A Conversation with Mike Donnelly of Seventh Sense

What happens when you put a couple of email people capable of "geeking out" on deep, arcane subjects on a Zoom call together? Here's your chance to find out. Mike Donnelly, CEO of The Seventh Sense, joined host Matthew Dunn for a no-holds-barred email geekout. Big data, delivery time optimization, cloud computing, privacy, monopolies, standards, the-sky-is-falling marketers — and that was just the first 20 minutes. If your company uses HubSpot — or sends email — you'll find this episode especially fun!

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[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: Good afternoon. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn host of the future of email marketing, my guest today, Mike Donnely CEO. And I bet you love saying this of the Seventh Sense, what a great

[00:00:25] Mike Donnelly: Matthew. Great to great to be here. Appreciate you

[00:00:27] Matthew Dunn: reaching out. Yeah, yeah, no, I was, I was intrigued by the company and of course I want to ask the history of the name, right.

[00:00:35] Mike Donnelly: So they're funny a, well, not, not a funny story, but you, you always make mistakes when you, when you're a first time founder. And we had initially named the company. In fact, it is still our incorporation name, which tends to be kind of a pain with regards to contracts, legal, et cetera. But our name was telepath, the data and the.

[00:00:57] The, the reason for that was we were thinking of telepathy, um, and then data. But then there was numerous people that sound, it said, Hey, this sounds like a phone company or something similar. And somebody said, Hey, 7 cents. And we were like, wow, we can actually get the domain name and it's not very expensive.

[00:01:16] So we went after that and here we are multiple years.

[00:01:20] Matthew Dunn: And am I fair in saying that, uh, like the critical, critical, uh, thing that you do for customers, and I know realize a broad domain of customers is, um, make their email better, send time optimization, being a fundamental.

[00:01:35] Mike Donnelly: Yeah. So we really, the co the company has a bit of a long story or history and pivots and things like that.

[00:01:43] But today in today's world, we like to call it really delivery time optimization because you send time optimization is, you know, people get confused where it's well, I have to send to each individual, no, you press send once. And it gets delivered. To each individual. So delivery time optimization is where we got started in the world of, um, marketing and artificial intelligence.

[00:02:06] But we've now, uh, really focused on that is our core value, but we've continued. To innovate and different areas around what we just like to call email delivery, optimal, the middle delivery optimization.

[00:02:18] Matthew Dunn: Got it. Like it. Um, and then there's, there's some platform focus to the company as well. From what I could tell you work, uh, you work a lot in the HubSpot and Marchetto

[00:02:29] Mike Donnelly: platforms.

[00:02:30] That is correct. So solely in those two markets, um, we don't, we, we actually have one very, very large multi-billion dollar organization that uses us in all kinds of different facets, but they were where we kind of piloted the, the product that dating back to 2013, um, when it was really just an idea and they still use us today for.

[00:02:53] All kinds of different things, but yeah, HubSpot Marquetto are two primary marketplaces. That's where we wake up. Think about day in and day out.

[00:03:04] Matthew Dunn: It's been something watching, watching a HubSpot in particular, just grow over the last, you know, X number of years. They weren't founded that much before you.

[00:03:15] Mike Donnelly: 2000, I want to say 2007 or 2008. I mean, they've been around for quite some time, but they've really over the past few years, they've exploded. And fact, we were one of their first, um, what they call back then connect partners when they were thinking about becoming a platform and there's history behind that as well.

[00:03:38] I,

[00:03:38] Matthew Dunn: yeah, I talked with them somewhere early on. Um, Another another, uh, another company under our same umbrella, uh, heavily involved in video and built on top of Wistia's platform in Wistia, up in Boston, they were kind of corporate buddies with HubSpot. And so I twigged to HubSpot relatively early on, like, this is quite cool.

[00:04:01] And then just watching the expansion has been unbelievable. Unbelievable. And, and. People don't always think of HubSpot in terms of email marketing, but can you talk a bit to that? Because it is, it's a robust platform for that.

[00:04:17] Mike Donnelly: So I, I think that's, I mean, they, they, they really had a, um, if, if you think about where HubSpot started, it was more or less in the, it was in kind of like the inbound marketing space.

[00:04:29] What does that mean? They were essentially. Telling people put blogs up on your website and then how am I going to reach those people? In fact, Pete Kaputo who I've become very, very good friends with. He started the partner program at HubSpot. I think he was employee number 20. Wow. And he went to the executives, Brian and Dharmesh, and said, Hey, we need to do email marketing.

[00:04:47] And they all just laughed at him and said, that's. Uh, hundreds of systems out there that do email marketing. And eventually they said, okay, well, we'll get into email marketing. And they got into it, uh, very, very early on in their history because it's like, Hey, I'm collecting all of these leads now, what do I do with them?

[00:05:03] Um, and so they, you know, I don't want to speak on their behalf, but. We're very heavily invested in kind of the marketing automation space. And as part of that, they built a really strong CRM. And obviously now they're branching out to kind of become the true back office for, um, growing companies. I mean, you even see with their latest products around payments, um, where you.

[00:05:31] They'll host your payment system for years subscription management. Wow. I didn't know they'd done

[00:05:35] Matthew Dunn: that, that you're right. Yeah. Um, okay, so we don't want to talk about HubSpot the whole time, but that's, it's good to, it's good to get a grasp of where these things come from because when a company gets.

[00:05:48] Well known enough, it looked like they just showed up and there's always evolution. There's always decisions. Some of them like, you know, like your founding company name, like, oops, we hadn't done, you know, wish we hadn't done that. And uh, you know, you look brilliant in the rear view mirror like that. Yeah.

[00:06:04] Um, so, so back to back to the Seventh Sense, um, and let's talk HubSpot Marquetto, who are your customers and where did they find you?

[00:06:13] Mike Donnelly: So it's, we're very heavily invested in marketing in their HubSpot, like the HubSpot ecosystem, the Marchetto ecosystem. We work with a number of HubSpot agencies. Uh, that's where we primarily focus on kind of like an inbound methodology where customers find us either be, uh, you know, word of mouth.

[00:06:32] We don't do any paid advertising, anything along those lines, it's all just, you know, referral-based or people finding us through the HubSpot at marketplace. We've also invested in, uh, SEO so that customers can find us that way as well know, they might be looking to solve, how do I throttle e-mails with HubSpot?

[00:06:50] Um, and then they find us, how do I throttle emails with Marquetto? Uh, and then they find us. Yeah. Then we go through a process with them to learn a little bit more about what they're trying to accomplish and vice versa.

[00:07:04] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, you mentioned early HubSpot becoming a platform, and then you mentioned the app marketplace and I sort of joined those two things together for someone who may not be familiar with the platform.

[00:07:15] If you're running HubSpot for filling the blank piece of your business, um, somewhat like your iPhone at the risk of a poor comparison, there's an app store and there's some amazing stuff, um, in the app store to expand what you can do with that, with that.

[00:07:32] Mike Donnelly: Yeah, it can't be all things to all people. And there's specialists apps that are out there like, Hey, I need, you know, a general contractor is another way to look at it.

[00:07:43] Hey, I need a plumber. Let me go get the plumber. I need an electrician. Let me go get the electrician. So look at it that way as well. When,

[00:07:50] Matthew Dunn: when apple launched the iPhone and Steve jobs was in the. We'll write all the apps anyone will ever need. Um, because version one, it was only web apps. I think they called them and relenting on that shipping a proper software development kit.

[00:08:05] Like how many billions of dollars in the app store business for apple now, like release the ingenuity of other people. Got. Not an easy play to make, but

[00:08:16] Mike Donnelly: no, not at all. And again, we've, we've been at it. We've seen it from the beginning of when HubSpot started making the shift. And, uh, I mean, it was really them moving an aircraft carrier is what it was, it really what it equated to.

[00:08:28] And, and, and it still is that way, uh,

[00:08:31] Matthew Dunn: big, big company, fast moving, lots of customers. Yeah. Um, uh, every, everything everything's scale catches up with you, right. It just, it becomes harder to do stuff. And that's another, to me that's another benefit of. Ecosystem, if you can make that platform transition that, you know, innovation is no longer only your job.

[00:08:52] Yup, exactly. Now Marquetto, I am not as familiar hands-on with Marquetto as a lot of other platforms, especially, uh, especially they become part of Adobe, but, uh, how, how long you guys worked on that platform and what are your observations? Uh,

[00:09:09] Mike Donnelly: so I will tread lightly on this. They are in a completely different space than HubSpot.

[00:09:18] They have not developed. They don't invest heavily in kind of their platform. Infrastructure. Um, and so it has been, well, we have very, very large customers in the Marketo space and it's, it is quite challenging to engineer products, uh, around their, uh, uh, around their.

[00:09:45] Matthew Dunn: You can't see us around there dancing

[00:09:49] Mike Donnelly: around their code, uh, I guess is one way to put it, but no, it's, it's a very, you know, Marquetto is obviously been around for a long time.

[00:09:57] Uh, they've got a very, you know, strong system. Um, it's, it's kind of like, what I like to look at is it's a little bit. An old school, Salesforce, you know, it's very, it's, it's there, it's, it's a very strong system, but not a lot of innovation happening within the, uh, within the platform.

[00:10:17] Matthew Dunn: Correct me if I'm wrong with their customer base skews sort of skews huge.

[00:10:21] And that's about it. I, I, you know, it's not a small business. Perhaps HubSpot, you've got some, you really got some range and they provide an entry point for all sorts of sizes. And then eventually you can't leave, but Marquetto, uh, seems to, it seems to be in a big iron, big budget, a big list. Big campaigns.

[00:10:43] Um, and that, that makes sense as part of part of Adobe. I mean, Adobe has got their own kind of wild ecosystem and I still don't always understand where the, where the, uh, enterprise tools like Marquetto fit into that. But, uh, now you mentioned Salesforce. Was that ever a, was that ever. Uh, platform, you contemplated moving your technology.

[00:11:07] Mike Donnelly: Yeah. And I mean, it is something that we contemplate at least once a month. Uh we've we, we know the folks over at, uh, you know, they're responsible for that platform ecosystem and exact target is, or the historical exact target or Salesforce marketing cloud would be an area that we would consider. And again, we just always.

[00:11:28] Part out on the other hand, we won't consider just because their API APIs are very, um, they don't, they just don't have the mechanisms for us to tie into, whereas Salesforce marketing cloud would. Um, but we're just not building these types of integrations where you're analyzing billions and billions and billions of data points a day.

[00:11:51] And we're not just like pulling in small little bits and pieces there it's. There's a lot of heavy lifting needs to go on, especially when you're talking about people that have lists of millions, of people that they're sending to on a regular basis.

[00:12:07] Matthew Dunn: That's a, that is a very daunting challenge. And I, I suspect there's an implicit observation there that API APIs are not always designed for that sort of wide Enbrel.

[00:12:18] Use a lot of, a lot of, you can get this one record stuff, but it's tough. It's tough to scale on that one

[00:12:25] Mike Donnelly: for the, and we've had to build around quite a bit of that. I like it, you know, so it can suck in everything through a coffee straw that's yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:12:38] Matthew Dunn: yeah. Exactly. Well, well, well, since we get to, we can geek out a little bit cause you and I are in control of the conversation here.

[00:12:44] Um, technologically 2013. So. That gave you an opportunity to probably build on the cloud very early on. Yes.

[00:12:53] Mike Donnelly: Yes it did. Um, which definitely. Helped. We didn't have to. I mean, we've, we've obviously invested millions of dollars in building out the company. And, but that being said back in 2013, the data infrastructure and data pipelines are completely different today than they were back then.

[00:13:11] And we've, we have changed our backend infrastructure multiple times now just to support, you know, I remember when processing, because again, we didn't start in the world of marketing processing is processing somebodies inbox of a thousand emails. Or I'm sorry. A hundred thousand emails was like unbelievably painful and now we're processing billions and billions and billions of events every single day.

[00:13:36] Wow. So has that scale has really increased. Yeah, we've had to make more technological advances, uh, with regards to it, a

[00:13:47] Matthew Dunn: AWS.

[00:13:49] Mike Donnelly: Yes. Everything is in AWS.

[00:13:52] Matthew Dunn: Okay. Okay. And that's, uh, there's some great technology in AWS for that kind of work. I was talking with someone else in this space and they're teed up a project using Kinesis and they were practically singing songs about kinases.

[00:14:06] So it kind of scale, like the kind of scale you're talking about. If you were trying to engineer that from literally from the ground up engine, that'd be a

[00:14:15] Mike Donnelly: heck of a lot. And we, we actually were on Kinesis and then we, we started moving things away from it because we've started reaching scale bottlenecks, um, with it as well.

[00:14:24] Wow. Okay.

[00:14:25] Matthew Dunn: That, that, that right there says something about the scale at which, which you guys play. How, uh, how do you get your arms around? How do you get your arms around a scale like that you and your team? I mean, not just building for it, but then, you know, managing it and making decisions and then.

[00:14:44] Change it's, it's not like you go drag drop copy. We're going to do this over here instead. And it never saw,

[00:14:53] Mike Donnelly: yeah, it can become a painful process where you start to see like, Hey, this is starting to crack over here. We need to spend a little bit of time before the dam bursts, um, and causes all kinds of issues.

[00:15:12] Luckily. Co-founder and CTO. He is just an absolute brilliant mind when it comes to data architecture, data infrastructure, and he really stays ahead of the game with regards to, uh, you know, all of this.

[00:15:26] Matthew Dunn: Excellent. Wow. That's it. That's a heck of an asset because it's, it's, you know, we're inventing the future almost a minute by minute in this space, the kind of data volumes you're talking about.

[00:15:37] Almost nobody may be Sabre was dealing with, you know, saber, the airline, no calculus, nobody was dealing with that kind of scale. Not even that many years ago. So like limitations of limitations of a mainframe and Sabres case limitations of, of, of, you know, relational databases. Now it's opened up and there's, and we're still not keeping up with the fire hose

[00:16:00] Mike Donnelly: even close, right?

[00:16:01] Yeah. I mean, early in my career, I actually started as a software engineer for a company called Solera genomics, which was where we mapped the human genome. And we had the largest supercomputer in the, in the, in the private company, in the private world at, at that time. And we were talking about, you know, millions and millions of data points, not billions and.

[00:16:25] The infrastructure probably cost anywhere from 200 to 300 million and just compute, uh, to, to support.

[00:16:33] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And now, and now to a great extent you want to rent that kind of capability because it's certainly expensive to buy that kind of capability. And then you really can't, uh, really can't make switches.

[00:16:46] It emails such a. Longstanding channel and, and look so familiar who doesn't get in their inbox every day that trying to equate someone, acquaint someone with the scale of, of email and actual use in the world. It's always a little bit hard. And when I say, you know, 300, 310 billion email messages a day, you can watch the gears grind and someone them.

[00:17:14] Did you just say a day? I said, yes. Oh, my God. I had no idea.

[00:17:19] Mike Donnelly: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, think about the scale that Google and Microsoft are dealing with from, from that, I mean, and HubSpot is, you know, HubSpot Marquetto, I mean, just, you know, their, their scale and their infrastructure is also just continuing to, uh, to increase it's

[00:17:36] Matthew Dunn: HubSpot their own MTA.

[00:17:38] I mean their own.

[00:17:41] Mike Donnelly: So they used to use SendGrid, um, as their main MTA, I believe they've switched everything to themselves now. I

[00:17:49] Matthew Dunn: mean, it did get, you know, given what they do, it's not

[00:17:53] Mike Donnelly: entirely the cost of continuing to use SendGrid, et cetera would

[00:17:56] Matthew Dunn: just, yeah. And you've, and you've got, you've got this funny back and forth shift of, you know, MTAs are only for the big guys and then they get so big.

[00:18:06] They, they build their own, you know, Amazon's got a SES in the cloud, right. Um, and then, and now if you, if you want to, and you know what you're doing, you, you can, as a relatively small marketing org, avail yourself a world of a world-class empty. Um, if your platform plays nicely with, with those, um, and I've even talked to marketers who switch, you know, they'll use this, that, and the other MTA.

[00:18:32] I don't know if they're just staying ahead of the, I, you know, IP and domain police or what, but wow. Wow. Interesting terrain. Where, uh, where do you, where do you want to take this company?

[00:18:47] Mike Donnelly: Just, you know, really continue to grow as far as driving value for our customers. Um, in specifically, right now in the world of email, but there's lots of different use cases in how you can apply time series analysis and propensity modeling in both the world of sales and marketing.

[00:19:05] And even outside of that in different aspects of business. The customer that I was alluding to, that was our first customer. We analyze, they make around 75,000 phone calls. Every single business day. They have a huge group of inside sales reps. I mean, again, it's a multi-billion dollar technology company and we analyze all of their phone data to predict when phones will answer.

[00:19:29] Uh, so there are customers when they're calling them, rather than just a sales person, randomly picking up the phone to call. Yeah, they now are informed that Sarah's phone has a higher propensity to answer at this particular time. And we've seen all kinds of long-term great results with that as well. So that's just one example of where, uh, propensity modeling can, uh, or time series analysis can really help out on the communication side

[00:19:58] Matthew Dunn: of things.

[00:19:59] Well, or is it more, we live with one foot in the real world and one in the digital world, the more data there is for you. You know, apply the, you know, the methods and systems to, to, to make them work better fundamentally. And, and I have to say getting a phone call when I'm more likely to answer the phone is probably better from my perspective as well.

[00:20:20] Um, it is always a back and forth tension to that, as you know, is it privacy? Infringement? Is it manipulation? And that's a tough question to answer. How is that jumping topics a little bit? How has. The shifting mindset, legal landscape, cultural landscape around privacy, data ownership, um, even nation by nation differences in privacy.

[00:20:47] Has that affected you?

[00:20:49] Mike Donnelly: So fortunately it has not had any real negative effect. And the primary reason for that is like for Marquetto we pulled zero PII from the Marketo system. We utilize a unique ID that Marquetto has, which is called a lead ID. And that's how we profile is based off of that lead ID is activity and very similar in the HubSpot ecosystem, they have what's called a vid.

[00:21:11] We utilize the vid or virtual ID as kind of our unique identifier. And then we obviously create our own identifiers. So for us, there's not really PII exchanging hands. Um, that being said, if somebody has a wish to be forgotten or anything along those lines, with regards to GDPR, CCPA, um, you know, we can take it from the vid or the lead ID and just scrub it from our system.

[00:21:36] Um, now the other advantage that we have. If one of our customers gets questioned about CCPA. Like, we can't answer the question. Like, I don't even know how many people reside in California that we have IDs for, because I don't know where they reside. We do nothing with regards to IP addresses or times and rooms just because, I mean, time zones are riddled with all kinds of issues.

[00:22:00] And I think that's, what's funny about a lot of modern marketing automation systems that say they do send time optimization via. One, you and I could live in the same time zone. You might be an early morning person that tends to engage in your email. I might be a late night person that tends to engage like truly engaged in my inbox.

[00:22:18] We're all passively dealing with email all day, every day, but we do tend to engage in our inboxes at certain times of day. Um, but with regards to. I may reside in the UK, but my email server lives in California and I VPN into it. My infrastructure lives in California. It looks like I live in California.

[00:22:37] So now by sending me an email based off of my time zone or IP address, you've effectively sent me emails in the middle of the night. Oh yeah.

[00:22:47] Matthew Dunn: I have to chuckle because the number of times I've wanted to bang my head on the whiteboard behind me dealing with. Date and time, like, unless you work with this stuff, you have no idea how stupid it really is fundamental.

[00:23:03] How, how inconsistent and, and, uh, arcane and edge case and nonsensical. I mean, we can't get away from. But like when, and where is a booger of a question it's not nearly as simple as you think. Oh, it's like, it's like, here's where people are aware of it. Now. Maybe they weren't two years ago. Uh, arranging phone calls or video conferences.

[00:23:29] Now people are much more time zone aware

[00:23:33] Mike Donnelly: than they've ever been and they've

[00:23:35] Matthew Dunn: ever been right. Cause all of a sudden you're literally living in working, uh, at different, in different time bands. And it actually really matters. I've had guests on this, uh, podcast from, uh, from New Zealand, from the UK, from Spain and.

[00:23:51] Wait a minute. How are we getting,

[00:23:53] Mike Donnelly: how are we going to coordinate this?

[00:23:54] Matthew Dunn: When are we going to get together without it being an awful experience for at least one of us. So, yeah.

[00:24:00] Mike Donnelly: Yeah. I think about even places in the United States like Arizona, Arizona has different time zones within the same state. Like it's.

[00:24:08] Matthew Dunn: Okay. Funny, funny, funny side story on that. I was, uh, I worked at Microsoft, uh, in the nineties, um, was a relatively small company when I started there. And I was in PSS, the tech support organization. That's where I started. And I ended up on a committee that was looking to pick the third PSS site from Microsoft, which is like, that's a lot of employees to plunk it down somewhere.

[00:24:36] So we were doing this whole site selection process and, and Arizona was almost going to be top dog and the time zone thing host them, because back then it was all telephones. And, and moving time zones and trying to schedule it off, it was like, oh man, no flipping way. I don't know if the phone system could even deal with this.

[00:24:59] So Arizona hobbled themselves without realizing it on that time zone thing. Yeah. I was thinking about times on the other day and I, I'm going to use this to dovetail over to talk, talk about privacy and apple a little bit, w we were looking at on, we were looking at some data from our newest service.

[00:25:18] That pertains to open rates. And because we did what you had to do is kind of normalize in the data warehouse and say, okay, this is what happened on a 24 hour cycle with this campaign, like, wait a minute, but middle of the night for who, right? Right. If this guy tends to open his messages at X time of day, you know, your domain of expertise and like morning people in the UK and morning people.

[00:25:45] Are not doing things at the same time at, do you want to show from the, from the user's point of view that their clock, or is it this global clock? That's easier to deal with computationally that we're trying to use to make a picture? I was looking at the tool set that was doing the graph. The data warehouse was doing that 24 hour, uh, normalization.

[00:26:08] Like I can't think of a. To make it deal with individual's time versus a global average G GMT based time. Yeah.

[00:26:18] Mike Donnelly: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, no point, uh, quite challenging. Um, but yeah, no, you've got a couple of things going on there. One. It's it's funny, just even in the United States, talking to marketers and saying, Mike, I don't ever want an email going out, like someone talking to a worker on the east coast.

[00:26:38] I don't ever want an email going out at 3:00 AM and even. Only user basis in the continental United States. My response always is that's midnight on the west coast. Do you know how many decision-makers or late night kind of individuals, as far as them truly paying attention to their inbox, that's how you can stand out.

[00:26:59] Then I talked to marketers on the west coast and they said to me, Mike, I would never send an email at 3:00 AM. Y that's 6:00 AM on the east coast. Do you know how many decision makers have a higher propensity to engage first thing in the morning in their inbox? And just because they're in meetings the rest of the day.

[00:27:14] So then you expand globally and it becomes an even bigger problem. Um, in addition to that, you have third shift workers expecially in today's day and age. Um, and so w w the approach we took was we, we look at relative time, As far as kind of like our profiling process when we had to build a whole, our own.

[00:27:37] Entire time zone library, because we just couldn't find anything that worked for the end users that use our application so that there was those two could co-mingle.

[00:27:48] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And so that they could make sensible decisions without going.

[00:27:53] Mike Donnelly: Right. Exactly. Right. I don't have to make my decisions based off of a global time zone or relative times.

[00:27:59] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:00] Matthew Dunn: It's, uh, you've seen those world time zone clocks that people will. Hanging on the wall. You know, what time is it in London? And what time is it here? What time is it there? It's like that's marketing today. You got to keep that, got to keep that thing, uh, live in your head. Cause you do probably have a global, a global audience, whether or not you think you do.

[00:28:19] Um, I mentioned it. I w I wanted to ask you about it has, uh, has, uh, apples, uh, shenanigans in the world of email and pixels and images affected things for you.

[00:28:33] Mike Donnelly: So why don't we let's take a step back and I'd love to dive into that. Um, so if for anybody that's not aware, I would assume most people are, as far as your audience, like the way open, the way open data works is I think of it this way.

[00:28:48] I install a transparent picture in my email that the human eye can't see. And when you go and open your email, it gets downloaded from a remote server and says this particular. Email address client, et cetera, opened this email. And that's how it opened fire. Well, what apple has now done is turned it on so that they will cash all of those images for anybody that turns on MailChimp mail, protection, privacy, um, where we made a strategic decision years and years ago.

[00:29:18] And we're actually lucky that we made it. It was like a great move on our part, but in hindsight, We wait, what we call events differently. And what I talk about events from email it's, you can have an open, you can have a click. Did that happen on a mobile device that, that happened on a desktop? How recently did that event occur?

[00:29:40] We have always kind of washed out mobile opens because mobile opens are really not a good signal and they never have been. It's a good, like, think about when you're opening. An email on your mobile device. You're probably most likely triaging your inbox. You're not going to fill out forms. You're not going to make purchases.

[00:30:03] And you know, if a brand is lucky, they sent it to you and then you're like, oh wow. I like those shoes. Or I like what I saw. And then when I get back to my desktop, I'll take action or, Hey, I liked what I saw about that webinar. So let me go, you know, register for that webinar. If something caught my attention while I was triaging my inbox, um, on my mobile device.

[00:30:25] So we've kind of always kind of what we've still we'll take that signal into consideration. We very much deprioritize it. Yeah. That being said. It hasn't been all doom and gloom. Like everybody said where your open rates are going to go to a hundred percent and things like that. Like I have not seen one company that has been so severely impacted by it.

[00:30:48] So that's one not to say that that can't eventually happen. Two clicks are still, I mean, clicks are the most valuable signal that we capture, um, and clicks on a desktop are obviously more valuable than a click on a mobile device, but. These these, so back to kind of like where you can still use mobile opens as a directional.

[00:31:12] And what I mean by that is, okay. So maybe your open rate went from 20 to 30% because 10% of your audience has male protection. Privacy turned on. Well, if you're doing any kind of testing, like I'm not a big fan of subject line testing because I think it's, fool's gold. It'd be for, for numerous reasons. Um, but just say I'm doing subject line testing.

[00:31:35] Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I split the audiences equally and an a and a B. Well, it's going to wash itself out directionally saying, you know, 10% of my iOS, 15 users are in the age group. And 10% of my iOS users are in the, in the B group. So you can still use it as a directional signal, which is what open rates have always been good.

[00:32:01] That's what they've been good for. They had true engagement. Call me crazy, but just because somebody opened an email doesn't doesn't mean anything.

[00:32:13] Matthew Dunn: You know what the cause I've been, I've been fairly involved in this and I'll delve into why in a little bit, but, um, time permitting. But, um, it was a one webinar conversation and we were bad at some of this back and forth early on when we were all guessing hard about what the impact of, of Apple's change in image, handling, whatever.

[00:32:35] B, um, and someone said, well, here's the thing to keep in mind it, we tend to think in terms of, uh, in terms of commerce based marketing and probably even more e-commerce base, you know, I'm sending you the list. I want them to do X. I want them to purchase or click or join or something like that. There there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of kinds of businesses.

[00:33:02] Where the content in the message is actually the point newsletter, easy example, publisher, easy examples. Like they don't want me to click through. They don't care if I click through, that's not what they do. What they do is like, like I've gotten newsletters I pay for, and I read them every morning and that's what they want me to do with it.

[00:33:22] They have lost some of the six. Which was always at best statistical and always at best, as you said, an indicator they've lost, they've lost some of their signal there, but one, it was an accident. It was there in the first place, but it wasn't designed for that. Like HTML happened to include an image tag image tags happened to be HTTP protocol.

[00:33:46] HTTP protocol has a whole big damn payload that you can look at. Wow. That was a nice accident that we exploded for 20 years and now, and now it's getting, uh, you know, it's getting handled differently, you know? Okay, fine. Uh, adapt. Um, and my, uh, my son, maybe self-interested comment is a real. Content provider early on.

[00:34:08] I said to the email marketer marketing guys in a w a zoom conference that if you guys have actually made more interesting use of HTML for 20 years, we wouldn't actually have this problem. The fact that pixels are about the only thing you do with SGTP. Well, geez, no wonder everyone's irked because really the pixel is good for you and it doesn't do anything for the recipient of the message.

[00:34:36] Maybe a little bit of feedback, so you can give them better messages are that's the, uh, that's the rationale we'll throw out, but truthfully, they don't see any difference. There was a Washington post article about this today, today, and my wife sent it to me and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but what the WaPo, our report are focused on was pixels and like.

[00:35:00] It's not the only kind of image you could send, but boy, so what we're going to talk about all the time and justifiably, so right. And I don't know. Yeah,

[00:35:10] Mike Donnelly: that, that, that's very interesting point because I always think about the why, like, why are people so concerned about this? Um, and it's. It all comes down to marketing, kind of like obsession with attribution grill.

[00:35:34] I mean, that's what a lot of these problems stem from is, is true attribution taking credit, like, just because I don't open your email. Yeah, it's not mean I'm like, it sends a subliminal message to me. Um, and it potentially sends a subliminal message. That's why, you know, you see a lot of marketers send email for the sake of sending, I send an email today or like I sent an email yesterday and they, uh, th.

[00:36:02] You know, kind of, we'll probably can go in 20 different tangents here, but like one of the challenges of today's world of email marketing is companies have invested millions and millions and millions of dollars into social advertising. And what's the goal of social advertising. It's. Brand impressions, but to it so that you can collect people's email addresses because you rent the house, you treat the house that you rent, which is Google, Facebook, you know, all the Fang stocks, you rent that house and you treat it better than the house that you actually own, which is your core intellectual property, which is your email list.

[00:36:39] And then. Tend to really treat it as a commodity. Um, because executives believe there's no cost to send an email. Well, the real cost comes in on the attention of your recipients. Yes. And once you have lost that attention, Because we, at the end of the day, we live in an attention economy. There's a reason why Netflix and Hulu are spending billions of dollars building artificial intelligence to understand what movie are you going to like next?

[00:37:06] Because they know if they serve you up that movie, that you are more likely to have a propensity to engage with. Then you're not going to turn as a subscriber, um, where you know, that. Instead of continuing to, you know, and again, everybody's databases are very bloated and rather than saying, Hey, let's take some money from over here and put it into the house that we actually own versus just trashing the house that we own.

[00:37:34] The world would probably be a bit like the world of digital marketing would be a better place.

[00:37:37] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Here, here, here. And cheers for everything that you just said, marketers don't mean to speak ill of my brother, but I don't think of myself as a marketer. They're Conda needy. It's like any email address, they get their mitts on.

[00:37:56] They're like, oh, hang on to this. Hang on a second. It's actually not yours. It's theirs. Right? They said, okay, I want to hear from you for now, but it's not, you know, it's not your address. It's their address one. Um, and in two, um, w you, you touched on it, like they'll send for the sake of sending, because it, it looks close to free.

[00:38:19] Imagine how differently email marketers would behave. If the cost, you know, ratcheted it up, where they had to pay attention. To it

[00:38:28] Mike Donnelly: like, well, I, so I th I, I actually think that is exactly what every company is dealing with today. There is other than the cost of storing and paying for HubSpot Marquetto Salesforce, whatever it may be.

[00:38:45] There is actually a real cost now. And the real cost is deliverability. Google, Microsoft, and corporate filtering systems are literally waging a war on spam. And I'm not talking about your professional spammers that are trying to steal your credit card information, but rather marketers that send lots and lots of email that people aren't paying attention to.

[00:39:02] And that starts just like you have a credit score in your personal life. That determines is a bank and a loan you money. How much are they going to loan you under what conditions are they. Yeah. You also have a domain score, domain reputation, which says, Hey, you've just completely hosed yourself or trashed yourself.

[00:39:18] I'm no longer putting you in the inbox. And that's what Google, Microsoft and corporate filtering systems are doing today. And that's why you see marketers scrambling, trying to say, well, email no longer works. Well, no, no, no email still does work if you do it well,

[00:39:32] Matthew Dunn: if you do it. Yeah, well we'll put in your you're absolutely right.

[00:39:35] Boy. We're we're very much on the same wavelength here. And it's interesting. This is a, this is a big jump, but it's probably worth talking about who elected them. God,

[00:39:50] Mike Donnelly: sorry. Say that again.

[00:39:51] Matthew Dunn: Who elected Google, Microsoft at all to, to do that, to do that job and under, under what sort of purview circum, you know, w uh, supervision. Like, and I'll pick on Google much as much as I admire the company and use the heck out of their technology. Like we're going to have a promotions tab.

[00:40:11] Okie dokie, like fine. And it's, it's like saying we're going to put male privacy protection in place. Everyone's going to say it's a good idea because of how you, how you pitched the idea in a word or two works fine. Well, now the marketers, as you pointed out, I have this it deliverability is the SEO of email, right?

[00:40:33] This bizarre black box world. That constantly changes. There's no predictability. You can't go to you. Can't go to the, uh, to the rule of law and say, we all play by the same set of rules here. Like literally big company X is setting rules and changing the rules. And it was just got to go crap. I guess we'd just have to pay.

[00:40:56] To keep up with that. And it, it does kind of irk me that, and it's, it's natural, natural evolution, natural maturation of the channel. If you will, that, you know, defacto monopolies emerge or de facto do Aplos emerge and they can exert this kind of control because they can, right. Apple arguably broke a whole bunch of internet agreements when they shipped iOS 15 in September.

[00:41:23] One of the agreements with. HTTP has the following headers. That'll define how the content behaves. They ignore those in NPPD. Like we're not going to pay attention to that, right. Because we don't have. Well, you said

[00:41:37] Mike Donnelly: something that I like at the beginning, which I disagree with. I think Google is an evil, evil company.

[00:41:43] Um, w we use them internally for it because it becomes, it has to, but with regards to like free email addresses, I mean, at the end of the day, you're the product. Um, and so that's what people have to recognize is that, that, that you are truly the product and. Now corporate filtering systems are different thing because let's focus on Google and Microsoft here.

[00:42:06] We'll pick on them for a minute or Yahoo or whatever it might be. Again, I'm no fan of Mike's. I mean, Microsoft is doing a better job of doing no evil. Google just continues to do evil for the sake of Google making more money. Um, but with regards to why they CA why. They've done things like promotions, tabs, and smarter spam systems.

[00:42:30] And all of that is because they use that as a bit of their differentiator, because there's an all-out war between, you know, who's gonna own that data. Is it going to be Microsoft? It's going to be Google and those free email addresses because for anybody that doesn't think that Google is reading your personal email to build a deeper profile on you as an individual, I mean, you're smoking.

[00:42:51] The same thing with Microsoft, any kind of those free mail dresses now, M or, uh, on the business side, when you actually pay for that, there's strict privacy laws, things like that, but let's face it. Amazon had their whole marketplace where they had a whole. Ton of engineers re reading their customers, purchases, things like that.

[00:43:17] So that Amazon could start, you know, outstripping their, you know, even the people that are on their marketplace. Yup. Yup. And effectively what's happened is these organizations have become utilities and yeah, we need to treat them as such. Um, I like the. That's kind of a whole nother discussion, but with regards to corporate filtering systems, I also understand that side of the house one, you have to keep out the phishing attacks, which are continuously becoming harder and harder for an organization to, uh, To ascertain or even understand.

[00:44:00] So that's one, two, if I'm a CEO of a corporation, why do I want my employees reading marketing emails all day? So their it organizations are saying, well, we have to keep out phishing attempts. So that's one, two. We don't want our employees spending all day on webinars and cause then they'll just not reading email.

[00:44:24] Cause then they'll never get anything done. I mean, we're all getting hundreds of emails a day, uh, whether it's in our personal lives or professional lives, et cetera. So these corporate filtering systems, that's why they put in rate limiting systems. Um, and, and the modern day spam systems are the rate limiting systems, whether it be Barracuda Sourcefire, you know, there's, there's a whole plethora of them that are, uh, that are.

[00:44:47] Hmm.

[00:44:48] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Wow, good observation. And, and, uh, they're very real tension. Let me feed that one back to you and see what you see, what you make of this could easily make the same argument about the web browser on a corporate

[00:45:02] Mike Donnelly: desktop. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not saying that I agree with it, but yeah, there, there are certainly organizations that block ESPN and Washington post CNN and Fox news and all of that because they don't want their employees spending time on it.

[00:45:21] Now I think in it, if you're working for a corporation like that today, I mean, that should be kind of it. Th th that would be a huge red flag, but even saw during the height of the pandemic, a lot of organizations started putting spyware on their employees, laptops, and desktops, to understand how much are they spending in different apps and how much time are they spending in meetings and calling people out on that.

[00:45:44] So there's big brother is not going away, I guess, is the long and short of it. Yeah,

[00:45:51] Matthew Dunn: absolutely. And we'll find, you know, find gorilla. Fighting back, but how effectively read the other day that one of the hot sellers on, uh, on Amazon, since used the word, uh, during the pandemic was a device that would make your mouse move while you weren't at your.

[00:46:10] Because because of the whole tracking things like, oh no, no I'm working. Right. See, the mouse was like, now the output is clicks. We have a very different definition of meaningful contribution as an employee. That in itself may be the root problem. Yeah. I, it's funny. I, I philosophically think app what apple is.

[00:46:37] What apple decided to do with, with MPP. It's like, it's fine by me. In fact, it's great by me. I'm sign, right? Sign me up in, in terms of, do I think it's, do I want to have some control over whether or not someone knows that I opened this email? Sure. Sounds fine to me. And I'm not sympathetic to them. As a marketer was slightly skewed metrics, not necessarily cinema problem.

[00:47:04] Right. Like I don't really care. Um, but it's pretty blunt.

[00:47:11] Mike Donnelly: Absolutely. And, and the fact that apple, I agree with you. I mean, when I first read the news, I mean, we'll come back to Amazon in a minute, but when I first read the news about MPP, I was very frustrated because while they still w apple still says, they can give you choice.

[00:47:30] Going through and setting up it's more or less. If you do this, your, your iPhone is going to, if you don't do this, your iPhone is going to explode. Um, and in fact, I actually liked it. If the, if the market were better educated, good marketers use open signals. In ways that actually help the consumer such as, yes, I am fatigued of your emails.

[00:47:58] I don't need an email from Nordstrom every freaking day. And if they would just recognize that if you and I were having a conversation, you started, you know, Matthew, if you started looking around while we're on this podcast and playing on your phone, I'm not going to keep going with the same conversation.

[00:48:15] Yeah, well, open data can be used in a very similar way where it's digital body language, which is this person is not really engaging with me. Let me slow the cadence or volume of email that I'm sending to them. Right. Which has benefits for the consumer benefits for me as a domain reputation, et cetera.

[00:48:32] Um, So to me, it was very frustrating that apple took this, this light because they made the decision to take this away from me. Sure. I can turn it off. Just like I can turn off promotions in my, you know, Gmail, et cetera, but you just, not many people know how to do it. Um, if your general consumer probably doesn't know how to go, they don't fumble around in their settings.

[00:48:55] Do what they do. But remember, this is the one kind of a positive note. I think email marketers tend to freak out quite often about news. And what I mean by that is if you think a couple of months ago, everybody was for wreaking about freaking out about MPP, destroying everything, email marketing was never going to work.

[00:49:16] And again sure. There's. Open data can still be used directionally until you have 100% open rates. And guess what? We're all going to open email on our phone, but then we come back and open the same email on our desktop that doesn't go away unless eventually Apple's going to employ impose. This on their native Mac or native mail client on the Mac.

[00:49:42] But I think people will find that frustrating because now every time, just like outlook, when I have to go click download images, which is the default, whereas Google doesn't have that turned on by default. Um, it just becomes too much clicky, clicky. But just like the, the sky was falling a couple months ago.

[00:50:00] I don't think we've seen the sky falling, but if you also remember a couple of years ago, and this is what I try to remind you. I remember when Alexa was going to destroy email marketing, because Alexa was going to read all of our emails and Alexa was going to read our email inbox to us. And everybody was like, open rates are done.

[00:50:22] Click rates are done. The delivery is done because we're all going to be sitting in our kitchen and Alexa is going to say, you've got an email and it's from Jeff. And it says, Hey, can you pick up the dog? And can you pick up the kids from school today? Yeah, I haven't seen that. Yeah, like, sure. It's a kind of a, I guess a thing, but it certainly hasn't ruined the world of email

[00:50:49] Matthew Dunn: mark.

[00:50:49] It certainly has not. And, and it's hard to imagine it. Yeah. More annoying

[00:50:57] Mike Donnelly: to me, like, oh, all day, every day that you got something, just talking to you that,

[00:51:03] Matthew Dunn: yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I mean, there's actually, there's a basic math issue about, about speed of audible conversation. Speed of scanning, not reading.

[00:51:12] Like it's not gonna where you're right there. There, there. A bit of a propensity to freak, uh, out there and, you know, back to back to root cause root solution. You S you said it a little while ago, right? Right. On the mark. If you do this well, these things are not obstacles and problems. Right. There are emails that I get very regularly that I read when I get them.

[00:51:39] Why? Because what's in. It's uniformly, you know, pleasurable, interesting, informative something, right. There's value there for me showing, you know, so I open up and there's others. I always ended up picking on these guys. One of these days, I'll fess up who they are, but there's a, there's a, a pretty good sized outdoor retailer who shall remain nameless.

[00:52:01] I've been on their email list for 12 years. I've bought thousands of dollars worth of gear from them and they still don't know what the hell. I still get the same drivel about categories that I'm never going to buy in when they've got huge signals about the things that I really am likely to buy. And I'm like, would you do this better please?

[00:52:23] Cause you could, you'd get in my wallet. I guarantee you'd get in my wallet. If you just bothered. And I know you've got the data, cause it was your cash register guy. What the heck. And I know it's hard, it's complex and there's too much data and you can't call it. Yeah. Right. I don't

[00:52:36] Mike Donnelly: care. No. That, that, that, that all can exist.

[00:52:39] And I think, you know, you, you have a enabling piece of technology on that front, which is, you know, kind of real time, you know, Hey, this individual is going to get this, this individual is going to get that. Um, you know, we, we have done some, uh, language model. This person tends to, uh, like emails with webinars.

[00:52:58] I mean, we're not there yet. It's kind of like been a skunk works longer term kind of view out this person likes webinars. This person likes white papers, you know, the, the more interactive with those types of things. Um, but like you said, like outdoor, the other component is again, is when people start to ignore your brand, um, that can have some, I don't need an email from call it a.

[00:53:23] Patagonia or REI every day, I would much rather have an email from them once a month. And if they recognize that if they sent me an email once a month, I would say because day to day, the product isn't going to change. Yeah. If they sent me an email once a month. Oh, wow. Let me go see what they have to say.

[00:53:39] Let me go see what is new in the store.

[00:53:43] Matthew Dunn: Let's pick on EMR, email marketers getting, cause it's so much fun. Um, rarely do I get a message? With the little dial at the bottom says, how often do you want to hear from us? Right. I may get a preference center that looks like, like the space shuttle dashboard. And I can't figure out all they really lumen to do is to not say no, go away, leave me alone.

[00:54:05] But that, you know, it'd be relatively easy to give me a scale choice of like how often you want to hear. Oh, well, click that one. Fine. Good. We're done litmus company in the email space for those of you listening, Litmos sent an email about a month ago. That said, do you want to keep hearing from us? And I do just like siloed guys, way to go.

[00:54:28] That was a, that was a. Decision to go ahead and say, we're not going to keep sending to you if you won't even click this little button, right. Y why? Cause it's, we're going to honor the signal of disinterest that we're getting, because we can't necessarily measure as well anymore or as clearly anymore, whether there's any interest at all.

[00:54:48] Cause that that feedback loop is, is weaker than.

[00:54:52] Mike Donnelly: Yeah. And the good, I mean, the good thing is we are shifting in a world of just mountains of information and mountains of data, where a lot, rather than having a preferences center, or rather than having, you know, putting the onus on you to say, do you want to still hear from us?

[00:55:06] You can utilize those signals to automatically adjust.

[00:55:10] Matthew Dunn: We start figuring it out. The kind of the kind of thing that, you know, we we've touched on them. Like big, big, big, big companies have applied their horsepower. To do, you know, bet Amazon is a pretty darn good idea. You know what I do. And don't, uh, what I, what I look at, what I read, et cetera.

[00:55:29] Um, they've got enough years history. That's

[00:55:32] Mike Donnelly: true. You know, and, and one of the things that I always try to remind, um, marketers about even like executives as well is if you're lucky, if you are lucky, 5% of your total addressable market is in the market for what you do or what one of your competitors does, if you are absolutely lucky.

[00:55:56] It is between maybe at the max, especially in commerce. E-commerce 10% for most B2B organizations. It is half that it's two to 3%. So would you rather try and. Those two and 3% interested, but also treat the other 97% with respect so that when they learn, when they are in the market, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36 months from now.

[00:56:27] Yeah. That they have a good impression of your brain. Yeah. You haven't, you haven't broken that kind of social contract, um, with the fact that they gave you their email address. Yeah.

[00:56:38] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Cause that, you know, that that negative impression takes a long time to wear off if it ever, if it ever in fact does well.

[00:56:48] Dang, man, this has been a fantastic

[00:56:51] Mike Donnelly: conversation. Awesome. Well, yeah, no, definitely have enjoyed it.

[00:56:54] Matthew Dunn: I love, love what you brought to and what you guys do if, uh, if someone's listening. Um, and they say, wow, this is interesting. I want to learn more about the company and we're on we're on HubSpot. What kind of, what kind of, what kind of guidances this is the kind of marketer or business that Seventh Sense can really can help?

[00:57:15] Cause it's not.

[00:57:17] Mike Donnelly: But it, we, we can help, like we co I shouldn't say we can, we could help everybody using HubSpot Marketo. Well, HubSpot has different tiers and there's API access all that, but yeah, we could potentially help organizations. And one of the ways people come to us is like, well, my email list is small.

[00:57:36] Well, that probably is your means your email list is really important. Those people on the email list, whereas they're like, oh, well your system can't really, or couldn't really help us. The email list. Doesn't this list size does not matter. What really matters is are you, do you have a defendable or like a definitive?

[00:57:59] What. To say ROI that you capture ROI from email, meaning is email a, a truly, is, is it a channel that truly drives results for you or you do fall in the camp of, I send email to send email. Um, and what we tend to find is when companies, we realize that. Did a lot of companies tend to send email to send email.

[00:58:26] Then they get themselves into deliverability issues, meaning they're no longer inboxing. And then they come to us and they want a silver bullet. We say, there is no silver bullet that exists for this, but we do provide you with tools that allow you to dig out of it. Um, and those tend not to be the greatest of customers of ours, um, because they're the ones always looking for a silver bullet, um, versus, Hey, I mean, you know, just like every company wants to do SEL.

[00:58:50] Hmm, very rare. I shouldn't say very rarely. A lot of companies don't want to invest the time or energy that it takes to really drive a true SEO program. Um, that's very much similar with email. Um, unless you are looking to truly invest in your email program, then we're we're we can help you, but it's not going to be a huge win

[00:59:15] Matthew Dunn: it's not this week.

[00:59:16] Yeah. Okay. Wow. Some sometimes knowing you knowing who's not a fit,

[00:59:24] Mike Donnelly: if that's a harder problem than knowing who is right. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:59:29] Matthew Dunn: it is. Well, listen, Mike, thank you so much for spending the w we've gone a whole hour talking in depth like this.

[00:59:38] Mike Donnelly: Cool. Yeah, no, thank you again for, uh, for reaching out. And this is, this has been an absolute blast would love to, uh, you know, stay in touch and thanks for anybody who

[00:59:46] Matthew Dunn: listen to this.

[00:59:47] We'll do that. My guest has been Mike Donnely, CEO of the Seventh Sense. You can find them on the web@theseventhsense.com. Correct? That is correct.

[00:59:58] Mike Donnelly: Thanks, Mike.

[01:00:00] Matthew Dunn: Thank you.

[01:00:01]