EmailTalk

As AI gets better at writing email code, and tools arrive to keep that code in check, what happens to email developers? And what does the job look like when writing the code is no longer the hard part?

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot sits down with Megan Boshuyzen, who designed her first email on an internship in 2008, coded her first in 2010 and hated it, and has spent her second career in email development. They talk about how the role is changing, why it now looks more like engineering, and where people still matter.

Megan explains how redesigning one long, text-heavy email into a hero image, some copy and a button made the open and click rates quadruple, and why that instant feedback pulled her away from graphic design. She describes moving from bespoke HTML emails to thinking in systems, and asks the uncomfortable question: if senior developers are busy teaching the AI, where do the next juniors come from?

Elliot shares his theory on the rise of good enough. When everyone has the same tools, he argues, the human becomes the differentiator again. They get into a HubSpot preheader debate on LinkedIn, why "spam words" are a myth, a Gemini inbox summary that skipped a moved meeting to talk about Halloween costumes, and Megan getting Claude to code in her component system. They finish on advice from one of Megan's old managers: don't spend more time managing the system than the time it saves you.

In this episode:

• From graphic designer to email developer, and the redesign that quadrupled open and click rates
• Why community is harder to build now, and why email still feels authentic
• What it means to be an email developer today
• Where the next junior developers will come from
• Teaching AI your components and your coding rules

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you're working out what AI means for the people who build your emails, this episode is for you.

Has AI made your email code better, or just faster? Tell us in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Megan Boshuyzen — Email Development Lead
https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganbosh/
Meg Codes Email, Megan's newsletter on email development and AI: https://www.megcodes.email/

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ep08

ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ep08

#emailgeeks #EmailMarketing #EmailDesign #AIinMarketing #EmailDevelopment

Most marketing teams feel they're behind on AI adoption, but if everyone thinks they're behind, most people aren't. The real question is how you get from playing with AI to building it into how your team works.

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot, Joe and Will are back together after a run of guest conversations. They start with the news everyone on LinkedIn has an opinion on, Salesforce buying Braze, and what it could mean for Braze customers and the agencies that move brands off Marketing Cloud.

Will shares what he's hearing from teams this month. The talk has moved on from shiny features to getting AI into everyday workflows, and he explains why a bit of chaos first, then a system, works better than starting with a process. He also covers why protected hackathon time helps people get to their first aha moment. Joe argues it's about learning to learn, because whatever you plan will be out of date in three months. Elliot compares it with GDPR: that had a clear before and after, and AI never will.

The second half turns to trust and security. They cover what happens with the 1% of the time AI gets it wrong, prompt injection risk when MCPs are connected, and why EmailShepherd not touching customer data makes it an easier yes. Then come the supermarket fridges hacked to 50 degrees across Europe, and HMRC's 15 year CRM business case.

In this episode:

• Salesforce buys Braze: the challenger becomes the acquired
• What it means for Braze customers and migration agencies
• From experimenting with AI to embedding it in workflows
• Hackathons, chaos first and the aha moment
• Everyone thinks they're behind, and why that's fine
• Trust, MCP security and prompt injection
• Hacked supermarket fridges and HMRC's CRM contract

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you're trying to get your team from experimenting with AI to using it day to day, this episode is for you.

Where is your team right now: still playing with AI, or building it into your process? Tell us in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

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/

Every brand feels like it should be doing more with AI. But where does it actually help an email and CRM team, and where is it just a robot arm making coffee?

Elliot sits down with Kimberly Fox, a CRM Activation Lead who has worked in email and CRM at agencies and brands in the US and the UK.

They start before the AI question: Kimberly's move from Indiana, Chicago and Denver to London, how conferences and networking have changed with hybrid work, and what she brought from agency life to the brand side, from project management habits to treating the CRM team as the agency inside the company. She also covers prioritisation when legal, product and promotional teams all want a place in email.

The second half turns to AI. Kimberly explains why clean data comes first (Einstein in Salesforce Marketing Cloud was no use on a database full of duplicates), why AI adoption is a culture job rather than a one-off rollout, and why teams should be open about where AI helped. Elliot shares where he sees teams start well, using AI to check copy against brand guidelines rather than write it, and why replacing people with AI is a risk to the brand.

In this episode:

• Conferences, networking and hybrid work
• From Indiana to London
• What agency experience brings to the brand side
• Prioritising when every team wants email
• Why AI needs clean data first
• Making AI adoption part of team culture
• Where to start, and when you don't need AI at all

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you're working out where AI fits in your team, this episode is a sensible place to start.

What's the most needless use of AI you've seen at work? Tell us in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Kimberly Fox — CRM Activation Lead
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlyafox/

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

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/

#emailgeeks #EmailMarketing #EmailDesign #AIinMarketing #AIAdoption

Email builds the trust. Push catches the moment. So which channel gets the credit for the conversion, and does it even matter?

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot sits down with Stefanie Kaberidis, who has spent around 18 years in email and CRM. She fell into email by accident at an email marketing agency, then moved through the Berlin startup boom ("one person has to do the job of five") and into almost ten years in corporate CRM.

Steffi explains why push brings in more revenue at the conversion moment while email does the branding and trust work. Someone reads your email on the metro in the morning, talks it over with their partner that evening and buys straight from their wishlist. The email lost the conversion, but a push at lunch or in the evening adds a second chance. Her advice to email people who've just been handed push: take it, it's a gift.

They also get into how AI is changing testing. Instead of an A/B/C test to a million people where "you choose the least bad", AI can test hundreds of combinations of subject line, hero image, copy and CTA for each person, along with send time and frequency. Email has the richer data to learn from, because push gives you "140 characters and one image".

Then hiring in the AI era (take-home case studies don't work when candidates "just bring you Claude's case study"), why Steffi now hires for mindset, the Berlin CRM scene and her women's breakfast round table, and how she went from workaholic to "you can have a career and you can have a life".

In this episode:

• From marketing generalist to 18 years in email
• Agency, startup, corporate: what each one teaches you
• Email vs push: branding and trust vs the conversion moment
• Why push opt-ins have no preference centre
• Why email data matters more for AI than push data
• The golden rule for email people taking on push
• Attribution across devices and channels
• AI and the end of the old A/B test
• Hiring when every candidate has Claude
• Hiring for mindset, and admitting "I don't know"
• The CRM scene in Berlin
• Career, burnout and having a life

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you've just been handed push, SMS or in-app as well, this episode will help you get those channels working together.

Which channel gets the credit in your team, email or push? Tell us in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Stefanie Kaberidis — Head of CRM
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanie-kaberidis-54235170/

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

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/

When there’s only one of everything, you can’t email like an ecommerce brand.

Elliot sits down with Vinit Ramnarayan, who has spent just over seven years in CRM at Sotheby’s. His route into email went through telecoms in India, DVD and Blu-ray licensing, and Havaianas in Madrid. While he was there he started helping the email team, taught himself the HTML and went freelance.

At an auction house, stock is finite and every item is one of a kind. So the email isn’t a weekly buy-buy-buy blast. It’s the timely alert: the artist you collect is coming up for auction, or the lot you liked closes in five minutes. And loyalty means looking after whole families, because the person you sell to today might consign that piece back to you years later.

Vinit explains how his growth marketing team wins over relationship managers who have guarded their clients for decades. They don’t fight for channel credit. They measure themselves against what the whole business needs: more bidders per lot, more consignments.

On AI, his team uses it to stop waiting on engineering. But he’s wary of vibe coding. If you don’t understand where your data comes from, you can’t trust what you’re sending.

In this episode:

• From telecoms in India to CRM at Sotheby’s
• Nobody’s painting any more Picassos, and what finite stock does to CRM
• Email as a timely alert, not a blast
• Loyalty across generations of collectors
• Measuring the team against company goals, not channel credit
• Using AI to stop waiting on engineering, and why vibe coding worries him
• Decades of offline data, and why plug-and-play AI makes him hesitant

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

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/

Why not hand every email to AI, from the first build to the final send? It would be faster. It would also give you twenty different versions of your brand, headlines that run past the character limit, and nobody accountable when something goes out wrong.

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey take on the "just AI everything" pitch that's all over LinkedIn. Elliot starts with a real test: he connected Claude to his Gmail and had it unsubscribe inboxes from everything they'd signed up to. It cleared weeks of work, but it still came back with a handful of failures per person to sort out by hand.

Joe explains why email design systems, the pre-approved building blocks that keep a brand consistent, are turning into the guardrails AI needs. A prompt or a skill can describe your brand, but a design system with validation rules can enforce it. That matters when an LLM can't reliably count to forty characters. The question now isn't whether AI can build an email. It's how you keep 200 agents building for your brand without drifting off it.

Will brings in what CRM teams are telling us: junior builds that look fine and then break in the inbox, taped-together workflows that leave every email slightly off-brand, and how much nuance you'd have to teach a model before it gets things right.

They also ask whether every email will end up looking the same, why AI should raise standards rather than cut corners, and which jobs nobody should be doing by hand anymore, like checking every link in 16 languages or copying and pasting all day.

In this episode:

• Letting Claude loose on an inbox
• Why not just AI everything?
• Email design systems as guardrails for AI
• Skills vs validation rules: describing your brand vs enforcing it
• Keeping 200 AI agents on-brand
• Accountability: "the agents did it" isn't an answer
• AI doesn't replace humans, it shows where they're invaluable
• Ask AI for the process, not just the output

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you keep hearing that AI can do the lot, this episode gives you a better question to ask: where does your team add value, and what does AI need from you to stay on brand?

What would you do with the time AI gives back? Tell us in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

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/

AI will tell you it's right whether it is or not. So how does an email team work out what to hand over, what to check, and what to keep?

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey look at trust in AI for email marketing and CRM teams. Elliot has just come back from Ogilvy's Nudgestock, where this year's theme was trust in the digital age. That sets up the conversation: how you learn when to trust AI output and when not to, and why this change is harder to manage than mobile or GDPR ever were.

Will talks about the themes coming out of CRM teams at the moment, Joe explains why AI is most useful in work you already know well. They also look at why AI can speed up an email build and still leave you with the same QA time at the end.

In this episode:

• The pattern this week: teams building their own AI tools vs teams doing nothing at all
• Nudgestock, Rory Sutherland and trust in the digital age
• How do you learn to trust AI, and when to stop?
• "AI doesn't replace humans, it surfaces what's irreplaceable"
• Using AI where you're the expert vs where you're not
• If you tried ChatGPT two years ago and gave up, try again
• Skills, context and codifying what "on brand" means
• Does AI save time if you still have to check its homework?
• The human sandwich: human, AI, human

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe or any other ESP, and you're working out how far to trust AI with your campaigns, this episode gives you a practical way to test it: try it first on the work you know best.

Tell us about the best time AI lied to you. Drop it in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

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/

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:

• Why reboot Email Talk now
• Elliot Ross: ActionRocket, and how Taxi for Email started with an 800-email problem
• Joe Cottam: from Taxi engineering to building EmailShepherd
• Will Harvey: the customer's voice in the room
• How email quietly became a solved problem in the 2010s
• Marketers now expected to lead on AI without an AI background
• Why there are multiple right answers instead of one
• Technology used to be the guardrail. Now it moulds around your team
• Email design systems, MCP and what's newly possible
• The bits you shouldn't hand to AI — starting with accountability
• Against the "I automated 100% of everything, want my prompt ebook?" crowd
• What's coming: practitioner voices, and the pitfalls people didn't see coming

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.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

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/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Jay here:
https://twitter.com/emailjay_

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Paul here:
https://twitter.com/Paul_Airy
https://www.beyondtheenvelope.co.uk/

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/