A Conversation With Jennifer Nespola Lantz of Kickbox

Kickbox is an email verification company that has expanded to include deliverability. Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations at Kickbox, has been in email since 2015.

She shared her fascinating back-and-forth journey in the technical and business sides of email.

At Kickbox, Jennifer focuses on helping clients understand the complexity of the email stack. In this casual conversation, Jennifer and host Matthew Dunn discuss the complexity of email across many fronts. They cover deliverability, SPAM, AI and the challenges of email coding.

Side trips include privacy legislation, the dubious joys of the pandemic and SMS-vs-email. They do agree strongly that the four day workweek is a good idea!

The juggling act of profession and parenthood is one of the through-lines in this conversation; Jennifer shares some of the particular challenges of doing that during the recent pandemic.

A Conversation With Jennifer Nespola Lantz of Kickbox

===

[00:00:00]

Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. My guest today, my, my Zoom friend, I should say. Jennifer Ola Lance from Kickbox. Jennifer. Yay. We, we connect and we talk live at last. Yes. I'm so excited to be here and I had to coax you just a little bit. I've, I, I've learned over the years that the, that the, the, the sometimes quiet folks in the back of the room actually have the.

Interesting things to say. So I was like, I've gotta get Jennifer to come on the show. Hey, tell people about Kickbox just for orientation.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Yeah, definitely. So Kickbox is At heart, a verification, email verification company. That's how they started. Yeah. And they have expanded to include deliverability because our ultimate goal is to become a deliverability company.

And so that's where I come in, that's where Al Iverson comes in. So Al's focusing on the product to [00:01:00] enhance it. Yeah. To do like inbox monitoring, DM a c monitoring, block list monitoring reputation monitoring. And I head up the consulting service. So I, I deal with any clients that come in that are having deliverability issues or those who, who want to just do audits and see how their program's performing.

And so together we're just covering the, the broad span of deliverability.

Matthew Dunn: Is it, is it fair to say that nobody sending email at scale has zero deliverability problems? I think that's

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: fair. Although, you know, I, I, there are some senders. It. It actually, I know you're kind of joking when you say it, but when I think about it, everyone's gonna balk in some way, and it's not even necessarily a reputation issue.

It could just be that you. Didn't sit well with someone. So there's no such thing as a hundred percent deliverability, even if what you're doing is absolutely perfect.

Matthew Dunn: Well, deliverability is like, I'm gonna riff a little bit. You can yell at me. Deliverability strikes me as [00:02:00] the, it's the technical equivalent.

You used the word reputation. It's like the technical equivalent, that social construct called reputation, right? I am sure there's someone out there who just doesn't like me. Like, why did he say that? Or why does he start that way, or whatever. You know what, it's not a hundred percent under my control. Now there's deliverability.

Yep. Yep, that's about right. And at the same time as you said, Kickbox edging more and more into the liability space. There are ways to improve it, to make it better. There are things you can do or avoid doing to, to, to get the, ultimately to get the impact out of out of those out. Messages to your customers and prospects, because if you don't reach them, it has no impact at all.

Right? Exactly. Exactly. And you've got a lot of background in deliverability specifically, don't

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: you? Yes. I always forget how much. I've been in email since 2015. Okay. No, [00:03:00] 2005. Kidding. I'm

Matthew Dunn: like the number five just tripped off. Just threw a decade away. Stop. Just a zero, right? A one.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: It doesn't matter. But I did different things throughout my time.

Yeah. At the company. So I, I started coding emails and then I went to leading the team. As a team lead and then I went to training. Mm-hmm. So I knew our platform, I knew how it worked and I traveled a lot to train users of it and how to use it properly. Mm-hmm. And all the things they could do with reporting and.

Coding. And then I went to managing the production team, and then I got into deliverability and that I just kind of fell into, but I, I fell in love with it and I've stuck with essence. That's

Matthew Dunn: an interesting, that's an interesting back and forth between, let's call it, you know, managerial side and technical side things that you do with your day.

Not everybody manage. To go back and forth. So good for you.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Did I, I was always the type person that I like to work, I like to work hard and [00:04:00] then, I was never one. There are some people, when I hear them speak, I'm like, oh, they're go-getters. They really go out and they reach for things. I always fell into things, Hey Jen, you wanna try this?

And I, I always said yes. And so that, that was my thing. Cause I was, I never knew what to look for, but if someone was like, do you wanna try it? I was like, sure. Why not? And then I just kept going.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, and kept going. Quite, kept going quite well and, and successfully. You, you mentioned you mentioned Al Iverson.

I have actually not spoken with Al, but I know he's he's got quite a, he's got quite a reputation in, in terms of his accomplishments mm-hmm. In this space. So fun to work with peers like that. Huh?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I feel like I bene, I'm selfishly benefiting more than anyone being able to work with him because I, I ask him a lot of questions and not only is he amazing at what he does, he is a. A great person. Yeah. Uh, He's an ally and he, he's just someone that you can talk to about anything. But he [00:05:00] never shys away when I'm like, Hey, I, I've got a, a rookie question for you.

And he'll, he won't just answer with a very simple, he'll give you background and resources and stuff. So he's been for me, You know, and he was always someone as when I got into the ability, he'd already been doing it for a long time. Yeah. So, you know, I would read his articles and he was always gracious on giving information even when he didn't know me.

Mm-hmm. And So being able to work with him and be like, oh my gosh, you were like my idol. It's been fun for me. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, that's, I mean, that is one of the, one of the fun things about a job where you get to acquire, you know, new knowledge, new skills, is it's gonna be the people you work with that really mm-hmm.

Make that, I think, make that come, come about to a considerable extent. So you end up at the. At the back and forth phase between those technical efforts and, and, and, and folks like Al and yourself mm-hmm. And actual customers, right? You work directly with accounts? Yes.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Yep. That's what I do in the consulting.

So they'll come and say, I'm having problems at Gmail, and then [00:06:00] because we're not the E S P, I can't just go in. And deep dive, everything. So we, we spend a lot of time educating in our audits so we can say, well give me all this information and then let's talk about what it is so that they can take that knowledge after the audit and apply it.

Mm-hmm. But then they'll have to go into their tool and sometimes we'll do research or we'll reach out to our peers in the industry. And that's another thing that's great about this industry. If you go to someone at an E S P and say, Hey, I have a client. Can you show me how to do this? Mm-hmm.

Everyone's like, yeah, sure. Nice. You know, it's not one of those like, I'm not gonna help you. So it's been really nice. So we've been able to help clients say, Hey, you didn't know what that branded domain is, but you need one, and let me show you how to do it. Right. And you know, we do that through all of our partnerships and our, our connections and relationships with

others.

Matthew Dunn: Nice. So you end up, you end up meeting people. At all, sort of, at all levels and layers of mm-hmm. Of the email stack. I was, I was chatting with a, with another guest yesterday, I think, and, and, [00:07:00] and we were just going off a bit on. How email looks simple cuz everyone's used to hitting send and how much depth there is, how many layers, how many, you know bazillions of messages and, and literally thousands and thousands of people Yes.

Involved in keeping the roads rolling. It's, it's complicated as

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: heck. Yeah. Very much. And I used to think it was super simple and then I was like, not simple because when I started. Email code is like the basic form of H T M L. Yeah. It's, you know, I want, when you think about webpages, they're doing crazy stuff with it mm-hmm.

To make these pages interactive and beautiful. And you get to email and it's like, you go back to like ba, make a table Yeah. And add colors and do this and, and go as simple as you can. But the rest of it's really complex. Yeah. Yeah. When you hear anyone talk on some of the industry threads about email and what they're doing, there's so much fit that I'm like, yeah, that ones

Matthew Dunn: [00:08:00] my head.

But well, partially it's the scale thing, right? When, when there's 300 plus billion messages flying around a day mm-hmm. You've gotta figure there's some complicated stuff involved in making all of that work. Yeah. Back to email HTML for a second, cuz you said you started as an email coder. Yes, it is. It.

If, if you, if you haven't put your hands on that stuff, and particularly if you've put your hands on a modern, let's use the term webpage, you have no idea the constraints that us poor email folks are fighting with. It's like I started webpages webpage activity in the nineties and it still looks like that inside.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I know. And to make them beautiful and and engaging is really difficult and I think that's why there's such a push. And, and people getting together to say, how do we make email really effective for customers? And so if you can't do it with the code, yeah. [00:09:00] Mailbox providers are gonna help you. And so they start to roll out things like, I'm gonna scan your email and figure out what's a travel email and I'll help highlight that.

Or you know, if you can just put some schema or some other codes in there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This will really help the experience because we can't do much with the body of the email. It's really kind of boxed in, but I can do it in my tool. So just put a little bit more and I'll take that out and make it better within my interface.

Or, you know, the people who try to push amp and stuff like. That's the only way that you can make these emails even more advanced at this point in time. There's

Matthew Dunn: a, there's a stage in the evolution of, of anything. Where there are things that just, they just don't change. Mm-hmm. Because there's mm-hmm. You know, there's too much of it out there.

You know, I'm making this up to make the point, are we gonna ever change the electrical plugs in the walls in American homes? No. Why? Because there's too many plugs out there. Right. And as much as, [00:10:00] as I kick about email, H T M L and like how nineties it is, I don't think we're actually gonna change the base standard.

I think we're, I think we're gonna keep using it for, for, for the.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Probably, I'm sure there's something out there working on working something. But you know, you think about electric cars Yeah. And how the car is advanced. It's true. You have to have the motivation and the purpose to say we almost have to force it.

We almost have to force it. Yeah. But I think it could change. We just have to figure out what. That will help move that needle.

Matthew Dunn: And there has to be a, you know, compelling reason. And I suspect there's enough people go, well I, you know, I already get enough email and it already looks good enough, enough, good enough.

You know, sufficient. Mm-hmm. That, that, that getting, hurting all of the cats into one place. I want hypothetical place to make a change. Whew. There'd be a lot of work, a lot of expense and things like that. I [00:11:00] think. I think I read on probably on Litmus, in Litmus data that there's something like 15,000 combinations of email client operating system device, et cetera.

Like if you're trying to make an email look pretty and you wanna look pretty on everything, there's a lot of everything's out there. Yeah.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Ouch. Yeah. Yeah. I would say I think with a lot of stuff whether it's liability or coding, I, I, and I don't, maybe this isn't the right philosophy, but you don't need to be perfect.

You need to be perfect for the people who are going to interact with you. Yeah. But you know, you don't need to be perfect for everyone, especially if they're not gonna read your mail. Yeah. But you know, it's like setting this bar way too high. If someone's like, oh, you know, This really obscure client is having a pixel gap.

It's like, well, what's the benefit, like three hours of work that might cost you x for the specialist to code it? Yeah. For someone who may or may not even [00:12:00] click. So

Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a, that's a flip and expensive pixel line, isn't it? Yeah. To to, to to, to, to fix it. And at the same time there, there's a bit of a black box problem.

We don't really, we don't always know either how many of 'em there are, but we, we can get closer to that or what effect that thing that we think is a problem is actually having, you know, did this email did better cuz it had a pixel gap or not. Ah, I know, right.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Did it actually enhance?

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Really? Did it actually enhance the experience?

Well, I mean, we're on the, we're on the back end. Email space adapting to mobile, which I know was pretty wrenching for a while. You must have been in the middle of that. Actually.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I remember when responsive, I, I don't wanna say first came out, but when we first, when I was coding and we started dealing with responsive it as someone who was coding the emails and yeah.

I didn't come from a, an engineering or development background. Yeah. You got

Matthew Dunn: a marketing [00:13:00] degree. What are you doing here?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Again, I fell into it. I was at a media company. Yeah. When I e, when I actually was interviewed to join the E S P. Mm-hmm. They were interviewing me to be an account manager and then, but they had a content specialist role open, the one that codes emails, and I'm like, would you like to try again?

It was one of those, I was like, sure. Why not? Sure, why not? Because I had a smidge of experience with HTML from my time. Working at the Space Grant Consortium at Penn State cuz I was helping just keep their webpages update so I knew just enough code. Mm-hmm. And because email's so simple, they're like, I, you could do it.

Sure. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It's just so, so simple. And here, 15 years later I know. Still learning stuff about

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: it. Exactly. And so the responsive part was interesting because I didn't spend a lot of time understanding. The media tags and all that stuff. So I had to learn a lot of that. But it was fun when you're QAing and you're opening and closing the window to see how it changes and then making sure that it still looks good, has the, the [00:14:00] flow that the email should have and what do you wanna hide?

And, and that even within my time there, how they did responsive or mobile changed. Yeah. So now if I were to go back, I don't, I'm curious how much it changed from when I. Hmm. Probably not much.

Matthew Dunn: So this is a, this is a curveball way to bring it in, but we're sitting here having this conversation after chat.

G p t has shot up to something like a hundred million users a matter of months, and I found myself thinking at one point. One of the messy problems that I would love to have AI solved for me. Mm-hmm. Yo, hey Skippy, the robot, would you please write this email template cuz I'm just tired of fighting with these stupid pixels and tags and, and if someone can have AI deal with email templates.

Okie dokey. I don't see that as a loss to the civilization at all. Mm-hmm. Because it's too damn fuzzy to really devote your brain to over and over and over. Yeah.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Yes and no. I mean, yes and no. I mean, most [00:15:00] email marketers, like when I think about the actual platforms if there's a way that they could potentially do that for like self-serve, like here's some templates you can use. Mm-hmm. A lot of those are already coded. Mm-hmm. I'm curious if a marketer would wanna spend the time with that, because with any code you have to qa.

So you could spit out the code and then say, everybody use this and as soon as you Q eight, you're like, ah, yeah, like soft break. They forgot to, they forgot it's using word and now you have to redo it all. So maybe I, I just with how I've used or used to code, I'm, I'm curious how somebody would implement that and knowing how tiny, cuz the other thing I think about when I was coding email, Not just how do you make it responsive, but how do you want all the dynamic pieces to come in.

Mm-hmm. So that, I don't think you could do with, easily with chat g p t unless you did, you infused it in some way. Cuz there's a lot of dynamic [00:16:00] stuff that when you code it, you actually have to change the HTML to accommodate this dynamic piece. You have to throw. Group of 10,000, the next people might have a different piece of code that you have to throw in.

Mm-hmm. And so those are things that you still can't really get away from that human touch of how you wanna plan Hmm. How it's comes and swaps around. Right,

Matthew Dunn: right. Yeah. It's going to the, the, the messy creative problems will probably stay in our hands at least for a while. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You think AI will end up easier?

You think AI will end up being able to help with deliverability, funda.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Ooh. In some ways. Sure. Or machine learning. I mean, there's, there's, there's something that can, I mean, it helps with spam filtering, so why can't help, it's a building. Right, right. And, and maybe not ai, but well, there is some ai, I'm still have chat G p T in my head, but AI used and machine learning is used, so definitely I, I don't know.

How it would be deployed for deliverability, but I'm [00:17:00] sure it could, I'm. Spammers are gonna try and also say, yeah, yeah, I wanna use it in some way so I can reverse engineer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Things, which is the, for me, the dangerous part of some of this. Well,

Matthew Dunn: one of the, I think one of the realities that not to stick AI in a, in a, in a box that's not gonna stay there for long, but we're already.

Using a whole bunch of things that under the hood are AI machine learning. Like pick your, mm-hmm. Pick your favorite set of related fields. It's already there. Right. Go. Google's saying you're a spammer, you're not there. Fundamentally, there, there are AI algorithms involved in that classification, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah's already, it's already there. I think, I think it's likely to be a more. Pervasive everywhere thing than a, an an oracle in the sky machine that we all talked to and, and mm-hmm. Down to and stuff like that. It's like, you know how many electric motors are there in your car?

Hundreds, right? There was a [00:18:00] point where electricity was, you know, one generator per company and everything had to connect to the one generator, and now we've got electric motors and generators all over the place. I think AI's gonna do that same. Dispersion where it's gonna do a particular job. Mm-hmm.

We'll have the right piece of it to, to do that particular job right or completely wrong. I don't know.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: It's at the beginning, so it's kind of fun to like theorize or have hypotheticals of where it's going and yeah. A a part of me wants to go back and think about some of the science fiction movies out there because when you think about.

All the science fiction now, some of them are like, in 2020, this is what you'll see. And it obviously has not occurred yet. Yeah, yeah. But it's amazing where those minds, the people who write that stuff up, where they go, and sometimes it's actually realized. Yeah. So part of me wants to go back to like, or some of the books about where the future's gonna be and Yeah.

And say, is that realistic, knowing where we are today? Right,

Matthew Dunn: right. Well, you know, [00:19:00] Arthur. Arthur, she. Predicted theorized you know, geosynchronous satellites before anyone was capable of chucking them up there. Mm-hmm. Into orbit. Turns out he was right. It works right. We depend on it now. Yeah. Nav system in your car?

Arthur C. Clark. Pretty direct line. Wow. Were you sci-fi buff?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I dabble, I'm, I wouldn't say I'm a buff though. I enjoy it. Hey, when

Matthew Dunn: you've got, when you've got when you've got kids, your, your, your reading has to get squeezed into a smaller space. That's my experience. Like what's reading? Yeah. Right.

Exactly. Right. It's, it's that thing we do in little tiny fragments in between this, that and the other. Right?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Or you at the point now sometimes I'll read a blurb and then I'll get to the end and I. I don't know what I just read. Cause you, you're just either burn out or you, you spent the whole time listening to your kids fight in the background and you're like, it wasn't really raining here.

I was contemplating how [00:20:00] to, you know. Yeah. Referee this discussion. Yes.

Matthew Dunn: Well, you've got the, you've got the double down going right. Small kids and the 21st century you know, flood of information that we're all trying to, trying to grapple with and not necessarily doing that well. How do you keep up professionally?

Like how do you keep learning about the space aside from picking AL'S brain?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: So, I we're a part of mog, which is awesome. There are so many smart people and I. I, I go there and it's so exciting cuz you, again, everyone in the industry is welcome, happy to share information. You just start picking their brains.

Mm-hmm. And say, you know, a lot of it when, you know, they talk about anti-abuse, so that, that's a whole nother field that I haven't really d dove into yet. And so to see like, what are you seeing and haven't talk about that. And then they'll talk about what they're doing to address it, which sometimes I don't understand, but I'm like, oh, it's fast.

I didn't know people could do. Or, you know, and then I get home and I [00:21:00] really wanna burn my computer. Turn off the electricity, just get rid of it all. Yeah. But, you know, I'll, I'll, I try to read, there's a lot of great really smart people out there that aren't just educating on the topic as it stands today, but they're forward thinkers and I, I love to read what, what they're thinking or what they're predicting.

So, you know, I. A lot of that, like I cut, carve out a little bit of time every day. Yeah. On my work day. Yeah. Cuz I can't do it during my personal time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To say, you know, here's an hour or half an hour, even 15 minutes, we're like, just go read these particular blogs or, or resources. I, I subscribe to like media posts, there's only influencers.

Mm-hmm. There's. Obviously al's blog word to the Y's. I am a part of mail op, so I'll read what I can in that little bit of time. I, I have it marked off as professional development, and I make sure I spend that time doing that. Sometimes I'll [00:22:00] learn a lot and sometimes it, it, it'll just be like some random updates, but mm-hmm.

For now, that's the starting. And then if I am at conferences, I, I really try to. I'm at a conference right now, I'm not gonna read email. I wanna go to these sessions and see different perspectives, even if I know the topic, I love to hear how else other people view it and how they educate or entertain an audience with the topic to say, what about this is gonna be helpful to you?

And just find different perspectives. So I find that very fascinating. Another way to teach myself on how to advance like what I'm doing

Matthew Dunn: and good for you. It's it. I'm irked with people who go to conferences and sit on their laptop while someone's talking. I'm like, why did you fly here? Seriously? Yeah. If you're gonna keep, you know, keep tending the beast.

Cuz the beast is not gonna ever quiet down. He's just gonna mm-hmm. Get, you know, gotta want your attention all the time. I, I noticed the other day, in fact, there's one sitting right here you know, actual books [00:23:00] that I, I, I really need to read for things that I'm. And it occurred to me, I almost never give myself permission to, to read a book during work hours.

Mm-hmm. Tons of 'em afterwards, but, so I'd be like, guilty, bad not getting work done. That's work.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: But it is work if it improving you. So I know, just cut out a little bit, even if it's 10 minutes. Do a little

Matthew Dunn: bit. Yeah. Yeah, that, that, yeah. Maybe I'll put that in my, Hey, maybe I'll, maybe I'll declare it a four day work week and you know, day five can be, I get to just read stuff.

That'd be awesome.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I love that. That'd be awesome, wouldn't it? I think, you know, we should just have four day work weeks anyway. Do you think we'll go, how refresh you are after a three day work? We, we, oh weekend.

Matthew Dunn: There are a lot of people saying we should, you know, that we, we, all of us should shift and there are, there are any number of companies who.

Made the experiment, found it successful and, [00:24:00] and gone there. I've never had a four day work week on a consistent basis. What? I think you're right. I think that'd be awesome.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Yeah. Wow. I mean, I remember you know, the parent company of Kickbox, they, they have breather days for us. Once a month they'll let you have like a half day.

And I remember like the one day I think I almost like cried cuz I was like, I can vacuum the floor. It was so simple, but it was just, and it's just one of those things that life gets busy and you have to prioritize. But it was one of those like, I can finally do something that is so mundane and boring and yeah.

But it made me so happy.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. It's, and, and you're probably, you know, more energetic, more engaged, plugged in, you know, the day after that than you would've been if you hadn't had that day off. Did, were you already working virtually when we did that wonderful pandemic lockdown experiment? Yeah,

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I've been working remote since [00:25:00] 2014.

Mm-hmm. And then prior to that, I was working remote quite a bit because when I was doing the training role, I was traveling so much. Mm-hmm And I was doing a lot of webinars. So the way the office was designed it, somebody called it a call center cuz that's what it felt like. So like I'd be training and you have someone behind me either.

Yeah. Chatting work stuff or just chatting personal stuff, but, and then you'd be walking back and forth. Yeah. And yeah. And so it just became too difficult for me to focus on who was on the other side of the computer. Yeah. They may have been fine, but I was having a hard time, so I been working from home for quite some time.

Hey,

Matthew Dunn: I, I remember one of. One of the things I had to learn as we were in the middle of the pandemic lockdown stuff was that I had already thought of that as fairly normal. Mm-hmm. And a lot of people, I think probably skewing in digital fields had as well, but it wasn't for a [00:26:00] lot of folks. For a lot of folks is wrenching, wham.

The door just got slammed. And What do you mean? I'm gonna try and do. From if they even had the space to do it in. Right. Yeah. Kids be quiet. My, you know, dad's trying to get mom's trying to, whatever. That

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: was a whole nother level. Yeah. Having kids, like working from home was one thing, but having kids and working from home, that was like, I went into it like, I'm gonna be this awesome mom.

I have plans. We're gonna have this time set aside. I had it all planned out and then it happened and I was like,

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You, yeah. You wanna make the universe laugh, tell a kid you've got a plan, right? Yeah,

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: you're right though. Like, I think about other people who are like, how do you work from home? I, I can't concentrate. And I'm like, oh, if I'm around people, I can't concentrate. Because when I was in the office, I was like, Hey, yeah what, what are you doing over there? And I, it just, It was if there were people, I wanted to be around [00:27:00] people.

So working from home was actually helped me focus more. Huh. But then when you talk to others who have no, who didn't work that way, they were like, I can't, I, I'll turn on the tv, or I throw in a load and I do this and I do that. And I'm like, oh really? Yeah. It was, it was strange for me, but it was it, you know, when the pandemic hit, it was hard for a lot of people.

Yeah. And I think, yeah. But the nice thing though, Is, I think it helped to open the eyes of a lot of companies that say that can give that freedom to people who can respect what you need to do when you work from home. And if you come from a, any type of, let's say, urban environment where it takes you. An hour in and an hour home.

Now people have two more hours of their lives that they can actually use. Yeah. Instead of just sitting in a car.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. I tend to agree. I, I tend to agree, but, and, but I have worked from home and I do it well and sounds like you do as well. And you're right, it's not for everybody. Mm-hmm. And I think we don't know what the experiment's really gonna [00:28:00] pan out.

In terms of the effect on collaboration, collegiality, relationships, all of that other stuff you know, you've got companies like Apple who are saying, Nope, you know, get your buns back to the office. You got companies saying what office we, you know, we got rid of them. Yeah. And who's gonna outcompete who with those different approaches?

I, I don't think we really know the answer yet. I, I do like, I do like that it seems to have put some, a bit more choice. In, in the hands of the, in a person actually doing the work. Like, Hey, as long as I get done when I'm supposed to get done, why do you care where my, you know, where my, what chair my buddies in at the moment?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I agree. And you know, I said the other day I was watching a little bit of TV and the commercial came on and it was a five hour energy commercial. And it was talking, and I can't remember the exact sequence, but it was something like, you know, you, you use it in college so you can study and, and then it shows like [00:29:00] later in life, okay, you use it, you know, while you're, have a young kid at home and you're waking up at all hours and you use it cuz you're running around all these games and what?

And I just stopped and I was like, it's sad. That our lives are so busy, we require supplements to get through the day. And so when I think about the commute and being able to like just have a little bit more time to just live it, that's why I, I find, yeah, that was my, this was at least the one nice takeaway.

I don't even wanna say that cuz pandemic was terrible, but like from it, something at least came that allowed people to like at least have some time.

Matthew Dunn: Did, and it, it, it, it broke a set of assumptions up that were never particularly well founded in the first place about mm-hmm. What might work and what might not work.

Like, nope. Guess what? We're gonna, we're gonna force the experiment and, oh, look, it worked a lot better than the naysayers thought it would. Yep. Yeah. I, I don't think we'll stuff that back [00:30:00] in the bottle anytime soon. I think there'll be a lot of adjustment and accom accommodation. Mm-hmm. I. Creative directors.

When I was running a different company, like, ooh, almost 20 years ago creative director got hired on, she was company was in California. She was in Vermont. Okay. And she's like, oh, great. Yeah, I've always wanted to work from home. And man, within three days she was going bananas. Oh, she was stalking us all on Skype, which what we used at the time.

Like, you show up in the morning and she's on why she was, she was going nuts. She wanted. The social interaction, we ended up paying for desks based at another company so she could be surrounded by human beings to do her job. Oh, wow. That's just how she was wired, right? Mm-hmm. No, right or wrong. It was, it was it was good.

And we, we got completely off email. Look at that. How did that Yeah. Well, sorry. So it's okay. All, all of, all of the pieces relate to each other. But let's, let's dot them back together. [00:31:00] Email used to be almost the only sort of digital channel that companies ran on. Right. Think early in your career it was like email was constant.

Mm-hmm. And almost everything seemed to flow through that. And while it still does, there's still plenty of flow. No shortage of stuff in your inbox. I think there are lots of competitive channels, both personally and professionally. Now you've got in work you. You know, email plus Slack channels, plus da da da da da, CRMs, et cetera.

At home, you've got certainly at least one inbox. Right? But I'll bet you're more likely to text with your friends and family than you are to email them. Correct? Yep. Yep. So where's email going to fit as we keep multiplying all of the digital channels that we can use? I

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: think it'll still fit. I mean, there's still a need to.

Communicate that way. Cuz it can be like one [00:32:00] location. You can have an email where everything flows into one. Now I'm sure that it could, you know, your phone is one, but you wanna use that because I'm not the fastest typer even with, you know, the query board gone or whatever, the little, you know, tap three times just to get to see.

And then there's like autocorrect, but still there's a limitation to what you can do. Yeah. So that's, Texting is very quick and you use shortened words. True. But I think email's n nice because when you have an email account, everything can flow into one versus if someone's like, oh, I'm gonna push everything through my app.

Well, if you are a customer of. Or consumer of content of a hundred things. You don't want a hundred apps necessarily. Right. And email is your way to just have that consolidation. The consolidation. Thank you for coming up. Words for me. So I think there's still a need for it. I can't say it'll be there forever, but email has been proclaimed dead many times.

Yeah. And yet it's still there. Yeah, it's

Matthew Dunn: still there. I, I think there's [00:33:00] also a a, a control. That matters. Like it's my inbox. I can decide who's in or out, what I get, don't get what I subscribe to un try to unsubscribe from. And I, I know that's not, not always easy, it's kind of part of the business that you're in, right?

But it, it's relatively difficult for someone to take an email inbox away from a person. Mm-hmm. You know, my carrier got chapped at me. They could take my cell phone number away, I suppose, and that would be kind of a disaster. But I don't want everything coming through my text messaging app. That'd be even more of a disaster.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, that's, I, that's the reserved, you know, high interrupt, high priority. I only. Only want known people to connect to me through that particular channel. Whereas email, I can go, ah, it's okay. Email, email me so I can ignore you there. Right.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I mean, it's the sense [00:34:00] of it's tolerance, really.

Mm-hmm. And how easy it is to manage. So if you think about direct paper, We don't really complain too much about the junk mail I do because I'm like, you're killing a tree. Right. But you know the, it's easy to go. You can quickly glance and trash it or recycle it. Yeah. Email. The email providers are making it much easier to do that for you.

I've got tabs and all that kind of stuff. Yep. And it is your inbox and you can get annoyed. It's much easier to manage your phone to me, they're, they're coming up with ways to also make them more manageable. Some of the providers with their messaging apps are making categories and stuff, which is helpful, but at the same time, when that gets inundated, it is not easy to quickly just scroll through and get rid of stuff.

Yeah. And it, and that is your main, at this point in time, Most [00:35:00] people's main communication for one-to-one. So if you interfere with that, that becomes a lot more offensive. Mm-hmm. To be like, you are in a place you shouldn't be. Mm-hmm. And you know, not everyone also knows how to complain or report on that stuff, which is something I think everyone needs to I would love to help.

Educate people on and be like, if this isn't, if you didn't want this, report it, yeah. Forward it 7, 7 26. Or use the application to market a spam to really protect that. And maybe one day it'll be something different. But for now, that is your very personal space.

Matthew Dunn: We, we haven't had as much abuse and spam in the text.

As I thought we might, and I, I know there are, I know that there are actual, there are legal boundaries with some teeth to them that may play a role there. Right? If, if I get an unwanted text, I can make it very expensive for the guy on the other end, which means he probably didn't start it in the first place if he [00:36:00] knows that that's possible.

So that's, that's one. But I also think we'd be likely to push back a lot hard. Unwanted email, you kind of go, eh, right. And you can blow it off. It's a tolerance word you used, but an unwanted text or two or three of 'em in a row. I'm, I'm gonna lose my temper really fast at that because of what you said.

It's like, I didn't want you that, you know, that I didn't want you in that channel. That's, I'm saving that. Right. That's for one to one, that's for people I said could and things like that. And,

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: and it, it's also controlled by fewer parties? I think so. With mailboxes, anyone can spin up a mailbox. It's true.

You know what I mean? And, well, maybe not anyone, but there's a lot of options out there and they all have different rules and they don't always talk to one another. And with your, your carriers, they work very closely together. They, you know, they're controlling a small number of carriers are controlling a lot of the pathways.

Yes. So I think they, that can help control it. There's also, like you said, better [00:37:00] laws. Yeah. And I. You know, I'd love for cans, spam to be updated, but more importantly, I'd love for a data law to be out there to be like, you shouldn't even have that person's data, let alone message them.

Matthew Dunn: I'm glad you said that.

I, I, I tend to agree with you. Do you

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: think we'll get there? Data law? I think so because you know, the states are making paving the way and at some point someone's gonna be like, I don't wanna deal with 50 laws. Yeah, yeah. Just, just do it already. Yeah. Just make it federal.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, cuz the state laws, I mean the California has made an impact with their privacy law, but still, aside from the expense of navigating 50 different ones, as you, as you alluded to, I think there are people who will still ignore it because they, their likelihood of getting wrapped on the knuckles in California's low.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and we are lagging. We, the US are lagging. Mm-hmm. There most other nations have kind of gotten their data and [00:38:00] privacy house in, in, in some degree of national order where we haven't quite figured it out yet. Right. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be it's gonna be fun to watch though, cuz there are.

There's enough value on both sides of the equation. There are those who benefit from the mess and the current mm-hmm. Wild West, who are gonna wanna keep it that way. Yeah. Yeah. I, I dunno how that's gonna pan out. I've actually got a, you were, you were involved with the with the E S P C, weren't you, you were on the board of the E S P C for while.

Email Center Provider Coalition.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Mm-hmm. When I was at Zeta, they were a board member and so I got to step into that role for a little bit of time. So that was, that was really fun. And being being able to participate and hear the discussions around the laws that were coming out. Yeah. And what they were doing, how alike they were to one another, how different they were when some have private right of actions and some don't.

Yeah. Big deal. So, you know, to continue to see, at the time I feel like it was only a [00:39:00] handful of states and now there's a lot more Yeah. That have rolled something out. Yeah. The. Varies. But yeah, it's nice to see each one's like, okay, we need, we need to do something. Because I do think that people are understanding the, and it's not just about a marketer has my data, Ooh, it's the volume, like the data breaches.

And if you shouldn't, you know, why do you have this person's data if they're not really interacting with you? Cuz now they're at risk. If someone breaches your database and, and does something with it, it's, you know, the selling of people's. And they don't even know it's being sold. Right. Right, right. You know, it's, there's all these other things that I think if someone was like, oh, I don't care, that's fine.

But nobody even knows any of this stuff is happening, so, yeah. It, it's hard. It's, there's no choice because no one knows they have a choice. Hmm.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And, and we end up paying, we end up paying a cost without, sometimes without realizing it, I think. Mm-hmm. The, what's the word I'm [00:40:00] looking for? The psychological toll of someone being in a better position to try to influence me because they have data about me mm-hmm.

Is a cost that I'm paying without realizing it. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's a trivial example to bring up, but, you know, go spend 10 minutes on the web shopping for, fill in the blanks, garden hoses, whatever. I don't care. And then watch, watch what pop starts popping. As you do other things, oh, why am I seeing yet another garden hose ad I don't, you know, I don't want it anymore, but it's profitable.

It's easier. Mm-hmm. If there's a inference that that's what I'm interested in to chase me down. Right. And show me more of those. I want the, I want the magic button that says I bought the hose shut up. Okay. Back off now.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Yeah. But then you also have those people who. Like I think I was looking at something than my husband was, and then [00:41:00] he's like, I'm starting to see ads for this Jen.

Yeah. I'm like, sorry. Yeah, I didn't do it. And then that's simple between us. But imagine. In a family or with kids and they're looking at something and now it's revealed to parents and vice versa. And so it, it starts to go way beyond the fact that you have a data point about someone. Yeah. It's influencing so much more than that.

Matthew Dunn: Well, and then the inadvertent one. Like I've, I've maintained a separate Amma. My wife and I have separate Amazon accounts because there's no cotton picking way to surprise her ever if I don't have a separate Amazon account. Right. She'd be like, what are you shopping for? Fill in the blank. Your birthday.

Sorry, honey Boston.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: It's okay. We just do the o's. Your birthday. Have

Matthew Dunn: birthday. Yeah. Yeah. Have birthday. Yeah. Stick, stick in the list. I'll, I'll, I'll actually hit the buy button so it'll be like Present. Present.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Just put it in there on the day of,

Matthew Dunn: right? Yeah. Something. Well, there you go. If am, if anyone from [00:42:00] Amazon is listening, you need a, you need a sort of a secret shopper function where with a shared account, I can go look for something, stash it away without it coming back and popping up in my, you know, significant.

Face if she happens to be logged in as well.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: That's cool. And with that, your searches would go with it? Should,

Matthew Dunn: should, yeah. It'd be, yeah, that, that, that, that would be nice. Back to the, back to sort of email, text domain for a second. Do, do, do, does kickbox or do you end up professionally grappling with companies that are starting to bridge from email marketing into email and SMS marketing?

Did it affect well, your professional life at all?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Not too, it did a little bit in my old, my old life. In my old life. I think there is a, a knee and or, or there's an appropriate reason to do both. Mm-hmm. Some people are fine with s m s and I think that's okay. I think when you shove [00:43:00] it down their throats, that's where it gets a little bit much.

Or if you get egregious with, I'm gonna send them daily. Communications that's too much. You have to just understand when it's appropriate. Mm-hmm. When it's timely to do s m s versus email. Do

Matthew Dunn: you have any s m s like mar actual marketing side subscriptions where you've said, yes, I want to hear from company X in the form of s m s

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: to get a coupon and then I hit stop.

Matthew Dunn: I, yeah. Same. Same. In fact, Two companies. I think that I, I have not, I have not hit stop yet because it's, it's kind of fun watching the little science experiment. And what I see is from the sample set of two, they are doing now, what email marketing was doing almost 20 years ago. Mm-hmm. Like, they seem to think that the only possible use of this channel is, is sale, sale, sale.

And what it's trained me to do is to just. [00:44:00] Like if they've got a widget I'm interested in, like I'll just wait because sooner or later they can send me a message, say that widget is on sale, and then I'll spend less on it. So, kind of backfiring on them in my humble opinion, cuz the only thing they ever tell me is, oh, amazing, fantastic sale.

And it's, it's gonna get, it'll be here tomorrow as well. Right? They're training me to just wait for the best price instead of acting on their message, which is kind of ironic.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I like sms. Bill alerts. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, account alerts to make sure there's like no fraud or suspicious activity. Mm-hmm. So those are things I wanna know about now.

So

Matthew Dunn: that's why dentist appointments. Dentist appointments are great. Yes. Love that popup.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Yeah. Any type of health appointment. Yeah. Yeah. Any appointment I should say really, but something that you need to know cuz you can't miss it. Yeah. And a sale can be missed. Yes. Sale can be missed. You're right. A newsletter can be missed.

But, and [00:45:00] the other stuff I don't wanna miss if there's a suspicious activity on my credit card or Right. Yeah. Or something like

Matthew Dunn: that. Yeah. Or something like that. Yeah. Earthquake. Earthquake alerts.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I mean, I don't have those.

Matthew Dunn: There was a, it was a couple years ago, but there was a tornado of all things, gosh, I think it was in Colorado, near where my mom lives, and I remember reading an article about it, the, they actually managed to do the reverse nine 11 and push a notification to all devices in the area that says tornado coming.

Get a warning. Warning in advance. So they use that alert notification. As a mass broadcast successfully, which I thought was kind of Wow. Like that seems like a good thing to me.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Yes. Yeah. I, and then I also think that SMS is great, but because it's not as wi, well, anything can be abused, but I think about the abuse side of it too, because you only have so much you can put in an sms, so, yeah.

Yeah. You know, if [00:46:00] someone reads something that's not improper grammar or something like that. They might just think it's s m s. It's fine. And so you, you know, the abuse might be easier to and go through from beginning to end and actually get someone through. You don't also see as much. Whereas on the web or an email, there's a lot of other visual indicators when you can see, oh, this email's, it's suspect, I'm not gonna do it.

That's true. Yeah. But sms, you don't necessarily see all of that. Yeah. And I, that's where I'm like, oh man, it can be dangerous. Yeah. And, and with all of this too, you know, I, I'm always curious like how much youth is learning about the dangerous side of it. Cuz they're using technology even more than we did.

Yep. Growing up. So I, I think about that too. How are they using sms? Because our, you know, we grew up with email. Email is the way to communicate. Is it the case? The younger generations or is it, you know, they're using other apps or whatever. And then how are they thinking through, how [00:47:00] much visibility do they have to some of this?

Are they blindly just interacting or,

Matthew Dunn: so, so here's a, here's a decent professional and personal wrap up question to, to chuck at you, and I won't hold you to it, neither will they. About what age do you think your like, To either allow or help your kids have an email account. Oh, an

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: email account. That's gonna be, I find that a little hard because I don't know, like at what age schools require it.

Matthew Dunn: Fair. Yeah. Fair. So I, to my knowledge, I've not seen schools requiring an email account. At least up through middle school age. But I had a guest podcast guest the other day who said he set up email accounts for his kids, like the minute they were born. And sent him pictures and stuff.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: That's a fun [00:48:00] little sweet thing.

Isn't that clever? Yeah, that is very sweet. And then when they're older, they can open it up. Yes. I'm gonna go through these. I, they probably won't go through like the 500 emails or whatever that's there, but maybe Dunno. That's very sweet when you, when you think about it that way. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm not sure when I'm gonna do that because I think if the school didn't require it, what's.

Oh goodness. I don't know. Probably like a teenager. It really depends on the maturity of each child. Like if I can explain to them, you can do this, and they get it. Mm-hmm. And like if there were nine, then perfect. If they're at nine, they were like obviously like, Ooh, it's an animal, I'll click on it then no.

Right, right. So dangerous issues, I think, for me, and it's just I have to determine like when we're interacting on some type of technology, Do they understand when I say Don't do this or don't do that? Yeah. Yeah. And can they, can they replicate it on their own? Yeah. Or you put [00:49:00] very strict settings on their accounts until you feel they can do it.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. That that'd be solution might. My experience, and my kids are older, considerably older than yours, but when they hit the applying for college stage, they mm-hmm. Had to have an email account. I had set them up earlier than. And they ignored it. But when, when college applications became a thing, at least at that point in time, that was the channel College was like, all of this stuff is gonna come back and forth in email.

Mm-hmm. And I watched that and that was their on ramp to email. I think their use before that was relatively small, but now, They've each got multiple accounts, they're used to it. Mm-hmm. For business, work, personal, et cetera. It's like, it's your home address kid. Like, sorry. Right. You're gonna, you're gonna have it, you're gonna use it for probably the rest of your life.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Right. And I mean, I mean, to your, to your point right there, I don't even know if they need email up into that point. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I guess [00:50:00] they could do online shopping, but usually, I don't know if they do it on their own without help from the parents, so I'm

Matthew Dunn: not sure. Yeah, it's harder for, it's harder for kids to get credit cards still.

Thankfully.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I dunno. I think my first email account was in 1998 or something like that. I remember. I was like, it someone, someone said, a friend of mine set it up for me, like, Hey, and I. What's email? Yeah. Like I remember not knowing what it was and I'm like, but what do you do with it? And like go on the, and I remember being going to the library to go on the internet cause we didn't have internet at home and sitting there and you dial up and stuff.

Yeah. And it just like wishing somebody would email me cuz I had it, but I had no fr no friends who also had email accounts. So it's like at that time we didn't need it. And I'm not sure if kids need it terribly. That much today until they get a little older and they, they need it for more professional reasons.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And I don't think they'll get the same through a lot of, you've got mail as[00:51:00] some of us did at particular points in time when it was a rarity. Because now it's not gonna ring, you know, any kind of digital message.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Everybody hang up the phone. It's my turn. I need to get on my mic.

Matthew Dunn: There was back when there was one phone in the house, or, or maybe one phone and, and an extension or something

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: like that.

And a really long

Matthew Dunn: cord. And a really long, I liked a really long cord. Yeah, I could go, I could paste the house with a really long cord, jump rope with it, and then cordless phones. Whoa, this is so high tech. I could go almost to the front door.

Stuff has changed a wee bit, huh?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: You should have a separate podcast about technology and like back in, I don't know. That's. Eighties, nineties and what is it

Matthew Dunn: today? Don't tempt me. Don't tempt me. Cuz I can actually play, I can play an age card there. I, I lived in such a small town that we had four digit dialing [00:52:00] and party lines.

That's awesome. And I was talking with Georgetown class for Jean Jennings, mutual friend of ours. And I said, party line. And then it occurred to me, and I. I'll bet you have no idea what I just said. Did you? And one of the students was like, yeah, I don't know what a party line is. I was like, holy mackerel.

Social media for farmers. Kind of, kind of.

Well, cool. Well, it's it's not gonna stop changing. That's what I'm, that's my bet. Agree. And I'm glad we, we've got people like you helping make all of things work.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: You're welcome. Any parting. Oh, I don't know. Just stay safe online. There's a lot of crazy stuff out there. And yeah, that's probably all I got.

Matthew Dunn: That's all good. That's, that's, that's not a bad note to end with. Well, my guest today has been, do you use all three words? Jennifer Neola, Lance, cuz that's a, that's your yes. That's your your kick. Your kick kickbox. And you. [00:53:00] You learned Italian? Was that in college or before?

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: I mainly learned it in college.

In college, okay. A little bit

Matthew Dunn: beforehand. So it just, it jumped out at me. I'm like, how cool is that? Well, cool. Well thanks. Thanks for making the time, Jennifer. You've been a wonderful guest and we'll get this out in the share it with the world.

Jennifer Nespola Lantz: Thank you so much for having me. Hope you have a great day.

Bye everyone.

Matthew Dunn: You too. We're out.