ChatGPT, deliverability, email marketing and everything all at once with Guilda Hilaire and Naomi West

00:00:05

Eric Trinidad: Hello and welcome to Emails Not Dead. My name is Eric and with me as always, my host and IRL brochaco JT. How's it going?

00:00:16

Jonathan Torres: Doing all right? Doing good.

00:00:17

Eric Trinidad: Good, good. Can you believe it, man? Four seasons up, four seasons down. Here we are at the tail end of this season. How do you feel, man?

00:00:25

Jonathan Torres: Excited to talk, to discuss, to really have more of an open conversation than I think we normally have. A lot of times it's like, hey, like, you know, what's experiences and what's tips. And now it's like, Hey, what does the future look like and how do we adapt to the future world?

00:00:40

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, well, we have a couple great individuals here to discuss that the future is now. Guilda Hilaire of Salesforce, Director of Product Marketing, and Naomi West, of Parcel.io , Senior Email and Lifecycle Marketer. Welcome. Thank y'all for joining us.

00:00:54

Naomi West: Thanks for having us.

00:00:55

Guilda Hilaire: Happy to be here with the best team ever.

00:00:58

Jonathan Torres: Aww thank you!

00:01:04

Eric Trinidad: Making this brown man turn red. Thank you so much. Well, just so the folks at home know a little bit about y'all, do you mind giving us, like, a brief rundown? How long have you been in the email game? Guilda, I'll give you the floor first.

00:01:16

Guilda Hilaire: Man. I've been in the email game since the Flintstone age.

00:01:24

Guilda Hilaire: When we were designing emails on rocks.

00:01:28

Jonathan Torres: Stone tablet one, I like it.

00:01:31

Eric Trinidad: Mark them as spam, you got to crush the rock.

00:01:34

Guilda Hilaire: Computers are black and white and you unplug and it would stop working. Wow I would say over 18 years I guess now. But at Salesforce it's about four years. And before that I was a customer for 15 years when I really started dipping into the email space so close to 18, 20 years, which is embarrassing to say because it shows age.

00:01:55

Jonathan Torres: I get that. I understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's fine.

00:02:01

Eric Trinidad: And you Naomi?

00:02:02

Naomi West: I have been only doing email since 2015. I will say I thought I discovered email automation in that first role that I had where I could just set emails to send to people automatically and I was like, Why has nobody told me about this and I've been hooked ever since, which is super fair. But yeah, primarily works both kind of in-house as a lifecycle marketer as well as on the vendor ESP side. So got to work on a lot of fun projects.

00:02:30

Jonathan Torres: Nice. That's awesome. We're talking about the general topic and the hot topic at the moment and I feel like it comes and goes as adjustments get made and as new things start popping up with it. But you know, automation, AI full on, you know, ChatGPT, I forget the other one that's out there now, there's so many of them that are popping up every day. It's evolving, constantly evolving. So it's just it's the thing and we know that it's taking over in some ways in the email space and it's being utilized in different ways in the email space. We want to just like talk through it. Let's just unpack a little bit here. So one of the things that I was saying as we were prepping to start recording is that, you know, I feel very attached to AI because it was my senior year in high school when The Matrix came out. And I you know, I saw it. It scared me. I felt like, okay, cool. At the very least, you know, we're two lifetimes away, so I will be long gone before we start making machines that think. Here we are on the precipice of that. They're not quite thinking yet. They're definitely learning though, and that is a little scary to me. But again, impressions are a different thing. That's the where I came from. But what do we think about it now? Like, you know, and kind of i'll open the floor with that? Like anybody want to say any opening statements along those lines?

00:03:46

Guilda Hilaire: I know. I think for me it's like it's scary, it's good and bad. I think for me, it's wow, there's a lot happening, right? Yeah. How do we stay ahead? And it feels like we're running this marathon, like this 4x4 marathon. And when we finally are learning something, right, we've handed the baton. We're like, Yes, we get it. Then somebody hands us another baton. Like, okay, now I need you to figure this thing out because we're all drinking the same Kool-Aid. So figure this thing out and you're like, okay, but I'm still wrapping up this first leg of the race, but no problem. I'll just continue running this. To me, it's like, wow, it's great because we're pushing our talent, but then it we're burning out at the same time, which is good I guess? You know, right? It's like. Yeah, it's like a good time to be a marketer and email marketer. I have to agree that's an excellent time. We're pushing our talents, but it's also a scary time because we're burning out, trying to push our knowledge and our talent.

00:04:52

Naomi West: I was going to say, just to completely repeat that, it is an amazing time to be an email marketer, especially like a junior email marketer coming in. You can have such an amazing opportunity in front of you to discover this AI tool set that maybe is completely overwhelming to people like Guilda and myself because we've been doing it for a while, and maybe that fresh perspective of like a junior email marketer is what we need to like really kick it into gear. I am overwhelmed personally with the amount of AI tools in front of me. I had a fellow marketer forward me a list. He was like, "this is an amazing most of our tools. It's completely wowed me." And I was like, oh okay. And he sent me it. Forwarded me the email and it's like 10 to 15 different tools. All like, dash great for subject line, dash great for, you know, user profile creation, dash great for image. And I'm like, I don't know where to look. Which one do I click on first? Like, what are my needs? I don't even know what my problem is that I need solved right now. So what AI tool do I go with?

00:05:55

Guilda Hilaire: Who am I?

00:05:58

Naomi West: Literally like, yeah, I have a lot of questions here. So it's an amazing time to be an email marketer. I think a lot of businesses are starting to realize how amazing the channel is, especially with the tumultuous social media channels going on. And you know, maybe they're not as reliable for pulling in leads and customers as they were before, but email is a steady channel, so I'm glad that there are now resources being put into dedicated email marketing positions and lifecycle roles, and that's something I've noticed that, yeah, while this AI stuff is really just free shaping things a little bit.

00:06:34

Eric Trinidad: You brought up a good point of it being like just another tool in your toolbox, right? Just to kind of help you along the way. But it's also a little bit scary, like Guilda was saying, like the different things that you're able to do and tell it to do and for it to produce? Is it kind of like the one ring, right? Can it be yielded for good or are we going to be, you know, is it eventually just turning us over to evil and like there's no really no wielding it. It's it's just going to be going that way. How do you feel?

00:07:01

Naomi West: My issue with it is it's pitched as this really easy thing to integrate into your workflow like AI should be easy and save you time. And I spend hours sitting in front of ChatGPT just trying to think of a prompt or editing copy that it's spit out because it's so far from the tone that I needed it to be that I have to completely change every word. I'm sure it could be writing later on, but I have had issues with how time consuming it is and how off it can be that I'd rather just do it myself at the end of the day, when it comes to like copywriting and the image gen thing, I don't have a need for that in my workflow, so I haven't really played around with that. I always wonder with the image generation, I'm like, before AI, what were you doing? Were you sourcing your own pictures from stock websites or like creating them yourself like it's crazy how it's taken off.

00:08:03

Jonathan Torres: That's one of the crazy uses that like, I just don't know, especially within the email space. And I think it also really just depends. And this is the same across the board for so many things within email and even when you're talking about marketing through email is what is the, the brand image, Right? Like how the brand is going to communicate. And I think, you know, using those AI pictures, like that's definitely going to be a for a particular brand type or customer type or, you know, something that's key that's going to fit that. And I just don't know what the use is there when it comes to the rest of it, like kind of writing the emails for people. And I think the thing is, is that like and this is kind of the theme that I'm constantly hearing is that it's about value also, right? So as a marketer, somebody who's doing that, who's creating the voice of a brand through email, it's so valuable to have somebody in that spot when you can do it. So thing is it. And I feel like this is where a lot of people are kind of getting hung up on it is for those that don't have that or who can't afford something like that, like they're trying to replace it with something like this or, you know, it seems like an easy way, a quote unquote, easy way to do it. I know it's one of the things that we've talked about in our our pre chats leading up to this. We kind of mentioned is that point of easy cost effective looking at in that scope or is it just lazy like is it, you know, like and to put a negative connotation on it. Right? Can somebody do that? Like is it easy? Yeah, it might be easy to replace it. With somebody throwing a prompt somewhere saying, Hey, write this for me, make it look nice and pretty. This is what I want to talk about. Or would it be more beneficial and better to, you know, curate that, curate that voice? Oh I couldn't get that word out. Curate that voice. Really say, you know what I'm trying to say for my brand, for what I want to project out into the world, to get to know my customers and for my customers to know and understand me. Has anybody seen any examples of people using that? Again, hot topic. There's so many things flying around everywhere and things are, you know, out in the open space right now for a lot of this stuff.

00:10:03

Guilda Hilaire: I mean, I haven't seen but I think it's a good point to raise because I feel like those are the things that are going to be missing in that equation. Right? That personal touch, the personalization, a human element. And, you know, we all hesitate to use the word easy, but you're absolutely right. People start thinking that, oh, it's easy. And if it's easy, I don't need to necessarily have that voice where I'm really, truly understanding my customers. If everything else is automated and I think that that's where myself, that our group here is needed because we still understand that customer interaction, right? We're still understanding our customer. We we're not coming from this new age where everything's AI and everything is great and everything is easy because we truly know it's not easy. We love to see this. These new tools come in and really try to help. I don't want to say ease. I won't say streamline certain processes.

00:11:00

Jonathan Torres: Good word.

00:11:02

Guilda Hilaire: Right?

00:11:03

Naomi West: Yeah. The only thing that I've used it for is SEO descriptions. I have taken a blog post and plugged in and said write an SEO description for this blog post. The blog post is written in my voice. The emails are written in my voice, but I'm like that SEO description doesn't necessarily need to be in my voice. Like, hopefully. I mean, if someone's listening to that, we shouldn't do that Naomi, please tell me. But it's like, yeah, it's completely the personality. Like I just cannot get ChatGPT to write in my voice, which is a good thing. I feel good about that and I don't want it to, and I still don't know if I would use it if it did speak directly in my voice because I would be too freaked out. See those are examples that people need to hear. Is that right there is this is how I've used it and this is what's successful and what's worked versus some of these bogus examples will get people thinking oh I think it could do my job. It knows the customer knows my voice, and it's like, No, it doesn't know your voice.

00:12:04

Eric Trinidad: it's learning our voices, right? Anything that we're putting into it. So it might not be coming back to Naomi in her voice, but maybe when, you know, I put it in, you know, looking for, I don't know anything. It comes back in Naomi's voice, but, you know, it's just gathering. I think it's it's a weird time where it's just gathering all this information and just, you know, essentially remixing it to whatever promts that we're putting into there. I think it's like it's a good mash up tool. Like it's like a DJ. It's just like pulling, you know, random songs from different folks. No, really, it's not its own ideas, but it's just putting it all together and saying like, okay, like this works. You know.

00:12:42

Naomi West: My problem with it is for Parcel, which is like an email coding tool. It saw the word Parcel, it assumes that I meant packages and like pieces of mail and for all the emails, that we're like, you know come into Parcel, code your emails or check for accessibility. It would be like and ship your package very fast with this tool. I was like, No, I would define it like Parcel is an email tool and it's great for developers. And it still would take that and be like, Sign up now to code your emails and send mail. And I was like ugh this is going so wrong. And it just took so much extra time to consistently be like pulling out those sentences that I never wanted in the first place. So the fact checking element to make the editing is time consuming and no one talks of that aspect. So it's like creation is so much easier and it can save you time. But no one references the editing and like the actual, like reviewing, which should happen with copy anyways. But you kind of have to go through with like a more finer tooth comb when it comes to things that AI have written.

00:13:53

Guilda Hilaire: And I think that's what we said like there has to be this learning that happens where this new generation understands these tools are great, they will automate. However, you still need to review the copy. You still need to check to make sure things are working and the lights continue to stay on just because, you know, automate or send or you set the trigger doesn't mean that you should still go back and QA. And that's what's missing here is the discussions of how important QA is still part of this process. None of these replace QA. We just need to have a shirt that says that none of these tools replace QA.

00:14:38

Jonathan Torres: I like it. I like it a lot.

00:14:41

Eric Trinidad: That's the next shirt idea. Thomas, get on it.

00:14:46

Jonathan Torres: Oh, yeah. I think like so many people. And I know the other thing that's talked about consistently is that so many people are starting to use it for, like, prompts. Right? I needed an idea of what to talk about whenever I'm doing my next communication. So and I think that is one of those things where you're then also, like not doing the I guess you're still leaving the important pieces in place, right? The actual writing of the copy, the actual like, you know, somebody putting a voice to it, putting personality to it, and then the QA and everything else like keeps happening down the line. But yeah, when, when it's used just to create that and to kind of send that out like, I mean I think even more so, like it's definitely more attention is paid to the QA process to make sure that things are there to not talk about shipping packages. You know, whenever you're trying to talk about a product that's not that, then it really becomes, you know, what is really your savings, right time wise, moneywise, like everything else, like it doesn't balance out. It definitely doesn't balance out. I don't know. I'm afraid to even type stuff into it because I don't want it to know me. So I don't really use it a whole lot. I'm like, I'm the outlier here because I feel like everybody else has done at least a little bit with it. I have not even quite dipped my toe in yet, but I know I'm going to have to at some date, at some point in some capacity. I'm sure the day will come. And I think that's to Guildas point. Like that education piece like, Right, How are people doing it? Like, you know, let's have those open conversations about things. I think I know I'm afraid to talk about it sometimes because I have strong opinions sometimes. And, you know, I don't want to throw that into the world and just be like, Hey, like, don't do it. It's it's evil. Like, it's going to paint your picture in a weird way and then, you know, whatever else. But I honestly think, like having this part of the conversation, knowing and understanding where it is that we can use it, I think is super helpful. And then the consequences of using it in certain ways when things go wrong to you, because I know there's been examples of that have happened, you know, out in the world. We're not going to talk about those examples. We're not gonna call anybody out. But I know that there's examples out there of it being used in a really bad way, and it is not having an understanding of the human element quite yet because it's just pulling things from all kinds of random places and putting them together. Like Eric wanted to call out about DJs, you know, like I guess he called them unoriginal or something.

00:16:56

Eric Trinidad: No, no, I was like mashup artists. That's what I'm referring to. Okay.

00:17:00

Jonathan Torres: All right, All right. Okay. So there. I got you.

00:17:03

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, There you go.

00:17:07

Jonathan Torres: I'm just poking fun at you a little bit.

00:17:09

Thomas Knierien: I'm gonna hop in on this one really quick. So I asked it for the research for this one, I was asking it, you know, like, when is the best time to send an email marketing campaign to, like 250,000 people? You can get to that point later. But I started to play around with it because I've never messed with it before and I tried to get it to be self aware. So like I'm a big fan of 2001 Space Odyssey, so I was asking like, How do you feel about yourself? I was trying to get it to crack itself and it wouldn't budge the whole time. I was even asking about its mindfulness at one point. Just trying to see if I can make it crack. Nah, wouldn't budge. So yeah.

00:17:45

Jonathan Torres: So there are some safeguards that are kind of working right now. Yeah. Yeah, right.

00:17:49

Eric Trinidad: One, do not become self aware. Two, do not hurt anybody. And three, I don't know what the third one is yet.

00:17:55

Naomi West: I also tried to do something similar, I guess maybe not self-aware, but it was one of my friend's birthday parties and we were all doing a roast and I tried to get ChatGPT to generate a roast based on qualities of this person that I told it about. And it was like, absolutely not. Like bullying is not tolerated. You will not be getting a roast from me. And I was like, All right, give me an ode, give me an ode or a haiku or a soliloquy, like whatever. And yet and mine was definitely the worst. But that's sometimes what happens when you lean on AI.

00:18:33

Jonathan Torres: Yeah.

00:18:34

Eric Trinidad: So it's a nice AI know what you're saying.

00:18:38

Naomi West: It's a nice one. Yeah. Yeah. Good qualities to not dish out roasts.

00:18:47

Jonathan Torres: When we wanted it to go bad it wouldn't. I get it.

00:18:49

Naomi West: Yeah. Yeah. There's some hard rules with it.

00:18:53

Guilda Hilaire: That's good to know though. So it has its limits.

00:18:56

Jonathan Torres: Yes. Yes. I appreciate that. And I know one of the things that I mean and we touched on this point a little while ago to that, you know, kind of like what we were saying about email still being a viable thing. Right. Like, you know, and thank you for that because we love pointing back consistently to the name of the podcast and email's not dead and we know it's alive. We're still here, still doing the podcast, still trudging forward with the email part of it. But I really do think like that so much of this is just called attention because, you know, there's definitely a place for AI in some things and I know it's I think because there's that level of, "hey, let me ask for a prompt. Let me get it back. Let's read it and see what it says." And then you can choose to put it in an email. And I think that a little separation is kind of like cause that part of it to blow up a little bit more and quicker, even though a lot of these tools themselves are a chat interaction. Right? But I think there's so little confidence in some of these that you don't want to put it immediately in front of a person without those safeguards and without that stuff in place. So I do appreciate that too, that it's kind of calling attention back to the email space. And when we look at it as a whole, I know like ROI is a big thing and people are still setting email in mass because you still get results from that and like how it's doing that. So I think that's super nice. But I'm also very curious is like how long before it gets good enough? Or we can do our own safeguards and our own things to use it in other places outside of the email channel. Whenever we're doing those kind of things like the chat interactions, the, you know, everything is going to that part of it where it's just, you know, chat equals WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. And when brands are trying to communicate and get people involved in that way, I think there is a space for that. And I think, you know, it's nice to know that there's possibilities that can happen in the future with some of this stuff. And that's kind of where I'm trying to lead to, is that, you know, I think we definitely need to still have a voice within the email side of things because that's such a different type of communication. Even though it blew up with, Hey, you can use it in an email like using an email, like write your emails with this. Awesome. I mean, it's nice to see that people have pulled back from that and really starting to consider the marketing aspect about knowing your customer, knowing your brand, how are you trying to do things? But then it doesn't mean that we have to close it off completely when it comes to the marketing side of things. And and I don't know, it's a fun thing to explore and think about and wonder about the possibilities.

00:21:16

Naomi West: I have heard of. I haven't played with these use cases myself, but some other use cases that really excite me are like CSV reformatting because I die in Excel. I hate excel, one it slows down my computer, but also like I can't do what people do in Excel. They're very talented. And if you could take email engagement data and say, take this CSV and reformat it to highlight my most engaged subscriber based on them opening at least five emails in the past month and send it back to me, That would be a great way to maybe organize yourself for an IP warming, right? So there are some opportunities that like excite me with it and go far beyond the copywriting and image generation that seem easy to talk about. But yeah, I think that there is a lot of potential, a lot of scary potential beacuse, where am I putting that data? Who's getting access to the CSV right?

00:22:23

Eric Trinidad: Is it staying at home? Is it only with the user who's downloading it and selling it?

00:22:28

Naomi West: Yeah. Where's it going? So definitely haven't toyed around with any of those myself, but I like the idea of it. And if like, let's say a trusted tool could create that for me, like my own marketing automation solution could take those capabilities and give them to me inside, like the trusted kind of data source. I would be stoked and things like, you know, create an automation for me that has three touchpoints over a seven day period split by active usage or something like the more possibilities that email platforms and marketing automation solutions bring that into the tool itself. Like so much time saving, so much fun. So looking forward to those. But everything else, I'm like eh.

00:23:15

Guilda Hilaire: Yeah, and that I think is a great concern to bring up is like the security part of it, right? Like who's listening, who's watching? Where's the data going? And we don't want to alarm anyone, but those are the questions and things to ask because obviously this is going somewhere. And thats that moment we don't want to happen down the line, that aha moment of, Oh my God, my data isn't secure. I don't want to name any platforms. But there's been platforms where everybody gets excited, everybody starts using it, and then the privacy stuff starts popping up. But by then we've already used it, shared our information and spoken on them and shared things on them. So I think it's important for these security and privacy questions to come up sooner than later so that we all feel comfortable using them.

00:24:05

Naomi West: I've definitely fallen for a couple of those. I think there was a couple of like phone apps that would turn me into like a seventy year old woman and also like a two year old baby. And I fully downloaded them and I was like, this is fake. And then like a week later, it was like huge privacy concerns with blank app. Facial recognition being sold to the interwebs. And I was like, Shoot, they know what I'm going to look like when I'm 70 now.

00:24:35

Eric Trinidad: What do we do with seventy year old Naomi?

00:24:38

Naomi West: We don't know. We don't know. We're going to find out. Yeah, I'm on my toes with that one. But, yeah, it was just like a complete lack of. You know, it's a fad, right? It pops up as this, like, cool thing, and I don't even think about where the data is being stored. I don't even think about it. And I should, and I will now moving forward because I feel like once you're burned in a situation like that, you hopefully remember it moving forward. But it's a really good thing to to point out Guilda.

00:25:05

Guilda Hilaire: Do you think we're now in an era of risk taking, like we all take these risk like cool thing comes out, sign me up. Let me test it. Right? Then I thought about privacy.

00:25:18

Naomi West: Yeah. The other thing is, I think from my stance on that is like I have entered my data into so many websites. My sense is like, what's one more? You know if someone really wants my email? They're going to get it. They're going to get it somewhere. They've already got it. Many people already have got it. I don't know how. My spam folder is just full of 1 to 1 messages of people that I'm like, Where did you come from? And so I'm on the sense of like, I want to be cautious, but at the same time i'm like, I've already done it. It's already happening. My data is everywhere. My face is everywhere. I've done this to myself through a public Instagram profile and many years of posting with no filter, literally.

00:26:05

Guilda Hilaire: I'm surprised Yahoo hasn't said not another sign up? Not another sign up.

00:26:17

Naomi West: Yeah. Stop. We can't handle anymore.

00:26:21

Jonathan Torres: For me, like, the reverse is kind of like the other problem is that with AI, it's learning. It's trying to get information out from the general Internet. And we've tried to, you know, kind of put our voices out there. Right? Like I know for myself, like an Eric when I've written blog posts and stuff like that, put that out there. We do the podcast, you know, it gets transcribed and posted out there like so how much of it is reading and then spitting back out like our own stuff to other people, you know, without giving us credit for that kind of stuff? That kind of stuff is also like concerning to me that other side of the privacy, you know, talk, right? And do I want to be using that uncredited work that somebody else has done in what I'm doing? So it's like it's always like it's always in the back of my mind whenever I start looking at that kind of stuff, too. So and you kind of throw this out there, like as, as one of the things I know we're kind of getting close to time and we need to wrap up soonish. But I do want to ask, like in an ideal scenario or what would be the ideal scenario to use some of this stuff? And I know you already touched on it a little bit. Naomi kind of talking about, you know, kind of what would be a little bit more of a nice way to use this.

00:27:23

Naomi West: My dream scenario for I right now is to say, to a tool to say, Hey, I have a launch coming up where I need to send an email, create a couple of social posts. I want to update our onboarding emails to mention this really cool feature. What should my project plan look like or what do I need to think about when I am trying to coordinate with other team members? Who should I talk to and then just like spit out some like go to market plan for me. That would be amazing. That is my dream scenario. I could just use the template that I've already created, but for some reason, like using AI for that would be amazing. And then again, just being able to work with my marketing automation solution to give it promts for like a new flow and the touch points I want and have it create kind of the skeleton structure. Those are my probably like two dream use cases. So if anyone is listening and they're already doing this, please send me over those things.

00:28:23

Guilda Hilaire: I love those. I would also add to that checkpoints as Naomi's building these. Right. But I also want AI to, if there's duplicate records. Make it prominent. Like catch mistakes or errors like before it happens. Like let's help marketers. Marketers worst nightmare is a campaign going out, that has the wrong copy, graphic or I work in an organization that sent an email out, the same email to a customer five times. AI want to remove some of the layers of stress that marketers go through when they're building, sending, QAing campaigns and figure out a way for AI to come in and help and flag certain things. Right. Double check the code and help with the tables and the graphics. Heck make suggestions, right? Because we're so busy in the day to day world of what we do. Sometimes we're drained and unless the coffee kicks in, we have no creative ideas. Do not come to me. Come to me after the coffee's kicked in. Because let me tell you the creative juices are flowing. But AI can help with templates suggestions and other ideas and stuff that we have maybe not thought about. So I think like AI want to come in and help with some of these areas.

00:29:50

Jonathan Torres: That awesome, I hope somebody is listening guiding this stuff to do it. Because as much as we love having it, still like that human element, especially for like cross-checking things and doing some of that work is still just that, a little bit of a pain that optimizing it would be just amazing. I don't think it eliminates very much of a whole lot because you still need to have that human eye cross check. But then to have an extra set of eyes like in an automated fashion I think is really nice.

00:30:15

Naomi West: The other thing that would be really cool now that I'm thinking about it, is once AI has fully taken in all the information it can, if I write in saying, Hey, I'm in this industry, what is the standard like onboarding plan for a tool like this? Like I'm just thinking like if it could spit out, like here are your competitors and this is how many emails they send in the first seven days and this is what they talk about. That's cool. Scary, but cool. It eliminates research that I have to do, which I should also do myself. But that would be an interesting use of AI if it could do competitive intel for me.

00:30:53

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, just breaking down some of like the tedious tasks so that you have the ability to be more creative yourself and really dive into metrics and statistics that can help you with the next campaign and the next project.

00:31:08

Thomas Knierien: Alright y'all so I want to talk about really quick about some of the research that I was looking at, some of the background for this episode. And yeah, like I said before, I never really messed with ChatGPT because, well, one, it scares the heck out of me. So I wanted to know when is the best time to send an email marketing campaign to 250,000 recipients? Say that five times fast. But all it did was literally just scraped pretty much best practices from all over, you know, blog posts and it looks like from other ESPs as well. So JT that made me wonder, you know, is this scraping of all these best practices for email? Is it skipping the art and science of deliverability in general just by scraping it all together? What do you think?

00:31:50

Jonathan Torres: Yes. Simple answer Yes. But like in all honesty, it's one of those things. I mean, Naomi, I know that's what you want and you want like to just get like, Hey, what's the easiest and best way for me to do X? And I think some day it will get there. I think there is an eventuality where that will be the reality. Like it'll know just because of what has happened, what's the best way to do it. And I think, you know, the deliverability space is so unique. I mean, when I read stuff like this, like that prompt you gave it like I just said a few moments ago, I feel like some of those are my words and maybe I'm just regurgitating what I've heard from other people and stuff that I've read on other sites and stuff like that. And maybe that's the case, but I know whenever I have to frame that and whenever I've talked to customers about that, there's always that piece that is the intangible right now. Knowing who the person is that's trying to execute that, just makes a huge difference. Industry behavior, brand voice, like so many of those things like do also play account into that. Like is this a normal behavior that's going to happen? Is it not normal behavior? Is it you know, what are we doing with our plan for the future? What is this going to look like when it's done? And and I think AI can get there. I honestly think that at some point there will be a tool that knows exactly those questions to ask to really help cater toward, you know, creating that without having to do, you know, too much background. Right. Or without having to know the exact of everything of or, you know, get close enough that something can be executed on and and in a safe way and in a good way. But I think right now that's not the reality of it. And I think that the it still even then takes the art behind it, you know, like a little bit away. And and I don't know if that's ever going to be replaceable is that piece that we end up talking about whenever we start having that conversation at a deep level on trying to solve this, trying to create a solution for a particular sender. Right? And I think that's what it comes down to, is that particular solution that we want there. So I think there'll always be room for deliverability type stuff. And that conversation about deliverability on a very specific level. But you know, it's going to happen. It's going to happen eventually. It's going to know other questions to ask, it's going to know what the scenarios are and then bring all the data that it has and really, you know, kind of replace some of that conversation that we we have as deliverability experts.

00:34:09

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, it has a lot of like the overarching themes but like the real nuances of it. I think that's kind of like where we have to step in and kind of keep guiding it. It's so fresh, it's so new. There's not the whole, you know, regulations behind it. We don't know the checkers that are in place. If there's checkers, if there's no checkers, like what is it, you know, where is it telling us to go and how it's telling us to perform these actions? You know, it's just you know, it's like it's in the infancy right now. So it feels like, you know, we definitely do have a long way to go and y'all are right. You know, time will tell. We'll get there.

00:34:45

Guilda Hilaire: Time will tell but lets not call it easy.

00:34:49

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, Yeah, for sure.

00:34:53

Jonathan Torres: I like it. I like it a lot.

00:34:56

Eric Trinidad: And we'll certainly find out for further on down the line, you know? Is the juice going to be worth the squeeze here? Spending, you know, an hour and a half figuring out what prompts and then do another two hours of a fact checking or, you know, just ultimately just doing the work yourself in that regard. Right. Like what's going to be better here. If you have any comments, questions, you know, just overall feelings in general about AI and you want to speak with either Guilda or Naomi. Guilda where can they find you at?

00:35:30

Guilda Hilaire: My social handles are @justguilda. A lot of people get confused. They're like, okay, just Guilda? I'm like, No, it's actually @justguilda.

00:35:44

Eric Trinidad: And Naomi?

00:35:45

Naomi West: Yeah, I'm also on Twitter @emailfromnaomi and Instagram as well under the same handle. I love Twitter and tweeting about email. So you ever want to talk about email you can tweet me.

00:36:00

Eric Trinidad: Right on, right on. And Thomas, this is the last of our season but if they want to see past episodes and other items like that, where can they find us?

00:36:09

Thomas Knierien: Yeah, for sure you can find us on mailgun.com/resources/podcasts. You can listen to all our previous episodes also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and anywhere that you digest your podcast.

00:36:22

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, Guilda, Naomi, appreciate you and your time. Y'all have a great rest of your day.

00:36:26

Guilda Hilaire: Thank you, thanks for having us!

00:36:27

Naomi West: Thanks.