Conversational Email Marketing Podcast – Andrew King from Campaign Monitor speaks about changes he believes are around the corner for the email for the email marketing industry.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Andrew King is the Director of Product Strategy & Marketing Intelligence at Campaign Monitor and CM Group, a global technology company that provides an email marketing platform that’s easy to use yet extremely powerful and a part of CM Group’s family of brands.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:25 Check in with Campaign Monitor
00:01:45 The history of Campaign Monitor & CM Group
00:04:36 How brands in CM Group work together
00:08:24 How Campaign Monitor uses data to evolve their products
00:10:32 Discussion around Andrew’s role
00:15:10 How CM Group looks at competitors
00:20:05 Reiterating and building products
00:22:25 How CM Group look at acquiring brands
00:26:05 Unique aspects of CM Group
00:27:25 Why do people want to move ESPs?
00:29:10 Changes to email marketing from Andrew’s perspective
00:32:40 What changes are coming to email?
00:36:30 How email UI will become more simple
Transcript
George: Hi, Andrew, welcome to the podcast. It’s so great to have you here.
Andrew: Hey, George. It’s good to be here. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
George: Andrew, we were all huge fans of Campaign Monitor It was so thank you so much for being here. Lots to discuss. And I’m very, very keen for this podcast. But before we get into that, you know, 2020 has been a pretty wild year. We just checking in with the Campaign Monitor and we’re just checking in with the Campaign Monitor team and yourself. How are you all doing and is everything stable? And okay.
Andrew: Yeah, thanks for asking. We’re actually doing fine. We’re doing well. Definitely. You know, better then, and a lot of other people. We’re very fortunate in that. You know, Campaign Monitor is a fairly distributed global organisation. We have team members, you know, mainly in Sydney, but we also have, you know, a team in San Cisco in Nashville, in London. So we’re pretty used to kind of using zoom and talking to people across the globe. And so it wasn’t too hard for us to transition into kind of a post COVID kind of way of working. So I think we’ve done pretty well. And yeah, the team, obviously, I think, collaborates and talks even more often than we used to do anything.
George: Okay, great. Yeah. And we found that with a lot of the companies that we’ve been talking to on this podcast that those who were remote prior to COVID, you know, that the transition was very seamless, and those who had to scramble, you know, it was a bit more of a challenge. But, I mean, that’s great to hear. So, you know, Campaign Monitor is an email service provider and, as I said, one of our favourites, a platform that we use often and upwards for our clients as well but, you know, for those who don’t I don’t know much about Campaign Monitor. And as well the umbrella company CME Group, would you mind just giving us a sort of a brief history and explanation of the company?
Andrew: Yeah, sure, I can kind of summarise that for you. So for Campaign Monitor itself, that was started in Sydney, by two guys called Ben and Dave. They owned their own digital marketing agency. I think they created it straight out of university probably. And they basically were serving their customers kind of building websites doing SEO, PPC, and email marketing. And they found that there was no good email marketing solution on the market, aimed at agencies like them. And so they actually decided to build their own kind of minimal viable product for their own customers that eventually started growing and eventually the revenue of that product out Through the agency, so they kind of concentrated on that product, which then became Campaign Monitor. And now it’s used by thousands of companies around the world.
George: So that was, you know, that was early 2000s.
Andrew: You know, in around 20, I think 2014 they got a lot of funding, I think it was 200 and 50 million from inside inches. They opened a San Francisco office, which is where I’m based, you know, big sales marketing team. Definitely sold to larger logic customers because of that. And then eventually, we merged with a company called Emma and deliver and became the CME Group. And now we have seven brands under our umbrella. So it’s kind of like a family of email marketing products and we have kind of niche products and enterprise products, we can kind of serve different customers based on Near needs. So if you’re an enterprise e commerce customer, say a product called sail through would probably be a good fit for you. Whereas if you’re a nonprofit, campaign workers probably better if you’re a university, then Emma might be best fit. So that’s kind of where we’re at today. It’s kind of a suite of products aimed at different types of email marketers,
George: And just going from sort of a product ideation or a product market fit. It’s, it’s, I mean, it makes sense that it was a solution based idea, you know, they were trying to find a solution and that sort of self perpetuated. And, and obviously, there was, you know, it really, it really sort of fit the need of a lot of agencies out there. So great to hear. And as you said, You’ve got the sort of brands like Mr and whatnot. So each one of those in the umbrella sort of serves a different audience in a way.
Andrew: Yeah, we’ve had to do some work there to kind of Figure out which brand should concentrate in which vertical and which slides of customer in that in Campaign Monitor before we kind of became one company, they were actually very similar. If you look at our websites, they said the same things, if you looked at the product features, they actually look pretty similar on the surface. And so we do a lot of work in kind of digging to figure out like, you know, how can we reposition these products or position them differently in the market, it turned out that both products kind of naturally had different strengths and weaknesses. Emma, for example, is really good for distributed organisations. So if you have 100, or even 1000 end users, and you want to do things like share assets, like images, or approve mailings or to see what’s going on in your agency account, emergence, great for that campaign, what it can do some of those things, but it’s definitely not as powerful when it comes to managing users. As in a campaign, what is more of the general SMB kind of self service platform, and then it has been repositioned as a, you know, a more niche platform team that distributed organisations, kind of like restaurants, gyms, universities, things like that.
George: And there must be an interesting conversation or a challenge there where obviously, you know, Emma, and as an example, Emma and Campaign Monitor, you know, they’re both ESP s and they serve a certain purpose, but how do you tweak the features, and whatnot to to cater to those different audiences is, is that um, you know, a very labour intensive conversation and something that’s always ongoing, or could you share a little bit about the thought process in not necessarily the specifics, but more about the mindset and how you sort of treat these different companies, I guess, within the same group, so it took us a while to figure it out. I think we’ve only really recently kind of figured out how to do that ourselves. It’s something that necessarily came natural to us, because we all come from individual companies and kind of come together as this larger group. And so one thing we did late last year, which I think was super helpful was create permissions for each separate permissions that each product in the portfolio. And so each mission is specific and kind of gives the product the marketing in the sales team, kind of a Northstar kind of a guiding light. And that helps some form kind of what features we build, who we sell to, and kind of why we’re building each product. And so Campaign Monitor, for example, that the product mission is to create the most intuitive, confidence inspiring and what was the last part of it About to be honest with you, but I’m sorry, you get the idea. So it’s it’s Yeah, we’ve kind of looked at, like who the customers are, who you want to target and and created these like very specific missions that kind of help inform what we build and why we build it. And I think without that, we would kind of be a bit bit lost, we might be duplicating functionality or features. And you know, we wouldn’t have a good idea of who would build products or because you’re right, they are the end of the day, they are all email marketing products that you’ll have, you know, some similarities.
George: So I want to delve into a little bit more about your role, because I think there’s some really interesting stuff to unpack there. But before that, just want to talk a little bit more about this evolution of Campaign Monitor and, and not necessarily specifics, but how, how do you evolve the products that do you sort of take user feedback and integrate that in? You’ve obviously the team has its own preconceived ideas on what needs to change and evolve? Is it a combination of things? Or could you explain a little bit more about how you actually sort of acquire that data to take things forward?
Andrew: Yeah, yeah, for sure. We do a lot of surveys, if you’re, if you’re a campaign or a customer, you may be receiving these surveys. And that’s from both existing customers. So we definitely talk to existing customers, we send them surveys, we do kind of more extensive interviews with them, as well as to see what they like, what they don’t like, you know, what we’re missing and how they generally feel about the product. We review that on kind of a quarterly basis with the leadership team. And obviously, the you know, the product managers and the pro team is monitoring that really closely just to inform kind of what the roadmap looks like and what we actually build. My role kind of flows into that pretty nicely. I look at the entire market and be competitive. landscape pretty closely. That’s a big part of my role. And so not only are we looking at kind of what customers are saying and what they’re asking for, but what our competitors building, where are they going, and trying to kind of figure out what the market is doing in total as well. So it’s not just, you know, talking to customers, there’s a lot more to it. And then I also work pretty closely with the sales team. So figuring out why we might win a customer or why we might not win as a potential customer is a big part of it as well. So can win loss analysis looking at this closely? Like, do we lose a deal because of an integration? Or was it a missing feature? Or was it price or something else? That comes into it as well?
George: makes complete sense. So so we touched on your role a little bit here, Director of Product Strategy and marketing intelligence. That’s that’s, that’s how sounds really interesting. And I’d love to unpack it a little bit more. So could you give us a bit of a top line overview of your role? And then I’ll probably start firing a few questions at you. Because I might be interested. And as you’ve said, You exist between multiple departments between the marketing sales and product team, correct?
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. So the the role is, director of product intelligence and market intelligence is really no ESP kind of marketing technology, part of it. And so I sit in the centre of the product team, sales and marketing. Technically, I’m on the product team, I report to the Chief Product officer, and someone aligned pretty closely with kind of the guys who actually making the product. But I also work very closely on demos with the sales team and kind of helping them with new customers. And then when it comes to marketing, actually working with them on positioning and helping Talk about each product, the bit marketing, it’s tough, we have seven products. You know, most marketers don’t have to market seven different products that do similar things. It’s a it’s a tricky thing to do. So my job is really to help help them figure out, you know, how do we talk about each product in the market? So it’s a yes, it’s an interesting job that kind of sits in between those three different departments.
George: And I’d imagine you sort of cycle through the departments depending on what’s going on at that particular time. I’m sure you’re having meetings consistently with them, but depending on what campaigns or new product new launches or all those kind of updates and whatnot, you sort of cyclically going through these departments, and you’re the connective tissue, kind of binding them all together.
Andrew: Yes, yes. It’s good way to put it definitely ebbs and flows. For the product team. It’s really it really is cyclical because it depends on kind of roadmaps and they’ll go through a stage where They’re trying to think of, of new features or new ideas to add to the roadmap. So I’ll get involved at that stage. But that’s not happening necessarily all the time. Because, you know, the rest of the time they’re actually building those features and actually rolling them out and doing lots of other things behind the scenes. With sales, it’s pretty constant. Definitely, we’re obviously we’re always selling some always involved in with whatever they’re doing and whoever they’re selling to, and in marketing, yet depends on what they’re doing. Obviously, they are busier sometimes, and other times, but they have a pretty regular cadence when it comes to like campaigns and different types of promotions and messaging that they’ve got going. Okay.
George: So if we break these down, if we were sort of saying this, let’s say for this particular example, you’re dealing with the product team, you know, are you coming to them with With your marketing intelligence saying hey, this is what’s going on the market. This is the feedback the sales teams getting this is what we’re seeing in the marketing sort of engagement in social or other data points and bringing that to them and say how can we utilise this information to redevelop or reiterate on some of the features of the ESP Campaign Monitor or the suite of products within the CME Group?
Andrew: Yeah, for then, they rely on mean and say mainly for market intelligence. So it’s what you know, what is MailChimp doing? What is Salesforce doing? What What do our key competitors Well, you know, what, are they building any new features? We don’t necessarily want to copy them or do the same thing. But you know, to stay abreast of what’s what’s going on, and what kind of the industry trends like is everyone building this one product or this one will settings one type of customer. They need to know that and they didn’t usually have time to do all that research and kind of look at the market as closely as I do, since that’s my key focus my role. That’s really where I come in and kind of help the product team, I’d say.
George: And do you find that? Do you find that within these different ESP s and whatnot, these trends come through? I mean, you’ve been in the industry for a while now. So you’ve seen sort of trends come and go. Is this, you know, you’ve obviously take take each one on its own merits and whatnot. But do you find that hey, you know, all our competitors are moving in this direction, you know, hey, either we need to go there, or we need to actively go against the grain to make ourselves different, you know, could you it’s a very general question because there’s no specifics or specific examples, but could you talk a little bit about that decision making process in when you when your competitors are doing something? How does Campaign Monitor the CME Group sort of think about Those things.
Andrew: Yes, it is a good question. It’s a tricky one. Because we we may see a lot of competitors doing something maybe a good example would be implementing support for Google app. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. Yeah. you can kind of do some pretty cool things with with email, right, like a email specific version of amp. And it’s a number of different you know, platforms that are supporting it, I think sparkpost sendgrid. company, but who else but a bunch of them now supporting camp the email. Okay. So do we should we do that? Like, should we just do that? Because I competed as doing it. Like, is that gonna get to me that our customers actually want? I think the way that we think about it is what? No, we want to do it for the right reasons. We don’t want to just do things because our competitors are doing them. So when it comes to that example, you know, we we don’t currently have a product that supports Google amp. I don’t see many customers asking for it. And I don’t receive many emails that have Google amp embedded in them yet. I think if it becomes a more widely adopted solution and customers are saying I, we have to have an app within like an email builder or something like that, then maybe we’ll build it. But we’re not going to build it just for like industry buzz or just to say that we have it. It’s really going to be something that our customers are looking for, or something that could open up a new market for us. Another one could be like website builders, MailChimp, this launched a website builder. Constant Contact is now selling a website builder, not just landing so separate or just individual landing pages like a full website. Yeah, yeah. Jim’s offering free domains and everything, you know, um, you know, we, we’ve talked about it internally, but that’s just not something that campaign mantra is going to offer. Yeah, we offer landing pages with some of our other products. But yeah, we’ve kind of said, you know, that is not a part of the market that we want to target. We don’t want to get into building with websites, we don’t even have any expertise in that ourselves. We want to be the best at email marketing. That’s kind of where we want to focus. So in that case, we are kind of doing the opposite to some of our biggest competitors.
George: Yep. Yeah. And sort of the jack of all trades, master of none, or, you know, that sort of sentiment, but that’s very interesting to, to hear that more. So then. So then taking that information, you sort of you’ve taken on the marketing intelligence and whatnot, you’ve you’ve, you’ve given that information to the product team, and you’ve you’ve reiterated and worked on some new products and features and whatnot, then taking that to the marketing team, you know, so now you’re giving them the source. They’re like, Hey, this is why people need to use this. This is the this is how I position this in the market. This is all the data that we acquired and why this is valuable. And here’s the value proposition to our customers. Is that is that the sort of process here? Or is there anything more that I’m missing there?
Andrew: Yeah, it’s definitely a big part of it. Say, the other part would be maybe sales enablement, like training the sales team on kind of how to use the new feature and why it’s actually valuable. Okay. And you ask them, why they should actually use it. I get involved in that quite a bit as well. And then is kind of like, you know, Full Circle Review of, of the feature itself and kind of, you know, what’s the adoption, how many customers are actually using it? What are you saying about it today? Do they love it? Do they hate it? Is it something that you did wrong or missed? there is that kind of feedback that We do get eventually from from customers as well. After, you know, the features been launched for a little while.
George: This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently and how much of an interesting age we’re in where you know, in years gone by, you know, maybe you released a some kind of physical product in maybe three four decades ago you know, you would have to all be relying on anecdotal evidence whilst now you know, I always think about Netflix you know, they have all these I’m sure they have all these analytics like these types of movies do the best and, and and Okay, we need to keep making horror movies all these ROM coms are doing great and the average view time is there. So you know, in and amongst all that, all those surveys and stuff you do, you guys I would imagine have an amazing pool of data to draw upon and that as well as a huge part of the process of reiterating and building these products.
Andrew: Yeah, yes. We, we have so many internal tools, especially across kind of the portfolio that we have kind of each company that joins us has their own set of tools as well. If you try to standardise it after a while. So we use look at the it’s kind of like our dashboard kind of tool similar to tableau, which is we can kind of see like log in you can see stats on kind of volume strains in the app. That’s more like a higher level like business metrics in the protein has their own tool I think everybody been using, but it’s definitely a tool that helps them see what we will do in the app. It’s not on an individual level. It’s kind of like, overall, how we will use the email builder for example, or how we are uploading a list. We can even see journeys. So someone signs up, what is the first thing they typically do? What do we want them to do? So yeah, we have access to a tonne of data Which helps inform kind of in app messaging or the signup experience, all the way through to kind of what happens if someone stops using the app? Do we need to send them an email to either like, you know, have some kind of notification somewhere? Yeah, we have access to all that stuff. And I’m not personally in that stuff all the time. But yeah, definitely, people get exposed to it. And the product team is definitely, definitely using it on a daily basis.
George: Yep. So I think talking about the acquisition of brands, you know, we went through a merger last year and it was just two companies merging It was a wild time. So having multiple brands, I think, do you have seven brands under the CME Group? You know, there must be I can’t even imagine some of the the massaging and consolidation of, you know, best practices across all these entities. But can we talk a little bit about the sort of bit more of a top level discussion around CME Group and, you know, how does it sort of look at the acquisition of brands and nothing specific yet, but maybe some sort of more thought processes or, or the vision behind what CME Group is?
Andrew: Yeah, we, I mean, we’re so new, we’ve really been been figuring this stuff out ourselves. And so we, you know, we came together, we were three brands, and then we kind of acquired a few more, we may acquire more in the future as well. There’s a lot of different email platforms. I think it’s over 400, possibly 500 in the world globally. So there’s definitely room for a lot of consolidation and there’s no, no secret is going to be a lot of consolidation in this in this market. Yep. And so, we’ve kind of put together some some thinking around kind of, like, why would you buy from CME Group like, what’s, what’s the point? Well, I have all these products that do similar things in one group. rupe and I kind of touched on that before each product, although it’s an email marketing product. They are targeted at different levels of sophistication, different verticals, and they have different features within them as well. And so what we’ve, what we’ve found is the email archives or anyone buying technology, there’s a lot of pain, low risk involved in buying marketing technology, you may sign up for an enterprise Marketing Cloud and find that it’s completely the wrong solution for you. That happens all the time. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through that yourself but I haven’t really customers all day that basically like how do I get out of this like Salesforce or Oracle contract or whatever it is,
George: and those are so sticky those companies like it’s it’s once you’re in your real you know, I’ve got a few friends who work for a couple of these companies and one of their sort of, I guess, not pointed Just the stickiness. It’s not It’s not easy to get away.
Andrew: No, no. And they, you know, that’s on purpose. I think Oracle especially is kind of known for that, like getting deeply integrated and making it really hard to move off of this platform. But I did write down a stat here. So littmus did a survey and found that 28% of brands dissatisfied with the ESP, well, it’s a pretty high percentage to me. It’s almost as if, in the past, is to a client site before this, I bought an ESP, and it was, you know, pretty clearly the wrong ESP. And I found that out within six months of buying it and trying to integrate it with our CRM, which was very painful. And, you know, I just wish that I hadn’t have done that, but you don’t know until you actually buy it, unfortunately. So it’s CME Group. Because we offer similar products. You can come in, you could buy cannabis Pay monitor. And you could find that that’s not the right platform for you. But, you know, we can easily migrate each one of our other six platforms. So there’s no need to kind of break your contract or, you know, go through a painful RFP process. When you use one of the products in our group, we can either add to it or migrate you between those products, which is kind of know the key benefit of CME Group and why you know, why customers would would buy from us,
George: Okay, interesting. So somebody may be sort of come to you and say, Hey, I’m on product x, but I need this, this and this, it’s a lot more seamless for you to migrate them over to a suitable platform, right, because of the integrated pneus of CME Group and how you guys are approaching it to make things sort of as as, you know, cross platform as possible.
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I would love to say it’s all automated, we just push One button and then you can see your name. Well, it’s not quite like that, unfortunately. Yeah. yet. That’s kind of like a, I guess a long term vision. But because we work together, we know, we can easily migrate data with migrate templates, we can train you, if you want to migrate to a different company. Or if you migrate between two different companies, they don’t help each other. Like you’re kind of in the middle. And you know, it’s painful to try to get your data out, get your templates out, re upload them. Because, you know, we are one company, we can seamlessly do that because we have access to these similar platforms that offer different types of functionality.
George: That’s so interesting, and I feel like that’s very customer centric, because, you know, the pain of having to migrate, right? I feel like you guys are trying to really solve that with this CME Group. So what what are some of those things that people normally say when it’s an ASP is not working? Is it the integration Either any sort of, obviously every scenario is different from the next. But do you see sort of the top three reasons why people want to, you know, move or that why why are those 28% of people dissatisfied?
Andrew: We see there’s two different angles, there’s people that want to move up from kind of the more self service platforms like like MailChimp, or Constant Contact, they’re typically complaining about things like support, like it’s hard to get through to support, or I’ve had like the deliverability issue, or being shut down for some reason. It’s typically why they’re looking to move off of those platforms that might be small things like Oh, I can’t do something in my template, or like some small feature of functionality that they don’t have. And that’s why they want to move what could be an integration. But from the top end, like the marketing clouds you also see customers Moving down to port parks like Campaign Monitor that happens much more frequently than you think. Again, that could be because of support. It could be because they feel like you’re paying too much for what they’re actually using. They might just need to send emails and they’re paying for, like, personalization, and it’s an S and all these other kind of bolt on features that they don’t actually use. And so they just feel like they’re, you know, they’re overspending on their mapping technology. So we can help them there as well.
George: Yeah, that sounds like there’s a lot of different scenarios and within the products as I said, before, you know, there’s there’s a lot of options for people out there. So I think one thing we haven’t really touched upon in this podcast so far is email marketing as a whole. You know, and and you’ve seen iterations and changes along the way. So it’d be great to hear a little bit about, you know, some of those changes you’ve made Seen and also where where do you see email marketing going over the next 510 years?
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. If I had to think about this question a lot, I’d say, there, you know, I’ve been in this industry 10 years. So thinking way back, responsive design was probably like the biggest thing and the rise of mobile devices, I’d say, it’s probably the biggest thing that’s impacted the industry in the last 10 years. Okay. So to me that, like, people will probably think that’s lame, like, of course, that’s so obvious, but I think it’s the thing that really is pervasive, like every email now has got to be mobile responsive. Like I don’t even remember the last time I got an email that wasn’t optimised for my iPhone.
George: Yeah, I remember back in the day getting the the desktop version on your iPhone. It’s like it’s screwed up. You gotta like zoom in.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. That’s something that I think, changed all emails and kind of change. Email design completely. I think interactive elements ascend to get a bit more traction. Obviously, I think you guys probably build a lot of interactive emails these days. I think, at first, I think it was a little bit gimmicky. Hopefully you don’t think that’s unfair, but I think it was just some things that people would do for the sake of making them interactive. I think today people are thinking a lot more about how can I improve the subscriber variants with interactive elements quiz or a poll or a way to capture additional data on the on the subscriber through interactive or to somebody to you know, improve their experience with interactive elements. So I’m really enjoying receiving those my inbox and I think that’s a big improvement on the industry in general. And then I think accessibility is another like big trend. But I’m really happy to see. So just thinking about how, how does the email work on a screen reader? Or if someone if someone’s blind and they can’t read enough properly, like on their iPhone, like regularly? How’s it going to look for them? Can they read the images? Say, can they read the HTML text properly? You know, that’s a big trend, which I also noticed.
George: Yeah, and I, you know, I’m not an email marketing guy, I’m more from paid media SEO kind of background, but one thing you know, since we merged, you know, last year to become uploads, I, I became a lot more exposed to email. And one of the big challenges that I saw is just the wealth of media types that you know, and, and, you know, each email can be so different from the next and phone x cannot read it and browser x can’t read it. So there’s so many variables compared to other channels. So I feel like that is there’s more complexity Probably coming through over time and and more different types so that that was that was that seems to align with with what you’re saying there and I guess piggybacking off that is where do you see things going you know, you obviously mentioned about interactivity that’s something we’re doing we’re doing sort of little games we did a maze thing recently for Easter you know, we did something cool for Warner Brothers and Annabel creation kind of thing, which was really cool. But um, you know, from your, from your perspective, someone who’s who’s in there in the thick of it, you know, what’s on the horizon?
Andrew: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen but obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning is gonna I think exponentially get faster and faster and and start to impact marketing technology a lot more we can start to see kind of more content kind of predictive Sending in the feature that we can do that today, I think it’s just going to get a lot more sophisticated, lot more complex. And I think the products are going to get a lot more complex, not for the user, but just on the back end, I think they’re going to start getting a lot smarter with what they can do. I also think there’s going to be, you know, a lot of merging between technologies. I don’t know if you’re familiar with customer data platforms. cdps. No, they they’re a new type of platform. In the last few years, it’s kind of like a Think of it like a CRM for your b2c business. Okay. Salesforce is a CVP to kind of figure out who your best customers are and kind of what they’re doing on your website and what you should serve on the website and email and, and and other channels. So those platforms are now starting to offer the ability to send SMS And emails and push notifications and I think just the blur the line between all these different marketing technologies is starting to blur. And so, you know, I don’t know if in the future you’ll have an ESP, it’ll just be kind of like a marketing hub, and it will kind of do a lot of different things and take data from different or different places.
George: So yeah, yeah, and I think I that definitely makes sense to me. But I guess the danger here and some not a danger, but something to be aware of is, you know, as we were talking about before with MailChimp, you know, are they stretching a little bit too far to go into websites, maybe it’s gonna work great, but then MailChimp becomes something else. Obviously, a lot of these chat platforms are going to transition and change and take on more or or stripped back and sort of a lot of disruption to the market, it seems on the way in your, in your opinion.
Andrew: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, no, just big enough that they can They could make a mistake and it’ll be fine. Probably Yeah, but I think they’d like smaller platforms and kind of new platforms that come to the market. What we are noticing is there’s a lot more specialisation. So no one’s going to come out with kind of a general email marketing platform like Campaign Monitor, like no one would do that they would come out with an email marketing platform aimed at like nonprofit in Australia and New Zealand, like it’d be super nice, and it wouldn’t have like really nice integrations and have automated journeys that are kind of related to the data that comes through the integration. So I think we’re just gonna see a lot more niche platforms come out in the next few years. And probably a lot of the bigger platforms come out with more niche solutions themselves. And, and just one final thing is when within that complexity you mentioned before You know, all these data points and sending out you know, person x reads blog and then they get this or you know, they trigger you know, the trip wires and then x y Zed happens within that complexity, do you think there’s also going to be more of simplicity in terms of the front end user face? You know, like, I don’t necessarily have to be an AI, crazy expert, I can just set up these automation flows very, very quickly, and get it to that level of customization for my business. So it feels integrated into my messaging. Yeah, yeah, hundred percent. I think that’ll be a lot easier to implement. I think, you know, some platforms make it really, really easy. Today, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. And there’s still typically some kind of coding involved when you’re, you know, initially implementing these things. So I think it’s gonna be a lot easier and faster to implement. And then I think, you know, you’re not gonna be Not gonna have to have a large team with expert coders and developers to actually kind of use use platforms that can it can kind of do this type of personalization. I don’t know when that’ll be there might be, you know, three years, five years 10 years in the future, but But yeah, that’s that’s kind of where I see the industry going.
George: Well, we’ll be waiting to see it. I’m sure Andrew seen absolute pleasure picking your brains and finding out a little bit more about behind the scenes of Campaign Monitor and CME Group. Just signing off. Is there anything you’d like anyone to know or any any upcoming things for Campaign Monitor or anything of that effect?
Andrew: Just check out check out CM Group, check out Campaign Monitor. You know, as I said, we are feeling you might not have heard of us. Take a look at the brands we have and give us a shot. Give me questions.
George: Yeah, as I said, definitely go check it out, listens at home. It is a great place. One at uploads we use often, Andrew, it’s been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and I hope we speak again soon.
Andrew: Me too. Thanks, George. Cheers. Bye bye