MarTech360 Interview With Dmytro Kudrenko, CEO At Stripo

“Email marketing is just a channel that helps to distribute content with maximum personalization.”

How does your background in email marketing, software development, and entrepreneurship enable you to apply Lean principles to email marketing and automation, and what strategies do you use to integrate these principles into your products for marketers?

My experience in email marketing, software development, and entrepreneurship has really made me a fan of Lean methods, which I bring into play in email marketing.

Using Lean methods in email marketing means using a system that’s all about being efficient, rapid learning, always getting better through continuous improvements, avoiding waste, and keeping iterative experiments. These principles are very simple, transparent, and effective. But they cannot be imposed and be simply followed, as they are easily broken. That’s why I believe that the most crucial component is the team, the people we work with, who need to feel and share this point of view.

At Stripo, we foster a culture where mistakes are learning opportunities. The issue is that people don’t act if they are afraid of making a mistake. If people make mistakes, we never condemn them; we try not to repeat them, to learn, and to support each other to move forward quickly.

Let’s look at some examples of how you can bring the Lean approach into your email marketing:

• MVP

Use the MVP approach. If you want to test something, you don’t have to do it fully right away. For example, say you work with abandoned carts, and you’re unsure about the specific item left behind. Then send a general reminder to the customer about their unfinished purchase, and add a link to your website to proceed. This approach works better than doing nothing. A timely, albeit imperfect, message is more effective than a perfect one that’s sent too late or too early.

• Strategy

Companies often postpone action, waiting for a full strategy. But in a rapidly evolving market, by the time a strategy is ready, it may already be obsolete, or business conditions might have changed. It’s crucial to figure out the direction and start with the initial steps. Progress comes from learning and refining data incrementally. For example, I once wrote a 100-page email marketing strategy, but by completion, it was outdated, and only the first 4 pages were relevant. Adopting an iterative approach is essential.

• ShuHaRi + Metrics

The Shuhari model, originating from Japanese martial arts, outlines the progressive stages of learning toward expertise, highlighting ongoing development. This idea suggests that, similar to the growth of a martial artist in skill and insight, a business should also continually evolve in its communication methods.

1. The Shu stage—adherence to best practices: following the rules.
2. The Ha stage—experimentation and transformation: breaking the rules.
3. The Ri stage—innovation: creating the rules.

This model is particularly effective in email marketing, helping us focus on the right metrics at each stage. Initially, it’s about implementation, then understanding the time spent, and finally, innovating through experimentation.

For example, in the first stage (Shu), an email marketer’s metrics shouldn’t be Open Rate, Click-Through Rate, and Conversions but rather how much you’ve implemented, as that’s what brings in money. There are a lot of best practices can greatly boost the financial performance of your product. It’s crucial to remember that these best practices can amplify both the good and the not-so-good aspects. So, rather than focusing solely on perfecting a single email, like the welcome email, the most substantial early impact will come from adopting a range of these best practices.

Also, you need to understand how much time you’re spending on this. In the second stage (Ru), you test. You can start asking why some best practices don’t work for you and try different ones. Looking back at how your old campaigns did, you can figure out what didn’t help your brand. Sometimes, you might realize that the usual tips everyone uses don’t really work for you, or they might actually make things worse. Once you’ve got the basics down, in the final Ri stage you’re not just following rules—you’re creating them, paving the way for innovative progress for your company.

• No mass mailing without experiments

To achieve effective results and continually improve in mass mailings, it’s important to constantly experiment. By diving into these experiments and getting to know your audience, you get the full picture of your business. Mass mailings should become a part of systematic work. Each mailing to a large audience should be an experiment in which you learn something new or confirm a certain hypothesis.

• Great attention to errors

Defects are one of the list items of waste in Lean. It means the production of defective products or services, leading to rework or scrap. This includes the time and resources spent on correcting the error. For instance, imagine there’s a broken link in a trigger. It’s vital to quickly realize it’s broken. The faster we notice, the less impact it will have. Even a small error, if unnoticed for a long time, can lead to serious consequences.

Our team aims to streamline processes that minimize waste and optimize resources for the greatest impact. Quality is a big deal—it’s got to be top-notch, whether it’s the emails we write or the overall experience we give our customers. We’re also trying to build a company where “ideas don’t die.” I mean, I don’t want a situation where we come up with something, and everyone agrees, but then it doesn’t happen because we lack something: time, people, or resources.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview With, Thomas O’Banion, Head of Marketing At First Orion

Dmitry, can you tell us about your professional background and your current role at Stripo? Also, tell us how Stripo differentiates itself from other companies in the same space.

My journey began 25 years ago in high school and continued through university, where my peers and I founded an outsourced software development company. For over a decade, we crafted SaaS solutions for clients, which sparked our desire to create impactful products of our own. It’s been an enlightening path, teaching me that success in software isn’t just about technical prowess; understanding the industry, client needs, and the intricacies of marketing and sales are crucial.

Today, as the founder and CEO of Stripo, I’m proud to lead a platform that stands out in the email design industry. Our focus is solely on enhancing email production. Unlike other tools that juggle multiple aspects of marketing automation, we concentrate on what we do best. This specialization not only sets us apart but also makes us a valuable partner for ESPs, CRMs, and CDPs. Stripo doesn’t compete but collaborates with them, providing a unique, focused, and user-friendly approach to email design.

Three key differentiators for Stripo in comparison to other similar platforms are:

1. Flexibility and simplicity: At Stripo, we’ve struck a unique balance. Our platform is accessible for beginners, letting them create custom-designed emails effortlessly, yet robust enough for professionals to streamline their processes.
2. Modular email design: Our approach to creating email templates is grounded in modular design, providing a versatile and efficient template-building experience.
3. Stripo makes professional email design simple, promptly incorporating vital, innovative features as they emerge. Examples of this commitment include our early adoption of Gmail’s AMP4Email and the immediate integration of AI, all part of our ongoing effort to create accessible, user-friendly email templates.

What are the key features and integrations offered by Stripo, the email template builder, that make it a user-friendly tool for creating effective emails with minimal coding skills?

First, I’d like to say that the phrase “a user-friendly tool for creating effective emails with minimal coding skills” might sound pretty standard, but there’s actually a lot packed into every word of it.

• User-friendly tool

We aim for simplicity without sacrificing capability, ensuring ease of use for all while enabling advanced users to code as needed. Our focus is on creating emails that are aesthetically pleasing and creative right from the start. As a developer, my own challenges inspired me: My work often falls short of my vision in terms of beauty and professionalism, yet a professional designer can achieve a vastly better outcome with similar effort.

• Effective emails

We do a lot to ensure that emails are adaptive and look the same across all email clients. This means that the user doesn’t need to delve into accessibility issues, understand the old version of Outlook, or be up to date with all the new features from Gmail.

• Minimal coding skills

Stripo provides a no-code editor that empowers users to easily design professional emails without any coding skills. The platform offers a wide range of customizable prebuilt templates, streamlining the email creation process and saving valuable time.

One aspect I’m particularly proud of is our modular email design, or what many call “modules.” It’s more than just dragging and dropping prebuilt email components. This method lets you:

– ensure brand consistency across all emails

– accelerate email creation, thanks to modules that need minimal adjustments

– offer both flexibility and creativity by mixing different modules to craft unique emails.

Now we have a library of 10,000+ modules crafted by our experts, featuring gamification, smart elements, interactive content, and more. But to us, modular email design isn’t just a feature; it’s a philosophy. We’ve pushed the boundaries by enabling users to:

– update multiple emails simultaneously by tweaking a single module

– create emails automatically from data feeds

– even integrate with ChatGPT for consistent copy in product cards, webinar invites, and blog digests.

Now, let me touch on a few other noteworthy features:

– Integration with over 80 ESPs, such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, and AWeber, as well as email clients like Gmail and Outlook. This means you can create in Stripo and then seamlessly transfer your emails to your marketing platform, CRM, or CDP.

– Support for interactive and AMP content, including image rollovers, anchor links, and AMP forms.

– A tool to quickly generate brand guidelines, ensuring brand consistency no matter who is designing.

– A vast selection of 1500+ email templates suitable for various industries and occasions.

– An email testing tool to preview how your emails appear across 90+ devices and major email clients.

– A no-code tool for creating email annotations for Gmail’s Promo tabs.

How can experiential marketing enhance email campaigns for a more engaging experience, and what are the benefits for businesses aiming to connect uniquely with their audience?

Experiential marketing, when integrated into email campaigns, can significantly enhance user engagement and create more memorable experiences for the audience. It’s like giving your emails a supercharge of engagement and making them unforgettable for your audience. Imagine crafting emails that are more than just messages—they’re like little adventures in the inbox, filled with fun games, quizzes, live polls, and surveys. It’s not just about reading; it’s about interacting and playing around.

Why does this rock? Well, for starters:

1. Videos, GIFs, polls, and quizzes turn a regular email into this cool, immersive world that grabs attention way better than just words on a screen.
2. Businesses can make their emails more personalized and relevant. This approach leads to higher engagement rates and stronger customer relationships.
3. These interactive, experiential emails stick in the mind, making your brand more memorable.
4. Here’s a smart part: Those interactive bits are like secret agents gathering intel. Quizzes and polls? They’re actually learning about your audience’s likes and dislikes for you.
5. And the numbers speak for themselves—more people opening your emails, clicking through, and fewer waving goodbye with unsubscribes.

That is important, so we put a lot of focus on interactive emails. But let’s be honest, making interactive emails is a tech challenge that usually doesn’t yield profit. Still, we’re dedicated to making user ideas a reality. For instance, we’ve come up with an interactive modules generator where users can create games. As for now, we are the only ones who are doing this:

• providing a platform-agnostic solution
• combining HTML and AMP email to increase reach
• providing it for free.

We want our emails to become more engaging and also for brands to be able to utilize all the possibilities of using emails.

What are the key strategies and approaches you have found to be effective in driving growth and results in marketing over the years?

Marketing plays a significant role in researching the target audience, which facilitates the controlled modification of a product or service based on data. At Stripo, we’re all about getting up close and personal with our audience. That’s why our key strategy is content marketing.

Good content drives the flow of data. Central to our strategy is the creation of compelling content, which not only engages our audience but also drives valuable data back to us. This process involves creating, verifying, and refining content based on innovative ideas. We then gather feedback, integrating it directly into our product development cycle. This ongoing dialogue with our users keeps our offerings relevant and ensures we’re continually evolving with our audience’s needs.

We have generated these core values for ourselves:

• Unique knowledge

This is about sharing knowledge with our customers that they haven’t heard before—something that only we can provide. It’s all about showcasing our unique skills and know-how.

• Fresh organization (systematization)

When we present our customers with a new way to organize or categorize their knowledge, it really adds value. It’s all about giving them a fresh perspective that helps them see things differently.

• Customer evolution and product mastery

This is focused on helping our users get the best out of Stripo and grow in their professional roles. It’s about teaching them the best practices, advanced features, and tactics to make sure they’re really making the most of what our platform offers.

We’re big believers in the power of great content; it’s the heartbeat of what we do. You can ask, “What about email marketing?” and it’d be the right question. Email marketing is just a channel that helps to distribute content with maximum personalization. It acts as a catalyst: greatly enhancing the effectiveness of a good content strategy and marketing campaign and nullifying a bad one.

How can one effectively enhance email open rates and click-through rates in a competitive market where subscribers are inundated with a large volume of emails, and what are the recommended strategies and best practices for achieving this?

Open Rates (OR) and Click-Through Rates (CTR) are overrated and not the best metrics for measuring effectiveness.

For instance, we recently helped a client improve their email marketing. We conducted A/B tests: OR and clicks were the same, but one of the emails resulted in better conversions on the website. I’m not saying that tracking OR isn’t necessary, but it’s more of a proxy metric. If you see significant fluctuations in this metric, then it’s worth paying attention to because, for example, emails could be landing in spam. This is because a person might see your email just in their inbox, and that’s already counted, even though they might not have actually opened it.

So, what to do? To put it simply, it’s essential to be useful to your audience and not to spam them with unnecessary emails. Personalization is key. Personalize your articles, considering who your audience is and in what language they prefer to communicate. Most people will be more likely to engage with your email if you send them interesting and relevant content.

Also, there are still best practices that will help you increase your OR and CTR:

1. Sending-time optimization. Determining the ideal send time for emails requires some experimentation, but it leads to better OR and CTR. Since people engage with emails at varying times, it’s essential to test different sending schedules. Analyzing this data helps pinpoint the most effective times for maximizing email engagement.
2. Creatively attractive subject lines that compel the recipients to open the email help you to increase your email click-through rate.
3. A clear, compelling, and well-placed call to action (CTA). If there’s no call to action, then naturally, there would be a zero click-through rate, as that’s where the clicks are generated.
4. Do not underestimate the importance of the preheader. Optimize the email preview text to complement the subject line and provide additional context.
5. Use Gmail’s annotations for the Promotions tabs. This feature enhances OR and conversion rates by allowing recipients to go directly to your websites without having to open the emails first, making your email stand out more.
6. Get BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification). Experts recommend BIMI and the blue tick, and I think this practice will eventually become essential as it contributes to a secure email environment for everyone.
7. Pay attention to your sending reputation. In the pursuit of increasing open rates, over-sending irrelevant emails can lead to being marked as spam.

And, of course, continuous testing will lead you to the best results and a deeper understanding of your email marketing strategy.

What advice that helped you personally would you give to other leaders?

Here’s my advice—zero in on the problem you’re solving, not just the way you’re solving it. As someone with a developer’s mindset, I often catch myself getting too attached to a technical solution. But that’s not really the right approach. For anyone out there thinking about starting their own venture, I highly recommend reading “Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution” by Uri Levine. It’s a recent publication, but it’s already one of the best reads in my experience.

And for startups in the marketing realm, here’s a little tip: Lean on tools like Stripo. Don’t spend your valuable time building these tools from scratch. Instead, focus on what really matters in your business.

What is the biggest problem you or your team is solving this year?

First, I have to mention that Stripo is a startup with Ukrainian roots. Before the full-scale war broke out, 95% of our company’s staff resided and worked in Dnipro, a city located not too far from the front line.

This year and last, we’ve been facing a really tough challenge with the war in Ukraine. It’s a serious situation, especially since we’ve got team members over there. Our main focus right now is making sure they’re safe and sound. Whether it’s moving them to safer places or just making sure they’ve got what they need, their safety is our number one priority.

Of course, the war is also throwing a wrench in our usual operations. We’re dealing with everything from communication hiccups to changes in the market. But we’re hanging in there, keeping our services top-notch and making sure our customers don’t feel the heat.

We’re also putting our heads together to plan for the future, making sure we’re ready for anything. This means beefing up our strategies to keep things running smoothly, no matter what gets thrown our way.

Is there anything that you’re currently reading, or any favorite books, that you’d recommend?

If you’re working on a product or running a startup, I highly recommend checking out these books:

1. “Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution” by Uri Levine. Published in 2023, this book is a recent yet invaluable resource on the topic.
2. “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.
3. “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” by Eric Ries.
4. “Product-led Onboarding: How to Turn New Users into Lifelong Customers” by Ramli John. A must-read for entrepreneurs.

For those in marketing, here are some books you shouldn’t miss:

1. “Email Marketing Rules” by Chad S. White.
2. “Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level” by Chris Baggott.
3. “Holistic Email Marketing” by Kath Pay.
4. “Strategic Database Marketing” by Arthur M. Hughes. Though it’s an older publication, it’s packed with valuable insights.

Thanks, Dmytro!