In this edition of Quick
Questions, Sara Scofield of U.S. Bank answers questions about accessibility in email campaigns, the biggest downside in leveraging AI in workflows, and more.
At the last Email Insider Summit you focused on the value of accessibility. What is the most impactful change you have made since then?
We were already implementing accessibility rules into our email modules at the time of EIS but the guidelines and rules we have were not followed by our business line partners in their creative.
This led to push back on them from my team, which created a difficult situation for our partnerships. We implemented Litmus in January which allows us to visually share with our partners why an email
is not deemed as accessible and opens the doors for my team to make recommendations around best practices. This change has helped enhance our build and deployment processes not only for rendering, but
for the full purview of how our emails check out for accessibility compliance.
What’s
your comfort movie/book?
Tough one to answer. I don’t really have a comfort movie, but I always pull up an old rom com when I need a pick me up. Although, my go-to-anytime
movies are Sixteen Candles and Shawshank Redemption.
Whose email program do you
envy?
It’s a tie between Delta Airlines and American Express loyalty campaigns. Not to be confused with their sales/promotional campaigns.
What has been the biggest downside of leveraging AI in your workflows?
Being in a highly regulated
industry, trying to incorporate any AI (copy, images, etc…) into our workflow is very challenging. Each creative version of our emails need to be approved by our compliance partners before we
can deploy. At this point in time, we don’t utilize AI except for frequency and send time optimization.
What is the biggest mistake tech/email vendors make when pitching you new products or capabilities?
In general, a lot of vendors I’ve talked to
don’t really truly listen to the business problem we are trying to solve for. Instead, they continue to shove their functionality at me even if I made it clear we weren’t interested or
able to participate at this time. I’ve also had people come into a pitch and start knocking down their competition, which is not ok in my book either.
If
you’re interested in submitting content for future editions, please reach out to our Managing Editor, Barbie Romero at Barbie@MediaPost.com.