Adam Torres and Scott Cohen discuss email marketing strategy.
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Show Notes:
Email marketing strategy can benefit from AI, but is AI in the space overrated? In this episode, Adam Torres and Scott Cohen, VP of Strategy & Marketing at Inbox Army, explore Inbox Army and the role of AI in email marketing.
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About Scott Cohen
For nearly 20 years, his been a brand-side marketer in e-commerce and higher education and an agency startup veteran in the email marketing space. I bring both award-winning copywriting chops and industry-renowned expertise in email marketing strategy and execution. I’ve worked with brands large and small across many industries. He also knows his way around many email service providers (ESPs) and other SaaS marketing platforms, including Adestra, Cordial, MailChimp, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget), Dotmailer, Cheetahmail, Eloqua, and more.
About InboxArmy
InboxArmy is an elite, full-service email marketing agency offering the full spectrum of email marketing services, including: – Full-Service Campaign Management – Email Template Production – Email Marketing Strategy – Email Marketing Audits – Email Automation & Custom Integrations We work with brands of all sizes, agencies, and email service providers to deliver best-in-class quality service, production, and support.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters. com and click on, be our guest to apply. All right. So today my guest is Scott Cohen and he is VP of strategy and marketing over at inbox army.
Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. Thanks for having me. All right, Scott. So big topic today, how AI is changing the email marketing landscape. And I’ll tell you, we’ve been covering a lot of AI topics from different angles. This will be the first episode I’ve done and how it’s affecting email. So I’m excited to get into this with you and pick your brain, not just for my audience, But for me too, we send email and we have a newsletter.
So I want to know too. But that being said, before we get started with all that, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Scott, we at mission matters, we amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission.
Scott, what mission matters to you? Our mission here, and it really matters to me greatly at InboxArmy is we help companies grow their businesses by building and growing their email marketing programs. I love helping companies grow. It’s, it’s when I was on the brand side, it’s been true agency side. It’s true.
A lot of what spurs growth, particularly from an email perspective, I call it shipping, getting stuff done, getting stuff out the door. InboxArmy is a full service email marketing agency. Our bread and butter is production, getting stuff. Done. I’ll use the nice S word here. You know, what our services enable is more resources for the companies we work with to focus on more strategic work that cross channel work, the big rocks that help those companies grow.
Right. So yeah, we play a small part, but it’s, it’s so gratifying when we see growth in revenue sales, their list growth, all that stuff. Like their successes are success. And I just love it. So I’m a big fan of email and that’s one of the first things I always tell people. They say, Oh, I want to grow my podcast.
I want to grow that. And I say, well, do you have a newsletter? Do you send out that on an email? Do you have anything created around email? And they’re like, many times I shouldn’t say everybody’s like, no, and I’m like, I don’t have an email list. I said, you do. I said, my, my, my, I think my email list started with my mom.
I don’t think my dad wanted to be on the list, but I think that, and that was my first. First podcast listener ever shout out to mom for that download. But that being said that is also one of my biggest regrets at this company is that I, we were, I’m telling you, Scott, I’m embarrassed to say this. We were probably three years in before we’re eight years old now.
But we were probably three years in before we started actually emailing out our content and like giving it. And the worst part is, you know, podcast is free. It’s not like we were even sending out a newsie, something selling something, of course, but not that I’m against that. But we, we kind of skipped that step and I think, I don’t know what it was.
It was probably you know, you hear in the media all the time, email’s dead or is email this or email that. And you don’t hear it as much now, but this is, you know, going back eight years ago, when. Everything was supposedly social media and this and that. And I didn’t understand it. I was just kind of getting into the, into the marketing side of things.
So just to be transparent, but that being said email, why is email so relevant? Now let’s just start there. We don’t even have to get into AI and all that yet basics. Like why? Cause there’s some people watching this that are, that are judging me that don’t have their email together either. So don’t judge.
Yeah. You know, you’re not alone. Let’s put it that way. It’s the, the number of companies that we run into where they’ve been collecting names on their list for four or five years. Right. And they’ve never, or they may remember to do an email every once in a while, if they’re lucky, you know, it happens.
Email, I think, I mean, I’ve been doing this for 15 years. I’ve been doing email as part of, or all of my job for 15 years. And, you know, when I started, we were hearing, Oh, email’s dead. Email’s dead. Right. And then I think about what’s happened over the course of my career. Facebook launched email for, you know, A hot minute before they realized I didn’t want to manage all those servers.
You know what Elon Musk just came out a week or two ago and said that he’s working on a Gmail alternative, right? So you’re thinking about like, it’s just kind of the little engine that could, I call it the offensive lineman of marketing channels because most people don’t think about it. until there’s a problem.
Yeah. And, but it paves the way for everything else to work, right? I mean, we are in this age where cookies are going away. First party data is becoming important. Well, where do you gather first party data? It’s not going to be in the walled gardens on social. It’s not going to be in paid search and all that.
It’s your list. So, you know, I always say, just get them on the list and then start emailing them, you know, There’s obviously a lot that goes into it, but COVID kind of put it back on the map. I mean, how many, you remember Adam, how many emails did you get from people going like, Hey, this is what we’re doing because we’re shut down.
Yeah. And you probably didn’t remember signing up for half of them. Right. So email, because it’s a cost effective channel became so much more important. Well. It was, it’s always been important. It became more openly important to everybody else around COVID. So it’s just, it, you email marketers are like the stewards of your data.
They own the customer data. They know what they’ve done. Like all these people have done with your company. And so, You don’t just put them in sort of the back room and say, send email. No, they know all this stuff that all these other channels can talk to them and go, Hey, what do you know about these customers?
How should we retarget them? How should we do retention? All this stuff like that. So I I’m biased. Of course, no, no, I don’t, I don’t think you’re biased. Actually. I think, I think that many people just don’t understand the, that the asset that it’s an asset. So what happens is when we think about what, how, how social media is Been kind of propped up because obviously that gets them the eyeballs right now.
But, but, you know, I, I can tell you, and I, and by the way, I’m not biased against any of these platforms. We use them all our contents on all of them. For example, I just, I’m going to pick on one Facebook because a lot of people like to pick on them unless they’re watching or listening Facebook. We love you.
And if you’re watching us on Facebook, hit, hit the subscribe or follow button, whatever they got, but, but we use all of these. But my point being in bringing that up is that you know, The algorithm, how they distribute the content, everything else. You’re not in charge of any of that. We spend out speaking, I’m speaking for myself mission matters.
We spend, you know, tons of money building followings and all these different platforms and putting out content and creating processes and things like that, they change the algorithm tomorrow, you know, Instagram or otherwise. And now we’re hitting maybe 10 percent of the people that actually opted in.
With a quote unquote, follow or subscribe, depending where you’re at. And now maybe 10 percent of the people that opted in for whatever reason are seeing the content. I’m like, man, like that was a lot of time spent to build Facebook, a bunch of people then bringing them to their platform. I remember when clubhouse came out, we brought out, we brought people onto their platform and showed them how to use it.
Cause we were building there and I’m thinking, why did I spend all that time and money building their audience? I should have, I should have been more working on things. That, you know, we own like our podcast channel. That’s not going to change our email, our email marketing. Like I own that subscriber in that email from the standpoint of they opted into it and if they open the email and they stay on the list and that means they want to continue being in that communication with me and algorithm change isn’t necessarily going to change that, even though we’ll talk about some deliverability things later, but but but that idea of it being an asset, I just feel like people don’t.
Always get that when we talk about cost and otherwise, when I are, when I acquire that email, assuming that person cares to continuing opening the email. And they of course opted in then the, the marketing for me to like, continue to send that email is like nothing compared to, let’s just say, and again, I’m not against this, but a Facebook campaign or advertising campaign where once I stopped paying Facebook, guess what, what, what happens when I stopped paying Facebook, Scott, do they just keep on?
Are they like, Oh, we’ll just keep running it for you. Oh, they think it’s adorable.
Oh, so where do we, so how do people like, if they haven’t gone down this route at all, like, where do they start? And what I’m talking about specifically is like with their email side of things. Cause let’s just say right now they just got a person that it’s like their job for like, you know, a couple of minutes a week or whatever, not a couple of minutes, but they normally it’s like outsourced.
Like you have like one person that’s doing it. Maybe they’re doing it right. Maybe they’re not. Where do they start? Where did the people start? Where did the company start? I think that’s, yeah. So it’s, I always start with those for like, think about what your customer journey looks like, what your customer life cycle looks like, and then what are those first hand raise moments, right?
So, you know, when you go to a site, Undoubtedly have seen on many sites. They have a pop up that comes up, say, Hey, give us your email address. We’ll send you some sort of incentive, whether it’s a discount or for ebook or whatever it might be. Right. Or even it’s just, you know, Hey, we’d love to send you the podcast, you know, when it, when it releases, right.
Boom, get, get on the list, you know, insiders, whatever it might be. Get people to that’s one hand raised, right. Where they say, I’m willing to give you my information. In exchange for some value from you, if you’re in e commerce, your next hand raise might be somebody who starts putting items in a cart, right?
And they, they, they fill in a cart and then they get to the point where they enter their email address and they go, you know what? I’m either not ready or, you know, They get distracted or whatever it might be. You know, people abandon carts for any number of reasons. Some of them are, a lot of people are smart now and go, if I wait an hour, I might get a discount.
And then of course your first hand raise could be a purchase, right? It could be a flat out purchase. I mean, that, that happens all the time. I mean, in previous lives, it’s been how many people their first hand raise with us is through a form versus their first hand raise with us is through actually buying something.
So. And then you have, so on those, what you want to do, I always say like, look at all the holes in the bucket and start filling the holes. So make sure you have what I call, you know, people will call welcome series for those people who sign up on site through the pop up, right? Make sure you have a cart abandoned program.
I mean, if you’re doing e commerce, you need cart abandoned in some shape or form. Even if it’s just, Hey, you forgot something in your cart. Come back and finish, right? You don’t have to, you don’t have to. Cool. Do an offer right away. In fact, I encourage you not to, because people will game the system and then you’re just losing, you know, margin.
And then of course you have your post purchase, right? Your order confirmation. If you’re shipping confirmation, if, if a purchase with you is a firsthand raise, you may have a version where you have kind of a welcome as well, right? Hey, we’re glad you’re here. Thank you for making a purchase. Here’s people want to get over buyer’s remorse.
I mean, everybody does. I mean, I’ve certainly bought things and went, what did I just do? And thankfully Amazon’s return policy is really good. Yeah, you know, yeah. So, I mean, those, those are the ones I always think about, like start there and then get some semblance of what I would call a broadcaster manual cadence going.
Right. It doesn’t have to be every day. It doesn’t even have to be every week. If you can only manage once a month. Great. Ideally, you’re doing at least twice a month because think about all the emails you receive and then think about all the emails that your subscribers receive and realize if you only mail once, you only have one chance to grab attention per month.
Right. So, you know, so it really a take a crawl, walk, run approach. You don’t need to, how many business lingo terms can I put in here? Do you don’t need to boil the ocean? Right away, right? Like you gotta, you gotta build up in an increment, right? So like a welcome email could literally be one email to start.
And then you get to, at some point, I’m going to expand to three or four, depending on the length of your buying cycle, card abandoned, start with one, then expand, you know, make sure order confirmation, shipping confirmation are set up at a minimum, but then you can do other things, you know, add on, but you don’t feel like you have to build some, I was in higher ed years ago and we built out 120 email.
Automation that went out over six years. You don’t need to build that. You do not need to build that. We got there. So that you say, where do you start? That’s where I start. So now, now that we, I wanted to kind of set the stage for this broader conversation with just some of the basics and the foundations for those that, and I know you can get, there’s many follow ups to that and and we’re, you know, Start we’re scratching the surface.
I want to throw a business one in there too, Scott, and how to approach that topic, but now how does now moving on to kind of the AI side of things, how is AI like working in the email landscape? Cause that’s all we’re hearing about. And I’m all these, I mean, speaking to emails, I’m getting all these different things and tools and stuff coming in my inbox, like from your vantage point and from your area, like how, how is AI playing into that?
It’s still very much in its infancy. Let’s be fair. It’s, I will say, you know, there’s always the concern that marketers are going to lose their jobs and I don’t think that’s necessarily going to be true. I think that the marketers that do lose their jobs are the ones that don’t embrace a. I. Yeah. So I think I saw an article literally an hour ago that Sam Altman came out and said that, you know, AGI, it’s like the artificial general intelligence he thinks will be able to accomplish 95 percent of what marketers do in five years.
Wow. Now, am I bullish on that time frame? No. But I think there’s going to be with every year, there’s going to be, you know, obviously incremental pieces that can be handled by AI right now. I think obviously you’ve got the chat GPTs of the world, the shocks, the Gemini’s who can help with copy. There’s a lot of these sort of public AI engines that can certainly help.
I like to say they’re great starters of content, right? Never just take what they write for you and go, good. Like, don’t do that. But if you go, I don’t know how to start this email or this article or these subject lines go, Hey, I need some ideas. It’s I’m a former copywriter. It is great. It is a whole lot easier to edit and have things to spur inspiration than to look at a blank page and go, I’m going to start praying to all the writing gods.
So there’s value there. There’s also, you know, there’s like movable links, Da Vinci and some of the other ones that are. You’re able to build your own, essentially build your own engine on a right and train it on your content, which is where I think we should. You need to go, right? Because it needs to be trained on.
You need to be trained on how you talk. And there’s a lot of input This human input, not, it’s not just going to be human management. It’s going to be human input, right? Cause I there’s the AI, it’s a garbage in garbage out. The AI is only as good as what it receives. So, and what it can learn on, because if it becomes self aware, we’re all in trouble, but let’s be fair.
But I went to a conference a few months ago where one of the sessions was put on by a brand who built. In three months, which was amazing. They built this huge AI engine that they were able to then for black Friday email, send 750 versions of their black Friday message, because they train, they built all these content blocks and then train the AI on that content.
And then said, now, based on what you know, on customer data and what we’ve put here, you build the emails in the way that makes the most sense for product recommendations and, but you know, other sorts of content delivery. And I think that’s where we’re going. You know, it’s prompt engineering is going to become important.
So not 10 subject lines about X, Y, Z, but like true full prompt engineering. And then in terms of email, it’s really going to be about content blocks and go, okay, we’re going to build. You know, and we do that now at a very high level with, you know, email template design and things of that sort where it’s like, okay, we’re going to build it.
And it’s going to be, you have 10 versions of, you have like a hero block and then a two column and then versions of two column and three column to then put in your content. The AI is going to draw on that and then actually put the content in. But again, we’re still, so AI is going to have a huge A piece in the content delivery mechanism.
And it’s also going to have a big, and it’s already, I think this is where it really started with like customer data platforms and some of the email service providers out there that have some CDP elements to it, audience data science. All, you know, sort of targeting and segmentation and, you know, next best channel.
So not just email, but Hey, they don’t really respond to email. Let’s send them an SMS. Or if you have a mobile app, it’s, Hey, let’s do push and SMS or push and email or just email. Like that’s, it’s going to become where the AI. And I would always say with anything, and this is true in the best email marketers or testers, really good testers, you know, test your own assumptions versus what AI is telling you.
And just see what gets better results, right? So that’s, it’s, like I said, still kind of in its infancy and there’s a lot of excitement and I’m hoping at some point it gets small. I like to say it needs to get small enough for people to understand and to understand the practical uses of it and we’re getting there, but we’re not fully there yet.
Yeah. What would you say, and I know you listed multiple uses in case scenarios there, but what would you say is the most I don’t know if I’d say obtainable, but the most likely for people to get value out of kind of going down a rabbit hole now versus trying to eat the whole AI what’s out there pie.
And it could be copy. I mean, I don’t want to put any words out there. Like what, what, what comes to mind when I asked that question? I think depending on what your tech stack is, there might be some immediate value on the. Audience intelligence side, I think, depending on what you’re using copy for sure, right?
Like I said, just breaking through writer’s block, getting some different testing ideas, right? If you go, Hey, I’ve been writing these types of subject lines forever. I just need four different versions of it, right? 10 different versions. And, you know, there, there are some providers out there that also help with AI generated and they’ve been for several years, AI generated subject lines and things where they help you test and do all that stuff like that.
I think that’s where we’ve seen sort of the immediate value now and sort of what you can pick up tomorrow, right? Would be a chat GPT, maybe the paid version, right? Because there’s more features in the paid version. But you know, that’s if you like, say, Hey, I’m going to go dabble. I probably dabble in chat GPT before really trying to dabble into the audience intelligence.
Hmm. And the audience intelligence side. Let’s get a little let’s like take us through. It could be, it could be something that you’ve done otherwise, or just kind of a case scenario. Let’s get a little bit nerdy on it. Like, what’s a possible use that you could see it working for now? Not the like in the future or something like that, like one day, but like, what’s a possible use case scenario?
I will be honest and say I haven’t. Done it to the AI effect yet, but I could envision it and it may be probably as possible in some cases to do this now. But for example, one of, one of the more advanced programs we’d like to build is what we call next logical product, right? So you bought, I worked in a mattress company years ago and it was okay.
I went to my data science team, my analytics team, and I said, give me everyone who purchased this mattress in their first purchase. And then what are the top four products. That were purchased in a second purchase. And then I built out an email series and this is more manual. Like I said, I can drive this right.
And make it more automated and go, all right, I’m going to feature those four products in those emails and go, Hey, this is great. Thank you for purchasing. We’d love for you to Give you a little discount to come back and order some more. Here are some products we recommend. And you’ve seen that you’ve seen product recommendations.
Product recommendations have really been a dynamic AI type driven thing. We just haven’t called it AI until now. Let’s be fair. I mean, big data, anybody who remembers the term big data, kind of sort of AI, right? So at least, at least where we’re at with AI right now, right? Like, right, exactly. Yeah. So we’ve had blanket terms for a while, but that I could see the decisioning.
And the product recommendations coming in and going much more rather than just sort of they purchased this, like they could factor in browse behavior, they can factor in, you know, maybe it’s zip code and yeah, you know what we know about incomes in those zip codes, right? So it’s like, there’s a lot of different factors that the engine can ingest and make those decisions faster and more automated, which is where I think is going to go.
What about timing? I’m just curious, like, like timing side of things of when to send otherwise, like, does that play a role in or a factor in it at all? I mean, send time optimization has been a thing for a few years now. I mean, probably closer to 10. I, my personal opinion is there’s value if you’re driving, like there’s value in going, Oh, this person is active right now in their inbox.
Right now, whether that’s true or not, I mean, there’s a lot of, it depends on a lot of signals and whether that’s going to remain true with cookies and everything else, who knows. But it’s also something that it can enable speed to market in terms of testing, right? Okay. I want you to send out every hour.
for the next 12 hours. And then, you know, it’s, it, it does it automatically for you. Like you could do those things. Yeah. I think it’ll be interesting. And then it’ll be able to ingest that and build your own same time optimization intelligence. Right. So there’s again, kind of in its infancy. Yeah. But, you know, I think there’s, I mean, I’ve done it where I’ll give you an example of a more manual test we ran where, you know, we were sending it 6 a.
m. forever. And I went, well, I’m going to test in the afternoon, late afternoon. It’s a considered purchase. They may not want to do it first thing in the morning, They have time in the evening. Let’s send in the evening. And so we sent in the evening for like three weeks. I sent it multiple cents. You know, another thing, don’t ever just send a test once.
Cause the, all you learn is what happened or didn’t happen on it. Tuesday, March 5th at 1 p. m. Right. That’s all you learn. If you only run it once, unless it’s a total bomb, right? Like if it’s a total bomb, but you know, don’t ever trust good news until you’ve repeated it. But we ran that test for about three weeks and I looked back and I said, huh, opens are better, clicks are better.
But conversions not interesting. So people were engaging, but they weren’t purchasing and my KPI was purchase. So I went, well, I mean, we can, we can send in the afternoon, but it. shows me that morning is better for that kind of thing. And we’re not talking like earth shatteringly better for opens and clicks, right?
Yeah. It was like, you know, Hey, it was 30 percent here and it’s 32%, right? You go like, all right, that’s not huge. And our volume is big, was big enough. We were able to get some statistical significance out of it, but so, but those are the types of things I could see. Like I said, I think the speed of market Is going to get once you do the initial big build, right?
The big build of the content blocks, the big build of all this stuff, there’s going to be legwork upfront, but once you have that, the speed to market, to do other things, it’s going to get exponentially faster. Yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting to just the speed is going to be I, I can’t wait to see as it evolves, but I do know there’s also obviously like anything there’s challenges and there’s going to be updates and other things coming down the line.
Like for sure. I want to jump around a little bit. So we’ve been hearing a little bit about the Google and, and Yahoo changing deliverability and otherwise. I mean, you’re, you’re my email guy. Like what’s that all about? In some cases it’s stuff that Gmail and Yahoo have been doing for a while.
They’re just making it public, like their spam complaint thresholds. Right. So. For example, and we’re going to get a little technical here as technical as, as technical as I’m capable of doing. There are deliverability people that are much smarter than me. And you can feel free to reach out to me and I’ll connect you.
You know, it’s point if you’re sending to over 5, 000 people in Gmail per day, this will, for example, this will come into effect. They have a 0. 1 percent spam complete threshold. So if you hit that number, they start looking at you and going, what are you doing over there? When you hit, when you hit 0. 3 percent now, now keep in mind, this is over a set period of time.
Like if you get one email and you send a bunch of email, they’re not going to go, Oh my God, one email at 0. 3%. It’s going to red flag you right away. It’s when you start hitting 4 consistently that they start going, we’re not going to deliver everything for you anymore. We’re going to start blocking things.
We’re going to start doing this. You got to get your house in order. The, The, the sort of bigger piece that is what everybody’s scrambling about right now. And my deliverability team has been doing a bunch of work around this because people go, Oh crap, it’s here is D Mark. And don’t ask me to tell you what the acronym means, but it’s D M A R C.
It’s an authentication. Protocol that really what it does is it protects you from spoofing. So other people pretending to be you. So when you send out an email, Gmail will look for an SPF record, which, you know, there’s three authentication protocols, SPF, DKIM, you may have heard of this domain keys and then DMARC.
And what they’re requiring now, DMARC wasn’t required. But now it is. So we’ve been setting up DMARC for a lot of people. And really what it is, is it, because what happens when you send through like a MailChimp or through a Salesforce marketing cloud or whatever is you’re delegating, you’re essentially allowing those platforms to mail on your behalf.
And the setups here, Tell the Gmails, Yahoos, AOLs. Yes, it still exists. You know, hot mails of the world that it is you sending this email. So what, what this does is, and then for DMARC in particular, you can set it to go like, all right, there’s three levels. There’s none, which is literally like a reporting only.
I just want to see reports. There is a quarantine. So if it catches anything that isn’t signed properly by you. It’ll push it aside and let it sit for a bit. And then there’s reject, which basically goes, if it isn’t signed properly, just trash it and don’t even throw it in spam. Just, just block it from the server altogether.
So the minimum requirement right now is DMARC. It’s like P equals none and everything else. Like you just have to get to a reporting level and it’s ultimately a good thing. Because I heard a stat, I think it was last week that night that gmail blocks 99 percent of email traffic every day. So think about the amount of email you get and then basically multiply it by 100.
Right. Like that you could be getting in terms of, of true spam. Right. So really it’s a matter of, okay, we know it’s you. We’re going to let you through. And then of course you still have to factor in reputation and everything else and sort of your normal stuff. And it’s like, it’s like. You get past the bouncer for the first room in the tower, right?
And then you have to get to the next bouncer. Like there’s multiple bouncers in this scenario, but you even enter the building. You have to have these set up and then they start filtering into rooms. Well, Scott I, last question, you’ve been in the email game now 15 years, I think you said, plus what keeps you so passionate because talking to you right now?
I mean, I’m a fan of email, but you’re passionate. You’re in there. Like, what keeps you so focused on email and so passionate about it? Like, like, why do you do what you do? I do what I do one, because it, it really works so selfishly. It feels great to do stuff that works, but it really is that combination of art and science, right?
And I come from a copywriting background. I, you know, I was a very briefly a music major in college, you know, and so I have that sort of. You know, creative, artistic kind of background. And, and then I have the, yeah, but did it do anything? Did it work? And email because of, because it’s first party data, because it’s, it’s just so direct and integral into that customer journey.
You can see the fruits of your labor. Right. Yeah. You know, I, my early career, I was writing TV and radio ads and this is before the days of, I mean, Nielsen’s always been kind of a, you know, quotation mark type thing, but this is long before the days of connected TV, CTV, right. Where you could track things and do stuff like that.
So the only way I knew something worked is if immediately after it went live, they had a raise and a rise in foot traffic and sales. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or just anecdotally, right? Like, Hey, somebody came in and said they loved the commercial. But when I got into email, it was, I can send out a newsletter and see immediately, okay, this many now opens are a little fuzzy right now, but I can see how many people clicked.
I can see how many people clicked and then went and converted on site. Right. And you have your hands. I love it. Cause you have your hands in so many things. You enable the website to do great things and vice versa. Right. And then, like I said earlier, you, you, you own that data. So you can go to your other teams and be like, Hey, do you guys want some data?
Cause I have some data and you know, you don’t have to say that weirdly. Like, you know, you got the money, I got the stuff. Right. But, but it’s just the efficiency too. And so there’s just so many things to like about it. And I also, if you’re not in the email marketing community and you do email, you should.
Like there’s an email geek Slack. There’s the email experience committee over at the ANA, the American association of national advertisers, like the email community is amazing. It’s filled with some amazing people. And it’s one of the few places where you go, we’re all competitors, but we all help each other.
So, you know, from a purely personal standpoint, some of my best friends I’ve met through this industry, and we’ve actually never actually worked Together, but we’re like really good friends. So that’s what keeps me engaged, man. That’s great. That’s a great answer. And I can see it. It comes through in your, your passion for the way you talk about email.
It came through in this interview. That being said, I know there’s a, it’s just really touched on so much today, and I know I’m sure that some that are watching are going to have more questions, more concerns, more thoughts, more, how do I get started? How do I figure out this email thing? Inbox army. How do people reach you and your team?
Yeah. So, I mean, really easy inbox army. com. We, we chose the name because it was 12 characters or less and easy to remember. And, you know, it’s that’s, I mean, Hey, it works, right? If you want to find me, you can find me on LinkedIn. It’s linkedin. com slash in slash Scott Cohen, 13, happy to connect with anybody and, you know, help out.
You need help with your email. Come check us out. Fantastic. And for everybody that’s watching, we’ll put all that information in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters or engaging in an episode, we’re all about bringing out business owners, entrepreneurs, experts.
Entertainers and having them share their mission. The reason behind their mission, you know, why do they do what they do? Like what gets them excited to get out there and to make a difference. If that’s the type of content that sounds interesting or fun or exciting to you, we welcome you hit that subscribe button.
We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing. Scott, thank you so much again for coming on and Hey, I know I’m more educated on email and I’m sure my audience is as well. So thank you so much. Thanks Adam
