#20 A look at the email creation space ft. Warren Stokes

Pierce is joined by 2XMarketo Champion and Kniva Ltd. founder Warren Stokes. Join them as they discuss what Warren has learned over the course of his career, how email marketers can find the balance between quantity and quality, and the future outlook for email.

The big question in this episode: is creativity in marketing dying? Warren shares his perspectives on how automation is impacting creative processes, and how marketers will need to adjust.

Show Notes

A self-proclaimed Marketo fanboy, Warren Stokes is a great friend of ours here at Knak. Warren has built his career with roles that span across marketing agencies, the tech industry, and solo consulting work. He’s become a specialist in marketing automation and has been a Marketo Certified Expert since 2017. Today, he’s a 2X Marketo Champion and leads Kniva Ltd., helping his clients with marketing automation strategies, multi-channel campaigns, and setting up Marketo instances from scratch.

Warren has had a lot of roles over the course of his career. From selling windows door-to-door and working as a personal assistant, to leading agency teams and subcontracting for the Google Apps for Work team, each experience has given him new knowledge and perspectives that he brings to his clients today.

“I don’t think I’ll ever stop exploring. I like exploring. I think it keeps me awake when I learn something new. It turns out now that those things fall into place and I’m able to give good advice on social integration, social ads, Marketo, or the platforms clients can choose from. I can give that advice because I have bounced around.”

It’s these experiences that give Warren such a unique and informed perspective when it comes to the email creation space. The way he sees it, it’s a sector that’s ripe for transformation. While there are smaller companies addressing specific challenges on the creative and operational side for email marketers, many of the big players have sophisticated sales processes for products that don’t really measure up.

Another big driver he sees in the space is automation. As industry leaders keep building integrations across the marketing tech stack – and marketers adopt these integrations – the focus on creativity is being pushed to the side. This is why it’s so important to have tools and platforms out there that build creativity into automated processes. For Darren, it will be fascinating to see how this impacts the job market moving forward, and how it could change the emails we get in our inboxes.

That said, he believes that there will always be a place for good, creative, and well-written emails – and we do too.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1) How Warren has used his various experiences to build his career 

2) What trends are shaping the email creation space

3) How automation is impacting creativity in email marketing