Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer at ZeroBounce, explains how AI, connected data, and outcome-driven measurement help email marketers and sales teams focus on quality over quantity.
When Brian Minick said open rates are a thing of the past, people in our live chat audibly gasped. Well, they gasped in the comments. But it was the most honest thing said about email marketing on our show in a long time, and it came from someone whose company helps thousands of email marketers clean their lists every day.
Jessie Lee Zach and I sat down with Brian, Chief Operating Officer at ZeroBounce, an email validation and deliverability platform. Brian started coding at 12 on a grounded weekend, built websites and software, and eventually realized he loved the people side more than the code. He moved into operations, and over about six years he helped grow ZeroBounce from seven employees to more than a hundred. ZeroBounce cleans email lists of bad and risky contacts and offers DMARC, blacklist monitoring, inbox testing, and validation.
Here’s what stood out.
How is AI changing sales and outbound automation?
Brian’s take on AI is refreshingly grounded.
“It’s not a replacement of people to me. It is a replacement of guesswork.”
— Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer, ZeroBounce
At ZeroBounce, AI analyzes customer data in real time, builds segments on the fly, and moves people into different marketing cycles as their behavior changes. Spreadsheets are out of date by the time you finish them. AI keeps up. The result is targeting that reaches the right person at the right time, not spray and pray.
He also uses AI to coach. His sales team uses it to work through objections and to front-load research. Instead of asking AI to write a generic email sequence, a rep might ask what challenges a healthcare company collecting lots of email addresses is likely facing, and then go into the call with better questions. Five to ten minutes of research becomes a few prompts.
His support team has its own internal AI chatbot trained on product updates, features, and integrations, because nobody can keep up with every change by reading release notes. That one hit close to home. Ingesting our internal wiki into AI has been on my to-do list for a while.
Brian was clear that a human still has to check the work.
“I firmly, firmly believe we’re still very far away from not having any human element check in there.”
— Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer, ZeroBounce
What does data-driven email marketing look like in practice?
“The best email marketers are not guessing, they’re using data.”
— Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer, ZeroBounce
For Brian, customer intelligence means getting a full 360 degree view of each person into the hands of whoever picks up the phone. The person who watched a webinar, created an account, clicked an ad, read a review, and then called should not be treated like a cold prospect. ZeroBounce feeds those data points into HubSpot so the whole team can see them.
His analogy is the barista who has made your coffee every day for a year. They know your name and your drink. That’s what he wants his systems to feel like.
He also made a point I agree with completely: segmentation and personalization go together. You can’t personalize well if you haven’t segmented, and segmenting is pointless if you send everyone the same message.
And he admitted the hard part. Building all of this doesn’t matter if people don’t use it. As an operations leader, he says there’s almost nothing more frustrating than building a system no one touches.
How should marketers measure results when privacy limits tracking?
This is where it got interesting. Brian estimates that a couple of years ago, 70% to 80% of traffic was trackable to some degree. Now he sees it closer to 60% to 80%, and falling. ZeroBounce first tried to squeeze value out of that untrackable 20% to 40%, and he called it a failure. They spent a lot of time on something that was never going to work.
So they flipped it around. Instead of chasing every traffic source, they started with outcomes: new paying customers, retention, lower churn. Tracking still happens, but it no longer drives every decision.
Email has the same problem. Privacy changes have made open rates unreliable.
“Open rates are a thing of the past. No one’s talking about them anymore. They provide no value.”
— Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer, ZeroBounce
Look at revenue, signups, and replies instead. Jessie added that cutting tracking and heavy images out of email can actually help deliverability, especially on a newer domain without much reputation.
This lines up with how we talk about identity resolution at BDEX. Our identity graph helps identify website visitors, but there will always be a percentage you can’t identify. Brian pushed that one step further. Knowing that a brand visited your site is great, but you should also figure out why they didn’t take the next step. Give them something worth doing, like a free trial or an offer. He also noted that easy Google sign-ups can hide a business user behind a Gmail address, which is exactly the kind of dot an identity graph can connect.
How do you scale growth with data and automation?
Brian has a rule his team knows well.
“If we have to do something twice, we have to figure out how to automate that.”
— Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer, ZeroBounce
With 500 to 700 signups a day, ZeroBounce can’t run without automation. When someone signs up, the backend scans their domain. No DMARC record? The platform flags it as an opportunity. That data flows into HubSpot and triggers workflows, sequences, and calls at the right moment. Someone who just uploaded a list full of bad data needs a very different message than someone whose list and domain look great.
The goal is what Brian calls the “holy crap” moment: the point where a prospect feels you really know them. In online software sales, where there’s often no face-to-face conversation, the only way to create that is with good data.
His advice when picking tools: make sure they connect. He has chosen tools with one great feature that couldn’t talk to anything else, and regretted it. His stack includes HubSpot as the central hub, plus Lemlist, n8n, Zapier, Clay, and ChatGPT. He also lets each rep work in their own style, because scripted sales calls are painful for buyers.
His hardest scaling problem right now isn’t data. It’s people. The company has nearly doubled in two years, and he no longer knows everyone’s name.
The bigger picture
What I like about Brian’s approach is that it doesn’t pretend the data will ever be perfect. Tracking is shrinking. AI still hallucinates. Not every visitor can be identified. So he focuses on what he can control: clean data, connected systems, clear outcomes, and a human checking the work.
That’s the same philosophy we’ve built BDEX around. Quality beats quantity, and accurate data is what makes AI, automation, and personalization actually work. Without it, you’re just sending more emails to people who will never open them, and these days you won’t even be able to tell.
Connect with Brian: Find Brian Minick on LinkedIn and learn more about ZeroBounce at zerobounce.net.
Work with BDEX: Want to turn anonymous website visitors into real, verified people? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the episode: AI in Email Marketing: How to Build Better Email Lists and Boost ROI
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
