How to Winback Dormant Email Subscribers with Dean Ginsberg - 93

In this episode, Brandon Amoroso hosts Dean Ginsberg, founder of Winback, as they embark on an illuminating exploration of the email marketing landscape. Join both entrepreneurs as they delve into Dean's journey from agency work to founding Winback, uncovering the intricate nuances of email deliverability and entrepreneurship challenges along the way.

Gain a deeper understanding of the ethical considerations and deliverability challenges associated with reactivating dormant email subscribers. Through Dean's expert analysis, distinctions between client-side and server-side tracking are clarified, shedding light on the significance of predictive pop-ups in email marketing strategies.

Furthermore, Dean unveils Winback's innovative strategies for driving incremental revenue while mitigating risks through targeted approaches and meticulous deliverability monitoring. From exploring the complexities of email marketing deliverability to discussing Winback's performance-based pricing model, this episode offers a comprehensive view of the evolving digital marketing landscape.

Join Brandon and Dean as they navigate the intricacies of email marketing, providing listeners with actionable insights and thought-provoking discussions on optimizing email deliverability and enhancing business performance in today's dynamic digital age.

Timestamps

🎙️ Introduction of Alex Back and Couch.com (00:00:02)

🤝 The gap between furniture manufacturers and retailers (00:01:50)

🛠️ Marketplace tech build versus buy decision (00:06:33)

🐣 The chicken and egg problem in building a marketplace (00:12:45)

📈 Leveraging content and SEO for organic growth (00:15:00)

🪑 Creating a furniture-first advertising platform (00:17:48)

💼 Couch.com's Business Model (00:18:17)

🎯 Niche Marketing vs. Broad Marketing (00:20:38)

🌍 The Challenge of Being Everywhere (00:21:48)

📚 Lessons from Previous Business (00:25:12)

📢 Focus on Marketing (00:30:02)

💼 Challenges of Multiple Apps in Shopify (00:33:57)

🤔 Pros and Cons of Specialization and Consolidation (00:35:27)

🚀 The Potential of Shopify and Market Dominance (00:37:53)

🌟 Alex's Journey to Starting Couch.com (00:38:11)

🚀 Launching Couch.com - A New Opportunity (00:43:06)

Dean Ginsberg:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-ginsberg-53bb3030/

Winback - https://winback.pro/

Stacked - https://www.stackedco.co/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/

X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast by using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency Oletchik, and today I'm talking with Dean Ginsberg, the founder of WinBack, a company that reactivates dormant email subscribers. Thanks for coming on the show, dean.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Thanks, brandon, it's good to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:37

So before we jump into some of the stuff that we want to cover around email deliverability, some of the new rules and requirements coming out from Gmail, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself?

Speaker 2: 0:48

Yeah, I'm Dean. I started WinBack. We reactivate dormant email subscribers and then only charge a percentage of the incremental lift that we create from the dormant list. Before this I ran agencies for seven years. So I ran an agency that did large digital transformation projects, mostly for private equity firms and the companies that they bought or publicly traded companies. And then I started a company called Stacked and we built lifecycle programs, also for large enterprise brands, and then we train up their team, build out their stack and kind of make ourselves useless and then go on to the next project. So in those experiences we were handling everything like very wide, wide range, a lot in like data infrastructure world setting up like more complex flows, like multi-channel programs, Figuring out like larger org structures than are like typical in like a mid-sized Shopify Clibio e-commerce setup. But a problem that like constantly came up was the CEO at some point would come and say we need a big revenue lift this month.

Speaker 2: 2:06

Why don't we just like email all those people that are dormant on the list? And then the lifecycle team would be like please don't do that, that's going to destroy us. But ultimately, like these two parts of the org didn't really understand the why behind why they weren't emailing the dormant list and also couldn't speak the same language around it and had different initiatives and needs, and so that was like a problem that I often like mediated, as both like the technical person on the lifecycle side but as somebody who operated like a business owner and understood the impact of bottom line and just facing that problem enough times over and over again, I was like, actually the solve that we have, the like best practice approach to this, is not.

Speaker 2: 2:51

It's not actually that intelligent. It doesn't take into account the business case and it doesn't really take into account the risk or technical component. Is there a way to build this up from first principles into a specialized service and technology stack that can solve the problem Not just for one, one company, but at scale? And so I dropped everything, started building, went back and it's been about eight months now.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Nice and how is it? How's that been going Like? What are some of the things that you didn't necessarily expect that you've had to deal with? You know from like an entrepreneurial standpoint in those first eight months.

Speaker 2: 3:33

It's a great question. Want to answer it honestly. In a way it's been the easiest business I've ever started, because it's like we only charge a percentage of incremental lift, which means like our value is never really questioned. It's a very easy number that CFO can understand. The lifecycle person can understand Like we're focused on a very specific audience, which means it's much easier to become and train people and how to be experts in it. And then we're left. We're kind of running the same playbook and program consistently, so the development of that program can come from me specifically and then scale across different orgs.

Speaker 2: 4:17

So there hasn't been like I would say like all my other companies, it was just constant, like learning of new systems, new structures and trying to pretend to be like a total expert on literally everything. This has been pretty nice of like. No, it's like I actually do know my shit and like this specific area and I just do it over and over again and the results are consistent and also where respond like you don't pay us almost for driving results, which makes conversations much easier. Right, I would say I like I approached the problem in an interesting way that might be helpful for people who are like thinking about starting a business Like. The first question was is our people interested in this? So, just like I have this concept with people be into it, and I was like, would people sign a contract to let me do this with like no money up front? Just off of you know, if we can drive, lift, you'll pay us.

Speaker 1: 5:18

And then it was like can we actually drive?

Speaker 2: 5:19

to drive, to lift Right, can we go into different accounts and could we actually make money in a way that is not just advantageous for the brand but profitable for us in our time. And that whole process took about five months to really get to a place where we're like okay, consistently, we know the like, tool sets to play book, the structure to consistently produce a significant amount of revenue. That makes it a good business model. And now we're just in the period of scaling that up. So, yeah, it's been a bit of a like, it's been cool to build something that can scale, you know. And then like the agenda and rush that comes from like growing at a bit of a faster clip from something that I develop over the course of a longer period of time, that's like very specific.

Speaker 1: 6:11

How um, I guess how are you thinking about growing and scaling it as well? But like that sentiment around it being significantly easier because you just do one thing and you're very good at it, you just rinse and repeat I think is a huge unlock for a lot of businesses when they decide to go narrow and just like own one thing versus trying to be everything for everyone.

Speaker 2: 6:33

Yeah, I do think that it's like one of those. I don't I don't think we're a success yet. We have a ton to prove. But, like you hear about those like 10 year overnight successes Right and it's.

Speaker 2: 6:46

I did the broad thing for seven years and that helped me, like deeply understand where a very specific problem was and built off of that, I think that trying to identify, trying to try to like enter an industry and pick a very specific problem is can be very challenging, right, unless you're willing to like pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot until you find the thing there is. There is a benefit to going broad because you just have a wider preview into one of the challenges and one of the problems that exists. But yeah, I do. I do think that that's a thing that people say is like pick this very narrow niche and then like crush it. But I also think that if you don't know the customer, you don't know the problem you know, know the technical challenges, you can begin to isolate yourself into a silo that doesn't actually work. And so sometimes there's there's a benefit of going back and forth.

Speaker 1: 7:45

Yeah, I guess, with the lecture coming, when we started we did everything for everyone until we figured out, because of doing everything for everyone, that this is what we are going to hone in on and that's when we unlocked the growth like the really substantial growth. But we went to may able to get there if we didn't do all the you know sort of widespread everything for everyone side of things.

Speaker 2: 8:05

Yeah, it's a I think it's like a Steve Jobs quote of like it's really easy to connect the dots going backwards, right, it's like I studied like history and economics and you know I learned so much in that that I'm using in my career. But if you told me that this is where my career would go, I would never have believed it. So it's very similar when even in just kind of identifying like the evolution of the business or even iterations of your own of the like the businesses that I started, it's like it's been a perpetual process, right, I mean, I just I love. The one thing that's been consistent is I love building things. So like I love the chaos of it.

Speaker 1: 8:56

It is. That's what makes it fun and exciting. It was a constant change. The cold night sweats, the impending feeling of doom, that's all the good stuff, right.

Speaker 2: 9:09

Yeah, the one interesting thing and I'm interested to get your take on, it was a big mental shift for me was in building agencies, particularly the ones that we were building, which is basically running a whole department at a C-suite or VP suite for large companies and doing that across multiple companies. I felt that 95 percent of my mental bandwidth was put into the client's company. Taking six months off and just being like what would it look like to build something where I'm taking all of my mental bandwidth to build an infrastructure that then can be leveraged across multiple companies, where my time is now focused on iterating, on playbooks it's more focused in my realm and my infrastructure than it is on very specific client needs or client problems or new programs. I think that's a challenging thing for agency owners. You can go pretty quickly into feeling like you have eight jobs, then you also have a bunch of employees and you have gusto to manage.

Speaker 1: 10:26

Yes, don't even get me started on the HRIS systems.

Speaker 1: 10:30

Those things are just an absolute nightmare.

Speaker 1: 10:36

But I agree with that because an agency itself, the whole service is to work within other people's business.

Speaker 1: 10:49

Any moment spent working on your own business is time spent working away from your clients yes, whereas in this transition to software, for me, with drinks and with scaless, every moment spent working on the business is also still working on what the client is seeing, what the client is getting to use and benefit from.

Speaker 1: 11:14

So I feel like it's a more synergistic relationship between software companies and the end users than necessarily agencies and the clients that they're servicing. Which is why I think at a certain point agencies become too big and the agency takes priority over the client, which is like a natural evolution. I tell everybody, when you're looking for an agency now, to look for the one that is on the up and up, small enough where they still care about you, but not so large where they don't, but not so small where they can't be effective or do anything. But that's going to be a finite window because they'll most likely just keep growing and growing until they get to 100 people and then they get 150 people and it's very hard to manage and maintain that level of scale for, like, when it comes to selling people services for software, it's totally different.

Speaker 2: 12:26

So I have a lot of conversations like people who want to go fractional or people who are currently fractional. Who's having a conversation with? A woman yesterday, extremely accomplished, went the fractional route, has no trouble getting new business and is very hands-on in the way that she manages her clients. It's truly like she's a fractional employee at a VP level of large companies. And she was like should I hire an executive assistant? I'm trying to figure out how I can take on more clients with the fact that I'm selling myself as a service. And the conversation we had was interesting because I think that that is a key inflection point for a lot of fractional people. Where it's and oftentimes that decision is not very thought through it's like oh, I'm going to hire this person to solve this problem. And then all of a sudden, now you're responsible for their work output and your name is on their work output and you also begin to like, when a problem comes into your purview, you're like, oh, I have a person who can solve that.

Speaker 2: 13:34

So I can now say yes to solving that problem for the client, as opposed to before when I was like no, that's not in my scope, I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 2: 13:44

And that becomes this like slippery slope of all of a sudden you just created an agency and you didn't even know it and now you're like behind because your agency doesn't have the infrastructure, the processes, the like intention that is actually required to scale it from. Like I'm selling Dean as a service to I am selling stacked as a service, Right, and I, I my take on it is like being fractional is actually can be an amazing place to be. You can continually up your rates to live a beautiful lifestyle and tackle on many different types of projects, meet many different types of people. But the moment that you start to like I don't even want to say greedy, because oftentimes it comes from a place of pressure, of like wanting to say yes to people who you want to help but the moment that that starts to slip into a scaled service, it needs to be a very conscious and thoughtful decision. Otherwise, like you should consider building a product that scales like an actual thing. That's correct.

Speaker 2: 14:56

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:57

I think growing the agency will be an invaluable experience for now going down the the software route and I was. I haven't gone completely down it yet, but I feel like it'll actually be easier to scale the software team because you're not dealing with as much client like Instability and as much variability on that side of the business is typically you're dealing with like annual contracts. I mean, if you're practicing a good place, like you're being iterative and you're you're very focused on internal stuff like what's it, what's our onboarding process look like for your team members, how are what are all of our so PS like stuff like that. So now maybe we'll have this conversation in five years and I'll be like it was a nightmare. I actually I'm going back to agency.

Speaker 2: 15:44

But I just read one of my clients posted this thing on LinkedIn where he was like SOPs and forums are killing a like killing agencies. And he was like I have this agency. They were great, they started scaling and now like anything that gets outside of, like you know, a form submission is like, you know, pulling nails, or it is like, in the beginning was me and the founder like iterating and being agile, and I do think, like I empathize with both sides of that. It's like you need to build structure, you need to be able to say no to things, to scale something, but like it's much easier to truly scale like quality when it is productized, and it is much easier to build a product than it is to build. Like it is much easier to scale your promises when you're building a product than when you're selling people's time, you know.

Speaker 1: 16:41

Yeah, people are. You know, they're amazing, but they're also not as reliable as software is. Like you build the software to do something, it's going to do that. You don't have the. You know, I hired somebody and I thought this was going to happen, but, oh shit, it definitely did not. There's there's a lot of that in the, in the agency world.

Speaker 1: 17:04

Yeah but Not going too far down the rabbit's hole, though I could just keep going about the agency versus a software dilemma. Coming back to Win back and what you're doing over there. How, like he talked me through the Email deliverability side of things, like what does it actually look like for a brand to engage and work with you directly? And you know you have some folks out there like retention, calm or a black crow AI, whatever their name is you Like? How does that fit into this, or does it not? Is it similar? Is it separate? Because I know I've heard anecdotally, you know, there's some deliverability issues that can arise from using those solutions, like within Klavia.

Speaker 2: 17:54

Yeah, so I would kind of separate a couple those two. Those two things are a bit separate. So, just at a high level, the difference between, like, WinVac and retentioncom is focusing on email acquisition, right? So similar to like what Wunderkin was doing. It's all about how do you identify a user who comes to their site, and with retentioncom you have the option to bring in emails that are not subscribed to your list. There's I can go on some like there's a whole ethical question around whether you should be doing that.

Speaker 1: 18:32

It's annoying as hell. I can tell you that.

Speaker 2: 18:34

And like, and then there's a whole like deliverability, question of like, if you should be doing that, and I can talk about that for a bit, so I'll just park it. Black Crow is the difference between client-side tracking and server-side tracking. And then they also have this predictive pop up so that, Black Crow, you're just getting emails that are subscribed, but you're being a bit more intelligent and you're getting outside of the limitation of a cookie window to identify a user who comes back. So, instead of tracking it in Google, which has which actually just got rid of cookies but you can track it server-side to not limited to a time bound if the user comes back. So that increases not just the amount of people who sign up for your emails, it increases the amount of abandon cart and abandon browse sends that you can send out, because you're identifying a returning user and not calling them a new user, and your abandon cart and your brand of browse sends are the biggest revenue drivers for your email program. So like both are like very different than WinBack, but also distinctively different in themselves.

Speaker 2: 19:42

With WinBack, we're only focusing on dormant email subscribers, so people who are subscribed to your list but are no longer interacting with email. You can think of that. It almost has, like the recycling center for your Lifecycle program. So people sign up, they're interacting with your emails. They go three months, four months without opening an email, visiting your website, making a purchase, basically doing anything associated with your brand. They're about they're cold. Instead of just not emailing them or waiting until Black Friday to like blast them you, we come in and we're actively managing that dormant list to drive incremental revenue but to also mitigate the risk in that sending. And I can go into a bit of like how we do that, but I feel like I might be rambling a little bit.

Speaker 1: 20:33

No, I personally want to hear you know the how, like, how do you actually go about like, let's say, I got a client who's got 500,000 emails that have been sitting there and haven't opened an email in six months. How do you go about, you know, attacking that yeah?

Speaker 2: 20:48

So there's two pillars to the company and they both really play off of each other. The first is it's an agency. Right, it's a hyper focused agency. The only thing that we do is reactivate dormant subscribers. So we just have more infrastructure, more data, more tests, more reps at activating this audience. The other piece is our deliverability stack. So we score the emails instead of looking at the, this large audience, which can be 60 to 80% of an email list, instead of saying we're going to assess the risk of that, just based off of their previous engagement, we're able to break that risk assessment down on an individual email level. So then that allows us to identify who we should target and who we shouldn't. Based off of that score, we run the emails through different sets of filters. The filters basically separate the bad and the toxic emails. Then we set everything up. We write all the copy. We only do plain text emails, which allows us to. There's like a whole deliverability reason why we do that. And then we begin to pulse users through the different flows that we set up in a user's claveo or send, send lane or iterable or brace account, as people are going through those flows.

Speaker 2: 22:09

We have deliverability monitoring suite that we're using. So we're monitoring DMAR, dkim, spf, bimi. We're doing seed list tests. We're basically saying every email that goes out, is it landing in inbox? And looking at it, at each individual ISP, what is going on? And we have the data behind the scenes to say, oh, this didn't land, what's going on there. And then we have a team that's trained on troubleshooting that to actually come up with resolutions. So the combination of are we targeting the right people? Are we targeting the right people aggressively? Are we agile in the way that we're adjusting those risk models based off of the feedback loops that we're now generating? And then do we have the tools to monitor that, not just in what's available in claveo, but go deeper down the stack to see where these emails are ending up and what are the reports that the ISPs are sending back to us to tell us about the health of that sending process.

Speaker 2: 23:10

The other key factor is like this is a big reason why I started the company is best practices would say don't email these people. The reality is best practices meets business cases once a year, once a quarter, and that just becomes a battle of one side wins or one side loses, and so what ends up happening is brands don't actually just leave that list cold and they're not going to be able to do that. So we're going to be able to do that. Brands don't actually just leave that list cold. They just let the risk of that list penned up until a big sale period and then they hit it multiple times. And oftentimes they're not building custom copy or custom created that is specifically made to reactivate that audience itself. They're just expanding the audience definition of their campaign sense.

Speaker 2: 24:01

What that's basically like the worst of both worlds in terms of risk and report. Both you're not taking advantages of the emails when they're most hot. Right, you're waiting, waiting, waiting and then you're. But like Gmail and Yahoo came out with these new requirements. They're new, but they're also kind of always been there if you've been in the compliance world. They are based off of spam complaints on daily send rates. When you basically like penned up and blast, you're concentrating all the risks of your send into a single day or week with pretty aggressive messaging. When you're actively, kind of slowly, turning these out. The volume that the volume is much smaller relative to your daily send volume. So it's much easier to stay below the thresholds and to be agile in your adjustment of how you're targeting.

Speaker 1: 25:02

Got it. So it really is broken down into those two components the agency side of things but very deep on the deliverability side of things. So you are actually sending the emails to those contacts from the brand's domain.

Speaker 2: 25:16

Yes, yeah. So we're writing all the creative, we build it out, we build all the flows in their ESP and we do that just so everybody has full transparency, right so the brand can see the segment, see the flows, adjust the flows. We're actively in there. We're basically just focusing on a single audience, got it?

Speaker 1: 25:38

And then your pricing is purely performance based too. Yeah, and the pricing is performance based. So then, who's the ideal client? What does that look like? I'm assuming if you only have a thousand dormant emails, it doesn't make any sense, but yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:57

We work with Ridge wallets, with thesis, everyday dose. We're working with brands that are typically on Shopify. We're using Sendlane and Klaviyo. We're newer to Sendlane. We just launched with our first client on Sendlane and the brands need to be doing over five million in revenue and most of the brands are doing over 20 million. Most of the brands are doing over 20 million in revenue.

Speaker 1: 26:32

So that like Shopify plus mid market and above yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:37

Got it Okay, that makes sense. The whole like email deliverability side of things is such a vast city of just like very technical, very, I would say, outside of the purview of even a lot of the people who are email marketers, like some of the things are. There's still certain concepts or things that I'm like wrapping my head around in terms of all the different layers of verification. You know why some emails might go to spam versus others might not, and you have all the various email clients and you have all the different operating devices. Like it is, it's a pain in the ass.

Speaker 2: 27:20

It's like I Would put, like I would rank the level of understanding and this in these different categories. There's business owners who have, like, heard the term deliverability, understand the concept of a reputation score, right, ultimately, are responsible for the bottom line of the business. There's the lifecycle team that, if you look at the responsibility of a lifecycle marketer, particularly in, like, a Shopify ecosystem, their job can range everything from like designing an email to understates to looking at like IP address records under like de Kim, like reporting. Those are two completely different skill sets, like. There are not many people who are great at both of those things, right. So, and and to the most part, like the lifecycle manager Understands deliverability to the extent of, like what quote-quote best practices have always been, which is like don't email people who are have been inactive for over x period of days, right. But when the CEO begins to kind of remin and say, like why, the answer is like reputation score Deliverability will end up in the spam box. But like why? Right, like that additional layer is is Missing, right, and there's a whole world of compliance and deliverability experts that it's. It's almost like talking to software engineers like, who are operating on like a stack that existed in the 90s. Right, it is like or we use the term like email nerds. There's like email nerds, and then there's like deliverability nerds.

Speaker 2: 29:02

It's like whole different level. You know, and I would put myself like I am not the best deliverability, like compliance expert in the world. There's people who are so much smarter than I am and have been so deep in the weeds of, like, monitoring these records and identifying these patterns across enterprise brands for 15 plus years. These are the people that I'm like, in chats with and learning from, but, like, those people are not available for the shop of like Shopify, claveo. I like users of the world, like the woman that I am working with like, she's 355 dollars an hour and it's it takes a lot of time to troubleshoot this stuff. Right, it's not available. So, like, the goal with WinVac was to create a business model where you can have an expert in Deliverability, managing your riskiest audience, but instead of that being a cost to the business that everybody doesn't really understand, it's tied to revenue. It's about how can you be more sophisticated in your target Targeting so that you can target more people will, minimizing your risk.

Speaker 1: 30:12

Yeah, no, I get the value prop is, I'd say, pretty much spot on, and then you have Pretty much no downside to leverage it because you know it's purely performance based. So I think that's that's the one thing that we were able never able to crack at electric is how to do performance based, because when you're managing the entire email account, yeah, doing performance base can get like sketchy Because how do I mean, there's so many factors that go into it and there's so many different ways that you can juice revenue or not Based off of you know how you're sending frequency, etc.

Speaker 2: 30:52

We measure it against a whole that audience right, and you can really only do that for dormant Audiences so there's like, depending on the size of the brand 10%, 20%, 30% the dormant list that is targetable filtered and we are not sending them an email just so that we can be sure that when we're talking, when we're talking about our revenue lift, it's isolating the variable of our program. So there's no like cross-link Attribution, there's no last touch. It's just like your science You're like high school science class like Control versus target variable. You can't do that for a whole program. You're leaving like way too much money on the table if you're doing that. So it's just, it works well for this specific business model, but yeah, it's like it doesn't really work when you expand it out.

Speaker 1: 31:52

I think that's why the software companies also have an easier time with onboarding new clients in some regards, though, some of these attribution windows have been getting a little bit ridiculous, so there's a lot of hesitancy around. Oh, we're only paying for this solution because a percentage of the money that we're going to make from it, but if the solution is telling you that you are making 10x more than what you're actually making from it, then the pricing isn't really that great.

Speaker 2: 32:20

Yeah, and that's why I felt like you can't do a performance-based model if you can't isolate the variable of the thing that you're selling, if you can't do it against a holdout audience. I've seen all of these decks when I was consulting and I'm just like where did that number come from? Wow, 2,000% growth in a month.

Speaker 1: 32:47

You guys are amazing. Stop asking questions. Too many questions.

Speaker 2: 32:55

One thing that I would put out into the world.

Speaker 2: 32:57

If anybody listening is a lifecycle marketer, there's a responsibility to understand not just the metrics that people are showing you, but how are those metrics formed?

Speaker 2: 33:14

For example, if you're using Clavio to monitor the performance, the Clavio analytics to monitor the performance of your program, it's your responsibility to read the documentation to understand how they're attributing revenue to each of your sense and each of your campaigns. The way that Clavio does it. I actually think it's great in a post-cookie world, but I'm just using that as an example of you can't just trust things on the surface, particularly when you have different sources that are telling you different metrics. You need to know what actually are the variables that are impacting whether this is counting this to this campaign or counting the revenue to this other campaign. One thing that I would highly recommend for anybody is once a quarter, do a holdout audience on your whole program or a particular flow. That means, yes, you're leaving money on the table for that period of time, but this is very common in paid media, where you need to be 100% sure that you're allocating your dollars as effectively as possible.

Speaker 2: 34:28

There's some incredible case studies of full-core where brands turned off their highest performing channel for two weeks just to see what the actual lift of the channel was. In itself, I haven't seen many life cycle teams do this, but it allows you to just get a single grounding point in what is the actual lift of the program. Then you can begin to look at are we investing enough in our life cycle program? Are we supporting those team members enough? Are the junior people on that team lifting way above their weight? When they come and they ask us for resources, do we need to do everything in our power to make sure that they're happy? I think a lot of people are operating in metrics that they don't fully trust, and there's a direction to it. Once you can fully trust the metrics you're looking at, you can make real business decisions off of those hard numbers.

Speaker 1: 35:32

That is the scary thing, though to just stop doing that channel all together to be able to get that baseline and to see what the actual lift is. The whole attribution thing is a nightmare.

Speaker 2: 35:47

You wouldn't have to shut it off entirely. You would take one target group, one holdout group, like 10% of your audience, and they just would have received the program. Yes, you will take a revenue head and that is scary Once a quarter I would do it personally.

Speaker 1: 36:12

You're the deliverability expert that can be your next business. You come in and you scare the shit out of the business owner by turning off one of their channels and showing them what the actual lift is.

Speaker 2: 36:28

Here's an interesting thing that we found Because we measure incremental lift, we can see a much wider range of impact on the program.

Speaker 2: 36:42

For example, when you're measuring off of last-click attribution or you're measuring off of Clavius attribution, which holds it within a window of when the email was sent, then you don't fully know the long tail impact of the email itself.

Speaker 2: 36:59

When you're running against a holdout audience, time is no longer a variable. The only variable is did they get this or did they not get this? What was the lift between those two audiences? Sometimes you'll see that you send an email and not a single person, but relative to the holdout audience, that group is purchasing at a higher clip than the other ones. That could actually adjust your whole strategy where you optimize for what you measure. If you're measuring off of a five-day attribution window because you're limiting yourself to click-based attribution, then you might implement strategies that are much more short-sighted and don't actually drive long tail, higher level returns, such as having more branded touch points, having more community-focused touch points. Not saying those are the right strategies to deploy, but just by measuring against a holdout and being able to see this different view that is indisputable it might actually impact the strategy that you deploy and drive significantly more growth.

Speaker 1: 38:10

I like that. That makes a lot of sense. It's a vast world out there of ever. It feels like there's ever-moving targets too, because you have various privacy updates getting rolled out. You have different changes coming from the email providers. It's a lot to navigate. One last question I have for you here regarding solutions like pretensioncom, some of these other anonymous identification. A lot of brands are using it. How can they make sure that it doesn't hurt their deliverability? Is it hurting their deliverability?

Speaker 2: 38:50

I like the way that you phrase that. I operate from the lens of a business owner. I get that it's hard and that everybody's getting pinched. Anything that gives you an edge, there's no judgment on it. It's like how do you leverage the tool in the way that it's most responsible, not just for your business but for your less than ecosystem? Something that I've seen that has troubled me is there should be a limit on how long you're emailing these people. Somebody came to your site. They didn't opt into anything.

Speaker 2: 39:33

I would imagine you get a couple shots at that before you're stepping across the line that requires you to actively suppress those audiences from your campaign sends, from your own WinVac program, from a longer tail of interaction. That's what I would recommend. You leverage it as an email opt-in. You have a welcome flow that they're running through. You might have some additional touch points, but you're at least conscious of when that cutoff point is, so that they don't just get melded into your other email metrics. Not only is that bad for your deliverability, it's bad for the general performance of your whole program. It's also not thoughtful to somebody who could potentially be a customer. You got to. I think you get a couple shots and then you got to call it until somebody is actively subscribed and says that they're interested. If that's a route that you want to go down, that's how I think about it.

Speaker 1: 40:50

I like that a lot because people are going to do it. Obviously the brands are doing it. How do you do it in a way that gives you some of that revenue upside but also doesn't hamper your business performance and what you have going on the email account?

Speaker 2: 41:04

to begin with, I think that makes a lot of sense. The other part of that is I would make sure it's your responsibility to measure the lift up that as well relative to the amount that you're paying for the product. You can't just take the vendor's word for it. If you begin to segment these things out and you're measuring your own impact, then you could make a real business decision. If that's something that's worth it for you, for some brands it's definitely going to be worth it. For some other brands they're going to realize they're not actually getting the ROI that they're looking for, it's just owning it. You're doing something that, in my opinion, is pretty great. You need to be hyper-vegulent about how you're utilizing it and what you're getting from it in order to continually make that decision.

Speaker 1: 42:03

I appreciate that context and also the usage of gray hat, black hat, gray hat I just love all the acronyms that get thrown around and created in e-com and whatnot. Thank you so much for coming on. This was super insightful. The deliverability is, I would say I'm in the middle tier. I'm not a deliverability nerd by any means. Like you said, there's a host of best practices. It's just crazy how much further down the rabbit hole you can get with where and how things actually work and operate. I really appreciate the context and insight. Before we hop off, can you let people know where they can find you and win back online if reactivating their dormant email subscribers is something they're interested in?

Speaker 1: 42:56

It's stuff in our conversation. That seems like you'd be nuts if you weren't.

Speaker 2: 43:02

I appreciate that LinkedIn's a great place to connect with me personally. It's just Dean Ginsburg and my company's Win Back. Our website is winbackpro. We're currently on a waitlist for new brands, but if you sign up for the waitlist, I'll reach out to you and we'll just figure out a way to start the conversation Awesome.

Speaker 1: 43:24

It's a great place to be in the waitlist. Thank you everybody for listening. As always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom and electricmarketcom. I'll see you next time. All right, thanks, brandon. All right, thanks for listening.