Transcription
Let's go. Got lift off. Yeah. How's it going? Yeah, good. How are you? All right. I've been better. Um, you already know why I'm not at 100% at the moment and uh, it's it's because of my haircut. Yeah. Do Do you want to talk about that a little bit and explore it? Cuz some people will be listening and not watching. Yeah, sure. Yeah.
I mean, just just think like an extreme Peaky Blinders haircut that you didn't ask for. And that's what I was given yesterday at the hairdresser who ordinarily is a great hairdresser but I think was having an off day. Um, so yeah, it's I mean for anyone watching, I'm doing a little side to side. It's just like incredibly extreme. It's very, very short on the sides and back, which I'm not used to and then really still quite long on the top. So it's uh, it's not great. You know, it's it, whatever. People who have never seen me before like you say Jamie, they're not going to notice. They're going to think this is just my style and I can live with that. But you know that feeling, everyone everyone I think has had a bad haircut at some point and of course, being incredibly English, I'm just like, yeah, that's perfect, thank you. And you know, just sitting there in a chair sort of watching watching it unfold and feeling powerless to the situation. Is you get all like, cuz I've I've had that before. Did you get like a bit like hot and tingly and like a little bit? I I have that. It's like, oh crap, like something's happening that I don't have control of here a bit.
The thing is, is that I have I have had that feeling before and then the haircuts turned out all right. So I think part of me was holding on to the fact that, okay, I've been here before and actually it's been all right. He's the professional. He knows what he's doing. This will be fine in the end. Um, I think I was trying to tell myself that. Um, so I didn't I know that hot and tingly feeling. Um, but I didn't I didn't necessarily have that. But it then he got the mirror out and, you know, did the whole 360 thing and yeah, I could see like the contours of my skull, which I've never seen before. So, you've had a non-consensual skin fade. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. There's got to be a support line for that somewhere. Yeah. Um, yeah, we meet on Thursdays. Yeah. As as our or my mentor or our mentor said yesterday, it makes you look hard. So, um, true. Just embrace that. True. Yeah, that's not necessarily the uh, the vibe I want to give off, but you know, the streets are only getting meaner, Jamie, so maybe it's not a bad thing. Um, maybe you need to go hang out on Prince of Wales Road here in Norwich. Yeah, exactly. Just like loiter about and just stare people down a little bit.
Do you want to know good facts about Prince of Wales Road? Go on then. I don't know if this is still the case, but when I first moved to Norwich, Prince of Wales Road had the highest second had the second highest crime rate of any street in the UK. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. So, there I think there was a street in Peckham that had a higher crime rate, but Prince of Wales Road was second, which is crazy given that at the time that I moved to Norwich, Norwich as a city had the lowest crime rate of any city in the UK as well. So, those two facts combined, it's like all the crime in Norwich happened down Prince Wales Road. Yeah. And probably mostly on a Friday and Saturday night. Yeah. Yeah. We're not talking serious crimes here, you know. We're not talking murders. We're talking generally people just pissing in public and getting into scraps and that kind of thing. Yeah.
I think um when I cuz I'm obviously, you know, I moved to Norwich like nearly 2 years ago. Um, and my brother was upset that I was moving to Norwich and so he was trying to Google things that were bad about Norwich and he Yeah. And one of the facts he came out with was like, uh, do you know Norwich is the most crime-ridden city in Norfolk? And I was like, hang on, is it the only city in Norfolk? Um, but I I don't know if King's Lynn counts. Does it is that a city? Uh, no. I think it's a town. Um, so yeah, but also what your brother has done there is I think an example of what basically every B2B provider does, which is they kind of they manage to create some sort of, we're the best at this, but actually logically they're the only one doing it. Yeah. It's like how we how we say we're the the fastest growing newsletter agency in the UK. It turns out there aren't actually that many newsletter agencies in the UK. It's genius. It's the genius of marketing. Yeah. If you're in a race of one, you're always going to be the fastest. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
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Okay, cool. Right, let's stop chatting nonsense. So, we wanted to do this episode. So, we went to the Mailchimp conference last week, which was called Forward Something. Actually, it was FWD. FWD, which is the trendy way of saying forward. Yeah, I actually think um that had unintended consequences. Whenever I had marketing communications from Mailchimp about that, the subject lines always started FWD at colon. Yeah. And so, yeah, it is smart, but also Gmail started like collapsing conversations and started doing weird things because it had really, I think, uh, but anyway, it were forwards. Yeah, I'd say always um, they always do a bit of wordplay on their conferences. Like last year it was like from here to there. Um, yes, it was um, I went to. But yeah, so we what James and I are going to quickly do in this episode is we're going to talk about two significant things that we took away from that event each. So four in total. Uh, we're going to discuss those a little bit. We're going to talk about why we might agree or disagree with that or the merits of those arguments. And hopefully the benefit for you as a listener is that within about 15 minutes, you'll have uh taken away what some of the key things from the Mailchimp conference without having actually gone. Uh, and all you would have missed is seeing Jamie Lang's face in real life and Fern Cotton. Uh, the free drinks, free coffee, free ice cream. Um, the Mailchimp floral statue of the actual monkey that had its backside bare. It was the juiciest bum you've ever seen. I don't know who designed that and thought, let's just make the bum even juicier, but uh, it was, you know, you don't usually see the Mailchimp's full body, so it was it was kind of weird to see that. I think his name is Fred or Freddy. Uh, and Freddy's packing, let me tell you that much in in the backside area. So, me and James obviously took some selfies with that backside. Um, so, you know, it that's probably worth the ticket price alone, but we're also going to give you some of the takeaways from some of the keynotes uh during that during that event. So, we do you want to let's start with um the Mailchimp keynote. Um, I think that's a good place to start, right? Since it was a Mailchimp conference. Yeah, for sure. What did you what did you take from that, Jamie?
So I think that there there was an announcement they what they're aiming to do is build an Intuit platform or an Intuit dashboard where your Intuit apps can all talk to each other. So, your your QuickBooks and your Mailchimp are talking to each other. And I think the the reason they want to do that is they're making this big move towards um data um and making data available to arm people with the um the data that they need to be able to make good decisions for their business. Um, and so their aim is to to bring in integrations, to bring in um to bring in um um this dashboard that links their apps together, but also bring in some AI as well, overlay with that to help people make quick uh and impactful decisions for their business. That that was the the headline, right? And we aren't sponsored by Mailchimp yet, unless they want to sponsor this this uh episode in in um in hindsight. But that was the main takeaway. Um, and I think that a couple of the other things there that that they mentioned were the sheer um level of investment that they're putting into into the platform as well. Um, you know, there's there's these big figures being flown around in terms of millions or billions um that they're putting back into the platform to reinvest to improve it to add all these extra features. Um, and you know there's I can't remember it was like there was thousands of thousands of tweaks made to the platform in the past few months or something uh since the start of the year. So, you know, all very exciting stuff that you expect to hear from someone who's running a conference and they're doing the opening keynote, you know, um it was um a little bit kind of Steve Jobs or Microsoft or Bill Gates, you know, with the music and the exciting announcement and the getting trying to get the crowd excited about these announcements when Yeah, I think the takeaway was the the data.
Yeah, I'm I'm actually disappointed at the lack of cringe um at this conference. I was really hoping for more cringe-worthy moments and actually everyone conducted themselves really well and kind of got it. They were self-aware enough to kind of understand for the most part that, you know, this is a conference. We're all here for um professional reasons. Let's not get too carried away. Um, but yeah, the word exciting was used on several occasions during this talk. I think you know Jamie, Mailchimp, like a lot of these big legacy softwares has been guilty of sort of retrofitting features onto a platform that was never designed to support those features in the first place. You know, it it has started to feel a little bit clunky in recent years because they will kind of just bolt things on and you end up with this somewhat unintuitive platform that it makes it quite difficult to find particular things that you're looking for. So, I think um it's good that they are sort of uh not starting from scratch, but that they're it sounds like they're very much creating a a separate platform to support this rather than sort of trying to shoehorn it into the pre-existing Mailchimp platform that we're used to. Um, so that was a relief to hear. I think time will tell whether um with these additional integrations with this with this kind of union between the Intuit platforms that it will provide marketers with the tools that they need to really elevate their email game. I would say that the the biggest criticism leveled at Mailchimp is that they don't provide users with enough functionality to do what other rival platforms can do. Um, particularly where commerce is concerned. Um, so you know, will this be the the game changer they're hoping it will be? Is it going to persuade people to migrate from traditionally more sophisticated platforms to Mailchimp? Um, you know, I I'm not necessarily convinced that it will. Uh, but it's cool that they are thinking from a more sophisticated perspective here and seem to be going after a slightly more sophisticated email sender than perhaps the the Mailchimp of say 2015, which was very much about, you know, getting those small businesses, those small business owners who um weren't particularly au fait with the tech and were kind of happy with that fact. Yeah.
I think one thing that I'd want to make sure or not make sure, who am I to say is that I should be making sure, but one thing I would like to see doesn't get lost is if we if we have more data available to us that we that users aren't then paralyzed with indecision with what to do. Um, and that if we then layer in AI as well, that we aren't losing um creativity and original thought either. And, you know, people who run businesses and people who run marketing marketing departments um should feel liberated by having the data that they have available and the AI tools that they have available. They shouldn't feel constricted or that they're producing lesser quality work because of those tools. Um, so I would like to see make sure I'd like to see that that doesn't happen. Yeah. Yeah. Um, we Okay. The Do you want to take one next or the next takeaway? Yeah.
No, I I um I had a nice segue actually, which is that speaking of AI, Tom Tom Goodwin, the the the final speaker of the day, um said something interesting, which is that AI has become a marketing term, which is is so true, isn't it? Like AI is is kind of being slapped on everything. Um, you know, the features that existed way before ChatGPT are suddenly AI features. Um, you know, a lot of the time I think AI has sort of been bastardized as a term. to basically mean anything that's automated or um, you know, um or or that uses data to draw insights. Um, that by the technical definition is not artificial intelligence. But that that's not the main takeaway that I had from um Tom's talk. But I I I wanted to mention that cuz I do feel like whenever you go to these conferences now, it's almost like Mailchimp has an obligation to talk about how they're integrating AI into their platform. I'm not necessarily sure that they've done a great job of doing that so far. I would say that for every email service provider, by the way. I don't think any anyone's really mastered it yet, but that pressure to include it in their platforms has has led to these kind of slightly substandard integrations that nobody actually uses. Um, the thing that I liked most about Tom's talk was um his emphasis on um marketing to normal people and remembering kind of how a normal human behaves in relation to brand messaging. Um, and I love this Jamie because, you know, as with a lot of humans, I like the points that kind of reaffirm the beliefs that I already have going into something like this. Um, and I felt there were a couple of moments uh across the day where I was like, this is what we've been saying. Um, and one of them is this idea that, yeah, something that we're we're often having to tell our clients is that, you know, people aren't orientating their their days or their weeks around the messaging that you have to give them. So, you know, there's often a hesitancy that brands have when it comes to sending too many emails, for example, or repeating the same message on LinkedIn and through a newsletter, as though there are hordes of people that are irritated or put out by the fact that they're getting the same messaging twice. Of course, the reality is you're probably only making one impression if you're lucky with your target audience. Um, and uh, you know, people need to stop believing that um when someone goes to bed at night that they're they're thinking as they drift off to sleep like, oh, I wonder what, you know, Lexus are going to um email me with tomorrow or I wonder what. He used the example of a he's looking to buy a car, which is probably why Lexus popped into my head um and he had like eight emails from this car vendor after submitting an inquiry um within, you know, I think it like six or seven days. Um, and this like absolute uh sort of bombardment that he then had to deal with. And, you know, it was all it was all things like follow us on socials, follow us on socials, leave us a review, you know, it was all asking, you know, like give us something, do this thing for us and kind of forgetting the point that like people, normal people who interact with brands and want to buy something, probably aren't that interested in following you on socials. You know, they're probably not that interested in spending their time leaving you a review. Um, particularly when they haven't even bought something from you. So, this constant um demand that brands put on recipients to like give them stuff, to give them affirmation, to give them reviews, to follow them on socials, to reply um is all assuming that like we're the center of their universe. And I just I really like the way I'm probably butchering the eloquence that Tom gave to this, but I really like this reminder, this this almost like this humbling reminder that brands are not that important to the average person that no nobody's day has been ruined or made by your emails. And you should remember that when you're sending your email.
Yeah, I like that. And I think um it is a little bit kind of like, you know, not that he said this, but uh, you know, we need to get out of our own asses a little bit and just think about, you know, the the role that we actually play in in people's lives when we when we're sending marketing communications and, you know, that plays a little bit into what we speak speak about so often, which is about providing value to people and to, you know, how do we make someone's day better um, you know, or, you know, how can we keep the reader in mind when we write our emails. M um, you you spoke a little bit there about um impressions and that was something that that an earlier speaker, Deloquist, was talking about in in his talk, which was around, you know, impressions in the inbox and that was one thing that I took away and I'm still kind of mulling over in my mind um at the moment and about the significance of people who receive an email but don't open it. The significance of the of that impression and how we so often will chase impressions on uh social media, we chase impressions on adverts, TV, uh, we're chasing impressions in every single marketing channel, but we never consider impressions in the inbox as a as a as a metric. Um, and I thought that was really interesting. Um, I think it's something that we we have to be careful about because we're almost saying then we can't just chase impressions of the inbox uh and not consider other metrics because what we don't want is we don't want an email list that's giving us a 10 a 10% open rate and we're just saying, "Oh, well, that's fine. Think of all the impressions we're getting." Uh, we have to balance it. And, you know, that's we always say here at the inbox club, we have to balance open rates with click rates and that we should never take one metric in isolation, but we should take all of the metrics and think about the story that they're telling us. Um, but I thought that was really interesting. I hadn't necessarily thought about impressions in. I agree. I agree.
And it it it's it's a lovely point for an email marketer because it it it means that even even if open rates are low, there's still an argument to be made that it's it's worthwhile sending emails, which is is always helpful. It's always nice to have that in our, you know, in our um artillery. I think, you know, for me, it's this idea that like I think Jamie, you and I are used to talking about email in a sense that an open is an impression and then a click is an interaction. And Deloquist, I I suppose, is is making the point that a send is a um is an impression and an open is a is an interaction, the first interaction, and then a click is another interaction after that. Um, and yeah, he actually made the point that if you are emailing a segment that doesn't engage with your emails, i.e. doesn't open them. Um, that actually there is a that there's an argument that you should be you should still be emailing that demographic every single week, which definitely goes against the conventional wisdom of uh of email marketing, which in general says, okay, you know, target that that that segment with some re-engagement stuff, but if they're still not engaging, unsubscribe them, leave them alone. You know, why are you paying to reach those people? Um, you know, why are you potentially impacting your deliverability in order to to reach those people? And uh, yeah, Deloquist was saying, "Oh, look, you know, you you're still you're still being seen. The likelihood is you're still being seen by them. Um, you know, they're still having to register in their brains that you've sent them an email and then they're choosing to ignore it and that impression might still make an impact." Um, it's quite a controversial one, Jamie, isn't it? Because you know, we do we do tend to preach that, you know, generally um, if people are ignoring your emails or uh, you know, they're not opening them as far as the data is concerned, that those people are lost causes to to some, you know, you can try and win them back, but it's probably not going to happen. I I'm not necessarily convinced by it personally because I I do think, you know, spam folders exist, promotions folders exist. There is a high chance that a lot of people not opening your emails are doing so because they are actually not seeing them, not that they are seeing them and then kind of making a conscious decision to not open. Um, so yeah, I'm not entirely convinced. Um, it's not something that we're going to be rolling out to our clients anytime soon, like let's start emailing your unengaged segment every week. Um, but I do think what it what it does drive home for me is that there is a there is a value in sending emails even if your open rate needs improving. And, you know, I think a lot of people are dispirited by the fact that maybe they're only getting 15, 20% opens, that doesn't mean you're being seen by 15, 20% of your list. Yeah. But it also doesn't mean you're being seen by 85 to 80% of, you know, the rest of them either, you know.
Indeed. Because you like you said, I think particularly for um for consumer-facing brands like and you're emailing end users who have promotion tabs or social tabs in in Gmail um, you know, there there are emails I don't see every single email I get so I'm not there's not an impression that's being counted there or or, you know, so just like you said, so I think um I think for me the takeaway and my advice, cuz I am in a position where I can offer email marketing advice, is that we we won't necessarily change any of our practices uh because we now have been told about impressions or or informed about impressions. But what we can do is we say, okay, well, we know what best practices and we we will stick to those. But also it it we think about, okay, for our clients, I would say benchmarking as an agency, we get anywhere between 50 and 60% open rates, right? When we report that in the future, we might say, okay, well, we have to also remember that the 50 to 40% 40 to 50% that didn't open, there's still some value there, you know, there's still some value, there's still some impressions being made, but what it won't do is it won't wash away all of our best practices and it won't change fundamentally what we do. It's maybe just how we think about the people that aren't opening, that that's still valuable. I think we still need to have uh very clear uh engagement and re-engagement and sunset parameters in place. Um, and for me, that could be 90 days, it could be 120 days, it could be 150 days, whatever that is. It's different for different businesses and brands. Um, and we should still stick to that those parameters, but it can change our thinking about how uh our emails are perceived even if they're not opened. Yeah, absolutely. No, I like that.
Um, yeah, I think a final thing for me was there were, as Jamie alluded to earlier, quite a lot of celebrities um speaking at this at this conference. Jamie Lang and Fern Cotton did like a kind of conversation on stage and Joe Wicks, the Body Coach as he's known to some, was part of a panel discussion in the morning. Um, and I really liked what Joe brought to the stage to be honest with you because I felt he was he was he was a departure from the kind of the marketing brain. He he came very humble and sort of, you know, this is what I do cuz it just makes sense to me. And, you know, I I I kind of liked his honesty when it came to like how he doesn't really use data to make his decisions, but prefers to nurture these long-term relationships with his followers. Um, and that seems to be working for him because at one point, Jamie, he kind of just casually dropped in the fact that he has a million subscribers on his newsletter. And I think again, this totally reinforced what um we've said in previous episodes. And I would urge you if you haven't listened to go back to our creator specials. We did a three-part trilogy um a couple of months ago. Um, but in that we talk about the value of creators um owning their data and Joe spoke really well about that and said, you know, one frustration that he's had with Instagram, which is his primary platform at the moment, is that he can post a story and one day he'll get 300,000 um impressions on that story. He'll post the next day and for no reason whatsoever, he's getting under a h 100,000, which obviously these are still eye-watering numbers for a lot of people, but, you know, the fact that he will see, you know, this huge decline in impressions for for no apparent reason, is really frustrating to him. He knows that if he sends a newsletter, he's going to get a 50% open rate, which by the way, if you've got a million subscribers, is incredible. It's relatively low effort. He sends it once a week and he's he's reaching half a million people every time he does that. And he's not monetizing it, Jamie, which is remarkable. You know, I I guess indirectly it will be monetized because, you know, it we've just talked about the value of impressions and people might go and buy one of his books having read one of his newsletters, but he's not um monetizing it in some of the ways that we discussed in our creative specials. Um, but still, like amazing that he he he he he made an effort to talk about how valuable he finds um email marketing and I think I think at the moment he's he's there are many creators talking about that. I think in a year or two, every creator is going to be talking about it.
Yeah, I agree. Um, yeah, and Joe Wicks, if you're listening because you probably are. Um, if you want if you want to monetize your newsletter and also stay true to who you are, the inbox club, we're your guys. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's a crazy figure. You know, I there can't be many many creators out there with a newsletter list with 100 sorry, with a million subscribers. That's a crazy figure. Yeah.
I think I think it's it's it's a crazy figure, but also a testament to the fact that if you just put a little bit of effort into growing a list as a creator, you can you can reach stratospheric numbers. Not relatively easily. I'm not saying it's an easy job for him, but it's not like he's pushing his newsletter aggressively every time he he posts some content. He's just built that up over the years. And remember, Joe Wicks has been going for quite a long time. You know, he was massive in COVID, but he was he was creating content on these platforms way before COVID. So, he's been going for a while. But, you know, he's just built that list up over the years. He he said he he sends like a super simple thing. He has like a workout on there. He'll link to a YouTube video or something like that, maybe a recipe. Um, that's all it is. Nothing too crazy. Repurposing stuff that he's probably already posted elsewhere. And, um, you know, he's reaching half a million people every time he he does that, which is amazing. Yeah, it is.
Okay, cool. I mean, we promised a 20-minute episode. We were at 27 minutes. Um, so sorry listeners, but they uh it's testament to to the Mailchimp conference. It is a high quality conference. Um, I'm not being paid to say this. I I will always go to it. Um, I think because it's the the talks are good, the the speakers are high quality, you get to see some celebs, which is nice, but also they do a great job of looking after you throughout the day as well. Um, and, you know, it's it's got a kind of premium feel around it, which is which is nice. So, the food was really good. Yeah, food was really good. Food was good. Uh, and you get to see Freddy the Mailchimp's butt um as well. So, uh, yeah, perfect. Check it out. It It happens every year. Um, so check it out for 26. But thanks for listening. Cheers.
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