Exploring the Dynamics of Customer Engagement in Email Campaigns

Unlock the mysteries of email marketing with Brian Cardona of AtData and RetailWire BrainTrust host Mark Price, as we dissect the role of email addresses in the digital marketing landscape. Our discussion peels back the layers of how these digital identifiers are reshaping customer engagement strategies, especially with the shift in traditional metric visibility due to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection. If you've ever wondered about the resilience of your email list in the face of changing privacy laws and the decline of third-party cookies, this conversation will illuminate the path toward a privacy-compliant marketing future.

Prepare to navigate the intricacies of inbox placement and sender reputation with intelligence from the forefront of email validation services. The introduction of engagement scores, pioneered by Safe2Send, is transforming how retailers refine their communication channels. This episode is a guiding light for marketers aiming to maintain relevance and authenticity in their customer outreach, as we discuss the art of balancing the evolving digital ecosystem with innovative targeting and communication strategies.

Brian Cardona offers his expert insights on the impact of GDPR and CPRA, and how first-party data reigns supreme in the age of transparency. So if you're ready to elevate your understanding of customers and lead the way in privacy-conscious marketing, make sure to tune in and join our community of retail enthusiasts.

RetailWire is the retail industry's premier source for news, analysis, and discussion. With a focus on the latest trends, technology, and consumer behavior, RetailWire provides a platform for industry experts and thought leaders to share their insights and perspectives. Whether you're a retailer, supplier, or service provider, RetailWire is your go-to destination for staying informed and ahead of the curve.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hello everybody and welcome to Retail Wired Podcast, your go-to source for all things retail. Whether you're a seasoned industry veteran or just dipping your toes into the world of retail, this podcast is your one-stop shop for the latest trends, insights and discussions that are shaping the future of retail. Today I'm your host, mark Price, and today I'm joined by Brian Cardona, who's the president of ActData. Brian Cardona, who's the president of AtData. Now, brian has been in the direct marketing business for 20 plus years and today helps Fortune 1000 companies apply technology to maximize revenue, minimize costs and improve the depth and accuracy of their marketing databases, which I think everybody in every marketing department in America would really want to be able to do.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Now, brian is a longtime veteran of what was, at the time, tower Data, where he rose from the VP of business development to becoming the president of the company, which he led for 10 years before its merger with Fresh Address to become AtData. So, brian, thank you for coming on this podcast today and really interested to hear a little bit about what you are doing right now and where you see things are going with data quality, dealing with issues around the deprecation of third-party cookies and, of course, there is no podcast. That could possibly be complete these days without talking about AI, but at the beginning would you just tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of as you've seen over the last what looks like 19 years of being in the company. In the last 10 years of leading it, how have things changed and how did you get to where you are today?

Speaker 2: 2:15

Awesome. Yeah, thanks, mark. It's great to be here today. I appreciate you having me Right. So I think you touched on the two main things of Tower Data and Fresh Address. Coming together is at data and we are the email experts. So, combined, both companies are over 20 years old and we were both born with the advent of email marketing, right? So email is our DNA and over the past couple of decades we've seen a lot change. Email is when we think about email marketing right, a lot change. Email is when we think about email marketing right. In 20 years ago, it was about list size and contacting customers with a newsletter or maybe sending out a coupon, and now the email address is so much more so. Uh, at data is provides email address intelligence to help our customers. Um, you do all things with that email address, and more than just email marketing.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Brian, would you say that the email address is so much more than just simply what goes into an email that is sent out to people? Can you say a little bit more about all the things that now are enabled with that email address?

Speaker 2: 3:23

Yeah, for sure, so when we think about email address intelligence, we're thinking about first of all that email is a persistent digital identifier, right? So as a person moves from one city to another, or from one home to another, or an apartment to a home, the email address is coming along with them. That's a lot different than a long time ago, when I'll date myself a little bit, but we responded to AOL or Net Zero or Juno and we were chasing that.

Speaker 1: 3:53

I remember I'm dating myself.

Speaker 2: 3:55

I remember those Right right, the $0 internet and the ISP. Well, now, we know Gmail and Yahoo are quite sticky right and we have visibility to this data, and we know people are changing email addresses less frequently and also people have more than one email address right, and so you know how do we consider that as businesses or as retailers. But when we're thinking about email address intelligence, it's primarily four things, right? First, we're thinking about the email address with respect to deliverability. So that's the traditional email validation. In our world we call the safe to send service. Is this email deliverable when I send an email to it, is it going to be received by Google, yahoo, hotmail and so on? Also, is the email risky with respect to deliverability? So, is it a spam trap? So that's our first piece, right? We're going to think is this email deliverable? Is it? Is it risky? The second is is it risky as it relates to fraud? So, uh, have we seen fraudulent activity tied to this email address? Have we never seen it before? And what does that mean? Um, the third is is it a good email, right?

Speaker 2: 5:06

So I think many of us again having multiple email addresses, some we are guarded and protected with. Maybe some we use for commerce, others we use for our fantasy football team and nothing else. Right, we never check that inbox. So how do we decide? Is this a good email address in the context of quality and responsiveness? And then, lastly, is identity, as you mentioned earlier, so understanding. Who does this email belong to and what else do we know about that household? Do they have additional members of the household? Are there additional email addresses that you can associate with that person?

Speaker 1: 5:43

that you can associate with that person. So does that mean that you can actually do householding and get to additional people who might be living in that location, who have two or three or four email addresses also?

Speaker 2: 5:53

That's right. So our alternate email append service is available, where an email address can be presented to us and we can tell you about. Here are the other emails that we have associated with that person and either at the individual level or the household level, and our clients are using that service. Um, you know, not so much to say, hey, let's grow our email list and and send more mail. It's around attribution. It's around, uh, clean rooms, uh, and again, broadening that reach of who that customer is.

Speaker 1: 6:30

Makes a lot of sense. Now, for a while, it seems like people were trading out their email addresses at a faster and faster rate, and you mentioned that that seems to be slowing down. Now Can you say a little bit more about that slowdown that you're seeing and why you think that's occurring?

Speaker 2: 6:48

Yeah, so I think we used to see as high as 2% 3% of an email list go invalid on a monthly basis and that just natural churn on a list. And now we're seeing about half of that right, so we're under 2% is what we're going to see, where that email address is changing. And again, I think it's a tribute to two things. One, you know, and I think the spam issue has been to some degree, or I guess it's managed well by Gmail and Yahoo, right, the algorithms they have, the spam filters they have, the new rules they have around authentication are going to take place and I think, on the whole, the inbox is pretty well controlled. So there isn't this need to switch around and run away from a certain email address.

Speaker 2: 7:37

But the other, and I think most important in this context, is that email address is how you're connecting with a retailer or an e-commerce business and using that as your login Right. So. So changing that email address is can be quite painful and, when it comes to loyalty programs, can be quite disruptive. So for that reason, for those reasons, we think, yeah, the email address is becoming much more sticky as we move here into the future of the digital ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 8:09

Now, you mentioned spam as well as one of the real benefits of using your service. Said it the ability to churn out email addresses and churn out bad content in order to achieve different aims, either political aims or retail aims, a range of different kinds of things. It seems like there's a chance that that could really explode over the next couple of years. You have the ability to head that off at the pass, don't you? How do you do that?

Speaker 2: 8:49

When we think about creating new email addresses and the harm that can be done by that by bad actors.

Speaker 2: 8:57

Certainly we know that Gmail has that functionality to use the plus sign to add trailing characters to an email address and create an infinite number of email addresses.

Speaker 2: 9:10

Also, the period or the dot can be anywhere within an email address.

Speaker 2: 9:13

So we know that the bad actors can manipulate that functionality and try to commit fraud.

Speaker 2: 9:24

Our technology allows us to what we call tumble an email address where we can determine if you take all of those Gmail addresses so Brian Cardona, at Gmail, I can say Brian Cardona Press, retail Wire, brian Cardona Plus, retailer 1, retailer 2, retailer 3, and down the line and tumble that into a single view for that email and that allows us to inform our clients with our fraud risk score to say, hey, this is one email address, it all belongs to this person. We see the IP addresses in some foreign country that maybe has less laws or something like this, and so you should apply higher scrutiny to this registration. So that's just one example, I think. When we think about spam and email address intelligence and at data services, you know, I think it's more around navigating that inbox placement and so entirely separate from fraud risk. We think about the quality of those email addresses and are they going to be emails that engage with people, that engage with the emails that you send, and if they do, that improves your sender reputation and therefore your inbox placement.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Now I say that you've created some sort of engagement score for email addresses. Can you say a little bit about how you do that and then how you see retailers using that information to change, maybe, who they're targeting and, how often, what kinds of communications they're doing?

Speaker 2: 11:06

We have an engagement score that's included as a feature of our email validation service, safe2send, and that's telling us exactly whether that email address is across our broader network of signals and email. That's an opener and a clicker. And again, that's important as we tie back to the inbox placement because many times a retailer maybe they're having inbox placement issues right.

Speaker 2: 11:33

So Gmail or Yahoo, proofpoint, et cetera, have said I don't like the looks of this mail, or let me put them in the junk mail folder, or let me block their email and and some of the the rules they have in place around that are related to engagement. So you send emails Google 100,000 emails and a low percentage open, you know. And so a lot of times the advice there which is good advice is to say maybe peel off and only mail to your active email addresses, right? So let's only engage with emails that have opened, email addresses that have opened to our campaigns in the last year, and leave the rest out. But then you know, mr CEO comes in and says we need more revenue in this quarter. You need to send more emails, right? And now what do you do? And as the marketer, you're thinking well, I can take my inbox placement and mail to my whole list. Or?

Speaker 2: 12:32

This is where our service comes in and what it was designed for. It helps our clients take a look at that inactive data that they have and determine what's active elsewhere across the broader ad data ecosystem, and that will mitigate that risk. So oftentimes it has a US bias the data signals but oftentimes for US retailers we'll be able to say half of the data that you have as inactive we're seeing active elsewhere. So we would suggest, hey, let's start marketing with that data first, reengaging with that data first to mitigate the risk of tanking that inbox placement and that sender reputation. So we're pretty excited about that. It's quite effective service again just to reengage with our onboard data that perhaps has been inactive with you. Again just to to to um re-engage with or onboard data that perhaps has been inactive with you, whether it's relates to a loyalty program or, um, you know other reasons.

Speaker 1: 13:25

So, brian, uh, obviously open rates these days are extremely difficult thing to measure, um, because uh, more and more browsers are uh dealing with that in a way that doesn't allow marketers to see the results. When you look at it, maybe with conversion rates, when you look at, sort of, an average email address versus one that you identified as high engagement, what kind of differences can marketers expect to see?

Speaker 2: 13:56

Well, it depends answer on that, unfortunately, but I think we would suggest that marketers take a look at what their average open rates are and they will see we're on par with that for the engaged data that we have.

Speaker 2: 14:10

And your point about the masking of opens right the masking of opens right Apple's mail privacy protection is certainly been influential, especially for our clients that have a lot of app signups. We're seeing, in some cases, one of our large QSR clients, their app we're seeing as much as 10% invalid, so super important for them to have that validation service layered in there. But also around 25 to 30 percent mail privacy protection or hide my email email addresses for them, and so we can help them identify them and treat them accordingly. So just a lot going on there. I think when it comes to engagement, it's so often around and opens and clicks right. It's so often around the different retail offering that you have and is it cyclical and so on, and so forth Google getting closer and closer to the deprecation of third-party cookies, which we had spoken about a little earlier.

Speaker 1: 15:16

it seems like your capability is going to get more and more important over time. Can you talk a little bit about kind of how you see that ecosystem happening right now and how do you see it evolving over the next year?

Speaker 2: 15:31

Yeah for sure. So, right, it seems like it's finally here. The third party cookie deprecation we know I think Google said 1% was a January and that they're looking for alternative methods to kind of hone in on identity. And we believe email address is the place to be when it comes to identity for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. And again, when we think about email address intelligence, it's time to think about it outside of the context of, or that vertical market or, I should say, siloed email marketing department, and instead look at it as a business.

Speaker 2: 16:33

What is our first party data strategy and what are the key pieces of our first party data? And there, right, when we think about identity, again, email address, obviously name, postal mobile phone number, maybe device ID but device IDs are going away too, potentially. So really, we know email addresses persistent and we think, okay, well, what about the privacy compliance and sensitivities to privacy in there, Right? I think that what's interesting there is the advent of data clean rooms. So do data clean rooms allow us to meet and be sensitive to privacy issues with hashed email addresses and again combine those disparate databases with the email addresses that can be components? So obviously it's quite a bit of change and I think we've known it's coming, and now, finally, you know, we think it's going to be here, and so we're seeing across our client base again, a further emphasis in a strategic approach to identity and tying that to the email address identity and tying that to the email address.

Speaker 1: 17:38

Hey, ted, great. One question I do have to ask you is every retailer has some customers in Europe, and if you have some customers in Europe, you are subject to GDPR. And so I was wondering, and you're subject to it not just for the customers in Europe. You have to have the capability inside your database anyway, in addition to CCPA and the Massachusetts laws and the laws that are cascading across the United States. So you talked about clean rooms. Would you talk a little more if a retailer were concerned? Well, all retailers are concerned, but they wanted to ask you about that what would you say?

Speaker 2: 18:21

With respect to compliance around compliance compliance with GDPR, I mean right. So I think the main thing is isolating that data as best you can and then making sure you have the appropriate privacy policy in terms and conditions and disclosures necessary by GDPR. We know CPRA in California is escalating things and from our side, right, it's just about being transparent with your customers as they're providing that information. Here's how we're going to use your data and honoring that commitment to the clients or your customers with that data. You know, as it relates to the marketing side, obviously, opt-outs and explicit consent. Gdpr, I think, is distinct in that the explicit consent is a little more strict than in the United States and so, again, just making sure that your website, or when you're collecting that data, you're adhering to those laws. I think, from our side, europe feels like it's pretty much settled. With respect to how that's going to play out in the States, I can tell you it's a lot of stress for the industry with all the state laws that are continuing.

Speaker 1: 20:10

I know the ANA and others are lobbying for federal legislation so that we as businesses can be consistent in the promises we're making to our customers and then consistently apply them and not have a for sure, but something we hope is going to be resolved here in the next, let's say, year or two, which is oh, I have a lot of physical addresses. I don't have the emails. You have the emails, I'll just start emailing them, yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:38

So that's something that, yeah, I mean, I think that's I need to say, to be harsh and say, well, you know, that's, that's often um, the way the thinking was maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Today, right, we need to be a lot more sensitive, um and right, um. First, when it comes to third-party data, um, our third, our data is U? S only. So you know, um, we haven't, and I know, you know the European environment is different, so our data is US only.

Speaker 2: 21:12

But when we're thinking about adding third-party data, our approach is always eyes open, right, why are you adding this data and what are you going to use it for? Right, and the hurdles with respect to can't spam are quite low. With respect to can spam are quite low. I think we'd all admit that law is maybe over 15 years old itself, so compliance there isn't too difficult. But it's more important to think about, well, what is the brand experience? What are our customers expecting from us? And there it makes sense to use third-party data, but use it in a way that's on brand, I'll say. And so, for example, you may not choose to just start mailing to the data, but you may use it just within your identity graph, or you may use it for attribution, or you may use it for display, advertising and other means. So it's definitely, you know, one of those things that it depends on the business and how they're set up and what their brand promise is, but something to be thoughtful about for sure.

Speaker 1: 22:23

Excellent. One last question for you Can you give us a view of the future, as you're working on new initiatives and new capabilities? Where do you see things going for you and maybe for the industry over the next because things are moving so fast, let's say over the next?

Speaker 2: 22:39

two years? Yeah, sure, I mean, of course, as you mentioned earlier, the AI, ML, and what does that mean for us, right? So from our side, we're investing heavily into our data science team and we're excited about that. There's some bright young people that are able to do some great things with all the data that the world is collecting, and so that's super exciting how quickly they can spin up and make decisions and iterate on those decisions. It's time to make some changes, so that's something that we're super excited about.

Speaker 2: 23:18

In the context of, if we're just thinking, a couple of years, I think we continue to see more investment in that first party data and how important it is first party data and how important it is right. We think about the walled gardens and you know the platforms that say bring your data to us and we'll take care of everything in this black box. That's often a good approach to things to get to a solution quickly, but we think the smarter longer term strategy is to take control of your first party data and not be so dependent on the walled gardens. So that's one, and then just one more, if you allow me to go a bit past two years, we again think this persistence of the email addresses is going to continue, right? So five years from now, 10 years from now, will it still be the email address I mean? I think you can get.

Speaker 2: 24:09

It's interesting to think about maybe some biotech that might change things, but that's probably a bit further away. So for now, we see that email address continuing to be persistent and what we're thinking about is what other decisions can we empower with that email address, right? So it's again not just a way to send Mark more emails to get him to come to the store. It's also thinking about you know who is Mark and you know what are the things that he's interested in and what does the household look like and what are his behaviors and so on. And further, even to the extent that, is it involved in empowering credit decisions? So, for example, right, your name and postal has changed a lot, but your email is persistent. Now we can know more about Mark over the last 10 years, where maybe the home situation wasn't as stable, right, there's a lot of Americans that are in that situation, that maybe don't have access to things.

Speaker 1: 25:04

So we see more and more availability of signals tied to that email address and we're excited about the opportunity it presents, um you know, to to empower those decisions well, that led me to one other question, which is there's a lot of concern these days about, um, if you will, the people who are inadequately served by internet access and by marketing in general, where there may be a situation of economic inequity that is driving them to have their information not as available. Do you guys have a specific strategy to address that, or do you think just overall specific strategy to address that, or?

Speaker 2: 25:52

do you think just overall, the way that you reach out, deals with that. Yeah, we're thinking about that now, right? So I think there's signals that we're able to aggregate and the privacy compliant way to help us help those that are kind of outside of the economy to some degree for one reason or another. You know an open banking, a thin credit history Like what can we learn about this person with that persistent email address? And we're excited again about that opportunity to bring equity to a broader set of Americans.

Speaker 1: 26:32

That's great. Well, thank you, brian. This has been a wonderful time learning about you and learning about AtData, both where you are right now and where you're going. I really think the most exciting piece of all is, as you mentioned, the email address, not just as a vehicle to send emails, but to use that as a central identifier, combined with other information, to get a better 360-degree view of customers, but not just customers, but people who have touched your organization but have not necessarily, you know, made a transaction, if you will warm prospects that are out there, that have left some piece of a footprint that allows you to get a better understanding of where they may be touching the organization through multiple places. Yeah, yeah, well said, but thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 27:29

Thank you everyone for taking the time to listen to today's episode. If you found today's discussion valuable, please don't forget to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform and for the latest news, exciting discussions and a vibrant community of retail enthusiasts, please be sure to join our daily newsletter, which is retailwirecom. Forward slash subscribe and we will see you the next time. Thank you.