Interactive Email - the next big thing in 2018: In discussion with Matt Harris, Co-Founder and CEO of Sendwithus
Dec 19 2017 | 07:00 PM | 5 Mins Read | Level - Intermediate | Read ModeIshani Banerjee Former Communications Specialist, MarTech Advisor
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Ishani, an Economics major, is the newest (and youngest) addition to the Revenu8 editorial team. Her infectious millennial curiosity to deep-dive into all things tech has led her to track the innovators and disruptors in the martech and HR tech world, and bring their stories to life in through the MarTalk and HRTalk Executive Interview Series. Her goal is to help simplify business technology for functional teams and enable a smooth digital transformation for them. Ishani’s loves to immerse herself in the constantly-changing digital world, and she is always bringing exciting new editorial ideas to the team . On weekdays, Ishani works towards building a successful career in Communications, but on weekends this twinkle-toed dreamer, who is already well-trained in Salsa, Jive, Classical and Hip-Hop, explores other dance forms to perfect. For all editorial queries on the MarTalk/ HRTalk Interview series, please email ishani.banerjee@martechadvisor.com / ishani.banerjee@hrtechnologist.com
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DownloadJoin us as we talk to Matt about how transactional emails are the big missed opportunity and how Sendwithus is making them strategic for its users. Matt talks about how they are empowering marketing and product teams to create content without involving developers or deploying code, the future of email, their recent $5 million Series A funding, and why their investors call them ‘category makers’. A self-proclaimed hacker, email nerd, and avid rock climber, Matt co-founded Sendwithus in 2013 in Victoria, Canada, and later moved to San Francisco, CA, to participate in the Y Combinator program.
What does true personalization look like going forward - how can email contribute to or even lead the personalization efforts of a B2B enterprise?
Personalization for a B2B enterprise is not all that different from B2C. Think of any data point a B2C company might use to personalize content and it can be applied equally to B2B. And I’m talking about far more than just ‘name’ — website interactions, app interactions, content views, content downloads, past purchases, even support tickets and geographic data -- these can all be used to customize email content in ways that engage customers. We all know that personalized content leads to more opens, more clicks, and more conversions, so regardless of whether we’re talking B2C or B2B,
if a marketer has the data to create a custom email experience, they should be using it.
Interactive email is the big thing we are excited about in 2018 – tell us more about what is going to bring email alive in the near future and how can B2B marketers leverage these opportunities?
It is exciting -- and interactive email can be anything from a simple product demo in GIF form to a full-on, emailable microsite. Companies are already experimenting with image slideshows and carousels, interactive shopping carts, and embedded forms for surveys and polls — the list goes on. An obvious B2B application of this is embedding slide decks directly within nurture emails, which some companies are already doing. Only time — and testing — will tell if these techniques are novelties or if they’re the wave of the future as some have predicted. And as with everything else related to their email efforts,
B2B marketers should test and retest interactive elements to make sure they make sense for their business, their products, and, most importantly, their customers.
Your focus is on ‘Transactional emails’. Is this distinct from or a subset of marketing emails? What role could transactional emails play in the buyer’s journey and what business impact could they have beyond a smoother CX?
Transactional emails are both distinct from and a superset of marketing emails. They’re distinct from marketing emails in that they’re automated emails, triggered as a direct result of an action taken by a customer or in relation to a customer’s account. Account activations, order confirmations, password resets, and app notifications are just a few examples.
Transactional emails have much higher open and click rates than traditional marketing emails because they are triggered by customers who are already invested in your product or service. That makes them prime opportunities for re-engagement, retention, or referrals.
It really is surprising how few companies take advantage of the marketing opportunities these high-value emails offer — opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, solicit reviews or recommendations, social sharing, etc. In that sense, transactional emails can definitely be considered a superset of marketing emails. But because changing these emails is rarely easy — traditionally requiring significant developer resources — it’s also a valuable touchpoint that is all too often ignored or forgotten. Many times these transactional emails become ‘dead-end email’ — guaranteed to be opened by a customer but with no call to action. This is a great opportunity for savvy marketers, willing to take that extra step and close the loop.
There is huge potential to turn a one-time purchaser into a repeat customer and a repeat customer into a promoter, increasing the lifetime value of both and making a significant impact on the bottom line.
Sendwithus claims to empower marketing and product teams to create content without involving developers or deploying code – I can see how that would be a draw for marketers. But how do you build in the integration, security and compliance factors into it?
Sendwithus is a platform designed to allow the whole team -- designers, marketers and developers to work together seamlessly on beautiful and complex emails. It provides a powerful API, intuitive visual editor and built-in device testing for truly collaborative email strategy and execution. We’re quite proud of how security and compliance are built into our enterprise offering, and we do this in two ways. First, the approval workflow requires that each email is reviewed before it's published and passed into production. This means design, product, and legal teams can all ensure regulatory compliance and other considerations have been addressed before an email is ever sent. Our platform makes this process quick and easy. And second, our platform integration is such that it ensures customer data is never passed to our system — enterprises own and control their data, which is a privacy compliance feature that is highly appreciated by our customers.
Cheryl Cheng, General Partner at BlueRun Ventures, who led your recent $5 million Series A funding called you ‘category makers’: tell us more about the category you are trying to establish? What components of Sendwithus make it different from other email strategy and execution solutions out there?
Simply put, we're not an email company, we're a content company. There's a massive need to centralize customer messaging in one place , and we're starting with transactional email. These emails are so often a missed opportunity for marketing, our platform truly opens new opportunities. This is the category we're defining.
Our platform is defining that category in several significant ways. First of all, as you noted earlier,
we’re taking transactional email content out of the codebase, this allows marketing and product teams to create, test, and edit content without involving developers or deploying code.
This not only saves time and resources, it also allows the flexibility to A/B test more extensively — and more creatively — and use the results of those tests to continuously refine and optimize transactional email content.
Secondly, we don’t actually send email. Our cloud-based platform sits outside both an enterprise’s production environment and their email service, connecting via API. This adds an extra layer of security, since our platform never touches customer data and only approved and published emails are passed into production. This helps prevent coding errors and brand inconsistencies, while also ensuring regulatory compliance.
Finally, our platform’s approval and publishing workflows allow enterprises to centralize responsibility for all of it — email content and code integrity, brand governance, regulatory compliance, and reputation management. This centralization can span teams, departments, divisions, and business units, streamlining cross-functional collaboration and ensuring consistency across large organizations.
Email is among the oldest and most proven communication channels - tell us what is new and innovative in email today? What does the future of email look like over the next few years?
Going beyond the obvious trends - embedded video, interactive email, etc. — data collection and analysis are more granular than ever, resulting in more advanced segmentation and more finely tuned personalization. I think this trend will continue, pushing us closer to true, one-to-one communication.
I also think this trend will evolve into dynamic, real-time personalization — email content based not just on what a customer bought last month but on a product they browsed this morning or a piece of content they read over lunch. Thinking longer-term, we’ll start seeing AI and machine learning applied to the text content of emails, not just images or product recommendations. Every marketer knows they need to test, but eventually content systems will be able to continuously test at every stage of the customer journey.
Security and regulatory compliance are critical issues that are becoming more important every day, so we can expect this to remain front and center as priorities marketers cannot ignore.
The future will also bring technological advances that provide a separation of email creation, approval, and publishing workflows from both the codebase and customer data. New technologies will accomplish this in a way that empowers continuous improvement and innovation while addressing those security and compliance concerns. Which is precisely what we’re doing here at Sendwithus.