When was the last time you talked to a Netflix employee about your account?

How about an Amazon employee?

I’m guessing for most of you the answer is: never. Netflix automatically charges my credit card every month and uses its algorithms to push content it thinks I’ll enjoy to my home screen.

A shipping problem or return request with Amazon is usually resolved with a couple swipes or clicks. It’s efficient customer service, but it’s all faceless, online, impersonal.

Now, when was the last time you stayed at a Ritz-Carlton or Four Season? How did that experience make you feel? Pretty darn good I bet!

The key to your success as an advisor is to marry the tech efficiency of an Amazon with the deluxe service of a Ritz-Carlton and underpin it with high technical competence. It’s really a three-legged stool—tech efficiency + deluxe service + technical competence.

I sometimes worry that our industry has become so obsessed with the tech efficiency leg of the stool that we are losing sight of what clients are really paying us for—helping them make better financial decisions so they can live their best life possible.

I couldn’t attend this year Wealth/Stack Conference, so I invited two of my favorite past guests who did attend to recap some of the key themes that emerged from the conference.

My guests today are Dennis Morton and Matt Wilson. Dennis is the co-founder of Morton Brown Family Wealth along with his partner, Kathryn Brown. Matt is the Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director of Keen Wealth Advisors along with his partner, Bill Keen.

Here are four major themes from the conference and our thoughts about each.

Email Marketing is one of the most effective, least expensive, and underutilized marketing strategies available to you right now.

I’m on the record as saying a person’s inbox in the most valuable piece of marketing real estate you can own. When a person gives you permission to show up in their inbox on a regular basis, you can develop a personalized relationship that leads to new business and long-term loyalty.

Now, you might be thinking, "Steve, have you lost your rocker here? Email is so 1990s. Why are you talking about email marketing? Email is dead. We've got Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, texting, Instagram, webinars and much more, so why are you talking about a dinosaur like email?"

Because it works!

Just like I was early to the podcasting space five years ago when I started Between Now and Success, the next big marketing and education platform is a resurrection of an old one—email.

I started using “electronic mail” back in the 1980s when I worked for corporate giants Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard. In those pre-commercial internet days, it was a closed loop and I could send mail only to other employees. I thought it was really cool back then and today, it’s even cooler now that your “email” is as unique and ubiquitous as your thumbprint.

To explore email marketing, I invited one of the country’s leading authorities on email marketing, Dan Oshinsky, to my podcast. Dan is the founder of Inbox Collective, an email consultancy that helps brands grow audiences, build relationships, and get results via email.

Previously, Dan was the Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker, where he helped launch new newsletters, optimize their suite of products, and drive paid subscriber growth through email. Dan was also the Director of Newsletters at BuzzFeed, where he built a team that grew newsletters into one of the biggest referrers of traffic to the site and drove 250 million clicks to BuzzFeed. Dan also wrote more than 200 posts for BuzzFeed, including one that hit 1 million views.