Maria Malaniia – Achieving Success with E-mail Marketing

Highlights

Maria’s Background and Transition to Email Marketing
Cultural Differences and Communication
The Importance of Segmentation and Personalisation
Email Automation and Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Spam, GDPR, and Consent in Email Marketing
Personalisation without Being Creepy
Sudoku and Mental Relaxation
Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Chris Barnard: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Bear Business Podcast with me, Chris Barnard, from FeedbackFans.com. Today, my guest is email marketing consultant, Maria Malaniia, and we discuss a variety of ways you can use this channel to get better results for your business.

Chris Barnard: Hi Maria, thank you ever so much for joining me on this latest episode of the Bear Business Vodcast. We’re here today to talk about a topic that maybe doesn’t get the love and the respect it deserves but is known to bring in great return on investment for businesses that do it well—email marketing. So do you want to just tell us a bit about your background and your journey to becoming an email marketing consultant?

Maria Malaniia: Thank you so much for having me. And, uh, really a pleasure to be here talking about email because, yes, it is a great, great marketing channel, and it should be used more often. But, um, I started my career, kind of my journey, in hospitality actually. I worked as a waitress, I worked in restaurants, and then I studied the industry, so I then moved on to more of the corporate side and started working with brands and creating brand experiences, kind of curating that physical guest journey within a hotel.

Like, when you arrive, what happens at the reception? Do you speak to concierge because you’re going to be in a luxury hotel? Etc., etc. So all of these touchpoints were my job, really—making sure that everything was on brand, looking nice, sounding good, and working with the hotels to deliver that experience.

And then, coincidentally, I was made redundant during the COVID times, as many of us were. I explored options of what to do, and I kind of tried different consulting areas, marketing. I’ve tried all kinds of little skill sets that I’ve got because I like to help people with all kinds of things, but I landed on email marketing a little later on because I thought that it used all my skills, really. So that’s a very short summary of my background there, but we can dive into that later.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, and so working in hotels and in hospitality, obviously great exposure to working with customers and knowing your audience, the difference between audiences. How did you find that experience going to a corporate environment in London? Very interesting for people who’ve maybe not worked in the big city before. Do you want to just give us a bit of your experience there, working in hospitality in London, in a corporate environment?

Maria Malaniia: Yeah, I think for me, it was—I moved countries as well when I got the job. So I moved to the UK for the first time, got the job in a corporate office, and I think it was the steepest learning curve I’ve ever had in my life. In the first six months, I was just learning how to work in an office because I had been working sort of on the floor, so to say, with people before.

It was a really interesting experience. I was so lucky with the team and my managers—they were so welcoming and so kind. I really, really learned a lot during that stage. And I think moving countries was always something that was on my agenda. I was like, I can go anywhere; I can go wherever they give me the job. That is not a problem. So that was normal to me. It was actually less normal that I’m still here in London. I’m still surprised—it’s been almost 10 years, and I really kind of enjoyed it.

Chris Barnard: I think one of the great things with working in London—and the listeners, I suppose we’ve got quite a good spread in the UK of where our listeners are from—but those who have worked in London will know that it’s a great opportunity to make friends from all around the world, different cultures, different nationalities, and people just having different approaches, I suppose, to life and business.

Did you find any sort of particular challenges working with British people, I suppose? British hotel guests as well, a particular phenomenon. In hotels, of course, around London, you’ve got people staying from all around the world. Did you find any sort of cultural differences that you had to adapt to when you first came?

Maria Malaniia: I think I’ve really—I had a lot of international friends and fellow students at university, so that particularly was normal to me. The team that I joined, we were very European. But then when I switched teams, I joined more of a British, British type of team, which was kind of interesting to me—to learn how to yet again, after just a year or two living in the UK, learn how to communicate better with these new colleagues of mine and how to do this within my new job.

Because that particular job required me to communicate with hotels across Europe—every country in Europe. Sometimes I would work with colleagues from Asia or colleagues in the U.S., so it was a much more global type of role. I really had to apply all of my cultural knowledge skills and learn some, for sure, along the way in terms of how to manage my workload, how to get things done, and who to speak to when I need to get certain things done.

I know if I ask a French hotel, they’ll tell me this. If I ask a German hotel, they’ll tell me that. And then kind of gathering the information that I needed to get my job done.

Chris Barnard: Communication styles in different languages—I think that’s so interesting. Do you find this in emails? Are you doing multi-language emails now? And do you tailor and change your communications and give the benefit of your experience to these organizations? Because there’s a lot of businesses now, of course, with advances, particularly in AI technology for translations, that make it more possible for businesses to be international. Is this something that you talk about as an email marketing consultant with the businesses you advise?

Maria Malaniia: I haven’t had a chance to do email in different languages yet, but I would 100 percent say so. Yeah, if there is somebody on my client list that needs to send an email in a different language, they usually know that audience, they understand, they obviously speak that language, they would be able to do the right thing.

But if we’re talking about a large organization that needs to send a campaign out and localize it to a Spanish-speaking community, Spanish-speaking in America versus Spanish-speaking in Europe—those are two different types of groups of people. Those are very different languages as well, actually, when it comes to translation and the meaning of words and how they are used. So I would absolutely advise that. That was a big part of my job before as well, to just remember we need to factor in translation budgets, translation timelines, and everything if we’re doing a bigger push.

Chris Barnard: It’s a great point, and it’s sometimes forgotten around localizations. And I would say this particularly for the British-speaking part of the world, because we are so used to people speaking British with our own particular localizations. But in some parts of the world, obviously, the localizations are far different.

And if you come across to South American Portuguese, Spanish-speaking, or communicating in a European Portuguese and Spanish way, you’re probably going to put some people off, or at least maybe you’re going to give people a laugh, right? And maybe they’ll forgive you for it. But email is a field that I suppose people are choosing other trendier fields these days.

It’s obviously quite a common thing now in marketing for people to niche down, specialize down. So that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned that email used a lot of your great skills. So which skills are they? Which are the skills that made you think email marketing is where I can really add some value to businesses?

Maria Malaniia: I wanted to do something that I really enjoy doing, first of all. I really enjoy putting together an email. I try to think of the best way to make it look nice, to make it sound good, to make sure that it delivers what we’re trying to deliver. It takes a bit of work and hours at best, maybe a lot more than that sometimes. And I looked at just overall, because I was doing generic marketing for people for a while—doing a bit of social, a bit of this, a bit of that—but of all my day-to-day activities, the email part was what I enjoyed the most because I could think strategically about what we’re trying to achieve.

I can be creative in actually making it look nice—digitally, to make it look nice and be creative in that sense. There’s some copy involved, obviously, because we’re trying to get the right message across to the right people. And also, it’s not forever changing. It doesn’t change day to day, and that’s something that I like because then I can think a little bit calmer about it. Social media stresses me out because it changes every day. I feel like you have to read a new report, or new trends, or new rules on how things work on social media all the time. In email, things change a little bit slower, thankfully. And so you can use a lot of the same strategies and systems throughout the years with, obviously, changes that come along—change tactics, change some systems, some technologies and rules change—but ultimately, email is a one-to-one communication that you send to a person because you want them to receive some value, or you want them to do something for you. That doesn’t change.

Chris Barnard: It’s a great point about social media. And I think there are a lot of social media consultants who went that way because it was trendy, who are now experiencing a lot of burnout or are actually trying to say, “Oh, look, I don’t do the whole market of social media anymore. I actually specialize in Instagram, certain aspects of short-form video content,” or whatever, which is very sensible.

I suppose the first critical steps they’d say for a business in social would be to make sure you have your profiles and that you are posting great content to them. So from an email marketing point of view, what would you say are the first critical steps for a business? If I’m a startup coming to you, Maria, with a nice, shiny, empty email marketing piece of software, what would be the first critical steps for a business from your point of view?

Maria Malaniia: Well, first, before you select your software, ideally, you decide that you need email marketing and how you’re going to use it. So you ask yourself two questions: What’s in it for me? What’s in it for them? What is it for me as a business? What am I trying to achieve? How am I going to use this within my business? What value does it bring to me? The value may not be particularly sales or monetary value. It could be that you are trying to build a community, and that is something that is really important for your business. So delivering value to your subscribers is the way to do it. And what’s in it for them? Why should they subscribe? We have so many subscriptions these days. There’s so many. If you look at marketing as an industry, there are so many marketing newsletters. How many can you even subscribe to? There probably are thousands. So what makes you different?

What’s in it for this audience that they should actually give up their email address? And then in the end, why would they read it, right? Giving up an email address is one thing—it can be an easy step for some people, and then they never read it, and you just have inactive users on your list, right? So ask yourself these two questions: What are we trying to achieve? And who are we trying to serve? And what are we going to do for them? Then look at picking your software that fits within your business and determine what software you need in terms of what needs you have. Is it growth? Is it creativity? Is it design? Is it the technical automation side of things? Is it AI that you really want to integrate into? Do you need it to connect with something specific? Etc. So then you ask all those questions and pick a software.

Chris Barnard: A few years ago, it was very popular for businesses to create emails with what’s now referred to as lead magnets. I always used to know it as gated content back in the day, where you would go to a website, and there would be, say, a white paper or a report or something of value that would be behind a password protection or something that wants to gather your email address and sometimes your phone number.

I think we did actually move to a point where it was more emails when people stopped picking up their phones because of the amount of spam, for example. And I suppose that cycle has continued. How much of a modern marketing approach is that? Is that something that you recommend? You see a lot of businesses doing, or are we moving more to a giving-away-information-for-free model that they use a lot more on social media, don’t they?

Maria Malaniia: I think actually both. You have to give away enough content on social media for people to be interested enough to actually subscribe. But when they subscribe, they still want to receive something that they couldn’t receive on social media for free a lot of the time. So it is a bit of both.

I think, within our industry, lead magnets are everywhere. You can have at least one, and you can have multiple, and that is a good way to grow your list. They can look in many different shapes and forms, right? They can be private podcasts, they can be just webinar recordings or live webinars. They don’t have to be a PDF with five steps or something like that. It doesn’t have to be a downloadable document. So they take shape and form in different ways. I think much more creatively than they used to a few years ago. But I would say value first. If you’re hiding everything, why would I even trust it with my email address? I don’t even know if it’s worth the information you’re going to send me. What’s the point? I’ll just go find somebody else. So, yeah, I would recommend it for businesses to have certain kinds of lead magnets and put it behind the email paywall, but not every single thing needs to be hidden. There can be strategic decisions around what you give away for free, what you promote in this way, but if you want to keep in touch with us or hear more news or be the first one to hear something, then you need to subscribe to the newsletter.

Chris Barnard: Thanks for listening. Do you see a lot of different approaches between different generations towards email marketing? Do you find that the success of email marketing for particular brands and businesses can be dependent on their target market? The reason I ask that is due to my own experience. Gen Z, when we used to send a few email marketing campaigns out, actually wanted to be communicated to on social media or WhatsApp or all those new channels, whereas, of course, someone from the older generations is used to email being the whole world for their operational day-to-day, right?

For business, for maybe the last 20 years, they’ve been using email to manage very little things to very big things. Do you see lots of changes in approach and appreciation for email marketing from different generations?

Maria Malaniia: You’re right in terms of different behaviors in how we use our social media, but Gen Z still purchases things online. They still receive emails, and they still buy off the back of emails. They just probably do it differently in that they have a lot more touchpoints, I feel like, because they grew up in this digital world from such early childhood that it’s so normal to them. I don’t think I could ever comprehend how normal it is for the kids these days to have access to the internet, email, and all of social media. But older generations are a bit more slow-paced when it comes to using email. So you may want to maybe reduce the frequency a little bit if you’re sending a lot, and you feel like, okay, they’re not really opening it. Let’s find out why. What’s happening? Why are they not opening, clicking, or buying from us, for example? Just ask them, like, okay, maybe you just want fewer emails. It’s fine. Because a lot of time, people have 1 million unread emails; there are people who have a zero-inbox policy, both of which are crazy to me, so I’m somewhat in the middle. And it’s a matter of, do they bother to unsubscribe? And if they don’t bother to unsubscribe, is the next thing they’re going to do is flag you as spam? And that’s something we don’t want. So figuring that out and who your audience is. If you’re targeting older Gen Zs and late Millennials, for example, the kind of group of people in their 20s, they would still 100 percent use email. It’s just they probably would use it slightly differently than the Gen Xers and Boomers would.

Chris Barnard: It’s a great point about cultural differences toward email as well. And I always love to have an eye over the shoulder of people when they are approaching their emails in terms of, exactly as you say, are they a zero-inbox kind of person? Are they a thousands-of-unread kind of person? The thousands of unread people are the ones who interest me the most because I wouldn’t be able to manage my life like that. That would drive me absolutely insane. But I suppose testing is always great in marketing, even more important when it comes to email marketing. It’s something I think businesses don’t do a lot of. What would you say are some of the common pitfalls you see businesses falling into with their email marketing, and how can they avoid making those mistakes?

Maria Malaniia: Yeah, there are a lot of commonalities, regardless of what business you’re in, whether it’s B2B, B2C, or even kind of who your audience is. One of the biggest mistakes is not sending enough emails—forgetting to actually contact folks who asked you to send them an email. People subscribe, and then nothing happens for six months. Who are you? Don’t forget to email them. And not segmenting their list—not splitting things into groups and personalizing the content to an extent, at least, to your audience. Another mistake is assuming that because you feel a certain way, your whole audience feels the same way about the thing—whether that’s frequency of emails, the type of language you use to communicate with your brand, or the way that it looks or any element of the email. Just because you like it as a business owner or a marketing manager, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not about you. It’s about the audience and what they want. How do they want it? And how can we serve them? Because we’re here to serve them. And as a result, we get something from it because obviously, we also run a business for that purpose.

But I think the biggest mistake is just making a lot of assumptions and forgetting that you’re trying to serve a certain group of people. Being static about your email—just test some things, segment some groups, exclude, include. If GIFs work, just because you don’t like GIFs doesn’t mean the GIFs don’t work for the audience. I would say, relax about it. Don’t take it too seriously. If you make a mistake, the world is not going to end. Just, it’s okay. If it’s a mistake like a broken link, you can resend an email. You can say, “Sorry, the link was broken. Here’s the right link.” It’s fine. No one’s died from this, you know?

Chris Barnard: It’s almost an email marketing rite of passage, isn’t it? I remember when we used to do the email marketing for a variety of brands in betting and on our digital team, you’d not really joined until you had sent the wrong email to at least some of the database. We used to do this when there were bank holidays and statutory days off. We’d have to send sort of the revised timetables of when you could bet and when you couldn’t bet, which was literally, as you can imagine, just tables of spreadsheets of data and times.

So it’d be very easy to send the wrong people the wrong information. I remember my junior did one of these, and I said to him, “Don’t worry. I did it, I think, twice in my first week. So it’s absolutely fine. Just send your apology in.” But there is that moment. There is a feeling. I don’t think any other marketing channel actually does that, does it, Maria? Where when you do it, hopefully you find out quite quickly. Usually, a good customer will come in quite quickly and be like, “I think you’ve got this wrong.” And so that will usually, yeah. No problem. Forgot to attach something, that’s classic, isn’t it? That’s the one you see everybody do. Have you got any experiences of that? Any that you’re willing to tell us about where things haven’t quite gone right? Because in email marketing, actually, it feels, as you say, it feels far more important than it often is because people are used to others getting it wrong and having to apologize. Is there anything that sticks out for you from your memory or your experience?

Maria Malaniia: Um, I see a lot of them in my inbox—like, “Oh shit, sorry, we messed up. Here’s an update.” You know, companies like Audible will send you an email saying, “You have zero credits left to use. Don’t forget to use them.” And you’re like, “What? That doesn’t make any sense.” Then they’re like, “I mean, it’s a mistake, and it’s a silly mistake, but it’s not gonna really hurt them personally.” I think in my case, I’ve obviously made mistakes, but I remember sending some subject lines that were test subject lines, that were just like the stuff you write, like, “I’ll just put something here, and then I’ll write, I’ll fix it once I’ve written the email,” because that’s sometimes how the software makes you write the subject line before the email. And then you forget to do that, then you press send, and you’re like, “What’s the subject? What’s that? Was it just like XXX again?” Or something else? So yeah, I think I’ve definitely done a few of these mistakes, but you just kind of feel a bit like, “Oh my God, the world’s gonna end. This is bad.” But it’s okay. Breathe in. Sometimes you don’t even have to fix it. Just assume that it was fine. It was meant to be this way. And then you move on.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, I have a very interesting sort of feeling in those moments. It’s kind of butterflies flying up through me, and I sort of try and remain calm, remain calm. I did it the other day when I was getting out of my car, and obviously, my car key had fallen out of my shorts. And I, thankfully, as I do, I do this kind of patty thing on my pockets to make sure I’ve got my wallet—although it’s quite light these days, I lose it every now and again—my keys, I’ve got my phone, right?

And so I do that. So I was like, right, I’m definitely missing something. And I found it. Just like when I used to send emails to the wrong people, I was like, “Right, we must remain calm. We must remain calm.” Hopefully, no one was watching me. I was at quite a prestigious golf course, probably ambling around trying to tell myself to remain calm. And thankfully, I found them in sort of the footwell after maybe 10 minutes or so of just trying to reassure myself that if I did stay calm, I’d be able to fix the issue. But I think it’s interesting, particularly from the point of view of cybersecurity as well. Because of course, in the last few years, something alongside people always sending emails to the wrong places that happen, but a good test for when you are looking to make sure that you are not being phished or clicking on a spam email is to look for errors, isn’t it, in an email? I just wondered how that’s affected your approach in terms of how you’re advising businesses. I know there have been some regulations that you’ll talk about in terms of how many emails get sent. Getting into just the general public’s inbox. Do you want to just talk to us about sort of spam and the effect of spam on the industry? Because it’s kind of a scourge for us all, really. If it’s not phone calls you don’t want, it’s emails you don’t want, right?

Maria Malaniia: Well, I am, as a consumer and as an email marketer, a fan of these regulations because they make it easier for us to contact the people who actually want to receive emails from us. We don’t want to just email people because we can and kind of send them stuff because that just makes it worse, and they become unengaged. They might flag you as spam, which ruins your reputation and kind of just really doesn’t serve any purpose. So as a user, the reason why governments and companies are putting all of these things in place is because they want to make your individual experience as a user, as an email account holder, better. They want to filter out the spams and make sure that you only get stuff that you actually want to get, that you subscribed to, that you asked to receive. And that just makes sense. I don’t see why we should hate on that. Just because, you know, five, ten years ago, maybe ten years ago, it was so easy to just email anybody anything, and people really hated the spam. You kind of get used to it; you just delete them. And then maybe you probably will never delete an important email, because important emails don’t look like those—how should I put this nicely—those shitty spam emails. You can clearly see that they’re shitty spam emails. The trouble is that obviously, spammers are very good, and they know the regulations, and they know the rules, and they will be compliant with the rules and regulations because that’s their job. Their job is to make sure that they get into your inbox and trick you into clicking on something or downloading something.

So as a regular business owner, not being compliant is just silly because if the spammers are compliant, you definitely need to be compliant to get into the inbox of folks who actually want to hear from you, who subscribed to hear from you, right? And it’s not that hard. It’s really, really not that difficult. The software that you use will provide all the information that you need to set it up with your domain and website. And if you have somebody who helps you manage the technical side of your website, your DNS records, they will explain it to you. They’ll be able to connect that to you. And really, that’s it. You just have to make sure that the software you send the emails from is like, “Oh, yes. You are who you say you are, we trust you.” And that’s it. And that way, they pass that trust on to the Googles, the Yahoos, the Hotmails, who receive those emails on our behalf, and they pass that on to them, saying, “This is somebody we know, they verified themselves.” Likewise, Google, obviously, and all of these other ones, they have their own systems in place to make sure that you are not being spammy, even though people subscribe to you, you’re not being spammy, right?

So there are certain words and languages, like, I would say things like if you overuse the word “free,” you might get flagged as spam, and things like that. But if you use it once in a while, don’t think it’s going to land you in the spam folder. You’ve got to be just considerate of your subject line actually referring to stuff in your email and not being clickbaity. So I would say it comes down to just being a reasonable human and not sending people stuff they don’t want.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think there’s been a marketing cultural change in the approach to consent and around communicating and ensuring you’ve got consent, and maybe we can attribute this to GDPR actually. But I wonder if it was just before that, maybe when GDPR was being introduced, actually, that people decided they wanted to do things better here so that they would get great consent.

And then if I’m a business, I’m taking that on board. I’m making sure that I’m marketing to the right people. I’ve taken your advice on board. So I’m looking at what I’m trying to achieve, what I can do for them, giving them great value. You’ve also emphasized the importance of segmentation. Do you want to just share some practical steps businesses can take to segment their audience more effectively? Because it’s one of those words again, “segment,” isn’t it? That people will say they’re doing, but actually there are many layers to it, like an onion, really. Different segmentation. Are there any tips you can give our businesses in terms of that?

Maria Malaniia: Yeah. Oh, I love segmentation. It’s actually shown to be one of the biggest factors to drive a higher return on investment in email if you’re trying to compare and measure things. Because what happens is with segmentation is you take your whole group of people, 100, 1,000, 100,000 people, depends how big your list is, right? And then you look at them based on different factors. So they can be the channels that they’ve come from, for example, where they signed up, where did they acquire, what kind of history do we have with them? Have they purchased anything from us? Have they thought about purchasing anything from us? Maybe they clicked on something, but they didn’t complete the purchase. Have they been with us for a long time? Maybe they’ve just been sort of hanging out and are a big fan, but haven’t done anything. That’s fine. That’s loyalty. That’s sort of brand awareness. Do we want to reward them for it maybe in some way? And it’s kind of looking at lots of different elements on how we can split and slice this audience that we have. It wouldn’t be necessarily like 10 people, 10 people, 10 people in these groups. There will be overlap between the groups, right? But it’s the first link to personalization—segmenting folks based on a factor of their behavior or information that we have about them. Then we can personalize the content based on that. For example, if you go on ASOS and you sign up or TKMAX and you sign up, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna buy something,” but then you don’t really buy something. Then you get an email a week later saying, “Chris, would you like to buy some high heel shoes?” And you’re like, “I was looking for sneakers for men, but okay.” And then the whole list of recommendations you get is women’s clothes. And you’re like, “Okay. But you know, I browsed only the men’s section.” So there, something went wrong in the communication of that browser behavior that you provided to them. And they thought, “Well, most likely, you know, 70 percent of our customers are women. So this is a safe bet. Let’s just send it to everybody.” And that way, they kind of probably lost you, or at least you were like, “I don’t need this,” and deleted it. Or even unsubscribed.

So that would be how segmentation tends to work, right? But as a small business, I would say, set this up early. Especially as early as possible if you’re starting from scratch, just do it already. Just have some tags in place, some sort of markers like, “Okay, they filled in the Linktree form on my Instagram profile. That’s where they signed up for the newsletter.” So now, you know, maybe there’s like 5-10% of people who come from Instagram. And then there’s a group of people who filled in the form on the website blog page. “Okay. They found the blog on the website. That’s where they’ve come from.” And it’s just knowing, kind of giving you information to be able to make decisions later on, on how you might want to segment and personalize some content. Another option is to just look at, well, ask some questions actually. Ask your audience, “Who are you? What do you want in your welcome sequence?” Or even just the first welcome email, you can ask them. “How would you define yourself? Are you a solopreneur or a business owner?” If that’s important to you in your business, how people define themselves. And that way, you know, once they click on one of these links, you can associate a tag or some sort of label based on that. Then you just know, “Okay, you have solopreneurs, and then you have a few types of business owners, for example.” And then go through all the different options of where you can segment and use that in the future.

So opportunities are endless in terms of where you can do that. The most important factor is that ultimately, when you do send a campaign that’s segmented, just try to get that right. And you know, don’t make those mistakes when you press send and you’re super stressed out, like, “Okay, it’s fine. If you make a mistake again, it’s okay. It happens.” But it’s very stressful, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. You really want to make sure you get it right so you have a little bit of that dopamine hit, and you’re like, “Yes, I can do it right, I can do it again.” So you don’t feel afraid of segmentation in the future.

Chris Barnard: I’d hate to think what some of my segmentations are these days, platforms sort of working with that. The hundred businesses we have on our platform, you know, I gotta be like, “Well, Chris has got some interesting interests. He’s there buying high heels. He’s also trying to get tickets to go watch the cricket. He’s also buying a bridal shop dress, buying some candles, and all of it wants to be an interior designer.” We think, you know, we’ve got three interior designers on the platform. It always makes me laugh when I get segmented on these things—what they must think about me from it. But I think you quickly, as you mentioned there, move on from segmentation to greater levels of personalization, and then it’s usually the automation that comes in, Maria, isn’t it? A hot topic in email marketing. How would you say businesses can leverage email automation to create that really great personalized experience that they know their customers will buy from?

Maria Malaniia: Yeah, it all comes down to having those foundations in place of knowing who your audience is and knowing where they’re from and what they want, or at least some form of this information. It doesn’t have to be the most robust sort of CRM, and you can store a lot of information about your email subscribers on the email platform, but perhaps you have a different CRM somewhere else that kind of has all of that detailed stuff around. “Okay, they bought this. They abandoned this cart.” Or on where your business is at and what you’re trying to do.

But one thing I would always say about automation is it’s beyond the actual sending of automated emails. You can have automation that connects your email software to other software. That is equally important as well—making sure that your business has that information within your email platform. You can find it, you can connect it, and you can figure out how to personalize and who to personalize to. But overall, automation, once you’ve got the foundations in place of like, “Okay, we know that this person signed up because they wanted to receive this webinar recording,” you send them that webinar recording, and then the welcome sequence after that is unique to that webinar recording, as opposed to someone who just signed up on the website footer completely. We don’t know anything about them. They’re brand new. What do we send them instead to introduce them to our brand and our business?

And that will probably be different. It might be that you have so many different places for people to opt-in that you take the first email, obviously unique and different, but then channel them into a similar funnel for the rest of it, because you might struggle to deal with 10-15 opt-in locations, right? But that’s kind of the baseline of email automation that you need to keep in mind. The more advanced side of things is based on behaviors and triggers. So if they click on a link or don’t click on a link within a certain timeframe, do we want to follow up? Do we want to send them more stuff? Is it a bit more manual in the sense that you’re trying to figure out what people’s behavior is like in the first period? You’re looking at it yourself before you decide what the automation pattern would be like, and then see what kind of behaviors there are, and set that up as an automation as a follow-up. Maybe the automation is manual—actually just sending you an email saying, “Somebody is about to do the thing, you know, reach out to them,” or they’re considering buying the thing that you were promoting. Don’t forget to maybe give them a call if you have their phone number. So the automations don’t necessarily need to do everything for you. They need to help you, like, enable you to do your best in your business. And what that looks like could probably include a lot of still human, manual labor because you want to have a personalized experience for your subscribers, buyers, and customers.

Chris Barnard: It’s important as well, isn’t it? I totally agree with that. I think not overthinking it is a great point. Just get to the next stage. It’s going to help you. I love your point there about where it will improve your internal operations or just make someone’s experience a bit better. Do you ever see people getting a bit too spooky with the personalizations and the automations, Maria? Because we occasionally get that sort of thing you see on Facebook, posted by an uncle somewhere, where he says, “I’m sure all my devices are listening to me. My wife has unplugged our own Alexa.” So no Alexa for me anymore. You know, as a marketing technologist. She’s absolutely not. She puts a—I don’t know whether this is a Polish thing or just a more cynical view—but she puts a post-it note over any cameras in the house, over my webcam if I’m not here, and stuff like that, you see. So I just wondered, it must be a balance, right? I imagine getting it right and not being too much like you’re following someone around, watching exactly what they’re doing.

Maria Malaniia: Yeah, I think, you know, our folks, they know a lot about us, but you can turn off those notifications, so you can set, you can turn off the settings, and then you’ll get the most irrelevant ads you can possibly think of. So if you’re interested in exploring the world outside of your demographic, give that a go. Yeah, well, the big organizations, the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, and whatnot, yes, they can use that to their advantage and be a bit spooky in terms of their recommendations for what you could buy from them or what you could find. They track your cookies or pixels and whatever they’re called—all of that backend stuff that knows where you are even when your phone is off or something. Which is kind of creepy. But with email, you can obviously connect it, but I would say this is a much more advanced assistive system for large companies with email teams and tech specialists and so on.

So, you can personalize a lot with an email manually. You can personalize it by doing dynamic content to certain groups within the same email, so you don’t have to duplicate the email, for example. And just using the first name or referring to past history of behaviors and things like that is also a level of simple personalization that isn’t creepy—that isn’t trying to tell you, “We know what you were googling last night.”

Chris Barnard: And maybe that’s the best place for us to stop, actually, just to make sure that everyone goes and checks their privacy settings on all these systems because actually, it’s something that you forget to do. And then over time, you’ll just passively go through it and go, “Oh, actually, I probably should have turned this off. I didn’t realize everybody could see all that.” But it’s such an in-depth topic, isn’t it, email marketing? I feel that we could be here forever, but I’m going to draw a line in the sand here, Maria, because that is perfect. So I’ve only got one last question for you, which is, what is your favorite game? It can be a card game, a board game, a video game. We had a garden game the other week. What sort of game do you like to play? What gets your brain whirring?

Maria Malaniia: Recently, I have been playing a bit of Sudoku before bed, which is just kind of a phase I think I’m going through. I’m going through this little book of puzzles and just doing the Sudoku part of it. All the other puzzles are not interesting to me. And it’s a bit of a challenging Sudoku format because the squares are not quite shaped, they’re like funny shaped, and it makes it a little bit confusing to be like, “Okay, well, so this column…” and you’re like, “Shit, okay, wait again,” then you have to recreate the picture of it in your head. But I like a good board game as well, to be honest. We play sometimes at home. It takes a while to set up, I find, and I like a little bit of a quick card game, as opposed to a “let’s take an hour to set up this board game, and then three hours to play” sort of game, which, yeah, we often don’t have the time to do.

Chris Barnard: Sudoku is a really interesting one. I know one of my uncles used to be really good at it, but he was the sort of person who would also do the kind of Guardian crossword on the super hard day. He even had sort of a framed one where he’d won it. So I was like, “Wow, okay. Probably not intelligent enough, you Chris, to be able to do these sorts of things.” So I’m very keen to understand, what do you like about Sudoku? It’s obviously a very individual game. It’s a one-person game, isn’t it? Is there anything we can read from your approach to business, Maria, from your love of Sudoku?

Maria Malaniia: Can we analyze my business approach from my love of Sudoku? I used to do regular Sudoku, obviously, and I still do it. But I think it’s just a puzzle. I like puzzles, and I like to solve problems. It’s a straightforward problem in the sense that I know there will be an answer. I know the rules are very simple, and there’s got to be a way to figure it out logically to get to the final destination of the right one through nine in every little box and growing column. But it’s just something for my brain to do that requires attention and doesn’t let me think about other things. Hopefully, it takes me away from social media before I try to doom-scroll before sleep. Looking at that, it’s easier to fall asleep, I think.

Chris Barnard: I’m in favor of it. No more doom-scrolling. I love the lack of faff in a game of Sudoku, and the Bear Business listeners love the lack of faff as well. So they will enjoy our matter-of-fact podcast today, Maria. Thank you ever so much for joining me. I’ll put your social media links in the show notes so people can come and ask you follow-up questions. But thank you very much for being here today, Maria.

Maria Malaniia: Thank you so much for having me. And, you know, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next for the Bear Business Vodcast.