Is Email Dead or Just Tired? | Ep. 03

Welcome to another episode of the Beyond Business podcast. My name is Charles Mackay and I'll be your host today. Today we had the absolute pleasure of talking to Mike Donnelly, the CEO and co founder of the 7Cents. The 7Cents is a really powerful email tool that's all about getting your email actually read and taken action from. We talk about email fatigue. What does that mean? Is email really dead? Which we don't think it is. Who owns your email within your organization? Is it the IT department or is it actually the marketing department now? And what metrics really matter with email? Often the metrics that we think are not the metrics that really matter to drive that percentage change within your organization. Anyway, without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to a really engaging and good conversation with Mike Donnelly. Enjoy. Welcome again to the next week's podcast. Today I'd like to introduce Mike Donnelly all the way from the U.S. i'll let him introduce where he's from and where he's sitting. But yeah, really excited today to sit down with Mike and discuss all things potentially email and probably a little bit more. But welcome to the episode. Mike, how are you?

Good, Charles. Appreciate you having me and great to see you. We've. We've obviously had a good relationship here for. For a couple years, and it's obviously you're all the way across the world, so it's again, great to. Great to connect.

Yeah. And we've actually been talking about doing this for a couple of years too, so it's finally awesome to sit down and go through it.

Absolutely.

So, Mike, whereabouts in the U.S. are you located?

So I'm right outside of Washington, D.C. in a place called Arlington, Virginia, and in my home office, and that's where I'm located physically. Yeah.

Cool. And how long you've pretty much been home office? Seven years, is that right?

Actually, longer than that. So prior to. Prior to founding $0.07, I was an enterprise, and I'll, you know, certainly get into this, but I was an enterprise tech sales rep. And when I first came out of college, I had more or less two office jobs. That was about four years. And that led up to. So I've been working remotely for about 16 years.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow. So the current situation is nothing new to you then, Right?

Having the kids home creates a little bit more of a challenge, but, you know.

Yeah, totally.

That's the big thing.

Totally. What's your number one homeschooling hack that you've come up with so far?

Homeschooling hack is we've got A lot of recess outside. So force them, force them to go get some energy out and, you know, make sure they. We've got baseball stuff set up out there, which is their favorite sport. They've got street hockey and we've got a kind of a long driveway and a little bit of a backyard. So we're lucky in that regard. We're not in a apartment or anything. So, yeah, lots of, lots of recess. And we're still trying to figure out the homeschooling too.

Totally, totally. Cool. So going. Let's go back a little bit. Like you sort of said, so you from Washington? So did you grow up and live in Washington like your whole life or.

Yeah, I grew up in Northern Virginia, whole life. Went away to college. That was actually in Southern Virginia. So I've been. And I've also spent a little bit of time living in Maryland. So I've been right here around the D.C. washington, D.C. metro area my whole life. Cool.

Cool. And then so obviously they went to uni and what was your, you know, what you study at uni and what. Where did that.

It's for. Interesting question. So I actually studied geology.

Yep.

With a specialty in environmental and engineering geosciences.

Wow.

And my first job, and this is a kind of a funny story. So my first job out of college, my. The last two years of college, I really got into computer programming. So I worked with one of my professors on a application and it's actually still in use today to determine rock slope stability on roads. So like when you drive by a road cut, there's all you have to study what is the likelihood of slippage of those rocks coming out into. Out onto the road. And then I. My first career or first job out of college was as a software engineer for a biotech company where we map the human genome. And there's a gentleman by the name. He's. He's very like in the world of genomic sciences. He, him and another gentleman, Francis Collins, who's obviously, he's the head of NIH and National Institutes of Health here in the United States. But the gentleman's name is Craig Venner. And I was having lunch with him and he asked me that exact same question. And he said, so what'd you major in in college? And this is a company of 500 employees. And here I am having lunch with one of the most profound scientists of our, of our lifetime. And I said I majored in geology. He goes, geology? He just laughed. He said, what the hell do geology and biology have in common? And I didn't know how to answer that question other than, hey, I enjoy programming and that's what I started doing for them.

It's fascinating. I love to know where sort of backgrounds start because obviously with what we're trying to do here is talk about businesses that are trying to do better and do things in a much more sustainable way. And I often find that the core of the. That comes from way, way, way back. So it's interesting that you're studying that because that, you know, you can obviously see how scalable, sustainable and you know, those. If you were actually to implement something that you'd studied, it's there for ideally forever, not just a couple of weeks, which is fascinating. Cool. So when from there and obviously finishing your study, where did you end up working?

Yeah, so after I was at Celera as a software engineer, I'd always kind of wanted to build a business and I thought, hey, if I can learn how to write some code, that's step one. But how do you really build a business? You got to have some sales skills. So I made the jump to the dark side of sales and then I was enterprise tech sales rep for about 13 years, had a ton of success working primarily in startup organizations and, you know, had a couple of exits. Like I worked for two companies where I was very early on, where we subsequently had IPOs and then we subsequently. One company we sold for two and a half billion, another company we sold for a billion. And then the third startup that I worked for, they were on track. Now we'll see if this happens. Now they were on track to go public this year and I still own, you know, I obviously still have some ownership stake in my company. And then that's kind of during that time of being enterprise rep, that's what led me to kind of founding Seven Cents.

Yeah. Cool. So tell me about the problem that you know, as an enterprise rep, what you know, and what era was this? This is what, mid 2000s, is that right?

So it was. I started in tech sales 2002 and then founded $0.07 in 2013. But for the first two years of the founding of the company, I was doing it kind of nights and weekends with another. With my co founder.

Yeah. So in 2002, what was that gradual shift from 2002, what did you do to get a deal to then when you finished that business, you know, working in that industry, what were you doing to get deals? How that evolved?

That's. Wow, that's a super interesting question. Who? I don't know that the, the clearly, when we would see deals like, there was a lot more decision makers and opportunities. We also saw really, you know, kind of two recessions happen where funding just didn't, you know, it wasn't a lot of. And I think that's why I kind of laugh when people talk about account based marketing, because that's what I did. My whole sales career was account based sales. I found an industry that I felt like, hey, this is an industry that really needs my product. Let me figure out a side door that I can get in because I'm competing with huge companies, huge incumbents that have huge fans within those companies or within those customers. And so I'd figure out a small side door that I could get in for a specific application or use case and get it deployed. And then the next thing you know, it would grow and grow and grow as I met more and more people within the company. And. And so it was taking that account based sales approach which really led to, I think, all of my success.

That seeding and also the seed and grow methodology. Like we absolutely use that myself.

Yeah.

You know, don't try and sell the whole burger. Just get a bit of lettuce in there first. Cool. So, and then what was the problem, you know, as obviously starting $0.07, but you know, obviously about email delivery and stuff like that. But what was the frustration you and your teams were starting to have?

Yeah. So I'll give you 7 cents today is not what it was meant to be.

Yeah.

So we. The problem that I was, that I was seeing and I talked to a lot of my counterparts and sales, and you would find that good reps did this, but we all just had. We were all recognizing that digital channels, social ads, email, phone calls, all that, it was just exploding. Like people literally couldn't keep up with it. And when I would have a, you know, a conversation with a VP or above, like decision makers, the resounding response from a lot of them was when I would say, hey, this project's getting delayed. And they would say, well, Mike, why is the project getting delayed? And I say, because you haven't responded to my last three emails. You haven't returned my last three phone calls. And the resounding response from all of them was, dude, I get hundreds of emails a day. And these are. Some of these people are people that I have and still have really good relationships with. Like, some of them were at my wedding. That's how close I became with them. And the resounding response was, I just. I never saw your email, Mike. Like, I Get hundreds of emails a day. I can't get through it all, let alone engage with it all. I would hear funny stories because now I'm starting to formulate an idea about how I can solve this problem. But I would hear things like, Mike, I respond to email between 9 and 11 in the morning. I go to meetings the rest of the day, I come back to my desk, I go to the top of my inbox, I scroll all the way to the bottom, and I hit shift. Delete, delete all my email from the day. And I'm like, well, that's crazy. What happens if you got an important email that you missed? Well, it's important. You'll. You'll email me again. You'll email me again. And it's like, well, as a sales rep, I can't do that. I can't be a pester. So what I would do is I would pay attention to, hey, if I want to reach Dave at comscore, I knew intuitively that he would respond to me between 9 and 11 in the morning. Whereas Kyle Mack at National Geographic, he would respond to me between five and six o' clock at night. And Britain Miller at Discovery Communications, he would respond me between typically 9 to 11 o' clock at night. Because he was. That's when he would catch up. So rather than me sitting here and just writing emails when it was convenient for me, which I would still do, I would actually send them to people when I knew intuitively that they would respond to me. So it would increase the likelihood of getting a quick response. And also the email not getting through, you know, the, you know, getting lost in the deluge. And I can't tell you, when we were founding the company, I would hear from so many sales reps. Well, Jeff always responds to me and I'm like, yeah, but you may have sent him an email on Monday and he responds to you on Friday. Guess what that is? Four days to get a response. What do we all want at the end of a quarter? We want four more days in our sales process so that we can close that deal. So the more you can chunk it up and do it, that way you can accelerate your deal process. So I would pay attention to these patterns and even think about when you're talking to friends or like industry peers, like, hey, I'm trying to reach Sarah. She's not really responding to me. Oh, don't ever call Sarah on Fridays. Sarah plays golf every Friday. Like, don't. Just don't even do that. Yeah, well, we would all exchange these kind of anecdotes. And one day I was like, why am I spending my mental energy trying to figure this out when it's all just sitting there in my data? And so we, I built a prototype. It was actually with an outsourced engineering team at this point because I didn't, I hadn't connected with my co founder. And what I wanted to see was could I illuminate people's patterns of behavior by looking at my email data? Like when are they replying to the emails that I'm sending to them? And I was like, oh my gosh, my intuition is like really good. It's, it's all right there. Then that is when these people are responding me. And so I connected with my co founder who was actually a customer of mine. He ran all of web operations and engineering for NationalGeographic.com.

Wow.

And so him and I connected and he was like, yeah, I'll work on it as nights and weekends project with you and we'll see what, you know, see what happens. We then took the prototype to a local company that's here in the Northern Virginia area. Here in here in the states. And we went to their CEO at the time they had about 500 inside sales reps. Wow. And we, we, we told him about what we were doing and he's like, this is brilliant. Like totally makes sense. We're seeing our connect rates drop as far as phone calls, we're seeing our email response rate go down. We're seeing our email marketing efforts not paying off as much as they used to. And this was 2013. So he said, look, I'll be kind of an alpha customer for you. Like I'm not going to pay you until you show me that it actually works. Yeah. So what we did was we analyzed all of their historical phone data. Like we tied into their PBX system to look at when are people answering their phones like their customers, business partners, prospects. And they're a multi billion dollar a year company and their CEO says if you can. And this is where metrics always get messed up, especially in marketing. His thought was if you can even just move the needle by a fraction of a percent, yeah, that is real business value for me. So the first part of the, of the testing, we analyzed all of their historical phone data. At this point it was about eight years worth of phone data. We then tied back into their custom CRM. They've built their own CRM and what a rep used to do was they would come in at say 8 or 9 in the morning, they would say, here's the 50 people I need to call today. Haven't talked to him in two weeks. I've got an open quote, you know, whatever it might be. And they would smile and dial. Whereas now what they would do is they would go into their call manager and they would press a time button and I would say, call these people at 9, call these people at 10, call these people at 11. So more or less schedule their day for them. Wow. And if we had data on somebody, what we found was the Reps would connect 37% more efficiently. Their CEO was just blown away. What we also found, which was he uncovered this statistic. The talk time during a predicted time, on average was 18% longer.

Wow.

They immediately became a customer after seeing that data. And they today They've got over 1200 sales reps inside sales reps, and they make anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 phone calls every single business day. So it's like huge, massive value. We then tied into their email, where rather than a rep just sending an email, the email just goes out at the most optimal time. So they became a customer. We then went off and pitched. We thought, you know, oh, everybody tells you you got to raise money. And if I'm giving too many details, I'm.

No, no, it's great. It's great.

So we went off and we actually got introduced to some of the top venture capitalists in the world. Like at the time, Barry Eggers, who was on the board of Snapchat, he's with. Oh, gosh, I can't believe I can't remember this. But anyways, Barry Eggers, Ping Lee, who's a God at Excel, like one of the top venture companies in the world, Gary Solomon with GGV Ventures, you know, one of the gods. And we kept hearing from them, and Ping Lee said it kind of like perfectly. If you came in today and you told me you had 10 customers and a million dollars in revenue, I would tell you to get out of my office. I'm not interested. But if you came in and you told me you have a thousand customers and only $100,000 in revenue, I'd probably write you a check. And the reason why I'd write you a check is because you've built like a scalable business model. Enterprise sales is going to eventually not go away, but it's just very, very hard to execute on. And so we came back and we said, all right, based off of all the knowledge that we learned. And we did get some term sheets, but we decided, hey, you know, What? Let's self fund this thing, try to bootstrap it. And we built a product that individual sales reps could sign up for and connect in their email. And then, you know, we had connectors for like Google and Microsoft and you could even upload your PSTS files to it. And we tried to start selling it to sales reps and it fell flat on its face and we couldn't figure out why. And we almost shuttered the company. Almost said, you know, let's just give up. This is too frustrating. We're just never gonna. People don't, I guess, perceive this as a big enough problem. But towards the end, all of a sudden a light bulb went off. As we had been talking to VPs of sales and CEOs, they were all like, this approach you should take to marketing first because marketing has so much data and they don't know what to do with it.

Yeah.

And so a gentleman by the name of, and God bless his soul, this gentleman named Steve Richards, who's, he's a very well known guy in the inside sales kind of community, founder of a company called Exec Vision, he said, hey, I know mark Robert at HubSpot and I think HubSpot, this would be awesome for HubSpot, like if you could do this. Let me set up a call with him. So he gets me a call with Mark Roberts and at this point Mark Robert is saying, hey, we're just about to build what we're calling our connect program, which is an integration. I would abs this just totally makes sense for our customer days. I would love to have you guys build on top of HubSpot. So we started building, we got our first 10 customers and we got our first 10 customers pretty quickly. And we did a bunch of AB testing and we were able to show those customers like, hey, this and all with statistical relevance that, wow, this thing is having a really big impact for us. So we kept leaning in, building more and more into HubSpot, getting more and more customers. This was back in 2016. We now have hundreds of HubSpot customers on the system. We also built an integration with Marketo and we are thinking about other integration providers, but those are two main focuses today and that's kind of where we are. So that's the long history.

Yeah, no, no, it's amazing. So it's obviously gone from a, something that you were selling to, you know, to sales to optimize. And I agree with that CEO that he said if you can shift our percentage by a micro percentage, I think that's Something that especially marketers get confused about is they try and do things by hundreds of percentages and thousands of percentages. Like sometimes you only need one metric to move the dial a very big way. But yeah, it's fascinating how that has evolved to what problems you're solving today. What are some of those not ways that marketers are using it now? But what are you seeing $0.07 used for on top of just getting through to the inbox, like, what insights, what information are people pulling out? That is just fascinating.

Yeah. So, and I'll touch on one other thing that you just made a great comment about, which is understanding metrics. We. So, like I always refer to what I call the 8% rule, which is a lot. If you, if you can optimize something by 8% effectively, you can accomplish in 12 months what used to take you 13.

Yep.

But for some reason it's very hard for people to wrap their mind around. And again, like you said, optimization is things that just, you know, everybody's looking for this silver bullet, like to increase things by hundreds of percent that silver bullets just don't exist. It's all about optimizing. And, you know, people are trying to cut corners, you know, do growth, hacking, etc. You just got to do the hard work and, and optimize as you go. Yeah. So what customers, initially, what customers were using us for was purely what we call send time optimization. It's rather than blasting an email to 5000-500005-00000 people at 10am on Tuesday because maybe you read a blog post says that's a good time, or maybe you've done some AB testing. What the system empowers you to do is we go analyze all of what we call engagement data. So it's when is Charles opening emails? When is he clicking on emails? Is he doing that on a mobile device? Is he doing that on a desktop? And then we build an individualized profile on Charles. And then when you're, when Charles is part of that list of 5000-500005-00000 people, Charles is going to get his email at a personalized time that shows it has the highest likelihood of getting him to engage in that email, open, click it, et cetera. Much like you think about. The easiest way to think about sometime optimization is, you know, people are getting hundreds of emails today, especially decision makers. The easiest way to think about it is why do people invest in search engine optimization, SEO, it's to try and get you as high as you can in a Google search. Whereas with send time optimization, the goal is to try and get you to as close as we can to the top of the inbox. When somebody happens to be sitting down and truly engaging with their email, it doesn't mean that they're not in front of their email and they're deleting things as fast as possible. It's when are they most likely to engage. And so the other component with send time optimization, which can also have a huge impact, is if I'm researching a problem, when I do, like Google search, I'm going to go look at the top five results and I'm going to sign up for all of their newsletters and all of that because I want to evaluate, understand it's part of that buyer's journey. Like, I want to do as much research as I can up front. Well, over time, whoever's at the top of my inbox is going to be the one that gets to, gets a majority of my attention.

Yeah.

So it's, you know, you're getting the opportunity to educate me because you're always at the top of my inbox versus I can only read so many blog posts or newsletters about a specific problem. And so that's one thing. So send time optimization is what people initially really use this for. What we've seen happen over time is that Google and Microsoft are investing a tremendous amount of resources into fighting a war on spam. And I'm not talking about your professional spammers that are sending you emails about trying to steal your credit card information. I'm talking about marketers that are just overdoing it with their email programs that people aren't engaging with. And the challenge that I think a lot of executive leadership needs to understand because I do talk to marketers that have this frustration is executives think, hey, it's free to send email. We've already bought HubSpot. We've already bought Marketo. You know, whatever. It's like, no, no, no. It's not free for two reasons. Reason number one is the attention on the other end. Yeah, it doesn't really cost us anything to send the email, but to get the attention of the recipients, there's a real cost to that and there's a real return to it. And two is if I just don't care about my email program, like give it a lot of love and care, the likelihood that I'm actually going to reach the inbox drops significantly. And this goes to where Google and Microsoft are waging a war on spam just because HubSpot tells you 99.8% of your emails got delivered. All that means is 99.8% of your emails did not bounce. That does not mean they made it to the inbox. And so we started seeing this kind of like really come to fruition, especially over the last two years. And we said, okay, sometime optimization is great, but how can we help with this deliverability challenge or what we term an inboxing challenge. The first thing that Google, Microsoft really, really look at is, and this again has shifted over time. They used to really identify like, hey, what IP address is this coming from? You know, to understand is, is this spam or is it not spam? Is. They started much like in our personal lives we have what's called a credit score, which determines our credit worthiness and whether or not a bank is going to loan us money and how much of money as a bank and a loan us. Google and Microsoft are building what's called a domain score, domain reputation on you, on your organization. And they're looking at how much are people engaging with your emails. And if your engagement is not high, then they start penalizing you by putting you in the spam folder. Corporate email systems will actually just quarantine your email. So yeah, yeah, if I go to my spam folder and clean it out, I won't even like, no, not I won't even see your emails because it's been quarantined by the, by the corporate system. And so what we started building was a individualized on top of send time optimization. One of the things that we can do with the engagement data is we can build, we built a machine learning model that more or less predicts the likelihood that somebody is going to engage. And we classify that as in kind of three areas. For the first 90 days we build a trend on Charles level of engagement. The machine is learning and Charles's level of engagement, his trend could be totally different than sales. And then after that 90 day period will actually determine, hey, are you more active, meaning your interest level is still there or are you becoming more passive, which means you're losing interest, you're falling below that trend and that trend is always going to be learning as well. And then after at least six months, have you completely, you know, lost interest or never even expressed interest, you'll then go into an inactive bucket. Yeah. We then built tools that allow you to say, hey, you know what, this isn't a super crucial email. Maybe I'm going to turn off sending to passive or inactive audiences because I don't want to continue to hurt my domain reputation. And then we built tools that allow you to say, hey, management just came to me and said, hey, we're not reaching our target goal with our email program or for this specific, specific email campaign. I can easily go and dynamically suppress and unsuppress different audiences. So it gives you a lot of flexibility in how you're, how you're treating those different audiences. And that, that, that's been a big focus of ours for, I would say, the last two year and a half and trying to get people educated and learn why that's an important thing.

Yeah, totally. It makes so much sense. It's just, it's so technical. And I think this is one of the components that, you know, as if you look at this shift of an organization, you know, email is realistically owned by it and it was infrastructure and the systems, and then now it's shifted into more of the marketing component. They own more nearly technology than it, but if they don't understand how things technically work, they're just like, well, I've sent an email. Why hasn't it gone through? So tell me about email fatigue. You and I have had quite a few conversations about email fatigue. Tell me what it is and what it means to potentially shift those contacts that you've had in your database that have not engaged to become re engaged. What can you tell us about that?

Yeah, so the first thing that I kind of always recommend is again, this comes into investing in your email program versus just kind of, again, yeah, it's free. You really do. If you want it to be successful, you treat it as a commodity, you'll get commodity. Like results is kind of like my mantra. But the first thing is to answer your question of like, what is email fatigue? It's, hey, I signed up to understand, to better understand a problem that I have or seek out a solution to.

A problem that I have.

But again, I've signed up for your email list and your five competitors, or you may not even have any competitors. But I've got four problems that I'm trying to solve, and whichever one is educating me more and making it easier and removing friction is probably the one I'm going to lean more towards fixing first. So email fatigue occurs when, hey, brands just send me too much email and I just get fatigued of it. So I'll give you, for instance, go to Nordstrom.com, buy a shirt, and the next thing you know, they'll start sending you emails every single day. I just had this happen where I'm a big baseball fan and I bought some new hats. For myself and my kids for what was supposed to be opening day. And we bought it from a site called fanatics, which is shopmlb.com literally in 21 days I received 38 emails from them. Yeah.

Wow.

And so I'm like, hey, I want to buy from Fanatics but they're overloading me. So I'm either going to do one of two things. I'm either going to three things I'm going to unsubscribe, which is, hey, you just lost being able to reach me. I'm going to mark you as spam. Okay, that's even worse because now you're hitting my domain score or three. I'm just going to ignore you. I'm just going to immediately because I know your brand. I want to buy from you again. I want to know what the sale items are, but I'm just going to immediately delete every single email that you send to me. And you're not even getting my mind share. You're not even getting my inbox impression. You're not getting any of that. Well, they have all the data that tells them and it's in their marketing automation system that I'm not engaging in these emails.

Yeah.

So I am fatigued of their brain. What they should be doing and this can have an immediate impact for people that have shown fatigue is they should suppress me from all of their mailings. Then once a month throw me one email and it's like, you know what? I haven't. Fanatics used to pepper me with emails every single day and they went away and now all of a sudden, boom. I get this email that's like, hey, I'm gonna, I, I haven't been on fanatics in a while. Like, you know, I think it's time for a new hat, a new shirt. Let me, you know, let me see what, what, what's going on with them. Whereas you, you're always going to have your, your window shoppers and your everyday browsers. For me, I'm leaving behind digital signals to say I'm fatigued, I'm tired.

Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. It tells me too that you know, depending on who's running that is too focused on net new rather than that client lifetime value. So what is that, you know, overall customer journey look like? Yes, Net news. And this is what we talk about going beyond the lead. Like it's pretty easy to get the lead but how do you get that lead to convert over and over and over and over and over again without burning them out? Which is I can see how much so many organizers. I can think of a few stories where I've literally blanket them out now is like, you send me too much. I don't want to unsubscribe because I need to know from you, but you just send me so much stuff that I'm just not really interested.

Yeah. You know, it's. It's digital body language. And Ivan from our team always puts it perfectly. It's like, hey, if you were having a. You and I are having a conversation right now. If you totally just turned around and started working on your computer or tuned me out, am I going to sit here and keep talking?

No.

No, I'm not.

Yeah.

Well, the same thing happens with these digital channels where we just keep talking and the people are ignoring us.

It's like 100.

Give them some space, give them some room. And also, the more that you are sending to people that aren't engaging again, the people that are ignoring you, that starts to become a big ding on your domain reputation.

Yeah.

Which means the people that actually want to hear from you probably can't even hear from you because your emails aren't going to their inbox. What's called. That's what's called graymail.

Gray mail. Yeah. What. What are the. Do you know what the metrics are on these? You know, domain reputations?

So you can go like, Google Postmasters is the best one that's out there. You do have to send a high enough volume, typically around at least 10,000 emails a month to get a decent signal from Google. But Google has their postmaster's tool. Yahoo or AOL has one, Microsoft has one. But Google is definitely the best one that we always recommend to clients to sign up for. One of the things that we also built into our app is what we call an active audience, more or less score. And what it looks at is every month, how many people engaged in at least one email that you sent to them, what is the percentage of that and what it's really used. You might have sent me 10 emails, you might have sent me one email. But if I engaged, I count towards that percentage. And what we have found, and all it is, is supposed to give you a really quick barometer that you look at once a month, is how much was your active audience. If you're above 30% or more of your audience is engaging with you, at least on a monthly basis, you're in like really good shape. If you're actually. If you're above 60%, you're probably not being aggressive. Enough with your email program and you could probably afford to send more.

Yeah.

If you fall between the 30 to 15% range, which is where we find most organizations, you should probably really start thinking about your segmentation strategy and doing some things there. And then finally, if you fall below 15%, 10 out of 10 times, you're having inboxing problems. We have yet to find a customer that's under that 15% range and they're not having any level of inboxing problems. Their domain reputation with Google is really bad. And, you know, we actually have done some studies and we're about to release an awesome case study where it's a B2B 2C brands and I'll share it with you. After the call, they were just sending gobs and gobs and gobs of email and their domain reputation was crap. And we said, look, just start suppressing your passive and your inactive audience for a couple of months. Well, a couple things happened. One, their domain reputation with Google skyrocketed. Two, their opening click rate, of course, skyrocketed. What's even more interesting is the physical number of opens and clicks. Even though they were sending less email, the physical number of opens and clicks skyrocketed by over 100%.

Wow.

So they were, they were sending far less email, but the number of. The actual number of people that were opening and clicking went up significantly, which was all an indication that they were doing a much better job inboxing. Most recently, notes. So we got the case study together and all that. We're fighting some internal politics with somebody new in executive leadership that's saying, no, we need to be sending back to all these people. So they've been sending more email. Again, they've been going back to the bad practices. Even though they're trying to educate leadership, they should not be doing it. Right. They've now seen again their domain reputation tank.

Yeah, right.

The physical numbers of opens and clicks has really started dropping off again. But now they're finally getting that word across to the executive leadership, so things are a little bit better off back to the races with them.

Yeah. So a theme that happens every year is, you know, come to December, everyone's like, you know, 2021 plans, 2021 top 10 tips, blah, blah, blah. No one predicted what was going to happen in 2020, let's be honest. And one of them is always, generally, probably for the last five years, has always been email is dead, email is dead, email is dead. What can you answer that question with about is email dead?

So there's A couple things.

One.

What other channel is there? Like we live in a, I mean email is the critical linchpin in relationships with customers, but we live in more or less a pull world. So email is a push communication tool in a pull world. But one of the things that I always answer that question with is, hey, how do you sign up for social network account? How do you sign up for anything on the Internet? It's with an email address.

Yeah.

Even though I may have a Facebook account, Twitter account, Twitter starts noticing when I'm not logging in and they're sending me emails saying hey, you should check back out. You know, so actually email is going to, and especially it is illuminated massive gaps in people's marketing operations. I think with everything that's been going on recently, which is, hey, we don't have the ad budget that we used to have, we don't have the trade show budget that we used to have. The trade shows aren't even happening, which is where we used to collect a lot of our leads. Ppc, well, all of us lived through this really great time from a sales and marketing perspective and we amassed these massive databases. Every, almost every company on the planet amass these major databases. That is the house that you own, but you abuse it and you take more care of your social advertising, all that, which is all now getting exposed that hey, we don't actually own our social, our social audience. We don't own the algorithms. Decide who Google displays the ppc ads to. Third party cookies are going away in 2022 by Google which is going to make PPC even that much more of a nightmare. Ad tech is going to get demolished because of that. Well, word, is everybody now starting to wake up and realize, oh my gosh, I have this huge email database. Maybe, just maybe I should invest a little bit of time and energy and resources into it. Yeah, that's what some of the companies that are doing now that are shifting to really making it better. But there's still plenty of organizations that are like, well, we should shift back to, we should shift our resources to email. Just send email to everybody, everybody, everybody. So it's a little bit of a mixed bag, but again, I think we're just going to continually see, and we've said this for a few years, a slow resurgence of email as a critical channel. And I think with what's happening in the world today, it's accelerating that it's.

Fascinating how quickly it moves. And I think I agree with you about that email address. You know, I'm sure people have all got multiple addresses, but which one is being monitored, which one is being used, which one has been accessed, blah, blah, blah. That's sort of where you come into your own. So tell us a little bit about obviously from when you started. So it's. Your business has had a few pivots in even the product and the channels that you're going to, but from that early stage vision to where you're at today and sort of give us some insights on how big the team is and how many customers you've got at a high level to just show how you. Probably the most pivotal component was when you said, right, we're going to fund this ourselves rather than getting some cash. But what does that road sort of look like compared to what you initially thought?

It's a great question. It has been exponentially harder than I, than I ever thought it would be. You know, going from the point of wow, I've, you know, personally invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the business and I'm never going to get it back. You know, sleepless nights. It's been a roller coaster ride. But there's been definitely very high peaks and very, very, very low lows. I think any business owner can attest to that. We are in the past six months have become in a position where we have over 400 customers now. We are profitable. In fact, even in today's day and age, we are going to be looking at hiring another member to our team. That's part of our plan for this year. And so we right now, in this kind of slow period, we're doubling down and investing in more product. In fact, we've also been working with a friend of ours doing some, he's doing some side work for us. And I couldn't be more excited about what's coming from a product perspective. Like it's more or less our system will almost feel like it's native inside of HubSpot like you won't. It removes that barrier of, oh, it's another app I gotta log into. Which is what we found with sales reps. The reason why our sales product fails because sales reps didn't want another tool to log into. They didn't want another tool that they needed to be in their workflow. And we've got some ideas about how we can do that now inside of their workflow. Google's built some things, we still have those connectors. So it's, you know, again, I feel more confident now than I did, you know, a year ago. And a year ago I felt more confident than two years ago. And two years ago I wanted to kind of jump off a bridge. So.

It'S, I think as these ecosystems are evolving and getting better connected and you know, the platforms are saying right, we realize we're not going to try and do everything, but we need best of breed partners. You know, I think that is a really good strategy these days and just add value where you can as soon as that problem comes up from someone. And there's probably two components. How aware is that business of the problem? That's one of the biggest things. Yeah. And then where to go to sort of solve that problem. And if you're just there and it makes sense and it works pretty straightforward. Just on the seven years or eight years of email marketing that you've been building, what would the number one thing that you would say be to even a veteran marketer or a new starter that's getting started in their career? What would that be that you would like to share that you think can add some real value?

I mean, obviously I've got a lot of bias, but I do believe email is the most critical channel that every organization has and owns. And I would say really invest in kind of learning it. And you made an excellent, excellent point earlier that I don't think that I've ever actually thought about it this way. That it used to own email and they used to own the systems of delivering that email. And so they actually understood it in a deep way. Whereas marketers don't tend to understand email in a deep way. Like what do you mean? Says 99.8% of my emails got delivered. So I don't have a delivery problem. I didn't see you had a delivery problem. I said you had an inbox. So it's funny, if you can learn the ins and outs of email, you can learn the ins and outs of any other part of marketing from a technical perspective. Case in point. I was just talking with a gentleman that was the senior vice president of marketing for Overstock.com he was there when they grew from 0 to 300 million. Guess where he got his start@overstock.com email marketing. He was hired on to be their first email marketer and worked his way through because he understood how to get that conversions through communication. And then he started coming up with really good SEO practices and things along those PPC practices.

Totally. Because there's so many things you can split test in email too to get blog article ideas. You know, every part of an email is trackable.

Yeah. Right.

And you own that audience and if you are adding value to it and then extracting a little bit of value where you can for your own insight makes a lot, a lot of sense. You know that. You know, Marcus Sheridan, you ask, we answer mentality. You deploy that with your marketing. It's especially email marketing. It's going to work, just takes a bit of time.

Yep.

And what about to. Because you will have had so much experience with this, a marketer that's potentially new in a role and has a big exec team that doesn't get it. You know, what advice would you give to that person to get the message across that they've got to listen and you know, not just say, oh, but we've got 30 years experience and you've had three weeks experience. But you can see there's a massive hole and this is a huge opportunity. But just can't articulate that and get the trust through to that senior team. Have you got some tips on that?

Yes, it's, it's an interesting problem. So the first and foremost I think is for. And I couldn't find a tool like this, so I just went and built one. I think one of the problems is there's not enough tools around that show you like what an roi, what the ROI of your email program is and how much stuff it actually touches and influences and things like that. I don't think executives think of it in that way. It's like, hey, it's this free channel. But if you actually go and show them how much email means to an organization perspective. And it's not just about acquiring customers, it's also about not having customers churn, educating customers. So email marketing can become even more impactful after the sale.

Totally.

It can streamline your processes. It can make a better, you know, a better customer. It can prevent that customer from churning, you know, all of those things. Like, I don't want to throw ads at you about this new feature that you're already an existing customer. Like, how many ads do we see from brands that were already like, why is Zoom marketing to me?

Like, I think Zoom Zoom at the minute is marketing to the world.

Right? To the world. Yeah, exactly. But I'm already paying you. Like, why are you, why are you marketing to me? You should, you should have, you should be actually email marketing to me. So the first of that is really getting the executives buy in to understand the ROI of their email channel to say, hey look, if we invested just a little bit of money into this and optimize this as a channel, look what we could do. And when you take that approach, we were recently on with a very large corporation and I was walking him through this tool that we built and the executive leader was like, oh my gosh, I never. And it was all numbers from them. I never thought about email in this way, like how much revenue it's really impacting and we can attribute to it. And you're right, Mike, if we just invest a little, not millions or even tens of thousands, if we just invest a little bit more time into it, this could have an immense impact. The return on the investment would be 10x100%.

And so that leads into my sort of last and final question. Share a couple of success stories that you guys have had, not necessarily just for you guys, but for your clients of what, you know, where they are at and now where they're at and then sort of how they started to push that boundary a little bit again.

Yes. So I shared the research from Carahsoft earlier. We've got, you know, we've recently started putting the. A lot more emphasis on case studies. So we've got a lot of those to share. I mean we've done a tremendous amount of tests with customers. Like where they look at, hey, send your email. The normal, take your list as long as it's big enough because we've got to look at statistically significant results. It's amazing to me how many marketers want to say, let's split test a list of 2,000 people. It's like it's not going to. You're not going to get enough signal. And then they may. Then you potentially make bad decisions on that because one may win, but it didn't win because you. It didn't really win. It was an anomaly. So we've done a lot of AB testing with customers and so where we find wins, there is increases in open rate click rate, those types of standard metrics, you know, revenue, revenue impacted. We're just about to release another case study where they were actually able to attribute additional revenue purely by catching people at a more optimal time. So kind of those traditional metrics of opening click rates. And what we find is that like on average what we see is probably about an 8 to 11% increase in open rates and typically anywhere from like a 12 to 20% increase in click rates. When we do those types of A B tests, some we see actually significantly higher. It all depends on. I don't want to get into it on this or maybe I'm happy to, but how quickly are you doing AB testing after implementing $0.07, how biased is your data. Have you always sent email at 10am which is going to bias data. We obviously do some things to phase some of that bias data out. So increases in opening clicks. But we've seen some customers reach over 100% increase like just from a pure optimization standpoint. Couple extra minutes with every mailing and I'm getting, you know, I'm doubling now. We like to under promise over deliver. That's why we say anywhere from like an 8 to 12%.

Yeah.

Is what you should. Is what you should expect. So that, that's one side of like success. The other successes we've seen is digging people out of deep holes with regards to inboxing. They didn't really know they had an inboxing problem until they look into it. Yeah, that they actually look into it. And so we've provided them tools to get them to dig themselves out of those, out of those problems. And that's where they'll see immense gains with what they're already doing once they again climb out of that, out of that deep hole. And then really kind of like the third area of success is providing some additional insights that you just didn't know you had like insights into your email program. And it's also, you know, there's been. When you think about email marketing, email marketing can be definitely stressful. Every job can be. But one of the biggest stresses in an email marketer's life is, oh my gosh, I'm about to send this email to a million people or 5,000 or 3,000 people. I'm about to blast all at once. Well, because our system like spreads email out over time and throttles it. We, it takes all that stress away. Like we built a pause button, pause the sending, fix the issue, wait for the, you know, you know, system to come back online, whatever it might be, and then you just go click resume. So it completely removes that level of stress from an organization or from an email market, etc.

Yeah, I like, I think it's truly fascinating and also to make the world a better place if you can go on that mission to stop as much email. In a nutshell, I think most people over send and not personalize enough. In a nutshell, lack of segmentation. Send too often and don't personalize enough. You know, you know those three things. With some data and some smarts, you're gonna get results, but it just takes time. Yeah. And that's, I think that's another thing. If you went. Isn't went in as a marketing manager in a new role and Said, I'm just gonna fix your email. They'd probably just go, oh, next. You know, you're not gonna get the job. But that would probably get the results they need.

Yes.

Which is. It's a backwards way of thinking, but that's often what we do here as well. So, Mike, we better just start to bring this to ground. So this has been awesome. It's fascinating how much knowledge you obviously have on email and how businesses can use it in such a better way. I think you're spot on when it comes to. If it's free, people don't value it. So, you know, getting a business to go. Right. If I've got 100,000 contacts, put a value on that sort of number per contact or whatever it is, and then you'll start to treat it a bit more seriously. So if people want to get in touch with you, how, like, what channels are your best channels to get in touch?

Well, first and foremost, email. Email is quite simple. It's just mike7se.com all spelled out. And then on Twitter, I manage our Twitter account, so it's owing when. So kind of in alignment with what we do at Knowing when and then LinkedIn as well, you know, very active in those types of communities. But emails is typically the best.

Yeah, perfect. We'll put all of those details in the show notes. But yeah, this has been great, Mike. I think it's really valuable to our audience. And until next time, I can't wait to see you. I'm not sure when it'll be like, we don't know if inbound's on. We don't know when we're going to see each other. So. No, I really appreciate you taking the time out.

Yeah. Charles, great to catch up and, you know, had a blast chatting with you.

Awesome.