Webinar Recap: Successfully Managing Multiple Email Streams

We hosted a webinar featuring our special guest, Jennifer Chappell, MBA. She is the Senior Manager, CRM at MyHealthTeam and she manages a whopping portfolio of 50 brands’ email streams. These subaccounts span 13 different countries and require deeply complex systems and procedures in place to ensure reliable delivery, optimized performance, and overall success for the business. 

SocketLabs’ Lauren Meyer, CMO, hosted the discussion also featuring Louis Driving Hawk, VP of Product, who has similar experiences as Jennifer in the hospitality industry. 

Biggest Takeaways 

To be honest, the entire webinar is enlightening. For many, the idea of more than a couple mail streams seems unfathomable. A marketing stream and a transactional stream is hard enough, but with higher complexity comes even more complex challenges, like effective segmentation and adequate personalization. 

Before we provide the webinar recording below, here are some of the important points to look for when you watch. 

There Are Two Suggested Ways to Separate Email Streams 

Having separate mail streams is always a good idea because if one negative thing happens, like a disruption in the reputation in marketing email, and there is only one pipe spitting out mail, your entire pipe can get clogged, including important mail like password resets and purchase confirmations. Louis provided his two suggested methods. 

By Type 

The first way is somewhat straightforward: separate by intention. If you have marketing or promotional email, move it away from more critical messages like password resets, purchase confirmations, and other transactional mail. 

By Reputation 

Reputation is a huge factor in delivery. If you mix high-quality senders with less savory senders, you could find both streams reaping the not the rewards, but the punishments of bad email practices, even if one sender is flawless in its execution. Email streams are like a soup. You can use great broth with the right amount of salt, but if you dump too much salt in, it will ruin the whole dish. Gross. 

Multiple Tactics Are Crucial in Running a Complex Use Case 

This is not a set-and-forget situation. Instead, there are key activities to engage in consistently to keep everything operating smoothly. Here is the overarching list, but you can get more granular advice in the video. 

• Segmentation and targeting 
• Monitoring soft bounce and unsubscribe rates 
• Throttling mail volume appropriately 
• Respect recipients’ preferences 
• Ongoing monitoring, testing, and optimizing 

Be Prepared but Adaptable 

Most ESPs don’t have easy-to-implement infrastructures to support a use case like this. Jennifer had to build and tweak things just to be able to do her job successfully. Consider the roadblocks you might hit when creating (or just using) a solution for such a complex use case.  

Don’t expect to win any races. The time you’ll need to build your systems and get everything for your success is time-consuming. You might need more people on your team. You might need to get help from product or IT teams. Expect the unexpected but have patience. 

That’s enough from us. Let’s have Lauren and our guests (and complex email program management extraordinaires) take it away. 

Key Timestamps: 

2:50 – What is an email stream 

4:31 – Benefits and challenges of separating email streams 

6:41 – Jennifer’s use case at MyHealthTeam

8:37 – How Jennifer optimizes inbox placement 

12:15 – How Jennifer is tracking the performance of 50 brands 

13:30 – Things Jennifer wishes she could do more 

16:20 – How Jennifer monitors all 50 brands to avoid negative outcomes 

18:30 – Things Jennifer built to suit her needs 

19:03 – How long it took Jennifer to get her processes in place 

19:15 – What teams helped set up their use case’s tools 

20:15 – Things Jennifer knows now but wished she knew then 

21:43 – Louis’s use case and challenges at MGM International

24:05 – Jennifer’s advice for managing multiple email streams

27:50 – Louis’s advice 

29:45 – Privacy legislation considerations for a global portfolio 

31:35 – Identifying at-risk accounts 

Transcript

Lauren:
I think we might as well go ahead and kick it off. We are going to be recording this, so if anybody is running late, they can catch back up. So thank you, first of all, for joining. Today, we are really excited to bring you a discussion on how you can successfully manage multiple email streams.

If you are tuning in today, you likely already understand why this topic is so important. That’s why you’re here. You may be currently managing multiple mail streams, and you may even be facing a challenge right now that you’d like a little bit of help or inspiration to solve. And hopefully we can provide that for you today.

I want to save as much time as possible for our subject matter experts who will introduce in just a moment. Um, so two very quick housekeeping notes. First of all, yes, this session will be recorded. We’ll email you and everybody who registered and couldn’t make it with the recording. Second thing, please note that we do plan to save some time at the end for a little bit of a Q and A session. So please share any questions that come to mind throughout the session in the chat. As you think of them. And we’ll do our best to catch those all at the end.

All right, so as we move in, joining me today are two incredibly talented and just so knowledgeable email practitioners.

First up is one of my colleagues at SocketLabs, Louis Driving Hawk. Louis is our VP of product and one of the masterminds who’s been building feature after just awesome feature within our cloud-based email platform. He’s been working with email for about the last 10 years, and each of his roles involved managing multiple mail streams, including running a loyalty program for MGM Resorts International and building out the email program for Tripping.com. He then moved out of the marketer’s seat and into roles as a deliverability consultant and team lead with Sendgrid and later as a senior business analyst for Sendgrid Twilio, all with a goal of helping others improve their email performance.

Also joining us today as a special guest is the oh-so-talented Jennifer Chappell, MBA. Jennifer has been working within email for the past 12 years, including roles at Dominican University of California, Email Aptitude, which was acquired by Tinuiti, and Vivino, where she owned the global deliverability strategy and data analytics for more than 30 million emails per month, spanning more than 17 countries. You can imagine how complex that program is, right? In her current role as the senior manager CRM for MyHealthTeam, which we’ll be talking about today, she is managing more than 40 brands. I think it’s actually perhaps up to 50 at this point, all with separate email audiences and segmentation, content, sending frequencies. And let me tell you, my hand actually started hurting when we were taking all these notes during our prep sessions. Her email program is super complex, to say the least. All right. So we’ve got a lot to discuss today. So let’s jump right in at this point.

You’ve heard me mention managing multiple email streams multiple times now. Let’s stop sharing so we can just see. What is a mailed stream, right? Louis, as the VP of product here at SocketLabs, I’m hoping that you can help us kind of level set here so that everybody’s on the same exact page as we’re kicking off. So what is an email stream?

Louis:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Lauren. So when we look at email streams, there’s a few ways they could be defined. And I would say it definitely the first thing we want to look at is the type of business that’s sending the email.

If you’re a direct sender, there’s quite a different definition there. And you can start to do mail such and split it up by triggered email, marketing email, transactional email, sales sort of marketing material and whatnot, and start to look at it by the type of email. and start there. And as your business grows and the business becomes more complex, you can then start to look at mail streams a little differently.

So for example, if there’s a parent company with multiple business units, or a hotel chain with multiple different types of hotels and different audiences for those hotels, you might wanna consider a luxury hotel chain different than a core hotel chain. And you can start to split out streams in that way by the audience type. And what’s really great about this is you really wanna look at it of the perspective of the recipient and how they look at that mound, how they do it, and those behaviors of the audience. Because really in the eyes of the mailbox providers, they want predictability. And it’s really splitting out the mail streams in that way.

Lauren:
OK, great. Awesome. Thank you for helping us level-set on that. Hopefully, everybody’s kind of on the same page here. And before we jump into Jennifer’s use case, can you quickly also share at a high level what some of the benefits and challenges are in separating your different mails streams? That’s a question for you, Louis.

Louis:
As you start to separate out these different mail streams, there is what I call the fingerprint for these mail streams. So you definitely want to start looking at it from that perspective. So let’s say you’re a direct sender and you have a transactional program triggered marketing and sales outreach. To get that more predictable, you’ve got to start creating those fingerprints on behalf of those mail streams and how you really start doing that is by your subdomain, DKIM, the bounce return domains, and having alignment in there, and having that fingerprint be recognized for that type of MEL. So as you start to go and start separating things out, just really understanding the fingerprint and aligning that with the different streams that you define are really important.

Lauren:
That makes a ton of sense. All right, cool. So I think we’re all aligned here. Thank you, Louis, for that.

I guess, you know, managing multiple mail streams is probably kind of a lot like living with a bunch of cats. They all have separate diets and feeding schedules, places that they like to sleep, ways that they like to be petted. Otherwise, maybe they scratch you, but oh, okay. Now that’s getting a little bit too personal. So we’ll kind of back out of that. Basically, lots of email cats would be very hard to manage, right? And this is true for any company that’s managing multiple brands or mail streams across ecomm, education, hospitality, health care, real estate, just to name a couple. Each of these companies might have separate audiences, managed or just kind of different people or teams that are kind of managing those. This is true if you’re an agency with multiple clients and it’s definitely true if you are a marketing automation provider or an email service provider with tens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of customers. Talk about herding cats, right?

All right, so on that note, I wanna dive deep into Jennifer’s use case. Are we ready? All right, so as I mentioned, Jennifer is working for MyHealthTeam, managing email streams, cats, I guess you could say, for more than 40 or 50 different brands as the senior manager of CRM. So Jennifer, can you walk us through the lay of the land for your company’s email program?

Jennifer Chappell:
Yes, definitely. I’d love to. So at MyHealthTeam, our goal is to make it easy for people diagnosed with a chronic health condition to connect with other people for support and receive medically reviewed content. MyHealthTeam wants to improve the experience of living with a chronic health condition. We service 50 chronic condition and rare disease communities, 47 of which are distinct private social networks. We have over 4 million addressable people. We reach over 18 million visitors on an annual basis, and we span the globe in about 13 different countries. So with these 50 different social networks comes a portfolio of 50 unique brands. For example, we have MyMS team, which is for multiple sclerosis, MyBC team for breast cancer, and then MyCirrhosis team, just to name a few. Each of these brands have different contact lists with different audiences, send times, messaging types, and engagement levels.

And as we all know, deliverability is critical to email marketing success. We need to be able to send the right message at the right time to the right audience and have it delivered to the inbox. So sending emails that don’t make it to the recipients is a waste of time and resources. So deliverability rates depend on various factors that we can control, starting from list quality to content quality, sending volume and timing to testing and optimization.

Lauren:
Yeah, and wow, I mean, 4 million people across the globe, 50 unique brands all with seemingly very little in common, in a sense. I’d imagine there’s kind of like a lot of moving parts to this, a lot of like kind of knobs and dials that you guys are tweaking quite often, and probably also like a lot of places where you might be able to optimize your inbox placement and the impact that you’re having on these people’s lives. I mean, we’re talking about health conditions here, right? So if you can find a way to connect with them, to provide the right kind of value, that’s super powerful to them being able to manage that condition. So how are you doing that? Can you tell us more about that?

Jennifer Chappell:
Yes, so it’s definitely a huge operation. And with any business, we’re always optimizing our email deliverability and fine tuning different factors. So some of the key methods that we use, first, we do segmentation and targeting. So, you know, it seems kind of high level, but we organize our email list based on factors like demographics, interests, engagement levels. This is ensuring that we can send the right content to the right people at the right time. Hopefully by doing this, we’re increasing engagement and reducing the risk of unsubscribes. And then we’re regularly adjusting the engagement of our email lists. So we’re keeping our audience engaged and ensuring successful email deliveries.

The second thing that we do is we monitor soft bounces and hard bounces as well as unsubscribe rates. To maintain high deliverability, we manage the soft bounces very carefully. And I’m sure I don’t need to say this, but a soft bounce is an email that’s temporarily undeliverable, usually because of some problem on the recipient side. So if a person’s having like a multiple soft bounces that’s coming across their accounts, you know, like maybe their mailbox is full, we’re adding these people to a suppression list and actually removing them from our sends for a little bit of a time period. We call it our quarantine list and kind of taking them out just to ensure the proper list hygiene. And then for hard bounces and unsubscribes, we remove them from the list at the end of the month. Unsubscribes automatically come out, but hard bounces are just. kind of an end of the month thing to make sure we’re keeping up with our list hygiene.

And then third, we control the sending volume. So we’re staggering the sending times and the days, you know, because we’re representing multiple brands and we have like 50 different conditions and sends that we’re doing. So we’re managing that email volume over the specific periods and splitting it out. on different days and different actual send times throughout the day. So that way we’re avoiding sudden spikes and hopefully ensuring that we’re preventing spam filters and then ensuring consistent email flow.

We’re also aligning with recipients’ preferences. So we’re ensuring that we send it optimal times. days, we’re actually doing some testing around this currently. So we’re testing sending in the recipient’s time zone, as well as a send time optimization. And the send time optimization testing is really kind of cool, because we can consider the recipient’s past opens to determine the best sending time, and hopefully increase our open rates and engagement levels off of that. And then finally, We’re constantly testing and optimizing. You’ll hear this a lot for me. Um, we believe in a data driven process. So we’re constantly like analyzing key metrics, like our open rates and our click-through rates, refining the strategies. And then also refining, um, different, you know, engagement levels on the list that we’re sending and hopefully by that point, improving the deliverability over time.

Lauren:
Oh yeah, wow, okay, so that was, wow, you’re doing a lot more. I honestly, I feel like this is even more than we talked about in our kind of previous session. So you’re doing all these different things, managing multiple brands, probably things that other people are maybe only wishing that they’re doing. We can’t see the lovely faces of the people that are in the audience, but I bet there are a lot of hands that are kind of going up, right? Like a lot of you guys are kind of wishing you worked at my health team and you could do this stuff. Honestly, yeah, so clearly your team has put kind of a lot of work into this, Jennifer. How are you doing that? Right. Like, how are you tracking performance of all these various brands? I mean, 50 brands is a lot. And is there anything that you’re not doing today that you kind of wish you could be doing? Like, where are you going from here?

Jennifer Chappell:
So that’s a great question. We are constantly, I mean, you can imagine we have the 50 brands, we have a ton of emails going out. There’s a ton of data that needs to be analyzed and like need to figure out what are the different conditions telling us and what are those signals telling us? And like, how do we need to make changes or improvements? We have an amazing data analytics team that helps us build various reports that we can use to help monitor results. So they are definitely one of the saving graces for us. And then also my team and myself are constantly in the data and every week going through and analyzing our email sends and figuring out different ways that we can optimize and then figuring out what kind of levers do we need to pull in terms of engagement on the list. Or did the open rates drop? Did we have any issues with the spam complaints? Or what exactly is going on to look for the key signals that we’re constantly monitoring for? For things that I wish we could be doing more of, well, so currently we’re doing some testing around a more personalized approach to segmentation to help our members see around corners. So like you said, these are people living with chronic conditions. So… giving them insight and more personalization to the condition they’re living with is definitely a passion for us. And then this personalized approach will be more precisely based on individual preferences and behaviors. So it’s gonna be adding in a lot more complexity to the email program as you can imagine.

But definitely worth it. The second would be probably having more… throttling control and just having more control over the rate at which we send the emails to like with overwhelming recipients and servers. I know I mentioned before, we do send on like different send times and different send days, but just having a little bit more control on like when those emails actually hit the inbox and like that sort of aspects. And then third, we are always looking for ways to optimize our email strategies. So anyone who manages a large portfolio of brands can definitely relate. We’re looking for ways to work smarter, not harder. And I think that’s one of my favorite things, is like how can you find ways to optimize and make it easier on yourself to optimize your strategy and improve it over time? Because try in finding those little things that you can do that will make your life easier, but will have great impacts on your deliverability and on your program as a whole.

And they’ll know you’re good. You’re totally good. I feel like there’s a little bit of lag going on here on my side, but so there’s, and then the last thing that I would love is to have kind of like a real time inbox placement insights, you know, like being able to know where the email lands. Is it in the inbox? Is it in the spam folder? And that’s just kind of the dream state, but as we all know, you know, it’s not always possible and you’re kind of like, And there’s also key signals that you can monitor, kind of like open rates and spam complaints and like different things like that, that give you key signals into how and where your emails are landing in the inbox.

Lauren:
Gotcha. Okay. And so I guess that stuff, I mean, knowing you’ve got like a data analytics team internally, I guess that’s all like very manual to kind of be monitoring that very closely and figuring out how to make changes,

Jennifer Chappell:
Yes, manually. It’s looking at a ton of reports and then also us going into the ESP and pulling out data ourselves throughout the week.

Lauren:
Yeah. So I guess does that prevent you from getting to some of those reports every week? Like do you almost have to have like a rolling schedule where you’re like, all right, this week I’ll look at these 10 and the next week I’ll look at a couple more? Or is there some sort of like urgency or priority scoring to that? Or how does that work?

Jennifer Chappell:
Yes, so there’s a little bit of a priority. So we have our like core sites that we spend the most time on and really look at metrics and like optimize for and then we have like a rolling basis. So you know all of our sites get all of the love but there’s some that are I guess to say a little bit more of like the special children in the but I mean that sounds horrible to say but with managing browns. But with like managing such a large group of brands, there’s definitely more of a focus on some than others. But, you know, across the board, what’s nice is the strategy that we are seeing like signals from is something that we roll out across all the sites. So like if we’re seeing something in like our the ones that we’re monitoring every single day and every single week, we can roll that out to the rest of them and kind of like optimize that way. So there’s a nice way to go about it.

Lauren:
Yeah, that’s super smart. I like that. Cool. All right, well, I’ve got a whole list of questions here. So I guess I’ll just kind of keep firing. How long did it take you to kind of put this process in place? Obviously, it’s very complex. So how did you do it? How long did it take you to do it?

Jennifer Chappell:
the initial setup, which was a few years ago now when I first started my health team, but was very time consuming as you can imagine. At the time, I was the only person on the team along with my manager, and we had about 30 brands at that point, but I was manually programming out each send and scheduling each individual send. So in order to kind of help shape the traffic and help with making the emails easier to manage, I actually built out an entire program that’s dynamically populated with some handlebar logic and it makes it a lot easier. So we can do coding basically that pulls in the information that we need into the email so we’re not sitting there and programming out each individual email. And then the next step was to set up the lists and workflows and everything, and set up these engaged lists that are dynamic and that we can switch and alternate between. So there’s different lists that we have already set up, and depending on how an email performed or how or if we’re seeing some type of signal. we’ll switch out and change that list to maybe a more engaged list. And then the next end, if that one performed well, we’ll expand it back out to maybe a less engaged list and constantly playing with that back and forth. And to answer the question on how long it took, it took probably about two to three months to build out fully.

Lauren:
Hmm. Yeah. Wow. And I guess how many teams were involved in that? I mean, you mentioned you were kind of a one person team with your manager, but for other teams involved?

Jennifer Chappell:
Yes, so I worked closely with our product and engineering teams at My Health Team, which they offered some great supports. They had a lot of knowledge and insight. And then I also was working with our ESP, the support team with our ESP, to kind of get the if-else statements correct and all of the loveliness with handlebar logic that comes into it. And then I also was able at the same time, I was able to hire a person to be on my team to actually help me build out the program. So that helps speed up the process a little bit as well.

Lauren:
Okay, that makes sense. Cool. All right. Well, I’m officially impressed. I feel like you’ve got like a team of superheroes over at your company. So kudos to all of you. That said though, I feel like it can’t have been all smooth sailing. Like looking back on that journey of creating this and kind of continuing to manage it, are there any challenges you faced or maybe some things you didn’t know to plan for that you wish you had set up in the beginning?

Jennifer Chappell:
Definitely. I’m not going to say that it was all roses and everything worked out. It definitely did not do that way. I think anyone that is in email marketing and is having multiple brands and managing these aspects knows that there’s always going to be unexpected things that come up and unexpected challenges. I think the greatest thing is that you have to be adaptable and be willing to change your strategy midway through. So… you’re thinking one thing’s gonna work and then something comes up and you’re like, wait a second. And just having that adaptability to be able to change and change that course. And I think too with any email program, we’re constantly learning and constantly optimizing our strategy. So it’s not like it’s set up and it’s set it and forget it. I mean, we’re still optimizing and we’re still learning today.

Lauren:
Yeah, I love that. I feel like we should repeat that. So like, keep learning, keep testing, do not set and forget, super important stuff. All right, that’s the clip I love from this.

All right, so Louis, I know that you’ve, not only worked with a bunch of customers with kind of similar use cases like this when you were at SendBridge, but you also had a hand in the email programs back in the day for those two very well known hospitality brands, right? So Trippin.com, MGM Resorts International. I imagine there’s a lot of complexity with those email programs as well. So did you face any… similar challenges while you were sending email or managing email for those massive brands.

Louis:
Yeah, absolutely. And definitely at MGM Resorts International, just because of the wide portfolio there, it’s always like, it’s not sit and forget it. Let’s just say that. So that was a very good point from the previous point. So with MGM Resorts, they have, they own everything from like a Luxor, Excalibur up to an MGM Grand Mirage, all the way up to Aria and Bellagio. Very different audience types going to each one of those types of casinos and hospitality companies. So while setting up your mouse streams in a way that makes sense frequency makes is a different layer to this equation Because now you have to have where I think about local audiences regional audiences worldwide audiences and because this audience Let’s say a regional audience visits once a year. It’s really hard to maintain Engagement because when they just visit they’re probably not going to look at an MGM email for six to seven months So how do you maintain that that? consistent reputation with mailbox writers.

So it’s always this back and forth of frequency and understanding your audiences and making sure you’re sending email that makes sense. And not only that, you’re driving brand love the whole time. You know, they’re getting that experience of where it clicks, it’s what they’re expecting. And when, in that case, getting offers that make them wanna come back and get them excited. That’s how you build up that brand love because at the point, the other element that’s not even being considered this is the competitors to MGM and emailing the same person. So now you’re fighting for a sheriff inbox at this point. So there’s a lot of different layers where I think it all aligns with adapting and really building that brand love with your recipients and making sure you just drive that home because at the end of the day, the more and more they come back to your brand and they open your email before someone else is your competitors. It’s only going to benefit you as you grow out your list with new recipients.

Lauren:
Oh yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, okay. So it’s great cause it’s like, oh wow, that’s so interesting, but it also feels very painful cause it’s one of those like if you’re running around, you’re trying to make sure everything’s working properly, you’re checking all your metrics, all that good stuff. So I guess with those pains kind of pretty fresh in everybody’s minds, what advice would you give to others who wanna kind of optimize or implement a similar process to their management of multiple male streams? I don’t know about your that, but okay. Jennifer, I guess let’s hear from you. Like what advice do you have for the audience?

Jennifer Chappell:
Sure. So we’re constantly monitoring and optimizing the email strategy. And I told you, I was gonna say it again, but we’re constantly doing that because I definitely wanna drive home that point that it’s a constant monitoring and you’re constantly optimizing. But in trying to gain insight into any signals that give you the insight into the deliverability. But… I’d say my advice is gonna be, when planning a project, it’s gonna be different for each company, but there are some overarching aspects.

So the first one is define your goals. What do you want to achieve and identify the specific metrics that you wanna track? Do you wanna go after open rates first? Do you wanna go after click-through rates? Are you dealing with conversions? Or do you wanna really focus on overall deliverability?

Find one thing and kind of focus on it and then go from there. To deep dive your current metrics, see where you are currently at and set specific goals and where you want to be and what does success look like for your program and what does it look like for your company. I think it’s really important to look at benchmarks for your industry and also for your email program as a whole because you need to figure out where you’re currently at and where you want to grow to.

The next one is really understanding your bounce rates and your unsubscribe rates and practicing proper list management. We are constantly, I’ve brought it up earlier about managing our soft bounces and putting people on like a quarantine list. For hard bounces, we will automatically remove you from the email list and the database. Unsubscribes are automatically. removed as well and just really keeping that list up to date with the most engaged people and the people that want to hear from you. And I mean, we’re all email nerds, so I’m sure I don’t need to say this one, but I’ll put it on here is make sure your emails follow GDPR and like can spam laws. You know, that’s an easy one to go with.

Find various items of your email program that you want to optimize. You know, is it going to be send time, send day,, personalizing the message… And these are kind of like the layers on top of your open rates and your click-through rates. And again, pick one, optimize it, and then go on to the next. Don’t think that you have to do it all at the same time. That can definitely get a little scary at times.

Then the last is the monitoring and the analyzing of metrics. Continuously monitor the key metrics, such as your open rates, click through rates, your conversions, and even your spam complaints. Use email analytics tools to gain insights and make data-driven decisions. Your strategy will constantly change, so you need to be adaptable and be willing to adjust, depending on what your metrics are telling you. And if you’re constantly monitoring your metrics, you can get ahead of some issues. So you’re gonna be looking for signals like decrease in open rates from your baseline. This can mean that you’re having an issue with inboxing or your engagement levels. I

f you do find yourself in an issue, pull in the engagement on the list, start sending to a really engaged list and then slowly expand back out. And then the one thing that I really wanna say is that all of these things will take time, so be patient with yourself, be patient with your program, but at the end of the day, you’ll be making an impact.

Lauren:
Yeah, oh my gosh, that is such a fantastic list. I’m so excited about every single one of those. So I guess, Louis, tough job here, but do you have any bits of advice to add to the list?

Louis:
I’m going to double down on some of those points because that was a great list. So the points that I think one thing is not being fearful to test something out. Because when you set up the reporting structure and you set up your baselines and you look at the metrics you want to observe for your business, you know, pull out a subset and test with it. In Jennifer’s case, it was multiple brands and applying it out to the rest of them. When you find a good sound finding, you know, over time with the patients. And then as you roll out, baseline will continue to improve as you start to do these incremental changes. So I would say just don’t be afraid to test out a part, a strategy with your business.

It’s often what I call a red line, in a car where you’re stepping on the gas pedal, there’s the red line and you wanna hit those RPMs right up to the point where you’re maximizing your efficiency. Sometimes you’re gonna go over, you’re gonna have to back off. And then sometimes you fall below, so you have to step on the gas pedal again. And it’s this game back and forth, push on the gas, step on the brake, and over time, your overall baseline will go up. And that would be my biggest thing is don’t be scared to test out to a small subset of your population. And as you learn, apply it to the wider base. And that’s the one point I definitely want to pick home from what I heard earlier.

Lauren:
Yeah, I like that. I would triple down on that, I guess, but yeah. Good stuff, great advice from both of you. All right, well, I guess we’ve kind of reached sort of the end. I’d like to kind of leave some time for questions. So if we have any questions from the audience, please go ahead and share those now. We did get a question from somebody ahead of time knowing that we were gonna be talking to Jennifer and the industry that she’s in. So Jennifer, one question for you. With brands spanning 13 countries, how do you confirm each mails stream is compliant with local privacy legislation, especially considering you need to adhere to things like HIPAA in the US?

Jennifer Chappell:
Great question. What’s really nice about my health team is we don’t have to be HIPAA compliant. And the reason that we don’t have to be is because we’re not handling, we’re not a doctor’s office, we’re not handling any type of, you know, information from that aspect of the people. It’s really, think of it kind of like a Facebook. We are social networks. The only thing is, is we are social networks for people living with chronic health conditions. So we’re not having to be like HIPAA compliant. And then as far as, you know, being compliant with like local legislation, it’s really like email laws. So as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, GDPR is kind of like our world ones, Europe, you know, it’s a lot more on that side and then US has more of the CAN-SPAM. But as long as we’re following those, we are good to go. And it’s nice that we don’t actually have to worry about the HIPAA compliance, because that would add even more complexity.

Lauren:
Yeah, but I think that’s one of those, I always have seen GDPR is kind of like this golden standard for now, at least with privacy. It’s so much further ahead than can’t spam is, for example, in the US. So it’s one of those, just get yourself to that bar. Legality is not what gets you to the inbox. It’s actually connecting with your audience, delivering mails that they like, which, of course, requires you looking at the data.

That brings me to the question that somebody just slacked me because they’re a little too shy. So. knowing that you’ve got all this data, you’ve got this analyst team that’s helping with reporting, what pieces of data did you build into your dashboards and how do you detect which brand needs the most attention on any given day or time from a selection of dashboards that large? So how do you find the problems, I guess?

Jennifer Chappell:
Yeah, great question. Our dashboards will actually load in all of our 50 conditions. So we have them all. What’s nice is we have kind of three main dashboards that we’re looking at, and they load in, you know, items such as like sessions, users, we’re seeing open rates and how site traffic is being affected across the different conditions.

And what’s nice is you can kind of open up the dashboard and kind of look at it and we have percentages of like increase, decrease, is it okay? And those are kind of like our little insights into like, oh, okay, this one needs to have a little bit more attention. And then we’re at the end of each day of our email sends.

My direct report is absolutely amazing. She will pull reports and put them into her spreadsheets and then go through and highlight ones that need to be better addressed and be like, oh, okay, that maybe happened. So I think there’s a few things that you can definitely do, but it’s literally just going through. There’s some cheat sheets and easy things that you can do, like how are you performing month over month, how are you performing week over week, and gauge it off of those metrics.

Lauren:
All right, nice. Very cool, all right. Well, I think I don’t know as if we have any other additional questions in the chat. So anybody else who has one, please speak up now or type up now, I guess you could say. Otherwise, I think we’ll perhaps just move on and thank all of you folks for being here. So let me go ahead and just kind of give you a little bit of information. So I guess you guys are probably aware that this was sort of more of a high level conversation. We tried to get as deep as we could without having the session be two hours, which is probably what it could deserve.

But in exactly two weeks time, we’re going to be hosting a roundtable discussion on this very same topic. So if you have questions that you don’t want to ask in a big group, if you want to get into like that minutiae and the nitty gritty details of what’s kind of happening within a complex email program, please join us. This is going to be just basically a small group of like minded senior product and marketing leaders that are getting together behind some kind of virtually closed doors to do some networking to discuss. the actual challenges that you’re facing right now and to brainstorm with your peers, to inspire that kind of innovative way that you’re going to solve your own challenges in managing your complex email program. You can submit your questions or your actual use case and the problem that you’d like some help with ahead of time for this anonymously. If you wanna kind of shout yourself out, great, but you can do it anonymously as well.

And then on the day of the round table, everyone is going to basically be encouraged to participate in that conversation, right? So you can ask questions, you can share feedback, things that you’ve seen work well. We’re gonna basically introduce two complex email use cases over the course of one hour, and we’re gonna focus on the challenges that attendees are currently facing. We’re gonna discuss those as a group.

There are no recordings, it’s not live streamed, it’s just basically a safe space to learn and to grow with your peers. Louis is going to be there, I’m going to be there. Will you join us? That would be great. Okay, so I’ve been talking long enough on this. We’re gonna be sending an email with the webinar recording to all of our registrants, but we’ll include the link where you can check out more information about the round table in that email as well.

A special thank you to our guest expert for today, Jennifer Chappell, Senior CRM for MyHealthTeam. If you’d like to learn more about MyHealthTeam and the communities that they’re supporting, head on over to their website, which is myhealthteam.com. And a huge thank you to all of you who have joined us today. Great questions. I would say great energy. A lot of friendly faces in the crowd. Good to see you guys. It’s a good group.

I hope to see you guys all at the round table in two weeks and be on the lookout for additional webinars that are coming from our socket labs team in the near future. This is just the first of many. we will be sending that webinar recording to all of you. So feel free to share that puppy with your colleagues or friends.

All right, until next time, thanks again everyone. Hope you have a great day.