MarTech Interview with Dmitry Kudrenko, CEO at Stripo

Dmitry Kudrenko, CEO at Stripo dives into the key fundamentals surrounding email marketing:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Dmitry, tell us about yourself and more about your role as CEO at Stripo…

I’ll try to keep it concise. I initially worked as a programmer; later, I became a serial IT entrepreneur, yet most people know me as a marketer because we create products for marketers.

My journey in software development started 25 years back in high school. My university fellows and I established an outsourced software development company a while back.

For over a decade, we created SaaS solutions for our clients, and then it hit us — we wanted to build our own products that would positively impact the world, regardless of the industry.

It did not take us long to realize that being a skilled developer is not enough to make your product successful. Understanding the industry, client problems, marketing, sales, and PR are sometimes more important than technical skills.

We accumulated our experience over the years by developing tools for professionals in direct and retention marketing.

Here are some of our projects:

• Yespo.io, an omnichannel customer data platform for eCommerce solutions;
• Reteno.com, a user engagement platform for mobile applications;
• Stripo.email, an email design editor;
• Claspo.io, a platform for creating high-converting website widgets.

However, I mostly focus on Stripo while my partners work on other projects. As the CEO, I am responsible for the vision, strategy, direction of development, values, and the team.

Tell us more about the Stripo email marketing platform and how it was started and how it’s evolved over the years?

Focus is the feature that makes Stripo special. Our team is constantly focused on simplifying the email production process for marketers. Stripo does not send emails but allows creating them easily and exporting them to any marketing automation system a customer uses for sending emails, whether it’s an ESP like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign, or a regular email client like Outlook or Gmail.

Focusing on one task lets us notice essential details in marketers’ work processes and develop the world’s best editor.

When we only started working on Stripo, which was our third email builder, we had a fairly accurate understanding of what it should be like. Because we’d been engaged in email marketing for over a decade by then, and we had a CDP, so we had the opportunity to analyze email marketers’ pains.

We knew that building an HTML email that would render exactly as needed across different email clients on various devices (all versions of Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, Hotmail, and others) requires knowledge of many technical peculiarities that most marketers do not understand. So they had to spend time learning how to deal with the code instead of doing marketing.

Therefore, we decided to create an editor allowing users to create professional emails without technical skills quickly. In fact, Stripo was supposed to be an email builder embedded in a CDP. But later, we decided it should be an independent product.

Soon after release, we realized that there was a large segment of the audience who were creating not only emails for marketing campaigns but also business correspondence. It was a big surprise for us. How did we find out? We added the ability to export emails to Gmail and saw that 30% of people were using this export method. Then we integrated with Outlook, which drove even higher interest in the product.

A seamless one-click integration with any email system became a part of our strategy. Also, we decided to create an extensive library of fully customizable templates (over 1300) per our user’s request.

We learn a lot from our users, with over 800,000 of them now. They share how they use the templates, and they tell us what integrations and features they’d love to see in our platform.

To be honest, when starting Stripo, I thought that within a year, we would accomplish everything we had planned. Oh well… We were constantly adding new concepts to email creation, such as

• modular template design;
• dynamic, interactive, and AMP content in emails;
• diverse ready-to-use mechanics for email gamification;
• multilingual support;
• collaboration tools.

Even now, seven years after the start, we have plans for several years ahead.

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How are no code platforms redefining the email marketing space today and what thoughts do you have for the future of this segment basis this?

If we look at the evolution of email editors, we can see that initially, marketers had to understand HTML to create beautiful emails. Then we had WYSIWYG editors that would allow us to work on formatting easily. And then the world saw the Drag’n’Drop email builders allowing the creation of complex emails without any coding skills.

But just because it became easy to design a button or add an image, it did not mean that all emails would look beautiful instantly. To create a good-looking email, we must consider small details like how spacing, fonts, and colors will look on mobile and desktop devices. So, in fact, you need to be familiar with coding a little to design flawless emails. And this is when the modular email design can help.

In this case, the designer creates (through the Drag-and-drop editor or even code) a library of modules for any occasion and any purpose just once. These can be blog post digests, webinar invitation modules, product cards, etc. Then save these modules to a library, aka modules storage. And a marketer can then use them for their new emails.

I think modules, aka the modular email design, are a new philosophy that changes the email design experience. It is not only about reusing modules across emails. This approach allows doing bulk updates of one module in many emails automatically, generating emails based on data feeds, and keeping the design consistent with the company brand strategy.

When it comes to the impact of AI in email marketing: how do you feel marketers and even sales people can use its benefits to retain the human essence yet scale their efforts?

I don’t recommend using it for a copy because only a human marketer can write an email copy. Writing copy requires a creative approach. I know the experience of Phrasee and Persado, and I keep my eye on OpenAPI ChatGPT. We can see a revolution here shortly, but not for now…

Use AI for the things you cannot do manually (where you need to analyze lots of data when it requires a complex approach):

• predictive segmentation. It’s a type of segmentation when you not only segment contacts by gender or location but also based on purchase activity, etc.;
• recommendations in emails;
• finding the best send time not only for promo newsletters but also for recommendations in onboarding. It helps you send emails to users when they are most likely ready to go to the next step in using your tool. (Not just the flow: first day, third day, etc., you typically set for automatic emails. It chooses the best time for each user individually);
• customer journey optimization.

Nowadays, we all use ChatGPT for email creation — it helps a lot with subject lines and preheader ideas, and we even plan to integrate it into Stripo to assist marketers in April. I will give you examples: “Adopt my subject line according to Cialdini’s principles” or “Generate a supportive preheader for this subject line.” It can help, but I think that the “right message” to the “right person” at the “right moment” is still the responsibility of the marketer.

And indeed, AI helps salespeople to analyze inbound emails and reply to them. It saves a lot of time.

What are some core best practices you’d share with marketers and sales people today when it comes to the matter of optimizing email and email marketing concepts?

The golden rule here is to focus on your customers, not emails.

There are a lot of best practices, and I recommend reading the book “Email Marketing Rules” by Chad S. White, where you will find the ultimate list of best practices for email marketing.

If we talk about email design principles, I would mention three of them. Your email should:

• be easy-to-read;
• have a clear call-to-action;
• be mobile-friendly.

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A few common misconceptions about the modern state of marketing and email marketing you’d like to comment on before we wrap up?

The biggest misconception about email marketing is that it is spam. Tons of books/articles/publications explain that it is not true. So, I think we should not even talk about it.

There are a few things I’d like to emphasize:

1. Email marketing is about communication. It’s just a channel to communicate. The most popular channel, the most effective channel, but just a channel. And it is your responsibility how you will use it, what you want to communicate to your customers through this channel, and how you will make them happy with the messages they receive from you.
2. Sending mass emails is not email marketing yet. The most significant idea of email marketing is to send the right message to the right person at the right time. You can also extend it with many more “rights,” like using the right channel in the right context with the right frequency, etc. So it is almost rocket science to find your right “rights.”
3. Email marketer is responsible for many more things than just sending emails. An email marketer is actually responsible for the customer journey, which should impact the direction the business grows. It would be best if you did not underestimate the power an email marketer has.