For about a decade the email playbook was close to a solved problem: build the components, follow the process, ship the campaign. AI has reopened all of it, and the interesting part is that there's no longer one right answer for what an email team should look like.
EmailTalk is back. Six years after the first series, Elliot Ross restarts the show with Joe Cottam and Will Harvey to work out where email marketing, CRM and lifecycle actually stand now.
Elliot runs ActionRocket, the independent CRM creative agency, and co-founded Taxi for Email, built in 2016 after a client asked for 800 emails in 20 languages and balked at the five-million-pound quote. Taxi sold to SparkPost in 2021, then MessageBird, now Bird. Joe Cottam was on the engineering team through that acquisition, worked on MessageBird's ESP and email builder, and went on to co-found EmailShepherd. Will Harvey joined this year from consulting and sales, and is on the show to ask what any of it means for the person who has to get a campaign out on a Tuesday.
In this episode:
If you run email or CRM at a brand, whether in Klaviyo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe or any other ESP, and the AI conversation has left you unsure whether you're behind, this is the reassuring version. Nobody is as far ahead as LinkedIn suggests.
We're not claiming to have it worked out. What we do want is the real questions: what you're stuck on, what you tried, and what went sideways. That's what we'll take into the next episodes.
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Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/