Expanded in-house email capability
Helped cut reliance on outside vendors by half while quadrupling the amount of email produced in house across Land O’Lakes brands.
Hi, I’m Andrew.
I build personalized email in Salesforce Marketing Cloud for agriculture and animal nutrition brands at Land O’Lakes. I write the AMPscript, SQL, and HTML behind the send, and I build AI agents that take the tedious parts of email production off my team’s plate. I got here on a little bit of training and a lot of experience: twenty years of design and ecommerce before email, so I care about how it looks as much as how it works.
Featured accomplishments
A few things I’m proud of from my time at Land O’Lakes.
Built practical AI tools for marketers
Created reusable Copilot and Gemini agents for content conversion, accessibility, geotargeting, reporting, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud analysis. Each one started with a task someone was tired of doing by hand, and a person still checks the result before it goes anywhere.
Introduced interactive email
Built the first interactive email in our Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance, a live CROPLAN poll subscribers could answer right in their inbox. See the case study.
AI & marketing technology
Tools and fixes I’ve built to make email production faster, cleaner, and easier to trust.
Geo-targeting ZIP finder agent
Created an AI agent that returns ZIP codes within a selected radius of a location, allowing marketers to plan regional sends without waiting on a separate data request. Distances use the Haversine formula, with results checked through a companion browser tool.
Inbox and content optimization
Used AMPscript and Schema.org markup to improve how a WinField United newsletter appears in AI-assisted inboxes, alongside Litmus sentiment tracking to understand reader response.
Finding contacts that silently went missing
Traced why some contacts were quietly excluded from sends to missing account-team assignments in Salesforce. I documented the root cause separately for engineers and business stakeholders so each audience could act on it.
The bigger builds, like the SFMC automation audit, the Word-to-HTML agent, and the alt text agents, each have a full case study in the portfolio.
What I’m working on
What’s currently taking up space in my notebooks, browser tabs, and custom Copilot agents.
Reusable marketing agents
Building Copilot agents that help marketers draft, review, convert, and analyze emails. The trick is getting them to follow brand standards and know when to hand things back to a person.
Smarter SFMC operations
Making automation activity, data extension dependencies, and run patterns easier for teams to understand so maintenance decisions are based on evidence rather than archaeology.
Accessible content at scale
Testing ways AI can help with image descriptions, cleaner email code, and quality checks, so accessibility happens early and by default instead of in a rush right before send.
Experience
Land O’Lakes, Inc.
- Senior Experience Associate Mar 2025 to present
- Senior Email Marketing Specialist Aug 2024 to Mar 2025
- Email Marketing Specialist Jul 2022 to Aug 2024
- Email Marketing Developer (contract) Apr 2021 to Jul 2022
I joined as a contract developer for WinField United and grew into a marketing technology role supporting email across brands. I work between creative, data, technology, and operations, often translating the same problem differently for marketers, developers, agencies, and leaders.
Brands I build for: WinField United, CROPLAN, Purina, Forage Genetics, Mazuri, and more.
Bulk Reef Supply
Rebuilt the email program around segmentation and testing. Open rates rose 80% and click-throughs 45%, and email beat its $1.25 million annual revenue goal for 2020. I also ran seven weekly newsletters and built 40 new automated campaigns.
ShopHQ
Ran the email calendar for a national TV retailer, with four or more sends a day in Salesforce Marketing Cloud from creative brief through deployment. Email drove more than $42 million in revenue across the second half of 2019.
The Tile Shop
Designed and coded mobile-first email, built a library of 20 templates, and grew send volume 82.5% while lifting open rates 20%.
Before email
Two decades in design, ecommerce, content, and production still shape how I approach marketing technology:
- Eaton Corporation, B2B Ecommerce Content and Multimedia Manager (2000 to 2010). Led a cross-functional web content effort that tripled site traffic.
- North American Membership Group, Ecommerce Content Manager and Creative Team Project Manager (2010 to 2014). Helped a new ecommerce initiative reach a $1 million first-year sales goal.
- Contract and consulting design for NatureWorks, Prime Therapeutics, and my own clients (2015 to 2018).
- Early career in art direction, multilingual document production, and retail visual communication.
Education
- Augsburg University, Communications
- School of Communication Arts, Certificate in Desktop Publishing Design
What I write and talk about
The topics I keep coming back to in presentations, team meetings, and the occasional long post. My take on each, in a few sentences.
- Practical AI for marketing teams
- The best agents I’ve built started with a task someone was tired of doing by hand. I talk about how to find those tasks, build something small that works, and keep a person checking the result. (Shiny demos are fun. Saving someone an hour every week is better.)
- Email operations across a lot of brands
- Email gets complicated fast when one small team supports a dozen brands, several agencies, and a handful of business units. In my experience, the hardest problems show up in the handoffs between teams, and that’s where better templates, documentation, and tools pay off.
- Accessible email
- Alt text written five minutes before send is usually bad alt text. I’d rather build accessibility into templates, content standards, and QA so it happens by default, and I’m always happy to show people how.
- ERGs and volunteer leadership
- Co-leading an employee resource group means getting things done with no formal authority and a team of volunteers who all have day jobs. It’s taught me a lot about influence, clear communication, and patience. I talked about some of that on the ERG resources panel at the 2026 Open Fields Alliance conference.
Portfolio
Most of my current work lives behind the Land O’Lakes firewall: internal systems, customer data, and workflows I can’t show. So the first four pieces are case studies with redrawn diagrams instead of screenshots. After those is older work from retail email, consulting, and freelance design.
Current work
Systems I’ve built at Land O’Lakes
The diagrams are redrawn so they’re safe to share. The problems and the work are real.
01Interactive emailA question appears inside the inbox
02Subscriber responseA choice is made without opening a separate form
03Cloud processingAMPscript and CloudPages handle the submission
04Response dataThe answer is captured for follow-up and analysis
Case study 01
Bringing audience feedback inside the inbox
I designed and built the first interactive email in our Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance: a live CROPLAN poll that subscribers could answer without leaving the email.
- The challenge
- Cut out the extra step between seeing a question and answering it.
- My role
- Interaction design, HTML email development, AMPscript, CloudPages, testing, and implementation guidance.
- What changed
- It became a pattern other campaigns can reuse, with separate guides for our technical team and our agency partners.
Automation metadata
Query and filter inventory
Run frequency
Data relationships
ANALYZEStructured auditNormalize, compare, connect
Operational reporting
Copilot knowledge
Maintenance decisions
Case study 02
Making marketing automation understandable
I built an audit and a Copilot knowledge base that pull together Salesforce Marketing Cloud automation details, query and filter activity, run frequency, and data extension relationships.
- The challenge
- Answering “what runs, how often, and what depends on it?” meant digging through several sources every time someone asked.
- My role
- Data extraction, audit design, analysis, reporting, documentation, and knowledge-source design for Copilot.
- What changed
- Those answers are now in one searchable place, which makes it much easier to decide what can run less often or be turned off.
WORD COPY DECK
Heading
SFMC-READY HTML
<h2>Heading</h2>
<p>Clean copy...</p>
<a>Call to action</a>
Case study 03
From copy deck to production-ready email code
I built an AI-assisted workflow that turns Word copy decks into clean HTML ready for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
- The challenge
- Copy starts in Word, and pasting it brings along formatting junk and inconsistent structure that someone has to clean up by hand.
- My role
- Agent design, instruction writing, HTML pattern definition, iterative testing, and quality-control rules.
- What changed
- The agent handles the cleanup. A developer still reviews the code before it goes anywhere near production.
▣Product imageIdentify the product and useful visual detail
▥ChartCommunicate the conclusion, not every pixel
◇DecorativeUse empty alt text when the image adds no information
▤InformationalExplain the content and purpose in context
Case study 04
Improving alt text by first understanding the image
I built Copilot and Gemini agents that figure out what kind of image they’re looking at before they write alt text, so the description fits the job the image is doing in the email.
- The challenge
- Alt text written at the last minute is usually inconsistent, and it often misses why the image is there at all.
- My role
- Classification framework, prompt and instruction design, example development, and output review.
- What changed
- It turns the questions I’d ask about an image into steps anyone can repeat, earlier in production.
Earlier work
Design, email, and photography
Before email, I spent a long time as a designer and photographer. These pieces are from those years.
Email: The Tile Shop
Product launches, design inspiration, events, and pro customer programs, designed and coded in-house, 2018 to 2019. Click one to see the whole email, on desktop and mobile.
Email: Bulk Reef Supply and ShopHQ
Promotions, automation, and video launches for two very different retail audiences, 2019 to 2021.
Design and illustration
Contract and consulting work, 2015 to 2018: case studies, product literature, infographics, illustration, and event materials.
Photography
Corporate, product, and lifestyle photography from my freelance work.
Toolkit
- Platform
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud, CloudPages, Data Extensions, triggered sends, and Litmus. Earlier platforms include Bronto, Silverpop, Mailchimp, Magento, and Oracle Stellent.
- Code and data
- AMPscript, SQL, hand-coded HTML and CSS for email, Schema.org markup, data investigation, and marketing automation analysis.
- AI
- Custom agents in Microsoft Copilot and Gemini, prompt and instruction design, knowledge grounding, AI-assisted quality assurance, and accessibility workflows.
- Design
- Email and web design, print production, photography, motion graphics, and the ability to spot when the spacing is off by about three pixels.
- Working style
- CliftonStrengths top five: Strategic, Ideation, Maximizer, Context, and Command.
Community leadership
In 2011 a class assignment required six hours of volunteering, so I signed up with Project 515 expecting to stuff envelopes. Instead they put me at a booth at St. Cloud Pride, where I froze halfway through my very first pitch. I kept going anyway. Today I co-lead the Pride Alliance at Land O’Lakes, and somewhere along the way I also became the guy who builds everyone’s website.
Pride Alliance ERG, Land O’Lakes
Co-lead the company’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group alongside two executive sponsors. We plan Pride Month programming, member events, and learning sessions, and I built the case for our partnership with Open Fields Alliance (formerly the Cultivating Change Foundation), which helps LGBTQ+ people in food and agriculture grow, connect, and lead.
In October 2026 I represented Land O’Lakes on the ERG resources panel at the Open Fields Alliance annual conference. We talked about not requiring anyone to be out to take part, listening before planning, doing fewer events but making them count, and partnering with universities and other ERGs. I came home with a list: connecting our members with OFA affinity groups, a book club on Queering Leadership, and a monthly meetup of Pride ERG leaders from across food and ag.
Digital help for community groups
Build and run websites for a couple of Twin Cities LGBTQ+ nonprofits, including online ticketing and payments, and set up a Discord community for one of them, complete with onboarding and documentation.
Volunteer roles
- Project 515, volunteer (2011 to present). Supporting legal equality for same-sex couples and families in Minnesota.
- Minnesotans United for All Families, Get Out the Vote Office Coordinator (2012). Recruited, motivated, and scheduled volunteers during the final push of the marriage amendment campaign.
- Gaylaxicon 2012, Registration and Publications Director (2010 to 2012). Built and ran registration for a 250+ person convention, from presales through on-site check-in, and produced all of its forms and printed materials.
About me
- Born
- New Orleans
- Grew up
- Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, and Minnesota
- Home
- Minneapolis area, with my husband Joe and our dog Carly
I was born in New Orleans and adopted, and I spent most of my childhood as the new kid: Starkville, Mississippi; Ballwin, Missouri; Alton, Illinois; and finally Brainerd, Minnesota. I landed in the Twin Cities for high school at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, where I studied literary arts and had my first real experience with photography, developing my own film in the darkroom.
Being adopted meant growing up with a blank spot where part of my story should be. I tend to expect things to be clear and straightforward, so that blank spot bugged me. I found my birth mother in the late ’90s, but my birth father took a lot longer. Eventually I did what I do at work: I went to the data. AncestryDNA matches, other people’s family trees, and a lot of patience finally led me to him in 2017. By then he’d been gone since 2003. But the search gave me something I didn’t expect: six half-brothers. I’ve gotten to know five of them, including Paul, who tracked me down on his own a few years later.
Joe and I met in November 1988. I was coming down from Brainerd with my choir for a church concert, and I also wanted to go to a Star Trek club meeting that weekend. A mutual friend knew Joe was in the club and set us up so I’d have a place to stay. I like to joke that he picked me up at church. He was my prom date, and we got married at WorldCon in Toronto in 2003, which meant that for the next ten years we were married everywhere except at home.
I’ve been excited by gadgets and technology for as long as I can remember. (If you ever meet my dad, you’ll know where I get it.) That’s still how I work: figure out what’s making the job harder than it needs to be, then build something practical. Sometimes that’s SQL or AMPscript. Sometimes it’s an AI agent, a clearer process, or a document that finally gets the technical and business folks talking about the same problem. Away from work, I see more movies than anyone I know, and we’re slowly turning one room of the house into a home theater.
I’m also a voracious audiobook listener. Since I joined Audible in August 2014, I’ve spent 4 months, 27 days, 4 hours, and 14 minutes of my life listening (and counting). That doesn’t include the countless books I read before that. And Joe and I love to travel. So far that’s taken us through Northern Europe, the UK, the Caribbean, Mexico, Belize, and Australia.
Berlin 
St. Petersburg 
Checkpoint Charlie 
Lamanai, Belize
Let’s talk
Questions about Salesforce Marketing Cloud, practical AI for marketing teams, accessible email, or building better marketing workflows? I’m always up for comparing notes.