QBR, Email Trends, And People

July 7th, 2024

Another Quarter Ends, & Another QBR Prep Begins (sorta)

Q2 has drawn to a close, marking the beginning of our crucial QBR (quarterly business review) deck preparation and data analysis. This time, our client has specifically requested the expertise of a strategist to delve into email trends and the future of email. As expected, TargetE selected me for this engagement due to my extensive experience and growing reputation in the email marketing industry. 

The only problem with this is that I don’t have much time to prepare this presentation, which is supposed to last 90 minutes, as I am busy with other paid client work. This “strategy” session is not a paid engagement, so anything I do for it will not go towards billable revenue, affecting my bonus for this year.  It was messaged to me that if I “knock the client's socks off” with my knowledge, sales will push to have me assigned to the client in paid billable work. That is all well and good, but if the client has to have the money budgeted, it's a gamble for me to put a lot of effort into it unless there is some sort of guarantee. As a strategist who has worked hard my entire career and produced results, I think doing “free” work is kind of a waste of time. The good news is we have an intern in our office this summer, and I might farm out most of this work to him since he seems somewhat intelligent when I have passed him in the office.  I figured that even though he works six days a week already, having an assignment from me might make his summer, especially since it's coming from me. 

I will hunt this kid down and tell him he needs to complete this in a couple of weeks since the QBR is set for sometime in August at the client's office in Oklahoma City. (barf)

July 15th, 2024

When In Doubt, Template It Out.

Ian, the intern, reluctantly took on this assignment, but I gave him a head start by finding all these decks I did at my last agency about trends and the future and telling him to use the concepts in there to create something awesome. I figured trends in email haven’t changed much in years, so we would be safe if we were able to dress them up a bit in the presentation with cool graphics and a storyline. I decided to focus on seven key trends:

• Email Authentication

• Generative AI

• Interactive email

• Mobile focus

• Personalization (including hyper-personalization and individualization)

• Segmentation

• AMP

To me, seven trends should be plenty in 90 minutes. I can point to the many retail brands that are doing this and show them that even though they are online travel publishers, they can emulate most of these as they are generic enough to be cross-vertical. Since this isn’t a paid engagement, I figured that using examples from brands outside their vertical can be inspirational. Signing up and tracking their vertical is a pain, and of course, Ian didn’t think to do it for me anyway.

Talking about the future of email proved to be a bit more challenging, so I told Ian to visit some other agency sites that discuss the future of marketing and see if he could apply what they said to email.  In the end, this is what makes him an intern because he came back with some really nutty ideas like full automation using AI, large language models doing all of the work to write content for the emails, and then this concept around micro-segmentation where literally everyone on the list (no matter how big) gets a unique image and offer specific to them based on geo-fencing and leveraging browse data.  I told him to simplify it a bit more since I really didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of the client, especially if they asked me for examples of this sort of thing.

In the end, we took a bunch of slides from what I have done in the past and what TargetE has done over the years and put them into a deck with 104 slides that will no doubt “wow” them with information. The only challenge I face now is to normalize these 104 slides since apparently, they are not teaching the effective use of PowerPoint in college these days.

July 29th, 2024

Time Suck. 

I spent the last two weekends on these slides to get them to a plausible state and have a good narrative for our August QBR.  Since the client doesn’t have a big travel budget and refuses to pay for a hotel, I am now forced to make the trip to Oklahoma City a day trip. This means a 5:00 a.m. outbound flight and a 7:00 p.m. return flight, which will no doubt destroy me in terms of my routine and sleep.  The even worse news is that I have to be on another plane the following day to speak at a conference where I am supposed to win the “Email Marketer Of The Quarter” award for outstanding participation in the industry.

The only saving grace to this whole thing is that the last three slides of this QBR presentation are around selling a bank of hours for them to work with me exclusively on their program. The engagement will last for months and allow my analytics team and junior strategists to work on tactics for the program, giving TargetX a better chance to raise the monthly retainer costs in production and technical implementation. While I can’t disclose the actual cost of the engagement, let's just say that it will give me a healthy bonus, allowing me to buy this carbon fiber package on my Porsche.

Until next time, make email marketing your priority, and please vote for me as the winner for Global Email Strategist of the Year!

***CORE insight from Andrew Kordek***

Email marketing trends have been around for as long as I have been in the business. Some of the trends discussed in 2008, like personalization and relevancy, are still being discussed in 2024 as “things to watch.”  The only difference is that the cast of people talking about them are not the same, and “trend” reports are used as lead funnels for vendor-side marketers so that you download, read, and treat them as the new shiny objects for your program. Trends come and go, then come back again, but what is often never talked about is having the basics of blocking and tackling in place for your program. I get it; trends are sexy, but having a solid foundation will allow you to get above the foundational line and focus on the trends that are right for YOUR business.

While Sam’s approach might be a bit polarizing, many agencies and vendors love to templatize what they have done in the past for clients and pawn it off as a bespoke presentation for your program. Be careful what you wish for from companies when you ask about trends or the future, as you might be getting something from them that is stamped out.