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if you enjoying these interviews, that's it

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episode. Now let's jump in. It's

1:56

like the more data that you can collect, the

1:58

more you talk to your users, the better. better off

2:00

the experience is going to be and hopefully you're

2:02

going to minimize people that end up snoozing and

2:04

kind of churning off your emails. When

2:09

you need a thirst, you need to be

2:11

a thirsty human. Who is intent

2:13

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greatest minds in business today with interviews

2:41

hosted by Nathan Chan. This

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is not your average entrepreneur podcast.

2:47

The founder podcast. All

2:51

right. So,

2:56

Chase, this is the first interview we've

2:58

done. I've done many with you. You've

3:00

taught an incredible email marketing e-commerce course

3:03

on our platform. You are the absolute

3:05

go-to when it comes to email marketing,

3:07

especially when it comes to e-commerce. You've

3:09

helped all of our students in our

3:11

community and platform so much. So, when

3:13

it comes to email marketing, you're the

3:15

guy. So, the first question that

3:18

I ask everyone that comes on is, how

3:20

did you get your job okay? How

3:22

did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today? Yeah, Nathan, pumped

3:24

to be here and can't wait to get started. So,

3:27

for myself, so in college, I had so many

3:29

jobs and internships where I was exposed to sales

3:31

and marketing. So, I was just a hustler in

3:33

college. I was doing all these different jobs and

3:36

internships, just trying to figure out what the heck

3:38

I wanted to do. And after

3:40

kind of taking some time to reflect on, you

3:42

know, A, what I was good at, and

3:45

B, like what things or thing was

3:47

working well at work, I

3:49

landed on email marketing. I really haven't

3:51

looked back ever since. So, I really

3:53

started my career doing email marketing for

3:55

SaaS, for newsletter businesses, for info, and

3:58

I ultimately found e-commerce in 2060. And

4:00

have been almost exclusively focused on

4:02

e-commerce marketing ever since so I

4:05

just was kind of busy working Found

4:07

all these different types of marketing disciplines and

4:09

just fell in love with email Because

4:12

the way that you can communicate to so many

4:14

people but in a way that feels very personal

4:16

if you do it, right? So if you do

4:18

email well You could come communicate with a hundred

4:20

thousand people in a way that feels

4:22

like the email is almost crafted for them Or

4:25

for a few people versus it being like

4:27

this crazy thing like social media You put

4:29

a post out there you see all the engagements,

4:31

you know, it's not just for you. It's

4:33

a little bit less personal So that's what

4:35

I really found, you know and fell

4:37

in love with in terms of email marketing Yeah and Look

4:41

when it comes to email and if you

4:43

run an e-commerce business You have to get

4:45

your email marketing right because you could double

4:47

your revenue just from without it, right? You

4:50

could triple your revenue. You can do all

4:52

sorts of crazy stuff. So You've

4:55

taught a course on our platform and you really

4:57

like the go-to guy when it comes to e-commerce

5:00

especially for email marketing, so I'm

5:02

curious I Remember

5:05

last we checked you generated over is

5:07

it 500 million now in email attributes

5:09

400 I can't remember the number

5:11

exactly right we kind of stopped keeping count It's

5:14

hundreds of millions of dollars. We're sending billions of

5:16

emails every year for our clean We

5:18

specialize with working with seven to nine figure

5:20

brands and to your point email typically accounts

5:23

for Anywhere from like a

5:25

quarter to upwards of like a half

5:27

of their revenue email alone

5:29

That's not including SMS or anything else So

5:31

email still today in 2023 and beyond is insanely

5:34

powerful So

5:36

I hope everyone really takes notes because I've

5:38

got a lot of cool stuff planned for

5:41

today. Awesome So well, let's kick off like

5:43

when it comes to if you're advising, you

5:45

know an earlier stage brand How

5:47

would you recommend they get into email

5:49

like let's just then I know you know what to

5:51

share like let's just go Yeah, absolutely.

5:53

So one thing I want to preface is

5:56

email is only as good as the traffic

5:58

and elites that you have coming in There'll

6:00

be times where people reach out and they're like, hey, can you

6:02

do our email marketing? It's like, well, do you have a list?

6:04

Do you have traffic? And they're like, no. So

6:06

I want to preface that email is only

6:08

going to convert well if you

6:10

have good traffic and you have leads coming through.

6:13

If you do that, you're in

6:15

a great spot. So once you've started

6:17

driving traffic and traffic could mean paid

6:19

ads, you know, on Facebook and Instagram,

6:21

it could be paid search on Google.

6:23

It could be affiliate marketing. It could be

6:25

influencer marketing. It could be SEO. There's so

6:28

many ways to drive traffic. And that's not

6:30

what we're here to talk about today. But

6:32

if you find one or more of those

6:34

channels, I would then focus on the following.

6:36

So number one, we have to turn those

6:38

traffic into leads. So we do that through

6:40

an email pop-up, right? A form on your

6:42

website that typically pops up in the center

6:44

or the full screen that asks for your

6:46

email and e-commerce. It's typically accompanied with an

6:48

offer, 10% off free

6:51

shipping, $10 off entry into

6:54

a giveaway into a sweep state. So we need

6:56

some kind of mechanism to collect emails. And you

6:58

want to optimize and test the offer and test

7:00

the timing. Do you show it right away? Do

7:02

you show it after someone's scrolled a percentage of

7:05

the page? You show it on an accident tent,

7:07

test the different types of behaviors, as well

7:09

as the offers. That's number one. From

7:12

there, you want to build out automated

7:14

emails. So if someone enters their email

7:16

into your form, into your pop-up, we

7:19

then want to send them what's called a

7:21

welcome series for non buyers. And this is

7:23

three, four, five, six emails. That's really focused

7:25

on building trust and affinity with the subscriber.

7:28

And your brand, getting them used

7:30

to kind of receiving emails from you,

7:32

delivering whatever that value proposition you promised

7:34

that offer that discount, that free shipping,

7:36

that content, and really just building trust

7:38

through social proof, through UGC, through reviews,

7:40

through any kind of press mentions and

7:42

highlighting kind of your best products that

7:45

they should probably start with. These are

7:47

our best sellers. These are what people

7:49

say about them. So building up the

7:51

core flow. So we just talked about

7:53

the welcome series. It's also building out

7:55

what's called the abandonment flows. So it's

7:57

a site abandonment email, a browser abandonment

7:59

email. an abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, these

8:01

are different emails that are triggered based

8:03

off some kind of behavior that happens.

8:06

So if someone's on your list, they

8:08

add something to cart, but they

8:10

don't start checkout or they don't make a purchase,

8:12

we'll wanna send them an abandoned cart. So each

8:14

of the ones I mentioned, the site abandonment, the

8:16

browse abandonment, the abandoned cart, and the abandoned

8:18

checkout, those are all kind of

8:21

different levels and have different filters that are

8:23

triggering those emails. And all the email

8:25

platforms you use, this should be fairly simple to set up.

8:28

So that part shouldn't be too hard. And

8:30

then the last thing on that one, before I

8:32

talk about a few others, is post-purchase. Once

8:35

someone buys from you, you really wanna kind

8:37

of confirm and reaffirm that they made the

8:39

right decision, that they made the right purchase.

8:41

So sending customer thank you emails, sending a

8:44

review request to get feedback and kind of

8:46

reviews on your product, sending cross-sells and up-sells,

8:48

you know what they purchase, so you know

8:50

what they like, make recommendations

8:52

that are gonna be complementary for

8:54

them and beneficial for them. And

8:57

win back emails, so it's really important.

8:59

You drive the traffic, you turn the

9:01

traffic into an email, you automate these

9:03

sequences, these automations of emails that are

9:05

really high in 10. And

9:08

then from there, we also wanna

9:10

send ongoing weekly campaigns. That could

9:12

be things like product launches, flash

9:15

sales, holiday emails, new

9:17

blog content, different types of social proof,

9:19

any kind of current events. And

9:22

then from there, along with the campaigns, we're gonna

9:24

leverage what's called segmentation. And is this making sense

9:26

so far, am I going? Yeah, no, it's awesome,

9:28

this is awesome, keep going man. Okay,

9:31

cool, so along with the campaigns, right, we have

9:33

to pick a segment or a list to send

9:35

to. So we wanna pick things like folks that

9:37

are engaged, a 90-day engage, so someone

9:39

that's opened and or clicked in the last 90 days.

9:43

Other type of segmentation would be geography-based. So

9:45

I'm in the United States, I'm on the

9:47

west side of it, I'm in

9:49

California, the weather here is 75 degrees or

9:53

higher and sunny year round. So in

9:55

the winter here, you could still probably send

9:57

me an email with a T-shirt or phone.

10:00

flip-flops and shorts as an apparel company and

10:02

I would buy whereas that same time of

10:04

year in the winter for someone on the

10:06

East Coast let's say like in New York

10:08

you want to send them things

10:10

like jackets, pants, beanies, you

10:12

know socks, those types of

10:14

things so leveraging geography even

10:17

leveraging things like a gender so if you're an

10:19

apparel company you sell things for men versus women you

10:22

know send the items for men to men and

10:24

send the items for women to women and there's

10:26

all types of things that you can do which

10:28

we'll kind of talk about a little bit later

10:30

around like AI and predictive analytics to understand

10:33

someone's gender based off of

10:35

kind of census data so someone's

10:37

first name is this what's the

10:39

likelihood that that's male versus female or are you

10:41

not sure? So there's some really cool stuff that

10:43

you guys can do based off names and other

10:45

kind of data that's available to understand someone's potential

10:47

gender along with the cues and the signals

10:50

that you have on your site what

10:52

what gender is the product being looked

10:54

at from this person here

10:56

versus that person what are people adding to

10:58

cart what are people kind of

11:01

constantly doing and looking at so there's all

11:03

these cues that you can use to leverage

11:05

segmentation based off what people are doing on

11:07

their site what they've purchased and whatnot and

11:10

with all of the above you have

11:12

to be AB testing you want to

11:14

optimize you know the traffic

11:16

and the leads and the emails and

11:18

offers and everything you're doing so that

11:20

way you're driving the maximum impact possible

11:22

and with all of that probably the

11:24

least sexy most important thing

11:27

about emails email deliverability really

11:29

making sure that you're being mindful of your email delivery

11:31

if you do those five or six things that I

11:33

mentioned you're gonna be light years ahead of

11:35

everyone else yeah I love it man so there's a

11:38

few things to unpack there so you talk about first

11:40

of all pop-ups and

11:42

having some sort of offer like free shipping you

11:45

know 10 20 30 percent off some

11:47

sort of coupon code is

11:50

that the fastest way to build your list

11:52

are there any other ways that you found

11:54

or any tactics that you would highly recommend

11:56

that are cost-effective yeah it seems like for

11:58

our contact right now you know driving

12:00

paid traffic to a website, a landing

12:02

page, whatever it might be, and then

12:04

capitalizing with the popup typically is the,

12:07

you know, the highest converting kind of best

12:09

thing. That being said, there's a host of

12:11

other things that you guys can do. Um,

12:13

everything from running like kind of partnered giveaways.

12:16

So say you're a brand that sells to

12:18

men that are 18 to 35, go

12:21

find three or four other brands that

12:23

sell to that same demo that don't

12:26

have competitive products. Their products are complimentary,

12:28

not competitive. And if you guys

12:30

all kind of partner in promoting to your list,

12:32

promoting on social, maybe running some ad spend, you

12:34

can end up with a larger list. That being

12:36

said, you really want to do a couple

12:39

of things, right? To make sure that you end up with people

12:41

that actually want to buy your stuff. Far too

12:43

often I'll see like people do a giveaway

12:45

and they'll give away a car or an iPhone,

12:47

but they sell a t-shirt, right? Just

12:50

because someone's getting your iPhone or your car doesn't mean

12:52

they want your t-shirt. So when you do giveaways, giveaway,

12:54

the thing that you sell, make sure that people

12:57

actually want what you're giving away. I think that's

12:59

one. You know, I think two is,

13:01

you know, making sure that you've optimized

13:03

your checkout process so that way when people add their

13:05

email, they're being added to your database, you kind of

13:08

can follow up with them there. So I

13:10

think like, uh, paid traffic giveaways,

13:12

you know, optimizing the onsite collection is one.

13:14

There's also stuff out there that's, I'd say

13:16

in the U S is kind of in

13:18

the white and an elsewhere, elsewhere you can't

13:20

really do it. It's kind of a gray

13:23

or black. So I wouldn't touch it, but

13:25

there are sites out there that can basically

13:27

keep your, your, your website and based off

13:29

IP address, I can tell you people's emails.

13:31

It's kind of like this whole interesting strategy where

13:34

it's kind of almost like retargeting, right? Just having

13:36

like a pixel on your side that you can

13:38

retarget. It's the same thing, but it can actually

13:40

provide email. So there's a whole host of different

13:42

strategies depending on where you're based and kind of

13:44

how you feel about these types of marketing tactics.

13:46

Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Um, so

13:50

let's talk about kind of, you

13:52

talked about segmentation. What

13:54

do you do with people that aren't engaged and how

13:56

do you keep them engaged? And

13:59

how Should you mail your list? Yeah, that's

14:01

a great question So in terms of like the

14:04

frequency the frequency really depends

14:06

So as I mentioned in our

14:08

clients to a minimum of a million dollars a year Upwards

14:11

to hundreds of millions of dollars a year and

14:13

at those sizes We're typically sending two to

14:15

four or maybe three to five campaigns per

14:17

week per client some brands more some brands

14:20

less So if you have a smaller list

14:23

and you have fewer skews, you probably want

14:25

to send maybe weekly or maybe twice a

14:27

week So depending on list size the season

14:29

right during Black Friday Center money coming up

14:31

Obviously everyone's gonna be way more aggressive than

14:34

normal So your frequency during that period of

14:36

time might be daily whereas throughout the rest

14:38

of the year It might be

14:40

once twice three times a week You know

14:42

the more skews you have the more skews and products

14:44

you're adding the more often that you can send The

14:47

more often that you're kind of testing offers and

14:49

having different creative So most of our clients seven

14:51

to nine figures and two to four or three

14:54

to five times a week But if you're a

14:56

smaller store kind of just starting out I

14:58

would start with once a week make it really manageable

15:01

and then as your list scales as you have other

15:03

things going on Look at doing twice

15:05

a week and then kind of gradually scale up

15:08

By looking at the data and saying are

15:10

my people were enjoying these emails and then

15:12

also having this thing called a preference page

15:14

So what most people do is they have

15:17

send emails and then they have an unsubscribe They

15:19

don't have the ability for people to manage preference

15:22

and that helps you basically Keep

15:24

people on your list to help them kind of

15:26

set the frequency that they want to receive So

15:28

they might only want to receive sales emails So

15:31

if you're only sending sales email on a monthly

15:33

basis, they might only receive a monthly email However,

15:36

maybe they don't want to receive sales and they only

15:38

want to receive education That's

15:41

really important one other thing that's really interesting

15:43

that we've done It's

15:47

similar to a preference page but the very bottom of

15:49

the email almost towards the footer ahead

15:51

of the unsubscribe It says, you know

15:54

snooze your emails for a period of time two

15:56

weeks or a month So people can

15:58

temporary opt out of your emails for two

16:00

or four weeks, whatever reason it

16:02

might be. Maybe they're traveling, maybe they're in

16:04

their busy season. So by allowing people to

16:07

either manage preferences or pause emails for a

16:09

small period of time, we've seen that save

16:11

a lot of unsubs. So that's a big

16:13

one. And then what was the other question

16:16

you asked about frequency and then?

16:18

And then I guess you know not

16:21

just frequency but keeping your

16:24

list engaged. Yes. Yeah

16:26

so I think like with finding the

16:28

right frequency and sending the right content

16:30

mix. So there's frequency and then

16:32

there's variety right? And those two go really hand-in-hand.

16:34

Frequency is how often do you send and that's

16:36

kind of what we talked about and then variety

16:39

is well when you do send what are you

16:41

sending? Are you sending sales emails all the time?

16:43

If so, you're gonna have a lot

16:45

of people opt out. Unless you're known for

16:47

being a discount brand and people are signing

16:49

up for daily deals or ongoing deals, if

16:51

you're just pushing shells down people's face, people

16:53

are gonna unsub. So you really want to find that

16:55

balance between education,

16:57

entertainment, content, and

16:59

sales right? I think people have different goals when

17:01

they send to a brand. If you think about

17:04

the company called Chubby's right? The ones that makes

17:06

like those swim trunks and those board shorts. At

17:08

least in the US they're really big. A

17:10

lot of people found those emails really funny and

17:12

really humorous and really just enjoyed them and they

17:15

had a really unique voice. So also too depends

17:17

on like what's your tone and what's your voice.

17:20

So I think there's like all these factors that come into

17:22

play like are you funny? Do you have a

17:24

big list? Do you have a lot of

17:26

different types of things to say? That really

17:28

helps you get away with sending more emails and

17:31

if you kind of get into this part where

17:33

like you're not really sure why things are happening,

17:35

people are unsubscribing, there's not a lot of engagement.

17:37

The easiest quickest way that a lot of people forget

17:39

is just ask right? Ask

17:41

people on your list like what do you want to see?

17:43

You know how do you feel about

17:45

what we've been sending? And even within the email you

17:47

could have like something at the bottom that gives it like

17:50

click one of these things. One star, two store,

17:52

three store, five star and let us know how

17:54

we're doing. So you're gonna create this constant feedback

17:56

loop. I think a lot of times people are

17:58

missing those feedback loops. and the ability

18:01

for people to self-flex and kind of choose their

18:03

preferences. With those, you can get away sending more

18:05

emails and sending the right type of content, plus

18:08

the segmentation we talked about, right? Like all

18:10

of these things work together. There's no silver bullet.

18:12

It's like the more data that you can collect,

18:15

the more you talk to your users, the better off

18:17

the experience is going to be, and

18:19

hopefully you're going to minimize people that end

18:21

up snoozing and kind of churning off your

18:23

emails. Yeah, so I'm also curious

18:25

when it comes to how many

18:28

email subscribers you have, on average,

18:30

how much revenue have you seen?

18:32

Like this is a very difficult

18:34

question to answer because I know

18:36

you talk about lead quality and

18:39

where the engagement and all that kind of stuff,

18:41

but what range? Like if you have 2,000 people

18:44

on your email list, what kind of revenue

18:47

could you expect? Is it a dollar per

18:49

email? Is it $5? Like what's

18:52

the range that you've seen? Yeah, that's a

18:54

great question. It's really hard to say because when we

18:56

work with all of our clients, the AOV, right,

18:58

the average order value, the price that people are

19:00

paying when they order, varies. We

19:02

work with clients like the brand Poo-Pourri that makes the

19:04

spray for the bathroom that might sell like a $5

19:06

or $10 spray. And

19:09

we also work with a company called 8 Sleep that sells a

19:11

$3,000 or $5,000 mattress, right? So

19:14

it's really hard just because of one,

19:17

like frequency, right? The more frequent you

19:20

send, you're probably driving less revenue per

19:22

user. Also too, like

19:24

the more expensive the product is, you know,

19:26

the more technically that you'll make per user

19:28

if it's a good email. So

19:32

average order value, lifetime value, all these

19:34

things like frequency of purchase is really

19:36

hard. The easier thing to share is

19:38

kind of what I what I led

19:40

with earlier was like about a

19:42

quarter to, you know, upwards of a half

19:44

of your revenue should come from email and

19:46

or SMS, right, those to kind of combine.

19:49

So I think like, you know, if a brand has

19:51

2,000 people on their list, you

19:54

know, maybe they're converting, you know, x percent

19:56

or half a percent and also too, like,

19:58

it depends on if you're looking at. campaigns

20:00

versus flows. Right, the revenue from

20:02

campaigns is gonna be a lot lower than the

20:04

revenue from flows. For example, like your

20:06

ban and checkout, that's when people are furthest

20:08

down the funnel. They've gone through the entire

20:10

step of almost buying and then they just

20:12

left. Maybe they got distracted. Maybe you didn't

20:15

have free shipping. Maybe they're waiting to see

20:17

if you're gonna send an offer. Like the

20:19

revenue per user there and the conversion right

20:21

there is gonna be the highest. Like you

20:23

might convert 5 or 10%

20:25

of the people that receive the email and

20:27

then the revenue per recipient might be dollars

20:30

or multiple dollars or you know tens of dollars.

20:32

Whereas in a campaign that's more of like a

20:34

batch and blast. It's like a product launch. So

20:38

it is a really hard thing to

20:40

say just because there's so many different

20:42

variables but 2000 emails

20:44

depending on your frequency, depending on

20:46

the quality. I don't know

20:48

you might be able to make hundreds of

20:50

dollars potentially to thousands of dollars on

20:53

a given send depending on how expensive

20:55

it is and what you're selling and kind of

20:57

how engaged they are. Like what's the open rate?

20:59

What's the click through? And so all of these

21:02

things kind of factor in. Yep got you awesome.

21:04

So let's move to AI. What

21:07

AI tools are you using right now

21:09

in your business? There's kind of

21:11

four that I primarily use. I think the biggest one

21:13

right the most popular one would be chat gbt. I

21:15

use that the most frequently. Another

21:18

one I'm using is something called too short.ai and

21:20

basically what it does and by the way I

21:22

have no ownership. I've got no vested

21:24

interest in any of these but basically what

21:26

it does is you could take your YouTube videos

21:28

and you can upload them and they all kind

21:30

of slice and dice them almost like a video

21:32

editor. They'll say like hey

21:34

these 30 seconds these 45 seconds this

21:37

minute look interesting. So it's helping me

21:39

take long-form content and turning them into

21:41

short form. So taking long-form YouTube podcasts

21:44

and turning them into Instagram reels or

21:46

TikTok videos or YouTube shorts. It's

21:48

called so that one's called too short.ai. There's a bunch

21:51

of those out there for

21:53

the agency for like calls and whatnot.

21:55

We're either using one called fireflies or

21:57

a Voma and those essentially are taking

22:00

call notes and transcribing kind of the

22:02

dialogue of team calls and client calls

22:05

and they also have things like sentiment like who Did

22:08

all the talking was the sentiment positive wasn't

22:10

negative and it helps you also set reminders

22:12

So we're instead of having our account manager

22:14

that was responsible for Writing and typing

22:16

all the notes before and how to be super present on

22:19

Kind of writing things down and not present in the

22:21

conversation It kind of gives them the time

22:24

back and the AI is not going to be tired or

22:26

miss anything The whole thing gets recorded

22:28

with AI and then the last one would be something

22:30

like a mid-journey To create like images

22:32

and whatnot that are kind of cool and

22:34

unique So those are like the four that

22:36

I frequently use most often Yeah, and when

22:39

it comes to e-commerce businesses, I

22:42

guess, you know, what do you see

22:44

is the biggest challenge to implement AI?

22:47

Yes, so I'm gonna answer this one about

22:49

my own business and then I'll kind of

22:51

answer any questions about kind of e-commerce And

22:53

I think where emails out and where it's

22:55

going. I think the biggest challenge

22:57

for my own agency Which

23:01

is a marketing agency. I think it is a

23:03

couple things I think one is like headcount to

23:05

its current process and three is being so

23:07

we have over a hundred team members right

23:09

now with Varying level of experience. So some

23:11

people are using in their spare time and

23:13

they've got a really good grasp and understanding

23:15

while other people Have never used

23:17

it. They've heard of it, but they've never used it.

23:19

So with that It's just been really

23:21

time consuming and expensive to have like the

23:24

training and resource allocation with everything else We've

23:26

got going on So I think at

23:28

the agency it's something that we're gonna adopt It's just a

23:30

matter of time and I think the other thing

23:32

that we've kind of been going back and forth on is like The

23:35

optics with clients around us using AI

23:37

so like we're a premium agency Which

23:39

are very expensive fees and everything historically

23:41

has been done by hand So

23:44

I think there's kind of some fear from some of

23:46

the partners and kind of some of our leadership on

23:48

How clients would feel if we were using AI for

23:50

summer all the work that said personally

23:52

for me and all my other businesses Whether it's

23:54

like my personal brand or some of the businesses

23:56

that I own that I have one employee three

23:59

employees five employees we're using

24:01

AI pretty religiously because it's way easier for

24:03

me to train them and teach them and

24:05

kind of change the process for one

24:08

or three or five people than it is for us to

24:10

go change the process for 100 plus

24:12

people in different parts of the world with different

24:15

jobs with different seniority with different experience so I

24:17

think like the big challenge is just around like

24:20

process and training and kind of

24:22

just Having everyone have

24:24

like a level playing field if that makes

24:26

sense Yeah, and when you said about like

24:28

some of your other businesses that might not

24:30

have like a bigger headcount How

24:33

are you using it? What does that look

24:35

like? Yes interesting So I think it's kind

24:37

of like a double-edged sword in some regard

24:39

where I think a lot of the reason

24:41

I'm not hiring more People at these smaller

24:43

businesses is because we're using AI with the

24:45

agency when AI kind of has come around

24:47

we already were so Big and

24:49

I don't want to say bloated in the bad way But we had

24:51

so many people that like how do we not

24:54

been that big AI probably would have been rolled out And

24:56

we probably would have been able to do more with less

24:58

and therefore probably not hire nearly as many people So

25:00

in terms of like the the current people right

25:02

now on my team a lot of

25:05

it is around like content creation so taking

25:07

like long-form emails or blog content that

25:10

we've wrote and then Repurposing that

25:12

for short form tweets or for Twitter threads

25:14

or for LinkedIn care ourselves so a lot

25:16

of like how we're using other businesses is

25:18

really around like content

25:21

creation content editing proofreading

25:23

ideation Formatting so I'm taking

25:25

a lot of like content I had and it's been like these

25:27

are all the bullet points These are all the things that

25:30

I think about email Here's five types of emails turn this

25:32

into a table or you know kind of

25:34

just some of the formatting and some of the ideas

25:36

Or hey, will you kind of quickly fact-check this will

25:38

you read this will you give me some thoughts or

25:40

hey? I wrote this version write me three other subject

25:43

lines for it So a lot of like how I'm

25:45

using on the personal brand other brands is like here's

25:47

my ideas. Here's my thoughts Give

25:49

me your feedback You know give me

25:51

kind of some twists on it. Give me some things around

25:53

it other things to abuse it for

25:56

is like big Data sense. It's like here's like

25:58

the analytics of all my posts show

26:00

me and tell me like where the trends

26:02

are when I talk about what topic what

26:04

are people resonating with so for a long

26:06

time a lot of my content specifically with

26:08

e-commerce email marketing and then through AI

26:11

I've learned that when I

26:13

post or less specifically to e-commerce email marketing

26:15

and just generally my marketing they get

26:17

a lot more engagement reach because it reaches a

26:19

broader audience so a lot of like my pivot

26:21

on like my personal brand my other brands in

26:23

terms of like content and kind

26:25

of ideation has just been by

26:27

leveraging data that like I otherwise couldn't understand

26:29

because it's just too big there's just too

26:32

much I don't have a data

26:34

analysis background personally I don't have a data scientist

26:36

on my team so that's how we're using

26:38

it a lot in terms of like being a

26:40

few people creating content across

26:43

dozens of channels every single day yeah

26:45

interesting so I have

26:48

to know when it comes to

26:50

AI and email marketing just

26:53

even in general not even just

26:55

e-commerce but would love to hear

26:57

like how can

27:00

people best use AI to

27:02

automate things like like

27:04

give us like some really good hacks man

27:06

what kind of tactic or something that someone

27:09

could take away which is like boom that's

27:11

crazy yeah I think predictive analytics is

27:16

a really interesting analysis

27:18

is a really interesting one so you know

27:20

what is that essentially it's AI machine learning

27:22

and data science and it's leveraging it to

27:24

make predictions based on the past to help

27:27

influence the future so here's a couple examples

27:29

so with predictive analytics you

27:31

can analyze past behaviors and try to

27:33

understand what each individual person on your

27:36

list is most likely to

27:38

engage with with your emails so allow you

27:40

to pick the right content for the right

27:42

segments like with a lot more degree of

27:44

certainty right right now with marketers

27:46

a lot of times we're kind of guessing that

27:48

we're hoping for the best like with predictive analytics

27:50

it's basically gonna say these 5,000 people

27:53

that have engaged over the last 30 days they engage

27:55

the most with the content on current

27:58

events and these 5,000 people over here,

28:01

they only engage with emails I mentioned offers

28:03

and these 5,000 people over here,

28:05

they only wanted to read the blog post.

28:07

So just like I mentioned before around like

28:10

asking people for their kind of

28:12

preferences, a lot of people just frankly

28:14

aren't going to tell you their preference. They're just not

28:16

going to click, fill out a form and do his

28:19

preferences. So when you use predictive analytics, it's

28:21

basically just analyzing their behavior and

28:24

making that assumption and that answer for them and that's

28:26

how we're going to treat them. So

28:28

if you go back to like the whole like

28:30

Henry Ford thing, right? Like if Henry Ford had

28:33

asked people what they wanted, they would have said,

28:35

if I hear horses, right? Instead of cars, a

28:37

lot of times too, like what people actually do

28:39

within an email and what they actually think they're

28:41

doing, there's kind of some discrepancy. So by looking

28:43

at the data, it's super important. Another

28:45

one could be to like send time. When

28:48

are you sending the email? That's super important

28:50

because with how worldwide and global

28:52

a lot of people's lists are, we might have

28:54

people in the US, but there's

28:56

four different time zones. You have people in

28:59

Europe and Asia and Africa, etc. And everyone

29:01

has different time zones. So me sending at

29:03

10 a.m. My time, PST

29:06

isn't the one size can solve for everyone else. Maybe

29:09

we should be sending it at 7 a.m. Everyone's

29:12

local time or maybe we should be sending at 10

29:14

p.m. The role is local time. So while analyzing the

29:16

behavior of each of your subscribers to

29:18

understand when they're opening and they're engaging

29:21

with your email, it's going to

29:23

help you understand when to send it for each person in

29:25

the future. And then a couple other things

29:27

could be around like content

29:29

recommendations. So recommending

29:31

content and products and services based

29:33

off their past behaviors and preferences.

29:36

At scale, it's actually really, really hard. A

29:38

lot of these recommendations that people are giving

29:41

just aren't the right recommendations. They're doing like

29:43

a one size fits all versus making sure

29:45

that the content is super tailored to each

29:48

person. I'm like really excited

29:50

about leveraging the data set

29:52

historically to make your

29:55

best guess born and along with kind

29:57

of future testing to serve people content.

30:00

having content be dynamic and that's

30:02

super relevant. So I think like

30:04

emails moving towards allowing people

30:06

to convert and buy within an email through

30:08

AMP and by leveraging AI to send people

30:10

the right thing. So that's some of the

30:13

stuff that you can leverage right now to

30:16

have these insights to drive more conversions. When you

30:18

do this, you'll notice a big difference

30:20

in your conversions. How do you do that

30:22

though? Like what tools like, yeah, can we

30:24

get into specifics? Yeah, so like for example,

30:27

like Clavio is probably the big one that

30:29

most people know in e-commerce, right? Sendlane is

30:31

another one that people know, you know, Jimmy

30:33

Kim, great guy. Like

30:35

Clavio is investing a lot of money into

30:37

their predictive analytics, right? So if you go

30:39

into Clavio, you could kind of do these

30:41

things directly and natively within the tool. So

30:44

one of the things I mentioned before was

30:46

like understanding people's genders. If you go into

30:48

Clavio, you can do predictive analytics for

30:50

gender. And what they're gonna basically do is they're

30:52

gonna analyze all your people on your list. They're

30:54

gonna look at their names and they're gonna take

30:56

that data and compare it with census data. And

31:00

they're gonna say the name Chase, maybe

31:02

we're not sure if that's a guy or a girl, right? Could

31:04

be either. But the name Paul

31:07

was always a guy, right? And the name

31:09

Veronica was always a female. So they're able

31:11

to take this really big data set of

31:13

like the likelihood that someone is male versus

31:15

female or unknown. And then from there,

31:17

if you're sending an email to men, the top half of

31:19

your email should be propped for men. And then the second

31:21

half should be propped for women. But if you're selling to

31:23

women, it should be the opposite. Women's content should be first,

31:26

men should be second. And just by

31:28

like these small adjustments and edits, we've

31:30

been seeing lifts and click through conversion rate.

31:32

And at scale, I mean, we're emailing 50,000

31:34

people typically on

31:38

the lowest side for our clients upwards to like five

31:40

or 10 million. If we're able

31:42

to lift conversion rates by a couple points, you

31:44

know, in each email, if we

31:46

can go lift it by 10% or 20% over what it was, it's

31:50

pretty significant in terms of revenue we're driving. So tools

31:52

like Cladio, and I think SendLan has it, or they're

31:55

rolling out, a lot of these tools are kind of

31:57

natively building it. And that's kind of like in terms

31:59

of like. the future of e-commerce. In

32:02

terms of people getting access

32:04

to this, I think the technology needs to

32:06

continue to improve. There's some of it today.

32:08

We're actively doing the things that I just

32:10

told you about today. But if

32:12

the tech comes a little bit further and

32:14

it becomes a little bit more universal where

32:16

every single ESP, every email platform has this,

32:19

then it's going to be so easy for this

32:22

to happen. And I think the future

32:24

is like AI is automatically analyzing data,

32:26

it's automatically recommending things. And I actually

32:29

even think too that a lot of

32:31

these ESPs are going to take tools

32:33

out there like CopyAI or JasperAI

32:35

and build them in or integrate them in. And it's

32:37

actually going to write the copy and it's going to

32:39

create the designs for you and it's going to give

32:41

you these different types of things. And then for you

32:43

as the marketer, you might be able to say, hey,

32:46

I want this or I want that. So

32:48

I think that's the future. This tool's set

32:51

getting a little bit more robust. This

32:53

automatically creating things and almost like you have an email

32:55

template where you can kind of create in drag and

32:57

drop modules. I think templates are going to be

32:59

created for us and copies are going to be created for us. And

33:02

it's up to us as the final sayers of this to

33:05

be like, cool, this looks great as is or

33:07

make these changes or combine these two versions. So

33:10

I think that's like where it's at, where it's going. So

33:12

I think it's going to empower people to

33:14

take responsibilities that they otherwise needed to offload.

33:17

Because right now, the process of getting

33:19

this whole thing that we're talking

33:21

about done is really time expensive

33:24

and really expensive. Right now

33:26

as a marketer, you have to come through data, you

33:28

have to share the learnings with the copywriters and the designers,

33:31

you have to then come up with the angle

33:33

you're going to take the copywriter then writes the

33:35

copy, the designer then does the design. And

33:38

then it goes through all these iterations and

33:40

this feedback and the current process right now is

33:42

so inefficient. It's not quick. I think

33:44

AI is going to allow these things to just

33:46

be super quick and in real time and one

33:48

person can have the power of five people. So

33:51

this stuff is a lot of it's possible today and

33:54

part of this end part I think is what's possible in

33:56

the future. So man,

33:58

look, I could talk to you all day about this. stuff

34:00

but we have to work towards wrapping up.

34:02

I've got one last question and that is

34:04

if you could boil it

34:06

down to one tool that could give

34:08

eConf founders a competitive advantage using AI,

34:11

what would it be? How would you

34:14

go about it? Like yeah. Yeah, that's

34:16

a really good question. I'd

34:19

say like the two, right?

34:21

Because there are two different things like that. I'd

34:23

say like chat GPT is insane for editing

34:26

and ideation and copy and first draft. I

34:28

think that paired with

34:30

your ESP, so whether it's Clavio

34:32

or Senlaine, like those compared

34:34

together is really powerful, right?

34:37

Having some of the stuff that can't be done in

34:39

the ESP is done through chat GPT and some of

34:41

the things that can't be done in the other. So

34:44

I think like chat GPT

34:46

plus your ESP, Clavio

34:48

or Senlaine, it's super powerful

34:50

for the data for the

34:52

copy for all these things. I

34:54

think you could be pretty unstoppable with those two.

34:57

Yeah. And then when it comes to chat GPT,

34:59

how do you best train it? And

35:01

I know like you go run soon, but like,

35:03

yeah, how do you best train it, man? Because

35:06

it's not enough just to like type in write this

35:08

email, you know, because people can tell and the copies

35:10

are like good. Yeah, I think one

35:12

like comes with like understanding like how to create

35:14

prompts. And then two is just

35:16

giving feedback. And then they recently rolled out the

35:18

ability to kind of set like universal

35:21

rules. So like, for example,

35:23

before what I would do is I just keep

35:25

the same tab open for my Twitter posts. And

35:27

I have a different tab for LinkedIn. And I

35:29

would be just every day feeding it. These are

35:31

the tweets that I did this week that did

35:33

well. This is what what each one got. So

35:35

I would just feed it the data out feed

35:37

it example. Right. And the other

35:39

cool thing too is somehow chat GPT has known

35:41

who I am, probably gonna ask him saying write

35:43

tweets like you're Chase Diamond. And it's pretty crazy

35:45

to see the feedback. And they'll be like, no

35:48

use emojis. I'm like, no, no, no, I don't

35:50

use emojis, emojis and they'll use hash up like

35:52

no hashtags. So I've kind of just like started

35:54

with, you know, basic to

35:56

decent prompts, and then just given a

35:58

lot of feedback over time and then I've sent my kind

36:00

of global rules for it. So

36:02

that way it learns and it knows and then all I have

36:04

to do now at this point is like, you

36:07

know, next one and it can create me a

36:09

table pulling from my blog or it

36:11

could create me a table pulling from something I

36:13

upload. So it's pretty crazy like once you train

36:15

it enough like it gets pretty good. So

36:18

you would say that majority of the content

36:20

that you're putting out is created by AI.

36:25

Created, edited, updated.

36:28

So I wouldn't say like AI is the end all be

36:30

all of my content but all my content

36:32

touches AI in some form. So a lot of what

36:34

I found that works on social media, this is a

36:36

way for like e-commerce to work. A

36:39

lot of what I found on LinkedIn in particular, dude over the

36:41

last 12 months I've had 110 million

36:43

impressions of my content on LinkedIn all organic

36:45

and what I've basically done is I've gone

36:47

to sources like my Twitter, I've taken my

36:49

top post on Twitter and I say hey,

36:52

I did these to be more on brand

36:54

for LinkedIn, right? So like I'll

36:56

basically take my short form content and make

36:58

it longer form for LinkedIn and then I'll

37:00

take my content that performs that's really unique

37:02

on LinkedIn and I'll shorten it for Twitter.

37:05

So my content kind of goes through different

37:07

phases. I'm taking popular stuff I've written in

37:09

the past and I'm using AI to refresh

37:12

or update or edit it and

37:14

then it's just so easy for me to create tons of

37:16

content like right now cross

37:19

my own channels like I have one or

37:21

two profiles on every social network there is

37:23

and on LinkedIn right now I run a

37:25

network of about a dozen pages that have

37:27

about half a million followers and we're

37:30

creating content every single day from there within minutes

37:32

from AI. So I'd say AI is

37:34

a big part of it, it's not

37:37

the only part. Yeah, awesome man. Well

37:39

dude, thank you so much for just

37:41

sharing all of your experiences, wisdom, lessons

37:43

learned across e-commerce, email marketing and AI.

37:46

Thank you so much, this is incredibly helpful for people.

37:48

Yeah dude, thanks for having me, this was awesome. Hey

37:53

guys, I hope you enjoyed this interview.

37:56

As you might already know, our mission at Founder

37:58

is to help you out. help tens of

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millions of people every single week

38:03

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38:45

I will see you in the next episode.