Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
Why You Should Email 3x Per Week (Email Expert Shares)
In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, I sit down with Zack Zeller, an expert in email marketing, AI, and copywriting. We dive into the evolving role of email as a marketing powerhouse—why it’s still one of the most effective strategies for businesses today and how to do it well.
Zack shares how his journey began by accident, sending daily emails to support his college’s fitness club (without the pizza bribes). From there, he built a thriving career working with major names like Jay Shetty, Jordan Belfort, and Agora, discovering firsthand the power of consistent, high-value email communication
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The Power of Email Marketing
- Why email remains the single tactic that works for nearly every business
- How even a small list of 600 can generate $15,000 in a month
- Why sending three emails a week hits the sweet spot for most businesses
- The underrated role of email in building deep relationships versus the fast reach of social media
Using AI the Right Way
- Why AI can speed up content creation but can also push you backwards if misused
- The “dirty sponge” effect of repetitive, low-quality AI-driven content
- How Zack uses AI to track patterns, test subject lines, and refine campaigns
- Why real expertise, experience, and thought leadership must still shine through
Real Results from Real Campaigns
- A client with just 600 subscribers who saw $15K in sales in 30 days
- An agency owner whose daily emails turned $3K into $181K in just 90 days
- How nurturing leads over time (30, 60, 90+ days) consistently drives 4–5x more sales
Key Takeaways for Marketers
- Don’t fear being “salesy”—the problem is usually not enough marketing, not too much
- Email accelerates the know, like, and trust factor
- Consistency, case studies, and valuable insights are what make your emails worth opening
- The sales question changes from if they’ll buy to when they’ll buy
Whether you’re sending monthly newsletters or considering moving to three times a week, this episode will show you why email marketing is still the backbone of lasting success.
Are you ready to rethink how often and how well you’re showing up in inboxes? Tune in and discover why email may be the most valuable marketing channel you’re not fully leveraging yet.
Connect with Zack:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zackzeller22
Website: https://thisshouldntwork.com/test
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Hi, I'm Kendra Korman. If you're a coach, consultant or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science, and that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Korman, and today I am joined by Zach Zeller. He is an expert in email marketing one of my favorite topics AI another one of my favorite topics and copywriting, which goes with both of those. So welcome, zach. Thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:So glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:So how did you get started in all this?
Speaker 2:By accident.
Speaker 2:So I'm a former engineer turned digital marketer, because in college I would buy a lot of stuff from marketing emails and at that time I was trying to run my college's nutrition and fitness club.
Speaker 2:We didn't have a lot of money to bribe students with pizza because it was new. So I realized what if I just send out a daily email to get people to come to events and join us and all of that stuff? So I ended up writing that newsletter for three years and then started my own nutrition coaching business, which I ran that for about a year or two and it really didn't do anything. So I started freelancing my marketing stuff and that took off or at least landed me $1,000 worth of clients, which was taking off for me back then and I moved from my parents' house across the country to Arizona where I probably did not get any clients for six months, but I was working the whole time A member of like two masterminds, so paying about $6,000 a month on the credit card every month. And finally I started figuring a few things out and getting some clients and working with bigger and bigger names, which was really exciting and started my career in earnest.
Speaker 1:On the more successful side, I love that story and it does take time for all of us to grow our businesses, and I think that that's something that people underestimate is how much time it's going to take to build. But I do love that you use email marketing because you didn't have a budget for pizza, which we all know is the number one draw for college students, right Free pizza. So since you didn't have any free pizza, you were able to grow with email marketing, and that was even with college students not that long ago. So I think that that's really important to note, because I feel like a lot of people think that email marketing is bothering people and it's not that I think that I shouldn't say that that's what people tell me.
Speaker 1:If I find out that they don't have an email list and they're not sending regular emails, I find out it's because they think that they're bothering people and they don't want to be salesy and they think that that's bad and I'm like but how am I going to remember who you are and what you do unless you stay in front of me? And email is a fantastic way to do that, so I love it. So let's talk about email marketing, because everybody does it. Now, right, I just read an article not too long ago that said like even all these brands are getting sub stacks, now too that are sending email digests. So how are you helping your clients stand out and leverage email marketing?
Speaker 2:biggest thing that we found is being valuable to email, and so value is probably the most overused word in marketing and what I've seen just sending tons of emails over the past I don't even know 11 years the most valuable thing that you can send is tactically useful information that's well communicated. So what's working right now specifically for clients is we send about three emails a week, because I'll get to that in a little bit, but for our goals, sending three emails a week works really well. We'd like to do one sort of flagship newsletter, and that flagship newsletter we focus it on the best content the client has. So sometimes that means using email actually as a distribution channel so we can send podcasts or YouTube videos or really practically useful or engaging stories to the list, which gets them opened, and then the second half of the email becomes almost a new email that tells people about our offers. And then the other two touch points during the week. I like to use case studies a lot Because, in addition to being tactically useful, one way of doing that is demonstrating your expertise, and the best way of doing that is with a case study example saying hey, I literally took someone from point A to point B with this method and here's how we did it, or here's a lesson from that. And, of course, if you want similar results, then I have this offer, this book, this cohort, this product that could help you as well and you can get it here. Or you could take the next step here and then, typically, the third piece is another case study or a second point at distribution, and I really like email as a way to distribute other content because of how marketing works in this day and age.
Speaker 2:So I view it as just marketing, as a game of fences and ladders. So a lot of people start with social media because that's not a high fence to go over. If you have a smartphone and an attention span of at least two seconds, you are on social media. That audience isn't just the first rung because it's so accessible, but it's also, for the business owner, the highest frequency tool you have to reach people, meaning if you send. Let's say we were sending maybe two emails a day when I was working with large lists of like 400,000 people I'm working, if anyone knows, agora Financial like sending to big lists and really sending them a lot of emails. We were doing about two emails a day and that's pretty good until you talk to someone like Gary Vee who promotes sending 100 pieces of content per week A different game, because if you can post, let's say, even two Instagram reels a week, compared to two emails a week, you can reach a much larger, even warm, audience or totally brand new audience and get them into your world, compared to sending those emails.
Speaker 2:The problem is a lot of that high frequency or reach that you'll have on social media is just starting the conversation at the lowest level. This activity of just getting tons of top of funnel awareness and reach and focusing on a really vague concept of brand where people have tweets or hooks. He has to someone knowing why you do what you do, a bit about what it looks like to work with you through your case studies and spending more time with you through email, which is going to be the slowest goal. So people are going to spend more time, give you more of their attention, assuming that you're doing everything right practically with the content.
Speaker 1:Yes, social media is fantastic. Right, it is great for reach. It is not building the relationships. I view social media as a great tool to get people on my email list. That is its job, right Is to get people move from one point to the other, and I think that there's so much value there. And I love how you talked about that.
Speaker 1:Email is a little bit of a slow scroll. People are spending more time. Their email inbox is a lot more personal to them than their social media feeds, right, so inviting you into their inbox is special, right. They don't want junk and I think that that's important. So I had a heart attack when I went from one, and I'm a huge, huge, huge proponent of email marketing. I actually have two friends that I'm getting started on email marketing this week, but it you know. So I'm a huge fan. I love it. I had a heart attack when I made myself go from monthly to weekly because I knew I just wasn't staying top of mind enough. So tell me a little bit about why three times a week, I mean, clearly, you have the content, you've got the case studies and the information, which is great. That's a lot isn't it?
Speaker 2:I mean, my perspective is based on when I started, I was working with people who do a lot of volume of marketing. I've worked with Jay Shetty and Jordan Belfort and Agora and a lot of these big, big seven eight-figure info publishing, info marketing type brands, and I don't just say that to name drop, but just to share that the frequency of email that you send depends on the stage your business is at, and I say three emails a week because there's I would say there's an opportunity cost. Yes, so I think of it this way. Let's say, you go from not sending emails to sending emails. That's going to turn email revenue from zero to one.
Speaker 2:It's like an infinite increase in revenue from email, which sounds really good, especially when you're an engineering nerd like me who talks a lot about stats. But you go and increase that frequency, it's going to take you longer and longer to write this content, or be more expensive if you're hiring a copywriter or someone to work with you on that, especially if you can speed it up using AI tools and all that, but there's still going to be diminishing returns. So that's why I like speed emails a week, because it's something that I know we can get quality information out for people who are between like a million to $3 million a year or even kind of scaling as a one person business where there's not necessarily things or promotions or news happening every day in the business, it's a good sweet spot.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about quality content for just a hot second here, because I think there's a couple different schools of people in the world of content creation and AI has become a cornerstone of that discussion. I'm a huge fan of AI. Ai saves me 30 to 40 hours a week on average. I love it. I could not live without it anymore. I would totally freak if I lost it. But there's a lot of people not using it correctly, in my opinion, and creating a bunch of junk. They're not creating that quality content. What do you have to say about that? Or about those people that are just using it to do what Gary Vee is saying and put out 100 pieces of content a week?
Speaker 2:The difference between really thinking from first principles and following tactics. So tactically it makes sense that the more content you put out, the more surface area and chances you have of starting a conversation and getting a client and having a magical transformation in your business. But from first principles you can't just put out the same stuff, and the problem with AI is it's trained. Not just that, it's trained on all the same data. But AI is almost like a very good employee in a legacy business where it wants to stick to status quo. It doesn't want to be wrong and it takes everything you ask very literally.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the time what happens is you can model content and get similar outputs, but then your content sounds like kind of the same thing over and over again and it's never going to be as new as the first person who says it. So your content kind of becomes like a dirty sponge where it's. You know it was nice and clean at first, but now the more you use it it smells funny Like there's dirt coming out of it before you even clean anything. It's not as effective and if you really want to create good content you can use AI to do that and move faster. But if you don't have the right direction for your content to go in, you're going to move faster backwards and not have that impact or results that you want.
Speaker 1:I think that there's so much there that's worth paying attention to. But, yes, it's going to move you backwards if you're putting out a bunch of junk. Right, you've got to be adding that value. Yes, value is an overused word, like you said in the beginning, because the first question I had when you were talking about it was sending value and I was like, what do you mean by value? And then you answered it. So that worked out. But again, it needs to be content that has your experience, your expertise, beyond just your voice, because I can make AI sound like me all day long. Right, it's got to have that extra piece of content, that differentiator, that thought piece, right, and I think that that's so important to talk about. So, how do you recommend people get started with AI? Because you're using it, right.
Speaker 2:So I like AI, for I like it for the process part. When I'm writing an email, there's four main pieces. So first there's like let's ideate and we have a promotional calendar, we know how much money you want to make in the month, here's the offers that are going to fit into that, and then, creatively, we need to come up with the different hooks and pieces that fit in there. The second part is how are we gonna take that idea and express it? And that's like how can we write our first draft and then create a second draft to make sure it's good and then review the data to see, basically, how our testing on the hooks worked? And that's really the power of email, where it's not just about owning your audience, it's not just about nurturing and this retention-based marketing marketing. It's really the lowest cost and biggest opportunity for you to test new marketing angles in your business. Because if you were going to create a new sales letter or VSL or run ads or do 100 outreaches to try and test a unique selling proposition or a new offer or whatever it may be request a unique selling proposition or a new offer or whatever it may be that's going to take a lot more time than drafting up an email and saying, hey, would you like it? I'm putting together XYZ, would you want to join us or ask for more information.
Speaker 2:So with AI, the way that I use it is A aggregating and seeing big patterns in the data so we can track email, creatives, subject lines, open rates, different formats of like hey, we're sending to a YouTube video, we're sending direct to an offer, whatever. And feed that all into an AI tool and just say, hey, what patterns emerge, what's working, what's not working, so that we can double down on behaviorally, like we did this. Here's the data, what actually works. And I think a lot of people miss that and they get stuck in this marketing echo chamber talking to imaginary friends and avatars of like oh, you know, if this guy, chris, is this kind of person who would buy our thing, like, how would that conversation roll out? But that's based off of, and imagine that conversation in your head. So I know I talked about a lot there.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, no, a lot there, which is great, but no, I think it's important. I mean, email is a way to get quick response, right. Especially if you have a larger list, you're able to get a decent sample size and see how that reacts and you can test. I mean, marketing is so much experimentation, right, it's about testing and learning and experimenting, which I think is really important, so that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Talk to me a little bit, because we probably have some people listening that are like three times a week, again, still think you're insane, right, I'm not moving to three times a week. If you're on my email list, don't worry about it, you're still getting one a week. Right, I'm not moving to three times a week. If you're on my email list, don't worry about it, you're still getting one a week. For now, I've been thinking about getting a sub stack and doing something more often, but we'll see. But that's, you know, on the to do list, that doesn't ever get done. So so let's, let's talk a little bit about some of the success that you've seen, right? So, so, doing these more frequent emails, leveraging email marketing what are some of the success? Can you share a case study, since you like those um, or an example of something that that you've done um, so that that we're more on team more often.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so actually all right. So this is going to be a big failure and then a big success. That's always good. Well, because I had an agency where I was doing bulk on chat closing for Instagram and it was a big lift where we would basically create all the marketing assets and you would just post this content, we would get all the conversations in chat and a full team would run the sales process to sell your stuff. And that was with a. I had a few partners in that and they moved on to different things and so did I.
Speaker 2:So I was talking to a client and I said man, you've got a great LinkedIn, I can create content and we can get a bunch of sales and that will be great. So we did the first month and then the second and the third, but we got no leads. And the way that I framed it because I was so confident is well, there's a setup cost and then we can just split the revenue of sales that we get. But if there's no revenue of sales, I'm just writing content for weeks on end. And he's unhappy because he's not getting anything going from this as well. So I told him well, let's test sending to your email list and I didn't do this at first because his email list was super small we had less than 600 people on it. But that first month we made over $15,000 because of these emails that we were sending that were much more than just little updates or thought leadership stuff. And we've been working together for the past two plus years now because it just keeps working and his list keeps growing and he gets very excited about that. But it's really like email is such a powerful thing that if you have, even if you just have 600 people on your list, even if you just have 600 people on your list, those relationships can really turn into a lot of business for you. I mean, I can't fit 600 people in my house. That's a huge amount of people in real life.
Speaker 2:A similar story was an agency owner. I was working with this guy, jason Wojo, who has an amazing Facebook ads agency and he was spending a ton on Facebook ads for himself but he never really messaged his email list. I think a big piece of it is not because he didn't want to bother people, just that he didn't have the time to. And I came in, we started sending emails. I came in, we started sending emails actually every day, because he had like 13,000 people on his list and in the first month we went from, his control was $3,000. We hit just over 17. And we continued doubling that every month and in our first 90 days we got $181,000 of sales just from email, just attributed from email traffic. And so it's such a powerful thing Because a lot of the time people on your email list they don't get there by accident On social maybe they give you a like because you made them laugh or because they think you're cute or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:But people on your email list typically opt in and they're in market or interested in what you have to say, and so if you continue sending to people, then they're going to buy from you. I mean, that's a pattern I've seen again and again and again. I was working with a client who trains solar salesmen to kind of start their own businesses and they give them this is super smart You're going to love this that they give them a list of 60-day-old leads, because 60-day-old leads no one wants those. They're super cheap and it's a great value add for the offer. No one wants those.
Speaker 2:They're super cheap and it's a great value add for the offer, but those 60-day leads convert really well because everyone stops talking to the leads by that point. But if you're installing solar you might need those two months because maybe it's winter, you're not going to get solar done. Time passes, maybe it's a money thing. They need two weeks to get some cash or to figure things out. Whatever the case may be, if you talk to people over time over 30, 60, 90, even emailing people up to two years I've seen just anecdotally on several lists you're going to get four to five times more sales over that amount of time versus just hoping people close within the first 30 days of talking to you on the phone.
Speaker 1:It's about relationships, right. I mean, in marketing, we talk all about the no like and trust factor. That's huge and email speeds that up. People feel like they know they begin to like you if they like your emails. If they don't, they're not your target audience, right, and they begin to trust you, especially when you're consistent and sending regularly. I think that that is just. It's so important, it's so undervalued.
Speaker 1:I had a conversation with somebody the other day and he's like, hey, I'm looking for a new salesperson. I'm like, no, you're not. He's like yeah, yeah. I'm like no, I'm like when you start email and stay on top of mind with everybody else that you're networking with, you've got a huge network. When you're able to stay on top of mind with those people and then still need more sales, then bring in a salesperson. But until you've got email turned on, you can't say you need a salesperson because you don't need a salesperson. You don't need someone going out, you just need to harvest what you've got already. Right, because he's got a long sales cycle.
Speaker 1:So keep talking to people, because you never know when it is that they're going to come back and market and I think that that's just. There's so much there, so much there and I love, love, love, love our conversation and I love that you're pro email and you're younger than me, so it's not dead and it works. Trust us, we promise, we promise, promise, promise. Email marketing, I think, is the one tactic. I haven't found a business or organization that hasn't been able to leverage it successfully. It's the one tactic right that I believe almost every business needs. I won't say that about every tactic or every organization, except for email, because it is that powerful and I really appreciate the time that you took to talk to us about that today, zach. So, but before I let you go, I do need to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests, and that is this show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say so. You know how a lot of business owners don't like feeling salesy. The biggest lesson I've learned is they feel that way because they're not spending enough time feeling markety. Meaning if you're trying to get someone to go from just talking to you to buying in one or two calls, you can cover that same amount of ground by taking people from A to B, B to C, C, all the way to Z with your marketing and we talked about how email is one way of doing that with your marketing, and we talked about how email is one way of doing that. But if you can focus on starting conversations, continuing those conversations, the sales game changes from a matter of if they'll buy to just a matter of when they'll buy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's great. So I think, yes, it goes from if to when, and if you're showing up in their inbox, that when is going to be much more timely. I talk about this all the time. I get emails from people, replies to my email newsletter. The reply has nothing to do with what my email newsletter was about, right. Half the time it's something just crazy and off the wall, right. That's like hey, I've been meaning to reach out to you about this and I didn't even talk about that in the email, right. But again, it kept me top of mind. They didn't even read the email, they just saw my name, remembered that they had to reach out to me, remembered what I did and did the outreach there's again.
Speaker 1:I'm such a big fan of email marketing. I think that there's again. I'm such a big fan of email marketing. I think that there's so much there. I know that we'll have ways to reach Zach in the show notes and the YouTube description, so be sure to check that out and connect with him. Zach is also writing ghostwriting short books for people. I know that I have written a short book myself. You can see my book over there. They add so much value and give you so much authority off the gate that, if you're interested in talking to them about that too, we'll have some of that information in the show notes also. Thank you again, zach, so much for your time. I really appreciate it For those of you listening and watching. If you learned something today and I hope that you did it would really help us out if you would rate and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. Until next time, have a great rest of your day.
