Practical Rebels

41: The Science Behind Email Marketing with Gavin Hewitson

• HatchMark Studio • Season 2

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Unlock the hidden power of email marketing! 

Gavin Hewitson is the founder of In-box, an email and SMS marketing agency based in New Zealand. (That’s right. Practical Rebels is officially a global podcast!) 

Our team collaborates with Gavin on a regular basis to help take our clients’ email strategies and execution to the next level. 

“With email marketing, you can get to about 80% on your own,” says Gavin. “It’s that extra 20% where you can really start to make a difference.” 

We explored a wide range of topics, from must-have automation sequences to a list of reasons why you might not be seeing the conversions you want and tips on how to capture more emails on your website. 

Whether you’re just starting with email marketing or looking to optimize and improve on what you have, this is an episode marketers and business owners won’t want to miss out—now streaming on all of your favorite podcast platforms. 

**Everything you need to connect with Gavin and dive into his resources—all in one place! 🔗👇**


Introduction to Gavin Hewitson

R

Welcome to Practical Rebels, the podcast First time on Riverside. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, for sure, For sure. Today we're going to have Logan, who is a friend of the show, and then Gavin. Gavin, tell us about what you do. Well, first off, where are you from? How'd you get there All that good stuff?

Gavin

Yeah. So, guys, my name is Gavin. I run an email and SMS marketing agency, or commonly referred to as like a retention agency. I've been in the space for a while now and we were just talking about like my, my origin story, really. So I was originally born in the States, born in Atlanta, but when I was seven years old, we uh family like up sticks and we all moved to Spain, lived in like a small rural town in Andalusia. Uh, for like two years, lived there and then moved to New Zealand, which is where my dad's from. So, from the age of nine till I was about 28,.

Gavin

You know, off and on lived in New Zealand, um, and then, uh, moved to Mexico, mexico city, just cause I wanted to grow the business and you know New Zealand's great country, but it's just the bottom of the world, it's a pretty difficult time zone to get involved in, and so I thought you know what Mexico City is great, super walkable, really green, nice people, and it's right in between the East and West Coast. So it allows me to kind of dance between two time zones, or rather, you know, east and West coast time zone, uh, really nicely. But, um, you know, I, I, actually I got into my email marketing journey in like a interesting way. I used to be a standup comedian, so I used to tour when I was doing standup. And so I was actually, um, me and my buddy were doing this tour and we'd gotten sponsored by this camper van company and, uh, you know, we'd have the camper van and we basically go from the top of the North Island down to the bottom of the South Island and, um, you know, standup doesn't pay the bills at all.

Gavin

Right, and this is no, this is no, it's, it's feast or famine. It really is. And, um, my buddy was working at an agency and you know he was like, hey, gavin, you know we need to need, need some general support with our email marketing, less of a strategy role, but more just like an execute campaign, design script, build the emails. I was like, yeah, you know what, I can do it. So while we were on the road together, I was basically doing the email marketing for this agency and I got good at it.

L

And I was making no money.

Gavin

It was basically like a study thing more than anything. But um, got good at it, jumped into another agency, got even better and, you know, after a couple of years, it got to the point where I was like you know what, I should just go ahead and start my own thing, cause I'm doing everything but invoice the client at this point. So, um, while I was freelancing, I was like, you know, I'm gonna try and get my own clients. So I started building my own little team, started building up my own website, putting stuff out on YouTube, linkedin, twitter, and, you know, fast forward a few years and you know, here we are. And so now you know, we've got a team of four at the agency and we specialize in, yeah, retention marketing for e-commerce brands, specifically Traditionally using, you know, like your Klaviyo, your Shopify, big commerce, woocommerce, attentive, all sorts of stuff like that. And uh, now, uh, now we are here.

L

Yeah, man, that's awesome and I know that we we got connected recently. Um, we pulled you in to help us with a project here at Hatchmark. Um, and it's just been so nice because you know, we, we know I would say like, say, like, we know how to set up an email campaign and we know how to like get clients going. But I think I found that, um, whenever we were trying to execute on the more advanced stuff, we were kind of like chasing our tail a little bit, and bringing you in has been great, because this is what you guys do you know what I mean like you guys do email all day long. Um, so it's been nice to be able to like lean in on your subject matter expertise and really like take a much deeper dive onto what our clients are trying to accomplish.

Gavin

Yeah, I appreciate that. I think, like with with email marketing, right, you can get to 80% of where you can potentially be with, you know, 40 hours of research, some YouTube videos and a bit of grunt work, right. But you know, for brands that are doing really like, you know, over 30, 40 K a month in revenue, it's that extra 20% that starts to make a difference where I think getting like an expert involved really does, you know, play off and we'll talk about that today. But you know simple things about, like, creating splits based off of purchasing behavior within automations is something that most people don't even know how to do or why you do that, and there's a bunch of these like little subtle nuances that you know, when done right over time, compound and, you know, really give you benefits that you wouldn't really see if you were just, you know, twiddling your thumbs doing your own thing in the backend Right, and I think that's a kind of a nice segue into probably our first like email related question.

L

Is you know, with that 80, 80, 20 split, whenever someone comes to inbox to your agency, like what is it that you would say on average that people are looking for the most? Are they looking for that, Like we were looking for that extra 20, or do you find more people coming in Like I don't really know what's going on with email, Like please help.

Gavin

Yeah, so. So all the clients that I work with you know they're they're definitely they've had touch points with email, right. They've done a little bit of stuff. They know their kind of general way around. You know, to warrant getting me involved from like an active management perspective. You're probably doing about, once again, 30 to 40 a month minimum. So you've definitely played with email.

Gavin

You know, when it comes to the active manager from a campaign perspective, the metrics that we really try and focus on and a lot of people seem to miss is how many people we can turn from first time customer into repeat customer is ultimately, you know, email and SMS is like a retention tool and then also how many people we can turn from subscriber into first time customer.

Gavin

And there's a bunch of strategy stuff that we can kind of go into to talk about that. But more often than not, the brands that come to me first port of call, let's say, let's take a look at our automations, make sure these are working as best as possible and in reality, once you do the automations for the most part you do them once they're going to set you right for quite a while in the future if you actually do them right in the first point. Now the campaign stuff. That's more of an ongoing piece where it's like, hey, let's actually take a look at what's working historically, let's look at things that we can do in the future. How do we continuously implement improvements going forward?

From Standup Comedy to Email Marketing

L

Yeah, and that's one thing that I always talk about with clients whenever they're talking about email and getting the automation set up. I always tell them I'm like once you get it all set up it seems like a beast at first, but once you get it set up you know, at least for a while, like you said, that should be on cruise control more or less, and you get to like benefit from that like down the road without a ton of more like extra lifting on the back end for sure for years, right, like I mean you can even set up tests, yeah, from day start, day go, and then from there you can even implement little improvements going forward.

Gavin

But for the most part, like, unless you know, for these smaller brands you know you're not, and when I say smaller I mean doing under $5 million a year you know you're not really gonna have to change or tweak a lot of things unless you're having like a full rebrand bringing in a bunch of new SKUs or you know, really changing an offer drastically, yeah, and I think email in general, just as a tool itself.

L

I know you live in the email world all the time, but I saw I read something recently that talked about how people now see anywhere from like 4000 to 10,000 ads a day. You know what I mean. They're just like constantly being inundated with ads. But with email, you know, you might get even a really busy person who works in an office. You know they might get 100, 120 emails. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, because that seems to me just from a numbers perspective. It seems like you have a more captive audience in a less saturated market in email than you do with just digital advertising.

Gavin

For sure. I think so. Yes, it's definitely less saturated because people are typically opting in to get these emails in the first place, right, right, Two things to that. Like, email definitely cannot be looked at in isolation when it comes to marketing as a whole, because I mean with email marketing, ultimately, the success of email is largely dependent on the traffic that we have coming to the website. Now, that traffic can come in a few different ways. It can come either from paid ads or it can come from, like organic and organic, whether that be SEO, whether that be you know, social media, anything like that.

Gavin

But you're right, like, email marketing is naturally going to be more effective because of the subset of the audience that you're working with. Right, it's not like we're working with 10,000 people who've never seen your brand before. Ie, that's what you'd be doing for ads. If you're running ads, like cold traffic, you're running. Email. Marketing is ultimately an advertising tool. I mean, it can also be like a lifestyle tool, but ultimately you are running ads to a subset of people who are already familiar with your brand.

Gavin

So, yes, email is going to be more effective at getting in front of people, but it's the type of people that you're getting in front of as well is fundamentally different, and it can't be disconnected. It can't be like, hey, we're going to take our marketing budget and focus purely on email and just completely turn off our ads, like it's never going to work. Right, because to grow the list and you can only sell to the same people so many times, right? Regardless of how good your product is, people more on. This is like something like toilet paper. You know trends are going to move and so you do need to have a consistent flow of new traffic, and that is going to come from a you know ad team, which speaks to another point where it's really important to have the email marketing team synced up with that advertising team, up with that advertising team, right? So, figuring out where your customers are on the customer journey and having automations and campaigns that supplement a marketing and ad strategy that's also working simultaneously they can't be looked at in isolation.

L

Yeah, and maybe you could talk a little bit more about that. And whenever you're putting together, you know, either a campaign or a marketing strategy for the year, you know people, obviously you know, and we we like to do this as well. We like to look at the meta ads, google ads. You know the organic stuff. Um, email, would you say that it's just like it's holding the same amount of weight as all these other things and like, if you're, how would you suggest people start that strat strategically? You know, at that level where it's just like when do I start thinking about email whenever I'm about to launch a campaign and how do I make sure that I'm checking that box and make sure I'm not forgetting anything?

Gavin

Yeah, I think it's really important to have your. So when it comes to considering email as a whole and then specifically to like a campaign depending on what the campaign is right Like if it's a product launch or a sale you're going to have different strategies there. First port of call for email is just making sure your fundamental automations are set up right, and I think the core pillar to making sure those automations are set up properly is splitting people based off their purchasing behavior. So make sure you have your core automations, the really simple, straightforward, basic ones welcome series, browse, abandon, abandon cart and abandoned checkout. Uh, I think I already mentioned the welcome series. Uh, post-purchase thank you, win back flow and, uh, some sort of fulfilled order flow.

Core Email Marketing Strategies

Gavin

Some people listening to this are like well, hold on, what's the difference between a post-purchase and a fulfilled order flow? I separate these two because you're triggering automations off of actions. Now, a lot of people listening probably don't have Shopify Plus, but if you're using Shopify, you can't turn off the order confirmation email that comes from Shopify that's going to come out. Give you your receipt. Now, if you're using Shopify Plus, you can, but within Klaviyo, I like to have a post-purchase thank you flow. That doesn't try to replace the order confirmation from Shopify but instead is more of a personalized thank you flow from the founder. It can really just be like a one or two part email sequence that splits people based off their purchase history that says hey, it's John from Team X, thank you so much for your first purchase. Really means a lot, those flows. They don't necessarily develop sales but they actually build a little bit of loyalty, not to the brand but the people behind the brand. Okay, and I'll talk a little bit more about this later but really trying to create a connection between the founders, ie the people behind the brand and the customer should be leaned on a lot more, I think, than the brand specifically. Right, it's not like now, if you're a bigger company doing like over $50 million a year, sure, like start tying in, you know brand trust. But at the end of the day, if you're under that, it's a personal, human to human connection that you got to lean on.

Gavin

The fulfilled order flow is different from the post-purchase order flow and then it's triggered off of the order being fulfilled, ie in Shopify the metric shipping it's been fulfilled, it's ready to go out. We trigger an automation off of that metric that we send from klaviyo that gives them the order confirmation, that gives them the details about their shipping, tracking, their package. And then we create emails based off of the repeat order rate of that specific product and what that product nicely dovetails and cross-sells into. So we split the automation after that.

Gavin

First email based off of the item right, and more often than not you know brands who know what they're doing know like, hey, you know, if they're buying, you know this pen, we know they're probably going to need a new pen in roughly 30 days. So we can create an automation that then tries to resell the pen in 30 days, right, either before 30 days, starts warming them up, gets them ready, asks for reviews, tries to check in on experience. And then we can also say, hey, if they've bought this product, we know that they might potentially need a ruler. So we can cross sell the ruler based off of that initial purchase. And that's where the fulfilled order flow kind of gets a little bit more technical.

Gavin

And what a lot of agencies I think miss and a lot of brands tend to miss is, you know, personalization. People talk about personalization. They think like, ok, yeah, first name field in the email, I look at personalization around sending people down different paths based off of what they've purchased, what they've done in the past, rather than you know their name or their state or something like that. That is an element, but not the major part.

L

Yeah, and you talked about selling, because I was going to ask whenever you're talking about that post-purchase experience, whenever you're doing email, how much of that do you focus on trying to sell more after you've already made the sale, essentially, and how much of that do you go into, you know, go into like hey, like, you know like check out our blog, or you know, just giving them like tools and education and stuff like that, less sales focus and more of that trust building. And is there, is there kind of like a don't column where it's like don't try to sell someone something like immediately after they bought some, or do you do that? Or you know what's your take?

Gavin

It's a good question. It really varies according to to the business, but more often than not, the first and second purchase and this is going to vary from from business to business the first and second purchase is usually going to happen quicker than people think right, probably within 90 days. More often than not a big chunk, probably within 30 days. Now I'm not going to say hard and fast, this is the time delay you need to have on this email, because I think that's what probably separates OK agencies from good ones is that it's customized to the business that they're actually talking to. I think a really important consideration to have here is, ultimately, it's margin right, and I'm a big fan of leveraging discounts to get the first purchase across the line.

Gavin

Now, when it comes to the cross-sell or the up-sell, a first purchase has already taken place, but it's about figuring out how many people you can get across the line to make that first order and then figuring out what the repeat order rate is and what levers you can pull to move that repeat order rate, ie increased retention from within the business.

Gavin

And that can come from a few ways right, messaging, yes, email. It's also going to come down to value of the product and the value of the product comes down to a few things, at least in my mind, right, the price you pay, the continued use that you get get and the value or the result that it gives you. And so, within email marketing, the levers that we have to pull are, yes, the price you pay, because we can play around with those incentives, and the post-purchase thank you flow, the continued use. We can encourage continued use via email through education. Great example is supplement brands, right, here's how many times you have to take supplement X, y, z. Here's what you need to do, what your routine should look like to get the best benefits, and that's that education piece that encourages continued use, that increases the perceived value, which therefore increases the retention.

Email's Advantage in a Saturated Ad World

L

Yeah, that's smart, because you know I'm just thinking about it is because it's. I think everything we've talked about probably so far is that 20%. We mentioned that 80-20. These are like taking things to the next level and just getting more, and said there are probably a ton of people who are missing out on stuff like this. But I do want to back up just a sec because we talked about capturing emails and stuff like that. Whenever people land on your website. I know that you just did an article on our blog in the little guest blog and you talked about the flyouts for Klaviyo and you mentioned in your article that you think that a lot of brands and I've seen this a lot you land on a website and as soon as you're there, you're getting the 20% discount offer, and I don't know why, because everyone wants 20% off. No one doesn't want that. You know what I mean. No matter what, but we click out of it because it's just like I just got to the website, I'm already being inundated.

Gavin

I haven't even looked around so I'm just going to X out of that for right now. But you have a strategy that you think works a lot better to get people to actually like put their email in there and actually capture that. Then we close it and it's crazy because then you know it's annoying, right, but we'll never see that offer again. A lot of businesses only have that pop-up. When you close it, the cookies on your website for whatever seven days or depending on what browser you're using, maybe it's. You know you're not going to see that offer again. What I like to do is, yes, like to have that pop-up. Now the pop-up, really it's. It's more. There's a few ways you can. Actually, if you want to get really technical with it, we can talk about zero party data, but with the pop-up it's less about capturing the email, it's more about increasing the on-site conversion rates, and the pop-up is really about giving an offer to somebody to convince them to make that first purchase. Now, what I like to do pop up eight seconds, right, and then anybody who closes that form, we have another fly out. A fly out is like a form that comes out from the bottom right, bottom left after 45 seconds. That then redisplays the offer. Now we also like to do something where we make sure these two forms aren't on conflicting pages, right? So the fly out is only going to show to people who are not subscribed to email marketing ie have not submitted from that eight second pop up, ok, and it's only going to show up on URLs with certain words in it, ie product checkout. You know it's not going to show up on Thank you, it's not going to show up on thank you, it's not going to show up on contact us. And you can actually make sure there's no conflict between this and the eight-second pop-up. So if somebody doesn't go onto your homepage, sees the eight-second pop-up and then the flyout comes out 45 seconds later, you can actually set the conditioning specifically within Klaviyo under the targeting and behaviors tab, and have it only show on certain urls. Now another cool thing right, like no one, really like no one does this stuff, but like it's crazy. It's so crazy, man, it's so easy, though it's a clone, your literally clone your pop-up form, change it to a flyout 45 seconds, easy, easy. Another thing no one does is with that offer that you have 20%. That 20% offer should be reiterated at every single opportunity that somebody who hasn't used it yet has. So create another pop-up form that literally is a flyout not a pop-up, sorry, a fly out that says hey, don't forget, you still have your 20% off discount code. Click here to use it and it's an auto apply discount code at checkout. So they often it's that it doesn't grow your list, it increases your onsite conversion rates. Another really important thing give the discount code on the signup form.

Gavin

Do not force somebody to go into your inbox to get distracted, to leave your website to give you money. It doesn't make any sense. Make it as easy as possible for them to give you money. Now some email marketers will say no, no, no, no, no. Make them go into the welcome series. And they do that for two reasons One, because there's an argument around deliverability If you get more people interacting with your email, it's going to bring your deliverability up.

Gavin

But two, it also makes them look a hell of a lot better because attributed revenue goes up. But what you'll notice is that the actual business revenue can either go down or stay the same, because you are not making it easy for me as a customer, right Like I go onto your website, I give you my email address and now you're telling me I have to leave your website to find the email that you sent me to then use the coupon code. That doesn't make any sense, right? You want to make it as frictionless as possible, so add that discounts code on the checkout. Reiterate that discount code at every opportunity. Right, with Shopify, you can do auto-apply discount codes, so make sure every email that gives that discount code has an auto-apply discount code when they click a button. Super easy, yeah.

L

I love the pragmatism on that too, because we talk about it all the time whenever it's like you don't want people to go off your website, but so many people to get that discount are asking people to leave the website, to go fetch a code, and then who knows what happens in that 10 seconds. They might just be like you know, I don't really need it, I'm just going to go somewhere else, even though I've just got this discount. I also wonder and maybe you have the answer to this, maybe you don't but how that? You know, if I go on a website and someone's just trying to throw this 20% discount at me like I can't get them to stop giving it to me right away, I feel like that kind of like amps up a little bit of the trustworthiness. You know what I mean, because instead of just saying I was offered 20% off in the beginning, I clicked out of it, but now I don't know how to get it back.

Essential Email Automations and Personalization

L

Um, now I feel like this you know I'm getting a kind of like a warm and fuzzy. You know I'm getting a kind of like a warm and fuzzy. You know what I mean. Like, oh yeah, like they're actually like they're trying to save me some money here and they're actually making sure that I don't forget about that discount code and maybe that creates that first touch point and maybe that you know it's like hey man, these guys are, these guys are all right. You know what I mean.

Gavin

Yeah, A hundred percent. I mean like yeah, for think. I mean it would make sense to me where I'd be, like you know what, these guys want me to spend money and they're willing to give me a compromise in their margin. And for any business that's worried about like 10% is good, 20% is the sweet spot in terms of, like, increasing the conversion rates. Just work that 20% discount into your margins. You have to make a profit or at least break even. I'd say make a profit on your first sale.

Gavin

But just keep in mind, figure out what your repeat order rate is.

Gavin

And if giving that 20% off pushes the total amount of customers first-time customers up, you're going to make up for it on the repeat order rate down the road for it on the repeat order rate down the road, Right.

Gavin

So, like, if you have a repeat order rate of like 10%, right, and you have a thousand people and the uh, the, so you're going to have like a was a hundred repeat customers. If you then introduce a 20% off discount, let's say it increases your first time customer rate from 1000 to 1200. All of a sudden you've gained an extra 100 and you've gained an extra 20 repeat customers, right, and that repeat order rate is usually cheaper to get because they've already placed order once. It's not cold traffic and more often than not I'd be willing to bet. If you looked at the AOV between the first and the second order, you're going to see higher AOV on the second order than you are on the first and you're not giving them a discount on that second purchase. The second purchase is more profitable. So do not be afraid about compromising margin to get that first purchase across the line, because it's going to mean you're going to get more first purchases which you'll make up for in the long term.

L

Do you feel like whenever you're talking to clients because you just sold me on this tactic but do you feel like some people are a little bit hesitant at first, so like, oh, we're not doing the discount thing. You know what I mean. Our product is good enough as it is. Do you feel like you have to kind of like talk people into the offer more often? Or do people usually like you know that's how it works, just do the offer?

Gavin

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you know most people understand. I think the biggest thing is people think it cheapens their brand. Um, it doesn't, like I don't, you know, like a lot of the luxury brands uh will like Louis Vuitton, gucci, they have like they'll sell their excess stock to discount resellers, you know. So if they're willing to do it, so so should you. Um, yeah, yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't, I wouldn't really worry about it that much.

L

Um, yeah, we talked about I feel like we already talked a little bit about segmenting. But um, I I keep wanting to rewind a little bit because I know that some of our listeners they might be thinking like this is way over my head.

Gavin

I can't even fathom what the what the heck is going on here.

L

But I do want to talk a little bit of just about like audience segmenting. You alluded to it earlier. Um, cause, I have to think that there are some people who either might be listening or might be thinking about it. There's like I have an email list, you know what I mean Like talk about the importance of segmenting that audience and like sending those different audiences, different officer offers and different messaging.

Gavin

Yeah, so I'll make it super simple for 99.9% of the businesses out there. Take your database and just segment it by engagement and purchasing behavior. So get your whole list. Create two segments engage 90 days Anybody who has opened or clicked, or anybody who has opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days or subscribe to newsletter in the last 30 days and can receive email marketing and has placed an order at least once overall time. Feel free to rewind that. Do that again. That's your 90 day. Engaged, placed in order segment. Okay, right, um, the other segment is exact same, but add the condition instead of has placed an order at least once overall time. Create and place order zero times over all time. Those are the two segments you really need.

Gavin

Engaged customers, engaged non-customers Run campaigns, whatever you want to run to these people, but just ensure that the engaged non-customers have the offer that you gave in the welcome series in every single email that you send them. Literally all I do in many cases is we'll have, for example, an educational campaign, two campaigns. They're identical, except for the non-customers. We have wording around in the banner at the very top. Also, don't forget, you still have 20% off your first order. Click here to use your code. That's going to do magic in terms of increasing how many people go from that engaged non-customer to engaged customer segment.

Gavin

Right Now. You can get way more technical down the road. If you want to talk about like sales strategies and stuff like that, I think it gets. I mean, it's a whole episode in itself but like a really basic example is if you have a sale coming up, just segmenting your audience based on purchasing behavior Again, non-customers first time, second, third, fourth giving people different discounts based off their purchasing behavior and the different discounts, you give less of a discount for existing customers, more of a discount for non-customers and you just play with that sliding scale.

Gavin

So if somebody's placed three orders over all time, give them 10% off. They've never placed an order over all time. Give them 40% off Because the people who've already placed an order need less of a push to make that order. And that's a way where you can usually get the same amount of sales as you would with just blasting your entire list of the discount and getting more margin on that sale, making more profit because you're giving less margin away to people who don't need that massive incentive to place an order than you are otherwise doing.

L

Yeah, that's smart and I think that for so many people that's going to resonate because it kind of like you break it down. It sounds so technical but it sounds so like pragmatic, like I said earlier in the long, because it's like if someone's already a customer, they don't need extra incentive and they already know they like the product. But for someone who keeps engaging but is still on the fence, maybe they just need, maybe that extra push is just what they needed to get them to start converting and then to turn them into the existing customer and get them in that pipeline that you talked about.

Smart Popup and Flyout Strategies

Gavin

Yeah, I mean, we'll think about it. Like if you had two people next to each other. Let's say I've placed an order four times in the last six months, it doesn't make logical sense to assume that I would need 40 percent off to make that order, the same as somebody who's never placed an order before. Simple, right, I'm probably going to purchase. If you just say, hey, gavin, here's five percent, ten percent, I'm probably going to purchase again, right, but a lot of people run sales in a generic way where it's like everybody gets this woohoo and then, yeah, you know, they lose out on a bunch of profit. You know, and things are getting tight nowadays, right, like you need to protect margin but you know we talked a lot about econ, is it?

L

or at least like the conversation just kind of like naturally gravitated towards e-commerce. What would you say and maybe this is a selfish question, because we're an agency, um, where maybe you can't necessarily attribute everything to a cart fill, you know what I mean. Or or maybe it's just like this is a lead who came in wanting like a certain service from us and we talked to him for a little bit. That kind of goes into the CRM like category, but talk about a little bit about how maybe if people out there who aren't necessarily in e-commerce so I'll talk about what I do for my business, right, and this is because I'm selling B2B.

Gavin

Right, I have a newsletter. Um, we've got, I'm trying to get to like 10,000 by the end of the year. Um, my primary focus in my newsletter is to position myself as an expert and give stuff away for free. And then the success metric is how many calls I can book, right, so people join my list. Uh, in a few ways, more often than not, it's either from Twitter, from LinkedIn or from YouTube, and there's usually a free lead magnet right where it's like hey, here is a free board with super complex automations, here's a design file with 80 different email templates that you can use, that kind of stuff.

Gavin

And really what I'm doing is I'm giving away all the information, and that's what I think everyone in B2B should do. Implementation should always sorry, information should always be free, implementation should always be for a fee, and so you know I don't hold, like, any secrets. You know I just if you check out my YouTube channel, everything I do is literally there. But more often than not, a business owner is going to be like I don't have time, and it takes a lot of time. It's like I don't have time and if you're, you know, focused on, like, running a successful business, you don't want to be spending your time on crafting the perfect email campaign or segmenting your database. So when it comes to B2B stuff, I just educate and give free stuff away as much as I can, and then occasionally there'll be some sort of push where it's like, hey, if you need to hand with this book, a time here, right Book, a call here, do this right. It's all about positioning yourself as an authority.

L

Yeah, and that authoritativeness we're working on that here as well. It's just trying to be kind of like a source of education and expertise for everyone who's just out there. It's like you know if you're having, if you're a business and you're having trouble with your social media, like here's 10 tips you know from industry experts who know what they're doing, take it and run with it. Um, that's why we do this podcast, quite frankly. Um, or at least a big reason you know this is free content for people to consume. Um, the article you know, like everything we post online, and I think that does like make a huge difference. And adding email to that is can, I'm sure, make a huge difference.

Gavin

Yeah, and can I just say anyone in B2B do video, youtube, that kind of stuff. I mean, it's just I can't tell you. Almost every call I get on now is hey, I checked out your YouTube and that didn't necessarily generate the lead, but it built up authority in a way that just there's something about being behind a camera and explaining something that brings an element of professionalism, um, that so many people are willing to do so yeah do the newsletter, but have that compliment also like a YouTube strategy.

Gavin

And the great thing here, too, is it's not like one plus one equals two, right, it's, it's one plus one equals four or five, because my YouTube grows my newsletter and my newsletter grows my YouTube and they compound off of each other and they actually build quicker than it would be if I was just saying these things are working in isolation. They're not. They're all synced up, you know.

L

Yeah, and I think that's really that's. That's that's a great point, because with YouTube and stuff like that and I think that you mentioned something I made a joke at one point. I said I think there's something about like holding a microphone that makes people listen to you more, and I think there is whenever you're on video and you're talking, there's kind of nowhere to hide, right. It's just like I have to come in here and I have to give advice and it's gotta be good and I like I can't hide behind anything. So I think it naturally people see it and they think that you know this person genuinely knows what he's talking about.

Gavin

Yeah, and it takes somebody who knows what they're talking about to be confident enough to like get behind a camera and say this is what I do, this is what you should do, Right? I think that takes like a certain level of of of expertise, which just yeah, Confidence in one's own ability that people can see you know, yeah, um, I'll rewind it even further back.

Segmentation and Discount Strategies

L

Um, let's just say like I think I think there are probably a lot of people out there who heard a lot of technical stuff, but they're probably maybe a starting block and maybe they have email marketing, but maybe they've just said put it on ice for a little bit. You know, if there are any businesses out there, what tips would you give them? It's just like, or maybe you could say like what can they? What's some low hanging fruit, like to say I want to get re-engaged with my email strategy. I know I want to do it. I either have access to clavio, mailchimp, emma, whatever your flavor is. Um, give them like an easy step one to just say like you know, just go do this yeah, 100.

Gavin

I think the first port of call for anybody is make sure you have your automation set up. Second step get a signup form pop up. Fly out. That's actually growing your list and increasing your onsite conversion rates. Then, outside of that, just focus on sending one campaign per month. Right, one campaign per month is really, I mean, it's the bare minimum. But just have something going out and you can start seeing some traction. You're going to be keeping your database engaged.

Gavin

The last thing you want to do is and some of you listening this might be where you're at. That's okay, this happens. But the worst thing you can do is you know it's been two years since I've emailed my database and you are essentially trying to warm up a database from scratch at that point. So keeping people continuously engaged is super important. If that does sound like you and you are, you know I've had this lapsed for a while and I need to come back and revisit it. Just play around with plain text emails initially, so emails without any creative that are text heavy. Write them as if they're coming directly from you, giving people the opportunity to unsubscribe and just saying, hey, it's been a while since we last been in touch. It's John from company John and co. I want to let you know we're going to be starting to send some more emails. If you don't want to hear from us, no problem, just unsubscribe. It's not the end of the world and then from there you can start getting back into a regular pattern of sending emails.

L

Yeah, I mentioned that. I don't know if you're. I'm sure you are familiar with Neil Patel SEO guy. A lot of people know that name. But you know this is someone who's got a massive agency and has all the resources in the world to do this kind of stuff. His emails are plain text emails, trying to get like a newsletter out. I feel I feel like a lot of people think that it's got to be this like beautifully designed thing, you know, and to your point, it's like get something out there, um, and keep your audience engaged. It's better than just doing nothing at all.

Gavin

Yeah, creative matters a lot less than people actually think. The reason so much emphasis gets put on it is because it's what it's how agencies can really differentiate themselves in a pretty commoditized space without doing the complicated hard work that you know we've talked about. So emphasis gets put on design because you can do like a really nice graphically designed thing, but I plain text emails can work incredibly well. I think if you're low on resourcing, if you're low on time, yeah, put together the design doesn't actually matter as much as you think it does. Design is probably the bottom of my list of things that I'd put emphasis on it. Actually put more emphasis on the offer that you have in the email, the copy and the segmentation.

L

Yeah, that's good to know. I think that's probably it. We could wrap there. I think that's probably it. We could wrap there. You could tell the people, Gavin, where to find you and if they want to reach out to you and talk to you directly.

Gavin

Yeah, perfect. I mean, check me out on YouTube. I really am trying to grow the YouTube channel. There's a bunch of stuff out there. Just look up Gavin Hewitson email marketing and I'll come up. Check out my website, check out the newsletter. There should be a link in every single one of my YouTube videos for that as well. Linkedin, twitter, gavin Hewitson I should be the first to come up on both those. And, um, yeah, it should be messaged. I'm just happy to talk shop with pretty much anybody. So if you want to learn a little bit about email, if you want to figure out what you're doing, right time, yeah.

R

And what is your website, gavin?

Gavin

You can put that out there for us please, yes, yeah, so my website is in, so in-boxconz. So once again in-boxconz, awesome.

L

Practical rebels were officially global.

Gavin

We transcend the borders. I love it.

Email Marketing for Non-eCommerce Businesses

R

I love it. Thank you so much, gavin. First off, that was amazing. I would love to have you back on again because you your depth knowledge about this. I mean, you saw me like you were blowing my mind. I'm just like holy cow, like because I loved, I love the shop online and like I see all that stuff all the time. I'm like get away, stop, click yes, go to another page. But I always, I usually I just have an account where I just sign up for stuff, yes. So it was interesting to see how that actually happens in the thought process behind that and why that happens. So, man, just incredible. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Definitely want to have you on again and talk about some more email strategies, but, with that being said, practical Rebels out.