From Subscriber to Customer: Crafting the Perfect Email Campaign

Today, we're unlocking the intricacies of email marketing. In an age where new digital platforms emerge almost daily, the humble email stands its ground as a powerful marketing medium. But why?

My guest expert, Kyle Stout, delves into why email marketing is still a cornerstone in the digital marketing toolkit, even amidst the booming rise of social media. From crafting effective content for nurturing campaigns to the debate over organic vs. purchased email lists, we cover it all. We also explore strategies to re-engage subscribers who've gone silent and discuss the art of designing compelling marketing emails.

Beyond the present, we gaze into the future. How will emerging technologies like AI and machine learning reshape the landscape of email marketing? And what challenges do businesses face in this realm today?

This episode is a goldmine for business owners, digital marketers, or anyone curious about the evolving dynamics of digital communication. Whether you're looking to refine your current email strategies or just starting out, there's a wealth of knowledge awaiting. So grab your headphones, settle in, and let's dive into the world of email marketing. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe to stay updated with our latest content

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ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH

Peter Boolkah is a business coach, author and speaker who has spent more than 20 years helping business owners build stronger, more valuable businesses that do not depend on them for everything.

He is the creator of The Hamster Wheel Trap® and author of Your Business Sucks: Build a Business That Works Without Destroying Your Life.

Peter works with founders and leadership teams on the issues that ultimately determine whether a business creates freedom or becomes another job: leadership, founder dependency, people, profit, execution, scaling, exit readiness and enterprise value.

His approach is direct, practical and built around one simple question:

Do you own the business, or does the business own you?

Learn more at https://www.boolkah.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hi, Peter Balker here, and welcome to today's edition of the Transition Guide. Uh, joining me today in the studio is Carl Stout, who is founder and CEO of Elevate and Scale, a leading email marketing agency. Welcome, Carl.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

So, yeah, email marketing, what an interesting subject. And many people say that email marketing is dead because actually there's been so many spammy emails. People that try to do email marketing really don't get anywhere fast. Do you believe that's the case that email marketing is dead? Well, you're gonna say to me no, because you have an email marketing agency. But why do you believe that email marketing is still a valid strategy?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I would say the main thing it really comes down to is that email marketing allows you to have a direct line of communication to your leads and customers on a platform that you own and control. So while we've had all these other exciting marketing and sales channels come about over the last 10 years, um, they and there are definitely things you should be doing. I'm not going to sit here and say that email marketing is the only thing and the most important thing. I think I believe in having a cohesive strategy. But there's a certain strength that comes with email marketing of being able to own the data. So you own the email lists of the people, so you can take them and move them to other platforms. And again, if you need to get a message out to people, you can always get them directly in their inbox versus if you're on social media or running ads, you're kind of at the whims of the algorithms to you know try to get to people. And a lot of people who are following you might not always see the content you post.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, that's an interesting point you raise, Kyle. Because is there a danger with all these exciting platforms, be it Facebook, LinkedIn, and various others, that perhaps people have become lazy with their database and have got used to holding probably data on platforms they don't own and they can't control the visibility of a great example being LinkedIn. Yeah, it's fantastic having all these connections, but the reality is LinkedIn can can your account at any given time, and you really don't get much in the way of the stats of how much of your network truly gets to see your content and who it is very often.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Yeah, so this is something I see very often. It's actually kind of one of my favorite scenarios whenever uh a new client signs up, and let's say they've had great success with social media and they're generating tons of sales from social media and other channels, and they haven't done any email marketing, they've got this whole list of buyers because they haven't really been generating leads because they haven't focused on email marketing. So I as long as the list is somewhat warm, I know, okay, we're going to be able to do a lot with this in a short amount of time. And a lot of times, what it comes down to is the founder or whoever's leading marketing for the company, everyone has natural skill sets. So they might have just naturally done really well on social media, or maybe they maybe their business was built initially within their personal and professional network, where they just had the right combination of the right people in that network and they really knew how to define their offer for those people. But that skill set just didn't translate for them over to email marketing. And so they just haven't had success with it. So um, this is something that, yeah, like it, like I said, it's it's pretty common. Um, and as you mentioned, there's a lot of advantages to adding email marketing into the mix, not only just being able to being able to increase sales, but also from the insights you gain, because whenever you put out emails and you test different offers, different ways of positioning your offers, or you test sending to different groups within your customer base, you start to learn a lot more about them as far as okay, what what things are they actually engaging with? So which types of emails actually get them to click through and and what do they buy? Because you can see the specific products they've bought when they click through in an email. So sometimes you'll you'll be promoting one product, you get a bunch of clicks and conversions, and you think, oh, we did great. And then you look in the insights, and yes, you did do great, but they were actually buying a totally separate product that you didn't mention. So what you did is you just successfully got them on the site, and that's you can take that and say, Oh, we need to do more emails about this product. There's clearly a lot of demand here that we're not tapping into. So there's just if you're always I I think if you always have the attitude of always be testing as a marketer that and you treat every email potentially as a test. Like if you don't, you don't have to worry so much that every email is a home run because you can take what you learn from that, build on that, and then bake that into the strategy going forward.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

And I think you're absolutely right. And this is also make an assumption that the database you've got is warm, is clean, and is not trashy. One of the things that I have heard conversations about is obviously when the EU brought in the whole GDPR process, people are quite scared to harvest data from their LinkedIn or Facebook for fear that actually the way they may get that data will not be in line with GDPR policies or without the permission or the actual owner of the business. What strategies would you suggest that people could sort of use in their business to actually start building that clean database so that they can market to yeah, you really need to be upfront and you want to create some sort of offer or lead magnet, something that's gonna get people into your email list.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

So just having the email list and saying, oh, we're gonna give you exclusive content, it's not compelling enough. You want to have a free offer. So if you're a product business, it could be as simple as just creating a coupon code that they get for signing up, or it could be free shipping with their purchase, free gift with purchase, something like that. If you're selling services, it could be some sort of free training or some sort of PDF. Um, I recommend if you're selling services, whatever your lead magnet is, I recommend it being quick and actionable. So something that they can take action on right now. And a really important insight for building the list of the right people when it comes to this free offer, you want to be considerate of who is the ideal customer that I'm I'm really targeting here. So, for example, with myself, a business like mine, where I'm selling a service to people who need email marketing. If all of my free offers are really based around learning how to do email marketing, a lot of times those those people are not my ideal customers. My ideal customers don't want to do this themselves, they want to hire someone else. So, what they're looking for are more like insights and high-level strategies as far as you know, what do they need to know? Why are these things important? And I don't really go too detailed into the how to do everything uh for those kind of offers because that's gonna target people who are the other email marketers out there for other companies who are just trying to get better at email marketing and they're getting these free tools. So that's something to consider. But yeah, that's really the best way is to be upfront, is to create an offer, be upfront about it and and to just promote it often. So if you're on LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever, you want to be getting as many of those people from those channels over onto your email list by creating posts all about your free offer.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Okay. And that's really stage one.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Yeah, exactly. Because you you got to start somewhere, you got to build the list somehow, and so you got to have something to get them in. And like you said, whenever you whenever you pull people's email addresses from different databases, it's not that that strategy can't work. It's just that you have to know going into it that most people don't like it. So you're not dealing with an audience that's super receptive. It's way better when you're dealing with people who consciously chose to be on your email list. And and yeah, they might get annoyed with the emails at some point, but at least they in their, you know, in their mind, they know, well, I did sign up for this, so maybe I should just unsubscribe if I don't want these anymore.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Which is fair, which is fair.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

So, really, it's all about building the database first, get the right data, put a compelling offer, get people to subscribe. How do you feel about buying data? Because I know look it there used to be this really big, and I would call it it was quite big about five years ago where people were just selling copious amounts of data and people would buy it. Do you think in this day and age there is day and age there is a marketplace to buy data?

SPEAKER_00 9:18

I think for other sales, you know, sales and marketing channels, there's probably still a really great place. I don't know enough about those to speak to it. I I I do know that some people still do that for um online advertising, for example. Okay. You know, getting databases that are targeted and using those as look-alike audiences and things like that. For email marketing, I can say that I really don't recommend it because I haven't really seen it work that well most of the time. A lot of times the data is not as good as it seems. Uh, a lot of times the emails, there's just a lot of invalid emails on there. A lot of emails people aren't using, even if they are valid emails. Um, and again, they've signed up for something else that could be related to what you sell, but it's not your company. And so you just start off the out the gate with people just kind of rubbing people the wrong way. And it's not to say that it couldn't work, but it's gonna be a much bigger uphill battle. And it comes with some problems that people don't anticipate. So the thing everyone anticipates is I'm gonna send this email to these people that they didn't sign up for, I'm gonna annoy them. Well, that's so that's the one of the most common problems. But here's the thing you don't consider because of all those emails that are invalid and the emails that people aren't using, what happens is that's going to affect your reputation of your domain. And it's gonna make all of your emails start going to spam and/or just basically not ending up in the inbox because you're sending all of those times you get that negative engagement reaction from emails that are just being totally unresponsive or they're invalid. Gmail and the other inboxes are making note of that, and that's seen as untrustworthy behavior, so they're less likely to have your emails go to the inbox for people who even signed up for your list just because you're doing that. So, one, you know, if you are going to go down that rabbit hole, one of the strategies that that a lot of these people are doing nowadays is that they create a separate domain completely different from their main domain. They send the emails from that domain so they don't risk their main domain getting damaged. And then um, you know, once people like engage or opt-in or whatever, they might move them over to the other domain. So that's just kind of like a more advanced thing if you if you really want to go down that path.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah, but that surely is just circumventing the real problem at the end of the day. Don't do trashy behavior and you've got nothing to worry about. Yeah, exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, it's it's interesting that Google and are taking notes. Now I've noticed that a lot of emails that I get go straight into my spam folder. And I was wondering whether that is a setting that I've created, but from what you're saying, probably not.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

There's a lot, it could just be the the content they have in there. There's just certain words, um, certain words that are in links, so there's too many links, and the there's just so many different um things that the spammy type of email marketers do that Gmail is very familiar with. Um so that's that's one factor, all of those things, but those are the kind of the more obvious. But yeah, like you said, a lot of times what happens is they've just been they've just been too aggressive with their email marketing, they've been sending to too many people that are unengaged, and their deliverability has taken a major hit. So they could be legitimately having quality content in the emails, because a lot of times I'm sure you notice when you go to your junk folder, you're seeing emails from lists that you are subscribed to and you did not unsubscribe from.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah, so that's a sign whenever those those people, and let's just say they don't have any kind of questionable content in their emails or anything, that's usually just because they have been getting too low of unengagement from other emails they've sent, and their domain has a reputation problem with the inboxes. So it could be that, you know, again, a lot of times it's not even just from the spammy people, it's just inadvertently happening to people who don't who aren't being as thoughtful with how they do their campaigns.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

So, Carl, is there a way to perhaps check your reputation score as a domain?

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Yeah, so there's all kinds of tools. There's um Google has tools to check for the technical configuration of your domain. So that's one consideration is just making sure you've you've got your domain set up correctly, and those are easy things to fix. Um, that's the easier problem. Then there are other tools, they're usually paid tools. One of them is called Glock Apps. There's another one called Um Emails on Acid. And there's a bunch of other tools like this now, where they will do a they'll give you a full report of you know, did your email land in the inbox versus promotions versus junk and how often, and for also for which inboxes, like is it happening only in Gmail and not in Yahoo inboxes? They'll give you this full detailed report and it will tell you which things in your email were the things that triggered a red flag. And it will also tell you if you're on any of the blacklists, so if your domain has been banned. So, yeah, there's lots of tools to, and I definitely, if you're having, if you're if all of a sudden you've seen a major drop in non-engagement and you suspect you're having deliverability issues, like you haven't changed up your content much. Um, I would definitely recommend just signing up for uh even a just a month of one of those tools and start testing, start sending your emails through that, doing test sends through those tools first, and then make note of the changes you need to make. And honestly, you people make it out to be this huge thing. You can turn it around in a month or two, like it's not some long six-month thing that people make it out to be.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Okay, so it's not a bigger jail as people think it is.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

No, I mean, there are some cases, there are extreme cases, of course, but no, a lot of times it's again, it's just get your domain set up correctly. There might be some errors with how it's set up. And once you kind of once you're you know on the naughty list with the inboxes, they're going to be more strict on these on these other these domain things, right? So you fix that stuff, maybe even have to take a break from sending for a little bit, and then do the testing to make sure that your emails are perfectly compliant and start sending at a at a to smaller groups of people at a time and kind of warm that back up. And yeah, this could this could happen. You could do this over the course of a month, three months, depending on how bad the situation is.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

I mean, you do raise the point though that if you want to be a successful, serious and professional email marketer, there is an argument that you get these tools from the onset to make sure that you never fall foul.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Exactly. I mean, that to me, the best thing is to be preventative in this. So that means that again, you have you're generating emails from people who actually want to opt in for your emails, right? You're sending them content that aligns and is coherent with the things you know they care about. So you're really putting some thought and effort into the content from the beginning. And then it's it's really about protecting those engagement metrics as you go along. So if you're sending more frequently and you notice a big drop in your opens and click rates, back off the frequency a little bit. This doesn't have to be this drastic, you know, it's just because you have a few bad emails, you're not, there's no permanent damage. This is kind of a flexible thing where you you play around with it. And one thing I would highly recommend as part of an ongoing campaign strategy is to start creating segments. So you can use a tool or a you know a tactic called segmentation, where you create different groups of people within your list and start sending to those different segments instead of sending every every email to every single person on your list, that will help you maintain higher opens and clicks. And because you consistently have that good engagement, it's the odds of you having deliverability issues go way down now.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

So yeah, now they're starting to sound like a really sensible strategy.

unknown 17:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

So that's and if if you have a really small list, you obviously you're not gonna want or need to do segmentation because there's not enough people to create these groups. This is something that comes, you build it into the strategy as you go along, right? So it really always comes back to the quality of the content. But yes, as you go along, you want to start doing this. And one of the first types of engagement groups or sorry, uh segmentation groups that I like to create are engagement-based segments. So I like to create a 30-day engaged group, a 60-day, and so on. I'll go through different, you know, time time lengths or lengths of time. And so what that means is that, for example, in the 30-day engaged group, those people have opened or clicked your emails in the last 30 days. And I even like to add in that they've they've visited the site in the last 30 days. And so now when we're planning out campaigns for the people who are the most engaged, that 30-day engage group, these people are highly engaged, we're gonna send them most of the emails. And then the people who do not fall into the 60, you know, 30, 60, or 90 day time frame, these people haven't opened or clicked an email in over three months. We're not gonna send them all the all of the you know regular emails. We're only gonna send them emails whenever we have a new product launch or a big promotion going on, something that's new and exciting to where if you think in the mindset of someone who has stopped engaging with your emails, but they haven't unsubscribed, it does just because they haven't opened them, doesn't mean that they never want to hear from you again. They just either weren't in the market anymore or they didn't need anything from you right you know for a while. But when you have something new and exciting, a lot of times those people, you've you have built up trust with them from the past, if especially if they're past customers, they would be interested in that. So if you start thinking about, okay, how can I create segments of people based on the products they've purchased in the past and um different interest groups? You can go by gender, age, location, things like that. Age is going to be tricky, um, depending on unless you have some way to collect that from people. Um and then you craft content for that segment. So now the the content is much more personalized that they're receiving in these campaigns because you've taken the extra step of not only just crafting the right offer and having good content in there, but you've tailored the message for people in this group. So if they have a previous product interest, you can mention the um the product they've purchased or the product they've viewed in the past and tie that into the product or service you're offering right then.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

So I've got a question for you on this. What types of content are the most effective in any given nurturing campaign? And how do you balance informative content with promotional messages?

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Okay, so nurturing, I so I want to talk about this in two ways because there's a strategy that's been around for you know the last 10 years where the idea is that you get people to sign up to your list, you nurture them for a long time, and then you present the offer, then you start selling. And that did work for a long time. What I find to be better is actually to do both at the same time because a lot of times, you know, people are people that they have so many things fighting for their attention, they need to make decisions quickly. And a lot of times people are actually ready to buy right now. That's why they signed up because you know, most people, and especially if you're in the B2B space, everyone knows what you're doing whenever you put out a free offer. They know that they want that free thing you that you're promoting, but they know in exchange that this is your opportunity to market to them. And so if someone signs up, they're saying, Hey, I'm open to you being, you know, you marketing to me because they know what we're doing, right? So to me, I think it's better to not do this whole thing where you do strictly nurture value only for a long time and then sell. I like to do a combination of both where let's say two-thirds of the email is value, the bottom third of the email is tying the value, having some kind of segue from the value you provided into the offer. And then for more um, just for content in general for nurturing, whether it's whenever someone first signs up in a welcome series or if it's just um anything you know that's going on long term. So if you're having more of a long-term nurturing sequence for people who've been on your list for a while, I like to think of all the um questions, concerns, objections. Those are all big things to talk about, educate them around those things, especially for the people who are new. And then also for the more ongoing nurturing, I like to think of, okay, so what's the lifestyle that they're trying to live that my product or service ties into? What are the what are their bigger goals or you know, what's what's the big picture here? And how does our product or service fit into the big picture and create content around those other things? So, you know, if like if you're selling a fitness product or you're selling fitness supplements, you can give them content that's just Educating them on good fundamental information about dieting, uh, following an exercise program, you know, mindset stuff, anything like that. And then you just tie it into the product. So the point is that the content was useful enough or insightful or entertaining enough that if they're not in the market to buy today, they at least think, you know what, that was it was worth opening that email. I'm gonna continue opening their emails. And if you get them to do that, when they are in the market again, they're gonna be more likely to buy from you because they've been engaging with you.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Okay, so that leads me on to another question. How long should a typical nurturing flow last? And also, what is the optimal frequency for sending nurturing emails without overwhelming or pissing off a potential customer?

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Okay, so the answer to both of those things is that it depends. And I'm gonna go into more detail because I know that's the worst answer ever. Um, so what there really is not a golden rule for every business. So, what I like to do is early on, it's more frequent. So if they just signed up, I want to give them uh I'm gonna give them emails every day for the first three or four days. Okay, and then I might start breaking it apart where it's every two, three, four, five days, something like that. Then after a little while, it goes to once a week. And but the way you decide, because you're you're just kind of guessing at first. So the way you decide is you look at the metric. So if you're going down the line, looking at your emails in this series, you look at okay, where where does the engagement really fall off? And it could be the content of that email. So it could mean that you need to test new content there. But if you see that the engagement is, say you get past email four and the engagement just falls off a cliff, okay. Well, maybe you have just maybe you needed to add more time between email three and email four and email four and email five. So this is the thing where you just you can go in once a month, make note of your metrics in these automated flows. I like to do track this in a spreadsheet. And then every month you go in, and if you make changes, you make a note of what changes you made as far as like did you change the content of the email or did you change the time delay between the emails? And then the next month you look at the metrics again, see how that change impacted opens and clicks. And it's just a game of of continually testing this.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

So that's the that's so I was gonna ask you. So the test and measure is really important. Are there any good sort of intuitive AI tools that you can start plugging into that perhaps does that analysis and gives you suggestions perhaps on where you need to do your tweaks, or is that not quite out there yet? And it has to be that manual. Let's look at Excel in terms of a process.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

So I haven't used any tools that can do that. You can, however, get insights where you can tell a tool like ChatGPT, for example, and it and then you're not don't expect this to be like the most groundbreaking um, you know, answers that you get. It's going to be more about trying to get ideas for things that you hadn't thought of. That's the that's the attitude I would have going into it. But you can you can tell it, yeah. Like I um I have this email sequence, and you can just break out what you've done, how many emails it have, tell them the metrics of where it dropped off, and say, you know, uh, can you suggest ideas for new emails that could replace email topics that could replace this email? Or you could say, can you suggest um a different frequency, something like that? And it will it will give you ideas. But again, it's it's more about getting the ideas, you still have to go test them. And I wouldn't rely on those things as like this is just you know the final answer. It's more like I'm going here to get more ideas for what I'm working on, because if you're doing this a lot and you're always working with the same emails, you know, you you're so close to it that you run out of ways to talk about the same thing in new ways over and over. So that's where AI can be really great for giving you some you know ideas and and um angles that you hadn't considered before.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Right. No, that's that's a really fair point. I was just wondering whether start business owners time challenged. Everyone's got these sort of funds in place to have this big marketing sort of department, especially when you're looking at the early stage startup businesses, maybe in this first sort of zero to four years. And I'm just wondering whether well, for them probably email marketing is critical, especially if they brought up a database, but they don't have time to really manually sort out these insights.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Yeah, that's where I say. I mean, so for one, I would say if you're an early stage startup, keep it pretty simple. Like you don't need to have all these advanced automations, have one main funnel you're pushing people through. So that way you really only have it doesn't mean you don't do other emails, but you want to have this main funnel that you're really paying close attention to. And it doesn't have to be this constant dedication. So when I say you go in, if you can set aside an hour a month, you can do this process. So it really is, it's not, it's more about just committing to it. You know, we're all really busy. This is one of those things that's so easy to push off to the next day, then the next day, then the next week, and on and on. And you just have to, you have to put it on your calendar and set aside a time. Now, one thing that's cool is a lot of these email tools now, the A B testing, um, a lot of it can be automated where it will automatically choose the winners for you after a certain point. Um, they've gotten you know a lot better about that. But I again I do recommend at least going in once a month and checking it. And if you and if you have a simple funnel where maybe you're only dealing with, let's say, less than 10 emails and the whole thing, creating it's gonna take a little bit of time, but managing it, if you just go in once a month, it's really not as big of a burden as it might sound like.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

Yeah, it just sounds quite overwhelming for the initial stages where you set it all up and get it ready in the first place. Now you talked about email sequencing and a bit of testing to find out exactly what frequency you should send people, but very often you and you mentioned it. You have people that perhaps have become disengaged. So they're still sitting on your email list, they haven't unsubscribed, but they are disengaged. What is your go-to strategy to get them active again?

SPEAKER_00 28:26

So, first, I like to actually give them a little break. That's so going back to the whole segmentation strategy of campaigns. So if they go beyond, you know, 90 days, 60, 90 days of engagement, I like to give them a little break because a lot of times what happens is, and I'm sure you do this because I know I do this, we build the habit of automatically archiving or deleting emails from certain uh people or brands just because like we at one point we lost interest. And then once you get that habit, every time it shows up in your inbox, you just deleted or archive it again out of habit. So, first you want to be able to have your email showing up in their inbox again be a novel experience again, which means you need to give them a little break for a while. And then if you can have some sort of special offer specific that you actually set aside just for these people who haven't engaged in a while, now that's gonna be the best way. So, not everyone's gonna want to offer some kind of special discount or free gift or whatever. But if you can give them a break for a while and then show up again later, and I like to wait, let's say, um, take a break between, you know, the 60-day and 90-day mark. So I won't be emailing people um who haven't engaged in the last 60 days on an ongoing basis. And I set up an automation that will trigger at, let's call it the 90-day mark or the 120-day mark that where they get enrolled into this, and you show up with something exciting. So it could just be um, you know, it could be an offer, so it could be like a discount promotion, something like that, or it could just be something that's tied to a previous purchase. So, and and the messaging can be fun. It's like, hey, you know, we haven't we haven't heard from you in a while, or you haven't heard from us in a while, you know, whatever. But make it kind of fun, like addressing the fact you haven't emailed them in a while and saying, hey, this is why we're this is why we're showing up. We have something exciting for you. And that is a lot of times you would be surprised how people will just get right back into it after that. They'll they'll either make a purchase or because they've engaged with that email, they start getting your other emails again and they get back into the rotation and they start opening and clicking again.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Okay, so it's important to make sure that there's a planned break and not keep on emailing them and really run the risk of being blacklisted. How do you how negatively impacted are you, especially like in the holiday season, when people have the auto-responders on saying they're on vacation? Does that does that have a negative impact on your campaigning? Is that something to consider?

SPEAKER_00 30:58

No, in fact, so for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, for example, that's the one period of time for the whole year where we take all our normal rules and we just throw them out the window and we say, send this to everyone who's on the list. So we don't we do. I mean, sometimes we'll craft certain, you know, if the company wants to craft certain offers specifically, like for VIPs or something, for example, of course, then we you know exclude and do all that. Otherwise, for the big offers, the certain periods of time, like these holidays, we will just go after everyone and we will be more aggressive. And because we've been so safe the entire year, we've never really seen any negative impact from that.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

I mean, um, auto-responders don't damage your trust score with email.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Not that I've seen, I've never seen it significant enough.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

No, okay, cool. That's probably what one thing I always considered. If I'm getting 30 or 40 out of office responders, does that mean that the email sort of providers think, okay, this is not getting through? Let's put them onto a blacklist.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

No, well, the email does so. What's interesting is the email, and I have to look into this. I don't want to give the wrong the, I don't want to um say the wrong thing here, but so they do receive the email. The issue is that they didn't open or click the email, right? But they replied to the email. I but so I I don't want to say this as a fact because I need to look, I've never actually thought about this, this very specific thing about the autoresponder. But in general, a reply to your emails is considered a way higher value engagement metric by the inboxes. So if someone opens your email, that's good. If someone clicks your email or buys, that's great. If someone replies to your email, they see that as you know, that's like to compare it to social media, that would be like someone liked, commented, and they shared the post, you know, like the the type of feedback. So, but I can't say for sure that so that's when someone manually replies. I don't know if the inbox um reads the auto reply in the same way.

SPEAKER_01 33:05

That could be interesting, actually. Because if that does count as a positive, you want to double down during the holidays, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Yeah, so I I've never I've actually never um looked into that, but uh uh I'll have to look into that though.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

What do you think are the key elements of an effective marketing email in terms of content design and call to action?

SPEAKER_00 33:26

So if for me, the most important thing comes down to first understanding your ideal client or customer and really understanding their wants and needs and speaking specifically to them because a lot of times we are too general with our messaging and we're trying to please everyone. And so if you're using um segmentation or if you just know that you're targeting a specific part of the market, you really want to make a point to speak specifically to them. Now, as far as the length of the email, it just depends on what works for your business. So both can work. I would say, in general, though, you want to have shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, make it very easy for people to skim the email. Because I will tell you that for how much work you put into writing an amazing email, most people, the vast majority, are not gonna read the whole thing. They're gonna read the headline, they're gonna read the call to action button, uh, or or link or whatever. And if you have a PS on the bottom, they're gonna read that. They that's actually the thing is people tend to read those things first. If they like what they saw, then they'll go back and then they'll read the email. So you don't want to have these lengthy, these lengthy essays you read and you want to think about you know being short and punchy and effective with your copy.

SPEAKER_01 34:44

No, that makes total sense. Which metrics do you think are most vital for measuring the excess of an email marketing campaign?

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Well, for me, it always comes down to sales for business owners, you know, like we can get people to uh it's opens are the easiest thing to inflate. That's the easiest thing is to trick people into opening. Um, and you know what? If you trick them into opening, nothing really happens much. Like you have to deliver on the subject line, meaning that you can't just use clickbait to get them to open. Um, so it's more often used. Yeah, exactly. And and because people are so they're so concerned with open rate, which I would consider more of a vanity metric in email marketing. And I would say that, you know, of course, I said sales is the is the best priority, but really the metric that's the that's consistently the most important, I would say, is click rate. So click rate, it's a lot harder to get a good click rate than it is to get a good open rate. And whenever your list starts uh stops engaging with your emails, you're gonna see your click rates fall before your open rates fall. And the reason why the click rate is important is because again, we are trying to generate sales. So if they don't click through, they're not they're not gonna go buy. And it's not always even selling. So, like if you're just trying to get them to go consume content, if you're trying to send them a link to a podcast or a blog or a video or something, if they don't click the link, then they don't see the thing that you that you created the, you know, you put all the work into creating the email for in the first place. So that that's the metric that I find to be the one where you got to watch that because that will tell you what's gonna happen next. So as click rates start falling, a lot of times revenue starts coming down afterwards. We might not be instantly. But all that said, dealing with um, you know, dealing with businesses. I mean, there are a lot of businesses where they don't have the highest click rates, but they generate a lot of revenue from their emails. So they just have a really big list. So that's why I say, you know, I mean, look, you know, that that is the the that's why people do email marketing, is that they want to have a consistent, reliable sales channel for their business.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

So um I would say, you know, you don't want to fall into the trap of patting yourself on the back because you have amazing opens and clicks if you're not getting the the main goal that you set out to do, which is one of the challenges around social media that people go for very much the force of vanity metrics, when actually, to your point, the ultimate RY are sales.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

Yep, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 37:14

How do you how do you consider you've been in the industry for a long time, how do you see the future of email marketing evolving, especially with emerging technologies like AI and machine learning?

SPEAKER_00 37:28

What I see, and I don't think we're near this yet, and I haven't seen any tools that promise to do this yet, but but what I believe we will have in the future is fully automated email marketing that's done by AI, where let's just say that you decide that you want to make an announcement or you want to launch a product or you're gonna offer a promotion, whatever it is, like you'll you'll still be deciding the topics of the emails, or at least you will have the ability to do that. And then your email service provider will have AI that writes the copy, does the design. But not only that, they will take all of the data they know about each contact that you have in your email list, and they will personalize that email down to the individual recipient. So, right now, what we what we try to do is, you know, we use segmentation and we're saying, hey, you know, do research on your target customers and use segmentation to try to personalize the content even more. But you're you're still dealing with thousands of people in each one of these groups, and you don't really know each person on a personal level, but all of these online tools, they know every website we go to, they know everything we're purchasing on any website. And I think it's gonna get to where we are all receiving individually personalized emails to where it's showing us the exact content we want and it's pitching the product to us in the way that's the most persuasive to us personally.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

So you honestly believe that AI will evolve to the point because it doesn't do it at the moment, like you said, where it's gonna be able to give context, not just content.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Yeah, I do because for example, whenever I use uh an AI tool, like say I want to get some some email copy or something, I'm doing a lot of this manually. So because I put a lot of work into defining the messaging strategy for any business that I work with, when I put in the prompt, I don't just say write an email about this topic. I say write an email from this company and I give it the topic of the email, the the type of email, whether it's whether it's gonna be promotional or it's gonna be value driven or whatever. I tell them I give it background information on the company, I give it some psychographics about the target customers, um, and put and I give it like potential angles to take, so certain things to emphasize. I put all that into my prompt.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

So you're loading up all the context up front.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

Exactly. So and so the AI is relying on me to go to get all of that right somewhat manually and some from data and to give it to that tool, right? So, but now what if the AI, because I'm using chat, say I'm using ChatGPT and I'm sending out an email from Clavio, which is an email service provider that we uh we use a lot. What happens whenever the the the AI tool is just built into Clavio and it already has all of the past customer information? If you think about Clavio, for example, it's a major email service provider. They're one of the biggest players, they're probably the number one tool for e-commerce businesses. So on the back end, they know they're these same people are on hundreds of different email lists. So they know the purchase history of this person across hundreds of different businesses. They know that their um web views, the which products they viewed, which content they viewed from hundreds of different companies. So they could take all of that and that would provide the strategy for the messaging for the email. So I can see right now with what we have, how it could be done. I just don't know of anyone who's working on it or any tool um that does that, and I don't know how long it's gonna take to get there, but that's that's honestly what I think we will get to.

SPEAKER_01 41:05

Okay, well, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

That is interesting to put me out of a job, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:11

And that's the thing, isn't it? Really, it starts to it's starting to understand where it is going, and some of it is exciting for some people, it may not be as exciting if it starts hitting their livelihood.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

Yeah, I know it's it's definitely a weird time right now. There's a lot, um just a lot happening where, like, for example, you know, when people were talking about AI and robots replacing jobs, you know, everyone said it was going to be the blue-collar trade workers. They thought it was gonna be um replacing people who did manual labor jobs first, and the creatives would never get replaced. And what we're seeing is that AI has moved into the creative space faster in the last year than it has in the other spaces. So if you think about all of the different copywriting, design, um, music-related uh type of AI tools and video-related AI tools that have come about. Now, I don't think that the creativity of AI is anywhere near um human creativity. And I also think that there will always be a premium on human-created art because we are humans and we and we connect to humans, and I think that there will be we will always put a premium on the fact that we know it's hard to be creative and it's hard to create something new, so we'll appreciate that, but it's very interesting. I I I really wonder how this will play out for everyone.

SPEAKER_01 42:32

Yeah, and I'm wondering whether or not it's going to be a replacement of humans or whether it will be an enabler for productivity, so it'll allow humans to do a lot more in the same amount of time utilizing the tools. So I suppose you look at it, I'm sure people were a little bit when the washing machine first came out, the microwave, the dishwasher, that automatically changed the dynamics of many households. Now, even to this day, washing doesn't do itself, although you may have many automated steps, it's been an enabler to free up time. I do wonder whether we'll find that balance where AI does the same thing, and actually you still need that human input.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

Yeah, so that's what I wonder, because I I really see it now as, like you say, an enabler of productivity. And that's one reason why I would say, although I have concerns about especially a lot of the like just big picture, you know, outside of my job, but big picture life stuff as far as AI taking over. Um, I I wouldn't say I have fear about it though, because I do see it as something that really adds value as far as productivity um to what we do versus feeling it, feeling a threat to it uh replacing us. Doesn't mean it won't replace us, but um, I see it. I view it as something that does help our productivity, like you said. And I I kind of I don't know why I guess I have a gut feeling, just because, like, you know, humans have always resisted change and innovation, and then it integrates into our lives, and then we get to a point where we're like, why would we ever want to live without this?

SPEAKER_01 44:17

You know, which I see us heading towards.

SPEAKER_00 44:21

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 44:22

One final question I have for you. What do you think some are some of the biggest challenges business facing email marketing today? And what can they do to overcome them?

SPEAKER_00 44:32

I think the one of the biggest things, or probably the most common thing that people say to me, and the thing that's that stops them from doing email marketing or doing it as often is they just don't know what to say. When they sit down to write an email or create an email, they don't know what to say. And I think part of that is an underlying mindset where we all have we all get emails that we don't like to get. And a lot of times emails can be annoying. We're busy. We don't like getting emails that aren't useful or just aren't the right fit for what we're looking for or whatever. And so that I think when someone sits down and that's going on in the back of their mind, they are already thinking, well, I'm going to be annoying people if I create this email. And that blocks the creativity to come up with something that's actually going to be interesting. So I know I've said this over and over, but this really is the thing I always come back to, which is first starts with researching your ideal customers, understanding their pain points, their dreams, their aspirations. But then you've got to come up with topics that are going to be interested, that they are going to be interested in. And you really want to focus on who you're selling or who you're selling to more than what you're selling. And if you have that mindset when you go to create the email, it's going to reflect in the copy and in the design because you're thinking more about them. You're not just thinking about what's in it for me. You're trying to think about what's in it for them. And then have a natural segue between that value content or whatever. It doesn't have to always be value. It could just be entertaining, it could just be funny, you know, whatever it is. And tie that into what you're selling. So the the thing I always come back to is you want to have a reason to show up in their inbox. So before you create the email, ask yourself, you know, is this email worthy of me sending to them that it's it's going to be interesting to them where they're going to open it and not regret opening it?

SPEAKER_01 46:27

Now you make it sound so simple, and I know you have a background in copywriting, and most business owners out there that I've started a business don't have such a background, and they're thinking, yeah, that's easier said than done. You mentioned on a couple of occasions clients that work with you. What does that even look like?

SPEAKER_00 46:47

So as far as just the um like what's what's involved from their part versus on my part.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

Yeah, yeah. What is it you offer and how does it work for your clients?

SPEAKER_00 46:56

Okay, yeah. So I mean it can be as hands-off as they want it to be. So most of the time we're doing just we're doing full management. So we're coming up with the strategy, we are doing all the copy, the design, all the implementation, uh, doing all of the analytics, everything. Sometimes people um they have ideas and input that they want to provide, or they have maybe they have a vision for what they would like to see from their email marketing, but they don't know how to execute it. And so we're happy to work with them in those cases. But a lot of times people, they're they're like, look, this is not my world. I don't know anything about this, I don't want to deal with it, right? And really, all I want to gain from them, especially early on, is insights into okay, what are your what kind of feedback do you get from people? What do people really care about? You know, if you have 10 benefits for a product, what are the two or three benefits that keep coming back to you over and over? And then we're gonna build topics around those things. And you can even so going back to this whole thing of like just doing the research and coming up with topics, I can give you a process you can do for to get AI to give you all these topics, which would save you all the time of that part. Then you just gotta actually create the email.

SPEAKER_01 48:05

So you've got quite a comprehensive process from sort of fully done from you to semi done for you. As much as every thing.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

Yeah, exactly. We do both, and and then the done so and the way we focus on it, we're we're doing um we're managing all of the opt-in forms, so getting people getting the leads onto the list, and then we're managing all of the automated emails. So that's one part of it, is just making sure that you've got automated follow-up set up throughout your sales process, and then there's the ongoing campaign. So whether you're doing this yourself or you're having someone else do it, those are the three big components of your email marketing that you want to be managing.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

I'm sure there's plenty of people listening in today, tuning in saying, okay, well, how do I get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_00 48:50

Okay, yeah. The best place uh to get in touch is at elevateandscale.com. And otherwise, if you're just looking to you know learn more about email marketing and you want to get some content around there, the the place where I'm putting out the most content is YouTube, and it's the same handle, elevate and scale.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

Perfect. Thank you so much, Scott. Carl, it's been really interesting. If you've enjoyed today's episode and you got great value, please make sure that you like it because that helps us with YouTube. Subscribe so you don't miss future episodes, and also share it with other people that could benefit because we want to get the word out. And if anything today has resonated with you and want to talk about it in a bit more detail, head over to bulka.com and get in touch. Carl, you've been an amazing guest. Thank you so much for being on today's episode.

SPEAKER_00 49:40

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 49:42

It's been a pleasure. And remember, failing to learn is learning to fail.