all sorts of stuff open to you from, from, from here and to any company, it looks like the company's doing.

[00:49:26] Jenna Devinney: Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I first got the job, everybody's like, so what does your company do? I'm like. Um, email industry. They're like what's so it took some time to like the, nobody had any idea, like

[00:49:38] Matthew Dunn: didn't you say you were at a reunion or something and you were trying to explain a bit about that to

[00:49:42] Jenna Devinney: people.

[00:49:43] Yeah. So maybe like almost a year or two ago. Um, my marketing professor and Penn state Baron reached out to me and wanted to me to be on a podcast with her. You talk about what I do. And, uh, the kids were like, what? There there's that much that goes into email. I'm like, yeah. Those emails that you get from old Navy.

[00:50:05] I mean, those take a lot of work. It's not just typing up an email. It's the consent. So they thought it was very fascinating.

[00:50:11] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And, and relatable in that everyone's got an inbox and has seen right. Seeing seen it. So you have an entry point for that. Conversations, the old Navy, that's a good example, right?

[00:50:22] Like two weeks, two weeks. And I think the average investment in an email template or in an email, or like it's thousands of dollars before they hit send. Yeah, that's crazy. And then you start looking at it, the numbers that fly around, you know, uh, a retailer like that is going to be in the millions and millions of.

[00:50:45] Th that they're sending like, wow, that's a lot to keep up.

[00:50:50] Jenna Devinney: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if everybody, my age would agree with me, but I'm not going to lie. I'm not a big email person. I don't sit there and really look at coupons as much as like, I dunno, you would think because we're younger. So we're more tech savvy, but I never really relied on email as much as I do now.

[00:51:10] So email wasn't really big to me. Um, so. Uh, I think it was really interesting to these kids that like how much actually went into email, because I don't think they're in their inbox. It's 24 7, like maybe like older people are. So

[00:51:26] Matthew Dunn: was your on-ramp was your on-ramp for email, like specifically Jenna starts using email, the college application process?

[00:51:39] Jenna Devinney: Um, yeah.

[00:51:43] Matthew Dunn: That's sort of recall have two sons and, and that's my recollect. I got email address. Cause I'm a geek. I got email addresses for both of them relatively early on, but it was like, they just didn't, you know, we texted me this, that, and when they started the college process, all of a sudden it's a bit of adulting, right?

[00:52:04] It's like, no, that's all good. To your email address, really? Yeah. Really

[00:52:10] Jenna Devinney: for social media, you know, you have to log in with an email. Um, but then when college hit, like you said, that's when I started using even more.

[00:52:17] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I mean, it's sort of, it starts with. Dependency slash habit slash or whatever else, whether or not you live in your inbox, slightly different question.

[00:52:27] Whether you've, whether you've got Ryan fail and said, if you don't have an email address, you'd kind of digitally homeless, right? It's like, yeah, everyone's saying it's not like it's a cost factor anymore. Um, like get a Gmail address. Okay. That was easy. Um, so yeah, and , everyone's got, at least, at least one, I think the average is more like four addresses.

[00:52:51] Yeah. Hm. Hmm. Well, we'll have to do a repeat of this and compare notes in about a year. How does that sound cool. Well, thanks Jenna. My guest today has been the wonderful Jenna Deviney from Webbula. Uh, she have much a content marketing fame go on LinkedIn, look for experts, panels, and a lot of emails related stuff.

[00:53:12] And you will find her. Thank you for the time. Young lady. Thank you,

[00:53:16] Jenna Devinney: Matthew.

Matthew DunnCampaign Genius