Why Your Black Friday Emails Fail and How to Fix Deliverability

Matt Edmundson (00:04)
Well, hello and welcome to the eCommerce podcast. My name is Matt Edmondson and it is great to be with you ⁓ this joyful sunny day in November. Now I say it's a joyful sunny day in November. I don't know when you're listening to it or whether it's in fact day, but a warm welcome to you. It's great to be with you today. If this is your first time with us on the eCommerce podcast, first time on the show. Great, great to have you. Always good to have new listeners. I hope your November is going well.

And of course, if you're a regular, welcome back. You're an absolute legend. Absolute legend. Always good to welcome back the regulars as well. Now, before we get started, let me give a quick plug to the newsletter we've got going on. ⁓ Head over to the podcast website, which is ecommercepodcast.net. You can go over to that website. You can find everything on that website. Actually, we've just done a massive new revamp. All of the past episodes, all of the archives are on there. You can find them.

There's a whole new menu system on there. So you can easily find topics. Man, we've done a lot of work on that, which has been ⁓ great. So, ⁓ I know you're in e-commerce. I know you like websites, go have a look, find all the things that don't work and just send me a message. Be my test army. That would be amazing. But of course, whilst you're on there, you can also sign up for the newsletter. ⁓ and every week we email out the notes from the show, ⁓ some extra thoughts that I have, which I don't publish anywhere else there in the newsletter.

⁓ and so there's a lot of value in that. We're getting a lot of great feedback actually on the new newsletter. So go sign up for that. It'll be fun to see you in it. And talking of newsletters, talking of email, apparently that's what we're talking about today. Robbie, welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. How you doing?

Robby Bryant (01:48)
⁓ Never Better, I think, is my standard answer. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to discuss the ins and outs of email marketing and holiday deliverability. Appreciate the welcome.

Matt Edmundson (01:58)
as fantastic

as it is great. Well, one is good timing, but not as good timing as your usual one liners there. I'm quite impressed.

Robby Bryant (02:06)
I mean, they'll trail off as this goes further. I mean, you start strong and it just kind of flat lines.

Matt Edmundson (02:08)
⁓ Yeah,

absolutely. As the coffee starts to wear off, right? I love it. Absolutely brilliant. That's one of the best intros we've had for a little while. So very warm welcome to you all the way from New York. Well, just outside of New York City.

Robby Bryant (02:15)
Yeah, it's a real problem, but we'll see what I can do.

I am in a little village called Scarsdale, it's about 30 miles north of New York City. So sometimes I go down, but most of the time I'm sitting here focused pretty intently on marketing. But when I do get out, it's nice.

Matt Edmundson (02:44)
Yeah, there's so many jokes we could make right there, but let's move on. Let's just tell us a little bit about you, what you do, the company campaign monitor you work for and all that sort of stuff.

Robby Bryant (02:58)
Sure. So ⁓ as you mentioned, I'm Robbie Bryant. I'm the Lifecycle Marketing Leader for Campaign Monitor. It's an email marketing platform. ⁓ Lifecycle Marketing Leader is basically, it means I'm doing marketing and product growth for them. I manage the production line to get all the assets out on a monthly and quarterly basis across the funnel to try and add value to email marketers lives and teach them a little bit about the craft and insert.

little tidbits about Campaign Monitor and why it helps at the same time, the same way.

Matt Edmundson (03:33)
And campaign monitor has been around a while, right?

Robby Bryant (03:35)
Campaign Monitor's been around for 20 years. It's an Australian ⁓ company originally. We now run it out of the states in Nashville. And ⁓ we run it under the Miracle Company banner. But it's a self-serve email platform. It was one of the first of its kind. And really, the reason we continue to stand out after two decades is because in terms of getting to ⁓ a beautiful email delivery quick, no one's going to get you there faster than us.

Matt Edmundson (03:38)
Yeah, yeah,

Robby Bryant (04:04)
And in terms of deliverability, which is another topic today, making sure that email gets in the inbox, that is where we truly excel.

Matt Edmundson (04:11)
Fantastic. Well, sounds like we're talking to the right person with lots of data and lots of understanding about email marketing. So, and I'm a big fan of email marketing for all these reasons. I still think, I'm still surprised, Robbie, maybe you are less surprised or more surprised than me, but I'm always surprised by the amount of people in e-commerce that aren't doing email marketing.

Robby Bryant (04:32)
I'm more surprised at the misconceptions that still exist because people aren't doing email marketing as much. mean, it's such an easy win if you do it correct. I mean, you're talking about like 30 to 40 X returns compared to all other media. I think where that misconception comes from is, you know, four or five years ago, even that recent, it was still a little bit more fragmented in terms of like the mailbox service providers that were facilitating.

all of the different emails that are kind of flying around ⁓ the world. And you could just send an email that wasn't very good with very little negative ramifications. But as I guess that world has consolidated into some core mailbox providers, you've got Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, of course, they're acting now as the sheriffs. And when people step into the email marketing arena for the first time.

Matt Edmundson (05:20)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (05:29)
I think when it's happening is they'll send a couple of subpart emails where they haven't done their homework. They don't have the right text to image ratio. They're not really segmenting it correctly. They're not selling it like they would in another medium. They're just trying it out. And it's that lackluster effort doesn't get a great open rate, doesn't get a good click through rate and people just kind of abandon it. So ⁓ that's why I mean right now, obviously.

Matt Edmundson (05:35)
Mm.

Yeah.

Robby Bryant (05:57)
We've got the holiday season upon us. We've got Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This is the Super Bowl ⁓ of marketing for e-commerce and retailers and digital marketing. So we want to take the opportunity to help people understand how to attack this holiday season correctly.

Matt Edmundson (06:13)
Yeah, no, that's really good. And like we said before, hit the record button. Sadaf, who produces the show, has kind of bumped you up the list a little bit because she's quite keen to get this episode out. Well, you don't thank me, thanks Sadaf. Send us some chocolates, she will be grateful. She, obviously with Black Friday coming up, right now at the time of recording, we're recording about a week before we're going to launch this episode. So this episode is going to come out. ⁓

Robby Bryant (06:22)
Thank you so much.

Thank you, Sarah.

on the list.

Matt Edmundson (06:42)
the 13th of November, which means it's two weeks before Black Friday. We've got two weeks to go. Then we've got Cyber Monday, and then obviously we've got the Christmas. So like you say, this sort of time period between now and even into January seem to be like sort of ripe times. And so it's good to get you on here. So we get a little bit of a checklist, little things we should be thinking about, tidbits that are really going to help us.

⁓ move forward. So a question I like to ask Robbie, ⁓ if you could wave a magic wand, ⁓ and solve like one key issue that every single person is making where email marketing is concerned around this time of year, what would you solve?

Robby Bryant (07:29)
⁓ I would solve the issue of ⁓ advanced engagement, I guess. ⁓ Really, the problem that people typically open up is around this time period, they decide, hey, this is the right moment. We need to actually do an email send. And they've got ⁓ these lists. Perhaps they're even segmented. But they've got this large customer list. And what they do ⁓ is,

Matt Edmundson (07:48)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (07:56)
Maybe they put together something really nice, but then they just do one really loud blast. And that is the exact opposite of what you should do. ⁓ You really want to have an established cadence leading up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and keep that cadence going on after the holiday. I'd point out, ⁓ yeah, don't just do a Black Friday, Cyber Monday blast. Like that is the start of, I don't know.

Matt Edmundson (08:09)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (08:22)
some holiday series, but you need to continue that cadence because it is the walk-up engagement practice that warms those customers up that will have them recognizing you as a brand that will have you or have them opening the emails and clicking out and That's important because your sender reputation is actually driven ⁓ By some some grading that I wasn't always aware of I got to tell you my background

I've been at Campaign Monitor for three years. And before I was in email marketing, I was in product and also ⁓ in marketing proper. And when I did media buys before, I was pretty much all in ⁓ paid search in the social world. And I too was kind of under this misconception that, like nothing you do in email matters. It's kind of ephemeral. I send an email that's spam out into the abyss. People don't like it. Well, that's just the way it is and there are no negative consequences. It's not true. So the mailbox providers.

⁓ they have this concept of deliverability governance. Okay. That's whether or not your email actually gets in the inbox. And if you're familiar with Google ads or Facebook ads, they have this concept of quality scores, ⁓ and they host it at the domain level. And similarly, if you know more about like say social, ⁓ YouTube and Tik TOK, they have dwell time or thumbs up and engagements and the, the sheriffs of, ⁓ the

Matt Edmundson (09:27)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (09:47)
Email marketing landscape, they're looking for similar things like specifically positive signals. So they're looking at opens clicks, replies, forwards, and then on the negative side, they're looking at deletions without reading spam complaints and marketing. ⁓ people marking is junk. So, you know, just understanding that those types of actions are, are being graded, ⁓ is key, I guess, to ensuring you, you keep up your sender reputation as you're also.

maintaining this cadence of engagement up till the holiday season.

Matt Edmundson (10:17)
Yeah.

Okay. So there's, well, there's two ideas that we can just jump in straight away. Send a reputation and cadence. So let's start with cadence and what you mean by that and what a good cadence should be. So obviously what I've heard you say, Robbie is actually don't do the, just send out one big email on Black Friday to your whole list. You've got to think about it.

much more holistically, you've got to ramp up to this form to a better expression. What does cadence look like to enable me to do that well?

Robby Bryant (11:00)
So this is going to sound like a cop out, but the real answer is dynamic. What you should be doing as a part of your opt-in process to your newsletters and outbound emails is asking consumers, what or how often do you want to hear from me? And ⁓ what do you want to hear about? Like, really, the key to any sender reputation is just sending things that people are actually interested in in the first place. So but at a minimum, if it's just like,

baseline average through this season, how often should I be sending if I don't have a set default and I don't have their set cadence preference, I would say at least one email a week through this time period is enough to keep them aware of your brand, to set expectations with those mailbox service providers.

Matt Edmundson (11:44)
Yeah.

So at least once a week. Yeah, okay. And this is interesting, isn't it? So we need to be doing that. Now, let me ask you another question then. If I'm doing e-commerce email marketing, then the chances are I'm emailing out once a week anyway, right? Most e-commerce brands will be emailing out once a week.

Robby Bryant (12:08)
or at least

transactional emails ⁓ at a minimum.

Matt Edmundson (12:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. Does that was actually my question. So I'm sending out my newsletters. I'm sending out my transactional emails. I'm sending out my sequences in my head and correct me if I'm wrong here, Robbie. I sort of have three buckets for email. One is my blasts or my offers, which I'll segment and send out. One is my sequences, which are just more individual things based on actions. And then another one is just transactional emails, right? And I think of them in different ways.

All of those emails together, do they help my sender reputation? Are they all counting towards my sender reputation?

Robby Bryant (12:47)
Absolutely. ⁓ all of that stuff factors in and like in terms of the IP you're using and the domain that it's associated with, provided you're using best practices that respect the AI filters and the content formatting, you're certainly benefiting from it. And I would say that's probably like maybe 85 % of the battle right there. ⁓ it could be a hundred percent of the battle if, ⁓ like your holistic list is being included in these engagements, right? I guess what I'm trying to avoid is, ⁓ you know,

There's always like, what's the upside on reaching out to 3000 people who haven't heard any communication from us in three months. And your boss might think no downside, but the downside is 100%. Those folks are already so far out of market, they haven't heard from you in three months. Expecting anything out of them from the first email, like that is a re-engagement process. So based off of the action items that you are already,

undertaking ahead of the holiday season. That puts you in mostly good shape.

Matt Edmundson (13:50)
Okay. So let's assume we've got cadence down and if we haven't, then is it too late? I mean, we've got two weeks from the time of coming out. If someone's listening to this and thinks, ⁓ poo, I was going to do the big blast on Black Friday. Is it too late? What sort of advice have you got for them? Or is it a case of actually, dude, just learn the lesson for next year.

Robby Bryant (14:13)
Um, I mean, I don't think there's anything quite so black and right, right? Like, uh, everything kind of, uh, what would we say? Like in a, in a logistic regression equation, you've got dependent variables and independent variables that influence that. And, you know, there are a bunch of variables that impact your success during black Friday. And if you haven't sent up until this point, I mean, yeah, that's actually a major, uh, ding.

against you. So how do you counteract that is all hope lost. I mean, it's diminished. But what I would suggest is, ⁓ this is a game of ⁓ value and appreciation and engagement, right? And if you talk about any black holiday preparation for email, it generally all comes back to hygiene, right? Like segment the list, personalize things, make sure people have been engaging with your emails, pull people off. So what I would say is,

Matt Edmundson (14:47)
Mm.

Robby Bryant (15:12)
whatever stage in the cycle you're a prep you're in, ⁓ that segmentation personalization to maximize the positive signals that come from that send will still work in your favor and in your momentum. So it doesn't hurt to build momentum, but the reality is around Black Friday, what's going to happen is there's going to be like a 300 X spike in the emails that are sent out.

And there's going to be ⁓ increased filtering and people that get shifted over into spam because the mailbox service providers are going into overtime trying to police the environment. So you'll be still somewhat susceptible to that if you're getting a late start, but the more carefully you hone who's receiving your note and the better the positive signals, that momentum will certainly help your favor. It will diminish kind of the negative debt that you've accrued by waiting.

Matt Edmundson (15:41)
wow.

Yeah,

yeah, very good. In other words, don't wait, get started. It's not too late, but it's probably not as good as it could have been. So learn the lesson for next year.

Robby Bryant (16:18)
Yeah, just like with all things, get in there, start working on it, and dig deeper.

Matt Edmundson (16:23)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What's, what are some of the other things, ⁓ that we need to think about? So you've mentioned list hygiene. ⁓ just for those that might not know, just explain what you mean by that.

Robby Bryant (16:37)
⁓ let's see, list hygiene really just, ⁓ if you've got dormant users that haven't engaged with, ⁓ any of your offers or opened your emails in some time, like pull them out of the lists, ⁓ honor unsubscribes, ⁓ people unsubscribe for reason. They don't want to see, ⁓ your content. They're definitely accruing negative ⁓ scores and association with your, your domain center reputation. ⁓ so like definitely do that.

You should be validating the new people who are coming in to your list to make sure that they're legitimate, right? You have a bunch of different sources sometimes when you work in media of varying quality and ⁓ you know, they're not all created equal. So make sure that the new people that you're adding to the list really want to be contacted. And then, you know, the biggest elements of hygiene are always really going to come back to, as I mentioned before, segmentation and personalization. ⁓ You want to

Matt Edmundson (17:26)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (17:37)
Group people according to attributes as best you can to ensure they see the most relevant offer you can present them. ⁓ Personalization is just taking that one step further, dynamically populating something that makes them think, this is for me. One thing I wanted to call out, ⁓ we've been doing some work on some new feature releases at Campaign Monitor, specifically AI enablement. And I was always under the impression, maybe early on, that the big advances

on the email side, gonna be, ⁓ it's just gonna write my emails for me and they're all gonna be amazing. And obviously, I mean, really wasn't the case obviously, but what is end up happening instead is that it's enabling email marketing in different ways. And one of the things we just released is this natural language segmentation feature. So in the past, whenever you do list hygiene and segmentation, you know, it's a...

Matt Edmundson (18:12)
Tony, that was true.

Robby Bryant (18:30)
kind of a tedious filtering process. Like what are the attributes I'm looking? Let's filter through this 10,000 unit list and then start partitioning and carving up and applying. And it's, again, it's tedious, but with the new natural language segmentation functionality released, it's AI powered. So you just tell it, like these are the attributes I'm interested in. It goes then and partitions them into the appropriate segmentations. So ⁓ it's a nice... ⁓

advance in the targeting process that will really help ⁓ list high G.

Matt Edmundson (19:03)
Yeah, it's interesting. mean, AI is a fascinating place to sort of rest on for a little minute because like you say, we all want AI to write the beautiful emails and I seem to spend half my time editing content that AI gives me for obvious reasons. Yeah.

Robby Bryant (19:17)
Well, it's only 80 % perfect at best, right? It's missing context.

10 % of it's driven by screw ups. ⁓ Yeah, you're always going to be fixing it.

Matt Edmundson (19:25)
Yeah, you are. And that's okay. And as long as you know that the, as long as you do that before you send it. But the other side of AI is this analysis side of things, isn't it? Where it can look at data and create some interesting insights for you. ⁓ and so using AI to segment your email list seems to make sense. How accurate is that?

Robby Bryant (19:49)
I don't have a stat off the cuff. My guess though, if it's like all AI things, ⁓ you know, driven by, I would say what is a 10 % screw up rate and probably 10 % context, I'd probably say it gets you 80 to 85 % of the way there, like everything else. Of course, it's campaign monitor, it's a hundred percent, but ⁓ yeah, without a doubt. Just being, I mean, these are all probabilistic models, right? If you remember how device graphs work 2000, I mean, the way they still work, they still don't.

Matt Edmundson (19:59)
Mm-hmm.

Without a doubt. Without a doubt.

Mm.

Robby Bryant (20:17)
100 % deterministically, I mean not frequently, completely identify a person and LMMs are doing this with the human language, all right? Word by word by word. So of course they're gonna get it wrong, screw it up.

Matt Edmundson (20:22)
Mm.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Interesting. Do, I'm curious to know, and I don't know if you know the answer to this, Robbie, just talking about AI. If I send an app, an email that AI has written that I've edited a little bit, but not loads, or maybe not even edited at all. Do the email providers know that that's an AI written email and do they penalize me? This is a question I get asked quite a bit. I don't know if you know the answer to this.

Robby Bryant (20:33)
You know.

It's not something they've admitted. And I would be surprised if they are doing penalization based strictly on that, right? Like supposedly they don't penalize you in the organic search anymore for having AI generated content. It's half of the internet's content at this point. It really comes down to, is it valuable? Like, why do we do things? ⁓ Like, why do we execute tactics? It's because there's an overarching strategy with a value proposition.

Matt Edmundson (21:11)
Okay.

Robby Bryant (21:26)
And emails are a tactic. So if that tactic ties into something that offers value, I think that's really what the mailbox provider's sheriffs are after.

Matt Edmundson (21:37)
Fantastic, fantastic. While we're talking about deliverability, because I've got some questions around that, explain to me SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If you've been around a little while in e-commerce, you may have seen these things banded around and not had a clue what it all meant ⁓ and how it affects you in your email. So once we've got an expert, let's ask him, Robbie, what do you think?

Robby Bryant (22:01)
Expert is kind. I gotta say, those are some hairy acronyms. They don't really roll off for a long while. Yeah, you know, that's good. ⁓ But very effective. So yes, SPF, it stands for Sender Policy Framework. Yeah. And basically what it does is it's telling mailbox providers which servers are allowed to send email for your domain. Okay. And it's a guest list for sends. And if your email doesn't come from an approved sender,

Matt Edmundson (22:04)
Yeah, no, I thought the first one was a sun cream, but then that's just me.

Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (22:31)
it gets rejected or flagged as spam. So that's SPF. DKIM, it's another weird one. Domain Keys Identified Mail. Similar, it's a digital signature that's added to each mail in transit. This is just something that proves it came from you. And then finally, the DMARC, Domain Based Message Authentication. So this is actually supplemental to SPF and DKIM. I don't know why I want to call it Kim.

Matt Edmundson (22:33)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (23:00)
But it enforces what should happen if an email fails either of those two tests. ⁓ It also reports back on spoofing or phishing attempts from your domain. ⁓ But in addition to these things, would say Gmail and other mailbox providers, this is non-campaign monitor advice I'm throwing out there, they use AI to judge sender reputation in real time to analyze user behavior, authentication history, and content relevance. So you're not going to hack your way past these controls. You need real

Matt Edmundson (23:22)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (23:29)
genuine user engagement. in addition to those authentication methods, I want to call it like some real easy like checklist that you can ⁓ nail down ahead of sending something that again, just common sense, respect the AI filters. This is all real time now. So no spammy aggressive phrases, no excessive capitalization, overuse of CTAs. There's no universal language to avoid, but you know, everything in good taste. ⁓ Don't be the car salesman.

Matt Edmundson (23:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah. I love that. Don't be, well, don't be the used car salesman, maybe. it's a, yeah, it's one, I know, I totally get it. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's almost like, as I'm listening to you talk, it's almost like, do remember years ago, maybe you're too young. I'm maybe, I'm a man of a certain age where you used to have your secretary who would come and open your mail and read it and then decide whether or not to give it to you. ⁓

Robby Bryant (24:02)
Either- Done.

Matt Edmundson (24:22)
We actually still have that in the office, very rarely do letters that are sent to me actually make it to my desk. There's like a filtering system that they go through. And it's a bit like AI is like that, right? It's sort of, it's reading the email before the email gets to me deciding whether or not this is going to bless my day.

Robby Bryant (24:42)
Yeah. And you know, what's interesting to me is the filtering that hasn't been applied yet, and maybe that won't be applied. So if you wonder why ⁓ email remains strong and relevant in 2025, it's because it's still a part of our lives, like all of us every day. And we're going through a lot of those emails still one by one. And what isn't happening on the email front that is happening on the search front is this consolidation displacement.

Matt Edmundson (24:59)
Mm.

Robby Bryant (25:12)
of that outbound distribution of traffic, right? Like now for any SERP, you've got three winner take all for what was previously generously like maybe a distribution of 20, depending on how low someone's willing to go. You don't still have that same consolidation or over-aggressive filtering of the results that you do in email. So it's a little more, ⁓ there's more of an opportunity and it's more distributed to succeed.

Matt Edmundson (25:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's interesting. And also, of course, sure. I suppose another problem here is more and more email programs are now including AI themselves. So what even when it gets through to your whatever system you use for email, like I must get like an Instagram ad every day for something like fix or AI is like, don't even bother reading your emails. We'll do it for you. We'll even write the replies, put them in your dress folder and send them out kind of a thing.

Robby Bryant (26:05)
I think that's wishful

thinking and that's not coming from an email marketing service provider. Like writing emails on my behalf in most cases are probably going to be a disaster. You know, there, is some preemptive filtering that like I've got chat GPT set up and connected to my Gmail account. And it hasn't really been the tool that I thought it was. It's something like if I need to know when my kids have some appointments, that's a great way to kind of compile that.

Matt Edmundson (26:13)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Robby Bryant (26:33)
and get back to my wife as soon as possible. But the transactional day-to-day management of email is something I haven't seen enough value to turn over to AI yet.

Matt Edmundson (26:43)
Yeah.

Yeah. But it's good. You can see where it's going to go, right? So I think from my point of view as an email marketer, it's just another level of filtering that I then have to think through. It's like, I've, I've got through Gmail. Now I've got to get through whatever program they're using to, get to that person. Cause AI is going to start reading it to reduce the amount of email.

Robby Bryant (27:05)
Absolutely. mean, yeah, you're right.

Matt Edmundson (27:08)
But that again comes back to your point, doesn't it about segmentation, personalization, engagement. What makes then, I mean, we've talked about some of the basics. Let's talk about the actual content of the email from what you've seen. yeah. Yeah. What, from what you've seen, what makes a good email? I mean, obviously we can use loose headlines. Like it has to deliver value, which is, it just rolls off the tongue. It's beautiful. I don't know what that means though. So what makes a good email?

Robby Bryant (27:20)
Please.

Has to be useful

to someone. But that's not, I mean, we are assuming that there is a problem that's being solved. And we are now talking about the mechanics that make email themselves good specifically as a tactic. So we can get specific. And I would say it's really about balance and around after the offer, of course, which let's think about content formatting, right? So 60-40 rule is rather good. Emails need about 60 % text, 40 %

Matt Edmundson (27:37)
Yeah.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (28:05)
imagery to give mailbox providers or that AI, that real time read to understand, you know, how legit this offer is. Should I go a hundred percent text? Hell no. Cause that's going to be an ugly looking email, but you don't want to send just a big image. Like you're going to spam, ⁓ excessive links, broken links. I mean, kind of just marketing one-on-one. ⁓ you know, a real common one that people probably don't

Matt Edmundson (28:06)
Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Robby Bryant (28:35)
think about, but an unaligned from and reply to is definitely something I would stay away from. then ridiculous to say this in 2025, but not optimized for mobile. If you're not optimized for mobile first, ⁓ stay home, I guess.

Matt Edmundson (28:49)
Yeah.

Yeah. Shut the business. It's one of those, isn't it? We were talking about this over the summer. Like what can you do to, you know, for those businesses where summer sales historically just fall off a cliff because everyone's at a beach. It's like, yeah, but people are still on the mobile phones and actually mobile usage goes up, doesn't it, over summer. And so you really find out whether your website works on a mobile, I think, over summer.

Robby Bryant (28:57)
Abby.

Matt Edmundson (29:20)
⁓ And, know, learning that lesson, think is super important.

Robby Bryant (29:24)
You know, I did ⁓ basically a lot of experimentation across multiple industries and sites for two to three years ⁓ ahead of my work ⁓ at Campaign Monitor, partially how I got the job. ⁓ This is, it's obviously cliche, it makes total sense, but after doing all those experiments and trying promotions ⁓ during various times of the year, ⁓ the only time that promotions really drove ⁓ incremental revenue.

and seem to work were during those down periods where people had less of a reason to transact and clinch. So you could run the same promotion during a work week and get a tepid response, but do it the week after Christmas or do it during the summer doldrums. And like that's a way to recoup a little bit of it while you're testing whether your website works on mobile.

Matt Edmundson (29:54)
Mm.

Hmm.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. The team dates, I feel are very good for those kinds of things. You know, the, we're talking about this yesterday in cohort, which is like our sort of online group where we just all get together and have a chat. ⁓ team dates in the UK are interesting because in the UK, most people get paid monthly, not weekly. And so it's normally in the team dates, you know, like the 13th, 14th, ⁓ those kinds of dates where you're

Robby Bryant (30:31)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Edmundson (30:40)
most retailers will notice a drop in sales because it's like, it's not the start of the month where I've got money. It's not the end of the month where I know money is coming and I'm bored or I just need to spend something because it's the end of the month kind of a thing. And so I find the team dates are quite interesting dates to do a lot of these types of promotions.

Robby Bryant (30:57)
You know, I got to tie in a little bit of a promotional note here. One other AI feature we have, we just released is called marketing monitor. All right. And what makes marketing monitor interesting is it looks both at your data set in the account, as well as like the larger industry data set associated with like your, your discipline and focus. And, um, it is set up to help you maximize an objective, whether that be an open rate or a click out rate.

Matt Edmundson (31:14)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (31:26)
And it will then go through and give you suggestions based on things that sees in your account and things that seems the larger industry is doing to improve that. I can imagine if, you know, timing is part of the evaluation and analysis that it does when making those recommendations. So that would fit in very well with that. And furthermore, my favorite thing about it is just that baseline of context that the industry stats give us.

Matt Edmundson (31:42)
Mm.

Robby Bryant (31:54)
I don't know about you, but I don't know how many times where I've just kind of been magically making my own funnel metrics and thinking like these things make sense. ⁓ but really because they're not grounded in reality and what's happening out there in the world, they're still a decent guess, but it's just not as effective as they could be. So getting that, that context is super nice too.

Matt Edmundson (32:09)
Mm.

Yeah, totally. Anything else we should think about in terms of content for the email?

Robby Bryant (32:17)
content for the email. Well, I mean...

In terms of like recipes for success, I guess, like maybe a series, I guess I would say is it's not about one email. should be about probably content calendar plan, how you choose to engage and, ⁓ you know, don't propose on the first date. Kind of a golden rule, but, think about things like interactive holiday series, like 12 days of deals, giveaways.

Matt Edmundson (32:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (32:52)
Steady patterns for these mailbox providers and continual exposure for the audience. Personalized gift guides. Everyone loves a year-end review. I don't know that I have not opened a year-end review from ⁓ a vendor that I've worked with so far. So that type of content really sells it. It makes people want to open it. It feels less transactional by default.

Matt Edmundson (33:08)
That's interesting.

Yeah. But it tells the story, doesn't it? And people feel like they're part of that story, which is great. What about then, so we've got the deliverability obviously thought through where our cadence is, well, it's at least doing better than what it was. Where, you know, we've thought about the content of the email. How do we do follow-up? Like, do you just go, right, well, Black Friday's over, I'll stop the emails. Or do you think differently about follow-up?

Robby Bryant (33:41)
I mean, you have to be, ⁓ that's the thing about deliverability and like this sender reputation and like that quality score concept in general, it's not actually called quality score in this case, but the concept is still similar and that it is a perpetual and it's transactional and it as basically most human relationships outside of family tend to be. And it is like, what have you done for me today? And ⁓ your email program, the core tenant of deliverability

Matt Edmundson (34:06)
Mm-hmm.

Robby Bryant (34:11)
beyond of course authentication and sending valid offers is being consistent and being visible over time and there is no marketing effort especially in modern times where like the demand capture is instant no matter what channel that you're on maybe back in like 2005 when you had a shallow lead form and

There wasn't a lot of other games in town and like they needed that. Maybe you could then get direct attribution and that one click funnel worked well, but that's no longer the reality. Attention is a resource that you have to fight for and ⁓ your followup. It isn't only like continuing to legitimize you and the eyes of the mailbox providers that are grading you at the domain level, but it increases the chance that people are actually going to buy from you because they need to continually experience and be exposed to you.

Matt Edmundson (35:04)
Yeah, very good.

Robby Bryant (35:05)
And that's what like

the, the, the year in review, the, the, the 12 like days of holiday deals and stuff like that come in, like come up with a theme, personalized it, segmented it as best you can. So it's valuable and keep sending into January. And that's not just like selfishly speaking for campaign monitor, like wherever you're doing email marketing, that's the way.

Matt Edmundson (35:21)
Hmm. Absolutely.

Yeah, no fantastic. A top tip there. And I guess I ⁓

As I'm listening to you talk, I'm like, I'm curious, Robbie, are there retailers out there that you think are doing email marketing well that I should go and get on their email marketing list and just sort of see what they're doing.

Robby Bryant (35:48)
Gosh. ⁓

I don't get a lot of retail marketers directly in my box. The two that I could point to, I would say, ⁓ that impress me are Best Buy and Domino's. And ⁓ Domino's, I don't know what that says about ⁓ my personal taste. Probably not a lot. ⁓ But I guess, ⁓ you know, in the case of Best Buy, all of the emails are timely. They're geared around holiday seasons.

Matt Edmundson (36:04)
Okay.

Ha!

Robby Bryant (36:21)
based dynamically around things that I previously bought so they have a firm understanding of my profile and can extrapolate what my other interests might be, therefore by making it very relevant. Domino's. I love them, their marketing strategy rather, because they understand timing exquisitely well and know how to work the SMS timing and the email timing explicitly so when you're in that pre-dinner planning phase.

Matt Edmundson (36:42)
Yeah.

Robby Bryant (36:50)
and you haven't made a decision, that's always when they hit you. so they're like, Best Buy is a master of personalization and Domino's is a master.

Matt Edmundson (36:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, without a doubt. They always know when the game's on TV and it's like, you just want a pizza for the game, right? How do you know I'm going to watch the game? It's scary, but they do.

Robby Bryant (37:04)
Yeah.

How do know my wife's not here and I haven't made plans?

Matt Edmundson (37:14)
Yeah. Pizza. You watch now my Instagram feed will just be full of Domino's ads since recording this podcast. Yeah. And absolutely. It's brilliant. Listen, Robbie, I'm aware of time. So quickly, let me ask you this, right? I like to ask my guests for a question for me, which I go and answer on social media. What would your question be for me,

Robby Bryant (37:22)
Apologies in advance.

All right, this one's not gonna be easy. So I look forward to your answer. My question is, ⁓ podcasts like this, how are you folks replacing the traffic you're losing to Gemini on the organic Google search?

Matt Edmundson (37:41)
Okay, let's do it.

Very good question. I had a conversation with Sadha for about a second. Anyway, yes, very good question.

Robby Bryant (37:55)
Good luck.

I've got a piece coming out in two

months that's gonna like go through this in detail, but that's why it's on my mind. So maybe you can give me a

Matt Edmundson (38:05)
okay. Yeah.

You should definitely send me that, ⁓ that piece when it's out in two months. Yeah, that'd be great. Of course, I'll go answer that on social media. Follow me on LinkedIn to find out my answer. But Robbie, listen, love the conversation, man. How do, how do people reach you? How do they connect with you? If they want to do that? Find out more about campaign monitor. If you got resources, you can have resources coming out years, aren't you? So where should we go?

Robby Bryant (38:29)
Gosh, campaignmonitor.com, there ⁓ is a big menu up top and a resource section that you can get to. ⁓ We have an incredibly active LinkedIn page we post every other day. I'm doing a lot of that. ⁓ You can connect with me on LinkedIn, just look me up, Robbie Bryant at Marigold. Yeah, that's pretty much the easy ways to get in touch with us.

Matt Edmundson (38:54)
Fantastic. We will of course link to Robbie's website, the campaign monitor website. His LinkedIn profile will all be in the show notes. So if you're watching on YouTube, it'll be in the description. If you're listening on your favorite podcast app, just look at the show notes. The links will be there. Hit up Robbie, especially on LinkedIn, go and say how's it and tell them that you enjoyed. Well, I assume you did enjoy, you know, or if there's some questions you've got outstanding, I'm sure. ⁓

Robby Bryant (39:17)
They can leave that part out. You can just connect and I'll accept.

Matt Edmundson (39:22)
Yeah, go connect with Robbie on LinkedIn. It's always nice to do that. But Robbie, listen, man, this is the part of the show that I like to call saving the best till last. So for those that haven't switched off yet, that have kept the podcast player going, I'm curious, what's your top tip? You know, with all the stuff that we've talked about with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and leading Christmas and New Year and all that sort of stuff. If you were running an econ business today,

Like what's the one bit of advice that you would want somebody to tell you that you would latch onto and make sure ⁓ was implemented beyond what we've talked about? What would it be? You've got the microphone for two minutes saving the best till last Robbie Guy.

Robby Bryant (40:06)
order. The one thing I would have them implement, I don't know if we have enough time for that in two minutes, I would say one, here's where I would have some of their core focuses be, right? Like what are the metrics that matter? Okay, so I would list spam complaints. That's a big one. You want to keep those under 0.1%. If you don't, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft might have some explaining to do or they might reject your ability to land in the inbox altogether. ⁓

You've got unsubscribes, very important metric that matter. did I say unsubscribes? Spam complaints less than 0.1 % is what we're going to have to do. Then unsubscribes, you want that less than 1%. Again, just make sure you're sending the right emails to the right people. And a little bit of unsubscribing is healthy for your email program, but you should be tailoring emails so that it isn't an action that they should be taking, at least frequently. Bounces.

keep those under 2 % in general. This is a part of that email hygiene concept that we talked about. just something to keep track of, ⁓ continually refine the list over time. Lastly, the big metrics that matter always gonna be opens, clicks, click through rates, and of course, conversions. So whenever you're operating an email marketing program, stay honed in on these metrics. They're gonna help.

Matt Edmundson (41:09)
Yep.

Robby Bryant (41:31)
clearly determine the success of your program, especially the initial ones in terms of making sure you actually get seen in the first place.

Matt Edmundson (41:39)
Brilliant. I'm curious. mean, obviously we can benchmark industry click-through rates and opens years ago. Um, in email marketing, I was always told sell the click, right? You send the email and the whole purpose of the email was to sell the click to get them to click through to the website. That was the best way to do it. Is that still the right philosophy?

Robby Bryant (42:02)
as long as the intent is in good faith, absolutely. Right. mean, I think we're all like trying to push someone towards a transactional state to like pay for the time that we're spending with each other. So yeah, I mean, you, want to be presenting an offer that's compelling enough that encourages people to learn more because it's going to add value to their experience as a human. So yeah, I mean, put.

Matt Edmundson (42:30)
Yeah.

Robby Bryant (42:31)
sell the click, sounds maybe cynical and shallow, it's really where good intentions also lie, I'd say, if you're trying to provide value.

Matt Edmundson (42:41)
Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because also I guess there's the juxtaposition against that. Let's say I'm doing what I would call an educational email. There's this tension. It's like, well, let's say I've got this great article. Do I put the whole thing in the email or do I put part of it and tell them if they want to read more, they can go through to the website. Which one delivers best value? I don't know if I have the answer. If I'm honest with you, I kind of test both.

Robby Bryant (43:06)
I mean, that's one of those dynamic questions that's driven by relativity, right? It's going to change. ⁓ Yeah, well, ⁓ like, what's the meaning of life? It depends on who you are and what stage you're at. ⁓ So just like with that, who is your audience? Do they want to read a full article in the email? Would they benefit? I would say just in general, ⁓ casual content should be snackable. And

Matt Edmundson (43:11)
Let's go and ask Einstein.

Mm.

Okay.

Robby Bryant (43:34)
That's probably your best approach to most customers. ⁓ I'm largely against gating unless something is super important. So if you're giving them the summary in the email, that's probably the way to go about it with an opportunity to continue to learn more. And that's selling the click.

Matt Edmundson (43:49)
click through. Yeah.

Yeah. Very good. Very good. Robbie, listen, man, genuinely loved the conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been really fun and the time has flown by, which is always nice.

Robby Bryant (44:03)
Yeah, it's late already. No, it was a blast. Thank you for having me. Perhaps one day I'll

Matt Edmundson (44:08)
Well, no doubt, no doubt, anytime, anytime, maybe the maybe next time we'll time it better. So it's not two weeks before Black Friday when the episode goes out. But hey, we yeah, anytime is good. That's awesome. Well, listen, Robbie, what a legend. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed this week's show. What a great podcast. Hopefully you've got everything set up for Black Friday. Let us know how you get on with your campaigns, with your offers, how it's all going. We started our Black Friday.

Robby Bryant (44:16)
Any time is good. No worries.

Matt Edmundson (44:38)
campaign this week, or specific offers this week, we always like to start a little bit early. And man, we're killing it. So I'm to report things are going well. Let's see if they go well over the next few weeks, which is great. But let us know how you guys are getting on really would appreciate hearing that. Like I said, any information you want to know about the show, the newsletter, cohort groups, all of that sort of stuff, head over to ecommercepodcast.net. You'll also find a very good and beautiful detail.

blog post from today's episode. With all of the links, you'll find all of that there as well. So do come ⁓ and check that out. ⁓ But that's it from me. That's it from Robbie. Thank you so much for joining us wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.