Google/Yahoo Email Changes Were A Good Thing

81% of people don’t answer a phone call from an unknown number (Pew Research)

Day one of Email Camp 2024 focused on email deliverability and the Google/Yahoo 2024 email changes. The Google and Yahoo email changes were intended to make email more secure and improve deliverability.

If Google and Yahoo didn’t change this to improve email deliverability, email would become the next telephone industry.

Email would have the same statistics as the above quote.

With no one opening emails, email marketing would lose a lot of its financial luster.

Email marketing has an overall ROI of 4,200% (Luisa Zhou)

No one would open emails from anyone unless you knew them personally.

When I started managing the nonprofits’ email marketing programs, I implemented the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies because I knew deliverability was important.

Email Camp only reinforced that the Google/Yahoo update was significant for emails overall.

Refresh Your Email Designs

I will be the first to admit that I hated it when we would have to implement a new email design.

However, after attending Email Camp 2024, I have a new respect for refreshing your email template designs.

By bringing various parties together, including non-marketing folks, the email design process can significantly improve with new ideas and voices.

With a templating system, new email designs can be quickly implemented, reducing the time needed to update the email template design.

In closing, Email Camp 2024 was a blast and well worth attending.

SMS Is The Future

When I started working as an email developer, SMS marketing began taking shape.  Now, SMS marketing is coming into its own.

On day three, several presentations showcased the powerful marketing tool SMS. SMS is a technology that email developers should look into further.

SMS is a secure, reliable marketing channel governed by government regulations.

This makes SMS a technology that I’ll be looking further into over the next few months.

Thanks for listening,
Ivan Hurt, Email Developer

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In May 2024, Google launched its Gemini update that summarizes the email contents for a single email or across an email thread.

In June 2024, Apple followed suit during their Apple World Developer Conference (WWDC). With the release of iOS 18, Apple allows AI to summarize an email.

Ivan, what happens to the preview text that email developers have been using sense forever?

In all honesty, I am not 100% sure how this will affect the preview text. For the time being, I will continue to use preview text for any emails that I create.

However, AI has forced me to learn more about email marketing. I am solid on creating emails, making emails work across multiple devices and clients, and email development in general.

With AI enhancing emails, I’m glad I doubled down six months ago on learning email marketing.

The Google and Apple updates will not change email development in my opinion. Instead of relying on the preview text, good email marketers will continue to do what they’ve done for years: send quality content with a strong call to action (CTA).

The Google and the Apple updates do raise several questions for the future:

• How accurate will the AI email summaries bear the AI email summaries?
• Will user’s opt-in or opt-out of these and future AI features?
• What other updates Google and Apple had planning in the future>

In all honesty, I’m embracing AI, email marketing, and email development. I can wait to see how this affects emails of the future as I embrace AI.

Thanks for listening,
Ivan Hurt 
Email Developer specializing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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This year, my trip was cut short because I tripped up the steps in Penn Center. By the time I walked to the Javis Center, my knee was throbbing in pain. Fortunately, my knee was fine by the time I got back home.

Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are going all in on AI and Data Cloud.

Throughout the day, I saw multiple presentations about the power of generative AI and Data Cloud.

Data Cloud is an awesome tool that ties in the data and opens up a world of opportunities for marketers.  Salesforce generative AI and Privacy Center are great tools to allow companies to use generative AI, provide privacy, and stay compliant with US and international laws.

The overall theme of Spring 2024 Salesforce World Tour NYC is that AI is a tool for email developers to embrace not fear. Salesforce is making AI a tool to help everyone on the Salesforce platform to be more productive.

Unfortunately, I was only able to stay for a few presentations because the throbbing in my knee got worse.

In conclusion, the Spring Salesforce World Tour 2024 was a huge success because I look forward to working more with AI and Data Cloud in the near future.

Thanks for listening,
Ivan Hurt 
Email Developer specializing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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However, when you do a search for Visual Studio Code extensions, you come up the same old list of

• Prettier
• Debugger for Chrome
• Settings Sync
• GitLens

These are the Visual Studio Code extensions; my developer guys and gals tell me to try all the time. However, I am an email developer and most of these extensions don’t amount to a hill of beans to me.

Don’t get me wrong, if I was a Front-End web developer or PHP developer, I’m sure I would use those extensions all the time to be more productive.

To be honest, I only use two Visual Studio Code extensions and here’s my list:

Live Server

Live Server allows you to see you emails in real time. Live Server will reload the page every time you make a change to automatically your latest update. Created by Ritwick Dey.

Live Server should be first tool in your email developer toolkit.

Email Snippet

Email Snippet is a hidden gem created by Ahsan Habib. A lot of email developers don’t know about this Visual Studio Code extension and it’s a crying shame. Email Snippet allows me to create faster emails using Visual Studio Code and was a game changer when I found it.

Show Email Snippet some love and add it to your email developer toolkit.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Those are the two Visual Studio Code extensions that I use as an Email Developer. Try them out and I hope they will be a game changer for you too.

Thanks for listening,
Ivan Hurt 
HTML Email Developer

P.S. If you want to learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud and elevate your Email Developer career like I did, check out SuperMums Salesforce Marketing Cloud Training, authorized Salesforce Training Provider.

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I know I’m a newbie email developer who’s been living under a rock. 

Thanks to #emailgeeks hashtag on Twitter, I could buy a ticket before the registration ended, and I’m so glad I did.

Mailcon is the largest email marketing conference for email marketers. Due to the pandemic, Mailcon was virtual.

Here are three observations that I learned from attending Mailcon for the first time as an email developer.

Too Few Email Developers

I did a quick search on Mailcons’s community board and only found a handful of email developers in attendance. I went to the community board to network. I typed in a couple of terms for email developers, including email developers and HTML email developers.

I only found about five email developers who attended the conference. This search was done by job title.

I did reach out to the email developers in the Mailcon community. Everyone from the Mailcon community gave me great feedback to help me grow my career.

Be Prepared

While I was at the conference, my bio read, “Freelance email developer looking for remote email developer gigs.”

Several people reached out to me about working remotely as a freelance email developer. 

I just wish I had more HTML Emails on my portfolio.  

I recently removed several HTML Emails to revamp my email developer portfolio. I only had two email projects on my portfolio.

The lack of projects on my portfolio cost me several freelance opportunities from Mailcon.

I did manage to get one freelance gig from Mailcon. I know I could have landed more freelance gigs if I had more projects on my portfolio.

Attend More Email Marketing Conferences In 2021

Lastly, attending more email conferences in 2021 is a must. 

As a budding email developer, it never occurred to me to attend the email marketing conference. The thought never crossed my mind.

I learned so much from Mailcon. Mailcon gave me a better understanding of the current email marketing trends. I even learned more about marketing in general.

Final Thoughts

Mailcon was an excellent investment as an email developer. I gained so much knowledge from attending Mailcon. 

Thanks to Mailcon and all of the speakers for putting on a fantastic virtual conference. 

I look forward to attending next year.

Thanks for listening,
Ivan Hurt
HTML Email Developer

P.S. If you want to learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud and elevate your Email Developer career like I did, check out SuperMums Salesforce Marketing Cloud Training, authorized Salesforce Training Provider.

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