Insights from an email marketer and email developer, with Megan Boshuyzen and Julia Ritter

00:00:05

Eric Trinidad: Welcome to Email's Not Dead. My name is Eric, and this is Jonathan.

00:00:08

Jonathan Torres: Hello.

00:00:09

Eric Trinidad: Hello. We're here to bring you all things email your ear buddies this week for this episode. What are we releasing these weekly, bi weekly? Who knows what's going to happen at some point? We're deep into season three, and today we have a couple of very special guests. Megan Boshuyzen and Julia Ritter. Welcome to the show. How are you all today?

00:00:32

Julia Ritter: Hello, good. How are you? 

00:00:34

Megan Boshuyzen: Hi! Doing good.

00:00:35

Eric Trinidad: Excellent. Great to hear. Megan, you're one of our senior marketing devs and Julia, you're an email marketing manager. So we brought you on today because we heard you were able to experience something amazing, something fun, something out there, something that I think Jonathan and I have not been able to bear witness to. Unspam.

00:00:55

Julia Ritter: Unspam was great.

00:00:55

Megan Boshuyzen: Most amazing thing ever.  Unspam was amazing.

00:00:59

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Like when I first heard about it, I feel like that's like the thing that we tell the customers to do the most when they're like, what messages or what type of messages. So we send, you know, like, you know, clean ones like un spam, like not spam messages, you know? So I feel like this. This conference was kind of like in that same vein. Pretty much, yes. No, maybe.

00:01:15

Julia Ritter: I think that's a good comparison. Absolutely. They had the tagline like uncensored un, Oh gosh, I'm going to forget it now Megan.

00:01:22

Megan Boshuyzen: I don't know it off the top of my head. Oh, it's like a super unconventional conference.

00:01:26

Julia Ritter: Unconventional.

00:01:28

Megan Boshuyzen: Yeah.

00:01:29

Eric Trinidad: Unconventional unconference, nice.

00:01:31

Megan Boshuyzen: Yeah, yeah. UnConference. And it truly felt like an unconference. Yeah.

00:01:37

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, yeah. So hosted by or presented by Really Good Emails. We spoke with Matthew Smith in episodes past. Great guy. Did you all have a chance to interact with him?

00:01:47

Megan Boshuyzen: Yeah, Matthew's a wonderful, wonderful human being. Yeah. I listen to his last episode on here and it was awesome. Actually messaged him after about it. He's a great person and a deeply empathetic person, and I definitely appreciate everything he's done with Really Good Emails and the team with him and everything they've done for the community. I wouldn't be in this career where I am without those resources and that website. So it definitely means a lot to me to go to Unspam.

00:02:16

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Like, I'm glad that we do these remotely because I felt like after that episode, I just wanted to give him a big hug. You know, I don't know him personally, but I felt really cool that, you know, just be like, you know, hug it out, man.

00:02:29

Jonathan Torres: I think after that episode with Really Good Emails like, you know, and even before that, we knew that we needed to get people on here on the podcast who can talk about the actual composition of the message. Like what the message would look like, what you know, what things we need to consider when we're doing that. And that was that whole episode with Matthew. You know, like all those things with Really Good Emails and what they consider and why that's so important. And I like to think that I'm good at composing emails, but I'm really not. And I think it's just in my head. And yeah, I like to think that I have good things to say sometimes, but I think a lot of times I don't. And being able to bring both of you in and, you know, like the Unspam thing is great and awesome. I think that's very supplemental to what we're talking about here today. But I think in the company, in what we do, you know, with Mailgun, Mailjet like all those things. You two are a big part of those voices that curate that content and really help make it good. And I think as an email company, we really need to make it good. So I just want to throw that out there because I think Eric undersold it. Thanks, Eric. I think it's amazing. Like what we get to talk about and the things that we get to do internally to then project ourselves into the world and you are doing an awesome job. So I just want to interject with that.

00:03:37

Julia Ritter: I think what Matthew kind of, he started off the whole conference with this great speech of how we're all here now. It's been a tough year and everything, or couple of years, whatever. But I think they kind of set the precedent for the conference itself. They're all very welcoming. They're all very dedicated to what they do. So I agree he's a great person to talk to. I mean, the whole team is so meticulous. They hand go through every email that they put on their website. It's just it's very cool, very cool process that they allow us to be part of. So but hey, thanks for grouping us in that. Really happy. I'll take it.

00:04:12

Jonathan Torres: No, it's awesome. Yeah. So I mean, and kind of going along those lines, so I know they kicked off the conference and there was a lot of stuff that came out of that. I know in preparation for the podcast, we were talking about a lot of those things. So what are some of the highlights that you took away from it for the both of you? What are the things that you saw that was interesting and maybe you want to bring out to the masses?

00:04:29

Megan Boshuyzen: I think, you know, a lot of one of the big things that came out of this conference was like the whole being together and wanting to put good things out into the world and experience good things. One of the things that stood out to me was actually during the 2022 trends talked for email design. It was done by Meghan Sokolnicki. Senior Email Designer and dev over at Campaign Monitor. She's going over all these different trends and relating them to hot sauces, which I thought was hysterical and amazing and basically like saying, how much would you use this trend? And it was a lot of things like pastel colors. And now we're going to see some round edges and some waves, which is a sharp, sharp contrast to hard edges and things being kind of pulled back and minimal. And she kind of came to the conclusion that we all want to see good things and want to feel connected to something, you know, since we've all been so isolated over the last couple of years. So I found that really interesting because that was like truly the kind of the theme that went throughout the entire conference. It felt like.

00:05:41

Julia Ritter: Yeah, I was just going to say that was the exact theme that went throughout the entire conference. But she, like, made a very good point that, yeah, people want to see there's a human behind their emails that they're connected to something bigger than just, you know, receiving another communication. So that was another big trend for this year, which is so cool, you know?

00:06:00

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, I think that's what we've all been missing. Well, I know, like since we left the office, that was like a huge thing because we're such like a close knit group similar to like the Unspam conference, how small knit they are. Like, I know like our team was so tight knit, like we knew each other's families. We've been through each other's homes. And then to be able just to be cut out and like be sent away from each other for so long. You know, it's just, to be back together and be a part of a larger group just feels right. You know, so I'm glad that there's another community out there that's like that as well, you know, talking about the geeky stuff we like email. So, yeah, awesome.

00:06:42

Julia Ritter: True email geeks. Yes.

00:06:44

Megan Boshuyzen: Best community out there. Yeah.

00:06:46

Julia Ritter: I mean, the community, it's true. Like, I just joined the email geeks Slack group. I don't know what I was doing before, but everything else didn't matter, you know? Now part of this community, I keep saying this, and Megan's probably so annoyed with like how repetitive I am. But do I need to get a Twitter because everyone's like, Oh, DM me on Twitter follow me on Twitter. I guess, actually, I need a Twitter.

00:07:06

Megan Boshuyzen: Julia needs a Twitter.

00:07:07

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, yeah.

00:07:09

Julia Ritter: Never thought I woud need one again. But here I am.

00:07:11

Megan Boshuyzen: You can tweet about Elizabethtown with us.

00:07:13

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, yeah. There you go.

00:07:15

Julia Ritter: Did I miss that Twitter thread about Elizabethtown?

00:07:17

Megan Boshuyzen: You missed it.

00:07:19

Julia Ritter: I'll create one right now.

00:07:20

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, yeah. See, I think Jonathan and I have one. I don't know how many people Jonathan follow, but I think I only follow drunk Hulk, so I need to expand my audience a little bit.

00:07:29

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I tend to underutilize mine. Mine just kind of sits there and every once in a while like, I'll use it, but I need to start doing it more and kind of get ideas out there because I know, like, there's some good ones that people will follow. And I love it when people find like that really good spot of talking about the business part of their lives and the personal part of their lives, like, that's awesome. Kind of getting back a little bit more to like the email side of things I know because we talked about this with Matthew, like quite extensively about it really being a thing of like getting the email community and growing the email community and email geeks is like one of those ones that, man it's just awesome to see because there's so much collaboration happening between all parts of the business, which, you know, doesn't always happen with everything. And I think so often that we perceive that everything is at ends with each other, that the senders are at ends with the recipient side, right with the ISP's. And you know, the marketers, if you haven't experienced it yet, like it could feel like maybe you're at odds with everything. But the truth is, everything is so close knit and everybody wants to help each other out, which is really awesome. And I know that's a big thing that Matthew pushes through and Really Good Emails kind of talks about a lot overall, but I think we end up feeling that kind of that same feeling from our side. And when we do get to see it and we get to interact with it, which is pretty darn awesome. I know one of the things that was talked about there and I don't know, you know, just having my notes here, the community itself, how it's been, I guess more than anything like consolidating, like there's different things that are coming up. I know we talked about Twitter. Twitter isn't necessarily in this yet, but there's different things like different platforms like consolidation of, you know, really things becoming one when you consider customer interactions, right? Like, it's not just about your emails that are going out anymore or that's your only one thing, and that's your narrow view. It really is what do emails look lik? What is the rest of your communication look like? Are you doing text messages now? Are you utilizing one of the different apps that are messaging or, you know, even Facebook? I know people do like the Facebook, you know, supporting of business and stuff like that. So that's not me, but there's people out there who do it. So can you talk about that like the email community, right? Because this is very much email focused, like how much are they also now starting to consider the different things outside of email that our customer connections?

00:09:32

Julia Ritter: Oh, absolutely. With everyone you're connecting with, you know, they're working across like multiple channels or even like brands like we are, you know, so and people are doing multiple jobs. They had a whole segment on 2022 work trends in general. The surveys show that multiple people are doing multiple jobs within the organization to make everything work and to get those communications out the door.

00:09:55

Julia Ritter: That's awesome. I want to make sure and I want to like, I think it's just personal validation for myself because we talk about it so much and we've talked about in past episodes, so much on the podcast, like the more we see it and the more we expand, it's like one of those things where this is the truth. This is really what's happening. And it's not just something that's like isolated or that we're trying to push like, this is just the way that the market is going in the way of the future's going. So for those that are missing the boat or haven't really seen the light at the end of the tunnel, that's coming from the changes that are happening right now, like this is definitely the way that it's going. So you've got to hop on the train before it's too late. What else?

00:10:23

Megan Boshuyzen: So I spoke at Unspam, which was a really incredible experience. It was not my first talk, but the first time I stood on a stage in front of people and gave it like not from behind the screen. So it was like, really interesting. I'm glad that the first time I got to do that was Unspam. It's a very comfortable place to speak. You feel like you're speaking basically just amongst your friends. So it was pretty great. So I actually spoke about email accessibility, which I've spoken about a couple of times in the last few months. I've been on some panels and whatnot.

00:11:00

Julia Ritter: Is that something that's like spoken to you directly or you've seen a lot of issues with? Or was it more just kind of like based around your personal experiences?

00:11:09

Megan Boshuyzen: So it was a mix of different things. When people often speak about accessibility, I feel like it's often spoken about in the abstract and not something that affects people every day. Accessibility, there are things that you know an email marketer can do to help with email accessibility, essentially making sure that the largest amount of people can read an email and interact with an email. And sometimes people think it's really hard to make emails accessible, especially if they're not an email developer, because there can be a heavy lift on the developer side, but it's also something that email marketers can help with. I started off the talk from a personal place. I actually have a learning disability called auditory processing disorder that I've had my whole life. It's more of an auditory thing and that my ears are not hooked up to my brain, right? So if too much information is hitting me at once, it can be really hard to process what's going on. So that can happen in email if it's like not designed well. So like if I'm seeing, you know, a big block of text, I'll be like, Oh my gosh, what's happening? I can't read this. Please use some headers to break your text up visually, or if you stuff your gifs with a lot of information and be like, Oh no, I have four different products, I am now trying to see your regular price and your sales price and what is the product and what color is the product, and it's switching every second. So I don't know what's happening here, i'm going to peace out. So that was one thing I went over in my talk was how to make an experience like that better. So I feel like people don't think about those things. We often think about here are the cool things we can do to make sure that screen readers, you know, read the code correctly, which is very important. Or here's our color combinations, maybe to avoid because there are some people that are colorblind. But you know, I feel like it's always talked about like it's those people and not like myself or my friends around. And oftentimes, I also feel like you'll hear people going, Oh, well, the ROI is not there.  How much money are we going to gain by doing that? And to me, that is an argument to not be had, because if we are going to be living in a diverse and inclusive world, then we need to take everybody's needs into account because it's the kind and it's the compassionate thing to do. And if people can't read your emails and click through, you're not hitting your goal. And then if you can't communicate with them, that's what you're trying to do. So then why are you sending the email if you can't communicate with everyone? So it really it's, I truly believe, email accessibility and to do the best you can obviously should be like baked into your email program. People treat it as a value add or just an add on at the end to think about when I truly believe you need to be thinking about it from the ground up when thinking about your email program. And that's my accessibility rant.

00:14:00

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, that's good. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, why wouldn't you want, you know, your emails to reach the broadest audience possible, you know?

00:14:09

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. And I think it's, you know, kind of like to put it in the context of things going forward. I think it's also one of the things that if we don't start considering that kind of stuff, like how much further do we get, you know, without thinking about it, it's definitely I've been around through the times that people started thinking about, Well, OK, I like color schemes and you know, what does that actually look like on the screen and especially for people who are, you know, colorblind or can't see that or what does that contrast look like for people who, you know, struggle with that portion of it and light levels and things like that. And I did date myself real bad, but that felt like a while ago that that happened, and I feel like there hasn't really been an evolution of that to really start considering, like the next things. So and that's awesome to hear. And, you know, now I want to watch the talk itself. I need a copy of it.

00:14:50

Eric Trinidad: Can we get a link to that?

00:14:52

Megan Boshuyzen: I think I'm waiting on a video. I'm not 100 percent sure. I think it was recorded, so I think I'm getting a video at some point.

00:15:00

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. Awesome. And it's again, that evolution, like what does that look like next, what are the next iteration of really things accessible because not everybody thinks or processes or does things the same way? I know I'm bad at that I'm the other way around because I'm probably the person you're talking about when somebody throws too much information at you because I'll just go on long rants and talk really fast. So that's going to be the end of my part right now.

00:15:24

Eric Trinidad: Just like me trying to pronounce last names. So it's okay Jonathan, you're fine. So, yeah, so kind of going on with a continuation of that, what are some other things that y'all learned that we should be considering or should marketers be considering when sending out emails?

00:15:39

Julia Ritter: Gregg Blanchard of Sendview, he gave a great talk about beyond Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and I think when you're going into these conferences too, you think, OK, Black Friday, Cyber Monday doesn't really apply to me, you know, or maybe doesn't apply to your strategy, but you can take away something from everything, you know, because emails universal. So it was very cool to even though he was talking about Black Friday. I may not have a use for Black Friday. And he was talking about a ski resort. I still found it applicable to some of our, you know, campaigns. So he was talking about the plus one moments and how you can add that value to the value, like you're increasing, like here's something you need and here's like this extra value that you didn't think about. It's like all about the story. So I think in going back to Megan's talk to she made, she had a value. But she added a plus one moment by giving her personal experience and then showing both to, you know, email writers, you know, and like teams in general, why they should be accessible. But then she also gave examples for devs on why using strong versus bold is em versus italics.

00:16:48

Megan Boshuyzen: I say, I don't know if other people call it em. I say em short for emphasis. So, yeah, yeah.

00:16:55

Julia Ritter: So just very interesting. He also said that the average marketing email is three hundred and forty seven words. I have to go back in like, see how many words my emails are. That is, I don't think that's a lot. I think I'm too wordy, apparently.

00:17:11

Megan Boshuyzen:  As an aside, my marketing opinion, because I used to be an email person of one, I think content length doesn't matter that much. As long as your content is good, people read good content.

00:17:28

Julia Ritter: Yeah, that's so true.

00:17:29

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. And we also talk about it, you know, and one of the things that we constantly mention like on the podcast and deliverability overall is that you really have to also know your audience, like, is your audience looking for that kind of stuff? And if they're not, well, then you know, you're doing it wrong.

00:17:42

Megan Boshuyzen: Right, right? Like, if they do need a quick hit of a sale like, then you're not going to be wordy. But if you crack stories and that's part of your brand, they're going to read your stories.

00:17:52

Julia Ritter: Mm hmm. And if you don't know, like, test it out, because it's kind of fun, you know, two sentence intro versus like a paragraph. I love doing that.

00:18:01

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Either you're introducing clear coke or like a brand new shoe and you want to make sure it doesn't, you know, send a whole generation to consider being barefoot, you know? You know, that's good to test.

00:18:18

Jonathan Torres: Or just having nightmares of crystal soda drinks, you know? Not that we're going to call anybody out, right?

00:18:30

Julia Ritter: JT, was worried about dating himself with typography or color references and Eric just referenced clear coke.

00:18:36

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Crystal Pepsi is making a comeback, y'all. Come on.

00:18:42

Jonathan Torres: It's in the now, right?

00:18:43

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, it's the generation next. Come on.

00:18:46

Jonathan Torres: With all that stuff I like to consider, too, is hitting your audience and hitting the audience correctly, you know, and making sure that all that is in line, there's times where I think the toolset is also like the next thing that becomes important when you're doing that. And I'm kind of leaning into one of these other bullet points that we have written down here because there's new things that are up and coming and there's things that I think people are going to be looking forward to. One is like the amp stuff, which is really awesome. Like, I really love that and I think so many times are the way that I think people have considered it a lot. And maybe this is just from my perspective and my view is so many times people are looking at it in the sense of being utilized in a one to one, you know, transactional message or type of thing where they're really being a little bit more creative and utilizing it a little bit more. But when it can be done in one of many, I think it's really awesome and does some really good stuff. So I dunno if you guys want to talk about that and your experience with that recently.

00:19:41

Megan Boshuyzen: AMP is so cool. I wish more of Inboxes supported it. Yeah, we just worked with a company called Spellbound.io that's getting themselves up and running, and they make it easy to create AMP emails so you don't need a software developer. To do any integrations on the back end, so we're running a webinar with Salesforce, and we did the registration right in the email, which was really awesome so that people did not have to click to any sort of landing page. They just registered right in their inbox and boom they were good to go. And the Spellbound little plugin sent the information for us into our webinar system that we use and took care of everything for us. So it was very neat to see that happen.

00:20:30

Jonathan Torres: That's awesome to me. I love it. I love technology. Just overall, I'm always like for the new tech or for the new things that are up and coming in, and it's awesome to see it, and especially when it's utilized correctly and when you have, I think, companies that help do that, so like Spellbound like themselves, like doing, you know, some good work, making it accessible for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it. Yeah. And it's about finding those resources. And, you know, not to say that we're going to plug one thing exactly, but I know there's other companies that will do that stuff and other companies that are up and coming. If there isn't, you know what a slew of them out there already. So it's a matter of seeking out the resources and being able to help yourself. I think is just the big thing, but then being aware is another big thing that if you're not aware that those things are happening or things are changing what's out there, it just makes life way more difficult for you, especially considering that so many companies just come back to that ROI piece. And what have you making money from this and every dollar they spend? Yeah, they  want to see a return on that. So, you know, be educated about that stuff. And I know I mean, if this is your first time coming to the podcast, then awesome, welcome. You know, hopefully you come back from any more if you go back and listen to the past catalog, like we talk about so many of these things that can just help integrate things you need to be considering, things you should be looking at. Hopefully, we're getting a point across. I mean, maybe we're just talking to the wind and nothing's actually happening out there. But you know, if you are paying attention and if you're listening, like, it's everything that we say on here, we're doing it to try to just help people out. I think, you know, again, coming that community aspect, I know that's one of the big things that, you know why we started doing this, you know, it's nice and it's an advertisement. And you know, hopefully eventually there's some kind of ROI that happens for ourselves, you know, as a company. But that sponsorship piece from the company is just a part of it because we really have to, you know, become a community when it comes to that kind of stuff. And I think this is just the part of sharing knowledge and making everybody aware that those things are out there. So again, I'm sorry, i'm on one of my soap boxes, but it's happened. It's just that kind of day.

00:22:23

Eric Trinidad: I know you get going and I don't want to interrupt you so I'm just like nodding like people can see me nod, you know.

00:22:30

Megan Boshuyzen: No, the way I see it. And this was something when I first was like thinking about speaking. It took me quite a bit of time to get into speaking. I had a bunch of different talks like rejected from various places.

00:22:42

Julia Ritter: Lame!

00:22:42

Megan Boshuyzen: But when I was first thinking about it, something that someone I don't remember who said to me was that, you know, everybody has a different perspective. So like, there is enough space for perspectives from, you know, all sorts of people. You always learn something new. So, you know, to not be afraid to put yourself out there. That's my response to your soapbox.

00:23:06

Eric Trinidad: So keep getting on it Jonathan, we welcome it.

00:23:09

Jonathan Torres: Every, every once in a while, every once in a while, it's okay.

00:23:13

Eric Trinidad: Julia, now it's your turn to step on the soapbox.

00:23:16

Julia Ritter: Let me get on up here.

00:23:20

Eric Trinidad: Well right on, right on. Anything else of note that you want to share from this experience? Was this last one? Was it in person or was it virtually most?

00:23:29

Julia Ritter: Unspam was all in person.

00:23:30

Megan Boshuyzen: Yeah, totally in person. Yeah, it was great. I forgot how energizing people are.

00:23:36

Julia Ritter: It's so true. It's so true. It was very refreshing.

00:23:40

Megan Boshuyzen: I was there early since I was speaking, so it was just like almost a week straight of just being around people and talking to essentially my friends. And just the adrenaline. It was really like, I had come down from it the next week. Like all last week, I think I was just like, Oh man, now I'm by myself in my office, and how do I deal with this? Because I just had so much fun. You know, seeing people, I met a lot of friends who, you know, relationships that I cultivated online, that I finally got to meet these people in person and was just like, amazing.

00:24:14

Eric Trinidad: Anybody can go and enjoy the rarefied air among these colleagues? Or are they chosen in some specific form of fashion?

00:24:22

Megan Boshuyzen: It was a smaller conference, for sure. But yeah, they did require your vaccination, which I really appreciated. So everybody there was vaccinated. Masks were optional, but a lot of people did mask up. The conference provided kn95s with really cute email graphics on them, which was really cool. So, yeah, it was great. They had plenty of space for people to spread out if they wanted to, you know, for a lot of it, they really left it up to each person's comfort level and everybody respected that, which was awesome.

00:24:51

Julia Ritter: They're having three more this year Chicago, Boston and London. So very cool. And each. is devoted to a different kind of topic. So Greenville, where we went was email big ideas or emails  big ideas. And Chicago's ecommerce, I believe. I don't know the other two off the top of my head.

00:25:10

Megan Boshuyzen: I don't remember London and Boston might be SaaS. But, I don't remember London.

00:25:15

Eric Trinidad: Are you going to be attending any of the other ones?

00:25:17

Julia Ritter: I mean, I'd love to, but nothing else yet.

00:25:21

Eric Trinidad: Thomas, is there any way that you can get us on there or like you just put the word out there?

00:25:27

Thomas Knierien: Actually we're having swag being created right now so we can take Email's Not Dead to the masses. So something that your producer is working on because we need to be out there and to our listeners that are listening in, we want to come see you, we want to have these conversations with you. We want to shake your hand, if we can, you know, with everything going on right now. Yeah, we want to come see you. So something that's in the works so something to look forward to.

00:25:53

Eric Trinidad: But yeah, right on. Right on. Well, hopefully, if you all get to go, we'll have you back on so we can talk about the experiences that you've had there. If not, maybe we can all go together and do a live episode and we could talk in person to everybody.

00:26:05

Jonathan Torres: Oh, of course.

00:26:05

Eric Trinidad: Jonathan you down? Maybe Boston, I know you like going to Boston?

00:26:10

Jonathan Torres: To wrap up on some of these last subjects here. One of the things that we mentioned is like the email industry. We already talked a little bit about that, but I know some specifics within the email industry that have happened that we just want to touch on real quick. And one of them is the turnover that's happening really within email or what you heard about that during Unspam.

00:26:27

Julia Ritter: What we've heard.

00:26:30

Megan Boshuyzen: The market is hot, as some would say. There are a lot of email jobs out there right now. Yeah, a whole lot.

00:26:38

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. We also are always constantly creating jobs because it's growing. And I think that that is happening a lot with other companies and anywhere that you look when you talk about email, you know, again, email is not dead. Like not only the name of the podcast. Oh yeah. It really isn't like it's one of those things where it continues to grow and continues to be integrated into everything else. And I think that's, you know, for ourselves and I mean to I think we shine the light on ourselves a lot as a company official sponsor of the podcast and the reason we do the podcast. But all of us work here, and I think that's why we end up being able to talk from experience within that. But I mean, we already talked about companies consolidating and consolidating all their different communications and where things are happening. So for us, that was an acquisition by Sinch. So we're now, I guess, an unofficially Sinch sponsored podcast as well. So I'm just gonna throw that out there into the universe and see what happens. But like, that's important because again, from those pieces of it just being a thing that you have to think about it cohesively, there's no single item anymore. It's just email or this is just the email portion of things, right? And it's one of those things where we've got to consider it from all angles. And then I think that just contributes to the whole thing of like all these jobs coming up and, you know, people turning over from email, job to email job because it's out there and it's happening and which is awesome, like, I want to see it thrive and come alive. And we had this exact same conversation with Matthew again. You know that, you know, we want to see it grow because we're in this industry. And yeah, that's a little selfish. But I think at the end of the day, it's one of those things that just has legs and it's not dying, you know, it's just continuing on and on and on. It's been around for so long.

00:28:16

Julia Ritter: Just to go off of what you're saying. It's not dead. I mean, because it's so stumbly. Email's not dead, because I mean, it continues to bring in more ROI and not to bring in ROI one more time, but more than any other channel. And so Mike, from Really Good Emails, gave this whole 2022 work trends talk about how teams are now increasing to two to three people to cover all the work. The market is so hot and people are I mean, they did a survey for what email kind of looks like, what email jobs kind of look like. And apparently, fourty four percent of respondents are working email for full time, but this is a nine percent increase since the pandemic. So like things are just increasing, they're dedicating more time and money to email because it's bringing in again more ROI. So there's just a lot of focus on this. It's taking longer to create emails, you know, taking more team members. So we're not going anywhere.

00:29:11

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, that's awesome. You know, one of the last things we know that there's so much email going on out there that sixty eight percent of respondents say that they need a second platform to send stuff, right. So we need multiple ESPs to get stuff out there, in our context in the way that we see it, because we see that too. I know there's plenty of customers that that are utilizing our services that, you know, maybe they have a marketing team who's really good at marketing things and they want to create good email. And we have a platform for that and we have like a part of our platform that can be utilized to do exactly that. And then there's another part of the platform, which is really developer heavy. And if you want to make transactional emails and transactional requests and do all those things like, there's stuff for that too. So looking at it overall, right, that's I think part of the reason that companies are doing that because it's still alive, it's still within that space and there's still opportunity for it to grow and grow even more. And you know, again. To beat the word to death now, finally, I just get that last piece of ROI out of this. While we do that and I know Thomas is adding additional notes and I'm covering all these bullet points. But one of the things that we've got coming out is things like Mailgun Optimize, which is, you know, additional tools, additional pieces to help out with the delivery and deliverability. Really, one of the things that you know the podcast is is formulated around is the deliverability aspect of things like getting the message over to the right spot, to the inbox when appropriate and doing the right things to get it there. And we need supplemental tools a lot of times to be able to find that. And you know, Mailgun Optimize is one of those things where we're just building and crafting with that as our mindset. What do we have out there that we can test? What can we utilize? What can we see? Where can we make those points of observation and then do it? I know we talked about testing a little bit. This is just one of the other aspects of testing, right? Like the, you know, seeing where your problems are keeping up to date where your problems are. How does an email perform when you send it out even before the whole Mailgun Optimize suite. Like, we've had different things like being able to do a/b testing right from within the mailbox. And Julia, you've been talking about that and it's one of those things that, yeah, you have to do it. And, you know, maybe your audience does respond great to a two sentence email. Maybe they response, you know to, a few dozen paragraphs, I don't know. Maybe that's just my view of two dozen paragraphs or twelve dozen or a dozen paragraphs.. I don't know to talk about anymore, but there's a lot coming and we still got so much, I think, groundwork to do when it comes to email, like when it's funny to think that email has been going on for twenty, thirty, forty plus years? How old is email now? It's way old. It's been there for long, but we're still like, you know, laying out groundwork for more of the cool, fun, interesting things that are happening and the more and better we can get to do that. I'm all for it. Please don't let email die. I'm just asking.

00:31:52

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, more better e-mails. Well, Julia, Megan, thank you so much for joining us today. You know, we covered a lot. We stood on a lot of soap boxes. We really appreciate your time. Hopefully, we'll be able to get you all together back with us again soon. It was a pleasure.

00:32:10

Julia Ritter: Such a pleasure. Thank you.

00:32:11

Megan Boshuyzen: Thank you.

00:32:12

Eric Trinidad: You're very welcome. And so wrapping it all up, be accessible. Make sure you know you test your emails. Avoid being a fiasco with your marketing campaign. Appreciate you all until the next time. Stay really good.