How to Harness AI and Email Marketing for Your Creator Business; Part One

Hey, hey, you're listening to the Level Up Creators Podcast. Amanda Northcutt here, founder and CEO. We help digital creators build thriving, sustainable businesses they love, and we are so glad you're here. Welcome. I am super excited to introduce my brilliant guest today because he and I are going to cover a lot of ground, especially on AI and all things email marketing, all through the lens of the creator economy. But before I do, here's a little bit more about my guest, Casey Hill. Casey is a growth veteran with over a decade of experience in helping software companies scale fast. Fast, whether it's garnering millions of views on Quora and LinkedIn or pioneering new growth levers like booking his team on hundreds of podcasts. Literally, Casey is always looking for creative and value-led ways to grab attention and break free from the mold. In his current role leading growth at ActiveCampaign, he is building organic growth engines to propel the team to $1 billion in ARR. That's annual run rate. That's $1 billion with a B, to be clear. And on the consulting side, Casey also works with some of the world's biggest firms, including firms like McKinsey, BlackRock, Colman's, GLG, Guidepoint, and others, where he provides institutional guidance to private equity and venture capital teams around topics like SMB marketing, vendor selection, SaaS pricing, SaaS marketing, and CRM tool differentiation, market analysis, inbound marketing, and marketing automation. Welcome, Casey.

Hey, Amanda. Thanks so much for having me.

So excited to, to be with you today. And I mean, this conversation is going to be such a treat for our listeners because Casey, you are so good at taking your Massive breadth of experience and applying it so clearly and effectively to any audience. So thank you for putting on your creator economy hat today to chat with me about AI, best practices around all things email, from newsletters to onboarding to reactivations. And importantly, we're also going to talk about the value of owned assets, which we'll jump into here in just a minute. First, Casey, in case someone's, uh, this is someone's first time listening to the show and maybe doesn't quite know what ActiveCampaign does and how it helps creators and online business owners, could you give a quick intro?

Yeah, absolutely. So first off, super excited. There's so many changes that are about to happen in 2024 across a lot of these topics, from automation, email marketing, AI. I think there's going to be some kind of watershed moments. So super excited to unpack those. ActiveCampaign is an email marketing tool as well as a CRM tool to manage relationships kind of bundled into one. So the way I kind of explain it to folks, the way I explain it to my friends who are launching startups or creating businesses is When people are first starting out, there's a lot of tools that I think facilitate kind of basic email functionality. There's tools like Mailchimp and ConvertKit and a new one called Beehive, which I think is great. And these are really powerful tools to be able to essentially execute on creating your first kind of email marketing drips. But I think that as businesses grow a little bit, they often kind of hit these inflection points where they say, hey, it'd be really cool to be able to manage relationships. I just went to an event and I want to follow up with certain people that I ran into, or I have certain deals that I'm trying to kind of monitor. And that's where that CRM piece kind of comes into play. So oftentimes that person will be like, okay, I have this email tool. Now I'm going to get this separate kind of CRM tool to manage some of these relationships. And as we all know, in business today, you often use, even as a small business, a dozen different tech tools, right? I got Calendly because I need to book stuff and I start using, you know, ClickUp or Notion to start monitoring things. And so the other factor I think it's really important with businesses is to find a tool that a lot of things can plug into. So you're not having to constantly go with these complex outside integrations. So that's essentially where AC sits. It's for that business that's matured beyond that kind of just basic email marketing stage, looking for a little bit more sophistication, looking for something that works with all their tools as they kind of scale to that next kind of stage of their business.

Nice. Yeah, that's a great explanation. And, um, if listeners, if you've heard any of our previous episodes, you've probably heard us talk about ActiveCampaign and/or ConvertKit. And so we feel that those are an essential piece of a creator-first business tech stack. And ActiveCampaign is such an unbelievably powerful tool, and we have gotten unbelievable results for our clients by fully leveraging kind of the, uh, Swiss Army knife that ActiveCampaign is. And so I'm super excited again to have this convo and dig into it a little bit more. Uh, but First, I'm going to roll back just a second. I want to point out that you have a lot going on based on what I just read through on your bio, and I'm realizing that the teaching gig that you have did not even make it onto the show intro. So can you give us a little backstory on your career path and kind of how you got to where you are today?

Yeah, for sure. So I've been basically in software, in SaaS as an industry, for almost my entire career in terms of kind of my day job. So I've been doing that for about 13 years now. And during the course of various different businesses, I've kind of always been focused on that SMB sector. So working with a lot of small e-commerce companies, creators, consultants, agencies who are often that 4-person team, that 8-person team, sometimes even that solopreneur team. So spent a long time with people kind of in that initial inflection stage throughout my career. I've worked a lot in martech specifically. So working now at ActiveCampaign, worked for a competitor called Ontraport a handful of years years back. And during that time also started to do a lot of consultation. So because I was very exposed to this industry, started to meet with a lot of different companies and help with vendor selection, talk about kind of what's happening in martech, what are the trends. So I got kind of this unique lens to be able to spend a lot of time behind the hood of almost all the major players, spent a lot of time in HubSpot and Pipedrive and ConvertKit and Mailchimp, Constant Contact, MailerLite, Keep. I mean, I could keep rolling and rolling. But what was cool is to get a little bit of like that 30,000-foot view Oftentimes, I think that, you know, we choose a tool, we kind of jump in, and we're not quite aware of what's happening in the overall ecosystem. So I've been lucky enough to be able to work with a wide range of clients and a wide range of tools kind of in that space. And then starting in 2016, I actually launched my own e-commerce business that I took to Kickstarter. We raised $40K, and then we kind of had a phase where we went direct-to-consumer, and then we went to retail. So that was cool to be able to take some of these skills that I was learning every day actually working with folks and be able to kind of build that small business on the side. So that was really fulfilling and enjoyable and definitely learned a ton about, you know, ad spend, learned a ton about kind of monitoring those relationships. And because it was a physical e-commerce business, also a lot about shipping and fulfillment and those different pieces. So that was an adventure then because for a number of reasons, one of them being that the margins in physical product businesses are really tough. In 2021, I also launched a course business. So I started kind of down that path of basically running digital courses, seeing how that kind of varied, building an email list, kind of going through those motions once again on the side. So all of these businesses that I was running, I was running concurrent while working full-time in basically that SMB martech space across Ontraport, then a company called Bonjoro, and now ActiveCampaign over the last 9 or 10 years or so, those, those 3 companies. So that's kind of what I was doing. And during that time, getting a little bit more also into institutional consulting. So consulting, I started out, I started out doing small business consulting, right? Conversion rate optimization, email, that type of thing. And then I stumbled upon a company called Guidepoint. And Guidepoint essentially was like, hey, we have questions about SMB martech and we'll pay you a lot of money for an hour of your time to talk about these things. And I said, oh, what the heck, I'll try it. And it went well and they booked more sessions. And then that's what got me onto the GLG path and eventually, some of these companies started to reach out directly, hence the connections in with McKinsey and BlackRock and some of those other firms that basically were looking at oftentimes large series investments. And they wanted to talk with people that were deep in the industry that used these tools, that understood them to know, what does the partner ecosystem look like? What are the differentiations? Is it sales-led? Is it marketing-led? Those types of questions. So that was kind of the arc of that. Then last year, I decided to try to reach out and do some teaching. So I actually cold reached out to UCSD and part of the reason I did this is I was going through a hiring phase and I was a little bit frustrated with the challenge of hiring brand new people with marketing degrees who didn't seem to have a lot of like actionable industry skills. They didn't know a lot of like channel-specific knowledge. Yeah. It felt like education was very theory-based. We were teaching people about stages of the funnel. We're teaching people about ICPs and buyer personas and all this stuff. But what about how to write on Twitter, how to write on LinkedIn, how to actually run an email campaign? Like what actually converts? Some of those skills that are applicable and valuable to a company when you bring someone on were kind of lacking. So I reached out to UCSD essentially with the pitch of saying, if you want an industry practitioner who will talk about what we're actually doing day to day, the actual channel-specific stuff, I would love to do that. And luckily they said, that sounds brilliant, we'd like to do that. And so I built curriculum, taught it, went really well. So I taught it for a second semester. semester. And then Stanford actually recently reached out and was like, we feel like demand generation is changing. Would you be open to doing a course through our Stanford Extension around demand creation and where that exists today? And I said, that sounds brilliant. So I'm looking to do that in April of 2024. So that's kind of what started the teaching arc.

So cool. That is so awesome. I mean, yeah, the university model is Fairly arcane as it goes anyway. And yeah, it's— I mean, universities are research institutions, and I could talk about that situation all day and the conundrum with the hiring pipeline and all those kinds of things. That's one of the reasons, like, we hire young people and college interns and have a specific college internship program so we can kind of like influence those outcomes and learning. So I think that's super cool that you are giving back in that way. I love kind of the the arc of your career narrative as well. I mean, your experience in consulting and digging under the hood of like all these different businesses is so interesting in that, uh, in aggregate really enables you to give so much better advice to other people. One, when you're looking at a whole bunch of businesses, and also when you're doing that work yourself, running your own e-commerce business, running your own digital products and things like that, it gives you so much empathy for the people that you're helping, and it totally changes your way, um, or changes your level of impact. Because just like at the university model, you're talking about it being, uh, more steeped in theory than action. Consulting can often be, uh, more steeped in theory than action. That's like that whole, um, what's that saying? It's like those who cannot do teach, or those who cannot do consult, or something like that. So if you can bridge the gap where you're actually doing, uh, practicing what you preach and things like that, I think that's— Really, really valuable. And again, like I mentioned kind of in your intro, like your ability to distill your learnings into actionable, you know, strategic and tactical methodology for any audience kind of within that umbrella that needs like marketing technology and all of the growth marketing and things like that, which is just about everybody these days. It's such a unique skill. So I'm super excited to talk about the creator economy today. And this next question is intentionally broad, but what makes you so good at growth marketing? And how can our Creator Economy listeners apply your learnings in their own businesses?

Yeah, it's a great question. Growth marketing is so interesting. It's changed so much. And even the term like head of growth, I feel like is very kind of nebulous. No one knows exactly what that means. Is that a marketing role? Is it a sales role? I think that it's an interesting term. But the way that I think about growth at this stage, growth marketing specifically, is it kind of starts by having an eye towards distribution and amplification. So it's funny, actually, in my class where it kind of culminated in people building a content calendar, one of the things that I was very focused on in that class was to make sure that it wasn't just a content calendar, but it was also a distribution plan. One of the things that when I work with teams and in my own role, all the companies I work with, is I push really hard in saying, how are you distributing this and how are you getting this in front of more eyes? So it's not enough in today's world to just make content and just post it on social, right? You need to be finding those ways to hop on a podcast to talk about it, to tie in on a collaboration with a partner and get them to email out about it. You need to be thinking with that hat of how am I going to amplify this? And on social, one of the things I've always been a big pusher of as well is to maximize impact to time. So when I, when I spend time crafting a link LinkedIn post, I'm also going to move that into forward slash SaaS on Reddit and forward slash entrepreneur. And I'm also going to put it onto my Twitter and I'm also going to put it onto specific like demand curve on Slack, specific communities on Facebook. So the footprint of that post that might get 20,000 views might be 100,000 views for literally maybe 10 minutes more of my time. You have to sometimes craft to the medium a little bit, but if your focus is just generating really good content, often you'll find that it could be applicable in a lot of places. So that there's a lot of different ways and arms of distribution. But I think one, think about any content that you build with that lens, distribution and amplification. The next thing I think it's really important about growth marketing is to have this balance between fast, high-impact plays and slow, high-impact plays. So the way I describe this to folks is if you go change your prices overnight, you just go raise your prices, $10 a month, now higher. Usually what happens is the following. You will see an immediate step change in your revenue that will move up. Sometimes there'll be a little dip because you often will get a little bit of a churn bump, right? Yep. You'll raise your prices, it'll increase your average revenue per user, you'll get a little bit of a churn bump. But for the majority of people that are using that discretionarily, like you're not raising prices 10 times a year, usually it's net positive is the honest thing. It might frustrate people, but usually it's net positive for the business. So that's a fast lever. It's a fast lever that creates high impact within your organization. Same thing with website optimization, like changing your core copy or changing something on your pricing page that can create a big impact quickly. But the challenge is, as I just kind of noted, you can't do that continually. You can't just keep getting that same benefit by optimizing your website. You can't keep getting that same— you can't raise prices 20 times. So it's finite. So you have to balance that with these slower levers that build over time. And that's things like your owned assets, a podcast that you launch, a newsletter that you launch, building up your brand image, all of these things that can be really powerful SEO, but they take time. There are these cumulative levers that slowly build. And so I think that my step 1 is think distribution amplification. My step 2 is where is your combination of those fast and slow plays in your roadmap? And I can tell from working with a lot of brands, if you just focus on fast, You're going to have a bunch of peaks and valleys. And if you just focus on slow, you're going to be moving so slow. You'll see that continual growth, but you'll often have too much of a burn rate that people will, you know, you'll peter out, you'll quit, you'll fall out because you're not getting to that point fast enough. So, that's my second pillar. And then the final one, this comes from my mentor, Pat Campbell, who sold his business for $200+ million. I think he's brilliant in the content sector. And one of the things he always pushed me on was he said, you need to have a combination of maintenance and viral swings. In your marketing plan, so maintenance is the stuff we all know. You need to have the case studies that say we solve X problem. We do. You know, we're inserted at this point of the funnel, and and it's all the stuff that you know you need to be doing. And it's a mistake to not do those things because there is you know people are going to search for terms. You need to have some sort of visibility. So maintenance swings are important, but you also don't want to have just maintenance swings. You want to go out and create that. creative show that has a 20% chance of success. But if it works, it could be something that could get you hundreds of thousands of views. Your bottom of the funnel maintenance swings is not going to drive that top of funnel stuff. So the viral swings is where you get out and you really try those things that are more out there to get that top of funnel strong. And I think if you do that with a good tempo, then over the course of the year, you maybe have 4 flop viral swings, but you have 1 or 2 that land. And that works out in creating a strong top of funnel momentum. So those are kind of the 3 pillars, balancing the maintenance and the viral, having the fast and slow, and having that distribution lens that I think really help make the most effective growth marketers.

I love that. Yeah. And then kind of thinking like in rhythms, like what do we do on a recurring basis, whether it's the podcast or, you know, long-form YouTube video or whatever? Yeah, I love, I love that lens. That's a really good kind of 1-2-3 punch. And I think I want to double-click really quickly on the distribution amplification point number 1 of, of like growth marketing pillars. So I have 2 diagrams on my whiteboard right here, and one of them is distribution channels and the other is content maximization diagram. And so we use this video podcast as what we call our source content. And from this piece of source content comes at least 4 newsletters, at least 4 blog posts or articles, and we can make, uh, I guess at least 7 clips or shorts that we'll put out on YouTube and LinkedIn. And then, um, I just kicked off an Instagram account that I'm committing to post on every day for at least a year. It's CEO_Creator. My face is right there, so it's easy to find. But, um, I mean, it's just like an infinite content creation machine if you have that like long-form content, especially something like a podcast or something that's interview style, and you are both Pulling the maximization levers to trickle down through all of your available distribution channels and then, you know, plugging them in in the right places. So there's just infinite ways that you can slice and dice. And that is so important as a content creator and/or, you know, online business owner, solopreneur, anything like that. People with limited bandwidth and not necessarily like a team to help them thinking through that lens is so, so, so important. I'm so glad you shared that. Thank you.

Yeah, totally. And I think it also extends to say, You know, you create all those assets and then you reach out to me, you say, hey, Casey, here's a clip that I think might be valuable to your audience. And maybe you have partners or you have other people that work within the organization. You say, hey, I think this might be valuable to your audience, and then they post it. And so that becomes kind of the ripple effect too. You create all these assets and then you can deploy them across these channels that bring amplification because they have unique audiences, they have people that aren't exposed to you. And that's, I think, where the magic happens when you invest in just high-quality content. and high-quality advice, instruction, all those different things that enables you to have a really good distribution plan. That's one thing I'll just kind of say as the final point on this is that I think a lot of times folks will ask me, well, why would a partner share this thing that's just about my company? And what I tell them is, if people wouldn't share your content, it's too company-specific. You need to take that higher level. If you're looking at it and you're like, why would anyone share this? They probably won't, right? It's probably something where you're just like shilling your brand and it's not like actual wisdom that's system agnostic and is applicable for a lot of people. So I think that's a really good litmus test is you want to be non-promotional enough that people would inherently want to share it. Yeah. I actually push myself to do what I call the Reddit test. I will take content, I will post it on Reddit, and I will make sure that it can get 10 upvotes. And if my content can't get 10 upvotes on Reddit, then I will basically be like, it's too promotional. I need to go back to the drawing board. And it can be tough because Reddit is a harsh environment and ecosystem. Like people will call you out, people will slice if it has even a shred of promotional aspect. But I think it's a great way to test yourself to be like, hey, if this is genuinely valuable to a wide array of people and it's not just product promotion, I should be able to find success on those channels. And so just as a simple way, if you're thinking in your head, like, I'm not sure how promotional it is, go run the Reddit test and see. You'll be— it'll be interesting to experiment with.

Yes. Casey, maybe we should have scheduled 2 hours for this, but I think it would turn into something like highly self-indulgent because we could talk about this stuff all day. I'm sitting here thinking about our— before I hit the record button on the show today, you and I were talking about like the importance of having ad spend ready to deploy to amplify a post on any social media platform that is organically doing well. So that's kind of another lever that you can pull when you are Maximizing your content from a source piece of content, and you're using lots of different distribution channels, including partners. We are really big on partner marketing. So thank you for mentioning that. And then putting a couple bucks behind something that's already doing well, you know, putting good money after good instead of potentially like good money after bad. When something's already doing well, you have a proof of concept there. You're clearly providing the value that your audience wanted to hear, which is the litmus test that Casey is talking about, that you should not hit the post or schedule button on any piece of content that does not provide value, even if there is a call to action for, you know, to pick up a lead magnet, join my email list for a newsletter, buy this, buy that, whatever. Um, if there's not value first, it's, it comes across as like pretty tone deaf and, and a lack of empathy for your audience. So yeah, definitely.

Absolutely.

Yeah. All right. I'm gonna shift us here. Uh, I wanna talk about this concept of owned assets. So At Level Up, we do a fair amount of educating on the importance of owning your audience, not just, quote, renting it. Meaning having an email list is owning your audience, still on their terms. Of course, they're still in the driver's seat, whereas your social media followers are your rented audience. When you're on social, you're, you're playing in someone else's sandbox, so to speak, and the rules can change on a dime. Uh, social media ownership can change on a dime, as we've seen in 2023. And, um, Yeah, that, that can have significant implications for your account and therefore on your followers. And there are some parallels I wanna call out here when it comes to brand deals and/or affiliate relationships versus creating and selling your own products and services. So I think it's fair to say you are renting products to sell through brand deals and affiliate relationships, but it's far better to create and sell products and services that you own 100% of. It's much better for business. And can actually help you build your business on a solid foundation rather than relying on spotty brand deals and helping other brands that you're affiliated with get rich, right? So Casey, can you kind of build on that concept of owned assets and talk about how that relates back to email marketing?

Yeah, for sure. So I think owned assets are super important and are becoming increasingly important, I think, as we move forward, as we see so many different changes that are occurring. One of the things I often have a conversation with folks, new startups who are just kind of like trying to find new organic plays to grow. I have a conversation with them about starting your own podcast versus guesting on other people's podcasts, right?

Mm-hmm.

And I think that they actually serve different purposes. It goes back to this fast and slow type of thing. When I hopped on the SPI podcast that might get 100,000 downloads, right, in that creator space, we can go look at our sales when that episode goes live. This was back at my time at Bonjoro. And we see like those acute spikes, right? We might see 150 trials come in day 1 and 80 trials come in day 2. Like it is a pronounced way that we're amplifying. But again, it's rented. I have no control over that ecosystem. I have no control over what links go up. I have no control over those pieces. So guesting on podcasts is a good example of a lever that you can pull relatively quickly. You can get in front of a lot of right-fit folks, but you have very limited control. On the flip side of that, when you start your own podcast, you start from ground zero. You have no followers. You have to build this thing up, but you start from this relationship-building phase. So one of the first things I tell folks is when you start, you really want to think about the relationships with folks that you're building by having on guests that are in your space that have different topical expertise, but that might have connections. It might be partnership opportunities. There might be a whole range of things. And so You're starting out not from a direct driving business, but you're going to go through that slower burn, but you have full control. If you want to put a plugin for your product, if you want to advertise, if you want to have outside advertising, one of the things about owned assets, although they're slower, you gain full autonomy to use that however you want strategically. And I think it's important to note that it's not only about being able to plug in an advertisement. At the end of your owned asset. It's actually also about using owned assets to open doors, to be able to work with a partner, to be able to give them visibility, to be able to give them space. You have this chip that you now have full control over that you can leverage in these kinds of strategic ways. So similarly with email, and I want to be clear here that although there's changes all the time happening on the algorithm and you might go from getting 10,000 views to 2,000 views on social, and that's why we use that term renting, even email is, you're still, you know, there's changes all the time happening in email, right? We all know the big Apple changes and the auto-opens. And so that environment is not as if you, you know, have no challenges to contend with with the ISPs. But the advantage is, as you build that asset, you have that space once again to leverage and advertise and use it to have on guest collaborators in that exact same way to drive kind of relationship growth. So I think that As a business, you really, especially if you're a smaller business, you want to be plotting that 1, 2, 3 years ahead and asking yourself what relationships, what connections, what partnerships are going to take my business to that next level. Because when you get into that much larger pond, that much larger ecosystem, you use it to open that strategic doorway. That can be something that has a profound change in your business. And so I think that it's very important for folks to be thinking about both of these, to be honest, the rented as well as the owned audiences as you kind of build out your game plan.

Yeah, totally. I mean, you should think of top of funnel as, you know, rented audience. That's totally cool. You just, you want to have this thoughtful customer journey laid out where you're offering your email newsletter, you're offering, offering a lead magnet, which is like a valuable download that you give people in exchange for their email address, build up that owned audience over time, continue to add value, build relationships, relationships, relationships. And then you're looking to sort of not flip a switch, but kind of a slow burn on creating reciprocal value between yourself and your community of followers and your own audience, uh, where you're going to eventually ask them to buy things, right? Like, I mean, we're— our whole POV here is that, like, uh, totally calling my shot, creators are the future of direct-to-consumer spending. I mean, influencers— brands are already obviously very much catching up here, but legacy global brands maybe not so much. But, um, people want to buy from people that they like, that they feel that they know, trust, and are getting value from. And so that's why brand deals are so incredibly effective as compared to so many other types of marketing and distribution channels like we were talking about a minute ago. Um, but I mean, the, the, the ethos, the, yeah, of, of control is shifting very much toward creators and influencers because like we have the attention. And, and people are always— I mean, brands are trying to buy attention, right? That's how we make sales is through attention. So if you can couple the attention with relationships with creators and influencers, you can make lots of sales, right? But what I think we're saying here in terms of owned assets is like, sell your own shit, make awesome shit for your audience specifically, and they will buy it from you. So that's great to get a brand deal, um, and get paid for that, but you're helping make somebody else rich. Right? You've built the audience, you have expertise in something, make your own stuff and sell it. Own it. Own your audience, own your stuff, own your business, own your revenue streams, right?

100%.

Uh, and just kind of building on the, this concept of, of relationship building and the importance there, let's talk about best practices with your email list. So there's very much a right way to do email marketing that will produce great results for creators. And on the flip side of that coin, there is a very detrimental way that email marketing can be used as well. So Casey, can you break this down for us and give us maybe like the top 5 or so most important, important and impactful best practices around email marketing?

Yeah, for sure. So there's a lot to unpack and obviously the tactics are going to vary depending on exactly what you're trying to do with email. But I think the first thing is that email has evolved and changed a lot from, you know, if you go back a decade and you remember all those newsletters that were just like company updates, you remember if you would get like this long thing that was like, we're launching this product and we're doing this. And we're doing this and it was like 12 different CTAs in every single one. I think that there's so much noise in your inbox. The very first most important thing that I advise people is, is set expectations. What are you going to send people and when are you going to send it? And the actual when are you going to send it, I find is actually done by very few businesses and is actually still a huge opportunity. So what I mean by that is saying like, we will contact you each Friday at 9 a.m. PST with a use case of how a creator went $1K to $10K a month as an example, right? And then you have a crystal clear expectation exactly what that person's going to get. They're going to get a use case. It's going to be a use case that's applicable to that creator at that stage. Very clear expectation. So that's one of the first things I think that is super important is to make sure that you set that expectation. The next thing I think that is super critical is I've done a lot of work over the last maybe 8 years now around deliverability. Around engagement. And it's been this evolving art and there's been all sorts of changes with inboxes. And so I think that one thing that's super important is you need your emails to actually be read and to be engaged with. And a lot of the kind of benchmarks that the industry has set out, you'll see, I think Campaign Monitor and a handful of others, they post like the annual benchmarks, right? And they'll tell you that, hey, your industry has a 21% average open rate and a 1.2% click-through rate. And they'll give you all of these kind of standard benchmarks. What I have found is that this has led people to often have a standard of like, okay, 20%, 20% is awesome, 20% is great. Well, unless you are a huge brand, you know, if you're Nike, if you're some massive brand, okay, when I look at those people's emails campaigns, I've been behind the hood of a couple of those brands. Yes, those are going to be lower because you're sending to 15 million people per blast. But especially for small creators, your dynamic should be different. If you're setting expectation, if you're bringing people into that funnel, the last email newsletter that I created, which was called Growth Corner and was specifically focused around like growth tactics, we had about a 74% open rate and about a 12 to 15% click-through rate depending. And that was, you know, across, I think ended, we had something like 40 to 50 emails that kind of dripped out. So I think that the first thing is to challenge that status quo, but going back to deliverability, like how do you at a face level get better deliverability? Well, or deliverability slash engagement. I want to be clear here too. I'm talking about people, not just you delivering, but also people opening it. So the first thing is, like I said before, is you set expectation. That's super important. But the next thing is replies are being heavily prioritized in terms of inboxing. So one of the big ways that inboxes know whether your message is essentially promotional is when you send a personal message to someone, it has like an 80% reply rate if you send a message to like a colleague or your family, right? Whereas if you look at the reply rates for promotional marketing campaigns, I mean, those are super low, right? So it's an easy tag where if someone sends out 1,000 emails and it has a 2% response rate, they're like, okay, that's promotional. So one of the first things— and Pat Flynn, who also has done a lot of work around deliverability, I've chatted with him a lot about this and he has actually created videos where he calls out and talks about this structurally. But the idea is ask very specific questions early on and start ramping up that reply rate. And so an example of a bad question is something like, hey, do you have any questions? Or even something like, what is your top challenge? Can sometimes be a little bit broad because it can go a lot of places. Whereas if you kind of sharpen it a little bit and you say like, what is your biggest challenge with customer acquisition right now? Or what is your biggest challenge with insert something that helps kind of focus? Because if you're a creator, You know how many hats you wear. Someone's like, what's my biggest challenge? I'm like, oh geez, where do I start? Like, I have turnover problems, tech is confusing, acquisition is challenging. So you might not answer that question because it's just like this huge open bag. Whereas if someone's like, what are you struggling right now with your paid Facebook campaign? You're like, oh yeah, well, my cost per acquisition has gone through the roof and my targeting, I keep trying to change it. The retargeting isn't giving me the same returns. Like that kind of stuff is more top of mind. So another big question or big thing I would focus on is try to get more replies, try to get people communicating, ask very specific questions to try to get there. The next thing I would kind of say is segmentation and personalization are super important, but I have a little bit of like a bone to pick with this. One of the things I know is that a lot of people that come on and they tell you like you need to segment and you need to personalize, they don't even do it themselves. I've been behind the hoods of the gurus who are like, Personalization is the most important thing, and then I look at their campaigns and they're not doing any personalization. So I think when it comes to personalization, what you want to do is think really carefully about what actually structurally matters, and make sure that you're asking less questions but the right ones to personalize based on. So what I mean by that is, instead of on intake being like, what's your industry? What's your company size? What's your role? You know, like you have like 20 questions, right? What is actually meaningful? So in some cases, it might be industry. You might say, look, my e-commerce customer versus my SaaS customer. Like if I know that information, I can send them use cases that are tailored to that. And that is what is most important. But what I found in other cases is you might say actually really company size is more important. A 5,000-person B2B brand is more similar to a 5,000-employee direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand than it is to a solopreneur brand of either type. So it actually is the company size that is going to be most relevant to you supporting that person in the right way. You providing that use case. Imagine you're an enterprise brand who signs up and you get a use case like you're an e-commerce brand, but you sign up and you're, you know, Beardbrand, some huge brand, and you get a use case from a solopreneur. That's not a good hit. You're like, whoa, okay, this doesn't seem like my type of, you know, like they operate with a different type of clientele. So the next kind of pillar I would really push people to focus in on is to ask less questions, but ask questions that you're actually going to do something about. And that should be, I think, your, your litmus, if you will, kind of going into it. So I'll pause there for a moment. I think there's a lot of specific strategic, you know, if I'm talking with people about like, you know, onboarding your first 2 weeks and how many emails you should send in, like you can go down the rabbit hole of different types of segments. But hopefully some of these are kind of like the high-end scaffolding that in many cases I find a lot of brands probably aren't doing. You're probably not telling people the exact timing you're sending to them. You're probably not going through and having a really good targeted question at the right time. And so these are things you can actually go and audit your flows tomorrow and just look at what is the difference. Like, I'm a big fan of data and experimentation. Like everything I said here, you should be able to test and see that lift that happens from following those best practices.

Yeah. And man, we could talk about expectation setting for a long time. That is So foundational to trust in relationships, right? And that's not just in business. You could— you can draw that out for any of your, like, personal relationships. But I like what you're talking about with regard to setting expectations, delivering on expectations, and doing that over time. And that's in all of your marketing as well. So I know this is a little bit different than email marketability or email deliverability, but especially with recurring revenue products, which we love, and ActiveCampaign helps us really maximize like LTV, customer numbers, retention, everything like that with email marketing automation. But you damn well better be prepared to deliver on what you promised throughout your marketing efforts and probably like 10 to 25% more, right? Kind of that delight, surprise and delight your customers. And I think that's just so important in every aspect of your business and your life. So that's like a really broad kind of umbrella lesson that you could overlay on anything. Saying, but really glad that you said that. Um, okay, and then I'm gonna shift us again a little bit, but I do again appreciate like talking about how email deliverability works is super important because I mean a lot of content creators like don't quite know that yet, right? I think a lot of people, a lot of people throughout even like B2B businesses don't quite understand how that works. And so I think that's super great that you kind of hit the nail on the head there on get people to respond to your emails, and that will really help you in the future. And ActiveCampaign has something that I call the spam-o-meter. It's when you, uh, test your email and it, it runs a little like spam check on your, your wording and verbiage throughout, like in the subject and preheader text and in the tech— actual body of the email. And it will tell you like, hey, you can't use that specific word, um, in the subject line, like that looks really spammy and icky. And, and even like I send nothing that's spammy or icky, and we don't send anything on our clients' behalf that's spammy or icky. But I mean, even at the beginning of this year, I didn't know you couldn't use certain words in subject lines or that would really damage your deliverability. So I think that's really important to be thinking about.

Yeah, the tactical piece of that, I think, is so often when people think about deliverability, they get so fixated on the technical, right? They're like, okay, I'm going to do this in my DMARC, I'm going to do that. Like, and there's all these different steps. And those can be important. I tell people, like, if you see some dramatic step change and you're doing 40% and overnight you're doing 10%, yes, maybe you go get MX Toolkit or something and you go check to see if you're on blacklist and you can go through that whole technical side. But for 95+% of folks, it's tactical. When I get in with a client who's struggling and we help elevate it, it's all about, okay, focus on your most engaged leads first. We'll start creating positive signals from your ESP. I'll start bringing all those open and engagement rates way up. And people are like uncomfortable. I'm only going to send to 1/5 or 1/10 of my list. I'm like, trust the process. We're going to work on creating that reputational change over time. The tactical piece is so critical and so important. And so definitely, if you are struggling right now to not getting the open rates or the click-through rates that you want, strongly encourage folks to start at that tactical level. Start smaller, start with less folks, take your most engaged people. and begin that journey of trying to create those positive signals. And the other thing I'll say, and this is coming from someone who works at an email marketing company, I will say don't just jump around solutions, hope, oh, I'm getting a 20% open on Mailchimp, so I'm going to go hop over to this tool to get better, better deliverability like this. Just hopping between email tools will not solve your deliverability problem. Most of the major ESPs send in a similar way, which is a shared pool of IPs. Basically, you have 100 companies and you have, you know, say 50 IPs and they're all routing through these bulk IPs. That methodology is quite similar across brands. So you might see there are third-party tests that will run and say, you know, a brand like Klaviyo, for example, that might work with a ton of e-commerce brands, they might have slightly more deliverability challenges, just the nature of certain people they work with. But in general, the rule of thumb is Focus on the tactical side. Don't think of, I'm just going to switch tool, switch tool, switch tool as kind of this end-all to solve your deliverability challenges, because you're just going to stay mired down in that, in that challenge until you fix those best practices.

Cool. Yeah. Thank you. Time is precious. Thank you so much for sharing yours with us. Level Up Creators exists to amplify the voice, reach, and impact of creators making a positive impact in the world. With your expertise as our focus, our team of strategists, marketers, marketers, sales pros, product developers, administrators, and tech gurus handle the heavy lifting of building and optimizing a profitable business that will transform your life for good. Subscribe to the show and check out welevelupcreators.com to sign up for our newsletter, that AI guide. But the newsletter, we share weekly actionable business tips for creators just like you. But again, get that AI guide. We also just dropped a course on creator income, memberships, and the customer journey. So lots and lots and lots of free goodies. But we will see you next time on the Level Up Creators Podcast. Thanks.