From Email Marketer to Retention Agency Co-Founder feat. Eric Rausch - EP 49

There's a level of athletic tenacity that comes to reading data and hitting in the trenches and, you know, just throwing bows and looking at how can we move from point A to point B. There's a nice tunnel vision, I think, that comes with that. And it helped shape my mentality on whatever the goal was for the brand or the agency or the clients or whoever, because they're saying, hey, these are the KPIs we're trying to hit. And for me, it just became, I will do nothing else until I hit those KPIs. Yeah, it really just led into the connection into email marketing. And just as I quote on Twitter and LinkedIn all the time, blowing the doors off revenue goals. And every brand we work with has different KPIs they're going for. Many of them actually aren't even focused on attributed marketing revenue from your Klaviyo dashboard, which everyone talks about nonstop. And that's not what we're optimizing for. And the whole mission changes from there.

Yo, Eric, how about them Bears?

How about them Bears? Gonna be a big game tonight.

Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be exciting. Well, by the time the pod comes out, it'll already have happened. So what's the score? We're putting some predictions out here.

Let's be crazy and say 31 Bears, 24 Vikings.

Oh, that's not that crazy, I don't think. I think that's a very realistic score.

All right, let's go with it then.

That's also a high score though. That's a lot of points to put up. We'll see.

That is. Well, I mean, we'll see. Their defense, Detroit defenses. Yeah, okay. I don't know. We'll see. But anyways, Eric, welcome to the pod. You ready to shoot this thing?

Let's get after it.

All right. In three, two, one.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What is up everyone? Welcome back to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing and e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host Chase Diamond. All right, Chase. Well today, as you guys can all see on the screen, I've got a very special guest here today. Eric Rausch is. Is that how you say your last name?

Well, it is.

Okay. He's the co-founder of one of the fastest growing retention agencies in the world. And Eric and his team work with brands like AG1, New Era, Ruggable, Built Basics, Caraway, and so much more. But here's the facts. It wasn't long ago that Eric was on the other side of this and he was an email marketer simply working for brands at one point. And of course, even joining some agencies later on. We brought Eric on because I thought it would be really interesting to kind of just talk about his journey because many of you guys who are probably listening to this pod or fans of Chase and myself and watching this thing, you may be in this boat where you may be just an email marketer today. And, you know, I think getting a perspective for someone who's recently made a transition and successfully scaled, I believe that we could see some really cool learnings from all of this. So, Eric, I'd love to let you just have the floor and we want to hear the story. Like, tell us about where you did before you became an email marketer, how you fell into email, you know, talk about your journey through that email lens and then now starting retention changes. There's a lot and we're going to kind of ask you questions along the way, but I want to kind of let you kind of start and kick it off from there.

Awesome. My dad had his own creative agency in the marketing space. About 20 years ago. So I started writing for him when I was about 14 to 16, and I really liked writing for him. He was a great boss, a very demanding boss that really helped me focus on just elevating my skillset, writing, stacking skills, and presenting top quality work. I thought in that capacity that helped me get a little bit ahead of my peers. Just with that, you know, years of experience before we even graduated college. Post-college life, I started doing, you know, marketing manager stuff, which was a glorified term, you know, now that you have experience under your belt on the brand side, to where they would pay me $48,000 to do social, email, CRO on the website, do some basic coding, and then From there, actually, you know, I had ambitions of being a creative strategist, a creative director, just like my dad was, making these epic commercials for, you know, State Farm and Nike and doing all this cool stuff. That transitioned into getting a job at the Chicago Tribune when I was 24, I believe, and I got pushed into email marketing. And in my year or so there, I saw that of all the channels in the e-commerce space, email actually was paying the most. And me being a money-honey or money-hungry, you know, 24-year-old, I wanted to pursue that because I saw, you know, social media managers, which was my dream job 2 years ago, were making like $35,000, $40,000, and I was already doing $60,000, $70,000. So, The email route kind of just took me organically. I went from there on the brand side to Leo Burnett, Publicis, and Digitas. So that was mega corporate agency side, which I learned a ton from. Really grateful for that because I got to work with like Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin-Robbins, PlayStation, Sprint, some really, really huge brands. And I got to work with very smart people in the industry and just get some of those brand names under my belt. Then I went back to brand side, worked for a company called the Bradford Exchange, which, uh, you know, maybe some baby boomers will know, but not so much millennials and Gen Zers. Then I went from there to Charlotte's Web, which was a CBD company. In like 2019, I really caught that CBD boom, took them from $11 million in e-commerce revenue to, I believe, $56 million in total e-commerce revenue.

Wow.

In less than 2 years. Uh, and then from there I started freelancing, uh, along with my W-2 jobs. You know, it's, it's one of those things where if you know that you're good at something and you're efficient at it, why just work 40 hours a week when you can do that and then make side money? So I started doing that and then that led into meeting Firas. We're both ASU buddies and, uh, we launched New Standard as a, uh, proof of concept agency. And, you know, I think we're like one of the fastest growing retention agencies in the space right now. So it's been a wild ride for the past 2 years.

Heck yeah.

That's really cool. Talk to us about a little bit more about you as an email marketer. Like, you know, it sounds like you've got a copywriting background, which is where you've kind of learned and got your sea legs and so forth. But talk to us about like your, like your general principles and things you learned along the way that you might have, learned that basically helped you become the agency you guys are today?

Yeah, I think, I think from my, you know, very awful and boring career as a college football athlete where I, you know, had 2 tackles at a D3 school and blew my shoulder out, there's a level of athletic tenacity that comes to reading data and getting in the trenches and, you know, just throwing bows and looking at like, how can we move from point A to point B? There's a nice tunnel vision, I think, that comes with that. And it helped shape my mentality on whatever the goal was for the brand or the agency or the client or whoever is there saying, hey, these are the KPIs we're trying to hit. And for me, it just became, I will do nothing else until I hit those KPIs. And once you get a little bit of a track record of success there, Really, the question you start asking yourself is, how can I do this more for more people and make more money doing it? And that led me into the freelance world, approaching email as— am I still connected?

Yeah, yeah, you're here.

A weird notification there. Yeah, really just led into the connection into email marketing and just As I quote on Twitter and LinkedIn all the time, blowing the doors off revenue goals, which—

So you're like a performance email marketer. Is that the way you'd kind of consider yourself?

That's a really great way to put it. I like it. We look at individual KPIs of every brand that we work with, and every brand we work with has different KPIs they're going for. Many of them actually aren't even focused on attributed marketing revenue in your Klaviyo dashboard, which Everyone talks about nonstop, but if that's not what you're optimizing for, then that's not what we're optimizing for. And the whole mission changes from there.

Cool. I like that. Do you mind sharing, like, what does the team setup look like today? I know obviously AI, everyone talks about AI replacing marketers, this, that, the other. What does your team setup look like? Has AI replaced the people on your team? Has it not? What does that look like?

That's a great question. Every agency probably does things a little bit different. We are a boutique agency that really only hires senior-level people. Senior-level people, in my opinion, know how to leverage AI for their own efficiencies. They don't get replaced by AI yet. Cross our fingers there. So every one of them knows how to work the Clods of the world, the ChatGPTs of the world. They know how to work the Rayleighons of the world. To where it helps make them more efficient. But at present, the strategic mind of a senior retention person, whether that's a designer, a strategist, a data, or anybody, cannot yet be replaced by AI. Maybe in 2 years that's different. So our pods look like there's a strategist, there's a designer, and there's the holistic problem of the brand that they're working on. And every strategist on our team works with different designers on our team. Every designer works with different strategists. So there's not a singular pod structure. And it's really fun because we have all these dynamic Slack groups that are like troubleshooting multiple different KPI solves and problems for the brand. And they work seamlessly with each other and we can all cover each other.

All right. Top 3 KPIs, Eric. What are we talking here? What are you guys tracking over there at New Standard?

Number one, we're tracking first-time purchase rate. We wanna make sure that people who are coming in through the pop-up are buying and then coming back and buying again, right? The first-time purchase rate immediately comes back to how many people are repeat purchasing. We really are trying to find our niche in the subscription marketplace. So looking at reducing churn and increasing rebill rates for month 1, 2, 3, and obviously in perpetuity. And then again, it's really the easiest KPI to manage and track and measure, of course, against all of these brands, no matter what brand you're in, is this year-over-year revenue. Are we growing revenue top line? That can delve into contribution margin and everything like that. But really the main goal is, are we increasing revenue? Yes or no? And then all the KPIs fall under that.

Nice. I like it.

Is there one we're missing that we should be focusing on?

I mean, there's tons. I feel like you've covered probably the core ones.

Great.

Yeah. Yeah. Jimmy, do you think you missed any? I mean, I feel like the main ones are there, obviously, but there's a million and one others. Yeah.

I mean, the way ones are there, my deliverability hat goes on and goes, you guys aren't tracking deliverability and just like general, like, I mean, I guess that's not a main core KPI though. So. No, I feel like you guys have the highest thought process on some of this, right? The repeat rate. What's your repeat rate? Your KPIs around that. I guess you could look at AOVs a little bit. Lifetime value is the one that you can consider too. Are we increasing overall lifetime value of the customer base? It all kind of leads to the same thing.

So yeah.

We love to work on the e-commerce golden equation and AOV and CLV is the hot topic of that part of the equation, right?

Non-bounce.

Impressions times AOV, CLV times conversion rate equals revenue. We love looking at that and the hundreds of little toggles and things you can test underneath each of those to move the levers.

Hey, it's Jimmy. Quick 15 seconds of your time because I have something fun to share. Did you know between the two of us, Chase and I, we have over 20 years of experience in email marketing? Recently, we put our minds together to create a certification program that takes all of our knowledge and share it to the world. It's called Ecom Email Certified. It's an end-to-end course certification program that's designed to take anyone, regardless if you're a newbie or an experienced marketer, founder, executive, agency marketer, or any marketing professional, to teach them everything we know about email marketing, SMS, from deliverability to AI to copywriting to design to strategy. We cover it all. It's loaded with 175 modules and 25 hours of education combined with quizzes, community, all designed to educate, test, certify you to become a full-fledged email marketer for e-commerce. And so since you're listening to this pod, we want to reward you with loyalty by giving you a coupon for $200 off this certification. Just jump over to ecomemailcertified.com, check the show notes, and now back to your pod.

For sure. I think we got a good basis on kind of who you are, the stuff that you're building and looking at. I think we should talk about BFCM. What year is this for you in BFCM? Is this your 3rd, 7th, 10th? Like, how many years have you been doing BFCM now?

For New Standard, it is our 2nd. For me, it is my 13th.

That's a lot. So 13 BFCMs. Uh, with kind of the prep that you guys are doing right now, uh, what's like the 1 or 2 things that are similar to the last couple years, and what are like the 1 or 2 things that you're gonna think about differently this year?

I think one of the most critical things that an agency or brand or anybody in the space can work on is making sure that you have an integrated marketing viewpoint on everything, especially in the world of remote work, you know, post-COVID, no one's in office, whatever it might be. If you don't know what the paid team is doing, if you don't know what the social team is doing, if you don't know what the website's promo is, And if you're not communicating cross-channel, everyone gets in their little silos, you're going to be doing a ton of different messaging that goes out to the same people and it's very confusing. And so, you know, knowing exactly when X launches on the website, cool. Have you done any sort of pre-hype campaign to that? Have you formed a waitlist to get the buzz going? Is your Black Friday deal going live the Tuesday before Thanksgiving? Is it going live the Thursday night of Thanksgiving? Like, who's going to be online checking everything that's going well that give the ultimate green light of, hey guys, this promo code is on, it's working, we're good? Because if, if you launch VIP, for example, you launch a VIP list and your brand launches Black Friday early without telling anybody, which which has happened to us quite a few times, then you have this VIP list and they go to the website and they see it's already live and they get snubbed, right? They think that's rude. Are you using the opportunity to build your SMS list with early adopters? Is there a waitlist? Again, like that's the number one thing I think you should work on is how can we use all channels to make sure everyone that may be a purchaser is waiting in line on our website the moment the sale turns live? To get that first purchase immediately before their wallet starts diminishing with every other deal.

Love it.

All right. So let's— I want to switch gears here because I think hearing that story should be inspiring to our listeners, those who kind of heard that journey and different things. I guess the one question I ask before we go into our next topic here is like, As you look back on this journey and you look at your transition from email marketer to an agency owner, Eric, what's one good learning that you can share with someone who's thinking about jumping into that journey?

You really need to know where you want to be in 3, 5 years and know the type of person you are. The agency space is really not for everybody. Starting an agency is most certainly not for everybody. And it's perfectly fine and desirable if that's not what you want to be. So you have to ask yourself, am I comfortable in my current W-2 on the brand side with the workload? And I value free time. I think I'm respected with the money I'm making. If the answer to all that is yes, then keep doing what you're doing. You're great. You know, if you're happy at your— on your brand side, you feel respected. You're learning, you love being able to clock out at 5:00 PM, should that be the case for you, I would say that the agency side is probably not the route you want to take. I would say the agency side is for the people who believe that they are really good at their job, believe that they are very efficient at their job, and want to make more money at the expense Of let's just be real and say some client abuse, right? You're gonna hop on calls at seven in the morning on Saturday. Sometimes you're gonna blow the doors off revenue, and it still won't be enough. You're gonna be facing some internal headwinds with clients that won't approve anything that you make. You're gonna have to be online at nine p.m. on Black Friday, and if you're not, you know, at least for us, you can't work for us. So. The agency side is a bit of a sacrificing freedom for more money. And then of course, the root question is like, what are your love languages, right? Because as I tweeted like 2 weeks ago, if words of affirmation are your love language, the agency space is not for you. You're not gonna get 'em ever.

For sure.

No, I love it. I love it. I love the attitude around it too. It's very, it's cultural, right? This is the culture of how you think and believe, and it's not right for everybody, but there's some good advice A lot of things that people should be thinking about when they're going into this, because it doesn't matter if it's an agency or it's any business. Ultimately, I would say that that's kind of a lot of the things that you said and shared are kind of in line with working and owning and being the boss, right? There's no accountability. There's, uh, it's either you or you sink, right? Like, that's kind of the answer.

You have to sing for your supper, you know, every single day, every single week, which You know, if you like and you're good at and you can embrace, amazing, right? If you get stressed about quota at the end of the month, it's probably not for you just because, you know, your mental health is not gonna be top tier. You know, you're gonna be yelled at a bunch and that's perfectly fine for me. What are your thoughts, Chase?

Yeah, I've got actually 2 questions for you actually about this. So say someone has really thick skin, for lack of a better word to say it. If someone wanted to— a 2-part question. The first part is someone wanted to work for you, right? That's listening to this. How can someone stand out? That's part one. And then part 2 is maybe someone has thick skin, they wanna go out on their own. How do you recommend they get clients? So let's start with the first part. Someone's crazy enough like myself and yourself wants to come work for you. What should someone do to stand out from the rest of everyone else applying?

Uh, fantastic question. I like the phrase, if you say you a dog, go on, be a dog then. Which to me means, if you think you got the savage chops to do it, show me. And that to me, like we ask in interviews all the time, let's say, you know, I'll use the word Adidas. I like using Adidas. We don't work with them in any capacity. Adidas comes knocking on your door. They give you Klaviyo access and they say, make us money. And I'll ask that in the interview and I'll just listen to your answer. And I'll throw some caveats in there like, okay, great. Now you have no design resources. How do you make money? Okay, now you only have 10 hours before the client wants to see incremental revenue. What do you do? And if you can't answer those questions, you don't, I would argue, know enough about e-commerce to be handed the keys to a 9-figure account. When they're going to ask you at the end of the first week, what did you do? And if your answer is, oh, I ideated, I strategized, I looked in your accounts, Faraz and I will ask you 2 hours into an account, what incremental tests have you set up? And if the answer is you haven't done any of it, then it's like, what did you do for the past 2 hours? Yeah.

Yeah. Got it. So basically it's don't BS. Like if you're good and you know what you're doing, there's a place for for you with us. And if you don't, it's like, we're going to sniff out the BS pretty quickly. Save yourself and ourselves the time. Don't bother applying until you're ready.

Yeah. And we ask those questions, right? And it's perfectly fine if you don't know the answer to any of the questions that we ask, as long as your response is, I don't know that answer, but I'll look it up and get back to you, right? If you start lying to us about KPIs, like we'll ask people, what are the top 5 highest performing flows. And you would be, I think, shocked at how many people say they have 8 years of experience on their LinkedIn and resume and they're like, birthday flow. And we're like, oh my God, like, no, you know, like if you can't just hit off abandons, welcome, post-purchase, win back, like if you can't hit those right away, you know, talk to you in a year. Hopefully you come back and kick some ass with us.

For sure. Yeah. So someone's now maybe thinking on the second part of this question, Eric and Faraz, they've built something great. While I'd love to work for them, I really wanna be my own boss. What's the one or two quickfire recommendations you have on how to land their first, second, third, whatever client it might be for them as a freelancer or an agency? Hey there, it's Chase, and I hope you're enjoying the pod so far. I want to quickly talk to you about one of our sponsors. And yes, sales tax. I know no one wants to hear this. However, if you are selling online, you're probably spending way too much time, money, and stress on something that needs to be automated. Enter Kintsugi. They're named after the Japanese art of turning raw pottery into something beautiful and resilient. And that's exactly what they do for your tax chaos. Their AI monitors, files, and optimizes your sales tax automatically across all states and jurisdictions. We're talking about saving you some serious time. Their average customer saves 9 hours every single month. That's over 100 hours a year that you're going to get back to focus on actually growing your business. And here's where it gets really good. No longer will you have to have expensive tax professionals that eat into your profits. Kintsugi's AI handles compliance with a 98.3% reduction in errors. That's practically bulletproof accuracy. And they have many one-click integrations with your existing systems. That means the setup is painless and their white glove support team has your back every step of the way. Sales tax headaches, consider them eliminated forever. And it's for e-commerce, SaaS, and even agencies. Really anyone that pays a sales tax needs this and they need Kimsui. And we have a very, very special offer for you. So if you mention myself and Jimmy, you'll get 3 months completely free. That's 3 months of automated tax filing, perfect compliance, and getting your life back. Visit trykintsugi.com and mention Jimmy and myself for your 3-month head start.

You have to ask yourself, I think, why somebody would want to work with you and what your ICP is. Like if, if you're whoever and you don't have a designer on staff, Okay, then you really are limiting your your entire pool of someone who needs a CRM and they have no designer or no data or no implementer, and you're like, why wouldn't they just hire a CRM then? Like, why do they need you as an agency? If you have all those teams, then you go great. Okay, if Nike were to come to you tomorrow, could you solve them? Could you take them on? Right? Like, if you can't handle Certain clients perfectly fine. What's your ICP? Then if you know what your ICP is and you have the team to handle it, as as you both do exceptionally well, does anyone know that you're available and open to doing any of this work? How do you do that? By posting valuable content all the time on LinkedIn, Twitter, social media, anywhere, hitting up your network. And you're gonna eat poop for the first few months. No one's gonna wanna pay you any money. Our first couple clients were paying us $700 to $2,500 a month. I was working for free for the most part with my hours for the good part of a year. And if you're not comfortable doing that, it's not for you. You're not gonna get any case studies. No one's going to know you're working. You're you just like you're too money focused and you haven't earned it yet. So you have to sit with what your goals are and know that there's going to be a long road with no light at the end of the tunnel, and you're going to be working 100-hour weeks, and you're going to get that lovely $1,800 paycheck for the whole month of work. And if you're not smiling, ready to go back to work the next day, then it's not for you.

Cool. Love it. Love it.

I feel like we're going to rename this pod, Here's Why You Shouldn't Start an Agency.

When it works out though, gosh, it's great.

No, it's, I mean, dude, this is the most truthful, raw stuff. I mean, this is what people want to hear and, you know, they don't want to hear the fluff of how easy it is. They want to hear about why it's so hard. And honestly, you're right. Like if you're giving them a reason and you've said something here today that has stopped someone from going off and building an agency, Well, then you've done a service to the world. So that's not a bad thing. All right, Eric, let's let's flip this thing over. I want to I want to focus on something else. Now, you're coming on. We haven't done anything about Black Friday Cyber Monday yet as it's coming up, and I know we're probably late already to even share advice. However, I want to ask you, and I think I've got a couple questions, probably one or two questions around this. But really, the the number one question for me is like, how do you guys prepare for Black Friday? Like there's probably a playbook that you guys have internally, like. Here's what we're going to do. Here's a checklist. Here's all that stuff. And the second question that follows up to that, Eric, is how long before Black Friday are you typically ready to go? Like, what's your like drop-dead date? So tell me about this.

The drop-dead date is not candidly set by us. We are waiting on what the brand decides the promo is and whatever. And we're nonstop asking them like, what are we thinking? Uh, you, whenever you're listening to this podcast, had a great time, and I really hope you took advantage of it. You just came off Labor Day, which is about the last big sale pre-Black Friday. So you have to sit with yourself and ask this question: what did you learn from your Labor Day sale that you can repeat for your Black Friday sale? If the answer is nothing because you didn't test, then you didn't do what you needed to do for Labor Day. So those questions are like, do, you know, lifestyle hero images perform better than product style images? What landing page converts the best? Does doing a gift guide make it worth it or not? All of these things can be applied throughout Q1, Q2, and Q3 for repeatable wins that can be then launched for Black Friday. Does a waitlist help or hurt? It might not do a lot of great things for your brand, and that's fine, so don't do it. But do you know what subject lines move the needle? Do you know what creative visuals move the needle? Do you know what segments perform the best? Do you know what landing pages on your website convert the highest? Do you know if there's any customers in your entire list that will convert without a purchase or a discount? And do you know how many of those people that you can expect to purchase more than one time in November, you know, whatever, 24th through December 31st? Can you get as many of those people as you can to buy 2 or 3 times? What's your strategy on reactivating them once they've purchased? What are your exclusions on your campaigns? What's your post-purchase look like? All of those things should be dialed in by now. And, you know, Q5 is a real thing that no one really thinks about. Where you do post, you know, Christmas shipping cutoff. There's 15 days left in that year that you can really move the needle with some big wins if you plan accordingly.

No, I love Q5, man. I think we did a pod on Q5 before. We'll probably do another one this year, but Q5 is an exciting time. And, you know, when I was running my brand, that was a really big, like, I would say the difference between Black Friday and Q5 for us as a clothing apparel brand was Black Friday allowed us to kind of blow out like inventory for really cheap and kind of leftovers and old stuff. But Q5 honestly was actually more about people buying for themselves almost, it felt like. And our AOVs were much higher for Q5, and we just used to sell things at a lower discount than we had to do with Black Friday. But a lot of people who bought were not buying old stock, they were buying the newest and greatest stuff because I think they were buying for themselves. Something I learned when I was watching it. And we used to love that time because the profitability, uh, of the sale through Q5 was always better for us than the money that we made on Q— on Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Yeah, you really need those like hero catch-your-eye sale promos. And one thing, you know, especially in the apparel business, if you have a ton of SKUs, if you're like over-indexed on any SKU individually, you know, we've done it a bunch where we have said, you know, up to sales, and that up to number is ridiculous, up to 70% off. And it could be 1 or 2 or 3 SKUs that you're over-inventoried on, but that little hero gets more clicks, and then the sale itself can be typically, you know, 40-50%, whatever it might be. But you can really move the needle and reduce inventory overhead on some of your underperforming products if you switch the sale up after Black Friday to hit those individual SKUs.

Sure. Any of your clients launch new products during Black Friday? It's one of my favorite playbooks.

We had a bunch of clients launch products in the past few months. As far as I'm aware, I don't think any of them are launching products for Black Friday, but there might be some sweet nuggets in my inbox in the coming weeks that means they are. But as of right now, I don't believe so.

Okay.

What's the playbook if you are launching a product?

Very cool. All right, so it was a good breakdown of Black Friday. I'd love to kind of— what's the goal? I mean, obviously the goal is always to sell as much as you can for the brand and help them get as much repeat customers and drain the funnels and all that stuff. But when you guys are tracking your internal KPIs around Black Friday, because it's a special time, right? Like this holiday can— it's sad to say this, but like it can almost make or break a brand, meaning like— They either are going to have a great year or a horrible year based around this. And obviously being an email marketer and someone who's actively in the brand running that retention side, that's definitely a lot of pressure on different things. You guys sound like you're very data-driven around these things. What kind of data do you guys look for? You guys looking for big spikes around this stuff? Is there like a marker that you are looking like 3 times more on my AOVs or your repeat percentages should increase? Like what are you guys chasing there when you guys think about it? Hey, okay, I'm disrupting the pod for just a quick 60-second break and a quick little shout out to our title sponsors of the podcast, Omnisend. Okay, for those that don't know, Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS marketing automation platform specifically designed for e-commerce brands. They make it super easy to engage with customers, drive repeat sales, and create those seamless personal experiences we're always talking about. Here's 3 things I love about Omnisend. First and foremost, they're trusted by over 120,000 25,000 e-commerce merchants worldwide that absolutely love them. With a 4.8 rating star with over 6,000 reviews on the Shopify App Store, it's an obvious choice for your email, SMS, and push needs. Secondly, I love great customer support, and Omnisend, they're absolutely nailing it. They're responsive, their help docs are great, and their team is absolutely fantastic. And third, they have great features and better pricing. Pricing matters just as much as features, and Omnisend, you're going to get both of those. And they have all the features need for your store, and their pricing is absolutely fantastic. In fact, recently I just heard a story about 2 community members that made the switch. One reduced his price from $8,500 to $3,500, which is huge, but even bigger, that $3,500 included SMS, which is absolutely wild. Then another agency I just recently talked to, they just switched their entire client base over, and he's been saving his clients anywhere from 30 to 60% off their bill, which is allowing him to take that money and reinvest it on the top of the funnel so they can make more ads and make more money. Omnisend nails these 3 things that I care most about: great support, great features, and fair pricing. Plus, I just helped Chase make the move to Omnisend with his own personal email list, and their migration was super easy. They even have a team to help you, support you, and they have a great automated tool to bring your contacts right over. So if you're looking to take your email marketing to the next level, I highly recommend checking out Omnisend. They got the tools, The tools, the automation, the expertise to help your brands grow and thrive. Head over to omnisend.com/sendit to learn more and start scaling your customer engagement today. Now let them know Chase and Jimmy sent you. Now let's get back to the pod.

All of those KPIs, uh, are discussed with individual brands and they all optimize for different things. Some of them know that their CAC is going to be out of this world, uh, in Q4, and so they really want us to make sure that we get You know, the first wave of Black Friday shoppers to come back for Christmas and maybe come back for that Q5 window we talked about. So we're optimizing for repeat purchase rate in Q4 specifically. Some of them are trying to make sure that we don't over-index our discounts. So like, what's the lowest discount that we can lead with? And then there's a lot of interesting KPIs on the brands that keep the same promo for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Versus ones who make Cyber Monday lower or Cyber Monday higher. And as this Black Friday window keeps increasing, right, we're just starting more and more earlier and earlier.

Cyroctober.

If you're not changing your deal, at a certain point you're like on message 27 of 40% off and the customer's like, dude, you know, like what, what is cool about this? So it's really interesting to work with Brands on figuring out like what the promo structure is. Again, like BOGO 80 is the same as 40% off for the most part, right? But like BOGO 80 sounds cool if you can do flash sales, if you can do a mystery sale, if you can do something that changes the visual identity of the promo so you're not just doing 10 straight days of the same promo. We talk to them about that, how that impacts contribution margin. What are we doing in the giveaways and things like that? But really, the KPI again, all of those wrap up into revenue. And so the question is, what was your revenue last year? What is your revenue target this year? What is your revenue per email or revenue percent if we're wrapping in SMS? And those are the efficiency goals that we're looking at. You know, one of my favorite things as a marketer is to look at an SMS that has like images and emojis and you just go. That was expensive. So keeping costs low for SMS while increasing frequency is really crucial for the Q4 sprint.

Fire.

Cool.

Dude, that was great. I don't have anything left on my side.

I have like 1 or 2 questions, Eric. They're kind of like, Eric, any alternative channels you're using this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, not email or SMS?

100%. Direct mail. You should be ripping promos out pre-Black Friday. You should be ripping promos out in— if you can, in Q5. The goal for your direct mail again is to not send that to your engaged audience. You know, the thing I talk about all the time is if you send your engaged audience to Amazon, you're never going to get them back. So make sure you craft a nice win-back segment for that and use unique codes. If you can leverage an app That's really helpful for your brand, especially if you're like in the supplement space. That just helps bolster your SMS signups. It gives you those push notifications. All of these ways, if you have channels that you're trying to boost, again, like the app in particular, if you can give the VIP treatment to those individual channels through early Black Friday access, You can 10x your app signups overnight if you just slot that in, give them 24-hour, 12-hour heads up, anything like that. But those are really key. And then again, you know, social media giveaways are really crucial in this time. Anything you can do to break through the noise, but direct mail is gonna be your number one way to go.

Love it.

Cool.

What about push? You guys doing any push?

We do a little push. We should be doing more. And, uh, that is something that we are asking all of our brands. We have like this general checklist, uh, that we're asking all of our brands ahead of Q4. You know, can we do this? Can we do this? Are we open to this? We're getting a little bit too late for some of them, but you know, our mission and strategy is as long as we ask, if they say no, then like it is what it is, but at least we've asked. We try to give them this cross-channel domination option. And really just focus on sending as many great campaigns as we can.

Nice. Very cool. I thought I had one more question I wanted to ask you. We talked about toolset, BFCM. No, I think I'm there, dude. Dude, this was super awesome. Eric, thank you for jumping on here. I know you're super busy. Obviously, we'll see you in a couple weeks, but like, I know you're busy and we appreciate you jumping on this thing. Where do they— what do people find you online? And you have some social media plugs here?

Uh, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you follow either of these 2, they tag me and stuff all the time, which I'm very grateful for. Uh, and then, yeah, I'll see you guys at, uh, Commerce Roundtable in 2 weeks or so. Uh, best event of the year if you ask me. Uh, best venue of the year too. So very excited for that. Uh, and there's some pretty killer speakers lined up.

Appreciate you, brother.

That's awesome, dude. Yeah, thank you, man. Well, with that, that's a wrap. I don't even know what the title of this pod yet. We'll come up with something fun and fancy for it, but we'll do that. But this is episode 49. If you enjoy this podcast today, please make sure you like, subscribe, follow, leave us a rating on your favorite podcast listening platform. You can follow this show on X, LinkedIn, IG, TikTok, but YouTube is our primary. Also, of course, if you enjoyed what we're talking about and you want to nerd out with us, we drive a— we drop a daily newsletter at ecomemailmarketer.com. You can tune in and listen to that, and I mean, you have to subscribe to that and start getting retention stuff sent straight to your inbox. And last but not least, social media. There's two ways to find myself, which is LinkedIn and X. Chase, where they find you online?

Most platforms chase no A and diamonds.

And when he says most, he means like all the platforms. So go check check him out.

With that being said, guys, actually recently I just saw that. That you're on fire.

Thanks. Yes, it's been fun. It's been fun figuring it out slowly.

I gotta get on there. I'm not on there currently.

Uh, Chase is exploring. I told Chase about Lemonade. I'm sure he's gonna tell me one, uh, a week later that he's got 300,000 followers on Lemonade. Thanks. So, uh, that's the TikTok's Instagram looking thingamajiggy that's kind of like TikTok but not like Instagram, but I don't know. So yeah. Anyways, with that, guys, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week. That's Send It. Thanks, Chase, for being here, and thank you, Eric, again for being a special guest. We'll, we'll drop all his links and show notes, uh, below so you can get linked to him. Otherwise, thank you and have a great one. See you guys later.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.