Email Peeps 52: Nicole Merlin

What attracted you to email marketing, and how did you get to where you are today?
I was first introduced to email when I was working as a designer and front-end developer at an advertising agency. We often had email campaigns to build, and as the most junior person on the team when I started, I would often have these jobs passed on to me by more senior developers who were very eager to pass that particular task off to someone โ anyone! โ else.
Initially I couldnโt believe how illogical it was, the way email clients all rendered perfectly normal HTML in such wildly inconsistent ways, but I very quickly started to enjoy the MacGuyver-esque nature of figuring out how to get things to work. Iโve always enjoyed pulling things apart to figure out how they work in the absence of instruction manuals. I am naturally a bit of a contrarian at heart too, so when the consensus says, โthat canโt be done!โ I am tempted to find a way to prove it wrong. Both of these things come in handy for 99% of email coding!
After working on emails more and more in my role at the agency, I started blogging about it which enabled me to start connecting with other email geeks from all over the world. From there I started my own consultancy, Email Wizardry, where I worked full-time as a freelance email designer and developer, and also wrote a lot of blog posts and tutorials to share the things I learned along the way. I then took a role at Campaign Monitor for around a year as an Email Engineer, before returning back to consulting.
I first started working with Knak as a consultant back in 2013 and worked with them many times over the years. In 2021 I came on board with them full-time, initially as an Email Developer on the Engineering Team, and in November 2023 I was lucky enough to move into a new role here as Head of Email Strategy and Development.
What is your favorite email code hack?
There are too many to name! My favourite hack in recent memory is the Yahoo and Gmail with non-Google Account bug where HTML comments were partially removed โ Mark Robbins cleverly pointed out how this could be turned into a hack that allows the use of conditional comments in both clients. Itโs a classic example of email geek ingenuity, of the power of the email community, and of using email client quirks to your advantage!
How do you see AI changing the way we design and build emails?
I think weโll definitely hit the stage pretty soon where creating โan emailโ and then sending it becomes even less common than it already is, although I donโt think that process will ever disappear completely, because thereโs a time and place for everything. But it will continue to be more and more normal to involve AI-powered systems at each stage of email creation and sending, mostly in ways weโre already using: to select recipients, assemble content, and trigger sends, and of course to collect and analyse the results.
A growing preference for assembling content on-the-fly will increase the importance of having sophisticated email design systems which are capable of generating cohesive, on-brand emails at scale in a potentially unlimited number of design and content permutations.
I recently enjoyed reading an article by the Information Architect Jorge Arango about possible future roles for designers in the age of AI and he foresees that, in a future where design at scale is powered by AI models of UI and UX patterns, an important role will be the โPattern Wrangler,โ who manages the โdictionaryโ of these patterns to ensure the AI can work with them most effectively. Email designers and developers may very well step into that kind of role, becoming the overseer of those systems.
Ultimately weโll almost certainly become what he calls Meta-Designers, the people who โdesign the thing that designs the thingโ.
Iโm also sure there will be plenty of changes coming from email clients themselves that we will need to adapt to. We are already seeing Apple, with their latest Mail and Apple Intelligence updates, and Yahoo with their new AI-powered inbox updates shifting towards the framing of your email inbox as more of a personal information manager, leveraging the sheer volume of personal information that it contains. New features are going to continue to develop in those spaces and it will be the role of email developers and email technologists in general to keep pace with that too, to maximise the effectiveness and usefulness of the emails that we create and send, and take advantage of the emerging capabilities of email clients.’
We definitely have our work cut out for us!
Whatโs in your email marketing toolbox?
Hardware:
- MacBook Pro M1 Pro
- BenQ 27โ Monitor
- Apple wireless mouse
- Logitech wireless keyboard
- Lots of real test devices like a Windows PC, Nokia Android, iPads, iPhones, etc.
- Pen, paper, highlighters, sticky notes (essential!)
Software:
- Visual Studio Code
- A range of email clients across all operating systems
- Microsoft Word for quick HTML rendering checks (opening HTML in Word on both Mac and Windows is a quick and interesting way to see how most things will render in Classic Outlook)
- Email on Acid
- Litmus
- Notion
- Figma
- Loom
- Shottr for quick visual communication through annotating screenshots
- Adobe Photoshop (essential for certain raster image processing)
- Adobe Express tools (great for quick tasks like turning videos into GIFs)
I just moved house so itโs boxes everywhere and just a laptop at the moment! This is very grim and NOT my usual setup but Iโm still getting settled. Normally I have a sit/stand desk and use a monitor etc.
What is your favorite email campaign of all time?
That is such a difficult question. I really donโt think I could pick an all-time favourite!
I can call out one email that I really enjoyed this year, which was this particularly stand-out effort in the B2B space from Salesforce. It got a real chuckle out of me. Very well played by Salesforce indeed.
What is your advice for new email peeps entering the industry?
I think in email it really pays to start from first principles, particularly if you want to work in a technical role. Working in email can involve such an interesting blend of old and new technology that it really helps to be familiar with the whole story.
Iโd recommend learning the basic foundations: learn how email itself works, understand SMTP and MIME, learn about character encoding, learn about email authentication and deliverability, get a solid grounding in HTML, CSS and accessibility standards, and gain an understanding of how email clients and marketing platforms work. Then dive into the specific area that you want to specialise in. Having a deep knowledge that starts from first principles makes it easier to see the big picture and to adapt to technological change. Learning about everything also exposes you to all the different areas of email, which can be helpful if youโre not sure of the area that you want to specialise in.
My other piece of advice is: never underestimate the power of just getting your hands on things when you are trying to solve technical issues. If youโre having a problem with a specific device, email client, marketing platform, or piece of software, try as hard as you can to get access to it yourself, even if it seems like itโs going to take a while. Because email issues can often be really, really weird, there is often no substitute for getting your hands on exactly what you are dealing with, so itโs always worth the investment if you can make it happen.
You live down under but work for a Canadian company. How do you manage work/life balance with a big timezone gap?
I do! I love Canada, and Iโm super lucky because I get to fly over for company on-sites once or twice each year to see the team and briefly pretend Iโm Canadian!
Day-to-day, the best crossover between Australia and Canada is first thing in the morning, and I start at 6:00am to make sure I can maximise this time. When itโs winter in Canada, almost half the day crosses over, which is great. When itโs summer in Canada thereโs only 1-2 hours of crossover, so during that half of the year, we just make sure weโre really organised about prioritising discussions that need to happen in that time.
Knak has an amazing remote culture as well which makes it very easy. As a team weโre great at using asynchronous tools like Loom, Fellow and Slack to record videos and meetings and ensure everyone is always on the same page.
The time difference also gives me the opportunity to split my day into two halves, where meetings and collaboration happen in the morning, and then focused work can happen in the afternoon when the northern hemisphere is offline. It means that my afternoons are perfect for getting into those really gnarly or complex problems where it helps to get into a flow state.
Much love,
Andy
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @emaillove