EP #44 Mayme Frey from Rover.com discusses best practices for selecting a new ESP and migrating over

Introduction(00:07):

You’re listening to”For The Love Of Email Podcast,” podcast powered by netcore, a weekly show dedicated to helping email marketers, marketing enthusiasts, and professionals of all walks engage, grow, and retain customers through reliable, smart, and effective email communication and engagement. Discover actionable ways to increase ROI and deliver value through email innovations, personalization optimization, email deliverability, and email campaigns. No fluff; tune in to your best practices and tactical solutions from the best thought leaders and practitioners; master your email communication now.

Matthew Vernhout (00:41):

Hello, and welcome to another edition of, for the love of emails, podcast; I will be your host today. Matthew Vernhout, vice president, deliverability of Netcore Cloud for America’s market. Today. I have a wonderful guest with me. Mayme Frey, manager II, CRM operations at Rover.com, is a marketing manager passionate about CRM processes and organization. She has been with Rover for over four years and has helped advance the growth and efficiency of the CRM team. Mami, welcome to the show.

Mayme Frey (01:18):

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Matthew Vernhout (01:21):

So we’re going to talk a bit about a process that is, I think, really near and dear to the marketer and email service provider. When it is time to look and choose a new vendor and sort the process of how you go from old vendor to new vendor and maybe some of the resources in between, let’s start by introducing yourself in your own words to the audience.

Mayme Frey (01:51):

Yeah. Well, my name is Mayme, but I love everything about marketing. But I think email has this great thing where it combines creativity with process and organization, which I am nothing if organized. And just when I found email almost seven years ago, I found the love of my life. So I’ve been doing it ever since.

Matthew Vernhout (02:17):

That’s the true email’s one of those things that once you kind of trip and fall into it, you know, it’s hard to get out. And, most people enjoy their time here while they’re in email.

Mayme Frey (02:27):

It’s amazing and not stuck to one industry so you can do anything with it.

Matthew Vernhout (02:33):

Absolutely. Everybody does email, so you can move into any industry in any country and carry those skills forward. You are talking about email migration, vendor selection, and the different processes. You’re looking at a new marketing partner. Where do you start that conversation internally with your organization to say, you know, we’ve outgrown or no longer like the vendor we’re currently using?

Mayme Frey (03:06):

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think you have to assess and audit and clearly map out your program needs and where you are and align and ensure you’re in tune with your business goals. And then look and see if what you have now can get you there. What you have now might work great for where you are today. But if you’re trying to scale with fewer people and more optimization and you work for, and you have a big enterprise company that requires a lot of process and connection with their team, it just might not work for you. And so, from there, you start creating documentation slowly, building a case, and making sure that it is what you need. And it truly is what is needed for your company because it’s a lot of work, and you don’t want to dive into it on a whim because no one ever went into an RFP and migration because they had extra time on their hands.

Matthew Vernhout (04:10):

That’s true. In the email industry, there’s not a lot of spare time just to be experimenting with new vendors every six months or, you know, even every year, and there’s a lot of effort to move. So, you know, do you start the process with looking at, you know, a bit of a gap analysis of like here’s where we want to be in a year or two years for our program and sort of here’s what our current vendor supports or doesn’t support and have that conversation with your existing vendor.

Mayme Frey (04:42):

Yeah. So I think transparency and honesty are essential in any vendor relationship. I think it’s always a partnership, and it’s not. They don’t work for you. They work with you. And so make them understand your pain points and give them opportunities to solve for them or make an effort to, and then know when it’s just not going to work too. You have to be honest with yourself. You have to know what your threshold is and what is the bare minimum you need. And then you must be willing to walk away when they don’t need it. I think our relationship came naturally when we were a small team and self-sufficient, but when we needed support, we truly needed it. And we weren’t getting the level of support we needed if any. And we’re also really agile. And when a UI takes 10 seconds for every click, it wastes 10 seconds, which adds up. And so, we started by figuring out what became blatantly clear: our pain points. And then I ensured that it is just annoying pain points, or is this affecting our business? And when you answer that question, you do what you need to have a like to have, and would love to have, and you make sure those buckets are clearly defined because if you don’t have your need to have filled, you shouldn’t move. If you can’t find somebody to fill that, don’t waste your time with a migration.

Matthew Vernhout (06:14):

Absolutely. And I wonder, like, did you also look at, was, you know, you’re saying you’re a small team, was some of it just skills analysis to say, do we have the skills internally to support this?

Mayme Frey (06:27):

Yes. One of the biggest things is to know your superpower, know everyone around you, and surround them with your deficiencies. I believe in creating a team that compliments each other, that is not the same as each other, because if you have a team of you, then you can only do certain things. So I made sure that I had the right technical people. I ensured every stakeholder that was going to touch the migration was involved on day one of the RFP because they also needed a reason to believe in it.

Matthew Vernhout (07:04):

That’s a thing.

Mayme Frey (07:05):

We’re asking a lot of them.

Matthew Vernhout (07:07):

That’s a great comment. I’ve seen the migration process fail because not enough people are invested properly. Over the years, I’ve seen many migrations in email over 20-plus years. So you know, if you don’t have the investment rate from the top or as senior as you can get that buy-in, you set yourself up for failure, just like if you have a bad RFP, you find the wrong vendor.

Mayme Frey (07:33):

Exactly read everything in your RFP.

Matthew Vernhout (07:40):

Well, and I think you, you made a great comment around sort of the, you know, things I absolutely must have right now, if you don’t check all those boxes. Right. And you know, it either means you’re not talking to enough vendors, or maybe even your expectations might be unrealistic. Right. So there are a few of those things. Exactly. So you have to be realistic with what you’re asking for. Right. I’ve seen it on RFPs, and like, how do you guarantee a hundred percent inboxing? It’s like, well, you can’t.

Mayme Frey (08:09):

You’re setting if that’s your goal. Best of luck to you, right.

Matthew Vernhout (08:13):

On average, an email list turns almost 3% a month. So if you expect a hundred percent inboxing all the time, you know, 3% of PE and 3% of the people will disappoint you every month.

Mayme Frey (08:25):

Exactly.

Matthew Vernhout (08:26):

So when you’re building your RFP, what are the sort of elements that you should consider adding to your RFP. If you don’t meet these boxes, you’re out, but as you also mentioned, like the nice to have and the, you know, would love to have sort of lower requirement, not a lower requirement, but like if I don’t have it today, I can figure it out. But if I have it, yeah. If you tell me I will have it in eight months, it’s a great kind of thing. Now, how do you determine that structure in your RFP?

Mayme Frey (09:03):

Well, it took me a few years to get to that place, but once I did, I made sure that I clearly defined it because you can’t assume that the stakeholders you’re working with know as much as you do. They know a lot about what they know and don’t work an email daily. So you have to ensure they understand it from your perspective and theirs. Another key to start is you don’t have to have the experience of RFP. Many marketers will never go through one and never go through migration, but you can make up for that with documentation, planning, organization, and transparency. I didn’t know what I was doing, but what I did know how to do was organize and create documentation. So I made sure that I had a questionnaire that accounted for everyone.

Mayme Frey (09:54):

And then I shopped that around and made sure everyone agreed that it touched everything before I kicked it off as there was no point. I buffered in time for the unexpected because there’s always unexpected. And I created a grading system for every phase of the timeline I meticulously planned out because I needed people to know the expectations in every conversation they were listening to. Because if you generally let them listen to a conversation, they remember the cliff notes and usually remember it more favorably. The last one they listen to. So just ensure they’re in the headspace for every conversation individually and have the tools to make that decision. It also saves you time in the evaluation process because if you have ten vendors as we started with and you have three that got a one and two that got 10, you can spend the hour or two hours of your time and evaluations where you’re weighing talking about that middle group. After all, that’s the group you need to talk about at the beginning that you already know. The tens are probably going to go through without any pushback.

Mayme Frey (11:12):

And you know, if they’re not meeting your needs up front, they’re probably not going to meet them at the end. Right. But yeah, just creating the documentation, agreeing, and giving people the tools they need to succeed because they’re nervous and don’t want to make the wrong decisions.

Matthew Vernhout (11:27):

So how do you then determine, like you said, as you start with ten vendors, how do you make that determination of, you know, what ten vendors? Cause honestly, like every day. I turn around. I feel like six new ESPs are showing up in the market or you know, these CDPs that are showing up or, you know, these sort of middleware, they don’t own an MTA, but they build nice interface type solutions, and they kind of call themselves marketing service providers. You know, how do you determine who to include in that RFP because you have such a wide range of, what could be, you know, solving your needs.

Mayme Frey (12:07):

Yeah. So I started making the list of our needs, like on day one at Rover. Once I realized that we just weren’t clicking. And then, about 18 months before, I started taking every ESP call that came my way, good or bad. And then I started reaching out to others, taking the calls. I was very transparent and probably drilling in my conversations, which they probably were not expecting at that early stage, but I didn’t want to waste their time, and I didn’t want to waste mine. From there, I probably talked to 25-30, I got it down to 10, and they met the bare minimum, and at least some of them like to have it on paper. I did not go super deep because the RFP is for. But on paper, they met that. I also looked at vendors.

Mayme Frey (13:01):

We were already working with, like you mentioned, CDPs. A lot of CDPs are navigating their way through creating their own ESP. You might have a great relationship, get a great deal, and fulfill your needs with less work in the migration process if it works out with them. So, I included our CDP in our migration, even though they hadn’t rolled out their product. We graded them on what they could do and showed us, not what the experience was. Right.so I have also talked to people.

Matthew Vernhout (13:36):

Go ahead, and please finish your part.

Mayme Frey (13:37):

I talked with people who I know used their clients. I signed up for email geeks. I signed up on women’s email, and I connected with people who are their clients and got honest feedback, not just the feedback of their references that they gave.

Matthew Vernhout (13:53):

Right? Yeah. So you did. It’s a ton of research upfront because, as we said, there are tons of options in the end. So you go through, have your 30 vendor conversations, and narrow it down to 10. At what point, you know, did you make that five vendors list?

Mayme Frey (14:12):

Yeah, so I budgeted seven to nine months for our RFP. That is a very long RFP. I did that because I wanted to make sure we did it right because as much as I have confidence in myself, I don’t know what I don’t know. And I left room for discovery. So I created a very explicit timeline. When we kicked off the RFP, I invited them to join and told them they would submit their questions to us at week one. In week two, you will submit your answers. We will evaluate for two weeks. And then, we will decide from the questionnaire. And that included how much it will cost based on our volume and everything. And they had to blindly answer that if they met our expectations and had no follow-up questions, they moved on, we moved five on, and that included our incumbent.

Mayme Frey (15:07):

And then, from there, we moved on to the demonstrations, where we actively sent them a list of every touchpoint they needed to touch upon and what we wanted to see, in addition to their generalized demonstration for everyone. Because one, we wanted to see how much they can handle our business and how much they want it. Like how much effort do they put into wanting our business? Some put zero, and some put 150. And then, from there, we narrowed it down to three. I say three, knowing that two were a front runner because you always need backup. Things can go wrong and do not. That’s when you start your actual negotiations but don’t tell them that they’ve won until you have that sow solidified. And you have agreed upon a number because you’ve lost any leverage if you do.

Mayme Frey (16:03):

You have. I also say be transparent along the way. Like you don’t have to be ruthless in your negotiation. You can be honest. Like if you love a vendor and they are just your unicorn, and they are so exorbitantly expensive that it just automatically throws their grading on the running, tell them you love them and tell them, like I had a vendor when I told them that they were like, we don’t know if this if we’ll be able to negotiate. If we get down to this level now and I go, there won’t be an area to negotiate down the road. If we don’t negotiate now, because I’m telling you, we want you, but we can’t afford this right now. And you are not in line with other people and just be honest, but don’t tell them the other people, because they generally know the prices of their competitors. When they compete with literally everyone in the industry, they tend to be more honest about what they can and can’t provide.

Matthew Vernhout (17:02):

So be like 90% transparent

Mayme Frey (17:05):

You can be transparent about where they are, not who they are against.

Matthew Vernhout (17:10):

No, I’m teasing when I say that. No. And that’s good to know. Being on the vendor side, always knowing who you’re against, is important, but at the same time, a little bit of mystery. I can see how that works.

Mayme Frey (17:28):

In the end, I told them the types of VSPs they were against. I was like, you know, you are, there’s a scrappy one in the running which is a small company, but they take on a lot of tech clients, or you have one with a lot of marketplace experience in which we’re looking for. So I gave them a general sizing of their competition, but mysteries are good.

Matthew Vernhout (17:50):

And then, you know, so you’ve got down to your final three, you’ve had these negotiations, you have some idea of budget, what to expect, you know, maybe it’s unrealistic pricing like you were saying for your team’s needs or, available budget, you know, how do you make that final cut and say, you know, you are the winner.

Mayme Frey (18:10):

Yeah. I would say one in that interim time, once I’ve figured out which one I want, why I want it, and why they’re a good choice. I make the business case to shop to all senior leadership because ultimately, if something goes wrong or if it costs more or if there are delays, or if I have to put a pause on all emails for a month, they need to know why I’m doing it and why it’s important to the company. So once I buy in from there, I usually just do a pressure check to make sure that I’m doing the right thing, but mostly they’re all good by the time they get to three; they’ll meet your needs, but which one meets the best because there are great ESPs that just don’t fit your needs. And it would help if you were honest with the company you’re at. When I worked at a big corporation that was ecommerce, my needs were completely different from a marketplace startup.

Mayme Frey (19:10):

And once I’ve right-sized that and have the sow in place and have a good conversation about the, like what the cost will be, we let them know. And I always, with any decline letter or decline email, offer up my time to tell the person or the vendor why we made our decision. I think it’s good for them for future business. And you do not know where you will be in a year or five. You don’t want to lose those relationships. Right. And so I’m just really honest. So this is why we chose the competition. This is what we felt. It may not represent what you do, but this is how it came off. Right. And in the future, this is what you should show.

Matthew Vernhout (19:57):

Yeah. There’s always a potential for a bad demo. For whatever reason, someone’s having an off day. And it’s like, well, I know we could have done better because we do that thing. We just didn’t talk about it. So I’ve been on that call too. So I appreciate the feedback entirely as a vendor. I get it. So now we’re at the point you’ve made your decision, you’re ready to cut over. You have a start date. But now you’re looking at integrations and all the different touch points you mentioned earlier when you’re planning, you know, budget because it’s going to take some engineering time and some development time. You know, whether it’s a low code or no code integration option, you know, you’re, you’re redesigning all your templates. How do you make that decision, you know, can your internal team handle it? Maybe you have 50 templates you need to Recode versus an external freelancer or an external partner to do some of that work for you.

Mayme Frey (20:55):

Yeah. So one, I took inventory of what resources we already had, and we were at, we were at capacity internally. So I knew that in some aspect, I would have to hire a contractor or an agency. Based on availability and just we, we realized that we have the Rover expertise, which we needed was migration expertise. Agencies just afforded us the migration expertise they have at their disposal. People who know who we were leaving and how to work that and who know the new ESP and from there, I started meeting and doing a mini fee with agencies, but then I am a big believer in buying the implementation package of your new ESP. If you don’t end up using all the hours, good for you, but you don’t want to be in the 11th hour and make some harsh prioritization decisions because you weren’t prepared.

Mayme Frey (22:03):

I also looked at our, I made sure that I budgeted an increase in coding for our coding vendor that we outsourced to because I knew we weren’t going to have to Recode everything, but we were going to have to Recode a lot of things. And we also went through a brand uplift or makeover and not a rebrand, so I wondered, why don’t we fold this in? And so I knew that I would have to, so I just planned our current resources and what I would need. And then, I made sure that it was a part of my presentation to leadership so that they knew the costs and that it was still a positive outcome of ROI.

Matthew Vernhout (22:48):

That’s a great opportunity. I think that many brands maybe don’t always have the luxury of when it comes to, we’re making a big tech stack change at the same time, we’re making a branding change. We can throw them in together. And it’s one project line item to say that all these things are happening simultaneously. Because we’ve already got the coders, and we’ve got the resources, and we don’t have to do the project twice.

Mayme Frey (23:16):

I think that’s right. And you’re touching the campaign anyway. If you go back and have to touch it is going to take you, it, I mean a campaign, it doesn’t matter how many people it’s going to. It takes the same amount of time. Don’t do it twice.

Matthew Vernhout (23:28):

Good planning on your behalf, luck a bit, maybe at the same time

Mayme Frey (23:33):

Alignment in the stars, all of those things.

Matthew Vernhout (23:38):

So actually, that’s a significant lead into my next question. So, you know, you’re looking at, you know, several months for your RFP, then you’re thinking ahead, you know, potentially several months for your integration. So when you’re looking at the timelines, if you were to advise another brand, that’s thinking about this when like how far in advance should they think about starting their RFP to when their contract is ending with their current vendor?

Mayme Frey (24:06):

Yes. I might be on the very conservative end of this. So know that not every business has this luxury. I knew our needs weren’t being met, but I also knew we did not have time to negotiate in the six months before we signed a new contract. And so I signed a three-year contract and got the best price with our current ESP, knowing that my plan was to RFP at the end, maybe continuing with him, but definitely RFP and shopping around seeing what’s out there. So that was year three, like a countdown. And then I started collecting my research, and then I started calling at 18 months into that, knowing that a year and a half before our end contract date, I started the migration, and that was to give myself five to six months to migrate. That is a long time by migration standards. But if you think you need a month, you need to. If you think you need three months, you probably need five. You always underestimate your program because every layer of the onion has another onion. They lie to you is just another onion.

Matthew Vernhout (25:22):

And, that’s true. Cause you know, from my point of view, putting my privacy head-on, whenever I talk with a brand, a minimum migration is 60 days from the last day you sent an email on your old platform. Because when I am in Canada, the antifamily legislation requires 60 days of management of unsubscribed. So 60 days from the last day you use your old vendor to the last, you know, the last email you’ve sent from them. That has to be factored into your migration plan. If you’re only mailing in the us that windows a little shorter, call it 30 days just because it can spam that way differently. But I still think 60 days is a realistic point for the last mailing off the old platform before you consider yourself fully migrated.

Mayme Frey (26:10):

Then you worry about even warmup time. People don’t plan for the correct amount of time for their warm-up. If you have, you know, 3 million subscribers that take weeks to warm up to correctly in a way that’s not going to damage your reputation, and you have to do it in a way that’s not going to ruin your deliverability on your currents P as you migrate some of those people, it’s, it’s a dance, and it’s just the long dance.

Matthew Vernhout (26:41):

And you’re doing double the work, right? Cause you’re doing

Mayme Frey (26:43):

Double, and you have to double-coding. Yeah.

Matthew Vernhout (26:45):

Yeah. You’re maintaining both platforms. So you have just a natural migration, double the work co-budget item. Call it two to five months.

Mayme Frey (26:58):

And on top of that, you have to budget your bandwidth for your day-to-day activities because I think so many people can’t just pause and do the migration and return to their normal lives.

Matthew Vernhout (27:12):

Right. That’s true.

Mayme Frey (27:15):

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Matthew Vernhout (27:16):

We’re just going to pause. I’m going to pause the button for a minute. Yeah. If only and then, you know, other things that I find, and then you, maybe you can tell me if this is true when people are migrating is they’ll find that, oh, we were sending email from this other vendor that we didn’t account for, or this other platform. And now we have to integrate that. Is that something you experienced when planning your migration, or did you have a good sense of where everything comes from?

Mayme Frey (27:49):

We had a good sense of where everything came from. We may not. We didn’t exactly know how it was all wired together if that makes sense. So we knew that there was one-on-one communication from our JIRA platform. From customer experience, we knew that a section of our business on Shopify works with a vendor that works well on Shopify and ecommerce. I did know that, but all of those were approved through our team anyway. So I knew what was happening now. It gave us an excellent opportunity to unravel and take apart the car that is our API transactional emails and figure out how they’re connected, how they’re all deployed, and put them back together in a place that makes sense and makes it, so we don’t have to rediscover every time there’s a new person or every time we need to make an update. We set it up so that we didn’t need technical or engineering resources. Every time we needed to make a creative update. Now, instead of like connecting basically on API and by the user, we connected by a program or workflow ID to where it doesn’t matter what campaign or what creative we have within that, as long as we’re passing the correct user data,

Matthew Vernhout (28:12):

Which is great. Cause I think that’s something a lot of people miss out on. The longer you stay with your incumbent vendor, the more technical debt you build up as people move in and out of both sides of the equation for employment reasons. And it almost allows you to sort of wipe the slate clean to a degree and clean up some of those and maybe even update some of those broken workflows that you know. We’re sending emails to nobody or email, maybe to people who had unsubscribed. And you didn’t know because it was off on this other platform that nobody has insight into on your team. So I think that’s a great comment that more people should also consider that sometimes you just need to clean the slate and start over.

Mayme Frey (29:00):

Yeah. And be honest with your inefficiencies. We did great work on making an efficient team during the pandemic, but there were certain inefficiencies that we just had because of the way our old ESP was functioning and how they outputted reporting. We, we’re in 10 languages in eight or nine countries. And we had separate campaigns for every single version of that. And we’re trying to think about a global first approach. And so we took the time and effort to combine all countries into one campaign. So we took over 600 transactional emails down to 87, still over 600 versions, but it makes it much easier to think clearly about a global mind frame in unity.

Matthew Vernhout (29:50):

And now, you know, where exactly they all live. So it makes it easier to maintain them, to update things, you know, all the different pieces make your team more efficient post-migration as well, because you put all that effort in pre-migration to plan all that during the migration. So yeah, there’s a lot of things there that sounds like, you know, you did this better than a lot of other companies I’ve worked with where, you know, day 40 of migration. They’re like, oh yeah, we had this other thing over here. Can we integrate it too?

Mayme Frey (31:23):

I mean, that happened too. We were discovering. We’re like, oh, you know, we don’t have a solver. If somebody updates their email address, how is that updated? We did not connect that. Let’s figure that out. But the great thing is that we buffered in time to figure that out. And I think that’s important because can you migrate in four weeks? Yes. Will you have your sanity in the fourth week? Probably not.

Matthew Vernhout (31:52):

Yeah. Or will it be costly to migrate that fast, right? Like it’s a triangle pick, pick two good, fast, cheap, right? Yes. Pick two

Mayme Frey (32:01):

Or you are going to make a lot of shortcuts, and a lot of things will end up on the cutting floor that maybe you wouldn’t have if you had thought a little longer about it.

Matthew Vernhout (32:15):

Yeah. Speaking of, sort of like a forgotten element, you just sort of mentioned the, how do you update your email addresses and things. Was there other gut you moments you would tell people to watch out for?

Mayme Frey (32:28):

I would say everyone has expertise—the people who are going to be doing your domain work and all of that. And setting up all of that work while they do that work every day, they don’t do it for email. So allowing them time and an investment in their research and answering their questions is important because I would say that I probably did not do the best at the beginning. We worked it out, but I think it was slow. We were slow to start at the beginning of our migration because there was a little more discovery than I expected in that realm. And I made too many assumptions that I’m in an email daily. So obviously, everyone else is.

Matthew Vernhout (33:16):

I’ve seen that trip up more than once too, where it comes to, you know, oh, you need a DNS change. Our process means we only update weekly, so you’re waiting seven days.

Mayme Frey (33:26):

For us to, yeah, I will say right. That what helped us was we involved them on day one. So even if there were a lot of unknowns, they were excited about the work.

Matthew Vernhout (33:37):

And they were expecting it

Mayme Frey (33:39):

And they were expecting it. And I think, you know, when they came back, someone came in and didn’t fully understand. And they’re like. We can’t prioritize that until Q2, which would mean we wouldn’t migrate on time. I was like, can we talk about this? I think that we’re just saying some things, and I think it’s a lot easier than what I’m explaining. So can you give me a chance to explain it one on one? And I think just having those conversations, not panicking in those moments, and not getting defensive. I think you’re all on the same side. They need to know more about the side they’re on.

Matthew Vernhout (34:15):

Yeah, absolutely. And, the balance between your security, your IT, your marketing, and your sales team is always influx.

Mayme Frey (34:23):

And your legal team

Matthew Vernhout (34:28):

Legal for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, making sure everyone’s in line and, you know, contracts are getting looked at, and all the important Ts are crossed, and I am dotted, and all those things lead to a successful migration. If there was something that you would’ve done differently, cause it sounds like you did everything way better than most people I’ve talked to about the RFP and migration process. Is there something you would do differently next time?

Mayme Frey (34:57):

I would’ve spent more of my time researching and getting to know our data and our connections and what goes in the back end, like our IP calibrations and connecting our domain and Microsoft S and DS and all of that I learned on the way. But I think that I probably slowed down the process in some aspects by not. I spent too much time on our list of things and the project management of all without delving too much into certain details. That, to be honest, probably didn’t because those areas are scary, especially to a marketer and not a technical person. And I think procrastination and winging it are not great. I would also say like a partner with a good procurement person. They are your best friends. You just don’t know it. I had a great procurement person for a few years before the RFP who was a huge partner who taught me how to negotiate and learn. I absorbed everything. I learned everything about RFPS, so when he gave his notice this week, I kicked off our RFP. I was scared, but I was prepared. And I think just utilizing the research and looking at everything and everyone as an education resource.

Matthew Vernhout (36:31):

I have one last question for you. What do you think is a roadblock to brands that stop them from RFP?

Mayme Frey (36:42):

I think, I mean, I think that I put it off a long time because just the amount of work I was imagining or this thing that I was imagining was so much larger and worse and harder than the actual work itself. And I think that we knew we needed to do it. We knew our needs were getting met. We knew there were people out there who could meet our needs, but I think we waited so long because we were so afraid of the amount of work and the size of our team. And I think that, honestly, the pandemic gave us a huge push because we were forced to overall our processes to be lean, mean, and very efficient. And that allowed us to increase our output of campaigns by over 70%, which will allow us to pull back enough to accommodate migration. It’s always worse. Your head is on paper.

Matthew Vernhout (37:41):

That’s great, you know. I would say I a hundred percent agree. You know, I’ve put off many things in the past for that exact reason. And it’s just like, in the end, it’s like pulling the bandaid off. You’re like, oh, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be because we spend all that time planning to make sure we did it right.

Mayme Frey (37:58):

Yes. I would say on our last day of migration. I was a little disappointed. I was like, it seems so anti-climatic, and one of my team members was like, well, maybe instead of thinking of it that way, think of it as we were so prepared. And so on top of it, it’s just going out with a whisper, and so I was like, wait, a PR that I will take it.

Matthew Vernhout (38:26):

Win. Yes, that’s a win.

Mayme Frey (38:27):

Thank you. I am amazing.

Matthew Vernhout (38:29):

There you go. So I guess just a summary, if someone, you know, was curious or had further questions, like, you know, as somebody who’s been experienced and doing a massive RFP and taking the time and, migrating if someone wanted to reach out with questions would you be open to that and how should they reach you?

Mayme Frey (38:50):

100%? In full disclosure, I probably check my LinkedIn for these partnerships more than I would check my email. And so find me on LinkedIn. You’ll see the spelling of my name. I know it’s a little hard, and I’m happy to have these conversations. I think we get better by surrounding ourselves and educating ourselves. So happy to help.

Matthew Vernhout (39:15):

And, you said you’re already an email geek, slack, and you’re already a woman of email. To find you there as well. I would assume.

Mayme Frey (39:25):

Yes, find your tribe and connect with them. It’s great to feel supported. And email is just an industry that is fully transparently supportive if you open yourself up to it.

Matthew Vernhout (39:40):

Awesome. Well, thanks very much for joining us today, Mayme, on. Before the love of email podcast, I had a great conversation, and I know that people will get a ton of value out of this because RFPs are scary for many people. People think, as you said, it’s a ton of work, but if you’re prepared, things go much smoother. So thank you for joining us and for everyone out there listening. If you are interested in benchmark reports and you are interested in looking at a global data set of how you are stacking up compared to the rest of the industry, please do check out the link. It will be in the show notes to the Netcore benchmark, email publication coming out very shortly. It’s a study of over 100 billion emails and five regions worldwide across 19 different industries. You’ll be able to reserve a copy. So as soon as it’s ready to go, we’ll email you that. So do. Please check out the link, and once again, Mami, thank you so much for joining us. You’ve been an excellent guest, and I look forward to connecting again with you in the future.

Mayme Frey (40:51)

Thanks for having me. This was fun. My very first podcast. So

Matthew Vernhout (40:55):

You were amazing.

Mayme Frey (40:57):

So, oh, thanks. You too.

Matthew Vernhout (40:58):

Thank you again.

Mayme Frey (40:59):

Bye.

Outro(41:00):

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