Amy Heidbreder

Going back through pieces of my portfolio, I’m reminded of previous roles I’ve held. I spent over 5 years heavily immersed in email marketing.

A single email in your inbox can seem like such a simple thing, but add in contact lists ranging in the millions, ISPs deciding to filter email based on key words you didn’t know would be flagged, managing contacts and their individual deliverability needs, any given country changing its laws surrounding digital communication, trying to make email layouts hip using the most antiquated coding methods because any linked script or css file poses a security risk and gets stripped out by every ISP…needless to say, things get complicated REAL fast. Did anyone even follow half of that?

For what seems like such a simple thing, email can be hugely complicated. Just warming up an IP address to send email blasts to over a million inboxes can take months. A lot of people don’t know that or appreciate the huge feat that email is. To most people, it’s just another piece of junk in their inbox.

Email grew to be one of my passions. I just spent so much time immersed in it. As an entry level front-end developer, coding and testing emails is a lot of what I did. From front-end and email developer I moved into a new role that saw me managing all of the organization’s contact lists, sending email, SMS, and creating automations. I played an integral role in migrating from one ESP to another in the midst of my tenure as email specialist, seamlessly helping migrate a database of over 5 million contacts all while still sending email blasts to the same contacts every single day throughout.

I am no longer as immersed in email, but I appreciate what it helped me learn. These days my role in email is mainly to provide advice to the new email team, as I have since moved primarily over web.

Email and SMS, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic can be such a powerful tool, and automations when used well is such a simple way to nurture contacts. There’s an entire team behind all that junk you get in your inbox.

My experience in email was definitely broad and thorough. I appreciate every minute of it.