Interview with Lauren Meyer, CMO @ SocketLabs

Lauren Meyer, Chief Marketing Officer of SocketLabs, has a unique career path in marketing and technology. We discuss the challenges faced by email marketers and Email Service Providers (ESPs) in adapting to technology and user behavior changes. Accurate tracking and negative metrics are vital for deliverability and recipient satisfaction. We explore the impact of Apple Mail tabs (IOS18) on email marketing, focusing on sender guidelines and authentication. we explored SocketLabs’ innovative solutions for ESPs, including email analytics and performance monitoring tools. Finally, we talk about AI integration in email marketing, which is highlighted for efficient campaign management, and share our love to… Pizza.

Video from the podcast:

Chapters

00:06 Discussing trusted environments
00:29 Guest Lauren Meyer introduced
02:00 Email marketing journey
03:19 Email deliverability challenges
05:04 Socket Labs role explained
06:46 Evolving email industry
10:10 Email tracking complexities
15:07 Promotions tab benefits
20:28 Emphasizing proper authentication
26:28 SocketLabs solutions unveiled
33:03 Tools for email senders
46:01 Closing with pizza talk

The main topics discussed in this podcast episode are:

• Email Deliverability – Strategies, best practices, and challenges in ensuring emails reach the inbox
• New Sender Guidelines – The recently introduced sender guidelines by Google and Yahoo (referred to as “Yahoogle”)
• Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) – The impact of Apple’s privacy changes on email open tracking
• Tabs in Email Inboxes – The role of tabs (e.g., Primary, Promotions) in email inboxes and their impact on email marketing
• SocketLabs – An overview of SocketLabs, an email delivery service with analytics solutions and new products like Spotlight
• AI in Email Marketing – The potential role of AI in email marketing and deliverability
• Send It Right Newsletter – Lauren Meyer’s new newsletter focused on educating people about email deliverability

Keywords

Some Of The Key Terms And Concepts Mentioned In The Podcast include deliverability; Email reputation; Spam Complaints; Mailbox Providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft; Email Analytics; Email Service Providers (Esps ; Artificial Intelligence (AI; Machine Learning; Large Language Models (LLMs)

Questions/Answers

Q: How has Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) impacted email open tracking, and how are email platforms responding?
A: MPP has made email open metrics unreliable as email senders have lost the ability to accurately track opens in emails. Many email platforms are ignoring MPP as it’s challenging to separate human activity from bot activity, and the technology keeps changing, requiring constant updates. Most ESPs are unlikely to embrace making opens more accurate due to the complexity and rapidly changing nature of the issue.

Q: With the new sender guidelines from Google and Yahoo (Yahoogle), what are the primary takeaways senders should know?
A: The guidelines aim to create a trusted environment for email recipients by requiring authentication on all sending domains for bulk mail. This makes it easier for mailbox providers to identify senders and separate legitimate senders from bad actors. Senders need to embrace best practices, focus on the recipient experience, and build relationships rather than just boosting stats.

Q: What role do tabs (e.g., Primary, Promotions) play in email inboxes, and should marketers be concerned about Apple’s upcoming tabs in Mail?
A: Lauren believes promotional emails belong in the Promotions tab, as recipients are in the right mindset to engage with them there. Trying to game the system and land in the Primary tab can lead to unsubscribes or spam complaints. While tabs can impact email performance, the success of landing in the Primary tab is often fleeting, and marketers should focus on providing value to recipients.

Q: What role could AI play in email marketing and deliverability?
A: AI could be used to provide better insights and recommendations for email programs, such as identifying opportunities to send more or adjust traffic shaping. However, it’s crucial to understand how the AI models work and ensure they provide recommendations aligned with best practices and deliverability goals.

Key Points & Insights

Email Deliverability Challenges: With increasing email volume and sophisticated spam/phishing attacks, mailbox providers face challenges in separating legitimate senders from bad actors, making deliverability a critical issue.
Importance of Authentication: Proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) helps mailbox providers identify senders and separate mail streams, improving deliverability for legitimate senders.
Recipient Experience: Senders should focus on providing a positive experience for recipients and building relationships rather than solely boosting metrics like open rates.
Tabs in Inboxes: Promotional emails should land in the Promotions tab, as recipients are in the right mindset to engage with them there. Trying to game the system and land in the Primary tab can backfire.
Email Analytics Challenges: Manually manipulating and analyzing email data is time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies. Solutions like Socket Labs’ Stream Score and Spotlight aim to provide better insights and reporting for email senders.
AI in Email Marketing: AI could be used to provide recommendations for optimizing email programs, but it’s crucial to ensure the AI models align with best practices and deliverability goals.
Education and Best Practices: Lauren’s newsletter “Send It Right” aims to educate senders on email deliverability best practices in an accessible and engaging way.

Quotes

“It’s really about creating a trusted environment for our mutual customers, which is email recipients.”

“The goal is really to help keep them safe, keep them happy in their inboxes, and protect our own brands from becoming targets of abuse.”

“We’re seeing the volume of emails increase year over year, and that’s a good thing.”

“Crowdstrike, unrelated to email necessarily, but a very recent example of how bad things are getting, how critical security is in our world on the Internet today.”

The goal is to provide a happier experience for customers.”

“So it’s truly time to embrace the best practices that mailbox providers have politely been suggesting for probably about a decade at this point:” The goal is to provide a happier experience for customers.”

“it’s truly time to embrace the best practices that mailbox providers have politely been suggesting for probably about a decade at this point: really just focus on the recipient.”

Link and sources discussed

– Send It Right Newsletter by Lauren Meyer

– SocketLabs (Email Service Provider)

Lauren Meyer  00:06

Think about this from the bigger picture it’s really about creating like a trusted environment for our mutual customers, which is email, recipients mailbox providers care about that and so do senders, right the goal is really to help keep them safe, keep them happy within their inboxes, and to also protect our own brands from becoming a target of abuse, right like we’re seeing volume of emails that’s increasing year over year and that’s a good thing, right but there are new attack vectors that come with that constantly. You know, cloud strike, you know, is unrelated to email, necessarily but a very recent example of how bad things are getting, how critical security is in our world on the Internet today.

Sella Yoffe  00:44

Hello and welcome to episode number seven of email geeks dot show, the podcast where once a month, the leading email experts share their knowledge about email marketing email, deliverability and the marketing. My guest today is Lauren Meyer, the Chief Marketing Officer of Socket Labs and the creator of the newsletter Send It Right. My name is Celayofi and I’m an email deliverability consultant i’m working with global email senders startups and email service providers on improving their email deliverability email authentication and email strategy and. I’m the host of this podcast. Good morning, Lauren. How are you i’m.

Lauren Meyer  01:33

Doing great thanks for having me on the show, Stella, it’s nice to see you.

Sella Yoffe  01:37

Yeah, we share love not just to email deliverability and email marketing, but also to something else. Let’s say it’s a hobby and the passion we both share. More on that later cool.

Lauren Meyer  01:52

Sounds good.

Sella Yoffe  01:53

Your career path is unique with marketing, deliverability and technological roles. Can you tell us how did you get into email?

Lauren Meyer  02:03

Well, I think I got into email the way that a lot of people did, which is spamming people just kidding, sort of honestly, you know, my first job with an email was for an affiliate marketing company who was really kind of like raking it in with that cost per click, cost per acquisition offer kind of thing that was really popular back in the early two thousands. So like I started in 2006 at the time, like whitelisting actually meant you can get your mail delivered to the inbox pretty consistently. You know, of course, until you did something wrong and they booted you off for bad behavior. You know, since then, I think I’ve really, I’ve kind of been all over the map you know, I’ve worked for a startup where I was the fifth person hired and working, you know, 16 hour days from home. You know, within that job, I think what was really fun is i sent from about 10 to 15 different ES PS off and on for the entire time that I worked there. So really helpful in my next job, which was with mail chat, which is where I started to get really deep into deliverability, compliance, things like that, right. I’ve actually worked for three different ES PS one of those was servicing mostly like Fortune 500 Fortune 100 customers, which was a really cool experience because it taught me that even if you’re a household name, you still have to abide by the rules that the mailbox providers set, right so you’ve got these people coming and getting, you know, Spamhaus listed and, you know, demanding to kind of had just have that listing removed and you’re like, well, you’re purchasing lists, you’re doing a lot of things that you shouldn’t be doing. So realizing that deliverability really did kind of apply to everybody even way back, you know, let’s say a decade ago, two of the ESPS that I worked for were kind of like little engines that could, you know, mail jet, let’s say, back in the days when everybody thought that we were just called MailChimp when I would say it because they ‘d never heard of us. Or perhaps they thought that I was, you know, working for an airline company because our logo sometimes included like a plane so that was really fun. But you know, my role there was really head of deliverability and compliance and this really meant ensuring that we allowed as many customers in the door as possible, giving them a great experience, you know, really rolling out that red carpet and then having them start to pay us while simultaneously trying to keep all the bad actors who wanted to send spam and fish through our platform out of the equation, right. This is this is really kind of quite the balancing act to kind of prevent bad while you’re enabling good when there’s a freemium model and you’re dealing with, you know, thousands and thousands of signups per month so that was really challenging. I took a stop off at Kickbox, which is where I started kind of, you know, really kind of, I guess honing my marketing chops a little bit more we were unleashing a deliverability monitoring platform at the time, which is where I got to kind of take all the things that I’ve been learning about email in the past 14 years of my career and really kind of use those to help shape what their monitoring platform should offer, You know, to really start educating people on deliverability and really kind of like how to, how to send it right and I guess, you know, it’s like probably, you know, sort of attempting to make our company sound smart so people would want to choose our brand new product over the more established players like Validity two, fifty OK, back when that was still a thing, you know, and now we bring me to Socket Labs where I’m kind of, you know, just sort of taking everything that I’ve learned from all of these different roles and trying to apply that to our marketing efforts. You know, we’re really attempting with our team to kind of create content that educates the industry. While really, you know, our fantastically talented team of product engineering folks are really building like really cool things with analytics, the things that I always dreamed about having. And it’s my job to really kind of like get that message out, let people know why this is something that they need, even though we’ve been working with really challenging analytics for the last so many long. Yeah so anyway, I guess, you know, I’m taking us down a really long road and I don’t know, we want to go there so basically I’ve been in email for 18 years since I fell into that pothole in the street that we call email Yeah i’ve spent, let’s say I’ve sent a little bit of spam, a whole lot of ham, and I very much believe in using your data to justify what best practices you really need to be following and how to identify what your next best move is going to be with email.

Sella Yoffe  06:06

It seems that now and then someone, usually a big tech, is trying to kill email, or at least disrupted. Apple MPP was a significant disruptor as email senders lost their ability to track opens in emails. Email open metrics are now usually bloated due to Apple MPP. That was in late 2021 but still I see many email platforms ignoring MPP. What do you think about that?

Lauren Meyer  06:39

Yeah you know, I think there’s there are just so many reasons why ES PS are kind of doing this, right. You know, first I think we kind of just need to talk about the fact that there is just so much that’s changing with email right now, right like there’s privacy, there are security issues that we’re trying to kind of protect our users from. Then there’s also like legislation like GDPR in Europe, Castle in Canada, CCPA in California so all of these things are really kind of coming together to really shape what the future of emails looking like. You know, it’s really the goal is to kind of provide a happier experience for customers, right and you know, I just, I think there’s so many reasons why these vendors are not doing this, right first of all, you know, it’s not easy to separate human activities from bot activities. You know, technology just kind of keeps changing and even when there’s like very smart people who have attempted to do this, they’ve spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, it’s still really hard to feel good about the accuracy of kind of what you’re reporting on, particularly when you’re considering that customers are using that information to determine who they should send to in the future that’s a very big responsibility for an E. S P i think when you, when you think about that, the technology changes that are happening again, you know, you’re asking somebody to go back to a dev when there’s a new change in the process to push another update live, right which I don’t know if any of you have ever worked with product or engineering teams, They want to ship new features and then they want to probably kind of never hear about them again unless there’s something that they can do to make that feature more attractive to their customers. So then, you know, you’re really just kind of stuck to siding between do you want to distract your devs from building awesome new features again, because they’re the technology changes just keep happening or do you want customers starting to question the accuracy of your reporting because you’re not keeping up with those changes? And I think that just kind of, you know, opens this whole Pandora’s box of issues because if customers can’t trust the data that they’re seeing from you, they’re going to start to question other things about the way that your platform and your service works, which ultimately is going to just like lead to churn or at the very least, I would say just like a large number of support tickets that your team is dealing with that cost money that’s stressful for your team it opens up new areas of risk for churn as well. And then you add in the fact that a lot of email service providers have technical debt pretty much all over the place, which means that, you know, from the outside view, what seems like a very simple and obvious feature that every ESP should be doing from the marketer view, it’s actually going to require ES PS to sort of like rebuild some of the core infrastructure because a lot of these platforms have been around for fifteen twenty five years at this point, right? So I think you know what we’re talking about those servers that kind of sit and collect dust in the basement and nobody wants to touch that one black box server because who wants to be the one to knock that down, right it’s been working since the founder put it in place and nobody wants to touch it so I think, you know, this is a massive change for ES PS to kind of deal with. And it’s one that’s going to require like a lot of scoping and research before it could even be added to the product road map. And then on top of that, I think, you know, there’s just, there’s so many issues i’m sorry, i just keep going here but like, you know, there is the fact that a lot of the bigger, more well established ES PS have been acquired by non email companies who maybe don’t understand or kind of prioritize building new email features they’ve kind of put that platform into maintenance mode mode so there’s like this misalignment in plans for the future of the company and that’s only going to get harder to get this to the top of the road map, right like you, you’re fighting against multi channel, you’re fighting against push, you’re fighting against SMS, all these other things and I think keep in mind, you know, we’re talking about Apple MPP here that was your question, solo but it’s not just Apple who’s triggering these kind of open events, right for example, Yahoo preloads images in some cases, so does Gmail. So Esps would really kind of have to account for those prefetched opens for those providers too, which adds even more complexity to the, you know, what data the ES PS need to be collecting to be able to build those new reports. And then, you know, by the time they do that, Apple or one of these other providers is going to pivot again, change something in the way that they kind of, you know, were able to track that information. You know, it’s, maybe we’ll have another provider announce something similar, right so for all these reasons, i just, I don’t think ES PS are ever really going to embrace trying to make opens more accurate. You know, ultimately, yeah, separating out that bot activity from humans is really just a hard nut to crack and I just, I think most Esps are going to decide that it’s, you know, it’s the juice isn’t really worth the squeeze, I guess you could say. Not with how quickly changes are happening in this industry. I just don’t see it.

Sella Yoffe  11:20

You know, it’s a classic Catch 22 We will talk about the new senders guidelines later. However, part of those guidelines is to send emails to people who want to get your emails. As marketers we don’t have the data open metrics are bloated because of MPP and clicks bloated in some cases because of bots are clicking on emails. We call it non human interactions. If we don’t have the data, how can we comply with the new sender’s guidelines which say to send emails to people who want to get your emails?

Lauren Meyer  11:58

Yeah well, I, you know, I think there’s been so much focus on the positive metrics, right we always talk about opens and clicks and click through rates and conversions and things like that but I think often times people don’t focus enough on the negative metrics so unsubscribes do not hurt your deliverability, but they do signal a problem like a negative sentiment within your recipient base, people who don’t want to receive your emails anymore so I think you should look into those but spam complaints as well, right one of the main requirements from Yahoo and Google’s new list is to keep your spam complaints low, right below 3 at all times, below 1 as often as possible, right you shouldn’t see any spikes and I think it’s, you know, we just, we need to rely on the full picture of data that we have from recipients and not just opens, which, you know, they’ve never really been reliable they’ve always been indicative of a machine that’s kind of loading up some data. Obviously that’s sometimes driven by humans, but I think it’s just more follow the larger trends stop trying to look so closely at what happens when you sent to <a href=”bob@hotmail.com”>bob@hotmail.com</a> necessarily, but just what happened when you sent to all those people what is the overall sentiment of that segment that you’re sending to?

Sella Yoffe  13:12

With the release of iOS 18, Apple is disrupting the inbox once again with tabs in Apple Mail. As we record this podcast, we don’t have enough data on the effect of Apple Mail tabs on the email, industry but we can learn from tabs from other mailbox providers such as Gmail. What do you think about tabs? Should email marketeers be worried? Not yeah.

Lauren Meyer  13:40

Well, this is a fun one this is a very polarizing topic, so thank you for this, Stella. You know, it’s funny because Google first released their tabbed inbox experience over a decade ago and I remember when marketers were really upset about that and then there was a bunch of reports that came out maybe like a year later that kind of showed, hey, like this isn’t really a problem everything’s kind of fine if you look at your open rates, they’re still pretty much just chugging along the way that they did before, you know, and that was, that was a really long time ago, like a like, you know, a full 10 years ago so, you know, i’ve seen people talk about how they are making so much more money when they land in the primary tab of these inboxes, but I have yet to see any actual data that supports that beyond just extremely anecdotal use cases of somebody saying, Oh yeah, the day that we think we went, like, how do you even know that you went to the primary tab yes, there is seed testing to try to directionally help you with that but it’s just, there’s so many variables that make this really hard to understand you know, I am, I am personally very firmly in the camp that believes that the promotional email belongs in that promotional tab that you shouldn’t be trying to game the system. You know, honestly, you know, when you think about this, email recipients are in the right frame of mind to purchase something when they’re in that promotions tab, which means you’re going to have higher conversion rates when they actually do start to engage you know, it’s for me because I’m a child of the eighties it, it’s kind of like going to the mall, right when I’m ready to shop, I’m going to go to the mall, I’m going to hit the stores, I’m going to spend a whole bunch of money and then I’m not going to think about shopping again for maybe a couple of months or something, right? The promotions tab lets me think about spending money on my terms when it’s convenient for me, not when it’s convenient to the person who’s trying to sell me stuff, which i think is, you know, it’s super easy to do because email’s not fleeting the way that social media is, right like I could wrap up, rack up 100 different emails from multiple brands over the course of a couple months that are all within like the same category maybe I’m trying to buy AI don’t know a bathing suit or something like that, right. You know, these are all just a search term away from me within my promotions tab so I can kind of see who’s got a sale, who’s got the best, the best, you know, designs that I’m looking for things like that, right. So I think that’s super helpful but then on the other hand, you know, figure when you are not in your promotions tab, you’re not really in the right frame or mind to be getting pitched to be receiving promotional content that’s mixed in between emails from your friends, your family that are about your weekend plans, you know, basically things like that or maybe a newsletter or two that you have told Gmail that you find very important and you want to land in your inbox, perhaps like the Send it Right newsletter that I’ve just started but anyway, you know, I think you figure you want to get that stuff that’s promotional out of the way when you’re in your primary tab and you’re focusing on like the rest of your life, which means I’m personally going to drag that over to the promotional tab anyway, or maybe unsubscribe if I’m being nice. If I’m not, I might mark it as spam because, you know, maybe I don’t remember why I signed up or if I even signed up because it’s in my, in my primary tab i’m just, I’m not really thinking about that stuff, right and then, you know, we should also talk about, you know, all the change that we keep seeing within our industry, right we talked about this earlier, but you know, any success that you tend to have with getting males into the primary tab is so fleeting. Like it’s, you know, by the time that you kind of try to keep sending and replicating what you think maybe have worked, that window probably closed or it really was just some sort of anecdotal success so I think it’s you really kind of have to focus on just, you know, sending it, right stop trying to force your way into people’s lives in a way that’s convenient for you, and instead really just spend time focusing on, you know, how can you surprise and delight and add value to your users day in some way shape or form, even when that mail is landing where it belongs, which is in the promotional tab?

Sella Yoffe  17:23

Yeah, another mega event in the email industry is Google and Yahoo News Sender Guidelines. We call it in the with the funny name Yahoo Girl. You recently hosted the webinar with the people from both Yahoo and Gmail. What are, you know, the primary takeaways center should they know about the new center guidelines?

Lauren Meyer  17:48

Yeah well, first of all, I think don’t call it Yahoo or Goohoo or anything else anymore i think Clea Moore, the representative I spoke to from Yahoo made it super clear that it’s not really about Google or Yahoo, right? It’s really much larger than that and I think actually since their announcement, Microsoft has gone on, well, verbal record, let’s say, saying that they are actually going to be reinforcing this, having some sender requirements that are at least, you know, pretty similar to those, if not exactly the same so think about this from the bigger picture it’s really about creating like a, like a trusted environment for our mutual customers, which is email, recipients mailbox providers care about that. So do senders, right the goal is really to help keep them safe, keep them happy within their inboxes, and to also protect our own brands from becoming a target of abuse, right like we’re seeing volume of emails that’s increasing year over year and that’s a good thing, right but there are new attack vectors that come with that constantly. You know, cloud strike, you know, is unrelated to email, necessarily but a very recent example of how bad things are getting, how critical security is in our world on the Internet today. You know, Clea put this into context by kind of saying that, you know, about 95 % of the email that Yahoo receives on any given day is like really bad stuff, phishing, malware, other stuff that they don’t even accept into their servers the stuff that us humans like really, honestly don’t really think about very often. It’s really kind of that remaining like 5 % of the mail that they’re accepting into their servers that’s kind of either Gray or white and they’re trying to sort out which percent, you know, which folks within that 5 % are actually trusted senders that people want to hear from and which ones are potentially dangerous folks that they need to keep away from their users and honestly, AI is just making this tougher and it’s accelerating the volume it’s making, you know, spam much more sophisticated it’s easier to fall for phishing attacks at this point. And this just makes that task much more challenging for mailbox providers to kind of separate things out, especially, you know, if you’ve got folks that are falling for phishing attempts. If they’re not marking that as fish, then you know, from the mailbox providers view that could actually be seen as positive engagement. I’m not sure how their filters work for sure, but consider they’re looking at engagement, right so it really is important for us to kind of, you know, secure our brands i think you know Dan Gibel from Google put this as like there is no better time to be more secure. The more quickly you set up authentication, the less likely you’re going to be an attractive target for spammers, for fishers, for these bad actors to take advantage of your domain they’ll move on to somebody else’s because like, it’s almost like, you know, you’re the faster person running away from the bear, right so they’re going to get eaten. You’re not going to get eaten hopefully, right so I think that’s super helpful but you know, really I think what these new sender requirements mean for people is that we need to understand that, you know, by requiring authentication on all of the sending domains that we’re using for bulk mail, it is just so much easier for mailbox providers to tell one sender apart from another, even one mail stream within a certain senders kind of, you know, portfolio, they can tell those apart really easily and that means that senders who are, you know, are really not doing right by email are getting the deliverability that they deserve now more than they ever have in the past and I think that means that you really you got to send it right like no more loopholes, no more workarounds. It’s truly time to kind of embrace the best practices that mailbox providers have really politely been suggesting for probably about a decade at this point. Really just focus on the recipient, focus on making sure that they’re having a wonderful experience and that you’re connecting with them you’re building a relationship as opposed to just trying to boost your stats, right like these are humans we’re sending to.

Sella Yoffe  21:32

Right, what do you think will be the next step? Because I’ll give you an example. Yahoo is saying that D Mark should have an ROA tag, Gmail not so much not telling that this is a requirement at the moment.

Lauren Meyer  21:54

Yeah, I’m sad that they haven’t. My guess is that they’re trying to kind of breadcrumb this out where they’re like, we just need you to get the record in place and then from there we know that we can kind of step you up but I think it’s important to remember that the second to last letter in D Mark stands for reporting. The whole point is to be able to kind of see what’s happening, what activity is happening within your domain, what’s being sent that’s not passing authentication so maybe this is just you setting up an invalid record and kind of failing some of your mail so it’s a good way to be able to kind of track that and fix those issues. But it also could let you know of potential kind of outside factors that are affecting your deliverability so imagine if you’re getting somebody who’s using your domain for phishing attempts, you might be getting fish reports associated with your domain it’s not coming from you. Perhaps you see that the characters within your Demark reports are in Russian or some other language that you don’t send in, right like in those cases, you know, it’s just, it’s very easy for you to tell what’s going on so i really wish they would have required that but if you folks are setting up your D mark records, get the reporting in place be aware of the fact that eventually, maybe a couple years down the road from this point, these providers are going to require you to probably go from AP equals none policy where you’re just monitoring to something like AP equals quarantine where you’re basically telling them if the mail doesn’t pass authentication, keep it away from the inbox and put it somewhere else, right so take the time now to do it, set it up properly, monitor those reports. It’s kind of a pain, but once you get used to it really is valuable information that shouldn’t take you that much time to monitor.

Sella Yoffe  23:33

I think we can agree that many senders, you know, just rely on the platform to do it all the they’re not understanding the delicate ecosystem of email. And as you say, they need to know how to send it, right but they’re not at the moment.

Lauren Meyer  23:54

Yeah, And you know, I think I feel like ES PS have sort of enabled this not out of want to mislead customers or make them not be able to send it the way that they should but I think it’s really just, you know, ES PS want to make it easy they want users to come on the platform, find it wonderful right from the beginning, have a good experience as opposed to going through very technical setup before they can even send a test. You know, like we want that we want people to get sticky with our platforms, but there’s all these kind of things that are challenging and hard to explain and require a lot of support from your customer support teams. You know, I know there’s been cases where our support team jumped on calls with customers to work through authentication issues, you know, for twenty thirty minutes and it’s like it’s a valuable time those customers really appreciated it now they’re sending it, right but at the same time, that is a lot of resources for ES PS that are supporting hundreds, thousands of customers.

Sella Yoffe  24:48

Until the new sender guidelines, Gmail allowed marketeers to use their personal Gmail as their email address they are sending from with their ESP. So it’s a huge change in my opinion.

Lauren Meyer  25:02

It is yeah and I think that’s, you know, maybe it was naive for mailbox providers to think that when they recommended something that a lot of people are going to do it like you get the early adopters and any kind of technology so best practices, right but like even me for D Mark, I want to say that at least the first couple of years that it existed, I would hear about it at conferences and then hear this is probably not something you need to worry about for a while and I would kind of just check out because even just the letters D Mark, I was like, oh, my brain, I don’t want to think about this and I didn’t have to yet, right so I think it’s when you get senders who are focused on their business, not on email right like, I think we all sit in this nice little, you know, knitting circle within the email. Groups we understand this stuff, we’re passionate about this stuff everybody else is just using email to facilitate their business to get to their goals, right? And so I think we kind of forget about that of just like this is just a ton of red tape, right i just set up my newsletter for send it, right and it’s like, even for me, who is an email, person i, was like oh, am I doing this correctly like where do I go to set this up where do I create my D Kim record like, oh, this is more challenging than I would have liked, right so I’m just, I’m imagining how difficult that is for somebody who is trying to trying to do that it’s, you know, it’s hard when you’re not used to this stuff.

Sella Yoffe  26:17

Over the past years you’re you’ve been a part of Socket Labs. Could you explain to people what is Socket Labs for those who don’t know?

Lauren Meyer  26:28

Yeah, sure so Socket Labs is basically an email service provider we’ve been providing service to the industry for about 17 years or so now. Our platform is very similar to like a Sendgrid amail gun, Amazon SES we support mainly transactional senders as you mentioned, Sella, but we’ve also got, you know, lots of marketing people as well, people sending through APISMTP all kinds of stuff. Essentially, I think, you know, we’ve just got incredibly powerful pipes that help people reach the inbox and that’s really what we’ve been known for in the past. But we’ve kind of taken a hard left into email analytics in the last couple of years, right? So that’s been fun too.

Sella Yoffe  27:06

You recently developed two exceptional solutions, especially for email service providers. Could you provide additional information about each of those and elaborate on what makes them so unique that’s.

Lauren Meyer  27:20

Right Yeah, Well, thank you, first of all, because I’m glad you love it as much as I do i honestly, like I’ve been working in email for 17 years and it’s like I just over the years, I think we’ve all gotten used to just working with sort of table scraps of data and putting together these pictures and like we’re just, we’re almost like patchwork quilters at this point because we’re so good at just being like, oh, data from over here, data from over here let me put it together, let me put it into a pivot table, let me throw it into ABI tool like we’re doing all these things without really kind of thinking about how much work that is and you know, i basically socket Labs a couple of years ago, we just, we brought on a bunch of people that their history is working for ES PS for deliverability and security vendors, things like that. And honestly, I mean, we just, we think that the industry is underpowered when it comes to email, analytics right like obviously we all want to have powerful sending pipes reach the inbox, but like part of the way that you do that is by monitoring your performance and that’s just incredibly hard, incredibly time consuming and quite honestly, not that accurate because the data we’re using is flawed and we’re all manually manipulating it so it’s like, how much are you paying attention that day how tired were you were you hangry what were you doing? Is that data accurate right and so I think it’s really for me, it’s not about building a smarter pipe to send through it’s really about kind of, you know, building like smarter applications kind of around that pipe to make it smarter, right which is why I think, you know, in the past few years, we have really delved deep into creating tools that enable operators who are managing, managing their center reputation and the performance of their ESP customers or maybe they’re a brand, an enterprise brand who has lots of different mail streams, lots of different divisions and email groups and all these things and everyone’s kind of doing it right we’ve got some higher Ed customers who just have lots of different like, you know, schools within their university, lots of different departments they’ve got alumni sending stuff, they’ve got, you know, people trying to get in, you know, new students and rolled and there’s just a lot of complexity and a lot of moving parts and so we wanted to make that really easy, right so I think, you know, there’s just there’s so many ways you can do that so I think, you know, one of those is just having really robust like email, permissions user permissions so that you can really delegate access to keep people focused on like what their day-to-day is, right if you’re the one sending email, you need the tools to be able to send and monitor, but maybe you’re just in charge of the configuration, right you’re an IT or dev or something like that so giving you that access as opposed to the person who’s sending maybe you just need to see reports or pay the bills, keep the lights on, right so like whatever your role is, that was one step. We’re really working to improve the way that people send. So this I think started a couple years ago with our stream score, which really just kind of like dives deeply into all that lovely first and third party data that’s available with email, right it’s such a robust channel, but the data is flawed, right so we’re pulling in stuff like Google Postmaster tools, your spam trap and block listing feeds, bounce responses that are specific there and really just, you know, kind of trying to provide a snapshot of your email reputation down to the sending domain or the customer level if you’re an ESP, right and this really allows people to have kind of like that quick diagnosis by issue type for all their senders, right is it a list collection issue is it an engagement issue is it reputation based it’s something that we’re seeing from the mailbox providers like what does that look like? And then we kind of pair that information with guidance on what’s driving that issue, what steps you probably need to take to resolve it. And then like, you know, once we kind of got that stream score into a really solid place, like looking at all the edge cases, really trying to make sure that the confidence level in that is high across our entire customer base. We really wanted to build out a bunch of different reports on top of that, right so like we’ve got, you know, sort of the table stakes type of reporting that gives you know, your dashboard, but then also like your delivery reports, failure reports, complaints and bounce reports, your message details so that you can see all the way down to like the bounce details and the responses within that Jason event log, right so like getting really detailed for the folks that are power users at the ESP is the ones who really kind of understand the tooling and sort of where to look within those haystacks to find their needles but i think, you know, then there’s also kind of like those less experienced users, which I can tend to say is probably like the majority of people sending emails so you know, let’s say if you’re an ESP person who’s working in deliverability compliance or you’re in customer support or customer success, you’re tasked with identifying issues quickly, trying to resolve them before they cause damage, explaining to the customer what happened and why, and probably why it’s not your ES PS fault because they often times think that, But then also like creating enough of a story, providing enough information to be able to help that person affect change, right to get their decision makers on board to be able to change what needs to change to be able to reach the inbox more effectively, right so like we just keep creating these tools for better reporting. And then we’ve got something called rule engine that basically allows practitioners to make changes to their traffic, shaping their IP pull setups, all of those configuration things that typically you have to go and kind of ask a dev person to help you with and kind of wait a couple weeks after you filed that ticket. You can make those changes directly within our UI or send us an API call and we’ll be able to push that for you. And people have really just been creating some really unique rule sets here that just allow them to make this very specific to the quality of senders, the traffic that they’re seeing through their platform, right being able to kind of set those different reputation based shared pools, if they’ve got those or things like that so that’s been great. I think ultimately the last thing about this is where we really come into to spotlight, right so all of this reporting has been available for our customers, but we realized that, you know, not everybody is in a place where they can migrate all of their traffic over to Socket Labs as an ESP. You know, we get, we get some of that traffic, but it’s only a portion of what they’re sending, especially for these larger, you know, ESP types where they really care about redundancy and things like that, right so we decided to just take all these tools that our customers have been enjoying and make them available to senders of other platforms so we started with Sendgrid and Mailgun, since there’s a lot of folks who are using one or both of those platforms and need kind of a unified view of all their customers and all their sending data. And next we’re going to be adding, you know, Amazon SES, probably Spark post or bird after that. And really the goal here is just giving ES PS better insights into like the individual customers that they’re using with sort of like a stream monitor, right so then you can see which ones have the lowest stream scores, which ones maybe have a higher urgency score because something has changed very recently so instead of going in and just jumping in and out of each account and hoping you find something or hoping you don’t find an issue and you can just kind of focus your day specifically into, to what happens and just drill down within, you know, 3 clicks land on the problem, send that report to your customer success manager, have them proactively reach out to the customer, share that information and get ahead of that problem as opposed to kind of waiting for the opposite, which is the customer complaining and then you scrambling to figure out what it is and spending hours in reporting so yeah, it, it’s really exciting and you know, we’ve got free trials going we’ve got a bunch of customers coming on board now so if you’re interested, contact me i’d love to show it to you and at least even just get your feedback.

Sella Yoffe  34:20

And the next step is adding the rule engine to spotlight so yeah, that’s.

Lauren Meyer  34:25

Where the magic really happens, honestly.

Sella Yoffe  34:29

Cool, because that that’s basically a huge challenge for every ESP so every ESP then that’s the challenge. Managing the IP space, understand the data in real time, being proactive with the deliverability and the yeah, that’s a game changer in my opinion i.

Lauren Meyer  34:51

Think especially for ES PS that have a lot of customers on shared pools like figure it’s like you eventually run into an issue where somebody like Microsoft decides to block your entire shared IP range or something like that, or even just that shared IP pool and you’re sort of playing guesswork of like which customer caused it and like you’re hoping that the mailbox provider tells you or you’re hoping there’s some kind of smoking gun. Sometimes there is no smoking gun it’s just a couple of customers who kind of inched you over the edge and so I think it’s just being able to identify those quickly deal with them but again, try to proactively get ahead of that so you identify that customer when their stats are kind of just a little stinky as opposed to really problematic. We are talking to a lot of ES PS right now and it’s amazing how even from the outside view, even when they’re competitors, the inside looks a little bit different and so I think that’s where we see all these different custom implementations of tools and the way their data works and where it’s stored and how easily they can access or compute it and all these things and it’s like often times, you know, let’s say if you, if you’re an ESP that’s using Sendgrid, a lot of those platforms have been set up, a lot of those accounts have been set up where all the customers are dumped into what’s up one sub account so figure then from there you’re looking at them as if they’re one customer and so being able to kind of split that out, we’ve got something called Supertags, which kind of is like a layer deeper within metadata so it’s like you can start to tag things to be able to separate that out so even if you’re a Sendgrid customer, start sending us your data and then we can give you a view, a stream score into every single one of your customers without you having to make any changes to your configuration or your setup with Sendgrid so I think it’s, we’re really trying to just, yeah, like enable smarter sending without having to kind of make the pipe itself smarter, just really giving people better insights that they can do what they want with.

Sella Yoffe  36:38

Ai is in the center of attention right now with everyone and everything using it somehow. Putting the hype aside, what role would you like AI to have in email marketing that would be impactful?

Lauren Meyer  36:55

Yeah, I, you know, I think it’s interesting because AI is just all the rage right now, right and there’s all these tools coming out particularly for, you know, things that within generative AI, right, like to creating certain types of content but I think it’s, you know, there’s two types of sort of things that come into play with AI, right that there’s machine learning, which, yeah, people have been doing for over a decade, if not 20 years, right like there are these internal data sets that folks have been using to kind of try to, you know, come up with ways to view their data, to view their customer quality, things like that. It’s honestly, we created stream score using machine learning, not actual AI, right so we’re training up these models. I think what you need to do is have a really good sense of what your data is and then the part that has sort of been very popular with an AI recently is the large language models, right the LLMS. So what you know, I think people are confusing is like you’ve got machine learning, you’ve got the LLM that really needs to just sit on top and sort of do what you’re telling it to. So the more important part is making sure that your data is incredibly secure, that you’re crunching it in the right way, right if we’re using this for email, purposes making sure that you have somebody who understands what is most important within email or within deliverability or whatever you’re trying to do and then optimizing around that and then you find the right LLM to sit on top of it, right because there’s multiple like I think right now my, our company is testing like eight different ones to kind of figure out which one or ones would be the most beneficial to us but I think it’s just, it’s very challenging for people to understand what AI is, what it does but it’s one of those like it’s just creating lots of kind of black boxes where people don’t really understand where the output is coming from, how it’s being computed. You know, i think that’s really one of the challenges we’re seeing right now.

Sella Yoffe  38:42

I’m curious to know your thoughts about the role of AI in deliverability.

Lauren Meyer  38:49

Yeah, Well, I think, you know, I don’t want to spoil what we’re working on because my product team will probably kill me but essentially, I mean, I think we’re looking because we’re so data-driven we really care about putting email data to good use like we’re looking to use that to kind of better hone the insights that we’re sharing, right so not just kind of showing you, hey, there’s a problem, there’s a fire that you need to put out, here’s where it is and what’s causing it. But actually kind of getting more into like the positive parts of email, the parts that marketers love, the parts that deliverability people don’t have time to care about but just like, hey, like this one mail stream is doing fantastic you could probably send more often there, or you could send more smartly if you segment this list into a couple different ways. Or hey, you can change the traffic shaping on this we’re seeing the certain bounce message if you adjust this way, that will help you and like, you know, so I think there’s lots of opportunities for people to kind of, you know, pour gasoline on their email programs and the right ways, but also know when to kind of pump the brakes and so I think that’s the role that I see within AI right now it’s purely, you know, generative i know some people are getting into segmentation, which is awesome, but I really think it’s one of those like we’ll be able to use it to kind of take away those hours of number crunching that all of us deliver ability people love so much like I’m going to miss it, but you know, Brian from our team was actually looking into an issue for a customer not too long ago and it’s one of those it was very. Challenging issue there was a lot going on. I think it, you know, maybe it took him about two hours to kind of really kind of put that whole investigation together and honestly, Brian is one of the most smart individuals in deliverability if you ask me so like maybe that would have taken me three or four or five hours i don’t know what it would have taken i didn’t do it thankfully, but we threw that into the AI that our team is looking at. They landed on the same exact problem within like less than 30 seconds. So like, you know, it’s one of those like he is very hard to impress. And Brian was like, oh, that’s cool. You know, so I think it’s, there are things that AI can do, but I think it’s really important for us to understand like, how is the sausage being made, right is that an organic sausage that we know is going to be healthy for us kind of sausage is not very healthy, but, or is it going to be, you know, something that kind of leads us astray and you know, pushes us to do things like imagine if you have an AI that’s like, you’re not seeing enough activity, you’re not seeing enough opens, just send more. Like, that’s not the answer when you’re dealing with a very unengaged population, like you need to mix up the content, right so having it be able to give smart recommendations that actually apply to your email, program, but also, don’t you know, shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to deliverability.

Sella Yoffe  41:25

Yeah, you recently started a new newsletter called Said It Right.

Lauren Meyer  41:34

Yes, I did.

Sella Yoffe  41:35

Great name by the way so can you tell us more about what drove, you know, to start a content initiation, you know, like that?

Lauren Meyer  41:48

I think, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been very passionate about educating people about deliverability for a very long time you know, it starts when you’re working internally and you’re just trying to get your own salespeople to follow the terms of service that you hold your customers to, or you’re trying, you’re trying to do something basic and so you’re advocating for email, you’re advocating for best practices internally but I think it’s, you know, the more people I talk to, the more I realize that, you know, it’s kind of like that 95 to 5 equation that I was talking about with you know, the really bad mail versus good mail it’s there’s so 95 % of let’s say the senders in the world don’t care about deliverability a lot of them don’t even know it exists they definitely don’t know what SPF or Deacon records look like, even if they’re still struggling with deliverability to some of those top providers. And so I really just wanted to make it easier, right i wanted people to be able to understand what matters about deliverability, how you reach the inbox, like in a way that is easily digested, right so like I try to have some fun with this stuff i throw in a lot of like metaphors and things like that to try to just make just have a little fun, right get some laughs along with your deliverability guidance and so I think that’s my goal is really just, I don’t know, it’s kind of like give everyone a crush on deliverability, throw a little bit of cooties their way i guess you could say, you know, just get them excited about doing right by email, right and you know, send it right but that that’s it i just, I want people to send it right and I want it to be easy as pie for them to do that.

Sella Yoffe  43:15

Amazing. So how can people find the and register? Obviously I will share it in the in the show notes, but say it out loud.

Lauren Meyer  43:28

Yeah, so my website is send dash it dash right dot com, I tried to find a better one, I promise, but I didn’t want to go with the TLD of dot email, as cool as that maybe would be. So, yeah so send dash it dash right dot com, I’ve got a newsletter sign up there so I’ve got a weekly newsletter that I can send to your inboxes, hopefully, since my whole thing is send it right, better reach the inbox but yeah, beyond that, I’ve got a, you know, a list of a bunch of email folks that you should be following, tools that I love to use that help me send it right, videos and upcoming events, lots of different kind of goodies for people when they’re curious about deliverability, hopefully without overwhelming you. So yeah, look at, look at my website or come find me on LinkedIn as well i’m very active there. And I’ve got a nice little link from my profile over to my website.

Sella Yoffe  44:16

Yeah, I said that the beginning that we both have share a hobby, share a passion and now is the right time to reveal what it is. So we both pizza lovers and makers so we your used to have on your LinkedIn, I think pizza lover. I think that last time I scrolled your profile it wasn’t there, but I know you still have pizza so.

Lauren Meyer  44:53

I do, I do and you know, I love pizza to the point that my five year old twins are like, you know, the other day my son was like, mom, like what we why do we eat so much pizza? I was really sad because I was like, you’re asking because you think we eat pizza too much and you’re sick of it so I get it and to be clear, it’s not that often, but it’s often enough for a kid to be annoyed by it but yeah, so I, you know, I, I’ve got one of those uni pizza making ovens so sometimes I make those it’s kind of hard to get, you know, get in the hang of it you got to kind of screw up one or two first and then you usually get some good pies, but they’re delicious. So I kind of go with like a thin crust for those. But then I also, there’s this one when I was in New York City that I used to get all the time, which is not New York City style i guess if I’m going for that, go to Grimaldi’s or Juliana’s which is the one next door but it’s just a nicer vibe. But my favorite slice i think in the whole world is from this place called ME Squared. So it’s like Detroit style pizza so it’s kind of like those square pizzas it’s got like this really buttery kind of crust and the one I like the best has like pepperoni on top and then also some like jalapenos. And then it’s also got like a drizzle of hot honey on it so it’s so good.

Sella Yoffe  46:01

We’ve probably seen the commentary on Netflix about pizza. Have you seen it?

Lauren Meyer  46:09

I haven’t seen it chef chef there.

Sella Yoffe  46:11

Is a Chef’s Table 10 episodes of pizza makers around the world amazing?

Lauren Meyer  46:20

Love that yeah.

Sella Yoffe  46:22

So thank you very much, Lauren it’s been a pleasure. And you mentioned that people can follow you both on LinkedIn and sign to your newsletter and I will put those both on the show notes that.

Lauren Meyer  46:38

Sounds awesome. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate you having me on.

Sella Yoffe  46:42

My pleasure thank you very much.