Email is only for people over a certain age, right? Wrong! Both of the email whiz kids from CodeCrew are younger than email itself, but they make a convincing case for the business value of the channel. Alex Malone and Andrei Marin (aka Dr. Drei) and their email marketing agency team at CodeCrew have hit an average of 1,300% ROI across a huge range of clients. Beneath the modest whiz-kid team demeanor, Alex and Andrei drive results through a clear grasp of marketing fundamentals. Tell a great story. Be useful. Be interesting. Be valuable. You're not fooling anybody — and be yourself. Steve Job ..read more

Some business books are dashed off to burnish credentials, as if “thought leadership” is a matter of page count. Others — the ones to read, learn from, and read again — distill hard-won, genuine expertise in a field that the author genuinely cares about. Kath Pay is the latter kind, and her book (and company) Holistic Email Marketing is most definitely one to read and learn from. She’s also a terrific podcast guest, as you’ll see in this episode of The Future Of Email. In the book, Kath characterizes email marketing with 3 legs — marketing principles, technology and creativity. All three come ..read more

Missing the big wave versus catching it can be a matter of inches and an extra push to make or break the ride of a lifetime. Shortwave co-founder Jacob Wenger may not be a surfer, but he and his colleagues look to have caught the big wave after years of hard paddling. The wave in this case is the "AI moment" embodied in the ChatGPT buzz; Shortwave's particular ride is putting AI to work on that tough, tough problem called email. Shortwave's tag line is "intelligent email, powered by AI." The Shortwave app (mobile and desktop) looks like an email client, but acts more like an email assistant wi ..read more

News flash: your email team is overworked. Not because they're not really good at the jobs involved (they are), but because email marketing is NOT "hit send." This conversation with industry expert Luke Glasner goes deep into the details of what makes email marketing so tough — the technical details (15,000+ email clients), the data details (opens and clicks aren't what you think), and the organizational alignment. Luke says it well — email marketing is really a software development job. Every email that lands in an inbox is a complicated digital artifact. Creating millions of those a month ai ..read more

Guest Adeola Sole — fan of all things email — Zoomed in from London to join host Matthew Dunn for this conversation about email, CRM, AI, and being nice to Siri (or not). Adeola is a super-visible figure in the UK/US email marketing industry, speaking, moderating and consulting on email strategy. While it's easy to put "UK/US" together, this conversation delves a good bit into what's different about marketing in general, and email in particular, between those two markets. As Adeola shares, UK and EU consumers usually have and use WhatsApp; by contrast, there's no single widely-used messaging a ..read more

As a little girl, Jessica Totillo Coster slept in her new shoes. As she shares in this fun conversation about e-commerce, e-fashion and email, she was destined for this. As the head of Ecommerce Badassery, Jessica helps other businesses use the lessons that she, Zappos and other e-commerce pioneers learned the hard way. As she says, "One of the things that I discovered very early on: most small business entrepreneurs who sell physical products are not utilizing email to its fullest potential at all. I'm here to teach you all day long on the importance of it and get you started." Jessica is del ..read more

With over 25 years in privacy law, time in Federal service, and a decade of close with with the largest email senders and providers, ArentFox Schiff partner Reed Freeman knows a thing or two about the digital domain and privacy. If you think your company is paying plenty of attention to complying with privacy laws...you may want to listen to this. If you don't...you may want to listen to this! Reed shares some fascinating examples of the intended and unintended consequences in this fast-moving space. Do you record calls? Potential privacy issue. Is your opt-in easy and your opt-out difficult ..read more

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 dubio ..read more

How email actually flows around the globe, to the tune of 300+ billion messages a day, is a story that may never be fully told. Brian Minick, COO at ZeroBounce, certainly knows a big chunk of the story. ZeroBounce' lead line is "email validation", but the full range of the things they do for some of the largest companies in the world goes way beyond email validation. Brian joined host Matthew Dunn to talk about the complex back-end world of email in some depth. They cover deliverability, validation, SPAM, Gmail, open rates, reputation, AI and even "known complainers". Brian has a deeply inform ..read more

With 5 books and 2 full-time podcasts on ecommerce bearing her name, it's fair to label Chloe Thomas as an expert in the space. This conversation about ecommerce, email and marketing proves it. It's also fun! Chloe and host Matthew Dunn trade observations about the incredible evolution of e-everything — commerce, marketing, mail and more. Shopify gets tossed back and forth, along with Klaviyo and Amazon. There's also a tiny bit of wandering down memory lane — stone knives and payment gateways kind of stuff ..read more