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How did you get into email? 

I never intended to work with email marketing as a profession when I started out. I did a BA in Digital Concept Development, wanting to work with marketing on a scientific level and shape strategies to fit. With this strategic mindset however, it became very apparent to me while studying, that a lot wanted to think up the strategies, but very few knew how to actually execute on them. So to stand out I started learning a bit of code on the side, amongst other things, to give myself an edge.

Those side projects eventually ended up becoming a portfolio, one I then landed an internship with, in what I later found out to be, one of the biggest and most successful agencies in the city. I was a novice, with nothing more than a few half baked projects in my portfolio, but a belief in my own abilities to identify a differentiating need and learn how to overcome it. While I initially had applied for a job as a Frontend Developer there, my Manager was intrigued by my eye for details and tenacity – so he suggested that I should start as an intern working with email marketing, while studying, and work my way up to become a Frontend Developer.

While I was over the moon for getting a shot, it quickly became apparent that email coding was a bit of a tangled mess that nobody at the agency wanted to touch. I was fortunate enough to have a mentor who had done her tour and learned quickly the basics of how email coding could be less of a mess. It only lasted a few months though, before my mentor decided to go back to freelancing, leaving me with the ropes of large global brands email templates and not much experience.

It became my baptism of fire, being thrown into the deep end, with much responsibility and very little experience. But it proved to be a blessing in disguise. Not only could I set the bar for what we could and couldn’t deliver on, in terms of design, I could get a clear overview of what was the situation across clients, instead of being confined to only a few. It fueled my curiosity to want to do more, push the boundaries and come up with new ways, that ended up being award winning solutions and help spark a bit of a renaissance for email marketing within the agency, turning it from something that was dull, rigid and boring to interactive, responsive and highly critical for the overall campaigns we were doing.

This went on for a couple of years, and while I did eventually move on to become a Frontend Developer, later on a Technical Project Manager, Head of Digital Marketing and other titles, my heart always belonged to email marketing. It is the foundation of any good Marketer to fully understand the power of email, in my humble opinion.

Now I’m working with everything I love. Having founded Alpaco, I want to give Email Developers and Marketers the tools they need to manage their email templates however they want, with whatever setup and ESP they want, and not fearing that their users can ruin that in any way shape or form.

What are some of your favorite email design trends at the moment?

Uh there are so many at this point, but one thing that always draws my eyes is a well executed background image with content on top of it. It just makes every email pop and stand out from the vast sea of  written copy inside images or the simpler version with a basic image and some content beneath it. If you really want to stand out, you’re able to execute these design features, preferably with multi-languages, different pieces of content like text, buttons etc. Maybe even extend the image boundaries more than your content area to make it a fully immersive experience with large spanning graphics that’s both reasonable in load time, doesn’t ruin the mobile experience and draws the user in – now that’s a favorite of mine.

And if you want to take that even further, making it into a hotspot variant, to give more detailed descriptions, then that really gets the hairs standing.

How do you see AI impacting email marketers over the next few years?

I first want to make it clear that I’m a firm believer AI has come to stay, for the better. Right now we’re in a phase of “throw it to the wall and see if it sticks” kind of situation, so there are a few things that’s being launched and developed out there that I don’t condone and I believe is taking the whole value out of email marketing.

I think we’re going to see two different approaches to AI that will both prosper, but in two completely different ways, and I’m going to categorize them into “helping you” and “doing it for you” kind of AI solutions.

We’re going to see tools that can read your customer data, understand opening data, understand your products and start creating campaigns, content, personalization, translation and send the campaign out for you in a heartbeat. Those are the tools that go into the “doing it for you” category and is a mindset that I don’t think is good for the industry and whichever organization employs them, from the simple fact that it’s void of human touch. It doesn’t understand human touch and personality, and nobody is really bothering. A dystopian scenario is when an AI email campaign is being created and sent out to inboxes that too is being read and read and judged by an AI what’s the content of that campaign and whether it’s relevant to the human behind that email address or not – in that case I believe email marketing as a whole is losing its basis of existence and risk becoming just another channel users won’t bother to look at.

When it comes to tools that help the marketer make informed decisions on their customer data or translations, then it becomes just that, a tool that’s “helping you”. It’s a help, but a human being still needs to make the informed decision on whether that fits in with the goal they’re aiming for.

To me it really comes down to the way these tools are being shaped and how marketers decide to use them. Both scenarios are saving time and adding value, but I’m sad to think about the possibility of an AI talking to an AI, when the whole strength of email marketing is that you can be much more personal and human than on any other media channels out there.

What’s in your email marketing toolbox?

Hardware:

• Dell XPS 13, 2021
• LG 34” inch UW-QHD(gotta make sure it works on all screen sizes)
• Surface keyboard
• Surface headphones 1st gen
• Logitech Mx Master 2s
• Razer Chroma X docking station
• Nvidia GTX 3060 Graphics Card
• Canon R6 + Manfrotto stand
• Bespoke office chair
• Bespoke hardwood countertop + Ikea Bekant legs
• Maximus Helmet(always prepared for a silly-hat meeting)
• Breast implant(a nice little soft cushion for my cell phone)
• 3D miniature print of Alfred(our mascot)

Software:

• Adobe suite
• Figma
• Google suite
• VS code
• Docker
• Testi
• Slack
• Asana
• Sticky Notes
• Spline
• Maya 2025

Are you using AI? How?

The short answer is “no”, the longer answer is, “no, but we’re experimenting”. See Alpaco is an email design system platform that lets you create whatever template, design rules and data setup that you want. Now that has its strengths in and of its own, but when it comes to the content production part, the daily users are usually marketers that drag & drop the blocks/componentes into their campaigns. Here we want to offer a fast and reliable translation service, that with a few clicks can produce a campaign and translate it into numerous languages, all with the help of AI. That’s easy, now the real challenge is quality and security. At Alpaco we’re all about delivering certainty and flexibility, so we don’t want to release an AI feature onto our users that they can’t trust with their marketing message. We have a working demo, but we’re still fine tuning it so that we’re sure we’re actually helping our users instead of creating more pain points.

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

The first one that springs to mind is Stripo and their interactive emails. I’m not afraid to give credit to a competitor, and what they are able to make with AMP in email is no short of a beacon of light for all email aficionados. From what I can tell, these particular emails are all hand coded, but nevertheless the way that they’re pushing the boundaries and showing what AMP and interactivity can do for the user experience in email is marvelous and playful. Big credits to Dmytro and his team for still shining a light on interactivity in the inbox, no matter how steep the climb is or how narrow the path may be. It’s not for everyone, hard to scale, long implementation time and the support for it is sadly poor to say the least, but if I didn’t have Stripo to show me the way, I wouldn’t have believed it viable.

What do your parents think you do for a living?

My parents definitely think I’m doing some server-techy-marketing mumbo jumbo. Working with technology is still a bit of a mystery box to that generation and when I go on to explain that it’s specifically email marketing creation and the optimization of that genre, I think all they hear is I’m the one responsible for all the spam emails they get in their inbox. Untangling that and explaining that I’m actually trying to help the industry do better is lost on them.

As long as I stay true to being a help to others and are happy and content, I believe that’s what matters the most to them. 

Much love,
Andy

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @emaillove