In this latest series, we dig deeper into the stories of our expert contributors. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ryan Phelan has 25 years experience in email marketing and has written 83 articles for MarTech on that and other topics. He’s the co-founder of RPEOrigin.com, a digital marketing services company with an agnostic approach, and is the chairman emeritus of the Email Experience Council Advisory Board.
Q: How did you get into marketing?
A: I actually have a funny employment history! I went to varsity and studied to be a Catholic priest and decided, halfway through the program, that I didn’t wish to be a priest. And so then I believed, well, I’m a reasonably good DJ. So I worked at a nightclub for six years, being a DJ and running the club. And then I discovered DJing didn’t make any money, and that was during the dot-com boom.
I got my first web job with Giftpoint.com, which did gift certificates online. I worked in the affiliate world and I worked in email. And over the years I did quite a bit with internet affiliate marketing, after which decided that email is where I desired to go. It was more fun, more exciting, more latest. And that’s where I began my email profession, back in 1998. It’s been a heck of a ride! I got a level in Psychology. Most marketers I do know don’t have a level in Marketing, they’ve a level in something else.
Q: From the DJs I do know, it feels like there’s a psychological component to hosting a celebration.
A: There is. There are two things I took away from being a nightclub DJ that I still use today that I believe are great for marketers. I learned the best way to read a room. You’re up in the DJ booth putting on music and pondering: What is the crowd going to react to? What is the next song? And you get very attuned to what persons are doing and the micro-movements around the room, who’s going up for drinks and so on. You read the entire room and that helps predict the energy level and where you go next. That customer-centric focus is admittedly what I began back in ‘95, entertaining 600 people an evening in a nightclub. Taking that into email, I believe it’s really about putting the customer first and reading the room.
Q: In email marketing, there’s no single room where everybody is mingling together. Is that why it must be data-centric?
A: The “room” in email is your reporting, your conversion rate, your online behavior, heat maps, all that sort of stuff. But it’s still this centric approach of reading the room and attempting to work out that everyone is different.
When I used to be DJing we had a format, and it was a rustic nightclub. We developed, really, a science on the best way to play music in a nightclub. It began with a pair two-steps, a triple-step, which is somewhat faster-paced, after which one other faster song, until you reach this crescendo. And various kinds of people come onto the dance floor based on what you’re playing. Then you crash it all the way down to one other two-step, bring it up again, play one other slow song, after which start the whole thing all over again. What that does is create a stream on and off the dance floor that’s very like segmentation done in marketing.
In today’s world, most marketers are doing one-to-many messages. They’re not doing any segmentation, it’s the same message to everybody. That’s like me playing the same music over and all over again while I’m DJing. But what I’m doing, and what marketers needs to be doing, is using propensity, using demographic and geographic data, taking a look at persona-based models, and what you’ll be able to do to distinguish your message to different archetypes and groups that you simply discover in the data.
Q: Why do you think that email continues to be such a vital marketing channel in spite of everything these years?
A: I believe there are two upsides for email currently. Number one, we still have a big majority of marketers that also aren’t doing the advanced stuff — segmentation or “reading the room.” There are still corporations which might be fighting that. Covid was an excellent example of how corporations finally realized they were underweight of their technology with the intention to execute email, either of their staff or tech stack. Email got here in and saved the day again during Covid.
The second thing is that with the availability of information, email has the opportunity to proceed to grow in sophistication. From identification, to third-party data, to touching outside of email into social media or text or web — email continues to power those full-spectrum experiences. And so the same future I saw for email 25 years ago, I still see today. But it’s predicated on the indisputable fact that first we have now to get more corporations to purchase in on the sophistication that email can achieve with data.
Read our Spotlight on contributor Stacey Ackerman here.
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