The Email Is Dead. Long Live the Email!

Overview of Nerdearla and Its Impact

Jolo: So thank you, everybody, for being here. I'm Jolo. I come from Buenos Aires, from Argentina. You may know some of these people that are also from Argentina. And if you haven't watched these shows The It or Not or haven't watched this movie, please watch it.

It's a great movie and a great show. Argentina is also home to Okay. So this is how we pronounce Nerdearla In English. I know it's a mouthful.

So it's Nerdearla. Can you do it? Nerdearla. Excellent. Which is pretty much Spanish for nerd it up.

It's a nerd tech event. And it's the biggest tech event you never heard of probably before from here. So we started in 2014. We went hybrid in 2022. It's a 100% free for attendees.

It has been free for everybody since we started in '20, 2014. We are back well, we have been backed by big companies such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, Meta, GitHub, all the big players. Last year, we had over 200 speakers from 20 different countries. We have run 12 editions. Actually, this is our twelfth edition in Buenos Aires.

The next one is coming up late September. We are doing our first one in Madrid in November. We've done two editions in Santiago De Chile returning in 2026, and one in Mexico City that we are still filling out the dates. So last year, did three events. We did Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, And we had a total of 15, 000 people in person and 50, 000 online.

Imagine a big event with lots of people, lots of nerds, lots of people showing up, lots of fun activities to do. You could take your photo with the this is fine. You had 2, 000 people watching the keynote speaker at the end. We did a special event at the Buenos Aires Planetarium. It is a big thing.

And there is an unwritten rule for free events. I don't know if anybody organizes events here. But if 50% of the people that registers actually show up, you have to celebrate. You are lucky. The most that you're going to get in a free event is 50% of people actually showing up.

Because free events means low commitment and so no consequences for housekeeping. People register just in case and then they show up. Life gets in the way. I know that everybody has a life. There might be transportation issues.

Driving Registrations and Media Strategies

Maybe not I don't know about here, but in Latin America we do have a lot of transportation issues sometimes. There may be bad weather. It may be raining. It may be too cold or too hot. People may forget about the event that is happening.

So those are the reasons why people may not show up in the end. So how is it that we drive registrations? We rely on paid, own, and earned media as anybody does, with the exception that we don't really pay for anything. we don't pay for getting people at the door. We just rely on organic stuff and earned media, which we do great.

Actually, we are very lucky that most of the media in Argentina and around the country, they cover the event. So we are going to focus on own media for the purpose of this talk. And these are the numbers from last year. So we are doing great on social. We have over 1, 000, 000 one yeah.

One and half million impressions on Instagram, 1. 2 on Twitter, 600, 000 on LinkedIn, almost 300, 000 views on YouTube. And these are the great numbers. And we have a great, community manager. She's great. She really turned the volume up to 11 on her social media presence.

But social medias drives awareness, at least for us. That's what you drive with social media. You drive awareness. You don't drive conversion again, at least for us. So for me, this really represents 4% of people that register through Instagram, they actually show up.

8% for Twitter, seven percent or something that for LinkedIn. And again, these are all the own media that we have on social. Can you think of any other own media that we have and I haven't spoken about yet? I'm thinking of the name. Yeah.

Email. Thank you. So can you guess how many people actually show up if they register through email? 20%, do I get bored? 20%, 2530%, 30%.

Okay. Ta da, 35%. So these are the numbers that we got from conversion from people that register from social media versus email. And it was huge for us to actually realize that, we are focusing all of this time and effort. And again, it's great that we are doing social media and we love social media.

The Importance of Email Marketing

But at the same time, me as a conference organizer, really care about people showing up, people registering and people showing up to the event. But at the same time, we all knew this, that the email is dead. It was born in 1971. It died probably this year or it has died many times over because we have all of these gurus on YouTube, people going out on their way to say that the email is dead. You have lots of people saying on YouTube that the email is dead, that if the email is dead again, there you go, three reasons why the email is dead.

Five reasons why the email is dead, they keep going up. Email marketing is dead. I changed my mind on Reddit. Inc. Magazine seems to have some personal issue with emails.

So in 2018, they said the email is already dead. Mark Zuckerberg, of course, he has a thing against email. So he also said that the email is dead. And again, Inc. Magazine said again that the email in 2015, they said that the email was going to be dead by 2020.

That didn't really age well. At least they're still promoting their newsletter. So I don't really honestly know what Inc. Has against email. I get it why Mike Soccerware may be against email, Inc.

Magazine, I don't know. So some boring stats about email, and trust me on this one because, oh, you can see them. 4, 600, 000, 000 active users worldwide. 99% of the users check their inbox at least once a day, and many more we do it more than once. 69% read their emails while watching TV or in bed or in vacations.

And 58% checks their email before they check social media or they check news or anything else. So with that in mind, we say okay, let's double down on email. This is the attendees' database that we have right now. It's pretty large. And these are the users that are active within the year.

And we can discuss later if that's a good time span to keep your database. It should be shorter. It should be larger. We actually have over 200, 000 subscribers, but active within the last year. This is the latest numbers that I pulled earlier today.

And in 2024, we sent out 3, 000, 000 email to these poor people over here, which seems we are spamming people, but trust me, we are not. If you think of it, that's less than 20 emails per person, average. And we have people that are subscribed to our monthly newsletters, so that's already 12 emails that you're going to get throughout the year. And it's only seven more emails that you get. And we did three events this year last year.

Cost-Effective Email Solutions with Mautic

So and of course, that's on the average. some people may get only one email every month, and some people may get more emails depending on the segment on how we consider them. So 3, 000, 000 emails in one year. This is what we had to pay if we wanted to go the classic SaaS way. We could start here with Bribo.

Actually, we use sending Blue Bribo, almost $4, 000. And then we can go all the way down to Mailchimp, which was about $20, 000. Or if we wanted to really go higher, we could use HubSpot, which isn't really fair because they do much more than email marketing. But still, again, we don't pay for anything. We try not to pay for anything.

So here comes open source to the rescue, and open source doesn't mean free. Please, don't ever quote me saying that I said that open source is free. Open source is not free. But this particular project called Mautic is an open source project that you can run yourself. You can install it.

And it's open source, and it also happens to be free. And we are using commission of Mautic and Amazon AWS SCS for sending out the actual emails. So we went from having to pay between $4, 000 to 20 to can you guess how much we pay for $3, 000, 000 with AWS SCS? $50 Well, a little higher than that, but still $300 It is 0. 0000001 per email. But you do have to pay for your email, so we can discuss about that later.

So Molik is a very flexible platform. It's a very big platform. It has all the basics and more. here's the contacts view. So this is one of my co organizers, Eduardo.

So you have all the data that you want to have of your contacts, first name, last name, email, segments that you can build. And you can build these fields yourself for example if they want to receive sponsored messages, if the technology stack that they use, and all of this comes from registration. So although the conference is free, do need to share some of your information here. So years of experience was ten to fifteen, company, and all of that metadata about the contacts. And you also get I sent him 40 emails.

Dynamic Email Campaigns and Segmentation

He opened 90% of them, which is good. Thank you, Eduardo, for watching this. Click through rate and click through open rate doesn't don't know what Eduardo is doing. He should be opening up the emails that we sent out, but still pretty good. And you get these stats for each user.

You can build segments, of course, which is group of people. You can build them statically. You just upload a CSV file or whatever into a segment, or you create your own dynamic segments. I don't think this is very readable for you, but this is a segment of people that read this particular email. Or for example, people. country equals Argentina or email domain ends with. ar.

So you can build these segments, and you can build many, segments combining a lot of things using or and operators. And the fun thing here, and I will do it very fast so you can see when it appears again, you can build campaigns. So campaigns, they start with a contact source and you filter them out. For example, the first step is usually always have a valid email address. You wouldn't imagine how many people mistype gmail. com with an n or Hotmail or whatever.

Or they would even put gmail. com. ar from Argentina that doesn't really exist as a domain name. So you have to make sure that these are valid domains. And then it is a workflow, you send an email. You wait for a couple of days to see if they open it. And if not, you send them the email, you send another email, a follow-up email, and all of that.

And basically, can do, well, you can do actions, decisions, and conditions for each of these steps, and that's how you run a campaign. So in this one, if the segment is Argentina, I send this email. If the segment is not Argentina, so red means no, green means yes. If the person is not from Argentina, I'm going to send them another email. So maybe I will send them an email that's in English.

Whereas if they're in Argentina, they're going to send it in Spanish. Or for example, if they are a Hotmail user, I'm not going to send them anything. So if you are from Hotmail, nothing's going to come your way. If you are not on Hotmail, yes, I'm going to send you something and I will elaborate on that later. So how do we enable or foster conversion here?

And this goes more into the HTML piece or the email that you are going to send the user. This is one of our emails from last year. So it has everything that we needed to have. It has the header here. You have the copy and the call to action, register for free at the event.

And we used to send the same email to everybody. So basically, we were using email as social media. On social media, you cannot send one on one messages to everybody. And on email, we were doing the same thing, which was a huge mistake on our end because email does have that flexibility. So we were sending out this email, and this is a great email.

I would have assumed that people would be excited about receiving this email because we had a great lineup of speakers last year. So this guy created Unix and Go, Raya Perelman. He literally builds things that are on the International Space Station. Who else? we have somebody that landed a rover on Mars.

We had the creator of DevOps, Patrick De Wa. We had the first Argentinian, South American chess champ, grandmaster of chess. And we had great line of speakers. And the email did okay. We sent 122 emails.

Improving Engagement Through Personalization

34% no, sorry, 33, 000 people read it, so that's 27%. 6, 000 people clicked on it. So the CTR means 5% conversion here and CTO CTOR converse click through open rate was 18%, which by an industry average, that's okay. It's good. But then we discovered this feature that Malteq has, and I'm sure every other provider has the same, where you can build dynamic emails.

So based on conditions, you can actually tailor every email that goes out. And I'm not just talking about hey, Ariel or hey, Juan Pablo or hey, whatever. You can actually change the contents of the email. So what we did here was, again, the same. And instead of putting the whole the lineup, the speakers lineup, we built their own ones.

And I'm using this because these are actual timelines, I don't want anybody to feel offended. But we built custom, talks, recommended talks for everybody. Can you guess if we did it better or worse? Better. Of course, better.

Thank you. So we send out pretty much the same amount. We had a slightly better, 30% open rate. But we had twice, trust me on this one, we had twice as much people clicking. We had almost twice as much CTR and almost 31% versus 18% conversion to open rate just because we were customizing each email.

So we really increased the chances of people actually wanting to attend the conference, not to maybe watch Ken Thompson, which I love, but maybe people don't really care about Unix or go. They are JavaScript developers. But here, I'm telling you, go watch it this, Java eight or backend talk because I know that you care about that. So for us, segmentation is key thing. Sorry.

And this is how we do it. simply, we have all that in the information, so that was my record over there. So I'm a DevOps engineer, twenty years of experience. I use the technology stack Linux, Bash, AWS, whatever here. And on the other half, we have the tox information provided by the speakers.

So we have the title, the track, the target audience, and the tags. So this is pretty much a one on one matching thing. So you match the position to the track. You match the years of experience to the target audience, and you tag the you match the tags and the technology stack. And you get this beautiful email that you are going to imagine right now where I get, my recommended talks.

And again, we increase a lot, by a lot, the opportunity of people actually showing up. All of this without using any AI. We don't really yeah. Probably this is the first slide that you see no AI in the conference. Thank you.

Technical Considerations for Email Campaigns

So this is very simple to do. on Mautic, you can build your own dynamic content. So for example, here I have position technology using, this is UX Figma or Illustrator position designer or UX. And then I complete that with UX here. And on the HTML, I have remember the six thumbnails?

All I do here is image source that points to my endpoint with dynamic content here, dynamic content here, dynamic content here. And that's how you build, a very simple thing without using AI. Other ways to use email other way that we are using emails is to improve people's, experience. So whenever you come to the event, as many events, you have your QR code. So this is the, registration place.

And people have their QR codes in hand, they need to be scanned in order to validate that they are, real, attendees. So whenever your code was scanned, we had a webhook that basically send you an email saying, hey, welcome to the venue. These are the top things that we need you to do in the first five minutes that you step foot on the conference, and we do it every day. So here's the Wi Fi password. Here's the schedule.

Here's the app that you need to download. These are the social media accounts that you need to follow or tweet or, post or whatever. We do care about social media. We love social media, and we care that people use social media when they are on the event. I want people to sign up via email because I know they are more likely to come.

But once you are on the event, you are not going to shoot any emails. you are going to post on Twitter. You are going to post on Instagram. So I do want you to use social media here. Very quickly, some things that you need to have in mind if you are going to start your email marketing campaign.

DNS staff, you need somebody that's really wise in things technical staff because if you mess up your DNS configuration, your emails are not going to go anywhere or they're going to go to spam. You need to be sending consistent volume. So if you try to send out the first day's 50, 000 emails, that's not going to work. You need to warm up. You need to start sending by smaller chunks.

Keep your spam rates below actually 0. 1%. Monitor your campaigns. So if you are sending a campaign and you start getting a lot of bounces, a lot of spam reports, pause the campaign. Do whatever you need to solve for it. But do not keep sending emails if you are getting flagged real time because you are going to be shooting yourself on the foot.

And then, of course, use clear and honest display names. One click unsubscribe is something that we all appreciate as users. And you can use Bemi to get your logo on the on the email client. Also, be aware of your sending limits. We just got upgraded, thanks AWS.

We were sending 14 emails per second. We doubled that pretty much. So that means 1, 800 per minute. And this is how we on Mordec, you need to use Cronjobs to send emails. So it runs every minute with a time limit of fifty five seconds, and we allow it to send only 1, 700 just in case something happens.

But this is the way to keep emails when you say an email queue and also with throttle depending on how we are doing. But this is something important. again, Motik is free. It's open source. It's great, but you need to take care of this.

Again, for us, we are all C submits and we know how to do it. If not, we will have to rely on SendGrid or all of these other vendors. Also, Mordic, you need to close the loop. Again, we are using the API to communicate to SCS and then SCS uses SMTP to go to Gmail or to the email provider. If you get a bounce, if you get an error, you need to report that back to Morik because otherwise, it's not going to know that an error happened and it's going to try to keep sending emails to the same email address that's no longer valid.

So you are going to get flagged. You are going to be paying for that email in the end. And it's in nobody best interest to do that. So you need to do this manually. It's pretty tedious, but it's pretty straightforward to get them into your do not contact information.

So in this case, recipient address rejected, user unknown, so there was a user that was deleted out of somebody's email server. And finally, Hotmail. Don't know if anybody had to deal with sending emails to Hotmail. my pain here. I don't know.

I don't know if anybody who here works at Hotmails or if you do, let's be outside. It was too painful. We ended up deciding not sending emails at least not through SES. So we use Swapcard as our event platform, and we they get to Hotmails in some ways that we don't understand. So we ended up building this segment where we filter the email domains that equals Hotmail, Outlook, live. com, or hotmail. s.

Future Plans for Email Marketing Strategies

And we don't send emails to them anymore using Matic at least or using SES. We do communicate to these people, which is a very small portion of our audience, but still relevant to us, of course. But we are using something else because they can they can actually get to Hotmail. For some reason, it was a long time since we for a long time, we couldn't. Now since we improved, thanks, Eduardo, a lot of things on our DNS, it's working better, but still we rely more on Swapcard for that.

So what's next for us regarding email marketing? We are having now faster campaigns delivery, thanks to AWS that bumped our sending limits. We are going to go bigger on granularity on dynamic emails to get more better recommendations for our users. More AB testing. We are not really using AB testing right now, which you should be using AB testing.

For some reason, we are not. I know the reason. It's not we are not creative enough with the email subjects to do AB testing, but we should be doing that. We are also going to try to use the multixpolling system, and I'm sure this also happens in every other platform. You can assign users points for actions.

So for example, if they click an if they open an email, you give them one point. If they click on a link, you give them three points. If they click on two links, you give them six points. If they show up to your events, you give them 20 points. If they show up to two events, you give them 40 points or whatever.

And then you can build segments or stages or tiers and take action. So if you have a user that has 100 points, you can invite them to a VIP party or something that. We are going to also leverage unsubscribe groups. On Mordic, you can declare these different unsubscribe groups for different people. So we run Modrig for Neriala but also for other things that we do as a community.

So we want people to be able to unsubscribe for different things without unsubscribing from the whole of the instance. So that's coming up this year. And, yeah, I'm sorry. I we are going to use some AI for sure and recommendations and stuff. So the email is not dead really.

It's far from dead. Use it, and thank you.