Attracting growth like a magnet. The Adam Kitchen Story.

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Welcome to E Commerce Growth Stories. This is your hostess with the mostest, Juliana Jackson, aka the CLV lady. And also I am the Chief Evangelist for OmniConvert.

And this is Valentin Radu, CEO of OmniConvert. Thank you for tuning in today for a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories.

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My pleasure. I'm excited to get stuck in and talk about VIP flows.

Too. Cool. I'm going to start by asking you the same question I ask everyone because everyone has a very crazy answer to this. How did you get into E commerce?

Let me give you the short version. I'm 31 years old now, even though I look 16 years old. And my first job was selling supplements at a local store. Very niche at the time. It was targeted towards bodybuilders, people into powerlifting and things like this. It was my first job out of school and it was a weekend job. I used to go in, I was a sales assistant. And because it was a very niche store, you would have a group of bodybuilders, people who work security, power lifters who come in every weekend and I would speak to them. And you really had to know the products because it's. It's a very intricate industry in terms of the ingredients and what's in them. So the customers would ask you a lot of questions. So you have to spend a lot of your spare time finding out about the products. Anyway, I did that job for about six months and then I was always in my spare time on the Internet, on Bodybuilding.com's Internet forums. And I had a link in the signature to the website where I worked, which also has an E commerce operation. Now, this is 14 years ago. One day I got a call when I was in work on a Saturday from the owner and my manager, Chris said to me, adam, Mike's on the phone, he wants to speak to you. And I said, what have I done? So I got on the phone and he goes, I never spoke to the owner before. He says, are you Adam Kitchen? And I said, yes. And he said, what have you been doing to send all the traffic to our website? And I said, I just post on some Internet forum and I thought I was in trouble. And he said, wow, this is amazing. Like, you're sending 250 people a day to our website. Do you want to come to the main office and learn about E commerce? And I said, yeah, of course, definitely. So I went to Warrington, which is not too far from Liverpool, another city, and he became like a mentor to me and he was like a father figure, actually. I spent so much time learning about E commerce with him. I spent a year and a half and it was a great man. And back then, you know, everything was custom coded from the ground up on the website. There was no Shopify, there's no Klaviyo. There's no omniconvert. If you wanted something, you had to build it from scratch. And Mike's background was software development. So my first day in E commerce was the last employees left us. You're going to be like the E commerce manager. We've got 200 customer questions. Because you could post questions on every product page. And because it was very niche, people would ask like, how does this protein compare to casein protein, which is slow release. I'm taking a fast actin protein, so you have to really have knowledge on the products. And he said, there's a backlog of 250 questions. I need you to answer all of them. So I spent my whole first day answering every single question about all the backlogs, products and questions. And there was a. It was about two weeks of just speaking to customers, asking questions relentlessly. And then all of a sudden I had all these crazy ideas. And because he was a bit older, he wanted to find out like, what we should do. I said we should record videos of the products, talk about them, publish them on Facebook was new at the time. We built an Internet forum. So I was very, very focused on building a community because I knew from being in the store that when I spoke to the customers, they would really just come in to speak to me. They weren't coming in to buy products. We would just talk about daily life and then they will buy whatever I recommended to them because they trusted me.

Yeah.

And I tried to apply that methodology to what we were doing on the Internet. So I said we need to. This was before Facebook groups and things like that. So we built a huge Internet forum. We were releasing tons and tons of content. I've always been big on content. And anyone who gets bombarded with me on LinkedIn sees I love writing content, I love creating it. I just believe if you answer questions about the audience that they ask to you, then you'll win business because you're solving problems and giving them value. So we tried to apply that methodology and it done really well. We were the second biggest UK sports retailer at the time. And this was without any paid ads. We would turn over like 200 to 250k a month between like a small team of six of us on the Internet. And then all of a sudden I got an offer to move to Hong Kong, which was my dream job as a kindergarten teacher. So I've been in commerce and studying to be a teacher at university. And then all of a sudden I got an offer from Hong Kong for a kindergarten teacher and Because I was so close to the owner. I remember going in that day and speaking to him and telling him I had to leave and it made me feel so emotional because I didn't want to leave him. He was like a father figure to me. And then I always remember he said to him, why are you getting upset? And I said, because I feel like I'm leaving the business. And he said, no, no, I want you to go and achieve your dreams. This is amazing news for you. And that was a huge turning point for me because I realized that really great people will always try and bring others up and try and push them on. It would have been easy for him to say he was disappointed and he wanted me to stay because I was managing the whole e commerce site. And yeah, fast forward about five years. I was, you know, still doing things on the side online like digital marketing, writing articles, copywriting, messing around with Facebook ads. I came back to the uk. I lived in Bangkok for a bit. I was in Singapore a lot. And then I came home when I was about 27. And then previous contact in the sports nutrition industry offered me percentage of his company, which was a sports nutrition retailer as well, which was most of my background. I took a cut in the company. We couldn't make it work. We just couldn't make the company profitable. It's really hard to retail anyone's products, especially when you're a small company. And then after that company failed, I had no money. I was living in London and I said I was, what am I going to do with my life? So I said, I like email, I care about it a lot. It's probably my best skill. I'm going to strip away everything else and I'm just going to make a niche service for email marketing. And that's pretty much what we've been doing the last two and a half years is just email for E commerce. So I like to think I know the channel well, but obviously I'm always trying to learn. But most importantly, I'm always trying to adapt that philosophy of building a community and transferring it across to email because I really believe that's how you win with E commerce. It's always been the way in any business if you add value to the customers and you can keep their attention, engagement, they'll buy from you anyway.

What a roller coaster.

Yeah, I was thinking like, damn, I have so many questions about Bangkok. But maybe for another my answers to.

Bangkok might not be the best to hear.

That's what I figured.

That was a crazy city. From my perspective and even though I haven't lived there, it was, it was an amazing experience, but I wouldn't, I, I couldn't live there.

No. My perspective, I, you know, I've, I told you guys I've been to Bucharest as well, a few times actually. And people tell, told me Bucharest is crazy, but if you amplify Bucharest by like a thousand times, the noise, the busyness, that doesn't even come close to Bangkok.

Yeah. So, Adam, regarding your perspective in where the email marketing is going there, there were some voices telling that email is gone, the operates are crappy, and you can't, you don't open your emails, and so on. What's your perspective on this?

I think people, everyone's doing the same thing. And I've had this conversation with a lot of people. I think the problem is now that what I see the trends is that, and I've been guilty of this in the past as well, is thinking that you can just acquire customers from Facebook and Instagram and that you can blast them as much as possible and get the revenue up that way. And, you know, I've, I've done that before. I'm not saying I haven't followed that methodology, but I think you quickly realize that with the cost of acquisition going up, you actually need to focus on not how much you can bleed out the audience. You need to drive the unsubscribe rate down as low as possible and segment people properly. And I think it just goes back to that philosophy in general, that if you keep someone engaged for a prolonged period of time, they'll buy from you anyway. You don't need to sell to them. So I think where marketers are going wrong is that they're looking at email as a sales channel where it's not. It's actually an engagement channel. And if you distribute content and you focus on talking to the audience, they'll buy from you anyway. What everyone's doing, 20% off, 50% off, 30% off. And that's the only strategy. Whereas I would like to think, you know, we're trying to differentiate and provide experiences when people receive the emails. So I would say that where people are going wrong with email is that they're looking at it solely as a sales channel and where it needs to go is become an engagement and a conversational channel, which was its original purpose. How do you do that? I think you need to work towards having high open rates over a period of time and high engagement and not being sucked into vanity metrics where you're going, oh, the click through rate is high. You need to look at why is the click through rate high? What is the objective of the email? I had a client the other week asked me why the click through rates were 0.7% on an email. And I said because there was no call to action, there was no need to send traffic anywhere, just the unsubscribe button.

Right? Yeah.

So people are so conditioned to pigeonhole again, like, how much revenue does this email do? What is the click through rates? And when you look at these metrics, you siloing email as just a way to milk the audience. But as everyone knows, you actually need to engage people and keep them interested in the platform and they'll buy from you.

Anyway.

I want to take a pit stop here because this is one of my favorite topics lately. So, okay, so in the market right now, there's obviously a change that's happening. So a change of mindset, a change of, you know, how to approach different strategies. And from, you know, what I see coming lately, you know, coming out of COVID we see a lot of companies that were not ready for the digital transformation that they, you know, went in and they ended up over, you know, overnight over a pandemic with a lot of, you know, money, a lot of sales. But those sales never came back. So I see that in the market, when it comes to email marketing, there's a very surface, a surface type of approach when it comes to let's change the headlines, let's change the preview, let's, you know, you know what I mean? Right. So it's like the most basic advice that brands get. So brands are like bombarded of the echo chamber of the same type of advice. Change your subject line, put the preview, sell, sell, sell. So if you are, you know, if you're following the principles that you're following right now, which are more focused on quality and on distribution, how are you fighting with the majority, which is, you know, everyone is using email to, to, to sell.

I think it's, it's a mental shift that you need to have buy in from the company that you work with. And that's difficult because people approach us sometimes and they say, I need to generate more sales from email. And you go, okay, so let's dig a little bit deeper. How do you think the best way to do that? Well, we need to send more sales promotions out through email. But obviously that burns through people very, very quickly. And I always use the example where in regards to what you were saying about tricks and hacks that people are using, I can easily manipulate an open rate by just saying, oh my God, there's the headline of an email. But when someone opens that, it might go to 40, 45% on a campaign. But you're conditioning people to not open future emails. So because people are constantly looking at that short term picture, how much revenue did this email drive? How can we get the sales up this week? They're not taking a long term view when what they should be doing is yet not like hacking and trying to trick people. You should be building relationships. So how do you build relationships? You progressively profile people, you find out more about them and then you create segments and send them more relevant contents and messages.

Yeah, I like that. And when it comes to gamification and trickery and gimmickry, I have a friend on LinkedIn that's calls it gimmickry. I'm gonna go back to what you started when you were telling me, you know, we were telling us your story. So you said that you were operating in E commerce with the most basic things. It was no Facebook, no ads, no nothing. You guys were doing basic stuff, but you were winning because you are very much focused on crafting the whole experience in your own way. So would you consider that right now the market is so oversaturated with possibilities that brands can use to bamboozle sales and whatever? Would you say that the best approach that E commerce brands or E commerce marketer should take right now is just going back to basic and learning and unlearning a lot of things that the last 20 years of E commerce and marketing have put up on them.

I think it's just logical if you look at like for example, if people lose 25% of their email list year on year, you're not going to be able to constantly. It'll become an economical decision where people say we can't afford to continuously purchase data so we need to lower that unsubscribe rate and stretch people's engagement out. So when, when it's put to you that way, people start to consider the messages they're sending out and they put themselves in the customer's shoes. And I always say the best way to do this is just subscribe to your own emails and watch how annoying it is when you subscribe for the very first time because you'll probably be pissed off and you'll realize a lot of what's happening in your own brand. You would not like to receive that if you're a customer. So yeah, I think it's a huge mental shift, but I think it will be forced onto people rather than willingly because the cost of acquisition and ads and everything else, people are going to look at email, the negative signals. How can I get this unsubscribe rate down? How can I keep people engaged? Not just how can I blast people and get the sales up month on month.

Yeah, I agree, I agree. It's, it's crazy how much, you know, the e commerce industry has grew but at the same time, you know, it's, I feel like we're all trapped in a way. Yeah.

Adam, I wanna, I wanna emphasize something that you've said that most of the, most of the emails from retailers are like 20% off, 30% off. Buy again, buy now, special offer, whatever. What you would you recommend to be the ideal percentage of discounts and promotions versus let's say content, informative, how to use the product, whatever. Let's say not evergreen content, but useful content.

Yep. Obviously this depends on the brand that you're working with. Some people, it goes back to the, you need buying from the brands. First of all, we have people approach us where they say they've got no content to share, they've got nothing to sell to say we need to get the sales up. So you need to be able to work with something. As a rule of thumb, I like to recommend two content or engagement related emails to one sales campaign if I've got more materials. Sometimes we don't even send any sales campaigns. We work with some brands that don't do discounts, they don't want to or they completely buy into that philosophy. So I like the approach where the more content that you have that's genuinely valuable and related to that segment, just send that instead. Because if people go to consume content, whether it's on your website or your email, they're going to buy from you anyway. You don't need to force them into a browsing session, just condition them to engage with the brand. So as a rule of thumb I would probably say 2 to 1 in terms of engagements and content towards product focus. But I would go even lower than that. If you've got more things to say and obviously look at the segments that you're sending to, that's very important.

But what if the brand itself is like promotion driven? Let's say you have a product centric company which is not that, let's say they sell fashion or sneakers or sport apparel or whatever. What do you recommend for those type of companies?

Yeah, that's a bit more like you said because the customers are sometimes conditions as well to Receiving a lot of promotions, it's difficult, I'm not gonna lie. I don't think there's a magic bullet that you can just suddenly create tons of content. But I think at a very basic level, look at the segments. For example, are you sensing, I think I gave you this example, Valentin a few weeks ago where I bought from a sport retailer and I bought a pair of men's trainers and all of a sudden they're sending me emails for women's clothing. So just a very common sense basic level, having the right segments and then looking. Okay, when did this customer last buy from us? We've sent them 50 sales campaigns in the last three weeks. Are they really going to buy if we send them one more? And then thinking what can we do a little bit differently to engage these people? Well, it is difficult because again, it's the nature of the beast for that type of business. Sometimes you, you have a lot of inventory, you need to shift it very quickly. The customers are conditioned to a lot of sales campaigns. I think you just need to have the buy in from the brand to make them see the value of differentiating with content or with value again, and that is difficult and a lot of brands are going to have to do that because if you're just competing on price and discounts, what's to differentiate you from someone else? There's no loyalty attached to that brand. So again, I think it will become forced on the brand itself rather than them having to just create it on their own whim.

Yeah, I think what it's also important here to add, Adam, is that if you can't do outstanding things, at least do your hygiene with your segments and don't drop the ball with let's say general campaigns or irrelevant products. I also have to ask you something on top of this. How important do you think it is to calibrate the buying cycles with the emails? Because at some point let's say you have fast moving consumer goods, right? And of course you're buying coffee or tea every three, four, five, seven days or at least you're consuming these products with a certain cycle. But brands, they have this good old approach like let's send a newsletter every week, Tuesday, because we've heard this, this is the best operate. We've, we've read some best practices on this article. What do you suggest for those, those type of, of companies, let's say.

So just to clarify on your question, are you talking about like a fast moving consumer goods companies, say for example coffee or protein, for example, I was.

Asking you how important is to calibrate the cadence of your emails with the buying cycles? Because it's I've seen if you don't need to restock. I think it's stupid to get an email the second day after I've bought something which I haven't consumed yet. But you are sending me another email to buy it again or whatever.

100 agree with you. You need to look for patterns in the data and this is something you know, I'm learning about myself all the time. For example, if someone buys a protein powder that the life cycle is 30 days then why do I need to send another 10 newsletters in the time being about protein powder until I finish that product? So one thing we did and I'm not going to this is a new thing to us as well. Around three months ago I realized this myself. It was not an optimal experience and we went back into all the flows we'd ever built for our existing clients and we put what we call exclusion tags on people entering a flow saying if someone goes into a flow, especially if they buy from you for the first time, do not send them any campaign until they finish that flow. And when they finish that flow, yes, then you can send them a campaign maybe if they haven't bought. But even still, you know, I think there's a lot of value in finding out why they haven't bought. But yeah, I think you need to know on a product or category level the buying cycles structure the the reminders timely around then and just take a holistic overview and again try and pass through your own company's emails. If you're being saturated and bomb bordered, chances are if you're a customer you're not going to stay subscribed to that brand. So I think you should be working towards a lower frequency and higher engagements over time. Not a higher frequency and lower engagement.

You're on mute, Valentin. But it's good.

I just agreed.

Cool. Okay cool. So if you're on this topic, Adam, let's talk a bit about subscribers. So I subscribe by, you know, guilty pleasure to a lot of newsletters because I want to see how bad they are and I just do this for fun. But also I'm kind of surprised sometimes, right. Because the content might be interesting but I see the fact that when you subscribe to a newsletter, I guess the journey that you have pre purchase and if John is listening he might actually dig this question. So do you feel that the email marketing agency that a brand is working with or the email marketing in general that A brand does respect where the customers are or not the customers, the visitors are in their journey because you might be interested, you might just randomly find the website and you like something. Like there's a lot of stages of awareness, decision and interest. So when you subscribe to a newsletter, what I see as a common thing is that the welcome series is going to include the product, this product. So what is your take on that? How would you advise people that are doing email? Because I see some familiar faces here that I know that are doing email. So they're probably here listen to you. And what would be some things that you can do to understand where the person is in the journey with you? The subscriber. Right. So not the customer. And how would you approach the welcome series to not be a very boring ass?

Welcome series number one in the welcome series, don't try and sell excessively. I don't think there's any point but progressively profile people, ask them what their Persona is. If you can't collect it on the front end and you don't know anything about them, then you should find out about them. And segment as an example we again just to use my sports nutrition example, let's say for example, you're a sports retailer. I always want to find out if someone coming through the business for the first time is a bodybuilder, they're interested in fat loss or performance and then you can just ask them in an email and then segment them accordingly. That should be very high up on the welcome flow because otherwise you're going to send generalized messages to people. In an ideal world you'd be able to collect that before they even enter the flow. And that I think is what everyone is trying to work towards with overlays and pop ups. But yeah, perfect welcome flow for me is finding out more about the customer. Yeah, you know, biv's brand storytelling but the progressive profiling so you can tailor the customer journey afterwards because otherwise you are just guessing. And you know, we've, we've done it ourselves. We don't have enough data on the customer and there is an element of educated guessing at best.

Tell me more about educated guessing. Do you, do you, do you think email marketing people are doing guessing when it comes to email marketing?

100%. And so we as well, I won't, you know, shy away from it. I think anyone that says they don't guess to some extent is lying. And I think in a perfect world we're all trying to or we would like to get more data but I actually see the best marketers now and the people I admire are finding ways to capture those insights from people. And I've done a big shift in our company as well, saying that we don't just want to judge success on the revenue that we drive from email because again, I think it just pigeonholes email as a performance marketing channel when it's not. We want to find out more about the customer, engage with them, and create more granular customer journeys. So I think you'll get to a point with email in the future where you see the marketers who are able to create a better journey based on collecting more data will automatically sell more anyway because they just know who they're speaking to. And yet there's guessing involved for everyone. We need to find more creative ways rather than just putting people into a newsletter and hitting them with 20% off. Everyone's doing this and it needs to change. And we're trying to, we're trying our best.

Yeah. Well, I think it's, it's important to add on what you've said, Adam, regarding the granular customer journeys is that many times we are, we are having some assumptions about what we should be telling the customers, but the qualitative research would show other things. And I think what is hugely impactful for any type of business, even though you sell a single SKU or multiple SKUs, is to understand the jobs that the customers are doing with the products. Once you understand the jobs behind your products, you could do a small survey with, I don't know for which of the free jobs you're going. You are buying this product just on the thank you page. And once you have that, then all the streams of and all the flows could be about helping the customers to make the progress with the products that they've bought. Because otherwise you're gonna bombard the customers, assuming that they actually want what you want to sell. But the company wants something while the customers need something. And this is a huge gap which is not going to be filled in by the customers. They are not going to knock at your door and say, hey, I'm buying this for that purpose, so please send me things regarding those. They will vote with your. With their wallets. And let's say the bad news is that the competition is that high that they will migrate to another competitor which is doing a better job. And one more thing to add here. Customers are. We tend to think that customers are sitting there waiting for us to blast them with new products. It's like putting like something in their eyes, like take 20, 30 in front of their eyes like, but they will be felt just bombarded by you. But if you want to have a DNA as a brand that actually gives a damn about your, their customers, then you should be simply asking them what they need. And then you could fill in the, fill in the blanks. Otherwise you're gonna just be an undifferentiated brand. And that's a shame. And many customers don't understand that the purchase frequency is the, the most important multiplier. Their most important multiplier is how many times a customer is buying. Because it's completely stupid to have customers which are buying 10 times from you, not asking them what made you buy so often from us and go out there, pay money to Facebook ads and Google Ads, give me customers which are going to buy only ones so that I can squeeze my cash flow and go again to you to buy again from me. It's so stupid. And E commerce brands are not getting this simple math problem.

Yeah, when you frame it like that, you realize the biggest objective of your email is to actually find out more about your customers. It's not to sell to them, it's to continuously find meaningful insights so that you can then tailor better insights to them.

Yeah, I think there's not enough focus on qualitative data and on qualitative research because I speak a lot about this and I feel like we're looking at numbers and you know, at quantitative data. I have a very big problem with the word quantitative. I actually have a video of me trying to sing that word quantitative data. So we have a very big problem because we use data as marketers to justify shitty bad decisions. Because we're looking at data as you know, to help us to make an argument. Right. But without the context that qualitative data will bring and the analysis and you know, how you can collect that via email or surveys or pop ups or whatever is gonna be very hard to not play the guessing game because when you're talking about new customers, there is where you play the most guessing game because you can tell what's gonna happen. So you know, versus customers. Like you know, Valentino was talking about that spend that you know, come and buy from you 10 times and no one thinks like why the hell is this person buying 10 times from me right now? So while we are on the topic, we have a question here from Bruno Teixeira and I hope my Portuguese helped me to say that name right. If not, I'm sorry bro, that I destroyed your name. So he says hi from Portugal regarding the automotive industry Where a customer usually buys the car once in five years. How can we leverage email marketing? Additionally, what strategies do you recommend to acquire subscribers?

Perfect example is what we've just been talking about about so, so if someone's going to buy every five years, you'd want to progressively profile them to find out how frequently they're driving the car, how they service it, is it for a family and then obviously you can tailor more efficient messages towards them. So there is things that people buy once they get cause as well. I, I don't know what he's actually selling besides the cars. But if you're able to find out those that data by asking the customer post purchase or obviously up front, then you'll be able to send them more targeted campaigns. And when I say campaigns again, how to get the most out of their investments. Because ultimately especially in the automobile industry, people rarely do buy from people that they trust. So I would really make sure the customer satisfaction is high and that they're happy with the purchase. And I would find out obviously things like how they're using the car mileage families, how frequently it's MOT, stuff like that. So I think it just goes intelligent data collection and progressive profiling along the way and then giving them advice on how to get the most out of it. Because there is things for non technical people with cars like me that they have no idea about like how to change the water, you know, the tires and things like that. So there's lots of things you can do if you get creative and just think about the customer journey rather than what's the fastest way I can sell to this person again.

Yeah, that's perfect. I would also add to you to this Adam that Bruno, you need to understand which are your company's objective down the line. In five years you want that customer to buy again. But until then you want a customer which is so pleased about your, your service that he, he's becoming an, an evangelist for your brand and for your, I don't know, car, if you're a car dealer or whatever you are. So you should do this customer journey to understand the touch point and you should understand which are the questions that arise in the heads of your customers once they buy the car. Because okay, I've bought the car, I've paid, I don't know, US$20,000 or whatever if it's about car, not car parts, which is a different story. But if I, if I've bought the car then I, I would like as a car dealer to make sure that my customers are happy with it. So I would, I would ask them about the satisfaction and then down the line I would give him some tips about the fact that they've bought Volkswagen, which could be treated like this and that, and how to treat your SUV and then how to. Because the questions would be how, what is the mileage, what is the consumption? How can I diminish the consumption? Because it's about maintaining and nurturing and using the product. And then he's getting into a different, into a different, let's say, mindset. He's not about buying, but it's about using. And once you understand that email is a great tool to use down the line because if you build this content strategy that could go ever evergreen and the cadence shouldn't be like once a week, it could be once a month and whatever. I mean, I mean that's what you should be asking yourself, not how to use the email marketing. But how can I provide value to the customers? Only. Only. Yeah, okay, got it. So how can I provide value to the customers which are using this, this car. So carvana like platform. So these are, how do they call them? These are like house on cars or how do they call this? Yeah.

Oh, caravan. I say. Yeah.

RVs.

Yeah, it's like. Yeah, it's like a house on wheels that you move around.

Yeah, okay, got it. So mainly that's, that's my two cents about your, your question. It's not about the tool. And many, many customers are being bombarded by emails because they have their, those stupid KPIs. Like how many emails we've sent? How many people were clicking? No, how happy are the customers? And how can I integrate email in my whole customer journey? Because, and that's a problem in the whole industry. I mean the bigger the company, the more silos they have. And they have the social team, the email team, the PPC team. This is so crazy. I mean, it's crazy. From, from, from, from the way the org chart looks. The email guys, they have their own freaking KPIs and they need to bombard with emails their customers to come back and get to the website. While the social needs fans and engagement on the social media. But what about the customer? Where is the customer in all this craziness, right? Where is the happiness of the customer? What is the progress that he's doing with the products that you're selling?

Completely agree. First of all, number one, teach them how to use the product and get the most value out of it. That should be your objective rather than I need to Sell to them in five years time. And just to touch on that point, Valentin, I was speaking about this yesterday as well. We've worked with people where they say we need to get the email revenue up to 40%. I said, why? What, what's the purpose of this? And then you're having like departments fighting over attribution. It's, it's crazy. It's not a holistic way to, it's just a terrible way to look at the business in general. Why would you want different departments to fight? You meant to all work towards sales and providing a better customer experience. But yeah, it's sad. We're having like wars between Facebook ads versus Tick tock and then social versus email and SMS versus email and it just misses the big picture where they should all harmoniously help each other and.

Not work against each other. And I would like to add to Bruno's question because all of you guys added your two cents. I'm going to add to your question, Bruno. Look for lifetime value fans because if your business has such a low frequency product, you want to understand better the jobs that your current customers are hiring your product for so you can do smarter acquisitions instead of just going and spraying for whoever wants a car. If you understand the job right and if you understand the story behind, you can uncover the demand. And then when you go and acquire new customers, you can acquire them in a much more, on a much more higher value than you would if you just do, you know, thoughtless marketing. That's how I like to call it. But thank you for the question also, Bruno. So now, Adam. Oh my God. I've been waiting for this moment for a long time to greet you. So I have a question for you because, and I know Valentin would agree with something. I don't agree right now. So I have massive question for you. It's gonna be silly. So it's a common conversation in the market that's short copy sells better than longer copy and Valentin believes that shorter copy sells better than longer copy. But I want to ask you as an email marketing, you know, expert or, you know, email marketing dude? What? Yeah, I don't like the word expert, but that's another conversation. You clearly, you clearly know your, you know your stuff around email marketing. But tell me, is longer copy selling worse than shorter copy? And I want to clip this moment right now.

It's about context. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a black or white answer. What I will say, in general, especially for E commerce, the trend is to build emails to skim Especially if you're going for like a really visual branded experience. I think it makes sense to have like very clear headlines and short witty copy. We actually have an amazing copywriter whose background is in long form copy and he likes to write like really long story based emails. But because we're trying to be quite design centric we continuously have to teach him to write less copy for the emails because especially some brands, right. Like I see my sisters, I see how they consume emails on their phone. They're skimming the emails. So I think the, the majority of the time now I would say build emails to be able to be skimmed quickly. Unless you're in a specific industry where that type of long form educational storytelling works well.

And how can you, how can you tell that? Because I think, I think longer copy works if you have something valuable to say. If you don't have something valuable to say, it will be hard for you to write that much.

Yeah, again it goes, what's the goal of the email? Right. Like is it just to send traffic back to the website? If so then you know, clear call to action. Make it short and witty might work best. But that saying that it might might not be. You could include hyperlinks and long form content and get people. So ultimately I think it just depends on the quality of the message and the overall brand. And when in doubt a b test them pretty agnostic to like short or long just, just and finds out what works best.

Are you happy with that answer? Volunteer?

You can always test. Yeah, of course I'm, I'm happy because Adam, what Adam just said is he said it depends.

You are trying to be polite grilling me because I learned I write the longest emails longest I will I say all my story in one email. I'm capable of everything. So yeah that's, I, I had to take the chance and you know, I kind of played myself on it but it's okay.

Well I think overall right. Like I think less is more in a lot of circumstances and I know this myself. I love to waffle a bit too much sometimes but I think as a copywriter as well, you should always look for filler that you can trim out and make it condensed and get to the point quicker. So you want to make it as easy as possible for people to consume content and whether that needs to be in a long form or short form, you should just try and be as succinct as possible to get the message across.

Adam, what do you recommend to the e commerce entrepreneurs which are looking to start with their Email marketing strategy or to let's say make it proper this time where they should be starting. What are you doing when you are starting with a new brand to, to cooperate.

Yeah. So there, there is obviously I would say quick wins. Don't want to say growth hacks because Juliana might get angry. You know there's, there's things you can set up straight away. Abandoned Court, your welcome flow that everyone knows the standards, out of the box automation but that's stuff that anyone can set up. Everyone knows about those things. So apart from that, what I would say would be make a conscious effort from the beginning, beginning to collect as much data, which has been the theme of like this whole talk. Just try and find out as many insights as possible from your customers in as many different touch points as possible so that you can tailor a better message towards them. Don't build and then work backwards trying to figure out the insights because at that point you've likely pissed a lot of people off with irrelevant messages and just burn through them. So yeah, things like abandoned Court, welcome flow, post purchase, win back, whatever. Most people will have them set up as it go to like more quick wins but find out as much data as possible and create better experience through segmentation.

Cool. I have a question from our sponsor Vitex right now and it's a funny question. So they're asking, so they're asking you, what's your opinion about SMS marketing? Is it more efficient than email marketing?

The problem is, well, efficient in what way? Right, like it's about context and I see this with SMS a lot because of the cost on it, people feel very, very pressured to sell and generate an ROI that way. So I think that leads to bad practices because when you have such an expensive form of communication, the only way for a lot of brands to justify that is by trying to sell to the audience. But again that's just short term thinking. So I think sms, it's got, it's. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but I think for me it's a, it's a sales medium primarily and I would use it specifically for limited edition drops, sales promotions, things like that. And I would try and condition the customers to receive more purposeful long form content on email because it's, it's a cheaper medium to communicate that type of message.

But do you like it?

I don't know. I hate scouts and gas and messes and I unsubscribe from them. I find them quite invasive and saying that, you know, they work. I think that I do think it's not necessarily a trend, but I think it's going to change at some point. Surely some point someone will put like filters on the SMS inbox the same way you have with email. And I think when that happens it will change a lot.

Looking forward to that. Yeah. Adam, we are seeing that the third party cookies are, are going down. Do you think this is going to affect positively the email marketing industry?

Absolutely, yeah. Because it will make it again. It just goes back to what we've been talking about. It will make people realize that they need to tailor about the customer journey. You can't just keep loading people up and up and up. There's going to be less people going in through the top. So when there's less people going in through the top, it's forces you to think more about what happens when they come out the other end so there's not that surplus of supply where they go, ah, we can afford to lose nine people because we'll keep this one person and hit them with 50%, 20% off. Going to see people go, whoa, wait there, we need to keep at least three people. So when you're put into that paradigm where you, you, you have to shift mentally, you're going to really think about it from their perspective, which is what you should be doing anyway. But it will just force that and exposite it even more.

I like that. Go ahead, Valentin. Sorry.

I also wanted to ask you something Adam, regarding the, let's say our, our mission as you, as you know, we are completely obsessed about customer lifetime value and the, the impact that it has in the retailer's existence. Let's say, what's your, let's say best suggestion? Let's say, of course it should be specific to the E commerce and so on, but if you would give some tips about using email to improve the customer lifetime value, which would those be?

Don't be overly concerned with revenue per recipients and click through rates because they can easily be manipulated. I think long term open rates aggregated over time shows that people are interested in your messaging and unsubscribe rates will show if people are just pissed off and it's not relevant to them. So I think rather than obsessively focusing on how much revenue each email generates, if you can prolong someone's engagement over a year, two years, three years, they're gonna buy anyway if they stay engaged with your email. So that's my philosophy and that's how we're constantly trying to drive down unsubscribes and keep open rates high. And you do that how? By sending more relevant messages to the right customer at the right time.

And how you send more relevant messages.

More data.

The corner in Valentin. It's not cool. I'm curious, how are you living in Liverpool? Liverpool by being a Manchester United fan.

So I'm the referee here, right?

Yeah.

Honestly it's, it's a hard life. I mean I'm 31 years old now and now Liverpool are winning everything. But when I was growing up, Manchester United were winning everything. So just to give a bit of context, why am I a Man United supporter in Liverpool? So my father was from Manchester and my mom was from Liverpool. Now I don't for anyone who's from the States, who's not watching. Liverpool and Manchester are very close in the UK they're like 40 miles apart. But it is such a huge cultural change between. Between two cities and there's a massive rivalry where they hate each other. The worst thing you can do because football is like religion in the UK is support a different team from the city. City that you're from basically. I was born in Manchester. My parents got divorced when I was really young and my mom took me back to Liverpool. So I grew up in Liverpool. But of course you follow your father's team and it was hard. Yeah. But luckily we were winning everything.

That's not the case anymore.

Something funny actually. Right. Because footballs and Valentine you'll know as well. Football is just seems be to. To be the go to conversation for all men when there's nothing to talk about. Every time you get attack in a taxi in Liverpool, the taxi driver looks in the mirror and goes are you a blue or a red? So Everton or Liverpool? I go, now I have to explain the story about how my parents are divorced again. I'm a red but I'm not the type of reds that you think. And they go are you a man? Like a man? And. And you go oh, get out the taxi.

Hilarious. No, but I couldn't imagine how you, you are living there like you're going to, you know, you're where you cannot wear the T shirt. It's like being in the blood and the Crips. You cannot be seen with colors outside. That's fine.

I, I've, I've, I've got a Manchester, an old one now I don't buy them anymore but I do have an old Manchester United T shirt and I've went to walk out a couple of times with it on and because sometimes I just wear them around the House and I actually go back upstairs and change the clubs. Seriously?

Cool. So my last question for you. My one, I don't know, Valentin, you might have one. My last question for you is this. What are the top three things an email marketing agency or an email marketer should be focusing? Then don't tell me the data and whatever again because I, I got that. But tell me like what are three things that you know, you should unlearn from all this acquisition centric, you know, mindset that we're living? Because as you, I'm tired of seeing people treating email like a sales channel when it should be a distribution or a content or whatever. You know, like own marketing should not necessarily be sales. So what, you know, like there's many people listening to the advice of you and other, you know, others in your space and it's always, you know, a collide between advices that you get when it comes to email marketing. So what should people do actually? What would be those things? Because I too don't believe in email being a sales channel. Give me three things.

The first thing you should do is put a very intense focus on your segmentation who you send, especially when it comes to your campaigns, who you're sending to. Have you got the right information about them? Is it relevant to them? You should definitely start there. The second thing I would look at is how is the open rate over prolonged periods of time, not acute measurements? Because if the open rate stays high to each segment, that's a good intense signal that people are engaging with the, the messaging. The third thing is obviously look at the unsubscribes because that shows if people want to hear from you or not. You'll have noticed I didn't mention anything about revenue per recipient or click through rates because I think it's, it's, it can be easily manipulated. As an example, I can go into any E commerce businesses account tomorrow and start to send 50 off coupons to everyone and the revenue per recipients will be very high. It doesn't mean it's a good thing for the business. So you have to get out of the mindset of your in email to sell. That's what it goes back to. You're not, you're in email to provide a better customer experience like any area of the business. And the only way you can do that is by playing the long game, giving the customers what they want and stop thinking what's better for the short term monetary gains. It's a mindset shift.

I agree.

Adam. My, my question is what would you recommend to, let's say people here that are willing to grow. What's what's your best suggestion? Or maybe it's a book, maybe it's a habit. Maybe something that they should be doing to level up their their game and and grow on their on the inside, not only outside.

Find out your customers pain points, ask them and just create content around solving those problems. Don't even waste try to force your products in there as the solutions. Just give them the answers to things that they're looking for and then understand that they'll buy from you as a byproduct of trust. So I would invest massively in just collating all the customer service questions, all the common questions on products and I would constantly just be creating content around that and distributing them through channels. And I think if you do that then engagements will skyrockets and people are just going to buy from you. You won't even have to sell.

Excellent. That was my last question as well. Thanks a lot Adam for for being today with us.

I hope we didn't grill it so much.

I enjoy it. Take me to the fryer. Grill me.

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