The Email is Dead. Long Live the Email! 🔗 **Source:** [The Email is Dead. Long Live the Email!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [email-marketing, conference-organization, open-source] > author: WordCamp US > source: YouTube > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8 > date created: 2024-12-19 14:30 > > # 🏷️ Title: The Email is Dead. Long Live the Email! > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧰 Action Inbox - [H1] Implement email segmentation based on user data — 12:45 timestamp #email-marketing - [H2] Set up dynamic email content using conditions — 16:30 timestamp #personalization - [H3] Configure DNS properly for email deliverability — 22:15 timestamp #infrastructure ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - [Nerdla Conference](https://nerdla.com) - [Mautic Open Source](https://www.mautic.org/) ## 📝 Summary - Conference organizer from Argentina shares data showing email marketing drives 35% attendee conversion vs 4-8% for social media - Despite claims that "email is dead," it remains the most effective channel for event registrations and engagement - Using open-source Mautic + AWS SES reduced email costs from $4,000-20,000 to $300 for 3 million emails annually - Dynamic email personalization based on attendee data doubled click-through rates compared to generic campaigns - Email effectiveness comes from proper segmentation, technical setup, and personalized content rather than mass broadcasting ## 📖 Main Content Holo, a conference organizer from Nerdla (a major tech conference in Argentina), presented compelling data that challenges the narrative of email marketing being obsolete. While social media generates significant reach (1.5M Instagram impressions, 1.2M Twitter, 600K LinkedIn), the conversion rates tell a different story. Social media drives awareness but poor conversion: only 4% of Instagram registrants actually attend the event, 7-8% from LinkedIn/Twitter. In contrast, email-driven registrations convert at 35% - nearly 5x higher than the best social platform. The technical implementation involves Mautic (open-source marketing automation) paired with AWS Simple Email Service, reducing costs dramatically while maintaining deliverability. The key insight was moving from broadcast emails to dynamic, personalized content based on attendee registration data including experience level, technology stack, and role. Dynamic personalization doubled engagement metrics. Instead of showing all speakers to everyone, they match recommended talks to attendee interests and backgrounds. A backend developer with 10+ years experience sees different content than a UX designer newcomer. Critical technical considerations include DNS configuration, volume warm-up, spam rate monitoring, and proper bounce handling. Hotmail/Outlook proved particularly challenging, requiring alternative sending methods. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=0) — [H1] Nerdla Conference Introduction - Key idea: Major Latin American tech conference with 15,000 in-person, 50,000 online attendees - Evidence: "12 editions, backed by Google, AWS, Microsoft, GitHub, 200 speakers from 20 countries" #### ⏱️ [02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=150) — [H2] Free Event Attendance Challenge - Key idea: Free events typically see only 50% of registrants actually attend - Evidence: "Unwritten law for free events - if 50% show up, you celebrate. Low commitment, no consequences" #### ⏱️ [04:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=255) — [H2] Social Media Reach vs Conversion - Key idea: Social media drives awareness but poor event attendance conversion - Evidence: "1.5M Instagram impressions, but only 4% who register through Instagram actually show up" #### ⏱️ [05:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=345) — [H1] Email Conversion Superiority - Key idea: Email registrants convert to actual attendance at dramatically higher rates - Evidence: "35% of people who register through email actually show up vs 4-8% from social media" #### ⏱️ [06:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=390) — [H2] "Email is Dead" Narrative - Key idea: Despite widespread claims of email's death, data shows it remains highly effective - Evidence: "Born 1971, died probably this year - YouTube gurus, Mark Zuckerberg, Inc Magazine all declaring email dead" #### ⏱️ [08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=480) — [H2] Email Usage Statistics - Key idea: Email remains universally adopted with high engagement patterns - Evidence: "4.6 billion active users, 99% check inbox daily, 58% check email before social media" #### ⏱️ [09:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=555) — [H1] Open Source Email Solution - Key idea: Mautic + AWS SES provides enterprise email marketing at fraction of SaaS costs - Evidence: "160,000 active subscribers, 3M emails annually, reduced costs from $4K-20K to $300" #### ⏱️ [12:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=720) — [H2] Mautic Platform Capabilities - Key idea: Open-source platform provides comprehensive contact management and segmentation - Evidence: "Flexible platform with contact views, dynamic segments, campaign workflows, A/B testing" #### ⏱️ [14:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=870) — [H1] Generic vs Personalized Email Performance - Key idea: Dynamic email personalization doubles engagement compared to broadcast approach - Evidence: "Same email to everyone: 27% open, 5% CTR. Personalized emails: 30% open, 10% CTR, 31% CTOR" #### ⏱️ [16:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=990) — [H2] Segmentation Methodology - Key idea: Match attendee data to speaker content for personalized recommendations - Evidence: "Position to track, years of experience to target audience, technology stack to tags" #### ⏱️ [19:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=1140) — [H3] Event Experience Enhancement - Key idea: Real-time emails triggered by check-in improve on-site experience - Evidence: "QR code scan triggers welcome email with WiFi, schedule, app download, social accounts" #### ⏱️ [20:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=1230) — [H2] Technical Implementation Requirements - Key idea: Email deliverability requires proper DNS setup and volume management - Evidence: "DNS configuration critical, warm up sending volumes, monitor spam rates below 0.1%" #### ⏱️ [22:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=1335) — [H3] Hotmail Delivery Challenges - Key idea: Microsoft email services present unique deliverability obstacles - Evidence: "Hotmail too painful, ended up using Swapcard for Hotmail/Outlook delivery" #### ⏱️ [24:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8?t=1440) — [H2] Future Email Marketing Plans - Key idea: Advanced features like scoring systems and AI can further improve targeting - Evidence: "Points for actions: 1 for email open, 3 for click, 20 for event attendance, enables VIP segmentation" ## 📚 References - [Mautic Open Source](https://www.mautic.org/) - [AWS Simple Email Service](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/) - [Nerdla Conference](https://nerdla.com) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - Email marketing dramatically outperforms social media for actual event attendance, converting at 35% vs 4-8% despite lower reach numbers - Open-source tools like Mautic can replace expensive SaaS solutions, reducing costs by 95% while maintaining functionality and deliverability - Personalization based on user data doubles email engagement - matching content to recipient interests rather than broadcasting generic messages ## 📰 Newsletter **Email Marketing Still Dominates Event Conversion Rates** While WordPress events often focus on social media reach, this conference organizer's data reveals email converts 5x better for actual attendance. Their open-source approach using Mautic reduced email costs from $20K to $300 annually while serving 160K subscribers. Key takeaways for WordPress event organizers: - **Segment ruthlessly**: Match content to attendee experience levels and interests - **Personalize dynamically**: Show relevant speakers/topics rather than generic lineups - **Consider open source**: Mautic provides enterprise features without SaaS costs - **Technical setup matters**: Proper DNS and gradual volume increases prevent spam filtering This approach could transform WordCamp registration and community engagement strategies. Resources: [Learn WordPress](https://learn.wordpress.org/), [Developer Docs](https://developer.wordpress.org/), [WP-CLI](https://wp-cli.org/) ## ✅ Action Items #### Community - Maintainers: implement email segmentation for community newsletters based on contribution areas - Contributors: create onboarding email sequences for first-time contributors with role-specific content - Sponsors: develop email nurture campaigns with personalized sponsor benefit communications #### WordPress - Community: evaluate Mautic for WordCamp organizer toolkit, create email best practices documentation - Marketing: analyze current email vs social media conversion rates for WordPress events - Meta: investigate open-source alternatives to current email marketing stack - Polyglots: segment translation team communications by language and experience level #### DevRel - Developer marketing: implement dynamic email content based on developer technology stack and experience - Community management: create scoring systems for developer engagement across email, events, and contributions - Education: personalize workshop recommendations based on attendee skill assessments ## 🧪 Hypotheses - Open-source email marketing platforms can reduce costs by 90%+ while maintaining deliverability for WordPress community events - Personalized email content based on contributor data will increase WordCamp attendance rates by 25-50% - Email remains more effective than social media for driving actual community participation and event attendance - Technical contributors respond better to segmented communications based on their areas of expertise ### 📊 Methodology - A/B test personalized vs generic emails for next WordCamp announcements measuring registration and attendance - Compare email delivery costs between current SaaS solutions and self-hosted Mautic implementation - Analyze existing WordPress community email engagement data to establish baseline conversion rates ### ❓ Questions - How can WordPress community events better leverage contributor data for email personalization? - What technical barriers prevent more community organizations from using open-source email marketing? - How do email conversion rates compare across different WordPress community segments (developers, designers, users)? ### 🔮 Future Research - Investigate email marketing effectiveness for WordPress plugin/theme adoption - Study correlation between email engagement and long-term community contribution patterns - Explore automated community onboarding sequences based on initial WordPress involvement type ### 💡 Implications - Practice: WordPress event organizers should prioritize email over social media for driving attendance - Policy: Community guidelines should include email marketing best practices and deliverability requirements - Education: Training materials needed for community organizers on email segmentation and personalization - Funding: Budget allocation should shift from social media advertising to email marketing infrastructure ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment Reading level estimate: 9th grade (technical concepts explained clearly) #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Email performance charts, platform screenshots, campaign workflow diagrams - Improve: Add email template design examples, segmentation flowcharts #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: Conference presentation with clear verbal explanations - Improve: 5-minute audio summary of key email marketing principles #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Technical terminology well-defined, analogies to social media - Improve: More storytelling around specific email campaign successes #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: Step-by-step Mautic setup process described - Improve: Hands-on workshop guide for setting up email campaigns #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: Clear data comparisons, cost analysis, performance metrics - Improve: Decision tree for choosing email marketing platforms #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: Conference Q&A session, community context - Improve: Discussion prompts for event organizer groups #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: Self-assessment opportunities for current email practices - Improve: Individual reflection questions on email marketing strategy #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: Ecosystem thinking about email as part of marketing mix - Improve: Analogies to natural systems and sustainable growth ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: Well-structured headings, clear section divisions - Improve: Add alt text descriptions for data charts and screenshots #### Keyboard navigation - Present: Standard presentation format with logical flow - Improve: Ensure any interactive elements support keyboard access #### Contrast and readability - Present: Clear text, good contrast in presentation slides - Improve: Verify all data visualizations meet contrast requirements #### Text resizing and reflow - Present: Content scales appropriately across devices - Improve: Test email template examples at various zoom levels #### Media and captions - Present: Video has transcript available - Improve: Add time-stamped captions for technical demonstrations ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: Perspective from Latin American tech community, global email statistics - Improve: Include examples from diverse geographic regions and event types #### Inclusive language - Present: Gender-neutral terms, technical jargon explained - Improve: Avoid assumptions about organizational resources and technical expertise #### Neurodiversity support - Present: Clear structure, consistent formatting, chunked information - Improve: Add content warnings for technical complexity levels #### Representation - Present: Non-US perspective on community building and event organization - Improve: Include voices from different organizational sizes and resource levels ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - Deductive strength: Email statistics lead logically to effectiveness conclusions - Inductive strength: Single case study generalized appropriately to broader principles - Causal reasoning: Clear connection between personalization and improved engagement - Analogical strength: Social media comparison provides useful context #### Fallacies - Survivorship bias: Focus on successful implementation without discussing failures - False dichotomy: Presents email vs social media as either/or rather than complementary #### Tone of voice - Overall tone: Enthusiastic and data-driven, balances technical detail with accessibility ### 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - Deny: No denial patterns present - Attack: No attacks on critics or alternative approaches - Reverse victim/offender: No victim/offender dynamics - Emotional cues: Positive enthusiasm about open-source solutions, mild frustration with "email is dead" narrative ## 🎯 Conclusion Email marketing remains a powerful tool for community engagement, particularly when enhance <!-- deep-read:sections end --> ## 📺 Video  --- # 📄 Full Transcript *Auto-generated from YouTube captions · timestamps roughly every 30 seconds · [watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_wnYM_6r8)* **[00:08]** So, thank you for being here. I'm Holo. I come from Buenosirus from Argentina. You may know some of these people that are also from Argentina. And if you haven't watched these shows like The Not or haven't watched this movie, please watch it. It's a great movie and a great show. Uh, Argentina is also home to Nerla. Okay, so this is how we pronounce Nerdla in English. I know it's a mouthful. So it's nerd la. Can you do it? Nerd la. Excellent. Which is pretty much Spanish for nerd it up. It's a nerd tech event **[00:40]** and is a BS tech event you never heard of probably if you're from here. So we started in 2014. We went hybrid in 2022. Uh it's 100% free for attendees. It has been free for everybody since we started in 20 like 2014. Uh we are backed or we have been backed by big companies such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, Mera, GitHub, all the big players. Uh last year we had over 200 speakers from 20 different countries. Uh we have run 12 editions. Actually this is our 12th edition in Buenosirus. The next one is coming up late September. Uh we are doing our **[01:11]** first one in Madrid in November. We've done two editions in Santiago de Chile returning in 2026. And one in Mexico City, but we are still fig out the dates. So last year we did three events. We did um Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. And we had a total of 15 15,000 people in person and 50,000 online. Imagine a big event with lots of people, lots of nerds, uh lots of people showing up, lots of like fun activities to do. You could take your photo with the like the this is fine like you had like **[01:43]** 2,000 people watching the keynote speaker at the end. We did a special event at the War Planetarium. It is a big thing. And there is an unwritten law for uh or unwritten rule for free events. I don't know if anybody organizes events here, but if 50% of the people that registers actually show up, you have to celebrate. You're lucky. That's like the the most that you're going to get in a free event is 50% of uh people actually showing up because free events means low commitment and so no consequences for those skipping. People register just in case and then **[02:14]** they show up. Life gets in the way. I know that everybody has life. Uh there may be transportation issues maybe not I know I don't know about here but in Latin America we do have a lot of transportation issues sometimes uh there may be by weather bad weather it may be raining it may be too too cold or too hot uh people may forget about the event that is happening so those are the reasons why people may not show up in the end uh so how is it that we drive registrations we rely on paid own and earn media as anybody does with the exception that we **[02:46]** don't really pay for or anything like we don't pay for getting people at the door. We just rely on organic stuff and earn media which we do great actually like we are very lucky that most of the media in Argentina and around the country that they cover the event. So we are going to focus on own media for the purpose of this talk and these are the numbers from last year. So we are doing great on social. We have over 1 million uh one yeah one and a half million impressions on Instagram, 1.2 you on Twitter, 600,000 on LinkedIn, almost **[03:18]** 300,000 views on on YouTube. And these are the great numbers and we have a great great community manager. She's great. She really turned the volume up to 11 on our social media presence. But social media drives awareness at least for us. That's what you drive with the with social media. You drive awareness. You don't drive like conversion again. At least for us. So for me this really represents like four 4% of people that register through Instagram they actually show up 8% for Twitter 7% or something like that for LinkedIn and again these **[03:48]** are all the own media that we have on social can you think of any other own media that we have and I haven't spoken about yet I'm thinking of the name yeah email. Thank you. So can you guess how many people actually show up if they register through email? 20%. And do I get bored? 20 25 30 30 30 Okay, 35. So these are the numbers that we got from like conversion from people that registered from social media versus **[04:19]** email and it was like huge for us to actually realize that that we are focusing all of this time and effort and again it's great that we are doing social media and we love social media but at the same time like me as a conference organizers I conference organizer I really care about people showing up like people registering and people showing up to the event but at the same time we all knew is that the email is dead. It was born in 1971. It died probably this year or it has died many times over. Uh because we **[04:51]** have all of these like gurus on YouTube like people like going out on their way to say that the email is dead. You have lots of people saying on YouTube that the email is dead, that the email is dead again. There you go. Uh three reasons why the email is dead. Five reasons why the email is dead. They keep going up. Uh, email marketing is dead like changed my mind on Reddit. Uh, Ink Massing seems to have some sort of like personal issue with emails. So, in 2018 they said like the email is already dead. Um, Mark Zuckerber of course he **[05:22]** has a thing against email. Uh, so he also said that the email is is dead. And again, Inc. Magazine said again that the email like in 2015 they said that the email was going to be dead by 2020. That didn't really age well. At least they're still promoting their newsletter. So I don't really honestly know what ink has against like email. I get it why sucker but maybe against email but inc magazine I don't know. So some boring stats about email and trust me on this one because oh you can see **[05:53]** them. Four uh 4.6 billion active users worldwide. 99% of the users check their inbox at least once a days and many more we do it more than once. Uh 69% read their emails while watching TV or in bed or in vacations. and uh 58% checks their email before they check social media or they check news or anything else. So with that in mind, we say like okay let's double down on on email. This is a attendees database that we have right now. It's uh pretty large uh and these **[06:24]** are the users that are active within the year and we can discuss later if that's a good time span to to keep your database. It should be shorter. It should be larger. We actually have over 200,000 subscribers, but active within the last year. This is the latest numbers that I pulled earlier today. And in 2024, we sent out 3 million email to these poor people over here, which seems like we are spamming people, but trust me, we are not. If you think of it, uh that's less than 20 emails per person, like average. Uh and we have people that **[06:54]** are subscribed to our monthly newsletters. So that's already 12 emails that you're going to get throughout the year, and it's only like seven more emails that you get. And we did three events. uh this year last year. So and of course that's only average like some people may may get only one email every month and some people may get more emails depending on the segment on how we consider them. So 3 million emails in one year this is what we had to pay if we wanted to go like the classic SAS way. Uh, we could start here with Brio. **[07:24]** Actually, we just said sending glue brie like almost $4,000 and then we can go all the way down to Mailchimp, which was like about $20,000. Or if we wanted to really go higher, we could use Habspot, which isn't really fair because they do much more than email marketing. But still, again, we don't pay for anything. We try not to pay for anything. Um, so here comes open source to the rescue. And open source doesn't mean free. Please don't never quote me saying that. I said that open source is free. Open source is not free. But this particular **[07:55]** project called Moric uh is an open source project that you can run yourself. You can install it and it's open source and it also happens to be free and we are using combination of modic and Amazon AWS SCS for sending out the actual emails. So, we went from like having to pay like between $4,000 to like 20 to can you guess how much we pay for $3 million with AWS SCS? $50. Well, a little higher than that, **[08:26]** but still like $300. Like it is like 0.0000001 cent per email, but you do have to pay for your email. So, we can discuss about that later. Uh so Molly is a very flexible platform. It's a very big platform but it has all the basics and more like here's like the like the contacts view. So this is one of my coorganizers. So you have all the data that you want to have of your contacts like first name, last name, email segments that you can build and you can build these fields yourself like **[08:56]** for example like if they want to receive sponsor messages if the technology stack that they use and all of this comes from registration. So although the conference is free, you you do need to share some of your information here. So years of experience was 10 to 15 um company and all of all of that like meta data about the the contacts. And you also get like I sent him like 40 emails, he opened 90% of them which is good. Thank you Edardo if you're watching this. Uh click through rate and click through open rate doesn't like I don't know what the D is **[09:26]** doing. he should be opening up the emails that we send out. But still like pretty good and you get these stats for each user. You can build segments of course which is like group of people. You can build them like statically like you just upload a CSV file or whatever into a segment or you create your own dynamic segments. I don't think this is like very readable for for you, but this is a segment of people that read this particular email or for example people that country equals Argentina or email domain ends with AR. So you can build **[09:58]** like these segments and you can build many many many segments combining a lot of things using or or and operators. And the fun thing here and I will do it very fast so you can see when it appears again. Uh you can build campaigns. So campaigns they start with a contact source and you filter them out for for example the first step is usually always like have a valid email address. You wouldn't imagine how many people mistype like gmail.com with an n or hotmail or like whatever or like or they they would **[10:29]** even like put like gmail.com from Argentina that doesn't really exist as a domain name. So you have to make sure that these are valid domains and then it is a workflow. So, you send an email, you wait for a couple of days to see if they open it, and if not, you send them the email like you send another email, follow-up email, and all of that. And basically, you can do well, you can do like uh actions, decisions, and conditions for each of these steps. And that's how you run a campaign. So, in this one, like if the segment is **[11:01]** Argentina, I send this email. If the segment is not Argentina, so red means no, green means yes. If the person is not from Argentina, I'm going to send them another email. So maybe I will send them an English an email that's in English. Whereas if they're in Argentina, they're going to send it in Spanish. Or for example, if they are a Hotmail user, I'm not going to send them anything. So if you are from Hotmail, nothing's going to come your way. Uh if you are not on Hotmail, yes, I'm going to send you something. And I will elaborate on that later. **[11:32]** So how do we enable or foster conversion here? And this goes more into like the HTML piece or the email that you are going to send the user. This is one of our emails from last year. So it has everything that we needed to have like it has like the header here. You have like the copy and the call to action like register for free at the event. And we used to send the same email to everybody. So basically we were using like email as social media. On social media you cannot send like oneonone like messages to everybody. Uh and on email we were doing the same thing which was a **[12:03]** huge mistake on our end because email does have that flexibility. So we were sending out like this email and this is like a great email like I I would have assumed that people would be excited about receiving this email um because we had a great lineup of speakers last year. So this guy created Unix and Go radioman they like he literally built things that are on the international space station. Um who else? like we have somebody that landed a p a rover on Mars. We had the creator of DevOps but the **[12:34]** war. We had the first Argentinian like South American chess champ grandmaster of uh uh chess in and we had great line of speakers and they did okay. We sent 122 uh emails 34% no sorry uh 33,000 people read it. So that's 27%. 6,000 people clicked on it. Uh so the CTR means like 5% conversion here and CTO CTOR convers uh clickthrough open rate was **[13:04]** 18%. Which by an industry average that's okay it's good. Uh but then we discovered this feature that Maltic has and I'm sure every other provider has the same where you can build dynamic emails. So based on conditions you can actually tailor every email that goes out. And I'm not just talking about like hey Ariel or hey Juan Paulo or hey whatever. you can actually change the content of the the email. So what we did here was again do the same and instead of putting like the whole like the the **[13:34]** lineup the speakers lineup we built their own ones and I'm like using this because these are actual timelines and I don't want anybody to feel offended. Uh but we build custom like custom like talks recommended talks for everybody. Can you guess if you did it better or worse? Better. Of course. Better. Thank you. So, we sent out pretty much the same amount. Uh, we had a slightly better like 30% uh open rate. Uh, but we had twice, trust me on this one, we had twice as much people clicking. Uh, we **[14:06]** had almost twice as much CTR and almost like 30 like 31% versus 18% conversion like to open rate just because we were like customizing each email. So we really increased the chances of people actually wanting to attend the conference not to maybe watch Ken Thompson which I love but maybe people don't really care about Unix or go they are JavaScript developers. Uh but here I'm telling you like go watch like this that you know Java 8 or backend talk because I know that you care about that. So for us like segmentation is is key **[14:38]** thing. Sorry. Uh and this is how we do it like very simply we have all the attending information. So that was my record over there. Um, so I'm a devil's engineer, 20 years of experience. I use a technology stack like Linux, Bash, AWS, whatever here. And on the other half, we have like the talk information provided by the speakers. So we have the title, the track, the target audience, and the tags. So this is pretty much like a oneonone like matching thing. So you match the the position to the track. You match the years of experience to the target audience and you tag the you **[15:10]** match the tags and the the technology stack and you get this beautiful email that you are going to imagine right now uh where I get like my uh recommended talks and again we increase a lot by a lot the the opportunity of people actually showing up all of this without using any AI like we don't really yeah probably this is the first slide that you see no AI in the conference thank Uh so this is very simple to do like on Modic you have you can build your own **[15:41]** dynamic content. So for example here I have like position like technology using like this is UX Figma or the illustrator position designer or UX and then I complete that with UX here and on the HTML I have like remember the remember the six like thumbnails. All I do here is a image source that points to my endpoint with dynamic content here, dynamic content here, dynamic content here. And that's how you build like a very simple thing without using AI. **[16:13]** Other ways to use email that the other way that we are using email is to improve people's like experience. So whenever you come to the event as many events, you have your QR code. So this is like the registration uh place and people have their QR codes in hand and they need to be scanned in order to validate that they are like real like attendees. So whenever your code was scanned we had a web hook that basically send you an email like saying hey welcome to the venue. These are the top things that we need you to do in the **[16:44]** the first five minutes that you step a foot on the conference and we do it every day. So here's the Wi-Fi password. Here's the schedule. Here's the app that you need to download. these are the social media accounts that you need to follow or tweet or like post or whatever. Uh we do care about social media. We love social media and we care that people use social media when when they are on the event. I want people to sign up via email because I know they are more likely to come. But once you are on the event, you're not going to shoot any emails like you're going to post on Twitter, you're going to post on Instagram. So I do want you to use **[17:15]** social media here. very quickly. Some things that you need to have in mind if you are going to start your like um email marketing campaign. Uh DNS stuff. You need somebody that's really like really wise in like technical stuff because if you mess up your DNS DNS configuration, your emails are not going to go anywhere or they're going to go to spam. Um you need to be sending consistent volume. So if you try to send out like the first days 50,000 emails, that's not going to work. You need to warm up. you need to start **[17:46]** sending by smaller chunks. Um, keep your spam rates below actually one. 0.1%. Monitor your campaigns. So, if you're sending a campaign and you start getting a lot of bounces, a lot of like spam reports, post the campaign. Do whatever you need to to solve for it. But do not keep sending emails if you are getting flagged like real time because you're going to be shooting us off on the foot. Um, and then of course use clear and honest like display names. one click unsubscribe is something that we all appreciate as users. Uh and you can use **[18:16]** Beanie to get your logo on the on the email client. Also be aware of your sending limits. We just got upgraded thanks AWS. We were sending 14 uh emails per second. We doubled that pretty much. So that means like 1,800 per minute. And this is how we on Mic you need to use Chromes to send emails. Uh so it runs every minute uh with a time limit of 55 seconds and we allow it to send only 1700 just in case something happens. Uh but this is a way to keep emails like we **[18:46]** use an email queue and also we throttle it depending on how we are doing. Uh but this is something important like again motic is free it's open source is great but you do need to take care of this again for us we are all Camins and we know how to do it if not we will have to rely on send grid or all of these other vendors. Uh also Nordic you need to close the loop like again we are using the API to communicate to SCS and then SCS uses SMTP to go to Gmail or to the email provider. Uh if you get a bounce, if you **[19:18]** get an error, you need to report that back to Moric because otherwise it's not going to know that an error happened and it's going to try to keep sending emails to the same email address that's no longer valid. So you're going to get flagged. You are going to be paying for that email in the end and it's in nobody best interest to do that. So you need to do this manually. It's pretty tedious, but it's pretty straightforward to get them into your do not contact information. So in this case, like recipient address rejected, user unknown. So this was a user that was deleted out of somebody's like email **[19:48]** server. And finally, uh, Hotmail. I don't know if anybody had to deal with sending emails to Hotmail. You know my pain here. I don't know. I I don't know if anybody here works at home mails or if you do like let's meet outside. Um it was too painful. We ended up deciding not sending emails at least not through SCS. So we use swap car as our event platform and we they get to hotmails in **[20:18]** some ways that we don't understand. Uh so we ended up building like this segment where we filter the email domains that equals hotmail outlookive.com or hotmail. uh s and we don't send emails to them anymore using multic at least or using SCS. We do communicate to these people which is a very small portion of our audience but still relevant to us of course but we are using something else because they can they can actually get to hotmail for some reason it was a long time since we like for a long time we couldn't now **[20:50]** since we improved thanks Eduardo a lot of things on our DNS it's working better but still we we rely more on on swap for that so what's next for us uh regarding email marketing we are having now faster campaigns delivery thanks to AWS that bumped our like sending limits. Uh we are going to go like bigger on granularity on dynamic emails to get more like better recommendations for our for our users. More AB testing. We are not really using AB testing right now which you should be using AB testing for **[21:22]** some reason we are not. I know the reason it's not we are not creative enough with the email subjects to do AB testing but we should be doing that. uh we are also going to try to use the mount expo system and I'm sure this also happens in every other platform. You can assign users points for actions. So for example, if they click an on if they open an email, you give them one point. If they open a if they click on a link, they you give them three points. If they click on two links, you give them six points. If they show up to your events, you give them 20 points. If they show up to two events, you give them 40 points or whatever. And then you can build **[21:53]** segments or stages or tiers and take action. So if you have a user that has 100 points, you can invite them to a VIP party or something like that. Uh we are going to also leverage unsubscribe groups on Moric. You can declare this different unsubscribe groups for different people. So we run Moric for Nola but also for other things that we do as a community. So we want people to be to be able to unsubscribe for different things without unsubscribing from the whole of the instance. So that's coming up this year. And yeah, I **[22:24]** sorry I we are going to use some AI for sure and recommendations and stuff. So D is not dead really. It's far from dead. Use it and thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay, I think we might have time for one question because then we're going to all be heading up for the final keynote panel. But yes, let's go ahead and ask the question. **[22:56]** >> Thank you. Um, hi, I'm Daniel. We're also using Mic, but at a much smaller scale. So, our badges are around 4 to 8,000 emails, I would say. So, if nobody else wants to ask a question, I will take this opportunity to ask you for your favorite not so obvious feature in Motic. So, maybe something we could steal and also use. are using are using the points system. That's the key thing that I want to try that I'm most excited about next. Uh **[23:27]** because you can do that. You can actually start like rewarding behavior. So if somebody opens a email, you give them one point. If they click on email, you give them three points. If they do something, they download a white paper or whatever, you give them more points. And then you like they start bubbling up. So right away you you can see actually on the segments who's more engaged and you can do stuff with them like or you realize that okay these people are really like you can build like the marketing funnels around it. So like conversion like okay these people **[23:58]** this person is ready to go to our next stage or maybe we could upsell them that here's an opportunity they downloaded this white paper we can upsell them whatever I don't know what is it that that that you do as a product but I will use that and the other thing I was going to say uh well this like building dynamic emails is great also on modic you can build like these forms the other great thing about modic is that you can build web like landing pages and web forms so for example if you go to our web page the like the sign up for the newsletter that goes directly into Moric. Uh, but you can do like download **[24:30]** this white paper or whatever and you get their contact information and you let them download some assets so PDF or whatever you have and you put them right back into MAI and you update the information and everything. So, point systems and subscribe groups as I was saying like also those are great. Uh, and we just migrated to to Maltic 5. We have been running Maltic 4 until like two weeks ago. Thank you Nachi. Um, so we just upgraded to Maltic 5. It was a very painful process to migrate all the data. Uh but I'm sure this has like many **[25:01]** features we haven't discovered yet. Uh also the queuing system changed a lot. I recommend using cues to be able to throttle the the sending limits and yeah try those things. Thank you.