Scott Cohen - CEO at InboxArmy

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom Pod. We have Scott Cohen with us today. Scott is CEO at Inbox Army. Scott's an award-winning email marketing veteran with 2 decades marketing experience. He has obviously an expertise in email marketing strategies. Yeah, I checked the Inbox Army logos the other day, was quite impressed of what you guys built. So Scott, welcome to the pod. Tell us— bit more about yourself and what you're building?

Yeah. I mean, thanks for having me, Charles. It's hard to believe it's been 20 years that I've been doing marketing in some sort. Started life as a copywriter and been doing email for 17 years. What we're building here at Inbox Army, I'll be quick with my plug, full-service email and lifecycle marketing agency. So we do email, SMS, and push, all the sort of in-app You know, owned media channels. You know, we do soup to nuts strategy, execution, design, copy, all that fun stuff.

How was Scotland?

Scotland was incredible. You know, I'm still dealing with a little bit of jet lag. You know, had to deal with some, unfortunately, some delays in, you know, the layover coming back home. But yeah, it's, you I got to take the kids, their first international experience, and it was just wonderful. And thankfully we missed the heat wave, so it was normal Scottish summer, not hot Scottish summer.

Right. I had a business partner and I was there at the same time and yeah, I got my attention to Scotland. And yeah, you told me that there was some great golf courses, right, in Scotland. If you're a golfer yourself, you have golfing clients, tell me a bit more about your Your golf passion. Yeah.

So St. Andrews Links is known as the home of golf. The Royal and Ancient, which is sort of the founding body of the sport, has their headquarters there as well. And I got to— one of the day tours we did, we based ourselves in Edinburgh, and one of the tours we did, I got to walk a few holes of the old course at St. Andrews and bought entirely too many things. Got a flag and shirts. I'm wearing my Inbox Army shirt, but almost any other time I'd probably be wearing— because I went to the Masters earlier this year for the first time as well. So I either have Masters shirts or now St. Andrews shirts. So my wardrobe's probably going to be pretty boring. Started playing golf as a kid, was a baseball player as well, did music for a long time. Picked up golf as an adult and it's just something I love to do. Gets me— it's sort of the one thing that gets me outside is golf. So I just love to do it. I watch it on TV. People go, how can you watch it on TV? And I go, it's just, you know, every once in a while the pros hit that one terrible shot that you go, I can do that too. So it's a lot of fun.

Yeah, I guess anytime someone that knows about the sport and dissects it and analyzes it, they can watch even quote unquote boring sports like baseball because you know the details, right? You know, it's more than just what happens on screen. You're, you're like deeper than that and you're analyzing, I don't know, how they think, how they breathe, how they move, um, the specific challenge, what the announcer says, right? All these, uh, these metrics are somewhat important for— Yeah, I love it, uh, but I prefer Full Swing, right? Like Full Swing is like, uh, giving them— obviously it's like Netflixified and, you know, documentary drama, right? Like, it's a bit too much sometimes, but it gives you a glimpse at a good part of their real lives, right? And you, you know, like, their mental models. And all these guys, especially in the Masters, they're all super high performers, right? Like, it doesn't get any better. And golf is not the most physical sports, uh, there is, but it's one of the most mental sports there is. Like, uh, you need to be a super athlete when it comes to making mental gymnastics, right? The pressure, everyone's watching, uh, it's silence when, you know, you're, you're like focused on hitting this golf ball.

Yeah.

You have to have true consciousness of your body. You need to project yourself on the course, right? And where the ball will go. So it'd be fun to do like a brain scan on a golfer, right? And how they, they can picture that the golf course while not even look at it, uh, physically. So It's a different kind of sport.

Yeah, I mean, and you see like the heart rates, right? Because Rory McIlroy wears one of those Whoop bracelets, right? And they, you know, they've done the whole thing of his heart rate was this when he was on 18 at the Masters and stuff like that. And you see that and you go, how can— to your point about the physical and the mental at the same time, it's, you know, that it's just going to be nuts, right? That you're— but it's how you manage the heart rate Anyway, how you do the thing anyway. And that's why you see the golf in particular, they talk, the golfers talk a lot about their habits and their routine in a swing, and that they have to start over and do it all over again if they get distracted for something. And I mean, even a hacker like myself, if I know if I go too fast, I'll mess up. I know if I don't, I mean, I have a very minimal routine, but I know if I don't even do that much, my swing is not going to be good. So, you know, I don't have these elaborate things like some of the pros do. But yeah, there's definitely a— my kids like to— we said it a lot walking through Edinburgh, all the hills. It's like we have a big hill and my kid, my oldest, would yell, lock in! And it's like you have to lock in and go ahead and do it and just get it done. And so that's always fascinating.

Yeah. Do you remember Rory and, uh, I forgot what the cup is, uh, is called, but Europe versus US, right?

Uh, Ryder Cup.

Yeah, yeah, Ryder Cup. Rory just snapping because like some caddy was like blocking his view or something, right? Like these mental games being played. And yeah, that cup, what's interesting is that they don't get paid, right? But the emotions and the— I don't know, um, what do you call it— patriotism is like so high that, uh, that emotions sort of run out of control, like I just love that specific episode because the stakes were way higher than just a couple millions for them.

Yeah, yeah, I love that.

So Inbox Army, how did you get to the CEO title? You and I talked a little bit about that last time you were on, right? Like, and your pedigree, right? You were an email marketing manager for quite some time. You worked there for a year and then they're like, oh, you're that good? looking for a CEO that it's an obvious fit? How did that happen?

Yeah, so it's, it's interesting because I've worked for the company 3 separate times. In its first iteration as Inbox Group, I was non-founder employee number 1. So it was at that time, basically the CEO, the partner who was doing CFO, and me. And so I did that for a little while, then This was what, 2011? And I wasn't ready to work from home at the time. I went back and did brand side for a little while. And then my wife and I decided to move back to— I'm in Utah now. We were in Utah at the time. It's funny how my career has boomeranged and also our living situation has boomeranged a little bit. I grew up on the East Coast outside of DC. We went back there. Did that. And when I was moving back, I couldn't take my job with me. My wife got a job there. And I reached out to the, to the old CEO and I said, you know, who do you know in the area? And he said, forget it, come back and work for me. Did that for 5 years. We launched Inbox Army in that time as well and eventually stopped trying to market 2 brands and just market the one because Army just had more reach than Group did. And did that for 5 years and eventually just, I mean, I'll be honest, just burned out, right? I mean, at some point when you're trying to do marketing for the company and you're managing, at that point we were really small, I was managing 25 clients per day and it just became too much. Did brand, went back to brand side for another 5 years and once again reached out to the CEO. I like to joke, I say, hey, can the prodigal son come home? And by this point, he's in his 60s and he's going, great, I don't want to keep doing this forever. Could we put you on a path to take— I think he always wanted me to take it over. And it's certainly, I mean, coming from a company of 3 to now we're roughly 65 people, 70 people right now, it's certainly been an adventure, but it was just kind of a natural For me, a natural growth for this company. I think when we talked before, I don't think I'd be a CEO elsewhere, but for here it just makes sense because I've been such a part of how it's grown and I have a vision for what we want to do with it and shifting from sort of one focus to the focus we're on now. And it's— I would, again, I don't think I'd be CEO anywhere else because There's just a lot that goes into it. And I don't think I could be a CEO. I don't know, honestly, if I have the entrepreneurial bone, like the start-from-zero type personality, but I love building things. So it's a perfect fit.

And is it mostly an autopilot type of business at this point with all the systems you've installed, or is it still very much in growth mode and you feel the discomfort every now and then?

Oh, for sure. It's definitely not autopilot yet. I mean, from what I've learned from others who have done similar things, there's sort of pinch points, points of difficulty with scale. So you go from 1 to 10 employees is super hard, and then you kind of have a decent comfort zone until you get to about where we are in terms of size. And then you go, okay, you can kind of stay where you are or get a little smaller. You know, as you add more people, it becomes more complex. And so we're building the processes and the automations and all the pieces now to enable us to keep— as we bring on more clientele, we can grow and bring in more people. And what I'm trying to build right now is a an overall operating process that I tell my team all the time, if you won the lottery tomorrow and left, somebody could come in and know where things are, know where everything is. And that's when you go from a company where everybody's kind of running their own thing because it's necessary when you're super small to a company where I don't think anybody's replaceable, but you kind of have to operate in that mind of Something good could happen, something bad could happen. They could just go, I'm done. And I— yeah, their expertise walks out the door, but at least the knowledge of where things are doesn't. And so, but that's a really hard thing for some people who've been used to kind of going, you know, I hate to say fiefdoms, but they've been kind of running their own fiefdoms and all the process lives in their head to being now the process lives where everybody knows about it. And so that level of transparency and communication is something that is easier said than done.

And all these big logos that I've seen here, the founder is like 65 years old. I guess he unlocked most of them, right? Like the Hiltons, the Sherwin-Williams, the— I mean, I see some recent ones as well. Expedia, eBay, Spotify, Airbnb. Were most of these logos already there before you came in?

Most of the big ones, I would say, and they were more project-based, right? We've made a— I've made a conscious effort to switch us from being purely projects to more retainer-based because recurring revenue is the brass ring when it comes to agency life, because you can't really budget or scale hoping you can get a project here and there. We've also— the origins of the company have been more, I would say, production-focused, more of a price-conscious buyer. And we're really shifting more into strategy delivery and retainers and more expensive— I mean, just higher price, you know, moving from small market into mid-market and sort of that low-level enterprise. So we're making a very conscious effort to move into doing more work. For the folks like Hilton and Expedia and Sherwin-Williams where those were more sort of, like I said, they were big projects. They were big projects, but they weren't like a recurring, hey, we're just going to run your program for 12 months, which is what most of our clients do now.

And what kind of work do you do for them? Because I don't see pricing packages. Is it custom quotes? Is it one newsletter a week, one newsletter A month, there's email automation as well. Give me like a bigger picture of the product itself and also like who's your ideal customer persona? Is it always B2B or do you also take B2C?

We're actually more B2C than B2B. You know, we do have, I would say we have retainers that have certain levels based off of the amount that the clients want to do, but it's Custom, we don't really like clients to self-select because then it becomes scope creep and everything else, but we have clients that do 2 newsletters a month. We have clients that do— we have one client that we do production for that they do 4 to 8 newsletters per day. They just have multiple brands under the umbrella and multiple audiences. So we do a ton. We have a lot of scale there. But on the retainer side, it could be anywhere from— typically we don't have too many that are in the sort of number of campaigns per month. It's more hours-based now. So more of a— I call it like a fractional model. 40 hours, 80 hours, 160 hours, 320 hours a month, whatever it might be. And it's a blended rate across our— typically it's a blended rate across copy, design, all the platform work, things like that. We do have some folks who come in and they just want an audit or they want, you know, a master email template built. We still do things like that. We've also started a deliverability consulting practice in the last year. So we actually— a lot of our business is coming in through that, given all the changes with Gmail and Yahoo and Microsoft over the last couple years. Deliverability has always been important, but people actually are feeling the effects of those changes now. So We get a lot of work through that. You know, it's again consulting, remediation, warm-ups for— I mean, we talked before, you do some cold email and things like that. You know, sometimes we come in to fix what cold email breaks because cold email is— it can work, but it's a risk, especially to your— the list of folks that have subscribed and done all the purchasing and all that fun stuff. So. I like— I always like to say if it's related to email, we can do it, you know. So sometimes we do migrations, sometimes we do custom coding, things like that. It just depends on what the client needs.

And do you feel the hourly model will scale? Isn't it better to have like packages?

You know, it's something we've tested. Um, the, the issue with Really, from an agency perspective, it's ours either way. So if you go, hey, you get 4 emails a month, and then a client doesn't use 4 emails, and some clients will go, hey, we're not going to use 4 this month, we're just going to use 3, or whatever it might be, you're kind of on the hook to deliver. Or if it's, hey, I'm paying for 8, but one of them takes because of its complexity, just hours and hours and hours of work. There's risk both ways. So we did it before. The way we did it before was to just say, hey, you get a certain number of campaigns per month. And in the last couple of years, we've really focused on that fractional model and it's frankly better provided that we actually deliver, which I'm not going to say we're perfect, but 95% of the time we do.

And what does your GTM look like? How do you get your clients? Do you run cold outreach campaigns yourself?

Outbound historically has not been very effective for us, although we're starting to dip our toes in again. We shut it off middle part of last year just simply because it just wasn't getting us anything. For us, it's, I mean, you know, It's 99% inbound, so it's referrals. We have a lot of partnerships out there with the platforms and with just people and word of mouth and Google. And then of course, AI search and things like that. Now, obviously, we're not just resting on our laurels. We do content like this and content on the website, things of that sort. But Outbound has proven difficult.

It is extremely difficult, but it's like one of the channels that once you crack, it's like an ATM that keeps on yielding because you can directly reach out to your ICP without shortcutting, right? I add the podcast aspect to it. So give before you take, right? And there you go. You have a golden goose. I'm making it sound simple. There's like 100+ steps in between, but yeah, that's— That's what I've spent my life doing in the last 10 years. It's a beautiful system. I believe in referrals, of course, but yeah, I get people through the pipe, they become clients, then they refer me people. That's my funnel, right?

So— Yep. We get a lot through reviews. Yeah, we get a lot through reviews that way.

Reviews?

So, I'm gonna go and I read your, like our client reviews and—

Yes.

You know, they're on Clutch, they're on Google.

And where are these?

Google or? Yeah, Google, Clutch, several other places. I mean, we're not like on G2 or anything like that, but— Yeah, and then we just get, hey, or, and sometimes we get the repeat customers where the person works for one place, and then they go to another place and they hire us again, then they go to a third place and they hire us. We love those people.

So is your ICP CMOs? Or is that like the decision maker?

For email, the CMO is ultimately the signer. When we, I would say when we were smaller, And in the smaller business, you obviously dealt with the people with the CMO titles, or in some cases, the CEO titles. I mean, the number of email programs where the CEO is still sending email, and they're like big companies, you go, okay. Or they're still directly responsible for sending out email, which I go, let go, come on. But yeah, I mean—

Time to fetch a bigger bone.

Yeah, exactly. So I would say We're really in that like VP, senior director, really depends. Typically our first calls are with the practitioners or the folks that actually need the help. And then if they need to, they'll either go up and battle for it or they'll bring them in and we'll have a second, third conversation with the people that are holding the purse strings, so to speak. But given our niche, It's rare that we— it's becoming more rare for us to deal directly with CMOs on that level, at least as a first contact. But yeah, it's definitely more in the VP of marketing, senior director of marketing, senior director of digital, whatever the names are these days. I mean, I've seen email analysts in quotation marks that were running digital teams and you go, You guys got to work on their titles. It should be reflective of what they do.

And 80% are small, medium business and 20% like big companies, large enterprises?

I would say about 20% of what we do is actually white label for digital agencies. So there are many digital agencies that, in quotations, offer email and then we're actually doing the work behind the scenes. And then I would say nowadays for new business, about 25% in deliverability. A lot of people need deliverability help and that more often than not turns into ongoing work after we fix the initial problem. They go, hey, could you just keep running stuff? And we do and that's great. I would say we're firmly implanted in, I would call it the mature startup mid-market. And then we probably get 10-15% that is what you would consider enterprise.

Right. And who's in charge of sales? Is that you? Are you the guy bringing like most of the new clients in or do you have someone dedicated internally?

I have, well, nobody's 100%. Well, that's not true. I do have a sales manager who does a lot of the actual contract and you know, all that kind of stuff. But I have a VP that handles— we've adopted what we call the Atlassian model, where it's sort of a strategist-as-sales model. So it's not— there's no deck involved. It's rare. I mean, sometimes, you know, hey, could you bring in and do a little deck? And we have a pitch deck, but it's usually just a conversation. Go, hey, what do you need? What's going on? You probably need some of this. There's diagnosis involved in the sales process. And then that's how we go, okay, based on what I've heard from you, You probably fit in this level of service. And it's fairly quick. We try to keep it as painless as possible.

Right. And the growth on a year-to-year, is it like what, 10% since you took the helm? What's your goal as a CEO?

The first year was a weird year. And even then we grew a little bit, but we're on pace to grow 25% this year?

That's pretty intense. Is it your retention and referrals and reviews like you told me?

Yeah. I mean, we've— I mean, part of that is we've, again, because we've been going upmarket, we've been raising prices. So that's helpful as well. We don't have to work as hard for the hours that we're working.

Inflation?

Yeah. I would say it's— we'll call it market correction.

Yes.

So there's— we're not the most expensive out there. We're not the cheapest out there. Yeah, there's definitely— we don't compete with, you know, the Merkels of the world that do, you know, 6-figure-per-month type stuff. We don't do that. And that's great. And I don't want to— I don't want to live in that world either. That's just the enterprise world. It's its own beast. And the folks that we do get from enterprise, like I said, it's usually a project here and there. And that's Perfect, because that's usually less red tape than the other stuff. The number of times I've said to my team, for the love of God, it's just an email. If I got a nickel for every time I did that, I'd have a lot of nickels. And I run an email agency, so that's pretty funny for someone like me to say. But I've also sat on the other side, been being brand side and going, it's just an email, guys. Like, it has to be correct. It has to work and it has to sell, but we're not curing cancer here. Let's settle down. For most people, the people that work in nonprofit, the Cancer Society, yeah, you want donations. They're actually trying to cure cancer. That's kind of important.

What's the anatomy of a good email that converts, right? And is it like that different throughout your clients?

My VP likes, and he's doing a presentation on this, At the end of September at Canadian Email Summit. But, you know, we often get to a conversation around what are you actually selling? And most people just think, oh, I'm selling a t-shirt. And it's like, no, you're selling, you know, right? Like, what does Nike actually sell?

Selling medicine to a gigantic pain.

Yeah, right. Like, you're selling a relief for pain, right? It's not that you're selling the pill, you're selling the end result. So There's a lot of that that goes into it, but also, I mean, plain text email really works, right? When it's— because it gets stuff out of the way.

It doesn't get in spam if the copywriting is really good.

If the copy is good, if the hook is good, it's also very easy to interact with. I mean, AMP for Gmail hasn't really taken off. So, you know, converting inside the email still doesn't really happen. And so I've always said, I don't care how long they spend in the email if they click through and convert. So how do you make it easy? How do you, you know, there's, and it's something you have to test on a client-by-client basis too, because in some cases it's, and how high of a consideration is the purchase in general? I worked at a mattress company. The emails that sold, that we were promoting mattresses had to do a lot more work than the emails we sent promoting pillows. Because it was a $3,500 mattress versus a $100 pillow. It's a very different decision because money plays a factor in that. So in those, it's like for pillows, it's here's the main pillow, here are options. For mattresses, it's let's talk about why the mattress is amazing. Let's do this, let's do that. Oh, by the way, there's a discount or whatever, because mattresses, any mattress company that doesn't do discounts, they just don't exist. Like, I haven't seen it in a long time. But I would say it's, I mean, it's the classic, what's the offer? What's the call to action? What do you want them to do? Is it easy to act on? And then recognize that maybe 10% of your audience is gonna be ready to go at any given point.

Right.

And the rest of it is the branding aspect. You are there, you are providing value, and you're there when they're ready.

Yes, and discounts, I would argue across DTC, most DTCs still leverage discounts, even if it sucks to discount your product, they still work, right? Like, yeah, the debate on discounts, right? Like, just do it in the DTC space. Anyone wants to save money.

Well, it's pretty much everything. I had a boss years ago, and this has stuck with me. He said, nobody buys from you until they think they're screwing you. And I was like, that's pretty cynical.

That's rememberable.

True. Yeah. It's like, they don't buy from you until they think they're screwing you. And I go, And in some cases, it's— I had a client years ago, they sold air purifiers and they didn't want to be known as a discount shop. And I said, why don't you give a discount? Because they sold the unit and then they made their profit margin with— it's classic printer ink, right? Their profit margin was on the filters. Like, well, we make money on the filters. They won't buy the filters if they don't buy the unit. So give a little bit of a discount on the unit. And then just get them onto the filter flow.

The cash cow.

And then you make money. Yeah. So I think there's always a balance between sales and margin preservation. And I'm a big fan of preserving margin, like cart abandon, don't lead with a discount, wait a couple of emails and then go, if they still haven't come back, then do an offer because people are smart enough to wait an hour, to wait to save 10%, don't give it away right away. Or you can go, hey, 10% off, 10% off of something is better than 100% of nothing. That's okay. That's a decision you have to make.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, yeah, then that quote reminded me of Alex Hormozi's, uh, yeah, like, make, make them feel stupid not buying, right? Like, that's super memorable. Not necessarily 100% true, but very rememberable, which is the goal with Scott, thanks for being on. Where can people find out more about you?

I mean, Inbox Army—it's inboxarmy.com. That's super easy. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's linkedin.com/n/scottcohen13, so you can find me there. Yeah, I think those are the two big spots.

I make it easy. Scott and Charles for.