MaryAnn Pfeiffer, founder of 108 Degrees Digital Marketing, appears on The 789 Show podcast with host Kay Makishi, discussing why email marketing still drives business growth and where AI belongs in a marketing team's work.
What We Covered
MaryAnn opened by taking on a claim she has heard for her entire career: that email is dead. Her answer is that the channel is healthy, but a poorly run program can die on its own, and that is an execution problem rather than an industry one. 108 Degrees concentrates on B2B, nonprofit, and higher education, the markets where she says email marketing has its sweet spot. With a new client, she starts with the strategy, then reviews the email tech stack and asks whether it can carry that strategy out. Changing platforms is expensive, slow, and delays results, so she cautioned against switching providers as a reflex fix for deliverability problems. She sees the industry moving toward better personalization and a clearer understanding of the audience, with less emphasis on volume.
On AI, MaryAnn said the agency has fully adopted it, but not for creative work or brand voice. 108 Degrees uses it for workflow: AI reads Fathom meeting summaries and sends each team member the follow-up that applies to them, and it crunches email and website data far faster than people can. That efficiency means clients are not billed for hours AI can cover in minutes, which matters to the nonprofits she works with as their funding tightens and their outreach needs grow.
She also explained why 108 Degrees runs cameras-on meetings and asks clients how sales, collections, and customer service are going. Marketing is the voice of every department to the outside world, so when customer service is struggling, the messaging has to change. For product businesses dealing with gas prices and tariffs, her advice was to find the places where the business can stay nimble, and to lean on a trusted peer or outside advisor so the leader is not carrying every decision alone.
For a starting tech stack, she named Salesforce for CRM, Mailchimp for email, and Shopify for e-commerce, and urged listeners to treat the stack as a long-term investment built from tools that connect easily. Her advice to new entrepreneurs was to find human mentors who have walked the same path.
Key Takeaways
Is email marketing dead? Not for programs that are well executed
Personalization matters more than email volume
How to use AI for marketing workflows without handing it your brand voice
Check your email strategy against your tech stack before switching providers
Why new business owners need a human mentor, not just AI
In Her Words
"I always say that you can't send too much email if you're sending the right email." - MaryAnn Pfeiffer
