Movable Ink provides marketers with email marketing technology that delivers personalized content that changes in real-time according to the context of each recipient.

For example, the company powered the award-winning email marketing campaign of athletic apparel retailer Finish Line and teamed up with the Detroit Pistons to create emails that changed every time an NBA fan clicked on them.

The SaaS email technology company powered over 20 billion live content impressions in first-quarter 2016, the company’s largest quarter to date.

In addition, the company recently surpassed 100 employees and is still actively hiring new talent. Key new hires in 2016 include Dragana Ljubisavljevic as the new senior vice president and general manager of EMEA as well as Andrea Mignolo as head of user experience and design. 

Vivek Sharma, chief executive officer of Movable Ink, discussed his company’s embrace of technology as a platform for more creative email marketing campaigns in a conversation with Email Marketing Daily.

Email marketing is the most lucrative marketing channel, returning an average of $40 for every $1 spent. Sharma believes there is still untapped yield in email that could be assessed with more efficient marketing, thanks to the help of technology.

Email efficiency is a quantifiable problem, says Sharma, citing how the biggest constraint to email marketers is a lack of internal resources.

“You have this huge reach potential with email, but I think marketers have gotten a bit too addictive to the ease of doing it,” says Sharma. “They’re not spending enough time with the creative side because they’re spending way too much time just getting the emails out of the door.”

Sharma compares marketing technology to the assembly line -- Henry Ford’s innovation that ensured a speedier and consistent delivery of products.

But should email marketers be concerned that robots will steal their jobs? “I don’t think they’ll feel threatened, but empowered,” says Sharma. Sharma predicts a convergence of the creative and machine-powered, with artificial intelligence removing busy work to allow marketers to spend more time on creative strategy, data analytics and understanding consumer behavior.

“Let the machines do the things they’re good at,” he says. “The creative aspect is something machines will never encroach upon. It’s the admission that machines are better at the regular, perhaps disposable things, and then leverage that time to be more creative. Let’s get that boring stuff done in order to think about the bigger picture.”