Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

Mark Bundle on career paths, CRMs, and the importance of exclusion lists

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 41

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Ever wondered why email marketing refuses to die despite countless predictions of its demise? Mark Bundle, senior email marketing manager with The Adaptavist Group, reveals why email remains the "wise grandpa of marketing".

Mark's unlikely journey from aspiring barrister to email marketing expert offers a refreshing perspective on career development. With candid humour, he shares how pivotal mistakes became his greatest teachers – including the memorable time he accidentally bombarded hotel customers with hourly booking reminders. Rather than dwelling on the horror, Mark emphasises how these "learning opportunities" shape stronger professionals when approached with the right mindset.

We also dive deep into the power of marketing automation as "the backbone of the heavy lifting of your marketing," while exploring the emerging role of AI in this space. Mark believes AI currently offers only "tweaks around the edges" rather than replacing human expertise in understanding complex CRM ecosystems.

Whether you're a seasoned email marketer or simply trying to get more from your CRM system, Mark's three essential tips provide a powerful framework for success: document everything, deal with issues immediately, and test constantly. 


Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

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Haydn Woods-Williams:

My sweeping statement today is that email people love pasta. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Marketers of the Universe podcast. I'm here today with my co-host, tom Innes, and with ex-Brew Digital email extravaganza man, mark Bundle. We are introducing a slightly new thing that we're trying to do on the podcast today, where we invite a marketer onto the podcast. We ask them about their career, any insight they can have, any tips they've got for people wherever they are in their career, and also dig into what their biggest mistake sorry, their biggest learning situation we mean mistake, but to be positive, we're saying learning situation. So to kick that off, we have invited Mark, who's one of our favorite people, back onto the podcast and, without any further ado, let's get on with the podcast. Leading the conversation today is going to be our content marketing manager, tom innis. I'll be here chatting to mark as well, but my job is mainly to try and trip him up and ask the slightly stupider questions.

Tom Inniss:

uh, but for now, over to you, tom there are no stupid questions on this podcast, hayden, every day is a learning day, um. But, mark, first of all, lovely to have you back on the podcast. It has been a while. What do you do? Yeah, okay, what?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

do you do, mark? Who are you? What do you do?

Mark Bundle:

what do I do is a good question. Um, so yeah, I've moved from Vrew Digital back into the adapter's group, the umbrella company, the parent company. Uh, I'm still with senior email marketing manager. I'm still in charge of emails and crms and stuff. Uh, it's just now. Rather than advising our external clients, I spend more time in advising our internal teams and working on kind of building and improving our crm, making sure we are getting the best from the data that we collect let's start there instead.

Tom Inniss:

What has been like the big difference between working on a crm for external clients and then working on a crm for internal business units? Are there any key differences?

Mark Bundle:

oh massively. Um, I mean external clients generally. When they've come to us, it has been uh, we're looking to get started in crm, we're looking to build up a hub, for instance, or a salesforce or whatever, uh, and it's all wonderful and clean and there's new data going in. They're not kind of years of different processes going in ungoverned. So it's yeah, new clients ones tend to be a lot cleaner, even with migrations. It tends to be not too messy in that respect for kind of the smes we tend to work with.

Mark Bundle:

Uh, whereas the adaptive risk group crm is and I hope they're might be saying this it's been in use in an enterprise company for a long time. It didn't always have governance when the business was young and growing, and so there are still some hangovers from that hanging around which are like leaving a small trail of chaos with me. And there are crm admins are trying to fix and may kind of mean we're getting the most of that data. So, yeah, old, old crm historic legacy things that no one's quite sure what they are because they weren't documented new serums for clients and migrations for clients. You got nice, new, clean things that are much more easy to manage. You put a stamp on and document and get going from the from the offset is there?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

is there a difference between how you're able to kind of tell people what to do in a kind of agency situation versus being in-house?

Mark Bundle:

definitely again. Uh, being agency, you always have to be a bit one step back. So I'm advising you this, I'm suggesting that I would do this if it was me. Um, I think the best route is whereas um, because, because the clients paying the bills you can't tell them what to. You can just suggest what they should be doing unless they are really nice and giving you full control and say please make this better for us, and then you do what you like. But when you're in-house, I guess the biggest thing is I now get a bigger stick to wield. I don't have to advise people. I can tell people. Rather than saying you should document this, you should. Rather than saying you should document this, you should have people follow these draws. I can say no, these are the rules.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

You will follow them or turn your account off most people who who listen to this podcast tend to be maybe channel specialists, but they tend to be generalist marketers. Um, obviously, pretty much every marketer has experience of working inside a crm. If you've been marketing for more than five years and you haven't done that, you should probably look for a move. Um, do you have a tip for, like the generalist marketers who work in the CRM but aren't experts, um, in making sure that they can stay on the good side of you or whoever is the you in their businesses?

Mark Bundle:

Yeah, um, document things, ask questions. Like we said at the outset of this podcast, if it doesn't get cut, there's no. So things are stupid question and there's not. When it comes to your crm, they are big. They're complicated. If your company is bigger, your crm is bigger. It is more complicated. There is more mess. I don't care how good your admins are. There is more mess and it's going to be more difficult to understand every single function.

Mark Bundle:

And maybe you found a tool that you've not used before and oh, it does this thing. Should you use it? No, ask, ask the question, look for documentation. If your crm team haven't got a documentation hub where you can go and find out details about everything the team is using, get them to make one help, support them by giving them like an faqs of things you need to ask regularly. Get them going on a documentation.

Mark Bundle:

I think that is the the biggest thing any crm professional really needs to do. Yes, we need to provide value, we need to look at life cycle journeys and data and blah blah, but honestly, unless you're going to be in your job permanently and you can't guarantee that unless you're the owner of the company, documentation is probably the most important thing you can do, because it means whoever comes after you can pick up and run with it. They might make changes, but at least they know what the starting point is. They know why that random workflow does that thing, because actually without it some other process falls over and the sales pipeline doesn't function properly Unless everyone knows, or unless the person in control knows, what they are picking up.

Tom Inniss:

I mean, there's years worth of just trying on pick stuff and it's just not going to go well for you. We've gone so out of order with this whole conversation already, uh, derailed by the first question, uh, but that is that's what we're here for. But that is like excellent advice that I will probably get you to repeat at the end. We're in quite a unique situation well, not unique, but perhaps an atypical situation in that we, as the Adaptivist group, we have a lot of business units that sit under us and they all feed into the same HubSpot instance. In your opinion, is it better to have that approach or, from a technical perspective, is it better for everybody to have their own instances?

Mark Bundle:

uh, depends entirely what your objectives are really and how your business units interact. Um, if they're all very separate, they're doing different things, then yeah, potentially you might look to separate them and have like a data warehouse where you can do your analysis and kind of pull things together so you can analyze your cross-scale opportunities and your different personas and whatnot. If your kpis are quite aligned across those different business units, then you can keep it all in one place. There's no problem doing that. As you said, the adaptors group we do that and yes, obviously there's always someone wants to put in a slightly different direction because there are different business units. That's life. But generally we make it work and everyone kind of gets to share the data in one place and it's. You can do things a lot more quickly, a lot more agile that way.

Tom Inniss:

So, yeah, it depends how your business units relate to each other, I guess, and those I want to pull in different directions.

Mark Bundle:

That's what your stick's for yeah, uh, that, or if it is a valid uh thing, if somebody actually has you know what, there's an idea and yeah, we could do this, we could do. That is how we incorporate that in so it doesn't just work for that one team, that it will work for everybody. Because, as you said, we have this kind of power as a group. Let's make use of it and let's not start giving um one place a toy and then losing the value that someone else could be getting out of it as well that's, I guess, the big challenge of having a group versus being part of a startup or a kind of growing individual company yeah, people, people have different ideas.

Mark Bundle:

Um, because they are. Everyone sees themselves as their own little company, which is right, which is they're for their own objectives, their own kpis and budgets and everything, um. But there's then trying to remind everyone that they, your individual bits, are all part of a group and the group is what we're trying to nurture and grow. Um, so you're part of it. Yes, absolutely needs to grow as part of that. But that doesn't mean you want to compete with, kind of, your colleagues in a different business unit. Doesn't mean you want to take value away from them. It means if you find something that works brilliantly, let's share that. Let's get everyone using that so we can all benefit from these kind of learnings and where we are pulling in different directions, because there are so many different things or brilliant, that's, different sets of learnings we can all take and incorporate at once. It means you can learn and iterate faster as well.

Tom Inniss:

Awesome, thank you for that. So we promised the listener that we were going to talk a little bit about your career and how you ended up as a senior email marketer. So let's go right back to the beginning. How did you end up in marketing? By accident?

Mark Bundle:

I think it's probably true of a lot of marketers. To be fair, there's not too many people set out for a career in marketing. I don't believe. Fair play to those that do. Even did you? Uh, no, nor did I. Don't know who this is.

Mark Bundle:

I think it's quite a rare thing to set out to be a marketer from an early age. I mean, I trained as a barrister, I wanted to work in criminal law. That didn't work out, ended up doing some like telesales for a little while. Hated cold calling with a passion, absolutely hated it. But then we started launching. If it was in a publishing house, we started launching email newsletters alongside the magazines and alongside the websites and the guy that kind of started doing that. I was kind of shadowing him, um, finding out more about it. And when he left the business, um, they said basically, do you want to take over? Do you want to start writing the emails, um, from a marketing perspective? So that wasn't. I wasn't doing the setup and the technical bit in. I think it was Salesforce Marketing Cloud at the time, but I was like pulling together copy, learning the best practices, even designing a few banners and things for clients. Then from there, yeah, I really loved email. I loved the technical aspect of it.

Mark Bundle:

My next job was in an email marketing agency. They probably wouldn't like me referring to them as that. They always thought of themselves as a customer data platform, but by and large, what we did was build or help other people build emails and send them out, manage the data a bit. And then moved to the adaptorist group Again doing the same thing, but now more driving strategy. Still doing some doing. Still doing some build and send, but largely trying to drive strategy, trying to document things, trying to gain adoption of proper practice. So yeah, it's gone. Law, sales and marketing. I did also dabble in politics for a while, so I do sometimes just ask people which part of me would they prefer to dislike. First, the salesman, salesman, the politician, the marketer or the lawyer? Speed running yeah, exactly, it's like three years unpopular careers for their fit in one way. So parking warden next. Exactly that's my recliner plan do you do?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

you do you regret getting into email or are you pleased you did?

Mark Bundle:

no, no, I'm pleased I did it and, honestly, my job title is Senior Email Marketing Manager. I spend so little time looking at email now it's probably less than 10% of what I do, but it's. You know what it changed. It's still very much rude. In the 80s, an email is still built table TRTD same as it was in 1980, dot. But how you then build things inside, that is always changing. Um, so, whether it's through getting countdown clocks in animated gifs, videos, I mean, you can get an entire shopping cart inside an email. Now, if you've got the right apis, I've seen someone deliver an entire presentation and it's folded back down inside an email. Um, so there's, it's a really old kind of traditional standard thing, but it's folded back down inside an email. So it's a really old kind of traditional standard thing, but it's always tweaking and changing as well and everyone's always writing it off and it's hilarious to just keep going. And yeah, it has a higher ROI than almost any other channel. Enjoy.

Tom Inniss:

I was going to ask, if you like, how do you back those criticisms, or not even criticisms, is it? It's more the joking around how email is perhaps less efficient or dead, or yeah, email is dead.

Mark Bundle:

Myspace took it over. Oh, did it? Okay, where's myspace gone? And god exactly, it's facebook's user numbers dwindling. Is twitter disappearing? Oh wait, social media keeps collapsing on itself. Um, so I'm not saying social media doesn't have value it absolutely does but saying it's taken over from email when you log in for most of those things with an email address is well, palpably wrong like the wise grandpa of the the marketing world yeah, exactly, it's always going to be around, um, and it's just going to plod along in the background.

Mark Bundle:

It's going to provide value. It's going to I mean in b2c particularly. It's going to throw you out your random basket, which is the most valuable thing, um see, it's always going to be. It's never going to throw you out your random basket, which is the most valuable thing, um see, it's always going to be. It's never going to be the most fashionable, the most glamorous. It's never going to attract the kids to do it, because they've been doing it on their phone since they were 14. But it's, it's there. It provides value and it's it's probably always going to be there how would you view direct mail versus a email?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

which one would you Direct?

Mark Bundle:

mail still has a place. It's obviously not as scalable because of just the need to physically produce things, but it's still the thing of getting something in the post, particularly if it's good direct mail, like personalized direct mail. I mean, I recently signed up as a present for my other half that they'll send a page of a story each month via letter. It's like a. You receive the. I think it's like a love letter from a regency period and each month you get or two turns once you get another letter, because that actually thing of holding the piece of paper in your hand adds value, has kind of this uh, I don't know activates a different part of your brain. It's. I'm not saying that direct mail is like a king among kings, but it's definitely still a good tool in the marketing mix, I think.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I'll steer away from direct mail. I just think direct mail is great fun.

Mark Bundle:

Yeah, it absolutely still has value. It just needs to be done properly. Like no one cares about the leaflet from the local business you're in, but if you do proper direct mail with personalized stuff on it, that's actually you know that could add value, then yeah, absolutely, getting something in the post is still great. There's not a bill. Particularly there's not a bill yeah, I guess.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I guess it kind of ties into your, your, the other big part of your job, which is the crm. And you know, I've been part of a business who who didn't look after their customers kind' address data particularly well. So when we ran a direct mail campaign, most of it came back. Sadly, those were chocolate bars. They were mostly melted. I'd ate a lot of melted Boost bars.

Mark Bundle:

That was intentional, though. Surely that was just so you could eat the chocolate on the marketing budget.

Mark Bundle:

We see you, Hayden go booster yeah, you know crm is there's 90 of my world probably now um, and, yeah, it's, it's so easy to do and so difficult to do. Well, um, more and more you'll see that crm is evolving beyond just email, where a lot of places have traditionally just gone crm email, same thing. Um, absolutely it's still part of it, but it's also life cycles. There's also um lifetime value. There's also kind of the integrations between sales and marketing and making sure those lines blur for the customer so that they don't feel this kind of clunky job between different departments. If they need to outreach to someone because there's a faulty product but then they get an email saying can you review it, I mean that's an awful experience. Good crm, make sure that doesn't happen and make sure it's a seamless experience, both for for your customers, users, prospects, whatever you want to call them, as well as for your internal teams to make sure they can access the right data to get good, relevant campaigns out to the right people.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Yeah, I think there's such a hidden art to it and you're so right with the fact that it's easy to do and incredibly difficult to do well, and also very easy to screw up as well oh, incredibly, it is, it's, yeah, it's.

Mark Bundle:

You can do the most innocent thing and then you can create like a property because you want to store some data in it, but because you've not told other people what that property is for, they've started using it for something else because they've seen and think, oh, that does what I want it to do.

Mark Bundle:

And then things overriding each other and one side's looking at data that makes no sense to them or worse, it makes sense but is wrong, and so they're using it, thinking it's right but actually it's not. Yeah, you can make such a mess of it so quickly without the proper kind of guidance and governance, which is why the industry is seeing more and more kind of CRM leads having seats at the big table. So industry seeing more and more kind of crm leads having seats at the big table. Um, so it's quite often your head of cro, your revenue officer um, will be kind of in charge of a crm um, because they are looking to make sure that sales and marketing uh driving the best value out of it and getting the most money out of it, and it needs to be kind of agnostic between the two. You can't have a crm set up for sales and a crm set up for marketing. It needs to be set up for everybody, with neither one of those feeling like they're losing out to the other definitely that's.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That's. That's interesting. Um, we'll, we'll ignore the, the naughty ding in the background. Someone, someone hasn't set off their notifications. Phone is not on silent. If this was a cinema, we'd all be turning around and throwing popcorn at you. One of the things that I know you work a lot on and I think is one of the things that is really undervalued in businesses, is the simple workflow. How important is a workflow to what you do, and do you think it's something that more people should be like playing with and working with?

Mark Bundle:

yeah, and just to clarify workflow in this instance we are talking about marketing automation as opposed to like how you go through a process of of doing work. And yeah, marketing automation in that aspect on workflows or whatever it is your tool calls them are absolutely essential. I don't care if it's b2b, b2c, whatever. There are so many processes that can be automated, whether that's assigning contact owners, whether that's checking if your support ticket is from a particular region and assigning it to the right rep, whether that's making sure that people that have downloaded an ebook are sent it, um or webinar subscribers are signed up to actually signed up to the webinar or, if they've not signed up, they're nurtured further to try and promote it or to promote other content that might encourage them to interact with you. If you're using a crm and you're not using marketing automation, you're not doing it right.

Mark Bundle:

Marketing automation and that's a significant part of CRM these days is absolutely there to make your life easier, to take away the manual, repetitive tasks that are prone to mistakes. Marketing automation takes that away. You set it up. That doesn't mean it's perfect every time. Everyone has made mistakes with their automations but it's there, you get it checked, you get it up. That doesn't mean it's perfect every time. Everyone has made mistakes with their automations. But it's there, you get it checked, you get it set up. And then those boring, mundane tasks, or those tasks that are at such scale that they couldn't be done manually, because you've sent an email to 100,000 contacts and you need to assign their preferences based on which products they clicked on. That can't be done at scale manually, it can by marketing automation. So, yeah, those kind of workflows or journeys or whatever else they're called in your tool are absolutely 100% vital. They make up the backbone of the heavy lifting of your marketing.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Now, Go ahead, Tom.

Tom Inniss:

I was going to say how much of that is now being taken over by AI, rather than you manually planning through the process.

Mark Bundle:

Surprisingly little. I mean, we use HubSpot and HubSpot's AI offering is really cool. You can ask it to prompt you for text for emails or subject lines. There is a I believe it's still coming soon feature where you can ask it to plot out a workflow for you. They've got different customer agents and they've got prospecting and intelligence enrichment and all sorts of things, but they have an AI offering. That's really good, but it doesn't mean it's perfect.

Mark Bundle:

I still don't think AI is going to take everyone's jobs, because it still can't spell check properly and if you can't correct a simple two letters being reversed, the world is safe just now from the terminators for something like a complex automation. It might be able to give you a basic structure, but how you then understand the data and we'll need to model that it probably won't understand unless you've, like, hooked up an llm that you've custom trained on your data, which then becomes a security risk. So maybe you haven't done that, but it's. There's definitely tweaks around the edges in crm, I think that are improved with ai. I think it still needs a human touch and I still think it needs a human understanding of the intricacies of how an individual crm instance is set up.

Mark Bundle:

So if you were going to try and get more AI involved, you would have to train it on your instance, and that's going to come from a CRM person who's going to have to keep updating that training as processes change in the rest of the business, because the CRM is a mirror to the rest of the business. It shows if a sales process is updated great. So does your pipeline automation. If marketing and now targeting a different sector great. So your target accounts have all shifted. Ai doesn't know that unless someone tells it. So it's a great tool. It can absolutely help, but right now it's not going to take CRM staff's jobs, in my view.

Mark Bundle:

This is Mark tricking us, because we all know that you are a robot driven by ai I mean, yeah, I have claimed for years I am a robot and I don't make mistakes, but, um, I do have to occasionally admit to them has he just set himself up for the mistake? Question that's up I mean I segued beautifully.

Tom Inniss:

I thought, yeah, yeah, he's trained, he's trained, so should we talk about some learning opportunities? Uh, you say that it's very easy to set up and it's also very easy for things to go catastrophically wrong. Can you think of an instance where that has happened for you? Yeah, what did you take from it?

Mark Bundle:

yeah, so, the, the, my favorite, and I say favorite in quotes um, probably instance I could. I had to a real learning from um. I was responsible for setting up automations for emails for a one and hotel hotel chain and we just refreshed all their branding. They just gone through the entire rebrand and, um, we set everything back up and I just put their abandoned basket email live. So people that started booking a holiday, uh, but not quite completed it, somehow I had put the wrong timings on the automation and I'd missed an exclusion list. So if you put a hotel in your basket, every hour on the hour you got an email saying you looked at this hotel and it just kept going and they had obviously people emailing them going, why are you spamming me? Um, they messaged me obviously quite irate going. Why are we spamming them? Uh, and me having a right panic going. Oh my god, I missed the exclusion list. I'm so sorry and I haven't obviously had to fix it. It was a difficult fix. It was just I said I missed the exclusions to say hadn't received the email in like the last 30 days or whatever. It was double checking everything and particularly for anything that goes live that's going to send things out to other people.

Mark Bundle:

Peer reviewing is, um, massively underrated. Make sure you get things checked, uh, so that you don't upset hundreds of your clients clients, I mean, I was still relatively junior in my career at that point and we had a good working relationship with the client. So they forgave me and it was fixed within like two or three hours. But it's still kind of the example of you know what? I was junior then and I don't make that same mistake now. But if if I hadn't made that mistake, then there's every chance I could make that mistake now.

Mark Bundle:

So I think all these learning opportunities rather than mistakes is a really good thing as well, because it's once you've made that error, you're not going to make it again. So when you are junior, you know what. That is the time to make the mistakes. A you're going to be forgiven because you're junior and you're learning. But B, it means that they're going to be set in stone for the rest of your career. You've then that learning will stick with you and you'll be able to pass that on to the other people you're helping to develop and train and follow after as well.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I like that, I really like that. I think that's so impactful, keeping on that kind of similar tone. Obviously when you're junior, when you make that, that mistake learning opportunity from a mental health point of view. How do you look after yourself in that situation and are there any tips that you can give to people who may, you know, may not know it yet, but they're due to make a mistake next week?

Mark Bundle:

yeah, the big red button scares so many people and you know what I'm happy with that the the more the big red button that says send scares people, the more they're going to check things before they hit send. Yeah, um, it really depends a lot of it on who you're working with, who's around you. If you make a mistake and you've got supportive team around you peers, managers, etc. And they're like no, this is the mistake. If you don't know how to fix it yourself, they can show you how to fix it. Um, they can, and I help you talk to the client and smooth the relationship over if they've got a longer relationship with them. It's. So you immediately feel guilt upon making the mistake. Oh my god, it's the worst thing in the world. Um, especially if you're working in marketing, it's not the worst thing in the world. Nobody has died. No one is hurt. Like it's a mistake. Absolutely own the mistake, correct it, apologize for it. But and you're going to feel guilty because human nature, but don't let that eat you up it's.

Mark Bundle:

It's not really a big deal in the great scheme of what's a big deal to your job, maybe yes you'll learn, you'll develop, you won't do it again and chances are the people around you won't do it again either. So it's kind of a ripple effect of the impact. But, yeah, you need to face the mistake, acknowledge it, work out how you're going to not do it again and then move on from it and go. You know what I've learned now, rather than going oh my god, this is going to crush me. I feel so nervous, I feel so guilty.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

You can't wallow in something that, honestly, if we're being really honest with ourselves, doesn't matter yeah, um, and I know you've, you've got experience and I think currently are a line manager as well. How do you deal with that from the other side when it's your employee that's made the mistake?

Mark Bundle:

yeah, I mean I like to think I'm reasonably supportive. Um, it's not a blame game, it's a okay cool. This is the mistake. Do we know what the cause is? Do we know how to fix it? Let's get that done. Let's get some learnings in place.

Mark Bundle:

Depending on kind of the process and the company. Do we need to have some kind of, like uh, documentation to show what the error was and what the the plan is to go forward? Do we need to have a chat with anyone to explain the situation? Because it's impacted another team, but it's very much from a place of it's fine, you've made a mistake. Let's make sure it's not happening again. Let's make sure that if there is a hole in a process that's caused the mistake, let's fix that hole. But it's. I'm not gonna hammy with a stick because you made a mistake. I'm just gonna try and make sure you learn from it, uh, and the rest of the team is gonna learn from it, and then we're gonna crack on because you know what you made. One mistake, brilliant. How many other things have you done today that you didn't make a mistake on? Let's let's make sure you're focusing mentally on those perfect.

Tom Inniss:

So just to wrap up, so that we have a section. We've scattered throughout this conversation some like best practices and things to do and not do. But if you were to provide three tips for a company, regardless of size, whether or not they're just starting off or if they are already a large scale company with a lot of data in their CRM, what tips would you give to support email marketing teams? Document everything.

Mark Bundle:

Your job isn't just to do your job. Your job is to make it easy for those that come after if you leave for whatever reason. Um, so make sure that that pickup is going to be as easy as possible and anyone working with you can pick up anything as easily as possible. We want to hold the cover. Don't make it hard for them. Deal with issues straight away. You might know you've got a problem, your data indecision, that you're missing a crucial field from one particular supplier. Make sure you're breaching that or you're fixing that breach as quickly as you can. Don't let things linger. The longer they linger, the more they'll compound. The more they compound, the more complex they become to fix. And three test People and I've talked about how marketing automations can do the heavy lifting for you.

Mark Bundle:

That doesn't mean you can just set like an onboarding email and explore, live and forget it. Testing and, more importantly, test and learn. So make sure you're again, you're documenting, you're testing, so you can see what the learnings are from each thing. Did the short subject line beat the long subject line? Cool, we'll use long ones now. Did the special offer be or that? Did the money off perform better than the discount off? Document is there. You know that to do further, iterate through your plan I mean, those are bad examples of iterations of different things but make sure you're iterating through and constantly testing if you think you're done, you're not. And that's the, that's the probably the the best way I can make sure you are always testing something, you're always trying to find something to improve, because there's always going to be something that you can either do better or you know what. The market has changed a little bit and preferences have changed, and so your market needs to adapt to that preference change. So, yeah, document it, address it early and test it there you.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Sadly, that is all we have time for today. Thank you so much to Mark Bundle for coming back and talking to us. Thank you so much for listening and we hope you found some really useful snippets from Mark today. Do go and put them into action. I think there's been some really, really impactful nuggets of information that he shared with us. We really love making this content. Thank you so much for getting this far through the listen. We'd love it if you could recommend to a friend, a colleague, family member, whoever it might be. And thank you to the Brute Digital team well, tom and I for their brilliant research. Thank you to Mark for his input into today's session. Make sure you check out our past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to our podcasts and we will see you in the next one. I've been Hayden. That's like what's your final meal?

Mark Bundle:

Probably something with pasta. Chances are it would be some kind of pasta with an Italian sauce.

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Haydn Woods-Williams

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