Philippe Gamache 0:00 What's up guys, welcome to the humans of martec podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil ganache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing What's up everyone today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Abby Gailey, director of marketing operations at vibrant health. Abby started her career in arts admin in regional nonprofit theaters and she moved over to academic conference production, where she later pivoted to a marketing and comms role and got her first taste of martec. She later worked as a marketing manager at Human Kinetics, where she were a variety of different hats, and she later moved over to Wolfram, an enterprise tech company where she started as a product marketing analyst but later pivoted to marketing ops, where she took ownership of iterable and other martech tools. Today, she's director of marketing operations at vibrant health, the leading platform for precision medicine research, where she leads a team that works in email, SMS, push and direct mail. Abby, thanks so much for your time today. Really excited to chat. Abby Gailey 1:15 Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. Philippe Gamache 1:17 This episode is brought to you by our friends at knack. launching an email or landing page and your marketing automation platform shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane mid flight with no instructions. But too often, that's exactly how it feels. NAC is like an instruction set for campaign creation for establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to knacks no code, drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. No more having to stop midway through your campaign to fix something simple Knack lets you work with your entire team in real time and stops you having to fix things midflight check them out@naqt.com That's kn a K and tell them we sent you. Yeah, I'm excited to chat with another fellow Health Tech marketer who is in the b2b, b2c world. Talk to a lot of b2b folks and b2c folks. So I feel like this is going to be a refreshing change. Abby Gailey 2:14 i It's a lot of alphabet soup. Great. So I work at a b2b b2c SAS. There are people who understand what that means. And then there are people who have to explain that, which is I'm glad to meet another person in that space. Philippe Gamache 2:28 Yes, unfortunately, like a b2b, b2c Is that like marketplace? And it's like, well, kind of like not really. I think one thing that's really interesting is that like, a lot of folks stick to one industry in their career, like SAS or E Comm, or health tech. And maybe they stick to one of those business models and b2b or b2c. But if you're crazy enough to venture into the unknown territories, and try some of these different industries and different companies, you quickly discover that marketing Ops is quite different at some of these different industries and business models. I think there's a lot of light that shed on like the b2b martec enterprise like ESPs, like Adobe's, and the sales forces of the world, but not enough conversations about the iterables and the customer. Ayios, and then the braises of the world. And so yeah, I'm excited to just like, unpack what mops orgs look like for you in your business model. So maybe we can start there. Abby Gailey 3:31 Yeah, absolutely. I so martec in my business model, first of all, so I'm a b2b, b2b SaaS, which, for those who aren't in that space, we have a business to business component where my company vibrant health partners with universities, research organizations, government groups, anyone who's really doing health care research. We have some really amazing clients and customers that we work with like the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Mount Sinai Medical Center at the National Institutes of Health, to help facilitate research studies. for them. Our platform is a software platform that they can use to help facilitate their medical research. And then on my end, my team is the team that's in charge of facilitating the emails and the SMS and the direct mail and the push to the participants of the research studies. And we have a lot to do and it's there's a lot of oversight. I don't know if you have a similar a lot of regulation in terms of medical oversight. And so there's a lot of precision in terms of what we can say what we can't say there's a lot of overview. But the thing that I see so often when I'm talking with other marketing ops, staffers is they're talking so much about lead generation and MQL and SQL is and rather And I'm just sitting here I have no tie to revenue. And I don't work with with Marketo or Salesforce, or I always want to call it Pardo. It's part Pardot. I don't even know if it's still a thing anymore, but I never worked with it. I, because I've just been the last couple jobs actually, I've been a lot of b2b b2c. And it's, it's both nice to not have to deal with revenue, and deal a lot more with enablement and engagement and those those kind of downstream aspects of it. But sometimes it feels kind of like we're left out conversation conflict is what just said, because if you know me, I have much to say, Philippe Gamache 5:47 Yeah, I think there's like pluses and minuses for sure of like, you know, there's a lot of baggage that comes with revenue, like you said, multi touch attribution, and like all the the revenue, stuff like MQLs, it is like, I would love to live in a world where I don't have to worry about that. But at the end of the day, there's, there's like something cool about revenue, where it's like, I get to show the impact of the stuff that I did, and the bottom line of the company, but like, I think you guys are still impacting the users. And like, instead of having to go through the trouble of figuring out how do I tie this email, click events or this push notification, click event revenue, like you just like skip that step of having to tie it to revenue. And you say, like, my role is driving engagement. And we drove engagements. Abby Gailey 6:42 And And in, when what we are trying to accomplish is research. There's a lot that is writing on whether or not people fill out their HIPAA authorization, whether or not people do log their steps. And so I I would love to be more, even more. So helping with the researchers to say like, how can we help facilitate this? How can we make this more engaging, because then ultimately, they're able to accomplish what they're doing. Which is also sometimes tied to government funding, which then makes kind of another layer of complication, in terms of funding sources and how the company is structured. And so it's, there's never a dull moment, over Philippe Gamache 7:29 here, on top of HIPAA and PA and all that stuff. There's government Yeah. Abby Gailey 7:37 I feel like the people in health care and the people in FinTech and those really kind of closely regulated industries. I think we have a lot in common in terms of what we can and can't do, and finding ways to still be creative and have nuance and still provide those genuine experiences while still being in what might be what people might consider to be a fairly dry area. Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity. Philippe Gamache 8:05 Definitely, I think the you know, regardless of health tech, or SAS, or E commerce, or even the business model, there's at least a few things that all marketing ops professionals have in common. And I'm curious to get your take here. But in my opinion, one of the best traits to have and marketing ops professionals or anyone who kind of like thinks about martech, you're going to spend a lot of time living and engineering perspectives and tinkering and figuring things out. And one of these things that I think is a key skill is like curiosity. And if you don't like to solve or figure out how things work, I think mumps might be a frustrating career path. Do you agree that curiosity is a key skill for martec? And maybe chat about some of your favorite things to do to learn some of these new skills? Abby Gailey 8:54 Absolutely. To curiosity, I, whenever someone mentions curiosity and tinkering around I think about just someone saying, what does this button do and then just pressing the button, and then she seeing what happens from it. And I feel like that's very much my approach to how I learn technology, which may or may not be a good thing. But I do think being able to find joy in that problem solving and that creative thinking and trying to find new and interesting ways of solving problems. Like finding a webinar that might be about a new feature in a tool that you use or how to activate certain sets of of people who to try to make them more engaged. You know, I really continually learning and finding challenges I think is part of that. The thing that makes it interesting, you know, and with with martec Everything is changing all the time. You You have to have some level of curiosity just to continue to learn all of the tools. There's so many tools all the time. Yeah, I would Philippe Gamache 10:11 say in the constantly evolving world of martech. Well, Abby Gailey 10:19 it's not wrong. I mean, you've seen those infographics with the 10s of 1000s of logos, right? It's remarkable what is in the space and what people are using, it's always changing. So I absolutely think curiosity is a big part of what makes someone successful. Philippe Gamache 10:38 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. I think that's fair. I think a lot of us who get our start in marketing operations were kind of self taught, like you put them into this idea of like, I like to learn tools by pressing the button and seeing what happens. And like, I'm totally related with that. Like, I think there's this common theme with a lot of these like self taught professionals. While we know of folks that are working on like online courses, and teaching this stuff, and in school and universities, there is merit, I think, to like being self taught, what do you think are the benefits of learning mobs on the job and, and pressing buttons and seeing what happens? Like what do you think could be taught and of course, that would save you the pain of learning through trial and error? Abby Gailey 11:27 How interesting. on the job training, I think, if nothing else, is gonna give you the practical skills. So for example, we use iterable. Love iterable use it all the time. And one of my most recent team members is fresh out of college and had never used iterable. And so one of the parts of the job is just learning the tool. And with that comes the creative problem solving of, okay, this is the this is the thing that I need to do. How do I do that? And so it is learning the tool, and it's also learning how to integrate systems, how data flows, how to surprise and delight, a, an end user how to how their, what a problem might look like, you know, so I think that there are, there's a lot of kind of high level, I guess, business things, for lack of a better term that can be taught in a classroom. But when it comes to the specifics of your vertical, the common pain points that you might come across the tech systems themselves, I think there's nothing better than hands on, on the job failure. And that, and then subsequent learning from that failure. Philippe Gamache 12:57 Yeah, yeah, really learning in the wild, getting your hands dirty. It's, uh, yeah, the fastest way to learn, I think, like, you can sit there and watch a bunch of webinars. And I think like, it is cool to watch webinars and learn some of this stuff. But I like definitely diving into Docs and reading through documentation. Yeah. But yeah, at the end of the day, like, how are you really going to remember that stickiness factor if you're not like logging into the tool and doing some of that stuff, but maybe we can chat about like some of the solutions and that you've built for for some of the problems that that you had? You mentioned iterable. And I think you talked a bit about before we started recording this idea of web hooks. And for folks that aren't super familiar with web hooks, essentially, I'm curious how you would describe it there. But my understanding is like, basically a way to submit real time data from whatever tool you're using to an endpoint, usually a third party tool, and like getting access to a public API. And you can also receive data back and like update user criterias, or like, personalize an email in there. But yeah, like you've mentioned, using the web hook functionality, and iterable has opened a bunch of doors for you and you've been able to integrate really cool third party tools like direct mail, walk us through that. Abby Gailey 14:18 I would I would love to webhooks is something that I was not. I couldn't define it, you know, before this job a couple years ago. So as we're talking about on the job training, this was definitely one of those instances. I think you nailed it. web hook is is grabbing information and sending it elsewhere. And so when I joined vibrant, one of the things that they had integrated was lob, which is a direct mail API service. And I love working with direct mail just kind of generally I've done direct mail at a number of different jobs. In I'd never worked with this because I couldn't go to a printer. You know, it was. It's, it's, it's an API. But the thing that I have learned how to do is, you know, you're in iterable, you're working on your automation, you have someone who has not responded to email has not responded to SMS has not responded to multiple attempts at contact. So what my predecessor had set up was, you know, you send that person's information from iterable via web hook, to lob, and then lob through the magic of technology, prints a letter, like an actual physical letter and mails it to that person. And I love. I think that that is such an interesting intersection between digital and physical, that I'm a little obsessed with it. And the people that love it, and so helpful, and they're not affiliated with law, but just, I really liked my CSM. Second, she's great. So we've been able to integrate direct mail and a lot of instances where we can't contact someone or, you know, we deal with a lot of, you know, perhaps an elderly population or rural population, or people who don't have access to digital media very often or can or consistently. And so being able to have that physical touch point that we can, you know, kind of automate through this data flow, we grab their name, grab their mailing address, and send it over via this little button. In the iterable. Journey builder, it's just a little button. And it looks so cute. And it sends. So information just across the internet. And it's one of those things that to me is just remarkable, that we can facilitate that so easily. from one system to the other system. And the web hook feature, there was an iterable webinar that I attended recently, it was hosted by Emily, Ben, why I think is her last name. And she talks about how she used web hooks to. And what was amazing to me was I was familiar with our lob use case, you know, you have information, you grab it, you send it at when you need to. And she was using it to not just send it to a third party, but send it back to iterable. and manipulate it in a way that it can be used in a different way. And that blew my mind. Because that was one of those things where for example, we have recently started enrolling children in some of our some of our research studies, but in most cases, the three year olds don't have email addresses. So we need to send the email to the parent. So an iterable, it's, you know, you have all the information about the kid, what's the kid doing? What is the, you know, this is available to the kid this new? Has your kid gotten their vaccines or something is available to the kid. But that needs to trigger an event for the parent. So how do we make that connection, we use a web hook, which I was inspired to do by Emily. And so we have this journey where something happens with the kids something is available, we send a web hook, but just back to iterable where it sends a custom event that says to the parent, this thing is available for your kid. And it's been remarkable how we've been able to manipulate this data and use what is a fairly simple, you send information from A to B. But in this case, we just send it back to a but continue did and that's the thing that I you can obviously you can hear me getting so excited about this genuinely getting very enthusiastic about this technology. I just think it's so cool that we're able to just boop boop and I don't have a developer background is the other thing I have I'm a fine arts major so I this is this is all stuff that I've like you said learned on the job was curious about tried to uplevel my skills with this with a webinar from our friends at iterable and it's had some really amazing results Philippe Gamache 19:16 nice the it's a super cool story I think yeah, like web hooks are underutilized because they may seem a bit scary for for your average like marketing automation user but I like how you've described it like it's just a way to send information to another tool and in the way that you've built it it's also getting information back and then doing other stuff with with it herbal. I love your your use case. So thinking back to like my current company, we use herbal we don't make use of the webhook stuff too much yet like a lot of our onboarding journeys for our users are very like custom and tailored for the client itself. So like we're struggling using catalogs to kind of like personalize stuff in one journey, as opposed to like having a bunch of multiple journeys. And we played around with this idea of having a web hook that would just trigger direct mail like self mailers and different like postcards. But there was always this element of QA in the whole process that like, just like it holds us back from from doing it. And it's so easy for, like, it's hard enough in iterable, to do QA and make sure that we're not like personalizing a wrong line in the address field, let alone like sending that over to a third party from a payload that comes in the web hook like and we don't necessarily get to like QA, all the payloads, let alone the information coming back. So I'm curious to ask, what does the QA process look like for you guys? Like how are you making sure that those custom events that are coming back that you're like using that to chat with the parents, like, the information in there is all okay, you're not like making any errors or anything like that, because of the payload coming from the third party? Abby Gailey 21:12 Oh, boy. Um, this is something that just came up yesterday, really where we I'm, I'm very lucky, because I'm at a SAS that we have some really amazing QA resources, who, whose job it is, is to test the software, you know, they're not, they're not email testers, they're not going to validate our content. But their job is to test the software. So when there's a new feature that comes out, for example, we had a new link style that came out and they were testing yesterday. And so they came to us and like, it's not working, the link isn't working. And they're about to submit a bug ticket to the software team. And they're about to escalate to say, like, we have to hold this release, the link isn't working. And so that's what it's a good cue for us to be like, is it possible that we use the wrong merge parameter? Let's, let's just check, let's just do like a sanity check. And lo, we had use the wrong merge parameter. And we were very lucky to have constant in in QA. I think that generally for us, you know, like, we keep trying to make sure it works, we have an iterable instance for our lower environment. And so if you get the email, it's a good indicator that it's working. And we we send it to ourselves. And if you don't get it, something's broken. And we have a checklist, we have lots of checklists, I'm a big fan of checklists. We have a lot of peer review that we do. You can't send anything out unless someone else has looked at it, validated it. And in that checklist, there's Did you remove your QA filters? Did you are all of the lines connected in your journey builder? Because that's, that's happened to us? You know, I don't know. You're looking at it. And you're like, it's not this email is not firing because the line is not connected. That is a thing that has happened. So we try our best within our team to go through our checklists, our preflight checklists, do as much as we can. And then when it comes to the web hooks, there are times where we'll have to bring in support either from the third party team or from iterable support who's always like so great at finding that comma that I forgot in the payload. Like you missed a comma that was like always, always with the comments. Philippe Gamache 23:52 This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census census is a data activation platform loved by marketing teams at Sonos, Canvas crocs notion, and more. As a customer, I've experienced the magic of census firsthand there, no code, audience hub and reverse ETL enable me to use our cloud data warehouse to power growth and create highly personalized customer journeys in all of my marketing platforms like iterable and Google ads. If you like to humans martec podcast graphics, and you want your very own image. We're doing a monthly raffle for a personalized t shirt designed by us enter to win at get census.com/humans Yeah, I'm a big fan of using Chad GPT these days to just like sanity check make sure that like when we play a bit with like SQL code or like when we're doing handlebar stuff to personalize the some of the content in the emails like instead of like thinking through it and like reading what can sometimes be like a massive like chunk of text I just wrote in GPT, like, Hey, this is handlebar like, what's the output for this? Like, am I missing anything? So I'm like, double. No worry, you lay in there just before I send it out. So I've actually caught or GBT has caught a bunch of stuff before other folks. Abby Gailey 25:15 Never occurred to me. I love that idea. Yeah, Philippe Gamache 25:19 yeah, definitely worth worth a test. But I love your, your checklists, process, I'm sure it's, it's saved the team multiple times we do something similar where like, you can't create your own email, someone else has to sign off on a spreadsheet somewhere saying that like yes, they QA this before you can actually send it out. And it's worked well for us like we we've sent a ton of emails and comms and I work with an awesome senior campaigns manager on my team. And like all the emails we sent out last year, like there was zero mistakes, or at least none that we have, like sometimes for sure you don't you don't find out about the mistakes of like, no one complains. But yeah, I think that's a no short feat. And I think testament to QA. Absolutely. Abby Gailey 26:10 A good checklist is worth its weight in gold. You know, it's just It's little things like, is there alt text? Is that link working? That's that'll make the difference between having to send an oops, email and not? Definitely, well, Philippe Gamache 26:26 you're on your team. Thanks. Yeah, I think a big piece of it is that like, when you're the person like coding the email, writing the email, and you're so deep in it, you've been looking at the same thing for the past three hours, it's way easier for our brain to like Miss little things. And having a second set of fresh eyes on there just makes a world of difference, I think and allows you to like else and take a break from looking at the same email there. Abby Gailey 26:56 I actually heard recently, of someone who went through their QA process, they came up with a negative checklist. They may be a different, it may be a different term. But essentially, their QA process, their QA checklist had been the same for so long, that the developers had started anticipating that they would be checking for those things. And so they had to kind of blow up the checklist and come up with a new checklist to factor in for other things that maybe would have been missed. And that never would have occurred to me. It was Yeah, I think I'm gonna have to take a look at the at the QA checklist and see what maybe he has, you know, could be could be added could be taken away, just because now we've gotten so much in the habit of making sure that X, Y and Z that maybe we're missing other things. And so that's that and monitoring are some of my strategic goals for this year for my team. Very cool. Philippe Gamache 28:06 Yeah, I've never heard of that. That idea. I think that yeah, a lot of teams that have a standard checklist, that doesn't change too often. It can be easy to just like, fall into routine and not like to feel like part of checklists for QA is attention to detail. But if like the steps are all routine, maybe you're losing some of that attention to detail. So it's a cool call out. You mentioned, goals for your team there and kind of like, maybe we can pivot a little bit to some career stuff. I was curious to ask you, this idea of mentors and the role they've they've played in your career. So far, I often attribute some of my career growth to mentorship. Some from like direct managers and co workers and also indirect learnings like content creators, and specifically mentors, though, that I like reached out to I thought I was a big fan of the work that they did. Sometimes it's like a freelancer that we hired that like kind of moved on, I reached out and I was like, hey, like, can we like keep in touch bounce ideas. And we actually have a mentor in common. Justin Jordan Yeah, helped me through a tumultuous time when I was at a previous company that I won't name. But like I had a conflict with the CMO. And I learned a lot about the art of having tough conversations through Justine she talked to me through through a lot of that and like refer to a book and so yeah, talk to us about the role mentors have had in your career and maybe share some of the things you've learned from Justine. Abby Gailey 29:43 Justine Jordan, huge shout out to Justine Jordan. I I slacked her when you had reached out to me and she said that she she knew you and I was I was like, Of course you do. Just Seeing is, and I think mentors generally, are, are very important. And I think working with Justine is the first time that I've had a neutral third party, not someone who has a direct boss or a co worker. And I think that they both have their value. So for, you know, I've learned a lot from the bosses that I've had, over time, the managers that I've had some, I've learned more than others, just because you tend to, you know, you get along with some managers, perhaps, you know, you tend to gravitate towards certain traits in certain managers. I remember in my first kind of big girl job out of college, my manager, my boss, at the time, pulled me aside after a meeting, and with the most grace and sincerity, she said, You need to control your face more in meetings, and it was the first time that anyone had given me coaching. So I wasn't sure how to react to it, I was, you know, 22, or something like that. But it was the, it was the first in a series of feedbacks that I think was really very beneficial for me in terms of developing a professional persona, and being able to constructively give and take feedback in the workplace, which I think is so valuable from those managers who choose to have that relationship with you, you know, I had one manager who, when I was working as more general marketing, I was writing a lot of content. And evidently, I was overusing exclamation points. And so I had one manager who, like gave me a framed photo of an exclamation point with a line through it. So this is your need to be selective and your exclamation points. And it's, it's little things like that, like improving your writing or improving your business acumen or your ability to respond in meetings. And I had one manager at one point who, within meetings, his advice to me was to only contribute to a call, if you were asked a question, or if you can, further the conversation, which I felt was, at the time kind of a, I thought about it for a long time. This is the same person who had who mentioned to me that he had like a work version of himself and a home version of himself. And that was the first time that I had really heard that people, not maybe code shift a little bit, but have they're not there. I don't know how to phrase it. But I don't know your Philippe Gamache 32:55 work persona. Like it's your shifting like who you are a little bit. It's interesting. Yeah. Abby Gailey 33:01 Because at the time, I was very much like, I haven't gotten to be my authentic self all the time. But I think that it was more of a Be selective of when you need to be level headed. And when you need to be fully transparent. And, and more diplomacy, I think, and being able to be respectful and tactful, and diplomatic in the workplace, which is something that as a young whippersnapper, I think was something I needed to hear. And working with Justine, like I said, has been, has been really wonderful because I don't work with her in my day job. And but she is so knowledgeable, so well respected in the email specific community. And she's a woman in a leadership position in tech. And so there are lots of things that I can go to her and say, you know, I'm experiencing this type of conflict. And you know, as at a director level, I don't have a ton of peers who perhaps have the same challenges in the same space. And so being able to go to, to someone to say, you know, how do I navigate this tumultuous time to borrow phrase or how do I, we, how do I address change? You know, how do I navigate these difficult conversations, like you said, those are the hard things that now as a manager, I want to be able to provide feedback in the way that I've received feedback and provide a meaningful experience for the people who work with me. And so how do you have that conversation about the control your face? Not think you're saying that to someone in a way that doesn't permanently damage them? she's, you know, it's nice to have those people in your life Philippe Gamache 35:04 definitely, ya know, let thanks for sharing that. I'm curious to, like, if you had to give advice to listeners who are thinking, you know, like I, I would love to have a mentor like Justine to help me through some of these things. I just don't know like, where to get started like, do I reach out to them on LinkedIn? Like, do I try to make it official and ask them if they want to be my mentor? Like, how did they kind of like, work out with you and just being curious? Abby Gailey 35:35 Well, with with Justine, it was just the most brilliant post I'd seen on email geek slack, nice. And it was. And I told her this, this was around the end of the year. And she had sent a post that was something to the tune of, you know, if you have use it or lose it professional development money, which I did. For the for the calendar year, make sure that you are using that to make sure that you're learning and so here are some amazing resources, you can buy a subscription to this. I forget what it was, but it should it was a subscription to a book or a podcast series or there are a number of paid learning opportunities that she listed in this slack post. And then she said, you can also purchase sessions with a professional mentor or a career coach, parenthesis full disclosure, I offer these services. And I'm reading this and I'm like, I have professional development money. These are usable tips that this woman is offering. But also, I would love to have a career coach. And it was just like the most precise, wonderful identification of a need value proposition. So low key and I was like, I need to work with this woman. Because obviously, I knew her from from her work, it led us and and all those things. And she's just so giving of her time and and I was really lucky to to find her. And I think that if someone were mentorship is kind of hard as a concept, though, in terms of how one creates that relationship. Artists, sometimes artificially, you know, like I don't I don't know if it is reaching out on LinkedIn to say, hey, I really respect the work that you're doing in this space. Do you have bandwidth to meet with me so that I can understand what you do? Or can I talk to you through uh, you know, I saw your post on LinkedIn, I saw your post on email geeks, Slack, or mops professionals or male pros, or I'm working on a similar project and I need help like I did. Is it something that you have pursued where you have reached out to someone like a cold call to say like, can I establish this relationship with you? That's something you've done. Philippe Gamache 38:06 know, personally Well, not necessarily like the I've always had, like sort of a relationship with previous mentors, whether they were like a consultant that we hired, like at a previous company, I was at a Marketo shop. And I had given my two weeks to the company and my boss at the time was like freaking out because there was no one that like, I hadn't, like, downloaded all of my Marketo stuff with a company. So they were like rushing to find a contractor to come in and help out. And I had selfishly taken the opportunity to reference people that I like, held in high esteem and took the time to like, introduce myself. And I got to sit down and walk them through like all the stuff that I built, and we kept in touch. And after I left the company, I was like, hey, like, maybe you can use me as much as I can use you as you're like now working with my previous company, maybe you'll have a couple of extra questions there. And so it's always been kind of natural in a sense. But I had a short gig where I was teaching local post grad university students, this like digital marketing certificate. And I was teaching marketing automation. And I did it for like three and a half years. And I've kept in touch with some of the students. And I've tried like my whole goal with it was like, How can I convince people to like be mind blown by martech and automation graduate instead of wanting to go in social media or in content, they want to like take a stab at email automation or martec. And I was successful in some smaller cases. I think it's cool because some of them went on to have cool, cool jobs and in agencies and different tech companies and I'm still in touch with some of them and So yeah, it's always been like a bit organic, so to speak, if never tried like the cold outreach, and I'm trying to think like how I would react. And yeah, I don't know, like if I didn't have like current mentees, and I had a bit more free time, and I didn't have a podcast on the side, but maybe I'd be more open to it. But yeah, I think yeah, the like being part of Slack channels, like I think like kind of segwaying to that. You mentioned email geeks. I'm a big fan of that slack channel. Also, not just for finding like new job opportunities, but like, just getting a sense of what people are sharing, like Justine is very, like posting stuff pretty often in there and personally learn learn from her on there, too. But yeah, I don't know. Abby Gailey 40:47 I totally agree about email geeks, especially I, my I am not exaggerating when I say email geeks has changed my life. The I, I have not heard verbalizing email gigs has changed my life it has. And for those of you who are not aware of email gigs, it is a Slack organization that is entirely made up of email professionals around the world. And there are similar organizations for marketing operations. There's mops professionals, there's mo pros. And there are lots of similar kind of slack organizations. But email gigs, especially has is a place where you can ask questions about specific vendors. iterable has a channel there's a there's a SMS channel, you can ask career questions, either, you know, in person or anonymously, you can see what people are talking about what people are struggling with, you can talk about legislation and governance, which is an deliverability, which is one of those things that I am so not good. I mean, like I just deliverability is one of those areas where I get really overwhelmed trying to navigate deliverability. And, you know, we all have our weak spots, and I fully Oh, that that is my weak spot, in terms of like, I know what it is, but I just I never feel fully confident in that space. And but luckily, email geeks is just chock full of so many amazing resources in that space, who you who are very patient. And with many of them, I feel that they have taken on like a mentoring kind of role, you know, even in terms of shout out to James Lamb, who on email gigs has been so so much of an advocate for salary negotiations within the email space, and what I mean, largely US centric, but just in terms of what what's skills are worth and, and making those negotiations. And I've learned so much from him just in terms of salary negotiation, I've never met him in person. But just reading what he has to say it has it has been remarkable. And so in my own life directly impacting my life. So very cool. Yeah, it's, it's, I highly, highly recommend that those in the email space, check out one of these, one of these organizations, you get to meet some cool people who share similar interests, and you can geek out about web hooks. Philippe Gamache 43:37 Totally. Yeah, this is not a paid plug for email geeks. But yeah, I totally agree. Especially on the Email Deliverability side. Super cool. Before us You are her last question here is the status flown by when I was like you like before I joined Pelago my current startup. I was afraid of email deliverability like, SPF and DKM. And I was like, like, Why do I have to learn all these acronyms? And what does this even entail? And I feel like over the past like two years, I've like gotten a fast track master's degree in deliverability. Because well done a B to C world it is it's tricky. Like it's a different world. You gotta kind of consent from the HR team or the client side on the b2b. But you don't really have opt in from the b2c side, but we're like solving addictions. So it's like, you know, like, I don't want to just email people who asked to get those emails because sometimes people are suffering in silence. So we use direct mail we use different tools I've had to really level up on on that side and email geeks has been foundational to like UPS, UPS upskilling or upscaling in that area, especially around like Google Senator guideline changes, like 0.3% came in like there's so many people that like We're posting stuff in the deliverability channel that we're just like, Yeah, I've got like tons of spam complaints over 0.3. What am I going to do? And most of the comments, were just like, well, you're pretty fucked. Like, sorry, you should have been doing better practices ahead of time. Yeah, I've learned a ton from, from that gentle Willow will link get out to folks that want to sign up because you do have to fill out a form to get access, but it's it's grown in massive size now, like, there's just a bunch of people as part of it. It's more than just super fun. Oh, how 20,000 path now. Lot of people do an email out there. I'm super thankful for for your time. This has been a super fun conversation. I got one last question for you. We asked this to all of our guests. I know you're a mom, Director, Team Manager and accidental marketer and avid Baker, and in your professional board gamer as well. One question we asked, like I said is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find this idea of balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? Abby Gailey 46:10 Oh, boy. Happy in my career, I think it goes back to what you're talking about, about curiosity. You know, I think if if I can maintain a level of curiosity, where I feel motivated to continue learning, and to continue growing, I will find fulfilment in, in what I'm doing, you know, if it's a new integration, if it's if it's a new client, you know, I think curiosity plays a big factor. For me, I'm also really focusing right now on balance, you know, I, I really love what I do. I love talking about email automation, I could talk to you for hours about email automation. But at you know, at five o'clock, I turn off my computer. And I go, and I, I'm very fortunate to be able to do that. And I recognize that I have a great team, I have a great organization that really respects that after a certain time, they don't anticipate that you're going to reply to your slack. But I think it is increasingly important for me to make sure that I'm not just relying on work to fulfill that part. Like, it's part of many things that keep me happy. I have a lot of other people and things in my life that I try to pursue to find balance. Because there are those days where work is hard. There are those days where it's challenging, and nothing works and everything is broken, and everything wants your attention and your Slack wants to stop blowing up. And that's when you need to rely on the other parts of your life to bring you that balance. So that for me, right? Balance, curiosity, those are the things that I'm relying on a lot right now. Philippe Gamache 48:04 Awesome answer. I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, it definitely echo everything you said, I think like those like boundaries, and turning off the laptop at a at a certain hour definitely goes a long way. But I like that you mentioned like it is in some shape of privilege, like not everyone has the ability to turn off their laptops at a certain hour. But I guess like the call to action there is there are a lot of jobs out there that allow you to do that and you own your career. And if you're unhappy and you're unable to do that, like you at some point, like when you're ready for it, like you can make the decision to look for something better and move your skills to a spot that you are able to get better balance. Abby Gailey 48:49 Yeah, that's that's my hope that everyone is able to find some level of of balance. I think that would be good for everyone. Yeah, Philippe Gamache 48:59 no kidding me. It's super fun. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. So much. I'll get to your LinkedIn and definitely email geeks for the listeners also via thank you so much. Abby Gailey 49:14 Thank you again Philippe Gamache 49:25 This episode was brought to you by iterable. Where will you be on April 30 2024. Ai and creativity are colliding and iterables signature activate Summit is the place to be the automation game is changing and you've got an opportunity to be a key player. Are you ready? Not just should you attend the conference, but you actually have an opportunity to win a full VIP experience. Interval is giving away a grand prize package. So whisk you away to San Jose for the summit and take care of everything in style. We're talking full pass that Activate summit that's $1,000 worth of learning, networking and inspiration with hundreds of marketing's brightest minds, a swanky VIP dinner to mingle with fellow attendees and speakers. A luxurious three nights stay at Signia by Hilton San Jose picture plush comfort and stunning views just steps away from all the action and also a round trip airfare within the US to leave all the logistics to iterable. Just focus on packing for your excitement. Entering is super easy. Just head over to iterable.com/activate before April 2 and register for either in person or the virtual experience which is free. And that's it, you're officially in the running so don't miss out on this chance to win a trip that will boost your career and ignite your marketing Mojo, head over to iterable.com/activate and enter today. If you're still listening, first of all, thank you for being here and as a reward for your attention. I'll leave you with my fever newsletter. Check out the marketing operations leader newsletter written by a friend of the show Darrell Alfonso, you might know him we interviewed him in episode one of one of the podcasts, Darrell is lead marketing ops at big names like indeed in AWS. And his newsletter is packed with practical advice, frameworks and new ideas to help you manage your marketing function. He launched it at the end of last year and he's already collected over 1000 subscribers. 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