How long does it take to make an email campaign with Mike and Justine from Really Good Emails

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Eric Trinidad: Welcome to Emails Not Dead. My name is Eric and this is JT.

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Jonathan Torres: Hello.

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Eric Trinidad: Hello.

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Jonathan Torres: Am I on the side there? Is that? Can I say?

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Eric Trinidad: Oh yeah, I guess so. Now that we're in a visual format, this kind of works out. So like you can see like, oh, JT's over here. He could be, he's usually over here.

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Thomas Knierien: Is this what the Brady Bunch was like when they filmed that intro? Like, where are you?

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Jonathan Torres: Trying to find people. That's what it was.

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Eric Trinidad: Yeah. As you can tell, we're in a safe space for geeks and the geeks in that love email. We are here this week to talk to our friends at really good emails. Justine Jordan, who is an email enthusiast and the head of, of strategy and Communication at BeeFree. Hi, Justine.

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Justine Jordan: Hi.

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Eric Trinidad: Yeah. And Mike Nelson is also joining us as well, who's the co-founder of really Good Emails and the head of growth at BeeFree. What's up, Mike?

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Justine Jordan: Oh, Mike's on mute. It's one of his,

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Eric Trinidad: You're muted also, Mike.

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Justine Jordan: Mike is the king of being on mute when he doesn't need to be.

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Eric Trinidad: Right.

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Justine Jordan: It's one of his other titles, so he wears it proudly.

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Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. Well, speaking with really good emails in the past, you know, we know that y'all procure and curate a bunch of really good emails across the industrywide. So, you know, it's great to have y'all back here again. And you know, this time around we want to talk about you know, some of the, the surveys and the statistics that y'all have around, you know, marketing, creating emails we've talked about in the past, not being wasteful with your time you know, creating emails and coming with campaigns. So it's great to have some numbers behind it. So let's jump in. Let's, let's see.

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Jonathan Torres: Like, what is the number we're talking about here?

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Eric Trinidad: Yeah, I don't know. That's the real question. That's what we're here to find out today.

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Justine Jordan: There's quite a few numbers.

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Thomas Knierien: Yeah. The original one that this whole episode came from, it was a week and a half from the last time, and apparently there's a new number. So that's what we're here for here and excited to hear about today.

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Justine Jordan: What is this mystery number that you're talking about? What does it represent?

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Eric Trinidad: What does it all mean?

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Thomas Knierien: I guess Mike and Justine, like, what made y'all want to come up with this survey and do this whole thing from the get go?

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Mike Nelson: Yeah, I think we should probably give you some background to the audience here on how we came up with this. You know, Justine's been this round for a long time, so have you, you guys so you know that you'll get a survey from your ESP at some point saying, you know, tell us how much you like it. And maybe some, some pain points, right? So you get like these published surveys from Adobe or from Salesforce or the other kind of the bigger ESPs back in like 2015, 2016, and they're very targeted on their users. And so for really good emails, what we wanted to do is say, Hey, let's be ESP agnostic and let's just see what the feeling is like. Out there and try to get as much information from these people as possible, as much as they want to give us, you know, and so every year we add a couple more questions to the survey. It is gotten pretty long, and thank you for everyone that's taken it. You know, I think we're, we're close to 1500 people that have taken the survey so far and spent way more time than we ever expected them to spend on this thing. And so, one of those questions is how much time does it take to produce an email? And so that's kind of the crux of what we're talking about today. One of many. So we ask them about their industry and what their role is and how long they've been in email and what ESP they use and for their pain points and all sorts of stuff. And so we can run correlations between that production time and see if there's something else that relates to why is this production time increasing over the years. When we started when we first published in 2018, it was right around six days. Last year we were at 7.7 business days. So, you know, it wasn't huge. It was like, you know, 5.7 to 7.7, so it was like an extra day, you know? But this year as of you know, us doing this, 'cause we haven't finished all the analysis yet, but we're at 8.21 business days, so we've added an extra half a day in a year to producing email content which is, you know, that's a week and a half worth of stuff for our business. That's, that's a long time that goes into one email. So, happy to dive into all the things that come around with that.

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Justine Jordan: Yeah. And that's a 44% increase since Mike started doing this survey in, in 2018, and I'm sure we can talk more about this, but it's like you would expect that with all these like innovations in tech and in MarTech and all these great tools that we have, that maybe our jobs get a little bit easier. Yeah. But it looks like. Maybe, maybe the opposite is kind of true. Really interesting stuff.

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Eric Trinidad: Right. Is it, is it like weather based mercury and retrograde? Like how does that all happen? Like, I'm not too sure.

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Justine Jordan: Tornadoes.

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Eric Trinidad: Yeah.

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Justine Jordan: Yeah.

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Eric Trinidad: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, they can definitely put a damper on things for sure.

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Justine Jordan: Yeah.

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Jonathan Torres: Yeah, I mean, and, and kind of break it down even more, like I just kind of, you know, there was a lot of info that there, and I kinda wanna go into a little bit of like what it is and what it all means and, you know, how we get to from point A, point B. And the first thing I just wanted to double check and make sure that I understand is like, how, like, you know. When you say people are taking the survey, who's taking the survey? How do they get to the survey? Like what, what people are we pinging to say like, Hey, survey worthy, let's go.

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Justine Jordan: Well, really good emails has, how many subscribers Mike like 250,000? That's just the, the newsletter. Not to mention like the, the web traffic, we get to the, the actual site. And so we, we promote the survey to the really good emails audience through the email newsletter, through people that, that visit the site. And so what I think is cool about this data, especially Mike was comparing it to a lot of the, vendor specific surveys, that are valuable on their own right. That come out. But one of the things that has always struck me about those surveys is that they were almost always seemed to be aimed at a, an enterprise buyer, clearly. Right. They're, they're, let's be honest, they're marketing materials and that's okay. I am cool with that. I used to be a marketer. But no one was really ever talking about like, the people that were in the weeds. Like what's the, the pain of like the average person and like what it takes to actually get this thing done instead of just the people that are like buying the software. Really good emails has not much to sell besides the, occasionally a ticket to Unspam, and that's even sold out. So, you know, I think we're in this really unique position to raise the voice of the people in that audience that are a slice of everyone that has their hands on email. And one of the most interesting things about this just a couple hours ago, in fact, I was putting the final touches on trying to figure out how industry plays a role in this. And so I like how we have just a really diverse slice of a lot of people that have their hands on email. Like, doing the creation.

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Jonathan Torres: Yeah. No, I like it. I had seen you know. The questions and like who's, you know, kind of the, how you self-report, like who you are and you know, what you do. And there, there is like a really good crossover of just a good breadth of people that are, that seem to be doing this kind of stuff. And I know for our survey, right, we have a survey that we do also that is very deliverability focused. And then there's always, you know, the satisfaction type surveys that happen. And I don't think I've seen a whole lot of this where it's like, Hey, just what, what are you doing? What's the pain point? And then every single segment I know has, it's job when it comes to email. I know there's a whole lot of us that are within email and claim to be of email and, and live in that space. But then those roles change just a little bit with everybody involved. So this is really cool. I really like the data that was in here and like how it compares everything and you know, what everybody's doing exactly like you said. I appreciate that, that it's a, you know, on your day to day, how are you in this, how are you in the trenches every day through email? So, when we talk about the length of time that it was that used to create, I know there was some nuance that we had talked about in the preparation for this this podcast episode is that the you're kind of reliant on self-reporting for people and then we, you break it down, you tend to try to break it down by their individual roles to try to get an idea of what it is that, that's taking a little bit longer. So can we hear more about that?

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Justine Jordan: Yeah, totally. I think one of the things that was probably the, that stood out to me the most, we also ask people to self-report on the complexity of their email process. So you can either tell us that your email process is simple, that it's complex or that it's very complex. You kind of have like three different ratings that you can give it. And that was actually the most significant factor affecting the production time. And there was a three, almost three and a half time difference between a simple email process that takes about four days to complete. And when you actually go to the very complex end of that, it blows that eight days out of the water, it's almost 14 days. It's like 13 and a half days on average if you have a very complex email process. So that was the thing that was the most significantly correlated to increasing production time. And that makes sense, right? Like if I have a very simple email. I sent one this morning. I had to crack open the ticket tailor, which is like the system that we use to sell Unspam tickets. And it's basically like a plain text email that, you know, I typed out and sent Mike a test send, and then we, you know, lit a candle and you know, press send. That's an inside joke by the way. We'll have to get like a, can you put that in there? In post T-Bird? Like a, you know, a. Definitely a shot of our, our, our, our ge really, really good candles. But that's awesome.  Oh, that's awesome.

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Justine Jordan: Yeah, like the really complex stuff, like I'm not setting up segmentation or doing a bunch of dynamic content rules or writing amps script or anything like that. Right. So, yeah. Makes sense.

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Jonathan Torres: Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. And it's I mean with the complexity, I know that's one of the things that we talk about a lot when it comes to the deliverability side. Whenever we're looking at how an email's performing, where it's landing at, like there's so much complexity when you start getting so complex that there is a lot of complexity with the information you get back and how you're reading that information and how you need to consider about performance of you know those complex emails when they're going out. So I get it. I totally understand like why they're taking forever and I wish that more people that were sending those complex emails would take more time to do it 'cause sometimes you get really complex ones and they're just like, I don't know how they do it. Like, like, you know, the whole lighting a candle thing. I understand. I get for a while we had a, Jon Snow themed candle 'cause you know, Jon Snow holding a little baby lamb that was actually a ghost. So for those that watched Game of Thrones, you know? Yeah.

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Justine Jordan: Oh man.

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Jonathan Torres: So, but it is one of those things I couldn't in a million years, being now in the industry for so long, I couldn't just, you know, hit send on something that's really complex. So it totally makes sense. Totally understand. And, and yeah, on the shorter side. Totally get it easier, much easier to, to get through and done. And I know when we start talking about the, again, when we look further into the deliverability aspect of things and how that's coming back, we need people to pay attention to those things. That was one of the things that I was curious about, like, do people ever tend to talk about like that. I'm curious as to whether. Like anybody's looking out for that or what roles we would correlate to being the people that would watch out for , that piece. Right. Because I know there's the pieces of that, you know, even on the marketing side, we talk about deliverability and the whole engineering part of that thing and, and what it is. But the people on the marketing end even, or people that are looking at this information within it and seeing how it's relating to the deliverability of things like when it comes to getting information, getting numbers back, considering the numbers and complexity and everything else that happened with the previous one, to then translate over to the next one and how that's, that's compiling in there. So, I I was just more of a curious thought that, you know, kind of came into mind like when we were talking about all this and, and just wondering , if there's, you know, roles that we see correlated to , that would align then within this process.

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Justine Jordan: Hmm. Yeah. So we do ask in the survey for, again, you to self-report your role. And so we provide you with a few different like generalized buckets to choose from. You can self-report as you know, a designer, developer, writer, strategist, analyst, project manager, executive, or we call just like, you know, the jack of all trades, Jack or Jill of all trades. Like I wear all the hats. We know that that's super common in email, like that's been me, it's been Mike, it's been probably all of us at some point once in our lives, right? We wear all the email hats. And so, the type of role that you have in that process does seem to indicate you know, whether or not your process takes a little bit longer. And this is one of the things where I would argue, like with any sort of data analysis, like, where's the chicken and where's the egg? Because the rules that reported having the longest email process were probably ones that you'd expect. Analysts, executives, project managers, the strategists, the ones that reported the lowest were folks like the jacks and jills of all trades, designers, developers, and writers. And whenever I think about the deliverability side of things, that always, to me sounds like analysis, maybe some strategy, right? Even occasionally, an executive, like I know if there's a deliverability problem for really good emails or beefree, I tend to get pulled into that because I just have been doing this forever and I know a thing or two about deliverability. And so, but it's usually like an analyst type of person or an operations person that's responsible for analyzing you know, post send, which includes everything from click and open data all the way to, are we making it to the inbox? Is you know, I used to monitor DMARC you know, compliance to see if anyone was spoofing us, right? So, all those kinds of things. Yeah Mike.

00:13:47

Mike Nelson: So there's also we ask how long you've been creating emails or been like, that's been part of your role and one of the things that I noticed when I was doing the research for this call was that your tenure at your company or just how much experience you have? The production depends on your tenure. So, for example, if you're like a new analyst, let's say, 'cause analyst is kind of like the best set for this like, deliverability individual 'cause we said in the survey that you spend time in, in reports and in Excel and looking at click through rates and delivery rates and all that kinda stuff, right? So analysts is really the closest fit for this role. But you say like, people that have like under two years they spend on average 16 days. Looking at emails like, that's a lot. And then when you go up to people that are like eight years, they're spending a day, a day and a half. So the longer you have in this role, the better you get at it. Right? It's and what I kind of like, there's this other correlation that I found wasn't in our notes, but I found this morning and have you heard of the endowment effect? It's kinda like the Ikea effect. Like you build something and then like, you like it better because you put your hands on it and like. It's yours. So like you build a set of Legos and you're like, oh, that's super cool 'cause I built it. Or like, you have kids and you're like, my kids are the best because I raised them. Right. So, the, the endowment effect is kinda like how much time you put into something. And I thought this was super interesting too, because the people, one of the questions is like, your sentiment of the future of email and the people that have a long experience with email like 6, 8, 9, 10 years have a pretty positive lasting sentiment for email. They have a longer lasting, there's a lot of data here. They a longer lasting sentiment, but they, but they spend, hold on, lemme go back to this. They spend lasting positive seven on average seven days to create an email. Whereas the people that have like a negative impact, they're like six days or three and a half days. So to me, this means that you're spending more time creating the email because you like it more and you feel like if you build more on top of it and you critique it and it's like your little baby, that it's going to have a bigger impact. Right. And so you're, you're actually spending more time because. You, you, you enjoy it. And so I thought that was a really cool side of the, a flip of the coin where it's like, oh, look at all these tools that are supposed to make it faster for us. But really, if you enjoy it, you wanna spend more time on it.

00:16:16

Justine Jordan: I'm just gonna say like, are we kind of indirectly measuring like job satisfaction and like just joy here, right? You know, we always talk about how like no one chooses email. Email chooses you. And if email has, has chosen you and you found joy in this, like for whatever weird reason I, but then again here, we're on a podcast about email, right? So, yeah.

00:16:37

Eric Trinidad: You're in a safe space.

00:16:38

Justine Jordan: So that's actually super interesting. Yeah. Like if you, if you're really experienced in what you're doing and you like it, then you're gonna invest more time into getting better at it and probably do your job faster.

00:16:49

Eric Trinidad: Yeah.

00:16:49

Justine Jordan: So interesting.

00:16:50

Eric Trinidad: Really good employees didn't even know. Dang nice.

00:16:55

Mike Nelson: Faster or not faster 'cause you like, you like just like to spend time on it.

00:17:00

Jonathan Torres: And, and I think it's exactly that too, like where it's, it's not faster, but I, even with the better tools, I think you would want to spend more time really crafting it to be as good as possible, because you know what that impact is. And that's, I think, where we land a lot in the deliverability side, where, you know, people recognize that you're gonna get good ROI, that you're gonna get good return on investment. You can grow an audience, you can grow a brand, you can get things that are really, really well done. It, you know, by doing those things, by investing the time and doing it better than what the other person is doing. It's awesome to see that they like it and then they're spending time to do it from those, the sound of it.

00:17:34

Mike Nelson: Yeah. Let, let's dig in on that for a second, because if you're spending all this time, how much would it suck if you go straight into a junk box, right? Like, what you're really doing is trying to set up, like you said, the branding is really important. Getting good click through is really important, but also like your BIMI, your DMARC, like all that stuff's super important so that like you don't spend two weeks on an email and nobody sees it.

00:17:59

Jonathan Torres: That would be the worst.

00:18:01

Thomas Knierien: Seriously.

00:18:02

Eric Trinidad: That tracks. No, that's awesome.

00:18:04

Thomas Knierien: Like our own Megan Boshuyzen, like she puts so much effort and work into our custom emails for email camp and like if our emails landed in spam, she would come down from the northeast and track us down and figure out what the heck is going on. Why did I waste all this time? So it's like, yeah, it's the benefit for everyone. The stuff has to work no matter what, so yeah.

00:18:26

Jonathan Torres: From the deliverability side, I always want to use that to like pitch the whole deliverability thing of how important it is because it's like if you do a throwaway one, like you may lose a good part of your audience. Like you may lose, you know, people that, that would normally be interested in the things that you're saying and you're doing. If you just, you know, kind of do it halfway. And by continuously doing it well. Like keep paying attention to everything that you're doing every single time that you're doing it. Like that's how you build it. That's how you continue to grow and better. And then you have those ones like Megan did a few years ago with the, the MySpace themed April Fools. It was April Fools. April Fools. I think it was April Fool.

00:19:00

Thomas Knierien: Yeah, it was.

00:19:02

Jonathan Torres: And it's like a huge hit. But it's like you build it from there, you know, people know what to expect and, and know and understand that you're gonna send something that's worthy of being opened.

00:19:11

Justine Jordan: Yeah, totally. And again, we don't have any data that backs this up, but I think between the five of us, like we have enough industry experience to know that one of the things that typically goes into your email program becoming more complex is more sophisticated segmentation, more sophisticated dynamic content. And we know that those things typically are done so to increase engagement, to make the content more relevant, to make it more engaging. And so, I hope by now, although there's probably a whole different podcast topic on here about busting spam and deliverability myths, right. But at this point in time and in the year 2025, it's not using free or like your content trigger words or whatever that land you and spam. Right. It's all those other things. It's engagement it's reputation, is the content actually engaging? Did I have permission to mail? And an organization that has a more complex process is clearly investing a lot into that and probably understands the role of all of those things. I do think the two are probably related, that the more complex your email process is, the more likely it is to have higher deliverability because you're investing into all of those aspects of a great campaign.

00:20:21

Eric Trinidad: I think that also, it kind of ties in what you originally were saying was like, with more time and as we become, you know, closer to getting, you know, flying cars and whatnot, you know, getting more tooling and, and better you know, overall just access to stuff. You know, maybe these folks that enjoy doing emails, taking the survey or investing time and learning these new things and putting those into effect into these email campaigns. That's why it's taking a little bit longer too.

00:20:49

Thomas Knierien: Speaking of, I love that they found that. I think, what was it y'all were telling us that people were averaging, like the original completion time was seven minutes. I think now people are taking 25 minutes for the survey. Right?

00:21:02

Justine Jordan: Yeah. Putting some thought and care into it.

00:21:04

Thomas Knierien: People care. People really care about how much, how much feedback they're giving.

00:21:10

Mike Nelson: Or we just have too many questions. Apologies. Like why is this getting, getting bigger and bigger and bigger? We actually, we actually cut I think we cut like 10 questions this year 'cause it was, it was like this thing is getting bloated. So, there was some questions in there from like, you know, COVID days when people are changing jobs really fast and not quite sure what's going on. And so we removed a lot of those, but generally. Yeah, it's, we try to stay true to the core principles that we have talked about today. One of those is also team size. Like it adds complexity, right? So if you take a look at like, you know, team of one or two, they probably don't even care about deliverability 'cause they just wanna get it out the door. Like they're a small company, they don't even know what deliverability is like, and they might have a small, you know, list size 'cause they're one or two people. And so you take a look at, this is always, every single year team size correlates with list size, right? So the larger your list size, the larger your team gets. Which is typical. And then you see like the analyst kind of we talked about earlier, that starts showing up with teams about four or five and above. And so really you start caring about this when you have about a team, about four or five people dedicated to doing email for your, your team. But, you know, team size does make a huge impact on production time too. Like you take a look at you know, teams of 10 plus are spending almost 18 days on average to do that. If you're watching the video version of this podcast, you will see some stats here.

00:22:35

Justine Jordan: Here's how that correlates with team size. So we got like a nice chart here, right? Solo professionals, just a few days. But like Mike said, like once you hit four or five, it dang near doubles, right?

00:22:51

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. That's crazy. That's awesome. I'm wondering now if there's an another question. I'm sorry to put you on the spot 'cause I know this data has already, already, you know, adjusted to how we wanna see it. But 'cause I know the other topic that we had talked about is how often people are sending out email. Like and so whenever we're talking about people that are doing those campaigns where they're like hitting, you know, again and again, again, does that also tend to correlate with like list size and stuff like that? Or is there any correlation between, you know, team size or list size to how often they're doing it?

00:23:20

Justine Jordan: Yeah, we did ask about list size. I don't know, Mike, have you already run that data? I did not look at that in particular. I did look at, some correlation with, what was it, the number of simultaneous emails that you're working on. And so again, I don't think any of this is super shocking, but for a company, if you're running more concurrent email projects, right? So if you're just doing like a one or two emails at a time versus if you're doing. You know, 10 or 11 or more emails at a time. It almost triples, right? So people that are just doing one or two emails at a time, it's like four days. People that are doing six or more emails it ends up being 11 days, and then it keeps going from there, basically.

00:24:06

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, that's, expected.

00:24:08

Mike Nelson: That's also industry specific too, right? Where you have like you have these hype up periods like Black Friday, you'll probably be spending so much time on your Black Friday stuff. If you're in higher education. I know January, February you're mapping out, you know, 30 to 40 different emails to hit, you know, the springtime for enrollment. There's all sorts of stuff. That kind of plays into when we ask these questions 'cause this survey goes out the end of the year and then January, February. So we try to make sure that we get a breadth of it. And so we, we miss the Black Friday, but we still have, you know, some of those industries that are high level planning mode where it's top of mind, where they're like stressed out of their brains. So.

00:24:52

Justine Jordan: Yep. And I think the other part of the industry stuff that wasn't at all surprising is that you know, highly regulated industries financial services, insurance, healthcare. All have higher levels or you know, longer production times. Whereas, I don't wanna say like less regulated or like, but you know, simpler businesses, most likely that don't have big marketing teams, manufacturing, real estate, you know? Automotive, those are all like industries that have smaller, and then when you look at like the meta data of industry, like, you know, boiling it down to B2B, B2C, am I a nonprofit? Am I a community run organization? I was actually surprised. I expected there to be. A bigger difference between B2B and B2C. Like in my mind, I've almost always been like in the B2B world, and so B2C to me has always seemed more complex and like higher volume and you know, more of everything. And so I kind of expected that to be a bigger difference, but. B2C was only about one more day on average than B2B. And it was actually, you know, like the community run and the publicly funded organizations that that take longer probably 'cause they're more resource constrained, more complexity, more regulation. Right?

00:26:08

Eric Trinidad: Right.

00:26:10

Jonathan Torres: That makes total sense. Yeah. And, and I mean and with industry too, like we know from experience with customers when there are customers who are needing to be now, you know, it's more of a templated approach. Like, let's, you know, be relevant and be quick and, and be able to hit that. And then if they have the opportunity, then within the deliverability side of things, to also then consider the things that they're putting in there, like how they're curating that, and then be able to iterate it through, you know, a little more metered you know, as that kind of comes through and be because they're being fast and Yeah. I can imagine when you're doing more marketing, when you're, you know, heavy, like financial stuff I know is always like, kind of a crazy thing too. And paying a little closer attention to how those are looking and how they're, they're different from spot to spot, you know? I think everybody has to be aware of what they're doing, how they're doing it. You know, I think overall is a big thing that we always tell people. Like, you know, your audience and know what they're expecting from you. And then that makes a huge difference, I think in a lot of things that we're concerned with. So like, I would assume that we're seeing that correlation or that you had seen that correlation there too.

00:27:11

Eric Trinidad: I'm wondering also like as you've continued to do this survey over time do y'all have people that continuously fill them out as well year over year. How the metrics from someone that took it in 2018 compared to in 2025, how their data has changed maybe, or if they were the same company?

00:27:29

Mike Nelson: That's all. Yeah. If they self-report their email address at the end, that's I guess a unique ID that we could go and we could find how they've changed over time. That could be cool. Like I could, because I take the survey also every year, right? So I'd be like how was I carried about this, you know, in 2017 or 2018? But no, that's not something we really look at. I think some people might be like, that'd be weird if you're seeing how I specifically changed roles over the years, but.

00:27:53

Eric Trinidad: Fair Big brother type of scenario.

00:27:57

Thomas Knierien: We, we know how your career is going.

00:27:59

Mike Nelson: How does really good emails make money? We, like, we mine your data. No.

00:28:10

Thomas Knierien:Thomas Knierien: [00:28:10] Definitely not.

00:28:12

Jonathan Torres: That's good. Wanted to open up for you guys to really talk about anything that you find interesting in here.

00:28:16

Justine Jordan: Yeah. I mean one of the things that I found interesting I've still been digging more and more 'cause we also asked about people using ai and that's been very interesting to me because I remember at UNSPAM last year I was very surprised when Mike revealed onstage the data around just how little people had adopted ai so far. And that seems to not only be changing, people are adopting ai more often. But again, the correlation of whether or not using ai to reduce your production time was also interesting. And so, people or organizations that using ai have a 37% reduction in their time to produce an email. So it goes from like, 11 days on average for those that are not using AI. To just under seven days for those that are using AI. And the most common way that people are using AI is for copywriting. And that also kind of makes sense, right?  You know, if I'm gonna take a long time to write something, put it through the review and, you know, approval process, all that kind of stuff, that like shortening that part of that process has probably ended up being pretty impactful.

00:29:26

Jonathan Torres: Wow. Yeah. That's interesting. That's very interesting.

00:29:30

Mike Nelson: What are you guys seeing on the ai side for deliverability? What's out there that's kind of helping your world make sense of you know, inbox placements and making it work?

00:29:41

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, it's growing. It's still, I think it, it's a little bit more in its infancy still. I think as people have discovered how to do it better. But I mean, the biggest thing that, that I think we're looking into from our side more than anything else is gonna be the, the analytics of everything. You know, human eyes can only go so far and, and you can definitely break down the information in a fairly good way. But then once you know and understand the things you should be looking for, like getting something else to help break that data down into you know, that way and several others is really, really super, super helpful. And, and not having to, you know, write scripts or you know, kind of go through crazy databases or create crazy formulas in a database to try to figure out that same info is I think gonna really, really start changing here in the next couple of years. Once we you know, once that gets more developed, I think it's a little bit slower to adopt.

00:30:25

Eric Trinidad: Especially with our, like, upper echelon of clients and customers. You know smaller mom and pop shops where they send like maybe thousands of messages a week or a month. Pretty easy to go through and kind of figure out some of the smaller trends there. But when you're sending out millions of messages a day and trying to parse through that information, it just, it gets more aggressively difficult every day. So, you know, ai's assistance, there is gonna be a game changing for sure.

00:30:49

Thomas Knierien: Yeah, we were worried more on the end of bad actors using it to kind of create sites and stuff for people to falsely opt in. And we were more worried about that. And then now it's like, okay. And especially too when ai was introduced, especially from the deliverability side, I feel like that the old man screaming at the sky, like, why is this, you know, why are we hearing about this now? The smoke is kind of cleared. We've kind of seen like, okay, it's being used on the email marketing side. It can still be used on the deliverability side to, you know, sift through data points and even through seed lists and stuff like that. But it's now it's just like, okay, like it's here. It's not gonna go anywhere for the time of being. I am waiting until Skynet kind of turns back on or something like that. And that's what scares me about it. But yeah.

00:31:32

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, I think the big skynet thing probably is gonna happen is just you're just gonna get signed up for a whole bunch of like, subscriptions that you don't want. And that's pretty much it. You know, you're not gonna get terminated or anything, so you'll be fine.

00:31:44

Mike Nelson: What's, one I wanted to ask this year that we didn't get in there was, you know, how have you been affected by a spam bot attack? Like every company I know that has a large list size. Has, you know, really good emails got hit really hard. Late last year we added something like 1.3 million addresses to our list in the span of like three and a half days before we caught it. 'cause I'm not there every day, right? So I'm like, dang, right. We're cooking on like, on day one. I was like, that's good. And I went back and I was like, oh wait, this is not real. There's no way. And so I think, you know, I think ai's gonna get really good at seeing this, you know, name+74663@gmail.com, you know, is not realistic when all of these are being added at the same time. So, that's another kind of leading into the ai world I think it was just interesting. I would, I don't know, similar listening to this podcast and then have a way to reach out and that'd be a cool little survey is how affected are you by Spambots?

00:32:43

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. And if it released on April 1st, I'd be like, well, you're about to be affected by one. I can't wait to see like what else we got, you know, cooking for that, you know. I guess on your end, I know, you know, as far as like, data collection, have y'all seen any other changes with ai, at least from really good emails, perspective on how you're curating stuff and how things are being collected.

00:33:09

Mike Nelson: We've got some things cooking on how we use our ai on RGE, so that'll be really fun. We've got some things on the roadmap for this year that will analyze different emails you've collected. Analyze the emails actually on the site to help you understand better copywriting skills or hierarchy of visuals, things like that. So that's all in the works. We just need to get cleared by legal you know, as legal likes to have their say. But, you know, that's a good thing 'cause they keep us in business. So yeah, once we clear those through those things, we should have some really cool ai side stuff on RGE

00:34:02

Eric Trinidad: Very cool. Very cool. Well right on.

00:34:05

Thomas Knierien: Speaking of, so, all these results that you guys have collected and everything from the survey. So, it sounds like you're gonna release the majority and everything. Kind of show everyone what y'all found at UNSPAM, and that's what, April 22nd to the 24th?

00:34:19

Justine Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. We'll do a big presentation then and then the team back at home, back at the office, the virtual office all over the world. They're cooking up all kinds of there's like a webinar coming up on like email mistakes where there's a couple of questions that we asked in particular the beefree audience about email mistakes that I think we're gonna weave into that, and then all kinds of content and stuff that's planned. So, we'll be recording those UNSPAM sessions and you'll be able to watch the video with, with all the data and, and the trends that we found. But then just to keep an eye out for more webinars, content, all the different ways we wanna slice and dice this data. Yep.  

00:34:57

Eric Trinidad: Awesome. Awesome. That is really awesome. Yeah. Well, Justine, Mike, thank you so much for spending some time with us today and, and breaking down the survey results. If folks wanna see more information or get more information about y'all, where can they find you?

00:35:11

Justine Jordan: Man, I used to say Twitter, but that's not really a thing anymore. I don't know, call me on my private bat cave line. I don't know. Yeah, LinkedIn probably is the best place to find me these days. Or an email Geek Slack, I'm gonna say.

00:35:24

Eric Trinidad: Oh, nice, nice. And Mike, you're giving out your personal number now?

00:35:30

Mike Nelson: Social. My social security number is, am I? No, yeah, find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to reach me. Or you can just send me an email at mike@reallygoodemails.com I get those instantly and read every single one of 'em.

00:35:43

Eric Trinidad: Nice. Great deal. Thomas. If people wanna find more information about us or find out more information about what we got going on, where can they go?

00:35:51

Thomas Knierien: Yes, for sure. You can find more at mailgun.com/resources/podcast, and you can also watch this at youtube.com/@mailgun. And you can see and hang out with our amazing guests as well. Also, if you wanna follow along with some of these resources and stuff that Justine and Mike have brought over from Really Good Emails, we'll also have those in our show notes as well, so you can take a look at that. So, yeah.

00:36:16

Eric Trinidad: Sweet. Sweet. Well, once again, thank you everybody for hanging out with us and until next time, take it easy.

00:36:22

Justine Jordan: Thanks for having us.

00:36:23

Eric Trinidad: Bye y'all.