Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of the Data Guru Podcast. I’m Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi, and today we are talking about email marketing. Studies have shown that almost 99% of people check their email at least once a day. I know I check it more than that. And adweek.com has also found that 59% of people say marketing emails can influence their purchase decisions. So as advertisers and marketers, it is important to get these campaigns right.

To help us dive into the ins and outs of email marketing, I’m joined today by our favorite data guru, Linda Harrison, and also by Matt Wolfrom, Chief Commercial Officer at BRIDGE. Let’s start with some introductions. Linda, data guru, what does that have to do with email?

Linda Harrison:

Well, you want to email the right people about the right things. Nobody wants their email box filled with a bunch of spam that is irrelevant, crazy to them. You want a relevant marketing offer for customers and prospects, right? So that I’m more likely to open the email in the first place.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

That makes sense. Matt, can you introduce yourself to our Data Guru community? What took you to BRIDGE? You’ve got such a rich background ground.

Matt Wolfrom:

Yeah, I’m lucky to be at BRIDGE. I’ve been here about five years. My experience has been … Listen, I’m going to date myself. I have been in digital marketing before the IAB existed, before the ad server existed. I worked at a company … I worked with CompuServe to help launch WOW! back in the day, which was their AOL killer. We know how well that worked out.

And then I worked at a company called @Home Network, which became Excite @Home, to commercialize broadband. And we started first at the first … We bought Excite for $7 billion back in the ’90s, for one thing, their personalization engine, their data, to be able to target individuals with advertising, way back then. And when you’re owned by cable operators, it doesn’t really help, because we weren’t able to dip into that data the way we wanted to, but it showed the promise way back when, around data, and email, and advertising.

And since then, I’ve been chasing that holy grail, and found myself here at BRIDGE, and being immersed in data, email, and marketing.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

That’s awesome. And I love that trip down memory lane. It kind of is a great setup for what we want to talk about today, helping people understand what they should do in this very important channel. So let’s start off with, if we can talk about any types of campaigns, or products, or what have you seen that tends to perform really well with email?

Matt Wolfrom:

It really boils down to the connection to the individual, to the person. Do people know your business? Do they understand? Do they have a relationship with your business? At the end of the day, no one really wants to get an email from a financial service, or something like that, that they don’t know, then ask them to do any type of form fill or whatnot, right?

Email is really important. You said the stats at the front end. There are, what is it, about 350 billion emails sent and received every day? It’s not going away. But at the end of the day, it’s around, are you understanding the consumer, and how are you delivering the message to them in the right way so they’re going to engage with that message?

So telecommunications, auto, those are industries that tend to do well, because people are on seasonal. If they’re looking for an auto sale, they may not know about it, and their lease is coming up, and they see that in their inbox, they’re going to investigate. Same with a telecom offer, they’re always looking to keep their costs low. And those are industries that do well.

Linda Harrison:

Are there some industries or products that don’t do well in email? Maybe the cost per new account is so much more than the profit that they’re making. Automotive, you can make a pretty good profit on a new car, right? But how about selling bubble gum? Is that a good use of email acquisition?

Matt Wolfrom:

No, that’s a great point. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s going to be the return on your ad spend that’s going to matter. And if you are hawking a product that is a low margin product, you got to make sure you’re managing that ad spend ratio, right? That return on ad spend ratio. So commodity products probably aren’t going to do very well on an email campaign like that, low margin business.

Or, an offer with an organization that you don’t know, asking you to do a form fill. That is a challenge. It’s one of the things that we see.

We run over a hundred thousand campaigns every year. They’re every channel, but we’re known for our email business. And what we’re seeing is that people are, while they rely on email, they’re being smarter about the engagements that you’re taking on email. And if they’re getting so many emails in the inbox every day, they’re going to take the ones that matter to them, and have a subject line that matters to them. But when they get in there, and you’re asking them to give a lot of information, there are studies that show that they’re bailing out on that.

Linda Harrison:

Just like anything else, consumers want it to be easy, right? You want the action to be easy, you want the reply to be easy. You want to just help people along in the sales funnel, just trying to bring them down to the end of the game. Not a huge form fill, or lots of questions that they’re asking, et cetera.

Matt Wolfrom:

It’s about time, a easy process, so the more time you’re asking the consumer to take, the less they’re going to give you. The more complex the steps are, the quicker they’re going to bounce. And if they don’t trust you, or understand you, they’re not going to engage.

So narratives are important, stories are important, visuals are important. Your entire marketing plan is important, so that consumer understands what your offer is, and why and how they should engage with you. Remember, email’s a channel, it’s not the entire marketing, overall marketing direction. It is supposed to be an execution of your overall marketing strategy.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

So that actually brings up something I wanted to touch on, which is email used in concert with other channels. Let’s say, for example, direct mail. I know both of you have got a wealth of experience in this area. Linda, can you give some examples of brands or campaigns that you’ve seen combine a multichannel approach successfully?

Linda Harrison:

Sure. We have done lots of tests with email with direct mail, email with social, email with social and direct mail. And I’ll tell you what, email lifts everything, right? It’s just that multitouch approach.

You can send an email before a direct mail piece comes out, or after a direct mail piece comes out. You can use it to augment your social campaigns. For direct mail, we see it typically lifts results by about 18%. Just campaign after campaign, we know it’s going to lift the results by about 18%.

Or digital, because typical digital campaigns have such low attribution rates, right? It’s 70%. But 70% of a small number is still a relatively small number, so it’s still lifting that result. It’s very cost-effective to help with your digital campaigns, but we see it as, again, another channel, another way to go after the market, another metric to look at.

Matt Wolfrom:

I couldn’t agree more. You see a 32% lift on multichannel campaigns. The more ability to touch a consumer with a message, and measure against that, you see a 32% improvement.

But let me step back for a second. I think the most important part of email, and multichannel campaigns, is the data, it’s understanding the person. Big believer in people-based marketing, and leaning into PII, but compliantly, and doing it within the regulation. BRIDGE is registered as a data broker where it needs to be, in California, Vermont, and elsewhere.

But we truly believe that it is understanding the person. Because if you can tell a marketer that, “I’m selling you, not data, but a person …” And take that the right way, sometimes that comes off when you hear it in your ear the wrong way. But if you can say that this person has told me that they’re open to marketing messages, because they have told me that they’ve opted in, and if I can tell you that I’m reaching that person … I’m going to do it anonymously, of course, but if I can show you on a report that a person took this action, not some opaque personic individual, who, who knows who it? Is it Matt? Is it Linda? Who is it taking that action? That is more, as a marketer, to me, that allows me to truly understand the efficacy of my campaigns. How to optimize my spend, where I need to put the dollars, or twist the knobs on the audiences for optimization.

We’re working with a home goods company that does cabinets, and they’re asking for a specific performance level, a CPL. We’re delivering that, because we’re able to target the individuals, and we worked with building lookalikes for them, and they’re people based, then we deliver across channels to those people. Have a visual dashboard that shows how we’re performing, and we have halved the CPLs that they wanted. So we’re performing so well, because we can optimize the media spend so efficiently, and effectively, and drive those people into conversion funnels for them, that we have halved their target CPL.

And that starts with the data. And it starts with targeting a person. And then being able to take those people across channels, from email, to native, to CTV, to streaming audio. And being able to measure against that, and show the marketer how you’re performing.

Linda Harrison:

We like to call it people-based marketing. So that instead of it’s a person, it’s people. Not like Soylent Green people, but people. We’re reaching the right people about the right things.

So let’s talk about best practices. What can you tell me about email permissioning? Can people really understand CAN-SPAM a little bit more, and how that works? Can you give us that high level view?

Matt Wolfrom:

I love the phrase Gerber eyes. I want to try to make this baby food, so we can all understand it, because we have a tendency to navel gaze and talk to ourselves sometimes. So, listen, email just celebrated its 50th anniversary, right? Came from the labs back in the ’70s, had a little bit of a renaissance in the ’80s, and it was really powerful in the ’90s, so it’s in its middle age.

People were getting, in 2003, getting inundated with, their inbox, with messages they didn’t want. And so this act, CAN-SPAM, was there to shut off those robocalls that you get on your mobile phone, and manage that. And some of the things you need to do is put a from, you can’t hide behind some sort of an opaque thing, you got to put a from in it. Who’s it from? So people know who it is.

And, by the way, if you’re a nefarious actor, you’re probably not going to want to put a from. So that’s the idea behind it, is to remove bad actors in an environment, by making them be more transparent.

Make sure that there’s an unsubscribe link. If you can’t unsubscribe, you’re not being transparent to that consumer. And so that’s one of the reasons to get the bad actors out.

And if you can’t provide a no reply, then you’re not going to be living up to the CAN-SPAM efforts, because, again, it’s all about, if someone can’t contact you, one, to complain, to ask a question, or get out of it, then you’re probably a bad actor, and you shouldn’t be in it. So that’s why they put all these simple, easy, human elements in there, so we can get rid of these bad actors. And that’s what CAN-SPAM really is, in the sense of it all, is to ensure that consumers have more transparency in who’s trying to talk to them.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

So to continue down the path of best practices, can you give us some pointers on what brands should be doing to make it to the inbox, which is increasingly difficult these days?

Matt Wolfrom:

Absolutely. Number one, manage your subject line. A lot of the Gmails of the world, and all that world, they’re so smart, they have so much technology, they’re scanning those subject lines, and throwing a lot of those into spam automatically. If it’s like, “Win now, free,” those types of things are just going to immediately get thrown into the spam filter.

Creative is important. Consumers want to engage with something that catches their eye, and is engaging, and is easy to and intuitive to follow. Don’t layer your creative with a bunch of links, and all these different nuances. Try to get to the point, simple, direct is better.

Personalize the email. You should know the person you’re targeting, so if there’s a way to target that person, the people that you’re trying to reach, that’s going to help.

Make sure the offer’s important. Again, we talked about it at the outset of this podcast, autos, if you have an auto offer, that’s going to be compelling. A switching offer for a telco, that’s compelling. If you have an offer for a new home goods, that’s compelling. Again, connect with the consumer.

Talked about it with CAN-SPAM, make sure people can opt out, have to have a clear unsubscribe. And link to reputable websites, because if those links are spidered, and they’re not going the right ways, you’re not going to deliver.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Thanks for that, Matt. All really good points. Let’s talk for a second about how open rates have changed. Do they mean anything anymore?

Matt Wolfrom:

No. Simply put, they don’t. And you can thank the walled gardens for that.

The walled gardens have been, for years, have been doing their best to step in between the marketer and the consumer. They want to dis-intermediate the relationship between the marketer and the consumer, so they can keep all that information for themselves, and manage that relationship with the consumer, and the marketer, so they can step in between them, and monetize it.

So open rates, we believe a antiquated metric for email. And it’s more around exposure. And the reason why open rates are not valuable, because Apple has done a really good job, and hats off, of using their technology to inflate open rates, because they just mark everything that comes into their email as an open.

We believe, if you’re starting with people, and understanding the individual, and the linkage between a email and a device … Because most people, we all know, we open our email, we open it on our mobile phones. If you open it on your desktop, it’s because you’re working. But your personal email engagement is most likely on your phone, a majority of the time.

And if you can link to that, and understand that individual, then you can have a better sense of who’s being exposed to your message, and then engaging with your message in an email environment. We think those metrics are more valuable than the old opens and click throughs.

Linda Harrison:

Plus, then, today, you don’t have to open an email to look at it. I can preview it, right? I can see the subject line, I can see the pre-header text, and I could get a pretty good idea of what it’s about. And then maybe if I’m a suspicious type person, which I might be, you can type in a URL for something, right? And see if that’s a real offer, if that’s a real thing, or find out more. So I think open rates don’t matter as well. It’s really conversions, it’s really engagement. It’s all those other things.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Last real question, and then we’ll shift over to the fun question. This question is for both of you, can you tell us about the most interesting or funnest campaign you’ve seen? Tell me about your favorite.

Linda Harrison:

How about a crazy one we did. It’s for an oversized iPad for your grandparents. Well, grandma and grandpa are maybe not as engaged in email. And, they might not want to admit that they would need this oversized iPad. So it just didn’t really perform that well.

It kind of reminded me of the Clint Eastwood movie, it’s named after some car, I can’t remember the name of it, but his children buy him like a gigantic remote control, and a gigantic telephone. And this reminds me of that, where it’s like a gigantic thing that just makes them feel old. What about you, Matt?

Matt Wolfrom:

So it’s a horror story … By the way, it’s Gran Torino, I think you’re thinking about, for Clint Eastwood.

Linda Harrison:

Thank you.

Matt Wolfrom:

Yes. Yeah. We were approached by an organization that wanted to get people into gold, to buy gold. And they wanted to use email to target individuals to … Their belief is that the Boomers of the world were active on email, and therefore they want to go into a … Because, I’m not kidding, that Joe Biden was president, that the world was going to end, and therefore get your money into gold, and that’s how we’re going to go about doing it. Counsel as we will, please don’t do this, this is not what you want to do. You want to do X, Y, and Z. And then, of course, there was the, well, the defeat of pushing forward into email. Well, it performed as well as we could expected, there were zero conversions, and zero form fills, because no one wanted to give their information on trying to get into gold on an email.

Linda Harrison:

I’m not saying she’s a gold digger.

Matt Wolfrom:

There you go. That’s it.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Maybe that’s how they should have created the audience.

Matt Wolfrom:

Exactly. But without any JavaScript, or flash, because those get stripped out. But, anyway …

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Love it. All right. So final question. We always like to end on a fun note. We’re recording this late in summer, and it is certainly been a hot summer. So for many of us, summer means vacation. So, Matt, where has your favorite vacation been?

Matt Wolfrom:

Italy. I spent a month in Italy with my wife, in the summer, not recently, obviously, because I wouldn’t be probably speaking so highly given the temperatures. But, Italy was, by far, amazing. And I’ve gone back with my family, and my son’s played soccer there. I can’t even speak highly enough of the time I spent in Italy, from Rome, to Capri, Positano, Florence, and Lake Como, for a month, can’t knock that.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Sounds amazing. Linda, what about-

Linda Harrison:

Lorel, you’ve been to Italy, haven’t you?

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

A little bit. We used to live there, so, yeah, every place you mentioned is-

Matt Wolfrom:

Where? Where did you live?

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Pisa.

Matt Wolfrom:

Oh, okay.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Yeah. Yep. It’s kind of funny. And when you live there, you don’t even think to go visit the touristy sites, until somebody comes to visit, because you walk by every day. And so you’re like, “Oh yeah, there’s the tower. Okay.” But, yeah, it was pretty awesome.

Matt Wolfrom:

Yeah, my wife lived in Florence for a year, so that’s why we went.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

Nice.

Matt Wolfrom:

But I know your feeling about tourist traps. When I lived in San Francisco, I went to Alcatraz probably five times, because five people came to visit, and they wanted to go to Alcatraz.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

That’s it. Linda, what about you, favorite summer vacation?

Linda Harrison:

I’m really kind of a staycation girl. I live on a lake, so I can go out on the lake anytime I want, go out on the boat. And so I kind of live the dream that way. But I spend a lot of my summertime also watering my garden. So every other morning I have to water, and do all that kind of stuff, and so I listen to a lot of podcasts while I water.

Matt Wolfrom:

So what I gathered from that is, number one, self-sufficient. A lot of food is going to be there, so I know where I’m going if the zombie apocalypse comes. Want to send your address?

Linda Harrison:

Come on over. Come on over.

Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:

And Linda’s an amazing chef, so I think there will be a long line of people headed to Linda’s house that day. All right. Thank you both so much. This has been a great conversation. And thank you to all our listeners. We will catch you next time.