Valentin Radu Talks E-Commerce

They are a company, and when they are establishing a relationship with a person, an individual, a customer, a prospect, they need to pay attention to their. To what they are broadcasting. And most of them are not aware that they've shipped the product, but they are already bombarding you with discounts. And even though they've shipped the product, they are not aware if. I don't know if I bought some shoes. Are those shoes feeding you, dear customer, that you are at the first order with us? Nobody cares about it. What they do care about is to give you, like, a coupon which is going to expire in two hours if they. And I think that's. That's one of the main things that makes me cringe.

Today in inboxing, Valentin Radu, CEO and founder at Omnicon. All right, welcome back to another episode of Inboxing. I'm really excited about this guest, and he's got a big fan base. Look like a lot of people signed up to hear this. So he's a great guy and he's done a lot and he's come a long way, and I'll let him tell his whole story and it's going to be great. So without any further ado, you know, please welcome Valentin Radu. Valentin, how are you?

Hi there. I'm great. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. I think this is the first live even for me, this, this year, so I'm excited.

Really? Oh, this year?

Yeah, yeah, this year. Because it's the 6th of January, right?

Or it's the 6th of January. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I didn't think of it like that because I know I'm pretty sure you've been on live programs before, but, yeah, 2022, this is my first live event also for 2022, so thank you and congratulations on being the first of this. Of this year. So, yeah, let's just jump right into things. How are you doing? Just to start with that, you know, in general, things are good.

Well, in general, things are good. Despite the fact that my kids are getting into that phase called the teenage. And to struggle and to cope and to learn, my negotiation skills are crap compared to what I need to master. But besides that, things are getting. Are going well for us. We grew a lot. I have a great team and a beautiful family. I'm grateful.

Okay. And we'll date the time here. But Omicron is spreading everywhere. How are things in Romania with Bucharest, with Omicron?

To be honest, Hill, I simply don't know. I think It's. I think we are not looking at the main conversions. I mean, the main conversions is how many we are surviving and not how many get infected. And pretty much I've disconnected consciously from that part of the world because it's not helping me to look at those metrics, let's say.

Okay, all right, so can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started with email?

Yeah. So mainly to give you a bit of context, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I love building companies. I've been a late bloomer, as they say, meaning that I haven't found my thing for years in a row. I discovered that I love the e commerce by doing it. It's like we have a saying here in Romania, the appetite comes while you're eating, you know, so you learn to like it once the time goes by. So, so basically I got into the e commerce space and then I discovered the power of email marketing because frankly, because of the high ad spend costs. So mainly that's how I got into the, into tapping into the email part. I grew our own list, so I helped other e commerce companies grew their lists. I've been into this game of attention grabbing, right, because it's a hard game to transform visitors into subscribers and then subscribers into customers and then customers into ambassadors. I mean, that's the whole game. But the media companies are tricking us into transforming their users, their swipers into visitors and pretty much that's their conversion. And I think email is great because of that, because of the fact that it's giving us the power to broadcast ourselves as creators. And pretty much that's how I see the email space.

All right, so what do you see in the inbox? What kind of things do you see? What kind of emails do you get that really kind of like make you upset or just like, oh my gosh, can't believe we're still doing this.

I think anything related to bombarding me with a discount before trying out the product, I think that these are one of the most, let's say awkward hiccups that the companies are doing because they are not aware that they are a huge company or a small company anyway, they are a company and when they are establishing a relationship with a person, an individual, a customer, a prospect, they need to pay attention to what they are broadcasting. And most of them are not aware that they've shipped the product, but they are already bombarding you with discounts. And even though they've shipped the product, they are not aware if I don't Know if I've bought some shoes. Are those shoes feeding you, dear customer, that you are at the first order with us? Nobody cares about it. What they do care about is to give you like a coupon which is going to expire in two hours if they use it. And I think that's one of the main things that makes me cringe.

I think what you're getting to is guess what? Companies don't treat people like people and like trying to like, treat them like cash machines. You know, like, okay, let's send another email. Maybe it'll, it'll convert the bigger list the better. Yeah, that's kind of. Yeah, so we'll get into a lot of that. All right, so yeah, I've seen a lot of stuff on your Resume, on your LinkedIn profile. Tell us a little bit of that journey. How did you get to, you know, starting this company? OmniConvert.

Yeah, we, I think struggle led me here. The first thing is that I think individuals, people, human beings are not acting if it's not painful enough. I think even vitamins have a painkiller component. So even it's like anticipated regret what makes people to buy vitamins. So at the end of the day, it's, it's pain as well. So I was struggling to improve my. Our own conversion rate at my former e commerce company, which was on the it. It turned out to be the largest online car insurance player here in Romania. We've got like 250,000 customers. But the ad costs were surging, the competition got fierce and we needed to do something. So I've built a conversion rate optimization platform because there was nothing decent in the market at that time back in 2010. And we built our own tool and then I got that technology and turned it into a product because I realized that, hey, there are many people which are struggling like myself into improving the conversion rate, into tracking what's important, into serving customers. So I've learned all these principles into, of the. On the E commerce and thanks to that, I, I got into, into building this company. Eight years afterwards, here I am with you.

All right, great. All right, so you admitted you're saying like you started this insurance company and then ad Costco. Is that, is that the story? Basically you were inspired, like the struggle inspired. You said, like, this is not working, like. And you know, like, I don'. Only one struggling with this. Everyone's struggling with this. So let's start a company that.

Because to, to be honest, in retrospective, I was pretty dumb. But I have this principle that we are always dumber than we will be, hopefully. I mean, I, I, I think that's the natural progress of life. But it was a bad assumption because mostly, I don't know, there are eight years since that moment and the CRO industry is not there yet because it's kind of hard to improve conversion rate. You need the copywriting skills, you need the data analytics skills, you need psychology skills, you need a lot of stuff to make conversion rate work. But I wrongly believe that everyone is struggling with the same thing. I mean, everyone is actually making something to improve the conversion rate. But on some verticals where the market was frugal yet, people were not looking at that. Because if the roas was there in Google Ads at that moment and on Facebook ads, they were just playing this game of acquiring customers, churning customers, getting new ones and so on. So what inspired me was my own story and my own impact because we have improved our own conversion rate by 60% in 12 months of, let's say, in depth working and a lot of experiments and surveying and whatever. And I thought that if I can turn around the company's destinies that easy, then I think that will work for other companies as well. So I've overestimated the technology aspect and underestimated the need of skilled and talented individuals. At the end of the day, we are not worshipping Mercedes or McLaren F1 cars. We are looking at the F1 drivers. Because that's what's happening in the CRO. That's what's happening in the marketing landscape as well. Technologies are great. Some technologies are plug and play, but not all of them are plug and play. And if you want to do advanced stuff, you need the human brain just yet. Maybe in 20 years from now we will be completely absent, but until then we need the creativity and data crunching and psychology schemes because we are where people selling to people, Right?

You can have technology showing you what the problems are, but to solve the problems you need people. Right? All right, so what was the most surprising thing you learned since you started working in marketing and E commerce and all that?

I think the most surprising thing was that I haven't knew anything until I had the privilege to learn about the Jobs to be Done methodology from Clayton Christensen and Bob Meister. I've actually realized that, wow, it was mind blowing for me because before Jobs to be Done, the Jobs to be Done methodology, I thought that we are looking to, let's say, influence people. While afterwards I learned that the people are already influenced by themselves and their struggle and all we have to do as marketeers is to find that struggle and to verbalize to articulate the story of our product and the creatives according to the moment in time when someone will have that struggle. So mainly if you are marketing for a particular individual, let's say if I'm, I'm now 41 and I'm driving a hybrid car, but not all the people which are 41 are driving a hybrid car. So if you are targeting for individuals, if you are playing this media buying companies like Facebook and Google and whatever, if you are using their targeting options, it's not that they are bad, I'm just saying that these are indicative. So he's not. It's a difference between causation and correlation. So what makes me buy a certain product is not making us an individual which is sharing the same characteristics as me to buy that product. So for instance, I have friends which are not having kids like I have and they are buying a sports car and they don't give a damn about a hybrid car which is too big and to too slow for them. But the idea is that we all have a job to be done, we all have struggles and we are buying products to make progress in our lives. For me, I can't imagine having to get my kids into a sports car. You know, I actually can't get them to fit in there because I have two of them and they are getting bigger. So mainly that was the most surprising thing that I've learned about marketing. The fact that I haven't knew anything and the fact that if you don't understand the jobs to be done buyer products. And I think it was the same for, from Peter drucker. Something like 90% of the companies don't know why their customers are buying. So they don't know what they are selling. Right. And they don't know why people are actually making the decision to say today is the day that I'm gonna, I don't know, ask for a coat to, to buy this product, that software or that particular product. And I've made, since then, I've made a lot of research by using the jobs to be done methodology. And it was eye opening for me over and over again. I was surprised about the findings over there. And I think that's the most surprising thing for me.

All right, definitely just give me some reading material because I'm not really familiar with this whole jobs to be done.

I've been so amazed about it that I teamed up with Bob Mesta and I got him as a professor in our CVO academy. So mainly we have a whole academy around improving the customer lifetime value in E commerce. And I've invited him and he said yes. So he has a module teaching jobs to be done to our audience.

That's amazing. All right, so what do you love so much about either email marketing particularly?

Well, the best thing is that it's free. Free. It's in your control. So we've been all trapped, I mean, if we are, let's say seasoned, not to say old marketeers, into that moment when we used to play the Facebook game of having a page, you know, and it was. I used to have two Facebook pages for my online car insurance company. We had something like 250,000 fans on one of them and 100,000 on the other. And at some point we were focusing all our marketing efforts towards building that Facebook page. And it had the same weight. I mean, we had a lot of engagement, we had a lot of views, but at some point, Facebook said, no more. You have to pay to play. So you can't get that with the email marketing. So I think the first thing is that it's in your control. Another thing that I like is that it's not like a public arena. So you are doing hiccups. Like, I remember a lot of hiccups in my history. Like one former marketing guy from our end dropped the ball once and then he said, sorry, dropping the ball again. With the we are sorry email. He dropped the ball again. So the idea is that you are getting this type of. Even though if it's one too many, but then it's one to one, it's not like a public arena. So that's another thing. And the first thing is that it works, it's efficient. I mean, it's so great to nurture an email list and to have this feedback and to have the impact in other people's life. And I think email is not a sales tool, but it's a communication tool. So as a company, unless you don't forget that I think you're on the right path.

What do you do in your role as CEO founder at OmniConvert?

Well, my job is to inspire people to team up with me to educate the market towards our category. We are strong believers in customer value optimization as a category. We think that for too long, the marketing was too much about acquisition. And we haven't got marketing managers, we got spending managers. All they were doing was spending money on ads on that, on that. And I think that's the, let's say, mission that I'VE assumed to educate people, to educate the market around customer value optimization and to craft this new category, this endeavor that takes into account the whole customer journey. So it's not only about acquiring customers that never come back. It's also about delighting customers so that they become your promoters, your ambassadors, your evangelists. So unless we don't see the big picture, we are just shooting in the dark. So there is a methodology around this. It's called cvo. And I'm doing this on top of that. I'm trying to, let's say, build the team, to handle the vision and to go on with the company. It's like an ultramarathon. I mean, entrepreneurship is like nobody can warn you what are the challenges when you sign up for this? And even though this is my fourth company already, it looks like I'm never learning. I think this is a bit, I don't know, is like I'm doing it to myself on purpose, you know, because I know that despite the pain, despite the challenges, the growth is there and appears so. I can't imagine how would I be as an individual and you can't a B test in life. I can't imagine how would I be without being an, an entrepreneur. So mainly that's, that's what I do over here. And I'm having fun by growing, growing this company, teaming up with my teammates and pretty much enjoy life while I'm aging.

Sounds great. All right, so let's see, what are your top tips, things to keep in mind, I guess, for the new year is that things changed so much from last year.

Yeah, go ahead. Number one, you need to focus on collecting data because nowadays we have these iOS updates, we have this lack of proper tracking. So you, you need to collect data in advance. So, and what I mean by in advance, I mean while you are having your people, your, your subscribers subscribing to your email, you need to collect this type of zero party data and then you need to use zero party data in the way you communicate or your, you position your, your product and your service. If you're not doing this, you're doing yourself a huge, let's say, say you're putting yourself in a disadvantage because it's so easy to collect this kind of data and this data is way more effective than looking in Google Analytics or in your email service provider to look for what you need to provide. The second email tip is around providing value. I mean, folks, it's all about helping people progress. That's why we are here. That's why you're watching this, it's about making progress and what kind of progress your audience is willing to make. What kind of things are struggling then? Because once you understand that, you'll be there. I mean the technicalities are not that important while you get the value, right? The fourth tip we are using for, I don't know, more than 10 years, a method called RFM recency, frequency and monetary value. So if you have an E commerce, for instance, you can use RFM to become way more relevant to your audience. Because as an E commerce company you are establishing thousands of relationships with individuals all over your market, right? But they are in different positions and have different relationships with your company. So with RFM you will end up having customers with the high recency, with the high frequency and with the high monetary value. We call them the soulmates or the super consumers, right? These are your best customers out there and you don't want to talk with them as you are talking with new customers or customers that you want to reactivate. You don't want to bombard them and annoy them. And also by using RFM you will have ex lovers like customers that used to be like the first ones but they are not there. So communicating with them according to the relationship they have with your brand, that's going to be completely transformative for, for your email strategy in 2022. The fourth tip is around, let's say becoming relevant. So if you can't provide value because you haven't done your homework and you haven't collected the data and you haven't done the qualitative research, at least do the hygiene part, right? And the hygiene part means don't overlap your company journey with your customer journey, right? So don't mess them out. I mean it's not about what you want to get from that email, it's also what you are giving. Because it's this rule, I think since the Bible was written, right? You always get what you give or do for the others, what you want them to do to you. So it's this simple thing. If you are not relevant and if you all you are looking for is revenue. So if you are hypnotized and obsessed about what you're getting, you're not going to get too much if you are going to be focused on becoming relevant. That may mean to also understand what kind of data you want to use at this current moment. So you need to work more like a movie director, like focusing on we have a new customer, what do we want to tell at this step? We have A new customer that has not bought in the last three weeks. But our purchase cycle is that people are buying coffee every two weeks. So let's send them an email which is relevant, not get discount. Because if people are not consuming your product, how can you buy again a product that you, you still have it on your shelf. So that's around being relevant with your email. And my fifth advice, let's say or tip is around blending email with other channels. I think it's important as you are like a movie director to understand what kind of other touch points can you use like SMS or Facebook remarketing ads or whatever or website experience for customers which are in this type of relationship with yourself. Because if you use the power of email with other channels as well, then you will be able to come up with a working strategy. Because we all know that everyone is bombarded with messages with ads everywhere everyone is spending. I don't know, my kid, which is 13 years old, he has something like 11 hours of screen time every day. We need to, let's say diversify the channels. We can't do only email. So that means orchestrating customer journey, which makes sense on all the touch points. And that may mean to also come up with an alignment between the departments within your company or that may mean to align the agencies, the email marketing agency within with the performance agency. These are things that need to be done right now in 2022.

Yeah, that was a great answer. Email marketers who run high volume email programs know that the ease with which you could make decisions impacts campaign success. And that's why Engage made sure it's easy to act on, optimize and leverage your data. With Ongage, you'll be able to see, send your customers on personalized journeys based on the data from an action based dashboard and with in depth reporting. To learn more, visit hillelberg.com engage and discover what Engage can do for you. There's someone watching the show from LinkedIn, Ben Kazinik and he's got a question. Where would you go to hire the best marketing talent? How do you go about hiring email marketers?

Well, that's a great question and I think this is something that I'm struggling with as well because it's a never ending story to find the right people. It's not about the best ones, I guess it's not about the best ones, but the right ones. Because the idea is to have the right people at the right place. What I would do, if I were you, I would. Besides going to, I don't Know things, finding out places where you can find those type of individuals, like online geniuses or other communities besides that. What I think is, is that you need to act more like a media company. The, the best people, the talented people, the right people for your company are looking to identify themselves with the path of your company. So you need to, to come up with an approach that allows you to reveal who you are and what's your vision as a company. And the balance right now I remember that I was hunting for jobs, you know, and the balance was the employers were having the power. Now the employees have the power. Right. And if the employees have the power, then you as an employer, as a company, you need to, to provide value. So if I would need to hire an email marketer, I would a go at the right place, second position myself properly and third, come up with a way to broadcast myself as a company and to make them identify with the path that the company has. And also, maybe you can do something more than the boring job description. For instance, one of my tasks for this quarter is to, is not to build the resumes, you know, the job descriptions, those boring JDs like we've been, we are doing that, we need that. These are your responsibilities. But to simply talk with the future employee that I will have on that position. So I will, I will do this type of videos to be able to hire the right people for our company.

All right, he's got two more questions and the third one's a quick one. What's the best way to go about upgrading a template? I think testing, I would say. Right. And if you're doing B2B marketing, you should use Mailchimp or there's a lot of other tools out there. I wouldn't recommend mailchimp for that. But you can also use mailchimp.

Yeah, I think it's first you need to test, always be testing. Right. There are zero chances that from the first attempt you found the most performing email design template. So that means gradually testing. If you don't have enough subscribers, that's going to be tough. If you have enough, that's great. If you don't have enough, focus on the right things. Because you, you can't do everything at the right time. So one of the lessons that I, I've learned throughout my career was to focus on the right things at the right time. Which means not all the. It was that story from Andre Agassi. He started to win championships when he started to give up on the balls, which were virtually impossible for him to catch because he Realized that not only he's not going to score, but he's always also going to be frustrated and have a bad energy for the next ball. So you need to pick your battles in a nutshell. So that means maybe it's not the right moment to upgrade an email design template if you don't have the right amount of people to get to statistical relevance. When you are doing an A B test and a B2B marketing company should be using any kind of email tool. There are a lot out there. I personally think that the simplicity and getting the job done is more important than the brand. There are a lot of tools. We are, we are now using Moosend and HubSpot. We've used the activecampaign GetResponse, a lot of them. I think the difference is not in the, in the tool but in the creativity and the strategy that you have.

Okay, all right. And then. Yeah, he just was a little confused. You mentioned zero party data.

Yeah. Zero party data means data that the visitors, the individuals are giving are intentionally sharing with you. Like what's your size? 41. If I have an E Commerce selling shoes, that's going to be a fantastic tool for me to have, hey, we have 41 new 41 shoes in stock. See what you like because that becomes way more relevant for them. Or if you're selling, I don't know, toys and you found out that you have someone which was subscribing and she's a mom and she has a, a daughter which is seven years old. That's fantastic for your email marketing campaigns you can do, I don't know, it's not about doing email lists for every age or every whatever, but you can do toys for girls and toys for boys. So mainly that's what zero party data is.

All right, back to the program. All right, so what do you. What are the biggest mistakes people are making?

Well, I guess I've touched this subject in a bit earlier, but lack of relevance is the first one and the most painful the second one. Lack of relevance can be solved by using zero party data and by consciously crafting and orchestrating sequences that are taking into account the relationship between the company and the individual. The second email mistake, I think it's is lack of value. Another one could be not doing AB testing enough. Another one could be not focusing fantastically on the subject. I think subject is the door. Right. If you don't hand. If you shipping a house with doors that have no handle that you. Nobody can get into that house. So subject is fantastically important. So you need to take into account to keep it compelling, to keep it short enough to be relevant. Because look in your inbox. You know, I have, I have got rid of the attempt to have zero inbox. Not. I gave up. That's it. I can't do it. Congrats to everyone that could do it. I can't. So I have 26,000 emails I can screen share. I can share my screen to show you 26,000 unread emails. And I'm always scrolling, I'm getting G suite. I have something between 150 and 250 new emails every day. How can you make me click on your email if your subject line is not standing out from the crowd? And I think that's a thing that you should be doing. There's a great thing I can recommend to you. It's called. There's a guy called J. Abraham. He wrote something like 10,000 subjects from newspapers. And you can use those type of templates with anything you are selling. You know, and there are, it's not about what they were stating there in the newspapers. It's about how you do a compelling subject line. Right. So the idea to attract to, to grab the attention of the, of the subscriber is to, to, to make it compelling. And these people, I mean from hundreds of years, they, they were using this attention techniques to craft their articles in the newspapers and this guy collected 10,000 of them. I've. I'm personally used something like 100 of them for all the subjects that I'm using. And I'm just rephrasing with things that I, I try to communicate like. And it was. There are all sorts of ways to, to craft a subject. Like is this the end question mark? Why blah blah blah is not working or all sorts of mechanics that will allow you to get creative into crafting great subjects.

Yeah, it's a great, that's a great tip. We're talking about mistakes, but yeah, so bad, bad subject lines. Anything else?

Well, I guess, yeah, nothing else gets through my mind but I think it's all a matter of let's say being oh that there is another one. Being hypnotized about things like CTRs and opens and the number of subscribers or unsubscribe rate. I don't give a damn about unsubscribe rate. And why? Because I don't want to bore people with my content. I want the right people. If I can have 1,000 people which are engaged and they are 1% of my list, that's, that's great. If I have 100 of them which are not engaged and they are opening, then mainly it's all, it's a numbers game. But unsubscribe rate is not showing you. It's indicative, but it's not showing you if you're doing the right, the right job. So basically initially I was always deceived about all 0.12 unsubscribe rate. Maybe I shouldn't be emailed them anymore. But hey, emailing all of them, you are losing the other 99.88% of your email subscribers which if they are not unsubscribing, that means they still have faith that you can provide value to them.

All right, thank you. Yeah, it's amazing. You, you know, you get jobs with companies and you're like, yeah, I don't think we should send that email. It's too many emails this week. All right, so how do you see email changing? I mean, I think we've gone through a few changes in the last few years but, but keep progressing like this?

Well, I have this vision that email is going to become blended somehow in the overall strategy which should be data driven for any company. So if you look at these silos, if you look at the companies that are having all these are the guys from the email team. And the email team has their KPIs like operate, subscribe, rate, whatever and revenue and they are being responsible for the revenue. However, the promotion team or the team which is handling the pricing or the assortment, if it's an E commerce or the team which is doing the ads, that's a separate team and they are not communicating with each other. I think this is a huge mistake because the company must work, must be integrated first and you need your efforts to be targeted towards the customer. And now as we are seeing a lot of competition in the digital space, let's say it broadly, we I was looking at Some statistics like 44 of all the e commerce company websites which are live right now were launched in the last 12 months. So maybe that that means the competition is fear. Wow, it's incredible. E commerce is here for 20 years and 44% of the players just started this game of E commerce. And basically that's why I'm building a project for this quarter called how to play the E commerce game because there's so much noise around that. But getting back, I think it's what you need to do is to align everyone the words a common goal. And the goal must be the satisfaction or customer delight. If you are not delighting your customers, you're going to lose them. And if you lose them, there are, I don't know, 200 other competitors every single day for, for the products that you're selling. It's, it's not a shortage of places from where you can buy stuff. You know, this phone I can find. I mean, there are a lot of competitors. So if, if you don't have a mindset that takes into account the fact that email is a part of the nurturing, email is a part of the communication, email is a part of the relationship that your company is establishing with your customers. And if you don't, first, if you're not using it properly, and second, if you are not, let's say, aligning it with the other channels that you're using, you're not going to be in the market. And I think this is going to touch the companies and also the agencies as well. I can't see in 5 years an email marketing agency which is not data driven. So that means you need to understand data analytics, you need to understand copywriting. And while you're there, you also have some creatives, right? And while you're there, you need to align the ads with the emails because you can't say something on the email and another thing on the ad. So that means I see clusters of agencies working together and teaming up to acquire customers and to make them thrive. And also I'm seeing the space of agencies being more consolidated. We already saw that there are these kind of aggregators, agencies which have the strategy, they have the performance arm, they have the creative arm, and so on. So that's how I see email changing in the next years.

Yeah, and I love how you mentioned delight. You know that like, you know so many companies and like, I think the best examples are companies that sell like a one product or two products. And they're just like, every email is interesting in some way. You know, like they're making you laugh, they're being silly, they're being funny, they're being personal, you know, just enjoyed opening those emails and when you wanted that thing that they're selling, you know, you know, you'll go back to them because you like them, because they delivered to you and they delighted you. Anyway, so what are your protest email achievements?

Well, one of the first ones was that I've been able to build a significant email list. We got to something like 30,000 people and then we purged. I'm a big fan of purging the database, by the way. I don't see any reason why you should be emailing people that don't say anything to you in the last, I don't know, six months, 12 months, whatever. And so that's one. And the second one is that after postponing the moment when I'm personally writing the weekly newsletter for years now I've been into this strike of writing the company's email every single Thursday. And it worked. I mean it's while I'm building the company, while I'm doing a lot of things, pnl, investors, product strategy, whatever, hiring, I'm also, and I find it enjoyable because it's disconnecting me from the other, other parts. And being a CEO is kind of, let's say demanding and boring at some point because if all you are seeing every day are numbers is not that fun. So you need words as well at the end of the day, if you consider that I had this realization at some point that we are chasing these Numbers, these goals, 20,000, 2 million, 6 million, 24 billion, whatever. But at the end of the day, what it's making us fulfilled are the words coming from the ones that we care about are not numbers. You know, because once you hit that number, that's it, it's gone.

All right. Yeah. And there's someone else, we don't know who it is but apparently she just mentioned back to email mistakes. She's just mentioning that, you know, she can't stand it when she's a new mom and she's getting product. You know, she gets an email that's just for everybody, you know, like it's not taking to him like you know, companies that she's bought for especially new new mom kind of stuff, products should know. Oh ring new mom, send her stuff for new babies.

This is the zero party data. So that, that's, that's why you need to collect intentional data that the customers are sharing with you. And it is not a problem if you're instead of having a, I don't know, subscription rate of 4% with the crappy stuff, you know, I mean just email address because less fields is better for the conversion rate. Maybe it's better to have 3% with people that are actually getting sharing this information with you knowingly because at the end of the day they know that this type of information is going to be use useable for them. And this type of. After the GDPR frenzy and whatever, I think we are all looking to get relevance in our lives because time is so short, we are so bombarded with crappy stuff from all over that we are now Knowingly sharing what, what we do know that is going to ease our lives in the future.

So what are your favorite brands in terms of email? And you see their email emails, you love opening them. Yeah, let's hear.

Yeah. So there are, there are these fine direct to consumer brands which are doing the right thing in terms of entertaining, like Kotopakshi or Chubby's shorts or Pit Viper sunglasses. These are, these are because they're. And it's not only about the email, it's about the whole branding. And I think this is an important aspect. Email is a channel, but you need the voice first and then to orchestrate and to use that voice across all the channels consistently. Otherwise, in the e commerce space, I think there are a few people which are doing the right thing, like Rick Watson on the strategy side. Also Michael Lorenzos has a great newsletter about e commerce. So there are a few. And of course hbr, which is the bible, let's say, in terms of business strategy. I'm always enjoying that content and I think the creators, the good creators will thrive in the future.

All right, what are your favorite email campaigns? That something you remember? You get that email and you're like, holy cow, this is amazing.

Yeah, it's a one, two punch that I got a few years now. So it was. I was looking for an education program and I got this from section four. And they sent me an email, Section four. It's made by Scott Galloway, which by the way has great emails as well and a great YouTube channel. And they got this type of zero party data from me. They knew what I was after. And it was, are you gonna wait until tomorrow? It was like an email. And it was the first email and tomorrow they said no more waiting. And it was like, I love that. And I recall that because it had this flavor of one, two punch. It was nothing, no call to action. In the first email it was like, okay, they got my attention, they knew what I was after, but they haven't gave me anything. And then they revealed what, what I could do for, could do with them. So, yeah, pretty much that's, that's one of them. And I, I also enjoy this type of any type of email campaign that shows me that that brand cares about how I feel. It was a, it was a statistic from Nielsen that almost 70%. Yeah, no, 68% of the customers which are leaving a company leave it because they feel that the company doesn't care about them. And I think one of the best email campaigns that you can do is the post purchase. NPS email. Because once you have someone buying from you, you need to validate with him. Hey, was everything okay? And if it wasn't, of course you need to take action because not taking action is worse than not asking them how they feel about it.

All right, awesome. All right, we've, we've reached the end. So yeah, you could just ramble. These are your final thoughts.

Well, for anyone that's listening, I'm gonna get out of your life. Thanks for, for listening up to this point. My proposal, my suggestion for you is to make a resolution to grow. I've been a former poor kid from Bucharest, Romania, and I've learned so much on this path by having an, I don't know, a complicated relationship with myself. But learning is never bad for you, unless you learn bad stuff, of course. My intention is to suggest you that you should be learning, you should be prioritizing learning because you need this type of attitude as a disciple. You need to continuously be learning in order to thrive and in order to feel fulfilled. And looking back now, I've said that again, I'm 41 years old. I'm at the best moment in my life. So if you learn, you will try this. Learn, you will have cool people around you. And if you learn, people will start paying attention to you and they will sustain you. And again, I think the best, let's say endeavor for this year, now that is starting is to learn. And pretty much that's it. If you want to learn something about e commerce and customer lifetime value and the things that I'm passionate about, I invite you to check out this thing. No, this thing.

CVO Academy.

CVO Academy. Exactly. We have eight professors out there, Harvard Business School professor, entrepreneurs, practitioners. And you'll be able to kick 2022 off by becoming smarter. So that you will look back and tell to yourself, I was so dumb 2 free 10 years ago, like I'm doing every year.

All right, so thank you so much. It's been really great. Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on and I wish you all the best and I hope we stay in touch.

Excellent. Thanks as well for inviting me.

For sure. It's been great having you on and happy New Year. And to the best 2022. It's be the best year ever. Thanks for tuning in today. Remember, really appreciate it and I hope you enjoyed the episode. Next week we're talking to Avi Goldman. Avi Goldman is the founder and creator of Parcel, a coding environment specifically for email developers. It's got a huge following by a lot of the top people in the industry. I see it more and more. He's a great guy and has a great discussion, so tune in for that. And again, thank you to our sponsor, Engage. Head to hillelberg.com angel engage to save 10% on your first six months of on gage and hope you have a wonderful day.