Hear from Dave Novick (VP of Marketing) to discuss the recent announcement by Google that is making email dynamically updated. Email hasn’t changed much in 20 years and the recent Amp for Email news will change that. Ecwid is the first
- Interactive Abandoned Cart
- Order Status
- One Click Email Verification
We discuss where this new technology could go in the future.
Transcript
Jesse: Richie, happy Friday.
Richard: It’s that day again.
Jesse: Yeah, love it, get to do another podcast here. Ecwid has been in the news recently. It’s exciting. We got a lot of coverage by TechCrunch and VentureBeat, Mashable, all the big. It’s kind of fun. We’re going to try to ride that wave little bit longer.
Richard: Yeah, changes happening. I mean speaking of, you guys have changed office too, right.
Jesse: Yeah, moved an office, lots of stuff going on here.
Richard: We’re not going to get to do the happy hour this afternoon.
Jesse: No, probably not. All right, now got to get back to work here. And because of all this news, we brought in the big gun, here. We brought in the VP of marketing David Novick. David, how’s it going?
David: Hey, everybody. Nice to be here today on a Friday.
Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe it’s happier when we get back to the office. I don’t know.
David: Actually, we’ll be talking about that later offline, but I’m thinking four o’clock might be pretty good today.
Jesse: I think that’s the way to go. I gotta celebrate the news.
David: That’s wins. There’s no doubt about it.
Jesse: Yeah, it’s awesome. So yeah, we definitely had some wins here. Dave, the initiative we’re going to talk about in the win we had as we worked really tightly with Google on the AMP for email initiative. So we brought you too in here. You’ve been working closely with this as has a bunch of people at Ecwid. Maybe you can fill in our audience on some more details on this.
David: Yeah. Absolutely. Definitely, the hot topic right now is dynamic emails. And for email, it’s a big deal. It’s a little hard to understand so we’ll break it down a little bit for people today. First, let’s talk about what the impact of this is. When you think about Facebook and Instagram and all of these great social platforms and all of the great tools out there, there’s nothing bigger than email. There are currently approximately 4 billion Global email users. So the scale of what happens in email is just fantastic. You know, it’s a funny thing. The scope of email, how many people use this workhorse that it’s been over the years. Anyway, let’s break into AMP a little bit. For those of you that are not familiar, AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages, and it’s basically an open source project that has been led to try to accelerate the adoption of mobile usage and accelerate content to get mobile working better. And as an offshoot of that with Google leading the charge right now, this email
Jesse: Yeah, and so diving a little bit deeper on it. The AMP for email is really… Google’s leading the charge, but obviously, a lot of people use Gmail and Google apps. So that’s a big percentage of the emails out there. But other people are going to be applying this well as well, but I think the interesting part you touched on it is like email hasn’t changed in 15 or 20 years. Like Facebook has like become a thing since we started first receiving emails and what I mean by emails haven’t changed, you get an email from a company or from your mom and when that email gets sent, it’s sent in, that’s it. You can’t change, you can edit, sometimes you want to pull back some of those emails you may be sent late at night, but in general, an email is sent, it goes out and it’s done. So dynamic emails basically make that email more of a living thing, more like a web page if you will, so AMP Google’s pushing, this basically makes it dynamic, I think in a nutshell.
David: Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head. If you think about it, as a digital marketer and
Jesse: Yeah, for users of MailChimp, there’s a little graphic of this monkey sweating when it’s about ready to push the button and that’s what all email marketers go through. You’re like, man, I checked everything twice and I hope I didn’t spill anything wrong. And you crush your fingers when you push send. Dynamic emails are going to do a couple of things. There’s a lot of changes coming in the future, but I think it’s best if we walk through an example or two on the podcast here, so people can understand exactly we’re talking about. Pinterest was part of this beta group as well. So when you get an email from Pinterest, it’s basically a bunch of pictures on the email, all the pins that Pinterest thinks you’ll be interested in because they want to keep the engagement. They want people to pin, right? It’s Pinterest. What this means is that Pinterest in an AMP for email world is you can hover over the image and you can click on it and you can immediately pin into your own pinboards. Before AMP mail, you might look at this email I said, okay, that’s pretty cool, I’m going to click in. And you’re basically going to Pinterest, now you’re off of email and you’re going into Pinterest and hopefully, you’re logged in correctly and all that. So with Pinterest for instance, it’s reducing the amount of clicks there. It makes it so you can be interactive inside of your email. And for all the techy people out there that might be kind of like an iframe. Yeah, sort of, it’s not really an iframe. Sort of that idea, if that helps people understand what we’re talking about. I think there’s another example and actually, this isn’t even really part of the beta but just for people that get to grasp what we’re talking about. We all get all sorts of emails but let’s say you get an email from an airline, right? So you can airline, I use Delta. I fly back to Minnesota and it says, hey, Jessie, $99 special flight to Minneapolis, buy now, whatever. I look at my email like three days later and I already know like okay, that’s just some sort of teaser rate. It’s obviously not there, but what if I could inside that email click on it, change the destination? Playing around with the dates and times and stuff in that, and the price dynamically changes. It’s not just a teaser rate. So that’s sort of an idea of what dynamic email could be. Another quick example, and by the way you can go take a look at Mashable, and TechCrunch, and VentureBeat for all this stuff. You can take a look at our blog for this. So,OYO is kind of like a TripAdvisor, you can see about destinations and they have ratings inside of their email. So with a dynamic email, you can start clicking on the ratings and rankings and see them inside your email. In general, you’re basically saving a click, you’re making email more of a central part of your day, which obviously Google is probably interested in that, they have their reasons as well. (laughing) But I think it opens up all sorts of opportunities in the future where emails definitely going to be changing and it will not be the same in 20 years. And so we’re on the forefront of this, it’s a pretty cool time.
David: Yeah. Absolutely. What’s interesting is if you think about we’re talking earlier about static emails and how they really can’t change, this is the great piece. We all know business is fast change, the one thing that you can count on in business is change, and so your emails should as well. And that’s really the premise behind this whole thing. So with the AMP project allowing for dynamic emails, what you’re really going to see is richer content, interactive content and when you have richer content, that is also interactive. You’re going to see a higher engagement level with the end users. When you send emails, when we send emails, they’re just going to be a lot more engaging and that engagement is going to play into higher conversion rates. So as central as email is to most
Richard: Yeah, I was just going to kind of reiterate a couple of things you guys said. What really is going on here is it’s about easing the friction. There’s a change that’s always happening and you’re going to have a customer that you started an experience with someone at one particular way. Say to your point of the Delta Airlines or something and they know what you want to do, but the flight status is changed or they sold out or whatever. And a customer could easily be frustrated if they click to go to the other website, they got taken out of their email, the other things going on and you added friction to their life as opposed to ease the friction in their life. And you think of the change in general whether it’s Uber, Lyft and all these things it’s trying to take friction out of our life.
Jesse: I mean that’s like Silicon Valley in a nutshell, right? Like they’re trying to reduce friction in every way they can. Saving a click is like champagne flutes are clinking.
Richard: Exactly, and let’s be honest everyone wants you to stay on their platform. If you can stay inside of Google email there, and they want you to because all of these platforms whether it’s Google, or Facebook, or anything, they’re all a driven. In some way shape or form, they just want you to stay in their ecosystem. So they would rather if you typed in Padres game in the middle of a Padres game. They don’t want to take you to the Padres website. They will show you the actual score of the game. Right? Easing friction, getting people the answers they want what they’re actually looking for right then and keeping that dynamic and changing. I mean, it’s exactly what you guys are talking about.
Jesse: Yeah, and the people listening to the podcast, you’re probably thinking like, okay, that’s great, but what about me, I’m in
David: Yeah, I think that it’s good to pull it back home with that. We’re really excited. I mean we are the first
Jesse: Yeah, this has been fun. When Google launched this, a couple of days ago, I think. So when Google launched this we’ve been working with them for quite some time. Our customers were ready to rock on the day that it launched. I’ll give people a little bit of a rundown of what we currently have and please go read about it on the blog, it’s Ecwid.com/blog — let me get this URL correct —
David: Yeah, what I really like about that is there is email fatigue, right? And we all kind of scan through an email and say make a decision as to what is important or not. And I find a lot of times that shipping confirmations, order confirmations, those types of emails are making people less engaged with the brand. To add more value to a single email we want to make sure we’re doing that at all times. It’s really about that
Jesse: Yep, and I think it might seem a little weird at first. The first year when this happens people are going to be you like well, where’s my next email? How come they didn’t send the Congratulations, you received your order, right? But it’s all going to happen at email and I think in two or three years this is going to be standard. You’re going to get one email from a merchant. And right now we have that out of the box. It’ll take a little bit of time for everybody to catch up on this but very excited about that one. One of the other things that they have active is the
David: Yeah, it is a pretty exciting time. We haven’t seen a lot of changes in email over the years and this is definitely the biggest
Jesse: If you get all those platforms, you’re probably talking like 75% of all emails and then all the people that don’t have it are going to have to implement this as well.
David: We’re gonna cross that chasm essentially. Yep, but think about this a little bit more. Right now the applications are a little bit limited but imagine that you make even richer and more interactive components in the email. Why not put a
Jesse: Yeah, I think that’s to get people thinking about where emails coming, where it’s headed. I think in the very near future we’re going to see… Let’s use a
David: That is what we’re expecting.
Jesse: Don’t quote me on that. Yeah, I think Dave is saying but yeah. When that happens basically email
David: Right. Well, interesting point and those of you that are familiar with Ecwid you have an understanding of what we do. Basically, we allow smaller merchants to sell across the internet and around the world with a single dashboard system that facilitates selling on. You can create your own online store. You can add products to an existing website. You can sell on Instagram. You can sell on Facebook, Amazon, eBay, etc. And now email, to some degree email at this point. It’s definitely getting there. Yeah, but over time it should be expected that this will develop into a full sales channel in itself. You wouldn’t need to leave the email itself. You can actually do the transaction within it. And that’s really one of the benefits of Ecwid as we bring these great opportunities to smaller merchants and allow them to have all of these great sales capabilities from one single dashboard. So it is really exciting times.
Jesse: Totally agree. Yeah, very exciting. That’s always been our mission is to help small business people, small business merchants. Because Ecwid has this architecture where it can be placed on many sites, we’ve already had people have Facebook stores, the Instagram shoppable posts, like all these different things and now bring an email into it. Taking it to another step forward. I think that’s awesome. It’s good times.
Richard: Yeah, good stuff. I mean to Dave’s Point earlier, it’s been static for so long and then you’ll hear people talking about how email open rates are diving but no one’s going to get rid of their email, right? It’s nice to just pump some new life into it. See what’s coming in the future, see what other channels too. This is going to give life to email again, right? It’s just interesting. I love being able to let people know on the podcast and new things that are out there, new things that are coming, ways they’re going to be implemented in their business. Obviously, specifically, Ecwid users, what you’re doing to try to help them sell more and build their business. So it’s always fun.
Jesse: Yeah, totally agree. I mean, I think it’s always fun to be on the front edge. We beat several of our competitors on this one. A little pat on the back for all of us here. But yeah, we’re just excited to keep bringing new developments in technology to our customers. For people that are listening, if you do want to find out more about this, I’ll give you the blog title one more time. It’s
Richard: No, I just want people to get started go to the blog post check it out. There’s a lot of interesting information and examples that we didn’t cover. But you guys need to get back speaking of change and change locations. Get back to your new office, get dialed in and get back to work.
Jesse: Yeah, man, it does not sound like fire. (laughing) But yeah, we gotta get back to work.
Dave: Come on, every day is fun. This is the best. I enjoy every day.
Jesse: Awesome.
Dave: Anyway, thanks for the opportunity guys. It’s fun to speak about the stuff.
Richard: Thanks for coming in.
Jesse: Thanks, Dave, we appreciate it.