A Conversation with Matthew Vernhout of Netcore Solutions
Speaker, author, executive, conference organizer, technical standards champion are just some of the hats Matthew Vernhout wears in the email space. As VP for NA Deliverability at Netcore, he's bringing deep experience with previous organizations to the massive task of helping customers use email effectively and ethically. Matthew sat down with host Matthew for a candid, often-geeky conversation about email. This episode will be of particular interest for people who "go deep" on the issues and technologies involved in email marketing.
What Skynet Heard:
Matthew Vernhout
Hurry is How's it going? Good. How are you? Good. Thank you.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, finally, finally get you live in one on one man. How's your summer been? Hot? Yeah, well, you but it's been ridiculously hot here lately. I don't usually get to whine about heat in the Pacific Northwest. But what? Yeah, it's 4040 degrees centigrade this week most of them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I used to I used to fly to Toronto just about every week back in 98 or so. And yeah, it can get soupy there. Yeah, it's been ridiculous. Worse than normal. Worse than normal. Yeah. Now ever seems like seems like everywhere except Colorado is getting a ton of rain. Go figure. Send it to California or whatever. Eventually makes its way to California, doesn't it? Yeah. Have you been affected by smoke much?
Matthew Vernhout
Uh, we have been a few weeks back be you guys some bad smoke from Northern Ontario. There was like 180 fires raging up there. I don't know what it's like now. The winds change. So it's not as bad for my allergies like crazy. I couldn't breathe for like three days.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, we ducked it. And then somewhere late last night, cloud rolled in and I can barely see the hill across the leg.
Matthew Vernhout
wasn't that bad for us? Because it's pretty far north. But like you could see the haze in the air and you could I guess none of its close. None of its close.
Matthew Dunn
This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. And my guest today is the famous Matthew in the email space Matthew Verna VP of deliverability deliverability for North America at NET Core, and I'm going to do the rest of it. Matthew, editor in chief email, karma publishing, etc. CHAIRPERSON and founder of the Canadian email summit. This is a guy who knows email. Welcome. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. How? How's how's? How's life and career in email? And why do you keep doing it?
Matthew Vernhout
emails? Great. I've been doing it for a long time now. You have over 20 years, I finally crossed that mark. Wow, years now. I've been in the email space. And honestly, every day is different. I'm never bored. I'm never looking for something to do. And honestly, after 20 years, I'm still surprised by the things that some of my clients tried to do. So no,
Matthew Dunn
no, I know, we've met briefly live at a couple things. And I've heard you speak a few times. But give a give people especially who are listening, give people a bit of a sense of, of your focal areas within email. I know deliverability is one of them.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, so it's been deliverability for about 18 years. On and off, mostly on. I've done Product Marketing. I've done product development, Product Management, network operations, sort of run the full gambit of things related to email. Yeah. Read through like I managed a customer support team for a couple of years as well. So Wow. Like I said, I've never surprised, never stopped being surprised
Matthew Dunn
by your stuff being surprised on NET Core, not as necessarily as familiar name, but certainly a growing footprint. In North America fill people in a bit on the company.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah. So netcore been around 23 years now, was point founded in India by one of the original sort of.com success story entrepreneurs, reject cheney had a very successful.com publication that he sold. And then from there, got into hosting email for other businesses in India, and then continued to grow. And when they started asking about how do we do this marketing thing, built a marketing platform. We now have product lines that look at email campaigning. Email, transactional platforms. personalization platform. So web personalization, so if you want product recommendations, story recommendations, as a publisher, journey building, we do in app messaging app, push Web Push, we have about seven or eight different product lines. That all roll up into a beautiful bundle of software.
Matthew Dunn
NET Core NET Core cloud, recent river cloud.com. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes sense with that, with that kind of scope of services to really go ahead and put the accurate moniker on it. Is there are there any things that characterize NET Core is customers industry size, any of those things?
Matthew Vernhout
Being a global brand was right, we work with companies all over the world, we obviously home based in Asia Pacific. So that's where majority of our clients are. But we have clients in Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern Asia, North America, South America. So we really do touch the globe, when it comes to client base, and it's everything from, you know, individual websites using it. The services just to send transactional messaging to themselves from their web forms, right on through two giant multinational organizations that rely on us to deliver their messaging and their banking statements and financial services, and oh, well, all of that. So well. Yeah, we really do run the gamut on products and services. And then client size from teeny tiny to massive brands.
Matthew Dunn
They scooped you up? Not quite a year ago. It's just over a year, just over a year. Yeah, it sounds like you're enjoying it, just given your clear knowledge of the company.
Matthew Vernhout
You know, there's like I said, there's things that I some of those product lines, I haven't even had training on there. So we like to do with them. And like the email, the email products in itself, keep me busy enough that the personalization point of view, I'll let the personalization team deal with that. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Not that I don't have interest. I just haven't figured out how much time I can devote to the other products at this point.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, with a company that scale especially global, like, that's a heck of that's a heck of a learning curve on with it with it with a club customer base. That's that global NET Core clearly had to get out of the box of air. Everything's in English, including all of the user interface. That's, that's a challenge that not all companies, especially US companies tend to tackle. We're still
Matthew Vernhout
working on that, too. Yeah, we have expanding need for additional localization languages. So we're looking at what the next round of languages will be that we're going to support. So yeah, you know, it's very interesting time to sort of think about all of those different pieces. And you know, how do you prioritize? You know, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese over German? Yeah, right. Yeah. How do you how do you, how do you prioritize those? And that's really where we're at right now. We're looking at the different types of languages and where our user base is, and which ones make sense to start first. And yeah, as you can imagine, the list is long.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, we went through, we went through the job of localizing our, our real time toolbox, it fits in email editors. And I mean, that's a relatively small, discreet code base, and it was still a ridiculously huge effort. And, like, How do I know if this is right? I don't speak like fill in the blanks. We're looking at the translation. Good. Okay. Huge degree of trust there, hire professionals. But
Matthew Vernhout
we operate in 23 countries, we have good diversification of people that speak different languages as well. So yeah. You know, you're right, though. It's, it's definitely different for me, where normally it's like, English, or Spanish jazz makes sense for North American businesses?
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Vernhout
Then you start to look and say, what's next? Right? Maybe it's German, maybe it's Spanish? Maybe it's and you kind of go from there where your client bases and those that are asking, asking, yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, that's me. And then the the right to left, the right to left stuff is making just making our head spin or like, Oh, you know, we're so you get so accustomed to that map, that the language that works the opposite ways, is kind of,
Matthew Vernhout
and there are I've been watching a lot. This is what I do. In my spare time, I watch a lot of stuff on history History Channel. And there are languages that are up and down right to left. And like, all in one, you have to kind of pay attention to the way that the words are written or the hieroglyphics are facing to understand where your eye goes next while you're reading. It's really interesting. Oh, well. Wow. Yeah. Thankfully, we're not speaking in hieroglyphics anymore. But you know,
Matthew Dunn
I don't know it's a visual communication is gone. Like as some of this stuff is, some of the stuff is coming back. I mean, watching the rise of emojis she's easily seen has been a fascinating thing, like, say a lot with the right choice of the right picture at the right moment. That would be hard to put into words. There's a real nuance to that.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's, that's true. I hadn't really thought I'm not going to build my interface to be Wingdings and no emojis, though. So I'll leave those ones after things. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. And push for development emojis in email. Not super common yet that I've seen not nearly as common as in like chat and text. domain.
Matthew Vernhout
It's getting there. We have a lot of clients that use them. We use them frequently in our own communications. Yeah. The challenge with emojis is different devices will render different emojis slightly different slightly. So understanding the potential risk of using an emoji and how it renders for somebody on a droid versus the desktop versus an iOS device. This is certainly something people need to pay attention to.
Matthew Dunn
And I hadn't I hadn't thought of this until this moment. But you know, the cultural assumption that the facial expression means the same thing here and there. Maybe a little bit risky, right? Is the smiley face always a smiley face? Yeah, probably. But you know, some of the other expressions may not mean exactly the same thing in other cultural contexts. That is true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Ah, I see. We've already wandered way that way a field off email, which is awesome. Email related, it's email related apps. Absolutely. It's email. Everything is email object. Yeah. That's true. Because Because you know what you're going to hear about it, you'll probably hear about it through email somehow. Now you ship the product A while back with with NET Core and I was looking for and I couldn't find it quick enough before. Before the call. But what was that again? So when we launched grade, my email grade my email, that's the one yeah, grade mail. mail.co.
Matthew Vernhout
Well, yeah, that's Yeah, that's Yeah. So the general intention there is to help people understand email authentication, how it's set up for their domains and their brands and things that they could maybe improve, and really sort of help those brands understand some of the challenges or mistakes maybe that they're making. There's a lot confusion around authentication. There is a RBL monitor there that's absolutely free. So you can go and sign up your domain, your IPS, and we will watch the most popular boquist for you and send you an alert if we see something. Wow. All for free. Yeah, nice guys that way. Yeah. And then yeah, there's other tools to help you maybe help you implement demark. So really, trying to just provide a good solid set of tools to the industry and help people out and I'm a big advocate. That's where I think a lot of that came from was, yeah, yeah. People fix authentication. Because it's so easy to do wrong.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Fair enough. And I think I think most, most companies probably don't have a really good grasp on and save time. And it will materially affect their business and communications. Absolutely.
Matthew Vernhout
I've done studies on it before, where SPF records at lookups in them, and the limit is 10. So, you know, people just keep putting stuff in that same SPF record over and over again.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. Now, you you've been at this 20 years, but it sounds like, it sounds like you've learned a ton on the job, because it's the only way you learn things these days. But I mean, you know, you've built this knowledge base yourself in in your career, right? It's not like you go to email school somewhere these days.
Matthew Vernhout
No, but I did. I did go I did graduate computer science, information technology. So your background in tech and coding and developing to networking certainly helped put me on the right path for a lot of those things. Yeah. And then yeah, like a lot of these technologies didn't exist even when I started. Yeah, right. SPF, if you believe it wasn't a thing when I started in email. It was developed after and it's been 1718 years since SPF came around like it's old tech now. And the dig him Do you give us probably at least 12 years old now. Okay, maybe a little bit older, you know, even even Demi to a degree even though everyone says it's the hot new thing. You know, as a member of the working group, we've been developing it for seven years.
Matthew Dunn
Wow. Wow. Now, yep. Put some definition to me, because I suspect there'll be a bunch of listeners who are like, I don't know what that is.
Matthew Vernhout
So what bimi is, it's a it's an acronym, like all things email, we have to have a funny acronym for things. So it's brand indicators for message identification. And basically what the purpose of bimi is, is to allow a brand to have some control over the logo that would display in an avatar location and an email client. So brands that aren't doing Demi, for example, may get an initial avatar that has just the initials of the sender, the visible family phone, or the email domain, depending what what's being set. Or what we've seen is someone makes the decision that this logo must belong to this domain, because it's similar enough and it's the wrong logo as a brand, if you have the wrong logo showing up next year, you know, is that even is that worse than having no logo? I think so. Yeah, the wrong Association. So, the general ideas, Dimi allows brands that are strong in their email authentication practices. So you have to have SPF D, Kim and demark at enforcement. So that's the first step. You have to have your logo in the proper tiny PS, SVG format. So it's basically a secure version of an SVG. So there's no link tracking or web beacons or anything in the SVG image, which was a concern for security purposes. And in order to get a certificate, you have to own a trademark on the logo. So there is an actual manual verification that your domain and brand own the logo. There is a basically a group of humans that check that, yeah, and it cost money. And then you get a certificate that you renew every year just like a HTTPS certificate that you publish in a DNS record. And if the web, the mail providers accept that certificate, and that's why there's only two providers that are right now it's because they're the only two that have gone through the process to get certified, if you will. Someone like Gmail will then display your logo next to your email address, their mail client.
Matthew Dunn
I see we're right back into emojis. I happen to be logos, but we're really right back in Visual Communication.
Matthew Vernhout
Sure. Yeah. You know, I think the prime example for this and where this makes sense is, if you are and I'm going to use an example of what I see so the the political parties here in Canada when they send you we're coming up to an election so I've subscribed all the emails When they send you an email that typically comes from one of the members of the party, but I don't know who all the party members are. I know who like the party leaders are. I know who my local representative is. And maybe I know who some of the cabinet ministers are. I don't know them. All. Right. But I get random emails from like, john smith, you know, party treasurer, right. I have no idea who he is. Right, as an example. But if that party's logo was displayed next to the name, I'd like, oh, at least I can make the association because I recognize the logo. Yeah. Yeah. So there's great benefits there. Yeah. And because they've gone through the process to have their logo certified and verified, and they get on the demark work. And it's displayed. Yeah, there is a level of understanding that, okay, this logo actually belongs to this domain, and they're authorized to use. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Well, in almost implicitly, for the process, you described, that there's a credibility and trust factor, like, you know, the, you know, the corner grocery store is probably not going to get to the bimi job anytime soon, you're going to see larger brands, larger organizations first, with that logo beside them. Right.
Matthew Vernhout
Right. And there are records you can publish that are what are deemed to be self certified or self validated. So if you are a small brand, and you don't own a trademark, but you have a logo that people recognize, you can still publish it me. Okay, it just won't be displayed everywhere. Yeah. And there might be additional requirements, such as the mailbox provider has to have a very strong understanding of your reputation and history on your domain. And maybe they have to manually verify the logo themselves. So there's going to be sort of different tiers, you know, you may not be able to display your BMI logo at Google. But yeah, who might accept yourself a sort of logo on a brand with a really strong reputation?
Matthew Dunn
Okay. Okay. Good. And and on the other side of the scale, if you're an email marketer at a more sizeable brand, and you weren't particularly aware of me before, like, you're clearly you're making some clear arguments already for the benefit of putting the work in place, which, just like what mostly one time and then renewal, right?
Matthew Vernhout
Well, for for that part, yes. But adding to getting your brand and your domains ready is a full company project, basically, because it includes your corporate domain, includes all your marketing mail, and includes your transactional domains includes maybe talking to your vendors to make sure that they can support domain alignment through identification. Yep. So getting demark set up ad enforcement is the hardest part of doing most of us, okay, because that's usually the biggest project and bigger companies take more time to do these things.
Matthew Dunn
A lot of cooks with their hands in the in the pot there.
Matthew Vernhout
Right? Yeah. And as soon as you move to reject or quarantine policy, then maybe you're losing mail and somebody is upset, because they weren't paying attention. And then what happens? I've done this with very large brands and gone down that path of, you know, this isn't an overnight project. For a lot of big brands, it could be anywhere from three to six to eight months, maybe 10 months or a year, depending on where you get buy in at the corporate level, who has control over what Yes. But it's a great way to get your seaso talking to your cmo and then actually finding a project where they can work together to the benefit of the entire organization.
Matthew Dunn
Right, right, with an actual visible result to an actual discipline.
Matthew Vernhout
And I will say, right, I've worked with clients that have seen an immediate benefit from getting their demark house in order for things like better inbox placement, better throttling conditions, so they don't get throttled nearly as much when delivering mail, their throughput ability goes up, their placement rates go up, opens and clicks all go up. So it is one of those things that there is a tangible sort of end goal for brands that are maybe on the edge of reputation when they fix some of these things. Because doing the project will show maybe some spots where you're not authenticating properly or where you have a you know, we've seen it a salesperson sending email through an ESP that they just pay for off their own credit card. Yeah. That's not approved by the company. Yeah. You know, there are lots of those things that happened. One story I was told by another deliverability consultant is they were working on demark with the client and the client said well, we only have four email vendors. This would be Real simple. And they turned on demark and a reporting only mode and they had 18 email vendors that many they didn't remember using, or a different department was using and they had no idea. Yeah. So tracking down who's using those vendors? Yeah, definitely take some time getting them in line and getting them in order. You know, I've seen brands getting spooked by their competitors as a way to drive their reputation down or steal customers. Wow. So yeah, there's lots of things out there that impact your reputation that until you sort of start looking for them, you may not even know.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, something that probably wasn't necessary at some point in the past. But as volume goes up, as the ROI of the channel keeps, keeps climbing, it's worth paying worth paying attention to on Absolutely. I 's adoption of me from what you've seen so far. on working globally, is it stronger in in some regions than others?
Matthew Vernhout
So there are some limitations on things like that not I'm not an ESP or not a mailbox provider. So I don't get to see the full global scope of things. But from what we've seen, and we've been able to measure through partnerships and site, adoptions growing, it's growing fairly quickly. We're still talking like 1000s of brands and not millions of brands. But you know, two years ago, it was 1000 brands, and now it's 20,000 brands, globally. So nice. It's doing its thing, but it's I think now that we've seen the launch of Google adopting it, it'll grow faster.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah. Okay.
Matthew Vernhout
But, yeah, like brands are absolutely doing it. They're absolutely interested. We get tons of questions, the bimi group, we get tons of questions, I get them through work through clients. There are some limitations about right now, where you have to own trademark. Oh, yeah. Okay. Approved regions as a starting point. Those will continue to grow and change over time. But, you know, we don't necessarily, well, we I don't, I don't have any control over it. But the general idea is like, a trademark in a small country in South America maybe won't be recognized like a trademark from North America. Okay.
Matthew Dunn
Okay. Gotcha, gotcha. I'm curious about a different angle on bimi. Because not not, not many people have the chance to do it. What What was the what was the working group? standards group process? Like, it sounds like it took a number of years.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, so adoption, we finally got Yahoo, Google, and fast mail publicly talking about it. We've seen some other adoptions in the wild mailbox providers testing it. They haven't necessarily disclosed it to the group. So I can't say it's, it's available or public or anything like that, because I don't know what their testing processes. We've seen other mailbox providers certainly asking about it. But I would say for the most part brands are the ones that are currently the most interested in.
Matthew Dunn
Who gratis, there's
Matthew Vernhout
at least one Android mail client that has come out publicly and said they've developed a bimi functioning mail client for mobile. Yahoo mail client is working. I believe the Gmail client on Android is working. iOS will be working soon. So you know, it's coming, consumers will start to see it in their phone in their desktops. And then as brands adopted, it will become more and more prevalent.
Matthew Dunn
Got it? Got it. Wow, it's a it's a boy, you'll be the guy with the gray hair going. I helped start. Already that guy got. Really, hey, shift gears for a second. What are your thoughts about, about the Apple Mail privacy thing that a lot of us have been discussing for the last couple months? I mean, we're having this conversation in August, Apple announced in June in theory, it's coming in September, potentially big impact, maybe maybe not. But I think
Matthew Vernhout
it's certainly going to impact in some areas, it's going to impact where journey builders maybe are looking at taking action after an open where you get 100% open rate against Apple users. So there's going to be some things there. You know, it's it's certainly something that espys are interested in trying to identify and maybe build safeguards into those journey building programs to say, you know, Instead of if I can identify it's an iOS device don't trigger on open. Yeah. trigger on click. Yeah, those types of things. So there certainly are, are changes from that perspective. open rates, however, you know, I've always viewed them as directional. Yeah, they're not necessarily going to be anything that I would put a ton of faith in as a key metric. It's not a KPI. It's a directional indicator. Simply because, you know, being in the industry so long, we used to have drive by open because every image rendered when you look at a trigger, email client, you scroll by, and then we had images disabled by default. And then we had images re enabled by default. And now we're going back to every image is enabled and called. You know, there's lots of people that read email without images enabled. So how do you track them if they're not calling? So open rates? At best, they're directional, but they're really useful in many cases for someone like me helping with deliveries? deliverability issues? Yeah, yeah. So if a client has zero open rate, right now, I can say, well, you probably went to the spam folder. good indicator that you had bad delivery. Let's look at the message. Let's look at your program. Let's go through and do some consulting and figure that out. Now, we're going to swing the other way. It's like, well, you have 100% open rate. Great. But what does that tell me? And it doesn't tell me anything, right? Yeah, yeah. So you know, we're gonna have to build models that exclude iOS device, an Apple device, you're still gonna get opens from desktop webmail clients, you're still gonna get opens from Android devices, at least, at least for now. Assuming the Google doesn't go forward and do the similar thing in the near future. But yeah, open rates are interesting. I've always much preferred looking at Click Open click to rate click rates clicked open rates, conversion metrics as much as possible. Because I think it tells a better story. Yeah. But it's Yeah, it's gonna throw a lot of people for a loop, I think in regards to how they they adopt and change. In the new the new world order, I guess, for open rates.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And it was one of those things that it wasn't designed as a standard, it became kind of a de facto common practice. And, and with a with a field where people tend to come and go, you know, they, they pick up expertise as much from the from the ecosystem and the tools as anything else. So open rate is something I can measure. Okay, I guess I measure open rate. But open rates, not the same anymore. Shoot, I guess I learned about that.
Matthew Vernhout
And even different email platforms report things different, right? Like some email platforms, you get every open, it's non unique, open. Yeah. And then some platforms only show you unique open, they don't show you all the open. Right, right. It's like click rates. So there's not even a consistent metric across the industry that you could say what open rate is measured? Like so? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. Well, if nothing else, my my sense is that apples, proposed change, has ignited a bunch of discussion and review and reconsideration like people are going, Oh, hang on, how are we using it? Is this the right measure? Is it just directional as, as you said, you know, even if Apple didn't flip that magic switch, I think open rates would be a different thing going forward?
Matthew Vernhout
I think so. And then you've seen other brands talking about this or other mailbox providers talking about like, should we be tracking open? Should we disable opens? Yeah, there are plugins that do it for you now. So it's, it's not new. It's an ad. It's an ad blocker of sorts. Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see how it rolls out and how the industry adapts and changes. So I know we've got a ton of stuff in the hopper right now trying to figure out how we're gonna address it. educate our clients. Yeah. And honestly, the clock is ticking. And, you know, it's September, the way the world the way that things are going right now. I'm surprised it's August, but the, you know, September will be here tomorrow. It
Matthew Vernhout
feels Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it really it really, it does feel like it's coming fast. We've been testing. The beta bill just upgraded a couple of devices today. Like this is going to go live. How soon Holy crow right, like, yeah, yeah, it feels it feels really fast. I also think I think small, small medium businesses where there's no one whose job title says email marketing, but they just do it. But I think it's going to be a more constant little more consternation or a little more burden on vendors to educate their because it's not someone's day job.
Matthew Vernhout
Right. And I think there's, we have a long history to, you know, retrain or re educate people because yeah open rates we used as vendors for years we talked Oh, great open rates. We love open rates really went open rates were always sort of directional.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, hey, shift gears a different direction, um, with with as much depth of experiences, you've got an email, I've had a couple of guests on on on this program from the world of of text and messaging, because those two things definitely coexist in the world. I don't think one is a replacement for the other but they do coexist. For a marketer. What, what's your perspective on where we're texting and messaging is and where my go?
Matthew Vernhout
I'd say we have a product that does it. And it's huge in our Asian markets, Whatsapp messaging directly to consumer, SMS messaging directly to consumer. So it's not quite as deep and penetration, if you will, in North America, but it's growing. Yeah. Maybe I'm just old school, but I don't care for SMS marketing. I don't want it mean either. I find it to be way more intrusive than email. Personally, but other people love it. And maybe I'm just that guy. That's gonna be the old codger sitting on the front porch. And he's texting me. You know, I for me, is texting as a channel that I reserved for friends and family of dedication that way? Yeah. I don't want messaging marketing. Coming through it. Have I seen some really cool uses for it? Sure. Text to opt into email. That's a great one. I've seen, you know, text to win. Okay, that's pretty cool. But again, I don't want to be signed up for text marketing afterwards. Right. You know, people love it in other regions. I just don't know if the experience in North America the same way that like in China, where you can buy stuff through text messaging, or through WhatsApp, or through, you know, WeChat, those types of things. I just don't know if it has the penetration in the marketplace in North America. So we're just not used to it. Yeah. Whereas in those other countries, they do have that experience and they love it.
Matthew Dunn
When you also you also, you also put your your thumb on a critical thing. In North America. It's a very fragmented market. China, like there's one app to rule them all. And that's what you use other markets, bigger penetration for a you know, a platform and in North American markets, like wait by by texting Do you mean I messaged you mean WhatsApp? Do you mean Facebook Messenger? Do you mean SMS to me? Like, and they don't talk to each other?
Matthew Vernhout
Right. And that's my big problem. Like because I so connected across, you know, I use WhatsApp for work. I use signal for communicating with some people in Europe because it's their preferred. Yep. I use telegram for other people. I use iMessage for texting with friends and family that are local. Yep. So all of a sudden, you know, five different chat messaging solutions. Yeah. And it's hard enough to keep up when you also look at things like well, I can chat with an Instagram, I can chat within Snapchat, I can snap with, you know, chat with him. Now listen, it's beyond just what I would look at as a traditional text conversation into is now also a social texting conversation. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would. I will. Venmo candidates, I have 00.
Matthew Dunn
Interesting. So so quick side story of Venmo. On my mice, my sons were in their 20s. Now on started, who just like they absorb it from the atmosphere of Venmo. So that they can pay the roommate back for the pizza or whatever. And then at some point, it was like, Oh, dear dad. Yeah, you know, I'll pay you back for gas. I'll Venmo to Oh, crap. I guess I need a Venmo account. But Venmo I think they modified it recently. I would occasionally open the Venmo app, and like, why am I seeing you know, Noah is paying Zane for the broadband. Like, I don't care. But then Moe had sort of monetize the short message on the transaction to keep noise and to keep interest. Like, wow, sure.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For whatever reason, it's I hear people talk about all the time and it's just not available here, at least as far as I know. It's not available. And if it is, I've nobody
Matthew Dunn
wants it. So when you launch it, is there. Is there an app used to exchange money it commonly in Canada?
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, there's a service called interact. So you can do Interac e transfers in your bank account interact. So I can do it from my banking app, I just put in the person's email address how much I want to send them into the button and nothing goes. Wow. So you know, there's a security word that goes along, they have to know the security word on the other side. Yeah. Or you can set it up to anything, it's my email address gets auto deposited into my account. So that's maybe why Venmo is not as big of a deal here is because it's so easy to transfer money between individuals between the banks, because they're all plugged in to interact already
Matthew Dunn
interact already and interacts been around my recollection has been around for a good long stretch in the US market lagged badly in the sort of FinTech space for a long time. I think it created opportunity for the the Venmo 's of the world and the bank back things like Zell to start to show up. But it's still it's a frickin mess.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, like PayPal is still a big deal. Yeah. transferring money from PayPal, PayPal. Yeah, something. You know, I've I've accepted PayPal payments for, you know, consulting work I've done because it's easy. I don't have to wait for an international bank transfer. It's actually cheaper than the international bank transfer. Yeah. You don't have to worry about like, I don't have a Venmo. You can't pay me that way. Right. Like, like, yeah, it's more universal almost to say just, here's my paypal, send it here or send them a bill through PayPal.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, that that layer above above the national borders, like moving, moving, moving money across those. It's funny, I thought, PayPal. I thought PayPal might wither and die. Because it was kind of just hanging out in eBay land for a while, and then they spun it out. And they seem to have gotten, they seem to have recognized what their assets were and come roaring back to life or last five years or so.
Matthew Vernhout
And then they just launched the international money transfer x.com or something like that, which is a brand I think that they've owned forever, but they just didn't use it in a product back. Interesting, right, because I actually think x.com was one of the original Ilan musk projects that I think you merged into PayPal. I think you're right. And then when PayPal got sold, they just kept the Yeah, kept the assets. And now it's this international money transfer thing. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. That that that space is only gonna get more interesting, right. Cyber currency. Yeah,
Matthew Vernhout
it's a reckless fraud to that whole man. Right. It's It's crazy. If you ever want to read about types of scams and fraud that happened. Go to the scam subreddit, slash are slash scams. They talk about everything from money mealing to sugar daddy sugar mama scams to people scamming you on Craigslist to things to watch out for dating scams, like all it's so educational sometimes. And occasionally, I've actually found stuff in there that's been useful to other people I know. You know, oh, hey, there's a drop box on this mailbox provider. I know somebody in their abuse desk. You got a drop box on your network? Maybe you want to look into it. Right? Those types of things. Yeah. See, sometimes find the odd nugget there. But there's some really interesting stories. And I've learned quite a bit a lot like quite a bit about dating.
Matthew Dunn
I think I saw you pop up on on on Reddit. I don't think we're connected or whatever the heck you doing random? Like, I've seen you on Reddit, for sure. I haven't seen you on Reddit. So yeah, I'm most active in the forum for my for my SUV of choice, which is kind of funny. Like, I'll double dip into the email for me so many other professional stuff. But I noticed where I post most is where I've, you know, spent sort of hobbyist, which is kind of funny. Everyone's allowed to have hobbies. That's it. You know, it's a it's a it's a darn healthy thing. And you're pretty active on email on the email geek Slack channel as well. And on LinkedIn. I guess yeah, yeah, you're all over that, which is hugely beneficial to people have someone with your experience willing to invest the time to say, oh, let me answer that question or connected with this person or whatever else.
Matthew Vernhout
You know, I've learned over the years that even though I'm not in sales, being nice to people, helping people with connections, helping people with simple questions that are going to take like five hours of my time to resolve actually leads to business people remember, like, oh, that guy helped me. Yeah, I should go look at his company and see what they do. Oh, they do that thing that I need? Or maybe they do the thing that some of my friends? Yeah, that guy helped me out. You should check them out. You know? Absolutely. Over the years, landed business with different companies I've worked at
Matthew Dunn
Well, it's also I worked in Canada a ton over the last 30 years. It's like that's also very much the the national character like you're good ambassador for it, but it's one of the reasons I love working in Canada. It's like Ah, yeah, cuz a lot nicer. We have our moments. We're not that different. But yes, yeah. Yeah. Actually I drove we literally drove across the border I live I live, I can see Canada out my office window. No kidding. And I drove across the border every day for about four years for, for for a position working for a Canadian company, and learning what was the same? and what wasn't the same guys? Kind of like you said, of email every day, a little bit of a surprise, like, oh, we're not that different. Or Oh, you do? What? How, huh?
Matthew Vernhout
cuz I've learned that now that I work for an international company based out of India as well. There's different different ways to do things, different cultural things that just sometimes surprise you. And you're like, Oh, okay. Yeah. There are clearly different phrases that could use frequently. That when you're first starting out, you're like, what
Matthew Vernhout
does that mean?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, give me an example.
Matthew Vernhout
So a very popular one that I find to be very, personally I find to be very funny, but it's just like a phrase. And it's, it's no different. So like, I have friends growing up, that spoke both French and English, French, maybe as even a first language. And when in French, when you do the direct translation for something like if you were to say like, Can you turn the light off? You'd say, Can you turn the light off? But in French, can they say they say can you close the light?
Matthew Dunn
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah,
Matthew Vernhout
yeah, it's just the direct train the literal translation, it means the same thing. But is it can you close the line? Yeah. Yeah. In in India, when when I want to say like, if I say, okay, that's approved, go forth and go and do it. They would say please do the needful. Nice. Right. Interesting. It's one of those things that it means the same thing, but when you read it the first few times, you're like, what, are they actually asking me? Yeah, yeah. But it's also something that is extremely cultural. And I'm sure you could find 100 of these different things for every culture. Yeah. That it was a new experience for me. It was actually very welcoming. I, you know, I find working. working within different cultures is incredibly mind opening. Yeah, right. Working with people from all over the world, you learn so many different things about culture, about the world about life. It's just amazing. Now,
Matthew Dunn
given the just a year and a bit, and pandemic, I'm guessing you have not visited the netcore headquarters in India yet.
Matthew Vernhout
Now. on my list, yeah. There's a standing invitation for when it's safe to travel. Yeah, yeah. You know, in fact, actually, I have only physically met my boss, maybe one time ever. Wow. And it was before he was my boss. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So Well, um, you know, I think there's only like a very small number of people that I've physically met face to face from the company. And it was never, it was it was never at a time where I actually worked with them directly. It was always at an event or, like you and I, right. We've seen each other in person three or four times over the last decade. Yeah. It's probably been the same way. Yeah. And you kind of meet in the hallway. Yep. Nice to meet you. Good to see it. And you're gone. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
There you go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's that only now. That's the plumbing Now, have you worked remotely? You've worked remotely for multiple companies? I
Matthew Vernhout
think, right? This is now the third company I've worked remotely for, for the most part. So when I was with 250, okay, I was fully remote because I was the only Canadian employee. Okay. So it didn't make sense to have an office. Before that, when I was working with company called inbox marketer, I was the only employee in Toronto for a long time. So it didn't make sense to have an office and then hired couple more people in Toronto. And then I had to go into the office every so often, I had to go to head office more frequently. So I still saw people. Yeah. But I would say for the most part, I was remote for that. So it's probably been four years full time and scored six or eight or seven years part time, but on top
Matthew Dunn
so you've already kind of you're already kind of in that gear. Yeah, everyone's gotten a gear.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, when when pandemic mode happened and everyone was remote. I was like, what's the difference? Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
I've been remote for most of 20 years so I was like yeah, I got I got work to do see this is no I got it. Yeah, I'm productive on my own Thanks. Yeah, you're right Really? Yeah, I'm really good at gay going in the offseason? No, I don't do laundry in the middle of the day and stuff like that. But but it's it's just been I had a I had a, I hired a VP of Marketing and creative director hired him away from another company once and the creative directors like oh, this would be so great. I finally get to work from home, drove her out of her mind. She was in Fremont. Most of us were in the West Coast and she would literally stalk us the minute someone showed up on it was Skype at that point in time. The minute showed up. Someone showed up on Skype, man, she was all over. She was craving, contact and interaction, we eventually made an arrangement for her to rent a desk. I think at the company her husband ran so that she could be in an office with other people much happier.
Matthew Vernhout
It's, you know, it's different for everybody. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I I like being around people to a degree, but I find them way more productive when I'm sitting in a room by myself. Yeah, I do miss the, you know, let's go for a drink after work. Yeah, kind of thing. But before the pandemic, the Toronto email community, which is actually huge. We used to do monthly meetups. So you'd be, you know, once a month, maybe twice a month, depending if we did a social and an educational event. We'd get together, you'd be hanging out with email geeks that you want to talk to you about email related stuff, you might learn something along the way. And you build those friendships and relationships. And I think that's why if you ever sneak into the Canadian channel on the email geeks, it's very active because we're very busy. And we all know each other. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's coast to coast. Like, I know a lot of people out west coast. Yeah. Even on the east coast.
Matthew Dunn
And that, get even one or two face to face, opportunities, casual social conference, whatever, like, it makes a different bond.
Matthew Vernhout
Absolutely pays off. It does. And I think it's for me, it's, I'm extroverted enough that I don't need to be in front of people. I can do everything I need to over video chat or phone call. But occasionally, yeah, you need that little energy boost to actually like get in front of somebody and have a conversation face to face and share dinner, share beer share whatever
Matthew Dunn
I want. I literally yesterday, first time since the pandemic that I actually went and sat at a brewery with a buddy and had a beer and just talked I mean, I've seen them at their house or whatnot, but like, Nope, just the two of us sitting outdoors. Yes, it will be outdoors. Thank you. This feels so good. I don't know why. But
Matthew Vernhout
that's that's actually something that we're looking at right now that things are fairly stable here. And yeah, we're getting better. Do we do an outdoor social? Yeah. Like a like a, bring your own picnic kind of day. just invite all the email geeks in their families and just observe social distancing. And yeah, you know, just see each other again, it's been like 18 months since we've seen each other just. So it's something that we're looking at trying to plan, find a weekend when it's not 40 degrees centigrade. Thunder storming
Matthew Dunn
and do it before you have to be in the big park down in and do it before snow calm. You get that when you've got that window, we're running out of time. So man, it gets cold in your town, I gotta say, Oh, geez.
Matthew Vernhout
You know, plus 40 in the summer minus 40. In the winter, it's an 80 degree swing over the course of the year. So it's all centigrade for those last minute centigrade.
Matthew Dunn
Right for those chances? Well, yeah, it'll uh, it'll happen is we'll have to, we'll all have to an engineer some unconscious habits to like it's, I find it easy to get in the groove of sort of, you know, just just keep doing the thing is like, wait, it's been how many weeks since? Like, go a week without leaving the house? Wow. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. If I didn't have a dog, I'd probably never be forced to go for walks and force to go watch a grocery show up in Atlanta.
Matthew Vernhout
Yeah, but like, we just started doing like patios and outdoor drinks with friends and yeah, good stuff. But like, we're all looking at him and like, Okay, well, we won't get vaccinated. It's all been a couple months. We're all feeling good. Yeah, we're away. And patio spacing is still a thing so that none of the tables are close. So, you know, we're so like that 70% capacity thing too. So it's not quite full capacity, like most of America has. Put the foot to the floor and off you go. So yeah, we're
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, we're struggling. We're struggling with where we're struggling with those decisions as a as a whole. But you can't do this what it is, it is Thank you. It is what it is. Well, thanks so much for the time and really, you know, whether whether or not there's a podcast, actually, I've been looking forward to a chance to chance to talk with you a little more in depth because I got such regard for what you do in the space and what you've contributed to. It's like it's cool. Yeah, yeah. So here we go. Official wrap up. My guest has been Matthew Verna VP of delivery. deliverability Why am I having trouble with that word today? deliverability.
Matthew Vernhout
I stumble over it all the time. I've been saying it for years, but it's not the it's not the Pretty use the words
Matthew Dunn
know a lot of syllables stuffed in a little sucker. You like to get the tail in there. Hey, thanks for the time, Matthew, I'll, we'll get this published and turned into content but it's been a great conversation. Awesome. Yeah, I've had a lot of fun. Thanks very much for having me. I'm gonna hit the stop.