We Asked Retention.com's Founder If This Is Legal (ft. Adam Robinson)

The reason our business has done as well as it's done is because we show people how to do it.

I quickly understood the product. It wasn't about building your newsletter list as much as trying to capture their attention at the moment. To receive an email about a product where my decision wasn't made, and oftentimes it's because of trust or pricing or through some kind of messaging, to feel like there was a real company over there.

You should have a partnership person making a relationship with the agencies. It is a super tight network and that is exactly how it goes down.

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 going on, guys? 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 am your host today. And today We're going to dive into something a little unique because in the community, you guys have asked us about our opinions, our thoughts, just questions around this topic, and we haven't really dove into it that aggressively. And I thought it would be best if I brought someone in who's way better than me, the person who probably many of you guys have already heard of, known either through social media or just the fact that he's been around in this market for a long time here. But either way, I want to go ahead and start by introducing and bringing in, he's the founder of retention.com, RB2B2B, and coming up soon, a product called MoltSets as well too. Adam, what's up? Welcome to the show, man.

Jimmy, thanks for having me, man. And my company's even called retention.com.

I know, I know. And so that alone has, uh, definitely, uh, we got, we got things to talk about and I want to dive right into it because look, Here's the, here's the deal, right? Like, and you've heard this for years running this as you've started this market, but this thing's, you know, dirty. This thing is illegal. This thing is whatever, you know, let's, let's just, let's just talk about this upfront because I want people to understand the legality of this and why it's not illegal and why it is working and give me the spiel basically. Let's just dive right into it.

Okay. So we started this company November of 2019. And since November 2019, we've probably been asked 5,000 times. 3 questions. How is this legal? How does it work? What do I send? That's basically it. So, uh, first on, uh, when I heard about this, and by the way, like I was like you, like I owned an email newsletter app prior to launching GetEmails. Uh, I did not even know that this was— and legal is not even the right word. It's compliant is basically the right word. Uh, And here's the story in the US and our data is only in the US. And when you use our tech, which identifies people on your website who don't fill out forms, it only fires in the US, right? But in the US, email marketing is an opt-out rather than an opt-in sport. What does that mean? It means so long as you have an opt-out link, On your email, it is technically compliant. Um, there's a lot of organizations who are trying to, and now that, that is a law, CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, uh, heavily lobbied by the Direct Marketing Association. Um, like this is how cold email works in the US. So you're like, well, why do I think that it's opt-in? Well, it's because the newsletter providers. And some other organizations, uh, Spamhaus and others, um, have encouraged people to push this message out that email marketing is opt-in. And they're very, uh, how do I say this? Like, it's in, it's in their best interest to not actually tell you what the law is. They say it's something that it's not. Um, does that mean you're a bad person if you send non-opt-in email? Look, when it comes down to it, like I always tell people like, uh, email marketing, if you want your email marketing to perform, it's not really about opt-in versus not opt-in. It's about how those emails engage and how those emails complain. If you happen to have an opt-in list that complained more than 1 in 1,000 times, You would be in lots of trouble. That usually doesn't happen, but I think that it could. If you had a non-opt-in list that never complained at all and purchased like crazy, then you wouldn't be in trouble at all. Right? So like email marketing is really a game of managing deliverability much more than it's a game of this idea of whether an opt-in is illegal or not. If you could buy lists and they would deliver and people would buy, people would buy those lists regardless of whether that was illegal or not. You know what I mean? Like, like, like this. So, so it's like the, the, it is actually legal and compliant to do what we do. And the reason our business has done as well as it's done is because we show people how to do it in a way To where the engagement works. You know, it, it, we, we, we dramatically filter and prioritize the contacts people get, um, in order to basically keep the incoming contacts at like 1 to 2% of their list size every day. Right. That's, that's the long and short of, of how we actually get this to work. Uh, because the reality is, There's varying degrees of an email, right? Like one is someone who opted in. One is someone who's on a bought list who's never heard of you ever. Someone who was on your website and did not opt in is somewhere in between that, right? So, uh, these emails will be sort of hotter emails than your list, but if you keep them to 1% of your total sends, and that's a list growth strategy that you have over time, uh, there is, we've just seen it over, I don't know, 7 years. Like there's, there's, uh, There's really not material deliverability risk there. And that's why we're still in business. We're super conservative. I mean, if we got the reputation we were blowing people up, nobody would buy this.

That makes a lot of sense. And your 1 to 2% statement is perfectly right on deliverability side of things. I mean, chances of you messing up someone's deliverability with 1 to 2% thresholds are very minimal. The only way that that might happen is if you got hit with a spam trap or some kind of dirty email. But however, I'm guessing you guys are probably scrubbing that on your side, right?

We are doing a lot of things.

Yes. Yeah. So you guys are protecting the users.

Yeah. I mean, in every possible imaginable way. Yeah. We've hired some, some people who were like actually spammers to like protect our users. Uh, you know what I mean? Like, because they understand the system, so they understand the inverse of the system kind of thing. Um, so, uh, so yeah, we have, we have a lot of, of, of really talented people. I want to add one more thing. So like, who does this work for? Because that's really important. I think if you're the, the, the thing about this product, which it's just sad, but like the person who wants it most is the person who started their business yesterday and they have no emails because they're like, oh, I can get emails that way. The problem is If you do not have a large body of emails going out, we can't do this 1% thing, right? So, um, it's sad. Like, like we used to have a PLG product that you just sign up for and use. The problem was we stopped doing that because people are just blowing themselves, you know, small people were blowing themselves up in Klaviyo and SendLane and whatever else because they'd have 10 contacts. They'd get 100 of ours and only add like a couple true opt-ins or purchasers or whatever. And then all of a sudden their whole list is us and that doesn't work. So generally speaking, I would say like, you want to start thinking about this strategy when you have like tens of thousands of people on your list, you know, it can start working for you. Then I would say our wheelhouse customer has like a 6-digit size list, sometimes bigger.

Yeah.

That's like wheelhouse people who can get it to work really well.

But you got to also add the second part. Second part to that, Adam, is like it kind of yin and yang. Like in order to have a large size of a list, it means that you're driving top of the funnel traffic, which is identifying users so that your product can work. So it kind of has to work together.

Yeah.

All right, stop. I know you're enjoying this pod, but I've got just 30 seconds of your time real quick because I have a question for you. Is it just me or has everyone's tools gotten way more expensive lately? And SMS is where one of those tool prices continues to sneak up on you. You'd think, cool, it's just a few few cents to send, but once you're sending like a real list, that bill really adds up. Because I've run brands and I've been on the ESP side, so I know what the pricing models work and how it's really priced. But SMS can look simple on the surface, and then once you get starting to send some volume, the bill starts looking a bit different. That's one of the reasons why I really like what Omnisend is doing right now. They just rolled out SMS pricing update, and guess what? They lowered their prices starting at just $0.007 per SMS depending on the country and the volume, of course. But you're already sending email and SMS together and having it all in one platform. That matters a lot. You can build automations where email and SMS works together instead of treating them like completely separate channels. And secondly, Omnisend has been investing in AI. They launched their brand new MCP that connects Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude. So you can ask questions, pull insights, check performance, move faster. without digging through any dashboards. So if SMS is a real part of your growth strategy or you've been meaning to make it one, go check out Omnisend. Head to omnisend.com/sendit to get started. And now back to your show.

Traffic is another really good correlate to this working. So like over 50,000 uniques a month, you can get this to work pretty well. And then another thing, it's like this product, And I just love being as transparent as possible because I don't want to waste our time or yours. Uh, this product, you need to think about it as an optimization, right? Really what this is doing, it's helping you grow your email list, but it's really amplifying the throughput of your store, right? The stores with the most throughput are the stores with the best product market fit. And if we're amplifying throughput, It's at a reasonably fixed price. Like the people who are going to benefit the most are the people with the most throughput, people with the best product market fit. It's my point. All of this is, it's more of an optimization than like a zero-to-one strategy. You know, like I would consider a zero-to-one strategy, like adding email marketing, right? Like you have to do that. Like if you don't do that, like your business is not going to get off the ground. Uh, this is very much like, okay, this thing is humming. Like, this is a fairly low lift way to like add something to this machine that where all of the like fundamental blocks are like working how they should, you know?

Yeah. And look, look, and marketers all know this, but like you're wasting, we're not wasting, you're spending a lot of money on advertising constantly. And I think to your point, what you just kind of say, there's 2 points that I want to drive out of that. Number one, like the simplicity of like being able to see the people that are visiting your site just on the Slack or in the messages, just kind of look at them and be like, hey, is that my core target ICP? Am I attracting bad traffic ultimately? That's number one. That's a huge one for me. Number 2, you know, I go back to when I first came upon like your product when it was called another thing. It was called Get Emails back in the day when it first started. I remember working with a customer of ours that I've been working with, a client of ours, and he brought the tool to me and he was explaining what it did. And at first, the skepticism obviously is there of how well this would work. And what was really cool that we saw, and this is, we're going back to 2020 here, guys. What was really cool was like, I quickly understood the product, right? It wasn't about like building your newsletter list as much as trying to capture their attention at the moment. So things like the abandoned cart emails and the coupons, like the things that you could be very direct and transactional, they were on your site, you got an email, feels relevant. Most consumers have no idea if they opted in or not. They forget because they do it all the time because it's just a normal habit of people's. So they don't even know if they did or not, or they might have, but to receive an email about a product where my decision wasn't made, and oftentimes it's because of trust or they're due pricing or through some kind of messaging to feel like there was a real company over there immediately actually brings validity, but also works really well. And that's where we saw a lot of the revenue in dollars. And yeah, if they make a purchase now, they become a newsletter person. But the way that we ran it when we first started was purely not to build them into the newsletter because that's where I think that people get really dangerous on because they're just thinking that they're just campaigns and newsletters. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so that, that to further break down the product, we have 2 different products. One is the one we started out with, which was quite aggressive, which is like people hit your website and we drop them into your newsletter at 1% of your list size per day. Basically that's called Grow. The other one is actually super conservative. It's only people who are on your list.

Okay.

And we're using these really long, durable cookies that like last a couple of years. Uh, cause Klaviyo is really bad at this actually. So we're just laying down much better cookies than Klaviyo can. And it, it like triples the audience of abandoned carts that get sent out to people already on your list. We don't even put people who are not on your list in those flows. So that's, yeah, that is like— Super vanilla. It is, if you are not doing this through some provider, a bunch of other providers offer this because there's nothing gray area about it. And it was like, you know, relatively easy to copy us in this. But if you're not doing that, if you're not using some type of identity vendor to amplify your abandoned browse, product, cart, and checkout, like you are just leaving money on the table. People do not charge a lot per month for it. It is the easiest way to, to, to up your email marketing revenue. It's kind of one and done, which is unfortunate, but like, um, yeah, it's, those are the 2 products. Every single e-commerce store past a certain point should be doing the second. If you have the risk appetite to do the first, more power to you. We won't, we won't blow you up. We swear. And it's compliant, but, uh, I totally get why people wouldn't want to use that one. Right.

Well, I want to go into a spicy topic, Adam, because this is, you mentioned it and I think it's a perfect time to talk about it. Let's talk about the competitive space, right? So I've been in this world just as long as you have in that we've seen this world a lot, but you started the product, I think it was 2019 when you came out into COVID 2020 and all that stuff. And you guys were the only solution in town at first, right? And now we've got a lot of different copycats. And you know what's funny? I always find about copycats is that They're always going to attack the leader, right? Obviously, right? And you guys are the ones that get attacked and people throw words and things. Our product's better. This is better. That's better. Dude, tell us the truth.

Larry Kim specifically throws words.

I wasn't trying to drop names on anything here.

Yeah, I know.

No, look, so, so yeah, we have people—

Let's talk about this stuff. I want to know, is there different data sources? Is there secret sauce that someone else has? Like, tell me about where this data is and like, is it really matter which product, or maybe the secret is you should be using multiple products. So let's, let's talk about this.

It's funny how much time brands spend trying to get more traffic and how little time they spend thinking about the traffic that they actually already have. Because every day people are landing on your site, they're browsing products, clicking around, and then they're leaving without buying or joining your list. And for most brands, they just accept this as normal. I don't know why, but they do. And this is where retention.com comes in. It helps e-commerce brands identify anonymous website visitors and turn more of that traffic into opted-in email subscribers. So instead of only marketing to the people who actually filled out a form, you can actually grow your list from the visitors who are already visiting your site. And what I like about it is that it's flexible. You can start free, you can turn it on when you need it. You can pause it when you don't, and you just pay as you go. There's no big annual commitment. So you just test it. And if it works for your brand, you keep using it. It's basically a way to get more value out of the traffic you're already paying for. Go check it out at retention.com today. And now we're back to the pod.

Um, the biggest guys will use multiple products. I don't think it's probably worth it. Like if you're not literally think of like the biggest Shopify store, you know, They all do this kind of stuff. Yeah. Like, like they all do this kind of stuff and they all, they all usually use multiple providers. I know that what, just from people leaving and coming back, I just know that we're more careful. Like, you know, I think we have a big revenue lead and like we have the ability to just be conservative in a way that Uh, you know, if you were selling against us, you might sell on total number of contacts resolved and pushed into the email list. That's a really bad metric to go buy on because of what I told you. You actually want the exact right amount of the highest quality, you know, highest intent people in your list, which is like, you know, kind of what, what we're focused on. So there's, uh, OpenSend and Customer AI do exactly what we do, meaning just like these 2 products and nothing else, basically. Um, then for the, for, for the abandoned product cart, whatever expansion for that, we call it Reclaim for that product. Uh, there are a bunch of kind of like tangentially related martech vendors who added that to their product suite, even though it had nothing to do with their product suite. So Elevar is one example. They were doing basically ETL, you know, like, uh, I mean, they still are. They sold that business, but like, he added it. Um, people actually, you know, if you're big enough, you use both of them because we're getting, for whatever reason, we're getting different people than they are. Uh, Triple Whale, I think, added it to their their product suite. People added it because it was relatively easy to build. And, uh, it was so easy to point to the revenue in Klaviyo, which Shopify guys love, right? It's like, well, my abandoned cart was making $1,000 a month before you turned this on. Now it's making $3,000 a month. Yeah, I'll pay you $299 a month for that. That's awesome. You know, so, so that's what happened there. And unfortunately for me, unlike my other businesses, which I have this amazing B2B following of SaaS people on LinkedIn, like my thought leadership really doesn't do much for the Shopify guys. Like they're more interested in following Nick Sharma and you and like, you know, whoever else is like more— look, it's not that I don't think I'm qualified to make e-commerce content. It's that I'm building SaaS companies in public. So I think I'm much more qualified to make that. So it's like where all my energy's going. So, uh, so yeah, you know, um, I think we still got a great domain name. We're the leader. Uh, all the big guys use us, but, um, I, I, I wish that I had this like media arm that my B2B side does, 'cause it's like the most amazing Sure.

No, and I think about the competitors you kind of named. I don't think any of them really have a media arm per se, and they're not doing anything.

They definitely don't. They definitely don't. But it's like, that would, that would, I think, solidify the brand part of like the industry leadership, and it's just like not there. So it's like, how do you stay top of mind? I don't know.

If we think about your early rising or retention, get emails, whenever, whatever you guys want to call yourself. There was a lot of time where the IRL or the, you know, in-person events that you guys were doing very aggressively. I believe that though you guys didn't go socially as hard, you guys ended up going in real life, meet people face to face. And as you know, and I know, like in this market, this is just how they buy. And this is why it works so well. It's why we run a conference, you know, and have that BigCommerce roundtable. I mean, we bring these people together and these people will buy from the vendors because that is what works there because of the human contact, plus the community aspect, right? Oh yeah, I use them, they're great. Oh, I use them, they're great. Oh, the 3, 4 people tell you that, you're walking right over to their booth and gonna go sign up.

Yep. I agree with that. I agree with that. And we did go super, super hard. Um, and then we kind of sold, sold to almost all of them, you know, like, uh, and then what do you do, right? When it's like, Uh, but it was, that was a fan. Look, I would recommend for anybody experiencing product market fit in the Shopify space, you're probably experiencing it with the relatively larger stores. To reiterate, you've got it, you know, it can go on forever for some people, but you've got at least like 12 or 18 months where you should hit every single live event. And like, you should have a partnership person making relationships with the agencies. It is a super tight, Network, and that is exactly how it goes down.

That's cool, man. Let's talk about, so last topic I kind of want to mention and broach is like these tools, right? And I always find this funny, but as markets evolve, time goes on, the tool pricing continues to go up and there's like more and more things. You guys recently decided to go the other way here on us and play the game of, and you know, there's a lot and you guys should follow Adam on social media, on LinkedIn, especially if you want to follow what's going on in his actual business side of things and like the business aspect of building a startup, if you're— if that's what you're interested in. But let's talk about this pricing because you did do something. I don't think you're really talking about it enough in the market. I think there's a good business lesson to it. You guys basically rose the raises, uh, rose the waves of how much everything is going to cost, and everyone chased you and tried to get close, but we're still 10, 20% off. And then you just kind of slammed them all on the ground right now. Price, you guys got, first of all, you guys have a free offering, 1,000 leads, I think is what it is now, which is freaking cool. But you guys have now a new low monthly price. Talk to us about this.

We, background on this is our other business, which is for B2B SaaS and agencies, it's called RB2B. It's a PLG. So like product-led, it's like, you know, a bunch of traffic's coming from my thought leadership brand. People hit the website, they speak to no one, they get their questions answered with Intercom's Fin AI thing, which is just, you know, uh, trained on our docs. And then they buy and we have a free plan and it starts at $79 a month. So like, we believe that for the Shopify Klaviyo implementation of this, if you hold out, you know, like, uh, the majority of people who buy it are that. And that implementation is actually quite simple. So we had set up our business to sell a $12,000 a month sales-led deal. And when we really looked at the entire value chain of that business, uh, we didn't think the customers were getting much value out of the handholding that comes along with selling a $12,000 deal, you know?

Yeah.

Um, and we thought that they would appreciate a super low, uh, commitment. It's like, you don't want to sign a $12,000 deal. I don't either in 2026. How about this? $79 a month and we'll charge you 10 cents an email. Use as much as you want. You want to stop, you want to turn it on, turn it off, whatever. Totally fine. Um, And yeah, that pricing is, is, uh, you know, it's 20% of the starting plan of the next, next best guy. So, so the question becomes, how do you push that message out? I mean, we're sponsoring your show, uh, but, um, what's tricky about something that's $79 is on like a $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 deal. Like you can go to these live events.

Yeah. The predictability becomes hard because the TAM, right? This is always the thing that the Shopify stores, especially the applications struggle with, is when you have a $2,500 annual cash value on a product, it's really hard to go to live events and sell on that stuff. Hey, you guys want to stay connected with us? Guess what? We send a daily retention newsletter out that you should join right now. If you're not a part of it, it's at ecomemailmarketer.com. It's completely free. We send it to your inbox daily. We do Breakdowns. We talk about the latest things. We talk about the latest tools out there. There's so much you can do. Plus, we even talk about the pod, of course. So if you're enjoying the pod, you want to be here, you want to listen to us, you want more email and SMS retention marketing tips, tactics, tools, tricks, whatever it might be, head over to ecomemailmarketer.com. We probably have something free that we're giving away right now too on top of that. So go get that, download it, join our newsletter. We'll see you there.

Yes, unless you also have an enterprise, quote unquote enterprise deal. And that is, it's like, so it's like, well, yeah, we're $25 a month, but like, if you got over 50,000 website visitors, we force you to pay $25 grand a year and you think it's worth it. You know? Uh, so some of them can do that. Like, uh, I remember Gorgeous was on the scene, um, you know, when we were, and they started super low. But for us, it's like, I think if I had a huge following in e-com, this message would be out there and it would be getting a huge amount of traction. I just have a huge following of SaaS people. And it's wonderful on that side. It's like when you have a super cheap channel like thought leadership, especially like a dominant thought leadership brand, you basically have free acquisition. And that's what makes funnels like this work, you know? Um, you can't run an ad for, and by the way, it's like, it's like, it's like 2 problems with this offer. One is it's a low dollar price. The other is, like I said before, you need to have a certain amount of traction to even make the $79 offer worth it, right? So it basically throws out 99% of the $2.9 million Shopify or 2.9 million Shopify stores. Which is like not the case with email marketing, for example. So like, it's really hard to target those, let's say 10,000 or 15,000 stores, maybe it's 20,000, uh, with this offer, especially because it's US only. Right. So it's like, it just shrinks, uh, it shrinks the TAM. Um, I still think it was the right move. Uh, but it's, it is unclear to me how I'm supposed to get this this message out, you know, besides sponsoring shows like yours?

Yeah, no, I mean, this is one step of it, but I think it's just, you know, as you, as we talked about it, just the community side of it. People need to talk about it and hopefully we're bringing it out to the masses on the retention side. So they start looking at it and they can go tell their bosses who are out there and their bosses will go, oh, wow, this is a much better deal, right? So there's a lot of things there. You know, you guys have been around for years now, 6, 7 years now. At this point, and you guys were the market leaders and still are the market leaders in the space. So that's why I thought, A, obviously was honored to be sponsored by you guys on the show. But secondly, it's great to have you kind of explain a lot of this stuff. I think that the listeners probably picked up on things that they were probably not sure, but sounds like a dumb question kind of thing. That happens all the time with buyers, right? And then 2, I hope that those who are listening that maybe have been skeptical about it got maybe better questions answered and you might be a little bit more comfortable exploring this, especially when it's free for 1,000. Go try a couple hundred emails, guys. The worst thing you're going to do is turn it off and it costs you no money and the integration takes like minutes. So like it's not very hard to use or set up. So I'm not really worried about that. But yeah, go check it out, go try it out. And you know, they have great things on our website, on their website and stuff about how to use it and all that stuff. And I'm sure they've got great tutorials or talk to the AI. They do a good job too. I know that that's, uh, That's a big thing as a, I'm a customer on the other side.

By the way, we actually on that side of business, we have humans, quite a few of them.

Well, there you go. Then you can at least talk to humans that can help you set this up.

Yeah, I think we, yeah, I think we probably have like 10 or 12 between sales and support, uh, a couple of salespeople and then we have success reps and then support people.

So, um, so you can take a demo.

Yeah, we, we, we actually have humans because it's, it's, it's more complex than the B2B implementation for sure. It just wasn't. We just thought it was less complex than the ten, the forcing people into a $12,000 deal. Like, you know, whatever.

No, I get it.

Yeah, man, that's pretty much the story. If y'all have any questions specifically, you can email me at adam@retention.com.

Yeah, there you go. Or you should follow him on LinkedIn if you're interested in B2B startup business side of things for sure. And if that tickles your fancy, but also RB2B, B2BR2B2 is another Yeah, I'll plug that. It's like retention for B2B. Yes. R2B2B. Yeah, it's crazy. Go find it. I'm a customer that's out on my other business and it's a fantastic tool for the B2B listeners who might be here listening for the intel about things that work. And I know it won't work on the retention.com, but there's actually a business version of the solution and it's generated me a lot of ROI back So I definitely recommend it. So with that being said, dude, thanks for being here today. Thanks for sharing this. We'll get this pod out live here soon, but always great to catch up and talk.

Thanks, Jimmy. It was a really fun show.

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 got Gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.