As an email builder, Stripo pays a lot of attention to data protection and email data security — both for our clients and their subscribers. That’s why we decided to discuss the future of email marketing, email security, and email deliverability with Matthew Vernhout, an email deliverability industry veteran with more than two decades of experience.
Interview Expert
Currently, Matthew participates in many forums and advocacy groups, including being the director-at-large for CAUCE.org, co-chair of the training committee for M3AAWG.org, and communications chair at BIMIGroup.org. Matthew is the visionary founder of emailsummit.ca, privacysummitnorth.ca, and emaildojo.io. Recognized as the 2019 EEC Thought Leader, Matthew, a CIPP/C, shares industry insights at global conferences and on his blog, EmailKarma.net.
Email marketing strategy: What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow
Stripo: What future do you see for email marketing as a sales and customer acquisition channel for large and small businesses? How will it develop?
Matthew: Email has never been a great lead generator, as messages sent without prior consent are often viewed as spam and tend to drive large numbers of spam complaints or could even be in violation of several laws. Building a proper lead capture form and program tailored to collecting consent from individuals will still remain a key function for B2C mailers of any size. There are no shortcuts in email.
S: How should email marketing strategies change in response to new privacy laws to maintain deliverability?
M: Email strategies should be evolving all the time. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, and the law is always changing in parts of the world, between provinces or states.
Staying ahead of these changes and ensuring your email program remains in compliance are always things to keep in mind. Consent might expire after a time, or permission requirements may change. Being aware and planning ahead will help keep your program on the road to success.
S: What are the top 3 points that email marketers need to analyze in their email strategies and emails to improve the results of email campaigns?
M: Being a delivery professional by trade, I like to focus on:
- bounce metrics;
- clicks;
- conversions from an email.
You can tell a lot about the health of an email program when you review the main types of bounces, the click trends, and the tangible success of a conversion — monetary, downloads, meetings booked, etc. as your KPIs.
S: Are there any industries or businesses that, in your opinion, definitely do not need email marketing?
M: Email marketing might not be a core function for all businesses, but most will benefit from some level of email services, especially transactional emails. These could be things like an email from your doctor, dentist, optometrist, or other service-based business sending an appointment reminder or a follow-up asking for a service review.
Some are already doing these things via SMS, but email could be an excellent alternative option for these service-type industries. There could be some opportunities for promotional messages from these groups as well but in a much more limited fashion.
Why SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are more than trends in data protection
S: You wrote about the critical role of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before it became mainstream. In what direction are these authentication tools heading now?
M: Taking proactive steps to protect your brand from spoofing or impersonation is now required.
In the past, these were strong recommendations. As of Q1 2024, these are now required elements for email. Mailbox providers are dealing with more spam than ever before. Authentication of brands of all sizes helps keep your mail from being abused by others and protects your consumers and employees from abuse.
S: Will SPF, DKIM, and DMARC ever become mandatory rather than recommended security protocols?
We are already at this point. They are no longer just recommendations, thanks to Yahoo and Google.
Matthew Vernhout,
S: Do you have any cases from your practice in which implementing security protocols dramatically improved the performance of email marketing campaigns? And vice versa — has insufficient attention to safety led to disastrous results? Please share them with our readers.
M: Yes, I worked with a furniture retailer to help implement DMARC for their brand. Over a period of 6 months we worked with them to implement a reject policy on their domains. This involved working with their partners, their ESPs, and their internal IT teams.
As a result of the efforts, they saw an improvement in Inbox placement rates, an increase in sending speed, allowing for more mail to be sent, and a reduction in phishing and domain abuse targeting their brand.
To counter that, I’ve also seen brands’ delivery really suffer when implementing these solutions, as they were not always following the best email practices. Some would say, “You earn the delivery you get” as a result of proper authentication.
How new email security trends affect email strategies
S: Last year, Stripo had an exciting experience getting BIMI and Gmail’s blue checkmarks. What do you think about getting BIMI? What benefits for the industry do you see in this trend? How will technologies such as BIMI and DMARC evolve to better combat phishing and build brand trust?
M: I’m biased here as the Communications Chair of the BIMIGroup. I love the idea of a brand being displayed in your email client when it is properly authenticated and validated by the recipient’s Mailbox provider.
People remember and relate to an image with more emotion than just a name. In my opinion, this is especially true when a brand chooses to use a persona to send emails vs. the brand name. I don’t know “John Smith,” but I do know ACME and their logo.
Some results tied to brands working on BIMI have shown very positive impacts on their email performance once it’s launched. This can be attributed to the overall process, which includes fixing authentication issues, strong DMARC policies, and the display of the brand logo.
BIMI can be so much more as well; it supplies a standard logo across all the participating mailbox providers, something that a brand could change in the future on its own. Not to forget the applications outside of email — search, social, and other technologies that could be authenticated in the future.
S: Sometimes, there is an opinion that all complex technical things that ensure email security are needed only by large enterprises. How do evolving email standards and technologies affect small businesses and their email strategies?
M: Businesses of all sizes will benefit from these authentication solutions, not just enterprises. My personal domain is regularly spoofed, sometimes a few dozen emails. On other days, it could be 10s or thousands. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all help protect my domains and others from receiving these spoofed emails. If my domain can be a target, any domain can.
S: How could AI improve email deliverability and security? Have you had any successful use cases?
M: AI or machine learning is already alive in the delivery space, mostly used to do things like smart segments, journey emails, or even throttling the number of connections that a mail server makes to another mail server when sending emails.
Example 1: Take a specific action when you see a specific error code — 4.x.x Mailing too fast, slow delivery by 50% for 1 hour, 5.x.x Blocked emails, pausing the mail queues for 4 hours, and then retrying — are very common examples of the early stages of this automation from a delivery perspective.
Example 2: Build and maintain a segment of users for future email targeting that clicked on emails in the last 90 days; on day 91, take a different action and move them to a new segment for retargeting/re-engagement.
Wrapping up
Here are some insights for email marketing consultancy and the best practices we took from this interview:
- Email strategies must constantly evolve to keep up with changes in global processes, laws, approaches to sales, and communication with customers.
- Email marketing might not be a core function for all businesses, but most will benefit from some level of email service, especially transactional emails.
- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are no longer just recommendations — thanks to Gmail and Yahoo, they have become mandatory rules.
- Some results tied to brands working on BIMI have shown very positive impacts on their email performance once it’s launched.
We are grateful to Matthew Vernhout for the interview, where we discussed important topics for the email marketing industry.
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