Ep. 130 – Pulse of Email Marketing w/GUEST: Kevin Vaudry [Senior Director – Campaigner]

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are here for another episode of do this, not that, and we have a really cool guest. I'm so excited about this one because we're going to get some information that I've been waiting to hear about. So we have Kevin Vodrey here.

Who's Kevin. Kevin is the senior director of sales and marketing for Campaigner.

And if you're not familiar with Campaigner, they're not just an incredible email platform and data hygiene platform. They're phenomenal for all your marketing automation and SMS, all this stuff. They have 120,000 customers. That's a lot of zeros. That's amazing.

And the thing that I asked Kevin to come on and talk to us about is a few fold. Yeah, we're going to get into some email stuff that's going to be amazing.

But Kevin has the opportunity to travel around the country, around the world, going to a million different conferences and events. And I want to dig into with him not just market, not just email marketing events, but what is the state of the union on events in general.

And I'm excited to dig into that. But first, let me welcome Kevin here to the stage. So, Kevin, welcome to do this, not that.

Thanks, Jay. I'm really excited to be here. I'm glad we could finally make this happen.

100%. Well, you're a busy dude. You're like, you need to like clone you. You're all over the place.

Yeah, a little bit there and everywhere. Yeah.

Yes, you are. So before we get into the topic of the day, tell everybody how did Kevin become Kevin?

Sure, my journey is an interesting one actually, but I wouldn't change a thing. So, you know, honestly, just quickly, I come from a family with a lot of teachers that in the family.

So I thought I was going to go to teachers college, but between university and there, I took some time off and I found my way into a sales job and that was the end of that. I went from sales into a transition into marketing.

You know, I was working for a web analytics company back in the day that was actually acquired by Microsoft.

So I found my way out to Seattle for six years, eventually found my way back to Canada and it's just been this organic journey of, you know, wrapping all the, all the things that I love about this digital business into, into one over time. Sales, marketing, product management, back to sales and marketing. It's been fantastic.

Like I said it, you could never have mapped this out, but I wouldn't change a thing.

Wow, that actually is an amazing journey.

So are you, like, when you, you, you, you get together for the holidays or whatever and everyone's sitting around the table and they're all talking about, I'm a teacher of this grade and this. And they're very intellectual and they're like, oh, there's Kevin. He's the guy over there. He doesn't, he doesn't play the teacher game.

Are you left out? Are you like, they frown upon you?

No, no, not at all. Not at all. I think especially, you know how it is. You're. You're there too. As long as you're happy with what you're doing.

And especially if my parents, you know, God bless them, who feel like I'm, I'm fine and they don't have to worry about me, even though they'll worry about me, then everything's good. We're all good.

Good, good. I like to hear that. No drama. I'm sure there's always drama, but not a lot of drama.

All right, so the first thing I want to talk through is events in general. What I mean by that is so you. There's been a lot of events going on, and I feel like there's a resurgence of events in person. Events now, actually.

Conferences and going to conference. You go to a ton of conferences, you exhibit at a ton of conferences. And I want to get the pulse. Is everything back? Is it packed or is it still.

There's a lot of hesitancy. What are you feeling from an attendee and exhibitor standpoint at conferences in general?

You know, that's when I could really feel that people were happy and excited to be back and could feel like, you know, it was okay to be there and it was good to be out and socializing and be back in a community together.

People seem, you know, as enthusiastic as ever to be sharing their experiences and learnings and community again. So I haven't seen anything this year or even through most of last year that would tell me that people are still tentative about going.

So, you know, that being said, if there anyone, is anyone out there that's listening that is still on the fence about whether or not they should be going back to conferences and whether they'll find value in them, my answers are resounding. Yes.

Well, I love hearing that. And so let me ask you this from an exhibitor standpoint, because your company also exhibits a lot of places.

Yes.

Are you finding that the people that are attending conferences, are they. Is it an elevated decision maker? Is it just people that are.

Companies are sending people that never had a chance to go to a conference before and you're having, let's say, meaningless conversations? Are you getting value again out of spending all that money on exhibiting? Because exhibiting is expensive. I don't have to tell you that.

Are you saying yes across the board exhibit, it's a great thing, or is it a hit or miss on different events? I'm not trying to throw any event under the bus.

No, no, nor will I. I would say overall, it's a great thing for us. It's been valuable. It's been as valuable for business development as it has been for anything else.

You know, there's always an aspect that I love about community and having conversations about email or digital marketing, but we wouldn't be putting the money into those. As you rightly said, they're not. Not an inexpensive proposition if we weren't getting a return back out of them. So.

So, although, yes, every once in a while you're going to hit a conference where the audience is more focused on the sessions and on the learnings than on wanting to see what tools might be available to them or to do business.

Overall, I would say that more than three quarters of the events we go to, we feel that we could go back because we got something out of them that justifies the investment.

Wow, that's amazing.

You know, I think that if you rewind two or three years ago, obviously that wouldn't be the case and certainly not during COVID So for us to be all the way back and for you, as a major exhibitor, be getting value out of, it's awesome.

All right, so let's pivot this now to email a little bit, since you do have so much exposure to Actual human beings that you're interacting with at trade shows and all this and they're coming up and they're talking to campaigner about stuff. What is the top of mind, the most common question or concern that you're getting from those email marketers that are out there?

Yeah.

So honestly right now the most common thing that people are coming up and wanting to talk about is how to improve deliverability or are you seeing any changes to the way the Inbox providers, the Gmails and Yahoos are treating email? And what can I do to stay ahead of that?

You know, because last year, I think it was October ish, both Yahoo and Gmail announced that they were going to be much tighter on the way that they viewed email coming in to their end users.

So, you know, not only ourselves, but all of the other ESPs in the space did a lot of work to prepare our customers as much as possible for these changes.

But nevertheless, now that things are in flight, the conversations are all about that how can I stay ahead of things on the deliverability side so that I can continue to get the performance that I have been getting as Gmail and Yahoo evolve their requirements for senders.

But do you feel sometimes that there's a management of expectations in your business?

What I mean by that is people have concerns about the Yahoo and Gmail changes, but in general, like deliverability, the bank, some of our emails are going to the junk folder. And I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, no matter what you do, no matter who you are, you could have some emails go into the junk folder.

I mean that's part of, you know, being in the email world. Do you spend a lot of time managing that expectation or is it, no, you should never go to the junk folder.

No, no, you, you can't. You. If we could guarantee that there'd be no need for anyone to go anywhere else except us, right?

So no, it, you have to manage an expectation and you have to let people know that it's going to happen sometimes, you know, but if you do the things that you know you need to do as a good email sender, you can absolutely mitigate that from happening most of the time. But you, for anybody to say you're always going to land in the inbox, I mean that's just not how it works. You know that as well as I do.

So, so what is, what is the red flags, right? What is, okay, you need to be doing these few things or else you actually will have a problem.

I mean like what is the low hanging fruit Everybody should make sure they're doing to make sure at a basic level they have basically good email deliverability.

Yeah, let's make it three things, nice and simple, right? It all starts with the contacts in your list and the contacts you're gathering. So email validation, making sure those email addresses are valid.

So whether you are cleaning an existing list, you know, by using one of the fantastic email verification tools that are out there, or whether you're validating emails as you're gathering them, or a combination thereof, you need to make sure that your hard bounce count is as low as possible because that is a sign usually to the inbox providers and to your esp that if your hard bounces are high, that you may have purchased that list from somewhere and you don't have consent to send to those people. So that's number one.

Obviously consent is required, but making sure that the email addresses you have are valid and keeping your hard bounce rate down as low as possible is the first thing you need to do so that you can get your campaigns to where they're going. Number two, it comes down to content. Honestly, making sure that your subject line doesn't appear like it's anything spammy.

Making sure that your content matches the subject line and everything lines up nicely in terms of expectation, I. E. I don't want to get an email about some fantastic sale and then find out that you're trying to, you know, sell me, upsell me into something useless like you. You do see these things where the subject line says one thing and the content is completely different. That'll get you in trouble. Absolutely.

You know, and then the other piece of that is watching your metrics. So looking to see how the last campaign performed, especially from an engagement side.

So the clicks on the links, the conversions, whatever you call a conversion, whether it is a sign up to your newsletter or a purchase or something else, and watch how people are behaving with each subsequent send. That will tell you if something is or isn't resonating with your audience.

You're going to want to watch your unsubscribes to make sure your people aren't tuning you out. And just generally keep a handle on how your email campaigns are performing.

So clean lists, you know, relevant, good content, especially with something eye catching in the subject line and then watching your data to understand how people are behaving as you continue to send. You follow those three things and generally you can keep yourself on a pretty.

Good path that is so valuable.

And I think that when you talked about hard bounces, I really feel like a lot of marketers out there, they're not paying attention to that and they don't realize how that's being interpreted by the email providers. Right? Who you. The. The what you are emailing out and how it's being received by these infrastructures.

And so paying attention to your hard balances is really what's going to be a big deciding factor of whether or not you're going to stay in that inbox. So I, I love that advice. All right, let's pivot here for a second. Let's get into some ridiculousness. Let's get into our segment that we call.

Since you didn't ask, now you're like an actual rock star, right? I mean, this is like a thing you. I mean, I don't want to just say you're like an email rock star. You're like a full fledged rock star. Is this fake?

Am I saying anything that's not true that you actually were in, like a rock band?

You're true in that I was in a rock band. To call me a rock star would be one heck of a stretch. But, you know, we can roll with that. But, yes, I was actually in a. In a band. Yeah.

So what was your role in the band?

So I grew up taking piano because my mother was a piano teacher. So there goes the teacher thing again. So obviously in the band, though, it was, it was keyboards. So my role was to play keyboards.

I sang a few songs here and there. No samples today. I promise your audience, otherwise you'll lose half of them.

But yeah, so it was keyboards, a little bit of vocals, you know, nothing, nothing too major. I wasn't the flashy lead guitar player or the lead singer or the drummer, but I was there doing my thing.

Did you have, like, groupies like, Kevin, we love you?

Oh, no, no, no. Nothing like that.

Why do I.

They usually save that for the guitar player. What's that?

Sorry. I have this vision of you, like, long hair, bandana, everybody's chasing you around, like, you know. Is that not what was going on?

No, no, it wasn't quite the big hair and the bandana and the eyeshadow and stuff like that. And you can clearly, you can clearly tell by looking at my hairline that I probably never had long hair. But, you know, look, it was fun.

I'm not going to kid you. When, when everybody's having fun up there, everybody being the bandmates and people are having fun dancing or just listening along or whatever.

It's, it is, it's. It's Kind of a cool thing. But I wouldn't say I played anywhere that anybody would know of anything famous. It was pretty much a local thing, so.

Okay, so who is. I feel like, since you're a music person is like your go to Spotify. Is it like Billy Joel or something? Like, what's your go to?

My. Oh, no, my go to. I. So, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna reveal my age here, but I grew up. I grew up. I was a teenager in the 80s, right.

So, you know, there was so much kind of music. So much music coming at you then, but there was obviously a very big hard rock type of influence then.

So, you know, when I look at my go to today, on the other side of that, I've got a 60s and 70s play playlist that I.

That's probably, like, 13 hours long, but I've also got an 80s hard rock playlist that I will go to just as often, whether I'm at the gym or in the car. So, you know, you can name any of those bands from that time, and I probably listened to them or went to one of their concerts for sure. All right.

We're gonna have to rock out with, like, some Motley Crue or Bon Jovi or something like that. I get it. That's my vibe. Well, this has been awesome. So, Kevin, where can everybody find you? Follow you, connect with you? What should they do?

You know what? The easiest place to find me and the one place that I'm on all the time is on. On LinkedIn, honestly.

So if you search my name on LinkedIn, I'll come up, no bandanas, no long hair, but you'll see my picture there. And that's where. That's where I connect to most people. I. I find it's a great place to have conversations, too.

And there's a lot of really nice, really good communities on there. And the email community is very active on there, and you're.

You're a huge part of that, Jay, you know how enthusiastic the email folks are and how much they love to talk to each other.

Yeah. Everybody, please go follow Kevin. He is a great follower.

He shares a lot of great content, and he's so helpful and just sharing his knowledge out in the industry. And we're going to put everything in the show notes so you connect with him there as well. And, Kevin, I appreciate you being here, man.

No, thanks, Jay. I'm glad we had a chance to do it and I got a chance to relive my rock stardom for a few minutes.

Amazing. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks for being here. We'll talk to you soon. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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