A Conversation with Lisa S. Jones, CEO of EyeMail, Inc.
Visionary entrepreneur Lisa S. Jones has been pushing the boundaries of email to bring video into the marketing mix since 2005. Her company now enables some of the world's leading brands to deliver compelling experiences, right in the inbox, with EyeMail's patented technology. This conversation with Lisa moves authentically through why she started the company, some of the challenges they've faced, and where she sees it going in the future.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Good morning. It's Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. And I'm delighted at that. Finally, my guest today is Lisa s. Jones, CEO of IML. Lisa, welcome. And I'm so glad we finally get to have this conversation.
Lisa S. Jones
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to our time together for quite a while so I'm glad the day has arrived.
Matthew Dunn
Yay. Ha so so let's start ordering people first starters. Let's talk about you. And then we'll talk about your company. You you've done so many things, including NASA. Like I get an actual rocket scientist on the on the conversation. How did you end up? Give us the short path to CEO of IML and founder I'm sure right.
Lisa S. Jones
Absolutely. So my background starts. I'm originally from Montgomery, Alabama. And in college I majored in logistics and procurement. I've always been fascinated with processes, how things work, what is the why what is the how. And so after I majored in logistics and procurement, I had an opportunity to work at to start my career at NASA. I also was accepted into the FBI but I turned that particular position down I get back to that whole question part of why things happen, what of this what of that but I was accepted. But I turned that down and I decided to go with NASA for my first career move. Okay. And in that move, I was able to I was the logistics director responsible for Space Shuttle parts for missions that would go up, maintain inventory levels. My career was going, I was going to retire my career there. But I always knew within me there was an entrepreneur somewhere, but she was just kind of hiding from me at the time. I decided to make a shift and move to Atlanta, Georgia, in the mid 90s. And I've been here ever since in Atlanta. And in Atlanta, I was a corporate executive, the telecom industry for Bell, South mobility, Cingular wireless, and then at&t, and I had the opportunity to work with women and diverse suppliers to look at contract opportunities for them. And in the midst of all of that, I decided that it was time for me to try something different again. And sometimes things in life happen where you become an entrepreneur, or your life is just redefined based on certain instances. And in my instance, Matthew, what happened is my oldest sister, I have two older sisters. And she called me one morning, it was about 824. In the morning, she advised me that my mother had passed away at home alone. 61 Wow. Wow. And Alabama. So I remember how that one moment in life, made me stop right to reevaluate. What's my, what is Lisa's journey going to look like for it? What does Lisa want to do? What would my mother want me to do? And live in my best life? Yeah. And I just remember when I went to her services, they lasted, it seemed to me, like for seven minutes. This is, this is the true story. And I always tell this story, because it's so important to knowing how you never know how your beginning is gonna start. But I remember Matthew, it was a graveside funeral. And the services lasted seven minutes. And I was thinking I was gonna get up and speak. I wasn't on the agenda. But in my mind, I was going to speak. And when the time came, I did not get up to speak. And so as people were going back to their cars, I remember praying, and I said, I said, Mom, I'm so sorry, I didn't get a chance to get up and speak. But when I get back to Atlanta, I promise, I'm going to start a company. It's gonna be inspiring, it's going to be to create a legacy. And it's going to be to make up for those seven minutes of time. Because everybody deserves to be heard and and to have a communication. That's important. And I thought about how one communication changed my life. So when I came back to Atlanta, I started thinking about how we communicate in verbal nonverbal and writing. And I said, What else do we do to communicate? And I said, we email people. Well, who do we email internal external one click anywhere in the world? And from that EyeMail was born.
Matthew Dunn
Okay. Wow. Yeah. I had read. And and that's a wonderful story, by the way. Thank you for sharing it. Yeah, that's a 61. thing. I can see 61 I so right over the hill, they're not supposed to go away quite that early. Yeah. So that big.
Lisa S. Jones
So it's a matter of defining, defining your life and thinking about that. And one of the things that I did when I came back to Atlanta, I, I signed up for 150, email distribution lists, it didn't matter. Any MBA, Home Depot, everybody. Yeah. And what I noticed there was a commonality, the commonality was, I didn't feel inspired to take a click for a call to action. And it was either a graphic, or a hyperlink. And I said to myself self, what if you could bring email to life? What if you can add a video experience for instant play? So as soon as someone opens, the video plays on mute, but they're engaged now? They are inspired to take an immediate call to action and then I was born,
Matthew Dunn
right. Okay. I Wow. Yeah. Good. Good for you and and way way overdue. Is that for a succinct way to put it, right? I mean, talk about the 150 emails for a second. Do you think if you looked at 150 today, when was it that you started EyeMail?
Lisa S. Jones
I started EyeMail officially in 2004 2004.
Matthew Dunn
Do you think if you looked at 150 emails today, they'd look a whole lot different.
Lisa S. Jones
Not a whole lot, a whole lot different. I would just my reaction. But you know what you remember back in the early 2000s. What used to happen was it was strictly just a hyperlink. And you would just click in you and go from the hyperlink You didn't even have an image back then on some of them right. Now, you might have an image or thumbnail and then you might even have a play button on it now, right? Or you might have a three second GIF that loops potentially, but it's not much changed.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, it's not but not much change and and email, you know, emails, emails. It's been around a long time, the technical standards That, that all email platforms have in common are there 20 plus years old? Right? Well, you know, email HTML is joke email. HTML is like, it's nostalgic. For me, it's like when we first started doing web pages in the 90s, because it's still the same set of messy, you know, nested tables and stuff like that. And the tool set that you've got on on more modern platforms, it's just not there.
Lisa S. Jones
It's just not there. And you know, when I first started, I male when I left, NASA, went to Atlanta, and started my career in Telecom. And then I became an entrepreneur, I was faced with the challenges that's at least a word, are you trying really, why are you really focus on this whole video and email or, you know, it doesn't make sense or just stick with your day job, you have a great career. compelled to, to make a contribution to the global society as a whole, because a video and a click to anywhere in the world, the idea of that was fascinating to me. And again, I'm all about processes and how things work. So I was committed to the journey, and I'm not, I'm not technical, Matthew, that's not my background. He's gonna ask you,
Matthew Dunn
I was gonna drill in on that. So how did you go about learning and figuring this out?
Lisa S. Jones
Well, as a woman, we focus on a lot of great things that we don't know necessarily, but we are willing to learn and to learn from others and to explore. We're willing to to fail and get back up and keep going forward. So for me, challenging myself of saying, I'm not a coder or developer, how am I going to grow this business? Well, I was fortunate enough to manage technical resources in my career. So I, I've always been a visionary. I knew what I wanted, it was a matter of how to get it done. So when I was going to all these development shops explaining what I wanted to do, I was faced with that opposition, of course, as I mentioned, and then the eighth development job, it took me eight good development shots before I got the right one. Yeah. And so I explained what I was seeking to do. And they said, well, we're not sure if we can do it, but we will exhaust every means to about that. And by I would say, by the spring of 2005, we had the first model first version of IML developed.
Matthew Dunn
Wow, that's just remarkable. To have had one to stick with stick with it. Congratulations. That's not easy, and easy. And to start, start cracking the code on such a hard, both technical and business problem. On at a relatively early period. You're not talking about 5g in your pocket, you're talking pre mobile, you're talking pretty, pretty sketchy broadband at in Oh, five. Right, exactly. The infrastructure that's going to help you now was nowhere nowhere near what it is.
Lisa S. Jones
Right, then you're you're totally right. And that was part of the journey was how do we develop the technical roadmap forward for growth? before even the cloud, the cloud? I mean, everything right. So one of the aspects that I decided as the founder and chief financial officer was that we wanted the technical leadership. So we became part of Microsoft's mentor protege program, okay. I'm part of their women in technology. And we were very fortunate to work in Microsoft's Innovation Lab, so that we could collaborate on IMLS roadmap and some of the nuances. So one of the areas that we knew were was most important was with regards to bandwidth. We all know, with videos, there are issues with sending them out directly because they could be there's a large file size. So I knew that with EyeMail I wanted it to be delivered so that when it reaches your inbox, it's no more than 15 kilobytes kilobytes in size.
Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa S. Jones
So that was a that was a feat. But we were able to accomplish that so that now whenever and EyeMail delivers to your inbox or your customers inboxes this full video hd experienced delivers, and only 15 kilobytes in size, and we can compress a video that might be 200 or 300 meg, in original size to that 15 kilobyte stream. Wow. Wow.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, that's remarkable. And I I did Alicia s. Jones, I did sign up for email a couple of weeks ago, so that I could so that I could, you know, get the experience and see a few of them on the one that the one that really struck me, like, this is amazing was the Porsche video. And and I'll get a technical question for you. Since we get to geek out a little bit. Um, I was viewing that I use lots of email clients. I was viewing that on Gmail and on Gmail, it did the revert to GIF is that Is that what I'd expect? Yeah. That's a gmail thing. Email.
Lisa S. Jones
Okay. So EyeMail is designed to work on Outlook webmail? All Apple products as well. Yeah. Yeah. in Gmail, the experience is it will deliver and play on that instant play. But you have to click for the sound. Yeah. Play a full 62nd video clip. Okay.
Matthew Dunn
Okay. Okay. And then on the, in terms of technical delivery, you were working on this before html5, but I would assume the html5 in the video tag is is a fairly was it was a nice step forward. When that when that started getting adopt adoption? Yes,
Lisa S. Jones
yes. Yes, it was. But lucky for us, we had already had the work. And with that Microsoft component, we already had clients on board. And for us, the client base started with the enterprise. That was the very first step was our first client was Time Warner with TBS. And from there, it just grew for it for adoption. It went to Coca Cola from there, and then it just kept growing the portion.
Matthew Dunn
Nice, nice, wow, I'm just I'm blown. I'm blown away at how early you're working on this.
Lisa S. Jones
Sometimes I think back on it, I'm like, wow, 2005 like 2004 even it's like, wow, time flies and standstill at
Matthew Dunn
the keynote. You know, what? If I were you, I think I pat myself on the back when I was introducing the company or when you're introducing yourself and explained that you were working on this before YouTube buddy existed? It's YouTube was not launched yet. In Oh, five. This is true. Good on Yeah. Right. Like you were looking at the same sort of this same core problem of, really of delivering experience, right, and making email visual, not just text before Wow.
Lisa S. Jones
That to everyone deserves for their message to be heard. And the idea that everyone deserves a visually engaging experience. I mean, when we watch TV, not like back in the day, right with black and white or solid pictures, we used to watch it because that's all we had to watch. But even in today's world, even when you think about email, it's a lot of words, a lot of pictures. Where's the where's the content?
Matthew Dunn
Well, and and yeah, yeah. Where's it go? I'm so glad you said that. Because I mean, we have we have a we have a bit of overlap of interests, Lisa and I in in in Visual Communication and Media and trying to drag email, sometimes it feels like kicking and screaming into being into being a richer experience. I want to bounce this one off you because I always beat people over the head with it on Litmus, the company that does that makes me Yeah, that tries to grapple with a mess of email, HTML. Litmus keeps an eye on stats, one of the stats being how long people read email. And last Dad I looked at from them, I think was 2017, maybe 2019 data. 11 seconds, the average email is read for 11 seconds. And if you multiply out average reading speed, that means 33 words of your average email are actually read. People are not sitting reading Moby Dick in your message, give me a break. Right. And, and yet, I don't know if you feel this way. But email marketers like they're kind of hugging the copy like, No, no, no, we have to, we have to work on our work on our words, like, people are visual man.
Lisa S. Jones
Exactly. And when you think about newsletters, to me newsletters are old school is because they are you have to keep reading down, you have to go below the fold, you have to keep going down and down and down. So you're losing attention every time someone has to keep going below the fold. And then you want my eyes to focus on left, right, up down, it's a lot going on. And so we found the best model for our clients is to have that main core message for the most part, and then have that call to action button or to to direct them to that next step or a call to action. And our value proposition is that we're able to drive open rates over 45% and open up and uplift. And on click through where industry standards are, let's say what to two to 4%, we're able to drive those numbers up over 25%. And that Porsche example that you saw, there was one event where Porsche North America had an event. And we were able to create a bi ml experience for them to encode and compress their video footage and add the IMO code. And as a result of sending out the IML version, they were able to close out their event two and a half weeks early because they had exceeded capacity. Wow. And that's what it's about. We want people to take an action on our messages for that next step, whatever that next step, right?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah, and and you know, it's funny marketing sort of caught up with your vision in a sense with not necessarily email marketing. And I don't mean to knock the email folks, but but I know you've I know you've had to work to become part of the right to become part of the ecosystem of email. And I'm going to guess you got told no, and it's impossible. Or it's more about subject lines a few times, um, marketers now keep talking about the customer experience. And you kept using the word experience, and I couldn't agree more. But reading is not super. It's not a super experience. It's not an experiment, and we've got to get we've, you know, if if email is going to remain competitive, and the numbers are not going to go down below that, like, 4%, that you mentioned. Uh, huh. Got to be richer, more visual, more experiential. That's my contention. And I think you'd probably agree with me. Yeah, I
Lisa S. Jones
totally agree with you, Matthew. And another aspect of that is that we're always within the organization, we're always forward thinking, and we're all about accessibility and inclusiveness. So as such, we also have a feature on eye mail that supports the hearing and the visually impaired, because there are over 285 million people around the US that have hearing impaired, you know, issues as well. So we added closed captioning, nice doing IML. So that if someone wants to follow the video, but we the tickler instead, as well, that scrolling, we offer that and it works with screen readers. And so we're passionate about that accessibility and inclusiveness and we've partnered with the Hearing Loss Association of America and the Helen Keller services division as well. And yeah, because it's all about what's the next step forward? How do you continue to help customers and others have the best experience
Matthew Dunn
now? Is it coincidence lucky coincidence? I suppose that that you happen to land in Atlanta when when you left NASA cuz I think of Atlanta is sort of the hub of of email. There's a ton of email companies specifically in that area. Is that lucky coincidence or deliberate?
Lisa S. Jones
Because I moved here in the mid 90s. So that was it was not even on the radar for me at that juncture. I didn't even realize my life was gonna take a love for the love of email.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Okay. I mean, it's good for us, because you got message scares? Yeah. Nailed. Yeah. There's,
Lisa S. Jones
I mean, conference was here, too.
Matthew Dunn
Yep. Yep. That's, I think that's Yes. Kevin. Again. Yeah. just just just a bunch of which is nice. And then London seems to be the other hotspot. And I want to dig into why that is. But we'll leave that. On. Wow, cool. How, how's the entrepreneurial like, put email aside, building a company having the vision to do something and to make a dent in the universe is Steve Jobs said, that takes some sand that takes some persistence has talked about your entrepreneurial journey. Are there moments where it was like, God, I can't keep doing this? Like, how'd you keep going? How'd you get how'd you get to here?
Lisa S. Jones
You know, so, a journey takes turns at any point in time in life, as we know. And so for me, I knew it was going to be an adventure, I'll put it that way at a challenge. But I was committed, I was committed since day one, remember, because I made the commitment to my mother. So that was in the foreground, in the background of my mind, I think if it wouldn't have been, for that particular incident, I can't say where I'm at with it right now. But I knew that I was so focused on living the dream of making creating a global product for mass adoption, in any language, that that was my core focus. And then, in the journey of trying to navigate my way through the obstacles of different things, always one, I relied on my faith to know that I may not see that next step forward. But that I know it's there. And I'm still gonna step through it even in fear sometimes just to keep trying even every step counts in the journey. So I would always try to find a way to map that next step, or to map that next connection to to make it happen. And also, I knew that it was important to build a team that would all we would collaborate and support each other. So in our case, part of our team, our youngest team member, Matthew is 23 on the team, and our most senior member is 75. Wow, and different parts of the world. So we have team members in Canada and Pakistan, in India all over and I love that and that inspires me and keeps me going as well. Because we believe in diversity and the importance of having all of these wonderful thoughts from different age groups brought together with different experiences, different culture for them. benefit of the customer, because it's all about serving the customer. And the best way we can do that is to collaborate. So from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I knew that I wanted a diverse team to keep me inspired, as well, just to hear others thoughts. Also knew as an entrepreneur, that everyday wasn't going to be easy. So as a result of that, Pete a lot of people know that I'm a big fan of Rocky Balboa, and Sylvester Stallone for that matter. So if you ever know Matthew, send him my way, okay, because I want to thank him a lot. Okay. So,
Matthew Dunn
I mean, he's an entrepreneur, if you think about it,
Lisa S. Jones
Stallone himself is an entrepreneur of sorts, because he put it all on the line to create Rocky and his income was limited in everything, but they wanted to put Ryan O'Neal and other actors Burt Reynolds to play Rocky, but he held out to want to play his star role of his movie. Yeah, yep, yep, yeah, me, when I see the movie of Rocky and everything with it. It reminds me of my journey of saying that, you just need to go for whatever your dream is, and not to give up on it. And it's about going the distance for whatever that means to you. For me, it meant I want to make an impact in the universe in email, particularly, particularly video, in email, I wanted to create engaging experiences to to bring email to life to bring communications to life. And so every time I watch a rocky movie, or a scene from Rocky, it inspires me as the entrepreneur that is within me to to fight for it to keep going and you might lose around but you know, you're going on the full distance. And that's the exciting part to me. Nice,
Matthew Dunn
nice. Yeah, it did. It really takes it how do we put this watching entrepreneur become? Not flavor of the month, but sometimes it feels like that, like it was oh, I want to be your and and those of us who have done that go like yeah, you look kid, it's actually not glamorous at times. It's just, it's just stick with it ness and determination, Kate and commitment like the one you know, the one you made. Walking away from your mom's you know, a funeral, you're like, You got it, you got to have a North Star that says no, no, no, we're not done yet. I'm gonna keep going. And yeah, I know, it's steep or hard or whatever. But I'm not giving up. I'm not giving up
Lisa S. Jones
and also to answer another part of the question. You know, how do you stick with it when there are times are difficult or things are not working? as well. What I found to be beneficial for me is to have positive images around me, that could be even a quote from Steve Jobs. That could be a photo of Oprah that could be listening to a podcast with white guy Roz how I built this. I'm staying motivated. From that standpoint, I think that maintaining and growing, your thought leadership is important. So even for me now, in the midst of the current climate, I decided that I wanted to continue my education. So I'm enrolled currently at Harvard. Yeah. Marketing as well with an executive education program. And I think that motivates me, as well as the entrepreneur within me to learn as much as possible so that I can share that with the team. Yeah, we grow and then share that with customers. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Wow. And yeah, that's not that's not the first MBA for you either. So you've continued to invest in in and make the time, which is hard when you're running a company, right to learn to take a step up. Talk about the Harvard program a bit like, this is 2020. I think it said on LinkedIn, you've so you've been at this for a bit. Did you start this pre pandemic? No. Oh, okay. Okay. Wow,
Lisa S. Jones
I started last summer. Okay, last summer. And it's been one of the best, I would say, one of the most defining periods of my life. When you think about Harvard, and you think about the thought leadership that they have there, the access to that from people all over the world. So of course, everything is virtual online now, because of the pandemic, but you have thought leadership from all around the world, that are coming together for a particular class, to share in the learnings in the teachings. And it's just, it's an it's an incredible experience of learning. And I'm just so I'm a person that celebrates gratitude every morning when I wake up just to say, Thank you, and I get to craft the day of what is going to be so in going to class, I am just full of joy, because I'm learning new things that give you gives you a different perspective. I've also learned there's a class by Professor Stefan tonky. And Professor Stefan tonky, teaches disruptive innovation. And he teaches about the power of experiments, and he wrote a book about business experiments and that a lot of us, you know, When you're in corporate or different avenues, you're not necessarily given the right or the freedom to experiment, fail, restart again, develop the next prototype, get faster with it, fail faster, move forward. And I think that's so critical to know that it's okay if everything doesn't work as you expect it. But what's your next part of that experiment of that phase for it for growth, and I just am so appreciative for all these lessons that I'm learning in the journey.
Matthew Dunn
The Harvard's the mean, that's the best birthplace of disruption and disruptive innovation. Right. That's where that's where Christensen was for almost careers,
Lisa S. Jones
questions and
Matthew Dunn
right, so he's kind of got a lock on it. I by what, I actually had the opportunity to meet Clayton Christensen. Yeah, cuz i like i pored through his books. And I hardly, I'm hard pressed to think of a more influential thinker. But on said a conference 2020 plus years ago, I'm tall. And I was looking like this. Are you? I'm six, three, Dr. Kristen seems like 680 Wow. Big N he was the nicest, most courteous, well spoken guy I was I just had a quick hallway conversation with him about education actually, cuz cuz, obviously, is a Harvard educator himself. And I have an education background. And he was talking about disruptive innovation with a bunch of, you know, high power VC kind of types, which wasn't me, but I pulled them aside in the hallway, I said, Well, you know, Where's his head for education. And he said, I'm not he said, I'm actually concerned about higher education as a as a as a ripe for disruption is not going to look the same way. It looks. And I do feel like, I do feel like it's a little later. But we're starting to see that now. I think colleges and universities are going to get seriously hammered and have to reinvent themselves, especially coming out of the pandemic. I mean, look at your Harvard experience. So you're able to do that all virtually on it, where it's not about IV and walking, you know, it's not about the IV on the walls and walking in the courtyard at Harvard, but you're still getting the benefit of it, have the education there.
Lisa S. Jones
And it's so exciting actually, because they have what is called low wall is that virtual wall that's in front of the professor, and it's like to raise your hand, you're pressing a button, kind of like zoom a little bit, but you're pressing the button, and then the big white button comes all over your face. It's like on these big square tiles. state of the art, it's world class, they have a world class production team that's behind the scenes over 100 microphones in a room. I mean, it's almost it's the next best thing to being there for sure.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, do you think we'll see more of Do you think we'll see more of that? I'm trying to I'm trying to think of how to say this style of virtual is that is that going to be accessible to enough institutions to start to to balance out virtual and physical education that way?
Lisa S. Jones
I think the shift has the momentum has already started the shift has already occurred, I think life has redefined what's important and what's important is the information regardless of where you are in location, how do you consume that information and being able to have the experience virtual now empowers more people right around the world to connect people that may not have been able to travel regardless if it was a pandemic or not. And so now it is allowed us to be more connected to each other's experiences. So yeah, I think definitely, it's going to increase and increased the ways that we connect on these virtual whiteboards how we communicate how we think all of that is shifting.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And then and then which brings us full circle back to to dragging one of the oldest digital channels email along for the ride on it's fairly it's fairly popular it's almost a cliche to see an art or an article by usually by someone who has something to sell to say yada yada yada emails dead it's gonna be oh
Lisa S. Jones
my god I
Matthew Dunn
was with x which is what his his or her company has to sell is not gonna die. Let's be
Lisa S. Jones
honest. That is such a what that is amazing that that myth has been around so long we rely on email What is it 81% of us according to Forrester Research rely email is the preferred channel. Yeah, so it's your footprint for everything that you do. So how is it How would it go away?
Matthew Dunn
So you don't think text? Let's have fun? You don't think text messaging is gonna gonna supplant email?
Lisa S. Jones
No, I think it is a channel. I think it is a channel for growth. And communications, of course, but no email email is here to stay. That's my prediction. Now, what I will share with you as well, this is a pre release, we're going to launch this particular product at the end of q2, and it's for video and text messaging. So what would happen is, so for corporations or whatnot that want to I'm not necessarily a corporation, it could be organizations. But basically, you would send out the text message, the video would play on demand in the text message minute, and it would deliver at 15 kilobytes in size with no downloads required. So now for any type of messaging that needs to be sent out regarding any aspect of a business now, that feature will also be included from IML. In text messaging.
Matthew Dunn
Nice. Nice. I, I agree with you about texts, like it's another, it's another. It's another channel and we don't treat it the same way. That email, right. So it's more high priority interrupt, but much more narrow range of people that were willing to hear from and I think that's a fair, I think it's a fair generalization. When I get the odd text message from a company or someone I don't know, it really, really ticks me off. Right bozo filter, no. How did you get this number? You know? Yeah, that's even more of a permission, inbox, if you will. The other thing I'd say about texting, Well, two things, one, text texting and messaging generically speaking, on is balkanized. as heck, right? When you say messaging, you're really talking about messaging, plural, right? Which platform, this proprietary platform that proprietary platforms, the other proprietary platform, Google made a run at getting RCS rich, or you know, a richer, call it like the apple, the apple messages experience, they made a run at trying to standardize and get companies and carriers on board, it flopped. And they kind of gave up on that a couple of years ago. So absent a universal standard, we're talking about a bunch of balkanized platforms, there's no way it's going to serve the ubiquitous level playing field function that email does. Exactly, I still see it happening. So and the other thing is, if I got as many flippin messages on my, you know, text messaging platform presented an email, I'd have to make it look and act like email, sort, organize, save, etc. We're right back where we started from
Exactly.
Lisa S. Jones
You know, I think in the midst of us talking here, you know, my story of when I fell in love with email, I would just love briefly just to hear your story. What was your first introduction to email? Or when did you fall in love with email? Or aren't you in love with email? I don't know what you're saying here? Well,
Matthew Dunn
I actually, I go way farther back with email, then must be people in email. I started the email support organization at Microsoft in 1990.
Lisa S. Jones
Wow, I learned something new.
Matthew Dunn
When, when, when we're not talking about internet, email and smtp. Right, this is the early land period on? Yeah, so Novell NetWare. These are historical terms from talking about, right, this is, this is NetWare, and land manager and, and, and, and Max in the proprietary Apple network. Yeah, Microsoft had a tow in corporate email on and we sort of saw the wave coming. So a band a band guys in the tech support organization, said, we need to carve out a separate support team for this, because it's really a very different, you know, technology and role in the business than things like Word and Excel. So I go a long ways back technically, with email, and I stayed away from it and did a lot of other things in the intervening 30 years. And then I was as as I was, looking at the things that intrigued me visual communications media, and an affirm conviction that, that we're in a very big shift from print to media. Like, you know, what, we're underutilizing what email can do? Why is email still so text centric? When architecturally there are pieces, they're capable of doing other things? Okay, let's take a let's take a run at it. So I sort of came back to email after close to close to a quarter century away from it, and said, Let's, let's make a dent in that if we can. So yeah, long ways back. There were debates about x 400 versus that SMTP that's how long I've been around email and none of that none of that's material now, because we adopted a we adopted a relatively simple but incredibly robust global standard. Like it's actually kind of fascinating how how email as relatively straightforward as it is technically a scaled to deliver what it delivers. Now there's 300 billion email messages sent a day. That's a big number. Right? And nobody owns that.
Lisa S. Jones
That's special.
Matthew Dunn
I love that right? Almost every other digital channel has been monopolized has a gatekeeper, right? Social media gatekeepers web, I'm sorry, but the web got hosed. on your website, maybe technically accessible to everybody. But you're gonna invest more in SEO than you did in building this the website in the first place. So that's gotten monopolized as well. Email manages to have steered clear of that somehow, which I that that's actually the thing I love about it is that it's like the last free range Mustang. Right, as you're putting up barbed wire everywhere else, emails like non market structure tells you everything. You can't name a dominant email company even even MailChimp isn't that big. And Congress does not haul email CEOs up to talk about whether they they've stopped people from communicating or whether they're monopolizing the you know, the public square etc. Like it's, it's, it's managed to remain relatively free. And I like that. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's cool.
Lisa S. Jones
A game show with Webby, Allah the other the other week. And one of the questions was, what was the very first email company that you use? Which one, where did you get your email address with one of the oldest one and so that was so interesting, because all three of us as the experts had three different versions, three different answers. So one was, is it AOL, you've got mail? your Gmail was first? Or was it hotmail?
Matthew Dunn
Sorry, dude's copy serving Genie. I'm way, too. True story. I got the opportunities early my Microsoft time at Microsoft, I got the opportunity to go work at the Australian subsidiary for a year long ways away, right. And this was not internet everywhere. This was not even AOL everywhere. And I i jury rigged a backdoor through Microsoft's corporate network because he had a corporate network running from Australia to the US. I jury rigged a way to jump through the corporate network hop off on the early early internet so that I could email my girlfriend now wife, and stay in touch with her without spending a bazillion dollars on the overseas call
Lisa S. Jones
and press.
Matthew Dunn
But we've all we've always wanted, like we've always wanted to stay connected, we've always found tried to find a way to get the message through and now it's global. And it's universal. And it's essentially free. Which is, that's pretty darn cool. That is cool. We don't have to pick a cow.
Lisa S. Jones
Like what's cool is you were able to bypass the system to connect with your girlfriend who's now your wife. I mean, you were committed to the journey on that
Matthew Dunn
27 years, baby. You betcha. And, and and some of the technical standards that were you know that were in operation, then we're still using now, which is pretty fascinating to me. It's pretty robust, pretty robust thing.
Lisa S. Jones
Yeah, definitely.
Matthew Dunn
Do you think I'm curious? Because I mean, you've got you've got the expertise in this space. And you've you've helped enrich the platform so much. We're starting to see we're starting to see the the monopolist is predictable historical pattern. The the guys who are successful on the frontier, end up wanting laws to preserve their empires. This is a short version of a great book by Deborah spar from Harvard, on, you know, Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress saying, Oh, no, no, we need to we need to revise section 230 is really saying is I want to keep Facebook in its wonderful monopoly position. But we're starting to clamp down on data and privacy. We're starting to realize that one of the things that's gotten injured as we rush out into the digital frontier, is our own sense of self and control in our in our own ownership of all the details that make us us and and you've got companies like Apple that are taking one response to say you're right, privacy important, respect to customer keep that locked down. You've got regulatory responses Europe in particular Kind of leading the way in saying people have ownership over information about themselves? Are we going to see a shift back to email, which has not been, as I would argue, invasive and has not monetized our data and privacy in a way some of those other channels have?
Lisa S. Jones
I think that email has been able, over the decades to maintain this whole uniqueness about it, the whole mystery of being like you mentioned the free range. And my hope is for it to continue back where it's not monitored as much. That's just my personal thought about it. I just think that it should remain unique as it is, and just have the current policies that we have in place. I don't know I'm kind of mixed on the thought about that. What was your thought, though? Your thought was?
Matthew Dunn
Well, here's what here's the way to bring it into focus. Because I know we've had to grapple with sort of policy decisions, we being campaign genius, and I'm guessing you have as well, on with campaign genius, when we're delivering real time content, whether that's images or links or animation or whatever else, okay, there's actually the potential to get a lot of data about the recipient. And we made a decision fairly early on, I was kind of a pain in the butt about it, to be honest, I said, You know what, we're not in the business of accumulating information about people at the other end of the pipe, we're delivering the experience. So our policy is deleted, deliver the whatever it is set of pixels that they're after, and delete everything possible about them. Why? Right, because it's not on our cotton pickin business.
Lisa S. Jones
We're into the experience, the customer experience. Yeah, no, I totally agree with and you
Matthew Dunn
You must have to grapple with that as well. Right. When you're when you're delivering a 15k video experience in in practical technical terms, there's information coming to you that you could hang on to do you.
Lisa S. Jones
Well, in our case, what happens is when we received the video from the client, and we encode and compress it, we deliver back that snippet HTML back to the customer, and they're loading it into their email systems email system, EyeMail agnostic so that it performs within any ESP, so we're not receiving any personal information from the client.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, okay. Gotcha. Okay. Now, I understand technically, where you sit, and how you how you integrate into their systems as well. Okay. Yeah. slight, slight difference, I, we had to build a sort of specialized infrastructure to do the real time delivery. So it'll fit into an ESP, but we've still got to be the delivery mechanism. handling of all of the requests, protocols is, frankly, msps. Don't do that on but that's where we said, policy decision ethics decision, if you will, right. Know what we could hang on to all of that, but that that's not why people are going to look or pay attention. That's not what the customers paying for. So bugger it, delete it. All right, totally. Yeah. And and, you know, you've got the, you've got the spam contingent of email, which is probably damaged, the reputation of email is as more of a respecter of privacy, but honestly, I look at, I look at the way email functions 300 billion messages a day. And a lot of that is self policing by the industry, which I think is pretty remarkable.
Lisa S. Jones
It is remarkable.
Matthew Dunn
Wow. Like, they're a bunch of people who actually take this stuff seriously, you know, in a really positive, you know, good of all kind of way, which I think is laudable?
Lisa S. Jones
Absolutely, huh. Yeah, no, it's profound, really, when we think about all of the nuances of email and and what it delivers currently, and what it delivers forward. One thing remains constant is that we're all looking for a way to connect with others. We're all looking for a way to plug in to engage. And I mean, email is just that perfect channel for that, of course, we know that the average person receives What is it 140 emails a day, and we send out at least 40, at least. And so it's a matter of going forward, how do we stand out from that clutter of the 73% of messages that are still unread? In the inbox? That's the challenge. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. How do you how do you how do you actually get that engagement and attention? You talk about you're talking about your, your customer base for a second, you mentioned some some, you know, some really marquee brands already, you know, Porsche, Coca Cola, etc, on what kind of companies are most likely to really grasp the benefit of what you're bringing to the market?
Lisa S. Jones
That's a wonderful question. And the answer to that is companies that are market leaders that are early adopters. When Coca Cola came on board, or when Time Warner came on board, they were all seeking to deliver various types of communications. So we have three areas of support. One is customer facing communications directly to the customer could be Product Marketing, updates, things of that magnitude. But then also on the event side, before it was, you know, live events, maybe it's a welcome message from the president welcoming people to an event. But now it's on the virtual side of that. I'm a welcome message or a sponsor message and a thank you message, and or survey, the employee engagement side, it could be anything from training, the HR executive communications, and now with more people going back in the office, it could be the the safety and health regulations of going back. So for our customer base, they go across those three broad spectrums. And so for, like, let's say, Major League Baseball that's focused on increasing ticket sales. That was before the pandemic, of course, as well, in that aspect with Delta Airlines, which is one of our premier clients. It's related to their communications, both internally, externally, and also for their events. For Porsche, it's for sales, test drive, for vehicles, as well as their events as well. So we've seen an array and what's so exciting about email and its whole IML experiences that we've touched so many different types of organizations, even from healthcare, from Merck. And also I was gonna say, Make A Wish Foundation. That's another one of our clients. Because, again, it goes back to how do you communicate? How can you How can you leverage email to deliver your compelling message and so video is definitely the way to go. And it's been said, according to HubSpot, viewers retain 95% when watching a video as opposed to 10% in text. Yeah, so it's just the right season and alignment for all these things forward in engagement, and we appreciate our customer base, and their willingness to take a chance. Yeah, to take it to take a chance on us to know that we will deliver. And by proving that model out we've been able to receive referrals from the enterprise to other brands. And so it's just been an exciting journey. To be honest.
Matthew Dunn
I'm intrigued by something you mentioned. did. Did I just hear you say that some of your customers have used eye mail for what I'd call internal communications, communication to employees. absolutely fascinating. I love that I love
Lisa S. Jones
and that's where we're also able to, to to drive the numbers up. I mean, we're all trying to get those eyeballs to watch our communication. So on internal, we've been successful as well, in driving, we've seen numbers upwards of 70%. I should mention one key point when I mentioned open rates, and we're able to drive those numbers in the uplift significantly. That's also based because someone will say people will say, Well, how are you able to drive open rates, you know, a person has to decide to open it or not. But what happens in the IML experience, 50% of us have a reading pane, you know, or a preview pane that's already open. And so IML is set when you're previewing, it's going to play on mute automatically when you're scrolling through your messages. So that's counting towards your open rates as well.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, well and and and, and it's a legit difference in engagement, my my my quip about video and to a lesser extent animation, but video in particular is where we are wired to, to detect motion and to make it a priority. Why? Because we don't get it didn't want to get eaten by saber toothed tigers, at least our ancestors did, right? So it's really hard to ignore something that's moving. You actually can't, your brain is gonna go focus, right, your picture move. The only thing moving on the screen here. It's hard for me to look at the camera instead of you. I'd rather look at you anyway. But right like it, there's motion. There's emotion there. It's
Lisa S. Jones
so true. It's so true. You know, I'm in one of my courses this semester. And there's a professor john Westman. He's in Massachusetts in and he mentioned to me about this movement piece about that. It's an eight in us to look to see is it a threat? Or is it something friendly? Our eyes will naturally migrate. He always used the reference of this movie called up I never didn't see up yet, but it's a animated movie.
Matthew Dunn
You've seen it? Oh my god. If you don't if you don't have tears in your eyes, in the first 12 minutes of up dinner's on me. You gotta watch what a fantastic film
Lisa S. Jones
to watch. He talks about this movie. And then when they saw a squirrel or something everybody's like
yes.
Lisa S. Jones
I will make it a point to go live this week and
Matthew Dunn
yeah, you drop your drop my smoke. My son hunter said, you know, if you don't, if you don't, if you don't end up tearing up in the first 15 minutes of just drop me a note, I'd be very curious to hear, I will, I will definitely do that it's Pixar. It's Pixar at its at its at its finest. There's another piece of the brain that actually matters. And I imagine you've exploited this for your, you know, for your customers benefit, but there's actually a part of the human brain that that is specifically wired to see eyes. Like, there's actually eyes, e y e s, there's part of our brain that actually detects that double spot on the face, where the other where that other organism is seeing, it's actually wired into, into synapses in, in the brain. Like, if you notice when you're, if you notice, when you take an object and you're animating it, the first thing someone does, and it's completely unconscious, is put eyes, usually eyes and mouth on it. But it's because as soon as you stick eyes on something, part of our brain is going that's that's another living thing, snap, just like that. It's very hard not to look at your eyes on this video screen here. And in part, it's because my brain has wiring that says, oh, there's eyes. And you knows how distracting your own picture is. On zoom.
Lisa S. Jones
Say, to look at my own picture. I look at the look at the camera.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, no, I try not to as well. But but we're wired to go seek that pattern. Right. We'll look for that. But it's literally it's literally built into our biology. It's not a psychology. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating, huh?
Lisa S. Jones
It is. It really is. And that's why it's so important to have the messaging the key messaging above the whole. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. And, and the visual and the motion above the fold, and the face, you can get a face, you get that above the fold, I bet your upward rate goes up even higher, because we can't not look at it.
Lisa S. Jones
Exactly, we
Matthew Dunn
actually process that that's actually pre conscious. We process that. Not a great metaphor, but we're stuck with it. We process the visual before we get to the cognitive. The AI actually makes pattern out of what seen before anything goes to the brain.
Lisa S. Jones
That's amazing,
Matthew Dunn
huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is not all. We're not talking style points. And, gee, maybe this is more effective than that. We're literally talking about fundamentals of how we're built, that aren't going to go away. So I'm always going to continue to go up in rankings, baby. That's my story. And I'm sticking to it.
Me too.
Matthew Dunn
So, before we wrap up, and I told you, we'd go more than half an hour, yea. Before we wrap up, if, you know, we've got a lot of people who seem to be listening to this podcast or running a business of some sort, they're just tend to be marketing, if nothing else, what's what's your advice for the marketer out there not just in terms of eye mail, but in terms of, of email, and its role in their marketing?
Lisa S. Jones
For any marketer that's out there, there's trying to create more engagement for their customers, I would say, Listen to your customers, interview your customers to understand what's important to them. Nice, because that's the core focus, we're here to serve. And we need to remember that it's about them and not us. And to hear that messaging around their core needs service. So I think that's fundamental. I would also say continue to grow, continue to learn, continue to go to conferences, on all things, email via deliverability, be it the visual content, learning more about video and email, all aspects of email, I would recommend that as well. Nice. I mean, just the growth factor of being mindful of the length of the message. Shorter is better and the message of being concise in the communication and just being thoughtful and empathetic. I think that human element is truly the key. And in wanting to be of service and always put that first.
Matthew Dunn
Not don't just don't just blast and well, that is that is a heck of a wrap up. Lisa, I want to chat with you really quick, but let me hit pause on the record button and we'll say we're done. My guest again, today was Lisa s. Jones, CA CEO, Chief IML. Officer at IML Incorporated. Lisa, thanks so much. It's been great to talk with you.
Lisa S. Jones
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
We're out.