Phelan – Spotlight on an expert

This new series will take a deeper look at the lives of our experts. This interview has been edited to make it more concise and clear.

Ryan Phelan is a 25-year veteran of email marketing. He has also written 83 articles on this and other topics for MarTech. He is the co-founder and chairman emeritus for the Email Experience Council Advisory Board.

Q. What made you want to work in marketing?

A : My employment history is funny! I studied to become a Catholic priest in college, but decided halfway through that I did not want to be one. So I decided to become a DJ. I ran a nightclub and was a DJ for six years. Then I realized that DJing was not profitable, which was at the height of the dotcom boom.

Giftpoint.com was my first online job. They sold gift certificates. I was in the affiliate industry and also worked with email. Over the years, I worked a lot in affiliate marketing and decided to move into email. It was funnier, more exciting and more novel. In 1998, I began my emailing career. It’s been an amazing ride! I have a psychology degree. The majority of marketers I know do not have a Marketing degree, but rather a different degree.

Q. According to the DJs that I know, there is a psychological element involved in hosting a party.

Yes, there is. Two things that I learned as a DJ in a nightclub that I use to this day are very useful for marketers. I learned to read the room. When you’re in the DJ booth, playing music, what do you think the crowd will react to? What’s the next song going to be? You become very aware of what’s happening in the room and how people move around, such as who is going to the bar. You can read the room to predict energy levels and the next place you should go. In 1995, when I was entertaining 600 people per night in a club, this customer-centric approach is what I began. In email, it’s all about reading the room and putting the client first.

A: There is no one room in email marketing where everyone can mix together. Does that mean it must be data-centric, then?

A In email, the “room” is your reports, your conversion rates, your online behaviors, heat maps and all that sort of stuff. It’s the same centric approach to reading the room, and trying figure out how everyone is different.

We had a format when I was DJing, it was country nightclub. It was a real science to know how to play the music at a nightclub. Then, we added a few triple-steps and a faster-paced song. Different types of people will come to the dance floor depending on what music you play. You then crash it to another two-step and bring it back up, play another slow track, and start it all over. This creates a flow on and off of the dance floor, similar to segmentation in marketing.

Most marketers today send one-to many messages. The message is the same for everyone. It’s the same as me playing the exact same music while I DJ. What I do, and what marketing should do, is use propensity and demographic and geographical data, look at persona-based model, and see what you can to differentiate your message for different archetypes or groups you identify in the information.

Q. Do you still think that email marketing is important after so many years?

A : There are two things I like about email at the moment. The first is that a majority of marketers aren’t using advanced techniques like segmentation and “reading the room.” Some companies are still struggling with this. Covid is a good example of how businesses finally realized that they had underinvested in technology to implement email, whether it was in their tech stack or staff. Email saved the day during Covid.

Email has the potential to become more sophisticated with data available. Email continues to be the engine behind these full-spectrum experiences, from identification to third-party information to interacting outside of email with social media, text, or web. The same future that I saw 25 years ago for email is still what I see today. It’s based on the fact that we need to convince more companies of the sophistication email can achieve using data.

The original post Ryan Phelan – Spotlight on an expert was published on MarTech.