email marketing

Episode Summary

If you can do one thing to speed up the growth of your email list, “learn to love the popup.” Kyle Stout answers some of the most crucial questions regarding your email marketing strategy, such as knowing if you’re sending too many or not enough emails and what to do if you’re still sending every email to your entire list. He also helps us understand some of the common pitfalls merchants fall into with email marketing and how to avoid them altogether.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have Kyle Stout. Kyle is the founder of Elevate and Scale, a email marketing agency. Kyle, go ahead, and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Kyle: Thanks for having me.

Kyle: Day to day is pretty much working with eCommerce businesses, with their email marketing helping them increase sales in their sales process drive up customer lifetime value and also just long term keeping a healthy email list. So people stick around and wanna buy. And then yeah, outside of work, I I’m really big into fitness.

Kyle: I love to get active and hang out with family and friends and get outside. 

Brent: So let’s just dive right into email marketing is email marketing still relevant today? 

Kyle: Yeah. So it’s funny cuz you always hear every few years or so the email marketing is dead thing comes about, but I feel like it’s only marketers that say that as a joke and it never really is something that’s ever.

Kyle: Something that actual users or business owners are saying, but email marketing to me, why it’s always been relevant is because it’s a platform where you have direct access to your customers and you own that platform. And over time, as we’ve seen attention shift from different social media platforms and things go from maybe where we were a lot heavier and blogging in the past, and then it shifted to social media.

Kyle: Email marketing was there was tried and true all along. And right now, especially with paid media costs all over the place and a lot of uncertainty in the market. I really think that over the next year or two, you’re gonna see people revisiting their email marketing strategy because a lot of businesses have I don’t wanna say totally neglected it, but maybe just, didn’t realize that they weren’t doing as much with it as they could.

Brent: And do you think that email is what we’ve discussed? That it’s still important, but so from a strategy standpoint, how much of that should be put back into email and how much should be put onto social and other channels that are out there? 

Kyle: Really, I think ideally you have both. I think of it as email marketing serves as a great function to help you get a better ROI from your top of funnel marketing.

Kyle: So you still wanna have your social media and doing anything you can to bring in new leads, bring in new customers and email marketing, cuz there’s two ways you can look at it. Part of it is just having some automated systems in place to maybe to help optimize your sales process. So help you get more revenue from the traffic that you’re already getting to your site.

Kyle: But then once you’ve got this growing email list, you’ve got this database of people that you can nurture and continue to get repeat sales over time. I really look at it as, partially something to help you get a better ROI from your top of Mar top of funnel marketing today, but also just helps you get better lifetime customer value in the long term.

Brent: Do you think one of the big mistakes that merchants often make is marketing the same email to every single client on their list. 

Kyle: Definitely it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see is that, and again, a lot of times people just don’t know any better. Like they’re just going off of that worked in the past and it just wasn’t email marketing and all marketing, just wasn’t quite as nuanced in the past, especially digital marketing.

Kyle: But yeah you really wanna personalize the content. So you want to be segmenting your list and sending different messages to different people. That’s most likely to resonate with them. 

Brent: From a personalization standpoint. Is there any particular strategy that you. Talk to clients about, and I just I’ll frame that in the sense of, at some point it gets a little creepy when it’s too personal.

Brent: Is there a balance between the two? 

Kyle: So yeah, there’s a lot of new technology where they’re trying to, totally personalize the email and. Talk to you, Brent, specifically about things that I can imagine where it’s gonna get really creepy, like what you’re saying, but really what I’m talking about more is at a higher level, just being able to segment people on your list and there’s different.

Kyle: Ways that you can segment. So you can segment people on different profiles based on if they’re a lead that’s never purchased before. And then you have customers who have purchased one time and then you maybe have repeat customers and then maybe you have VIP customers, and those are different groups that you could segment and then send a different type of message.

Kyle: Because the VIP customer, you’re gonna talk to them very differently. You don’t really need to educate them on your product anymore. They’re like the close friend they’re in on the joke they’re in, on all the inside jokes, they know what’s going on. And you’re also gonna wanna show them more love for being a VIP, whereas a lead, they might be almost a stranger and they might need to be reminded of some of the value propositions and the brand story and all that other stuff

Kyle: that they’re just not maybe aware of. and then there are other ways you can segment so you can segment based another really great way to segment would be, especially for e-commerce businesses would be based on engagement. So breaking down groups of people you can have, you can create segments for example, like a 30 day engaged group, meaning that everyone in that group have engaged with your emails or your website,

Kyle: however you decide to define it in the last 30 days. And you can expand that out to 60 days, 90 days and so on. And every business will be a little different, but after you send emails to these different groups, you’ll get a high level overview of not only how engaged they are, but how they respond to different offers.

Kyle: And you’ll find that the people who are most engaged, they wanna get more emails from you. So you can actually email them more often, or you can send them a more diverse content. Whereas the people who are less engaged, it might not be that they don’t like your brand or don’t like your products.

Kyle: It could just be that they only wanna know whenever there’s a really big sale going on or a new product coming out or something like that. So you might email them less frequently. 

Brent: Maybe walk us through how they test that engagement. Do you look at open rates, click through rates, things like that for the engagement.

Brent: And then if they seem like they’re engaged I know it still goes back to a tipping point where, Hey, you send ’em something every day, pretty soon they’re gonna unsubscribe. And I know there’s a magic amount of time for every engaged customer, as opposed to somebody that’s just wanting to learn.

Kyle: Yeah. So the way I do it is you have your key metrics you wanna track. So open rate, click rate conversion rates, and you can first, let’s just say for an example, send an email out to a 30 day engage group. Actually, one way, if you just wanted to test this, if you just wanted to say over the next week, do a quick test and get a baseline for all of this.

Kyle: You could send that one email out to your 30 day. Engage. Look at the metrics and then that’s, there’s a baseline for you. And then send the same email out to the 60 day engaged group and exclude the 30 day engaged folks, because you don’t want to that to throw off the data and look at the metrics there

Kyle: and then you want to have a certain threshold, like you said, of where you don’t want to go below that. The thing about open rates is they are a little inflated right now because of iOS. But traditionally it’s all the rule of thumb has always been, you don’t wanna go below 20%.

Kyle: If you send out to that 60 day or 90 day engage group, and you see the open rate fall below 20%, then you know, okay, that’s the threshold. I need to pull back and focus more on these groups up to that point. And then maybe only include those people in the big, like the black Friday type of promotion and, but so open rate’s one thing, but you really also wanna look at click rate.

Kyle: And this is gonna vary a lot from brand to brand. There’s industry benchmarks, but honestly it’s all over the place. So you really wanna look at just historical data for your company and compare that. Sending that first test to the 30 day engage group, and you might find that even the click, rate’s not where you want it to be with that group.

Kyle: But that’s a better determinant of engagement right now than open rates, because a lot of times open rates are higher. They’re showing as falsely higher than they really are. And clicks are also not only is it easier to get someone to open. It’s harder to get people to click and we’re not getting those false readings on the clicks right now

Kyle: like we are with opens. So I would wa I would pay a little bit more attention to that as you’re doing that whole test. 

Brent: When you include engagement, do you include social media? Just website visits, if you’re tracking holistically across and you know that this user’s, they’re looked at Instagram, they’ve visited your website but they haven’t opened an email.

Brent: All that goes into the fi the factor of some kind of engage. 

Kyle: Yeah, so you can go, you can get into social media and all that. In general, I stick with email and website engagement. So looking at, if they’ve either gone to the website or you can even create these different segments that are targeting product interest.

Kyle: So whenever someone visits a product page in the last timeframe, or they’ve added it to cart in that time, Then they are in the engaged group, whether it’s based on pure engagement across the board or interest in that particular product 

Brent: You mentioned iOS a few times and there’s the post iOS 14.

Brent: That is blocking a lot of of information that we can see through some platforms. Is, has it changed the landscape on how you measure engagement? 

Kyle: It really is one of those things that’s been blown outta proportion. We were all like bracing ourselves for it. And, and preparing by looking at our engagement groups.

Kyle: And when I say that, the segments that we create and someone’s email account and doing some reporting on, okay, it’s going live now and what’s gonna happen but honestly, the way it’s played out. It’s inflated the open rates. And so we just don’t really pat ourselves on the back as much as we used to about open rates and

Kyle: that’s been the biggest change, I have not seen a significant change in impacting these engagement groups to where or these engagement segments, I should say to where, we’re getting this negative feedback. Like people shouldn’t have been included in there or the conversions.

Kyle: And actual purchases don’t seem to line up anymore with the clicks and everything else with the email. It’s really just an inflation of open rates has been the main thing. 

Brent: Yeah. Maybe explain to our listeners why open rates would go up? 

Kyle: Because it’s showing that the iOS devices that receive the emails it’s showing them as having opened the email, regardless of whether or not they didn’t.

Kyle: So this is gonna be, this is going to come down to your list and lists that have way more iOS users on their list. They’re gonna have more skewed data and if you want to get. Let’s just say, you feel man, this is really clouding my data and I don’t like this. I just want more clarity.

Kyle: What you can do is similar to what I was mentioning earlier, where maybe you run a test where you create some different segments. You can create segments to exclude iOS devices, and then send an email. To you can go pretty wide or, whatever you would normally do, but take out those iOS people and then see what the numbers are.

Kyle: And. . 

Brent: Yeah. And it sounds like the amount of segments isn’t like too many segments isn’t necessarily bad until you get to a segment of one user . 

Kyle: Yeah, exactly and also, so that’s really the thing, the bigger your list is the more room you have to do to create more segments, which gives you more room to send more emails without everyone getting every email. And that gives you the potential to scale up the revenue you get from your email marketing. But like you said, if you try to take it too far, too early, you’ve got groups of, 5, 10, 20 people. It’s probably not worth all the effort. 

Brent: As a new business, you mentioned earlier growing your list a lot of people look at buying a list from somebody and I think that’s not the way to do it and probably illegal in a lot of countries, but, and if you send them email, I should say what do your recommendations around growing that list and making sure that it continues to grow and doesn’t decrease.

Kyle: Okay. Yeah. So regarding buying lists and I’ve never personally done it, I’ve never seen it work. I’ve known many business owners who have shared that they’ve done that, or, and I’ve seen the analytics and I can tell you, I’ve never seen it be a really worthwhile endeavor. And especially if you consider all the risk, but the damage it could do to your domain and all of that potential legal risks.

Kyle: I wouldn’t even mess with. So it’s gonna come down to the type of business. So for e-commerce businesses, oftentimes you’re not going to do the typical lead magnet type of approach, like a service business would. But you definitely can. So the first thing is you wanna look at your website and you need to have some sort of offer to get people in.

Kyle: So I know a lot of business owners hate popups. They just personally hate them. They hate going to a website and seeing a popup, the first thing they land on the site. And. Honestly, I used to hate popups too, but knowing what that popup can do for your business, you will learn to love them.

Kyle: You can create popups in a way that aren’t so intrusive. You don’t have to have the one that pops up as soon as they hit the page. You also don’t have to have it take up the entire page and you can make it very easy for people to leave to exit out of that popup. So in general, I would recommend at least having an exit intent popup.

Kyle: On your website, that fires, when people are leaving and give them some sort of offer to get into your email list for eCommerce it’s typical, but the thing is it works is usually you will see a small discount, a coupon code that they have to sign up for a 10 to 15% discount.

Kyle: The bigger the discount, the more opt-ins you’re gonna get. But ultimately it doesn’t necessarily mean those would be the best customers long term. So I don’t think it’s necessarily the best idea to go really aggressive and go 20, 30, 40% 10, 15% works. It could also just be free content.

Kyle: It could be a free guide. Or it could be, a free trial. So there’s different ways you can do it. Doesn’t always have to be a discount. It could be a value add where they get something extra for free with their purchase, and that’s gonna have high purchase intent cuz someone who’s signing up for that is already thinking well I’m planning on making a purchase.

Kyle: So I want that. I want that free bonus. So you definitely gotta have something. Your website itself, then when it comes to getting people to your site to sign up, that’s where it varies. From what I’ve seen in the last, six months of what’s working with paid media. So a lot of times I’ll be working with the brand and I’m working side by side with whoever’s running their paid media, and there’s always this temptation to have the whole ad campaign be based around, signing up for something free on the list.

Kyle: And I can say that the majority of the time, those freebie seekers. They don’t purchase and they don’t stick around and they really drive down the engagement of your list. I’ve found what’s better, is to go after customers and send ’em to your site and have your site optimized to where they’re going to see these signups.

Kyle: So see those popups or whatever you have in place and get. Actual interested customers to sign up for the offer thing you don’t wanna have your first impression going out to cold traffic or going out to strangers, be some freebie thing. You really want them to be interested in the actual products or services that you sell.

Kyle: And when they get to your site, they just find out that, oh, it’s like a surprise. They happen to get this extra thing that incentivizes them to sign up.

Brent: So I’m gonna highlight two things. So learn to love popups. I like that one, but the freebie seekers, I think, is something I’ve heard over and over again where people think that getting your list bigger is gonna be better no matter how you get that name.

Brent: And I suppose it doesn’t hurt to have that user, but having that pop up or giving him some value is probably more well, is more important than just the free thing they’re gonna get. So just talking about mistakes and I can think of one mistake that’s very annoying that I dislike is when you’re signed into a site and you get that exit intent pop up, or you bought something from them clearly, you’re their customer. 

Brent: Worst case is you’ve signed in and you get a popup to sign up for their email, super annoying. But even if they know your cookie and theoretically cookies are still around, we should block that popup. If you know that person, especially if they’re on the list. 

Kyle: Yeah, and that’s a really easy fix.

Kyle: In your software. We like to use Klavio most of the time with eCommerce businesses specifically. It’s just a box. You check whenever you’re building out your form, there’s an option to exclude current or existing Klavio contact. So anyone who’s already signed up, they won’t see.

Kyle: And it’s actually an opportunity to present them with something new. So maybe it doesn’t have to be a popup now for an exist. Contact but maybe offer something up to get their birthday so you can surprise them on their birthday later, or, just get more information about them to enrich that customer experience.

Kyle: So there are times when you would want to target the people that are already signed up specifically, but, you wanna do it in a way that adds some value to them? You’re no longer just trying to get their contact info anymore. So in general I like to just leave them alone for the most part. 

Brent: So may, maybe you could go over a few more mistakes that companies typically make for email.

Kyle: So first one the biggest one is what you were saying earlier. People just emailing the entire list instead of, trying to. segment and somewhat personalize the content towards people. Another thing is email frequency, and this goes both ways. Cuz a lot of times you’ll have smaller businesses emailing too frequently because everyone wants to grow.

Kyle: So they want to grow faster. Email is a great channel for driving revenue and they just get a little I think in my opinion, they get a little too excited too quickly. They get a taste of the email of, what it’s like to send an email. And all of a sudden you see a bunch of users on your analytics dashboard, on your site, and then the sales come in and you burn out your list way too quickly by doing that.

Kyle: You haven’t even let this list grow and mature and let these people stick around with you for a while. Then on the other. You’ll have big businesses that have a huge list. And let’s just say they’re only getting five, 10% of their total revenue from email marketing. a good gauge of if your email marketing is, doing a good job, at least when it comes to the situations where people can click the email and buy the product, they don’t have to hop on a sales call or any of that would be if you’re generating 30% of your revenue from email marketing, you’re doing a good job with your email marketing.

Kyle: And if you’re below that, then there’s probably either some room for improvement with what you’re doing, or there’s also potential that maybe you’re just not emailing enough depending on the situation. So yeah, it, that the frequency thing goes both ways. And then another big mistake. These are like the greatest hits right here would be only emailing your list when you have a sale or a promotion.

Kyle: And again, it goes back to sometimes people just get, they see what that does. They see that spike in revenue and they don’t like to send an email out that doesn’t get a massive spike in revenue. and I definitely encourage you for the major holidays. Yeah. If you wanna run a promo every major holiday, go for it.

Kyle: If you get into a sticky situation and you need a quick infusion of cash, okay. This is a channel you have available to do that. And if you’ve been taking care of your list, then it’s okay to do that. Whenever you need to, but. But really you want to be showing up. You wanna have different reasons to show up and educate people, inspire people, entertain them, give them other content.

Kyle: And the big thing is try to get them to buy without having to discount, give them reasons to be excited about your product, to care about what your product does, the problems that it solves for them without having to give them a discount just solely, because it’s a good offer. 

Brent: Yeah. I remember interviewing the founder of Gigz.

Brent: They’re a gifting service and instead of giving them a discount, they would give something to somebody based on a purchase. And they always equated discounts with with the decreasing revenue. And if you do too much of it, obviously you get people dropping off. Is there a point in which you send too many emails and that becomes counterproductive?

Kyle: That’s typically what I have seen over the long term. And it’s deceptive because at first you can get away with it for a while, because a lot of times let’s just say, let’s just say, you’ve been running your business for several years. Things are going well. Maybe you switch to a different team or person who’s managing the email marketing and they want to drive up those sales numbers because it makes them look good.

Kyle: And maybe they honestly just have pure intentions and they think it’s what’s best for your business, for whatever reason. And the people on your list, aren’t used to getting these deals all the time. So they might actually take advantage of two to three back to back sales. They might just reach into their wallet several times in a row.

Kyle: And then you would think as the business owner, oh man, every time we do a sale they keep buying, they must love it, but it never lasts. It really never lasts. And then by the time people notice the decline because every email you send out, you’re gonna get some unsubscribes. If you have a big list, you’re, there’s always gonna be, there’s a million of reasons why someone would unsubscribe.

Kyle: It’s just a normal part of email marketing. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong or they hate you. But that you keep emailing more and more. And you keep doing these big promotions more and more. You’re going to get more of that. And eventually if you’re not paying attention, you’re losing more people than are coming in.

Kyle: So that’s one problem. But then the people who are sticking around now, they’ve gotten trained to where I they’re only gonna buy. When you offer a discount. So now the random impulse purchases those go away. And now they know, they always know there’s another sale right around the corner. So why would they, in fact, I’ve found myself as a customer doing that with companies where I genuinely do like their products, but I always get this.

Kyle: It seems every time I would make a purchase, they would have a sale a few days. So I swear it was almost like, I always, I wondered if it was planned or something, and I’d have this regret. I’m like, if I waited three days, I could have saved a lot of money and I got to where I’m like, oh, I only buy whenever they have a sale now.

Kyle: Cuz they have ’em frequently enough. So why not? 

Brent: Yeah, I can remember buying a pair of Cole Haan, and having that exact same experience where they’re constantly bombarding you with emails and then suddenly you buy something and then you get another email. That’s 5% bigger discount or something. It was anyways, I did unsubscribe from Cole Haan eventually, cuz it was so annoying when I got that.

Brent: And I guess that just illustrates the point that there is never. Nobody has it down. And Cole Haan is a pretty big company. And you’d think maybe it was just my own experience, but big companies make these mistakes and they’re still making these mistakes. So it’s always good to be looking at all those numbers.

Brent: What are some of the key metrics that, that a marketer should look at to ensure that they’re not making some of those mistake? Is there leading indicators that say, oh, I’ve sent five emails this week. Maybe that’s too many. 

Kyle: Yeah. So there are, and actually I want to say something really quickly about what you just shared, because this is a really common misconception I think is that when people look at these big brands, you assume that this it’s this big successful brand.

Kyle: I know they’re spending a ton of money on their marketing. I know they can hire the best consultants. They can get the best information they’ve so they must know what they’re doing. And. I see them just making terrible mistakes all the time. My theory is that it’s because when they get to a certain level where they can bring in so many people, they can just, they just have the money to buy so much traffic buy.

Kyle: Acquire so many new people onto their list that they can burn through it. They can afford to burn through a lot of people. I don’t know what’s going on with the overall picture with their marketing, but I would definitely say if you, if your gut is telling you I don’t know, but this big brand is doing it.

Kyle: Definitely question it because what works for them will not usually work for most small businesses. But so looking at your metrics, of course you want to month to month, you should be looking at your averages, open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and also there’s also certain things.

Kyle: So for example, with an e-commerce business, you can have what’s called a welcome series or a welcome series for non buyers. Which is the typical automated email sequence that someone will go into when they first opt in through that popup. That one is very sensitive to the traffic. That’s hitting your website.

Kyle: So that’s one way to look at I know whenever we see the sales. And just actually overall engagement, not just sales deviate from the norm, pretty aggressively, either negative or positive that company has made some changes with their paid media. And sure enough, I’ll have case we’ll have a call and be like, okay, we’re seeing some decreases what’s going on.

Kyle: I I wanna get more context to make sure it’s not just what’s happening with the emails. That happens more often than not it’s that entry level series is a good way to gauge the quality of traffic that’s coming in. So that’s one thing to look at. but you can also run engagement reports on those different segments that I talked about.

Kyle: So having those key segments that you’re gonna be emailing most frequently in Klavio, and in the other tools, you can run an engagement report where you can see the open rates, click rates, and average order value of that particular segment. And you can see. People are starting to disengage more. And if you’re looking at a highly engaged group, like a 30 day engaged segment and you start to see people disengaging in that one, that’s a really bad sign.

Kyle: Okay. Something is definitely wrong. We’re hammering this list or this particular segment way too hard because just by its very nature of how that segment is created, everyone in there should. engaged. And then another thing to look at something that people might have to Google is you can look at the unique reach.

Kyle: So the unique opens the unique clicks on your email list. So that would be the total unique people, cuz it’s one thing to. A lot of times you’ll have the same people who continue to open and click all your emails. You just have a lot of people who are engaged, but you’re not seeing the big picture of everyone on your list.

Kyle: So when you look at the uniques, whenever you measure that, so that’s just a key there. Whenever you’re, if you’re Googling this or you’re talking with your email service provider, then you can see how many unique people you’re reaching on your list. Cuz ideally you wanna be reaching more people month to month.

Kyle: So if your list is growing or even if it’s staying the same. You want to be engaging more total people, total unique people. So I like to measure unique opens and unique clicks as a way to know, okay. You know what? Even if sales were a little down this month, we’re getting more engagement from more people and that’s usually a sign of better, long term success.

Kyle: Whenever you see those uniques going down, that’s something where, okay, if we’re reaching fewer unique people, then the odds are that the sales will come down. Let’s just say sales are, steady. Those sales will come down because we’re just reaching fewer people. And we can’t always rely on the same people to keep buying and buying.

Kyle: Cuz depending on the products you’re selling, you run out of stuff where they’ve just bought it all they’ve bought all that they want or need. So you really want to be looking at making sure you’re actually reaching more people within the list that you have, and also trying to retain more of them.

Brent: And I would imagine that these numbers all flip flop, when you’re talking B2B to B2C, like it’s a completely different arena when you’re talking, how you engage with the B2B customer compared to how you engage with the B2C customer. 

Kyle: Yeah. B2B is very different where. See B2C is I guess what I’m talking about.

Kyle: When I say B2C, a situation where it’s not gonna be like a, a really expensive product where someone has to hop on a sales call or anything like that. It’s something where they can click the email and buy right there. So you get really objective data. With B2B it’s a little trickier because you have more things involved in closing that sale.

Kyle: So a lot of times you’re using email marketing to get people into a sales call. And then from there it could be that you follow up with email after that, and then you get the purchase. So that’s one way to measure it, but you can’t neglect what happened during the human to human interaction.

Kyle: Of the sales call. So you have to be tracking that. So a lot of times you can’t get clean metrics where a lot of times people aren’t just going to click a link in an email and pay the invoice like that. It’s gonna be a manual process where a salesperson emails them an invoice, and then you get that and then you get the payment that way.

Kyle: So from there, it’s really more about mapping out the whole sales process step by step. So looking at each stage of your sales process, adding in automations, when you can so automated email or SMS or whatever you wanna. In between each of those steps where you can in between the human interactions. To try to move people along and you can measure that you can measure opens and clicks and how many people are moving through.

Kyle: And how many people signed up for the sales call, but then how many people actually showed up? So you need to start tracking all of that stuff as well. So it’s not quite as clean as it can be with B2C, but there’s still a lot that you can measure and give you a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

Brent: I think the important part there is putting it into a place where you’re tracking everything. So some kind of a CRM , where you manually put notes in for. Phone call or even better you call directly from the CRM. So that call gets recorded as a call with the client and then that engagement would then just play into your engagement with the customer, no matter if it’s in person or on the phone or through some kind of a service.

Brent: Kyle, we have a couple minutes left here. If you had some great bit of advice in 2022, to give somebody that wants to start email marketing, where would they start? 

Kyle: You need to have an offer and you need to at least have someone on your list. You definitely need to have a way to get people on your list.

Kyle: But’re but really the most important thing that it comes down to. And I think what’s. Forgotten is we look at all these systems and ways to optimize everything. And we need to get back to remembering that there’s another human on the other side of this email and just thinking about, okay, what content are they really going to care about?

Kyle: Or when it comes to my product or my service. What really matters to them, what do they really care about and crafting it around them and having your emails be more conversational. And it doesn’t mean you can be salesy or ask for the sale and all of that. It just means being more thoughtful to what’s going to help them make a buying decision.

Brent: One last question or advice that you could give the client, then learn to love popups, right? And let’s just say you don’t have HubSpot or Klevio or something like that, but you just want to get ’em into, let’s say you’re using MailChimp or whatever it is. 

Brent: I remember hello bars or whatever it was called before. Is there a free tool that you would recommend to get that popup going on your website? That’s fairly easy to install and get running on whatever website you’re running, whatever platform you’re on and you can install your popup and get it rolling.

Kyle: I think MailChimp has the popup capability. But most of them have that built in. And then there’s a bunch of like fancier tools where if you wanna get more advanced, honestly, the free tool that’s within your email service provider, most of the time is good enough.

Kyle: It’s gonna take you a very long way. You don’t need to get any of the other fancy tools. A lot of times those things you it’s just, you don’t have enough traffic. For the small amount of performance difference that you’re gonna get to even matter. It’s just gonna add an extra cost and some of those things potentially even weigh down your site and slow it down.

Kyle: If you’re e-commerce, you can go with Klavio. You can start out with a free account and you can use their free you can, get a popup going. I believe MailChimp has a popup tool. I just haven’t used MailChimp in so long, but pretty much all of ’em have a popup tool it’s already gonna be included.

Kyle: So if you’re, even if you’re paying for the cheapest plan, you already have that. I just say, don’t even overthink it right now. Get a good offer on that popup, get it live and then focus on getting people to show up to your site so they can see 

Brent: it. 

Brent: It. All right. Cool. Love your popup. I’m gonna keep saying that over and over again.

Brent: Kyle as we close out, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you like to plug, what would you like to plug today? 

Kyle: Okay. Yeah. For anyone who’s interested in elevating their email marketing, you can go to elevate and scale.com and there is a link there to book a call, which is not a traditional sales call, even though I know everyone says their call is not a sales call.

Kyle: You will get information prior to that call about our service and everything. But the point of that call is to give you clarity around how email marketing fits into the overall strategy for your business. So we’ll actually break down your sales process on that call. If you have numbers that you can share, that would be awesome, cause it makes it even better.

Kyle: And we can identify where the most immediate opportunities are for you right now to get more revenue from your existing sales process. And then talk about a strategy for you to grow your business over the long term with email marketing. Perfect. 

Brent: And I’ll put I’ll put those links in, in the show notes for this Kyle Stout.

Brent: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation. 

Kyle: Yep. Great. Thank you.