In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Learn about why email marketing stinks, why Flux.1 rules, fan service in Deadpool & Wolverine, and more!

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Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite

Are all email service providers horrible?

Mautic, MailChimp, Ghost, AWeber

Google Pixel 9

8:20 – 9:50 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Google Monopoly – Paying $20B to be the only choice kind of proves that

Canva acquires Leonardo AI (after 2 years – 19 M users!)

Chris’ GPT for event planners and webinar operators – generating seed questions

15:47 – 16:34 Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

TikTok Partners with Amazon

Speed of response huge on TikTok

Automating the MoC Newsletter

Cobra Kai and Deadpool Wolverine

Flux 1 Image Generation

RIP Crowdtangle

Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on excercises to put AI to work for you! USE CODE MOC now!

Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie

Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!

Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.

Machine Generated Transcript:

John Wall – 00:00 Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio. Justine – 00:10 This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. John Wall – 00:17 Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wahl. Cristopher Penn – 00:20 I’m Christopher Penn. John Wall – 00:22 And summer in full swing. July has just been crazy. We’ve had all kinds of stuff going on. The first one I wanted to start with is in the past week we’ve been kicking around email service providers a lot, talking about what’s going on there. And it was funny because I said to Katie, I was like, oh, I hate the way this is working. And she said, well, what else should we do? I was like, well, actually, I hate all the other email service providers even more. There’s none I love. One of the things I wanted to throw out there was to our audience, if you are somebody out there that actually loves your email service, whatever you’re using, I would love to hear from you. John Wall – 00:56 Because, yeah, to me, it just seems to be this endless battle of just picking the tool with the least pain, you know, the one that causes the least problems, but nobody kind of gets. Cristopher Penn – 01:05 It right for sending email or for processing email, for sending. So email marketing tools. John Wall – 01:11 Yeah, yeah. Email service provider, definitely. Cause, like, we’ve been using modic, which, modic is fantastic if you have somebody like you, because you keep it in order and keep it running on the servers. And so, like, I don’t think it can beat as far as the ability to hit huge, giant lists at an incredibly low cost. And I complain and whine about it now and then, but basically it’s, you just go kick the server and it does work. Like, the stuff does all work. It occasionally chokes now and then, but it’s not like it’s not there. And it’s like the A B testing is actually pretty good compared to some of the other vendors. John Wall – 01:45 I was on mailchimp for a long time in a couple different organizations, and the list management just got so weird and wonky, you know, having to manage segments and get the logic straight on that you literally had to specialize in that full time to get that right. And that’s something we’ve seen across the board for all these different vendors. You end up just having somebody that specializes in the thing and is doing all the tough lifting. But I don’t know, what have you been watching in the space lately? And like, what are you know, where’s your mind at today? Cristopher Penn – 02:12 Well, there’s a whole rise of, you know, these new ESPs, substack, ghost, et cetera. Beehive where they’re all going after the monetization model, they’re saying okay, paid newsletter is the way to go. And so they’ve, you know, they’ve been pushing really hard to say, okay, you can, you can have this newsletter on our platform. We’ll let you do it for free, but we’re going to nudge you to monetize your audience because of course we, you know, we take a slice for every transaction, which I mean that’s a good revenue model because it’s not advertising dependent, it’s subscriber dependent. And as long as you’ve got the content that people would be willing to pay for, it makes logical sense. Cristopher Penn – 02:48 I mean there are plenty of newsletters where people are cranking out decent money and we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars a month on their newsletters. The question really for folks is that a model that you want to go after? Whereas the way that you’re using it as you know from true marketing automation and these platforms are not that, they are not marketing automation platforms. They are strictly newsletter publication platforms. And so I think a lot of the legacy esps like Aweber and Mailchimp and stuff like that have to kind of decide what do they want to be? Do they want to be marketing automation software or do they want to be subscription revenue generating publication media software? You really can’t do both. John Wall – 03:31 Yeah that’s a great point because we’ve talked about modic but I’m using Ghost for the marketing over coffee list over there. And yeah it’s an interesting trade off in that all these headaches go away because everything is so simple as far as getting out the door. But then even just trying to run the most basic reports, I’m like oh, I can’t even get an excel file of clicks and opens. Like I can look at it and I have to roll through, you know, roll over some stuff in the interface. There’s no easy way to do that. So yeah, that idea that those in no way are pretending to be marketing automation platforms. Like yeah that’s, and that’s just completely a deal killer for a business. John Wall – 04:07 You know, like we need to have HubSpot telling us clips, clicks and opens so we can see who’s actually active and who’s into it. So yeah, it’s a trade off there. But yeah, I don’t know, the space is going through a lot of movement and then this idea that you sign on for a single CRM that includes a bunch of your email, I don’t know. I haven’t found any CRM that does a good job with the email marketing automation. We just run into spam blocking and just all these other issues that make that it should be a viable path, but it’s not. Cristopher Penn – 04:38 Yeah, I mean, if you want to maximize the outcome of any system, you need a technical resource. You need somebody who knows DNS, who knows deliverability protocols. Maybe you don’t need them full time, but certainly to get set up you need that in place and to maintain it. So there is a cloud hosted version of Modic. You can have somebody else do the server admin, but that comes at the trade off then of not having as much accessibility to the backend stuff. So for example, when we’re doing deep reporting, self hosted Modic has a SQL server on the backend. Again, if you’ve got a technical resource, you can just download straight from the SQL database. You don’t need to use the interface at all, which is good. And that’s always the trade off is how much complexity do you want? Cristopher Penn – 05:26 But complexity correlates well with flexibility. So if you want maximum flexibility comes with maximum complexity, you’re gonna have to come in. John Wall – 05:37 But yeah, as soon as you say export to SQL, that’s just like, oh yes, that’s it. You have all the powers in front of you that you can make things happen. We’ll talk about flexibility. Google Pixel nine, you’d mentioned that. That’s just dropping. Have you checked that out? What’s going on there? Cristopher Penn – 05:53 They had their big event made by Google yesterday, the day after recording this and Pixel nine. Huge surprise. No, it’s not a surprise at all. It’s like, hey, we’ve optimized this for Google, Gemini. So Gemini can run it’s smaller models on devices. Course it’s optimized for Gemini use. Google’s basically stuffed Gemini as many places as possible. They’ve got mo