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What attracted you to email marketing, and how did you get to where you are today?

I fell into email marketing like everybody else did: by accident. No seriously, I was in a creative role at a lovely Atlanta start-up (Scoutmob, RIP!) and we were neighbors with Mailchimp, so we used their tool, in addition to constantly trying to score sweet swag. It soon became clear that email was the number one revenue driver for the business so supplying the best content and creative in that channel was a huge priority. The rest is history, you could say. 

What’s your favorite email design trend?

While I love browsing and collecting the best email creative, I truly don’t think toooo much about trends–it’s all about what works for your business. I have loved the trend away from overly polished, overly staged photography in favor of something more real. I think people are distrustful of AI-driven imagery and constantly on the lookout for a “fake.” Great news about this trend: Anyone can pull it off and stay true to themselves, without a hefty price tag. 

What could most B2C brands improve when it comes to email deliverability?

Oh boy, loaded question! I think that brands could have better engagement-based suppression rules and actually stick to them. I know the temptation is great to just “blast” out an email (shudder) to try to juice some sales. But choosing a reasonable amount of time to move a contact to unengaged, based on your product and the buying cycle, respects your list and keeps your brand–and your deliverability–strong in the long run. And, of course, always be testing your inbox placement and keeping tabs on your key deliverability metrics. It’s a requirement at this point, y’all. 

What makes a good email campaign?

It should check one or two of the following boxes:

• Delights with content that can only come from your brand
• Provides helpful, personalized content that is exactly what the recipient needs at the moment
• Features cute dogs or babies

What’s in your email marketing toolbox?

Hardware: 

• A Mac and a screen, a magic keyboard and mouse. That’s it.

Software:

• Figma: For keeping up with a gorgeous email design system for both product and marketing
• Inbox Monster: For creative collaboration & testing rendering across 90+ devices and running creative diagnostics on things like accessibility, as well as keeping tabs on our deliverability
• Active Campaign: For creating triggers, journeys and other email campaigns that match back to my design system 
• Spotify: To stay sane with doing all of these things

What’s your favorite email campaign of all time? Why?

This is so silly, but the favorite campaign I ever worked on was for… Mattress Firm’s Columbus Day Sale. It was simply a huge stack of white mattresses that made the reader scroll and scroll. The headline at the bottom? A Ship-load of Mattresses. Simple, hilarious and got the point across in a novel way. 

Are you using AI? How?

We use some AI for image diagnostics within our tool that I find pretty nifty. Knowing that the ISPs are likely analyzing and tagging the content of all images to ensure that bad actors aren’t slipping spam through that way, Inbox Monster has a similar feature. Also, this is far from revolutionary, but when I’m stuck on a subject line or other bit of language, I’ll throw it into Chat GPT to get unstuck, though I never use the exact language it spits out. 

What do your parents think you do for a living?

I recently heard my mom tell her bridge friend that I work at Survey Monkey, though she isn’t sure what I do there. Way off, mom. Way off. (Inbox Monster, Survey Monkey, I can kind of see it? There’s a digital thing and a furry thing involved…) 

Much love,
Andy

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @emaillove