/
RSS Feed
Email marketing is one of the best and most affordable ways to drive more revenue for your eCommerce brand.
But how do you get started? And where will you see the quickest, most significant results?
Well, in this week’s episode of the Brand Builder Show we’re joined by the “Digital Postman” Reinis Krumins, owner of AgencyJR – an email marketing agency driving millions of dollars through email.
In the episode we discussed:
- Why email marketing is so important going into 2023
- How to structure the most important flows to drive more revenue
- What emails you should be sending and how often
- How to craft emails that convert
- And so much more!
This really was an episode packed full of insight and actionable strategy so be sure to listen until the end!
⭐️ EPISODE LINKS ⭐️
Ben Donovan 00:00
Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of the brand builders Show. Today we’re going to be talking all things email marketing, an absolutely huge topic in the world of E-commerce. And I’m glad today that we’re joined by a reignest, who is built out quite a name for himself in the email marketing space. Reinis. Welcome to the show today.
Reinis Krumins 00:19
Happy to be here.
Ben Donovan 00:21
Thank you. I mean, everybody says that, but yeah, hopefully, hopefully, you actually mean that. And we’re gonna get you some.
Reinis Krumins 00:28
Yeah, I mean, I mean, of course, it’s always a pleasure to because like from these podcasts is not simply not just a one sided conversation, you know, you can give your comments and I can learn from that as well. So it’s always a pleasure.
Ben Donovan 00:39
I’ll try. I mean, I’ll try my best. But we’re here to learn from you today, because you are an expert in the world of email marketing. And I’m interested to hear a little bit of how you got to be the expert. What’s kind of the story? Where did you start with email? How did you find yourself on that particular vertical in a wide e-commerce space? Give us a bit of a background to your story.
Reinis Krumins 01:01
yeah, for sure. So essentially, actually, this is my business partner in the background as well working. But we got started, I think it was like two and a half years ago, initially, we were working on Facebook advertising. But long story short, I had a client that needed work outside of Facebook. And, and chatbots, which I was doing at the time, there was email marketing. And as it wasn’t a chatbot scene, everyone was talking about how email marketing is dead, it’s dying. It’s old, no one cares about it anymore. But when we set things up for them, I realized that, you know, they’re making 60k a month and and all of a sudden, like 3k from emails, and I was like, Okay, this is pretty cool. And the letter downline as they scaled up to over 100k, a month, that number grew to 14k, etc, etc. And I realized that there’s a lot of opportunity here, everyone is providing Facebook ads as a service, etc, etc. But no one’s focusing on retention on the back end on emails. And that’s essentially where we swooped in, and we started doing it. Now, at this point, we’ve grown to around 60 clients. And at peak, we had 55, team members and our team, we’ve worked with companies who sell in the US, Europe, even Japan, Israel, all over the world in a bunch of different niches, and that just show that we were at the right place at the right time. And I do believe those also a factor of our success and of our meteoric rise.
Ben Donovan 02:21
Yeah, nice, man. What does that team look like? Now? You said pizza? 55. What is that on? Is it on? Obviously, we can get into all the details. Yes. What makes it good email process, but is that copywriting? Is it designers? What kind of team is it?
Reinis Krumins 02:35
Yeah. So as an agency, it’s not just the writing side, we also have to manage clients. So it’s accounts managers, it’s project managers, copywriters, graphic designers, all these different elements that get put together to build the team.
Ben Donovan 02:48
The year you said, you’ve been doing it two and a half years, the agency?
Reinis Krumins 02:50
Yes, that’s correct. And closing up on on three years soon.
Ben Donovan 02:56
Yeah, good. Good. Do you see yourself doing it for the long term?
Reinis Krumins 02:59
Yes, of course, there will be probably a time where just as a business, like the agency business model itself, you know, we have broke it, and we can move on to something that’s bigger and more, that has higher opportunity for us. But now for the foreseeable future. Yes. There is no reason not to. I mean, the only reason would be if there’s something like a different opportunity, which is just a lot better. Yeah.
Ben Donovan 03:22
Can you sell an ad agency? Agency, JR
Reinis Krumins 03:25
So Jr. Doesn’t stand for junior stands for Jacob Rhenus. It just sounds very good. But then as we started working with more and more people, people say the agency junior. junior. Now it’s not. It’s not that though.
Ben Donovan 03:38
Can you what you’re talking about the kind of long term plan are just like to get into the minds of entrepreneurs. Right. But the agency model is is it’s sellable? Can you sell a business that you build as an agency? Or are you just restricted to just keeping as a cash flow business?
Reinis Krumins 03:53
Are you ultimately you can sell any business? It just depends on what price and to whom? Typically, agency businesses aren’t the main business people would like to buy how I’d say it’s something that people just associated with clients working gruntwork. And they might not be the it might not be the most favorable, but it can be sold. Yes, I mean, any business can be sold. It just depends on what price and what’s multiple. There’s some businesses which are less value than others. For example, for e-commerce, you can get great multiples for SAS, you can get amazing multiples for agency that’s typically at the bottom of the tier list. Will we sell it possibly, but you need to build in a specific way. Ideally, you want to build it as an asset for people to buy because no one wants to buy a job. They don’t want to go in and fulfill the client work talk to the client, they just want to buy something that produces income and they don’t have to think and worry about it. They might be able to implement an operator to make the business grow and function but they don’t want to, you know deal with all the clients management stuff, which which is probably the main reason I believe why people are not not big fans of agencies because they just think agency client’s work me working, no go compared to e-commerce. You know, you might be actually doing more work when you buy an e-commerce business and sometimes even make less money than an agency. But it just the association by default that makes I believe people flocked those businesses more.
Ben Donovan 05:17
Yeah. This isn’t meant to be an agency podcast, I know, how much are you working?
Reinis Krumins 05:21
Personally. Like, I can work less, but there’s still a lot of room to grow. I, frankly, work all the weekdays and on weekends and work on Sundays. On weekdays, I typically wake up at like 6:37am. And I go to sleep at nine where most of the work is most of the time is being spent working. Some is like, you know, some degeneracy or some social media stuff, which I, you know, bucket and bucket and with the degeneracy side of things. But most of the stuff is still working, because I’m focusing also on building my personal brand, like, you know, even doing podcasts like these works on that.
Ben Donovan 05:59
Yeah, that’s good, man. Thanks for answering those questions. I know, a lot of people listening will be entrepreneurs and maybe wondering, could I get into the agency space as well as ecom? is a popular kind of, kind of thing to consider. So no, it’s good, man. Let’s talk about email marketing. Obviously, that’s the topic. That’s your expertise. Why, firstly, why is email marketing so important?
Reinis Krumins 06:21
Look, it’s, you know, as a business, you’re always going to be focusing on acquiring customers. And that’s probably the most difficult part of that journey, you need to build trust, you need to get people to give you their credit card details, which they feel are very, very confidential. And they need to believe that your product they’re buying, it’s going to be valuable to them. Once you convince them if you don’t talk with them at all, you’ve lost a client. So really, for a business, we have a we have a company, this is around 3 million a month, and I think 1.2 mil came from emails, right. So if they had no me email marketing, they just be missing out on a million a month. Right. So like, fundamentally, the bigger your business, the more important email marketing is going to be. Because you already have a customer base, you already have your loyal audience loyal fans and, and what you need to do is communicate with them. And not always is going to happen through paid advertising. Paid advertising is great for customer acquisition. But for attention, email, SMS is where it’s at. And really, as we dive more and more into the future of E-commerce and online business, more and more people in the companies are going online, like you know, five years ago, we saw more companies be you know, on a brick and mortar scene, and now all of them are online. So there’s a lot of competition and all the costs are going up. The place where costs are more fixed, you could say as emails because you don’t need to pay when somebody you know opens an email you don’t need to pay when someone views an email. When someone clicks an email, you just pay a monthly fee, for example to Flavio or whichever tool you’re using. And to send out messages whenever and to whom whomever you want, and you don’t really have regulations. You can communicate with a customer, you can make sure that the people you communicate communicating with they get your messages, the same thing goes for SMS as well. So it’s a it’s a tool for you to be more profitable long term. And also just to help you scale more, you know, email marketing and paid ads, they supplement each other they go together and to help you make more money ultimately,
Ben Donovan 08:16
and most of your clients using Klayvio
Reinis Krumins 08:21
Yeah, yeah. Because we use Klayvio hum meant to be fair for E-commerce. It’s the best tool. I don’t see any reason you’d be using any any tool other than Klaviyo freecom.
Ben Donovan 08:31
Yeah. And you mentioned SMS is obviously growing a lot. I think a few years ago, it was seen as a little bit of like an intrusion, intrusive kind of marketing, but a lot more brands are doing SMS marketing. Now, again, most of your clients doing SMS a few of them, how’s the structure?
Reinis Krumins 08:49
Not everyone, I’d say the ones in Europe or not, because in Europe last semester, regulations are a lot more strict, it’s more difficult to follow. However, in the US, I’d say around like 30-40% are the ones who are not. There, SMS lists might not be big enough at the moment for them to work on it or it just like nature of their business. It’s a one product shop and you know, SMS marketing plus emails can be a bit too aggressive. Or sometimes the business owners don’t think it’s necessary. So there’s no way to convince them bucket them all together. I’d say around like 30% of the customers use SMS. I actually had a stat that I was in a panel where someone from Klaviyo is also in discussion and they opened my eyes or is SMS because they said typically one person is only subscribed to four SMS lists, meaning that if you have someone’s phone number, it’s very valuable, biggest compared to email, you’re gonna give your email to a lot of people you’re gonna see a lot of messages. So, you know, not always you can see the highest conversion, but through SMS, you have fewer lists and you get messages, you know, less often, especially in America, everyone who uses iMessage. So the message you’re sending via via The next is going to be seen as well. Now, the the only trick with SMS is you can’t be as aggressive as frequent as you are with email. But you got to balance them. And you got to really use the two marketing channels together to get the most benefits.
Ben Donovan 10:15
Do you see it as something that is a bit of a fad? Or is it going to keep becoming as popular?
Reinis Krumins 10:20
If it was a fad? If would have died off by now, then that’s my answer. Yeah, good.
Ben Donovan 10:25
Okay. What kind of revenue? Do you really aim to get clients generating through email? And in terms of percentage? What was kind of healthy aim for you?
Reinis Krumins 10:35
Depends on the shop itself. The biggest variables are number one, how many products you have? And then number two is, are you a niche down store? Or do you have like a more general general shop? Because ideal scenario is you’re in a niche. For example, if you look at Lululemon, they sell athletic clothing. So if someone goes to buy from them, you know, they’re into whether it’s fitness, and you know, they want to get clothing from you. So email marketing for that company could be massive, it could be over 50 60% of their online revenue. Not including, obviously brick and mortar. But for example, for shops where let’s say you might sell headphones, it’s a one time purchase. After a while it’s good to reengage his customers and maybe sell them a new, a new product, but you wouldn’t be getting as much sales to answer your question. I will stick to the usual like 15-30% on what you see on average for some brands, maybe the different, the more consumable CPG brands brands weakened byproducts more often. That’s where you dive more into the range of like 24, top to 40% from the total sales.
Ben Donovan 11:39
Okay, that’s good. Those are some good benchmarks. In terms of let’s do a little bit of a workshop, you walk into a new client’s business day one of setting everything up. What are the core fundamentals? A business that has zero email setup right now? What are the core flows and campaigns you set up? And maybe you could just nobody that’s, I knew that email marketing just to find campaigns and flows, the difference between
Reinis Krumins 12:07
Yeah, so campaigns and flows, think of email flows as automated, you know, behaviorally based triggers for emails. So if someone goes to the site, they look at a specific product and leave, we can send them an email, they abandoned checkout, we send them an email and think of email campaigns as disruptive based marketing, like the same thing as you’re on Facebook, you’re scrolling through the feed, you see posts you want to see. And then there’s an ad is disruption based disrupts your your your daily flow, if you will. That’s what email marketing campaigns are with campaigns, you decide when and whom to send them to flows are being sent if someone fits a specific criteria, or they do something on the site. Now, for someone who is who has no email marketing, first things first, I there are two mechanisms we install and declines businesses, we work with ones the front end sales booster, the other ones, the repeat, buyer, and profit generator. So the front end sales booster is very focused on getting people to want to focus on boosting a row as simple as that. So this, this taps into the funnel you have on your website. So what we install is a pop up on the site to capture the people who go through the site, but don’t end the buying. Because if your conversion rate is 3% on pop up can convert anywhere from five on the lower end on average, like seven to 10% where you know, all sudden you have a lot more traffic, you can retarget through emails and also through paid ads. Then the next thing is an abandoned checkout secret sequence pretty straightforward. For people that were down the funnel and abandoned checkouts, then the thank you, thank you emails. So once someone places an order, we send them emails, reminding them about their order, that you know, we received it, setting the right expectations for when the order can arrive, and also try and upsell and cross sell the different products that might be interesting to them. Those would be like the core. Because like, if you add more, I would say it’s best to work with someone else, then then for you to do with yourself. This is what you I would recommend you do. And I’d recommend you set up if you do it by yourself. Obviously, the setups we run, they’re they’re more complicated than that. And I would say depends on the businesses size as well. If you’re doing less than 30k a month, I would say don’t think that much about the email, set up these flows and forget about them. Because mathematically speaking, if you do 30% Max from emails, you might make 9k a month in sales. So you scaled like 39k which is cool. But if you hone in on your product market fit and improve your ads, you can scale to hundreds K a month, and then all of a sudden focusing on emails or getting the 30% mark can be 30k extra month. So that’s the main difference.
Ben Donovan 14:40
Yeah, I think obviously, setting up the flows is just a one and done thing, isn’t it? Obviously you can optimize over time but it’s work you do once that can then pay off you know, so it’s
Reinis Krumins 14:50
at lower scale. Yes. And lower scale. Yes. At a higher scale. It’s like imagine you have a racecar. If you buy a racecar and just let it sit. It just all going to it’s going to run Stop, and it’s not gonna be you know, it’s only gonna be functional after a while. So you do need to maintain it at higher scales. But if you have something that if it was sharp that smaller, yes, you set it up and you forget about it because mathematically, you’re doing 1% optimizations like 30k a month is not going to make sense for you make like 30 bucks. Whereas if your a million a month and do 1% optimization is 10k extra sales a month, which over the years 120k Extra, it’s like hiring it’s a budget for hiring a new employee at that point.
Ben Donovan 15:31
Yeah. Okay. The flows before we get on to campaigns, just quickly on the flows, email signup, and that kind of orientation kind of flow. What are you seeing the best opt in rates for? Is it like a discount free gift? join the newsletter, what are some recommendations?
Reinis Krumins 15:49
Well, I’m gonna subscribe to the philosophy most OG marketers subscribe to just test. Really, it can depend like you can have the suit of same offers for one brand works for that it doesn’t work. But I would say the main ones, as you mentioned, yes, is a gift that can be a discount, it can also be a giveaway, we’re seeing giveaways become more popular, especially for higher ticket products. If for example, you’re selling a chair, you don’t want to like give them a 10% discount, you know, in the first order, because it might be their only order for next four or five years. However, you can do a giveaway where every three months or every month you give away a product, they can opt in to get a chance to win that you know that month, that month product for free. Obviously, if you’re operating a lower scale, it might be too expensive for you. But those are a couple of ideas. So you need to take into consideration your margin, whether it’s a one time buy, or you have multiple purchases, getting a free gift also with with the first order can be can be really good. There was a supplement company and how they, I think, I think that’s what they increase their conversion rate and abandoned checkouts by 17% by having a pop up that shows up when people are about to exit. And it tells them like, Hey, if you buy this order, and if you opt in, we’re gonna give you a free keychain with your order. It was a keychain it was like a small shake like a small shaker bottle keychain, something like that. Protein Shake bottle. And that helped them improve the conversion rate on their abandoned checkouts. So these are a couple of tests you can do those would be the main ones. I wouldn’t really deviate too far away from these could things could just get way too complicated, more complicated than you might need them to be.
Ben Donovan 17:30
Yeah. Okay. Are you collecting SMS at the same time as email on sign up when for people that are using SMS?
Reinis Krumins 17:37
Good question. So we would do two step opt in. So step one is they enter their email. Step two is we ask them to ask for their phone number bizim. Because email, it’s something that’s easier for people to give out. Phone number is something that people are a bit more lenient, they want to they don’t want to give it out as easily. So with a two step, you’re able to get their email and their phone number if they want to give it if not, you know, we already have their email. So we’re 50% done on the way.
Ben Donovan 18:06
Yes, good tip. What tool are you using for like pop ups and email collection.
Reinis Krumins 18:10
Right now, Klaviyo’s improved their pop up tool like very, very, very much. There is also Privy OptinMonster but for simplicity we use Klaviyo just because we can go into one tool see everything for you know each one of our clients. It’s and also you don’t have to pay anything extra and Klaviyo is raising their prices is getting a bit more expensive. So just using all the functionality is good. Typically I’m against using you know tools do everything all in one tool, because they don’t do most things well. But with Klaviyo it’s a bit different because crop Klaviyo does everything well when it comes to email and they’re improving their tool and their pop ups are really good now.
Ben Donovan 18:50
Yeah, their pop ups were the targeting wasn’t the greatest on them before was it preview would be much better for targeting and different flexibility. But you’re saying Klaviyo has improved a lot on that,
Reinis Krumins 19:00
ya know, the targeting and targeting is still fairly basic. But in most cases the targeting works it was primarily the the editor side of things which was very basic previously with the fonts you could use designs you could add now it’s improved by a ton. And the customization is a lot better.
Ben Donovan 19:18
I’ve seen quite a lot of comment on Twitter lately about the Klaviyo prices so it’s
Reinis Krumins 19:22
yeah, they’re raised prices all the time now. But that’s primarily I believe it’s because Shopify acquired a stake in them and then whenever private equity comes in or like larger companies come in they look to increase profitability cuts costs. So that’s one way to do it. Just increasing increasing prices
Ben Donovan 19:42
yeah for sure that Shopify actually had a like an integrated email tool they released didn’t they have a bad tried out? Is it is it really
Reinis Krumins 19:49
I didn’t try it myself but I just I just read the reviews I don’t think I saw a single positive review. And again, it’s something I believe, I believe that tried to mimic Klaviyo and they tried to get rid of Then because they saw how much money, you know, was in emails. So they tried to make their own soul, they understood how complicated how difficult that is. So they just, you know, it will be easier for them to invest in Klaviyo and just just get the same benefit.
Ben Donovan 20:15
Good stuff. Okay. And then moving on to campaigns, then what type of campaigns Would would you be running?
Reinis Krumins 20:22
Oh, that’s a very broad question. But I would say the the campaign, I would say fundamentally, the way I like to talk about campaigns at the moment, is for someone to understand the best campaigns to send out imagine as you’re giving it the rest of your customers. So right now, Black Friday, and you know, we just came out of Black Friday, Cyber Monday at the time of recording the podcast. And on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, if you want to get more sales, and you don’t want to promote the same products, or the same discounts, you can promote different angles. So one of them is, you know, it’s maybe Saturday or Sunday, you could send them an email saying, Hey, are you running out of your bike? Black Friday’s budget? Well, don’t worry, because you can buy now and pay later with after fail. Now on our shop, you know, it’s giving these customers at ease, because they might think, Oh, I don’t have any more money to buy, you know, this, this, this, this nice hoodie, but you tell him, hey, look, you’d have to buy everything upfront, you can get on a payment plan. Or even we had a conversation with a company to sell senior skiing equipment. For them. Skiing equipment was one of the one of the products they sell sold, and they also started selling shorts. Now with the shorts. Once someone places an order for skiing equipment, you could tell them, hey, look, you know, if you bought skiing equipment, you’re probably gonna go to a resort in that resort, you’re gonna have a sauna, you’re gonna have a spa. So get these swimming shorts as well. So you can enjoy a nice relaxing evening at the spa after a full day of skiing, you know, just giving customers these ideas. And they’re like, oh, yeah, cool. This is a good idea from you. And they’re more likely to purchase.
Ben Donovan 21:55
Yeah, good. And how often would you suggest a brand is emailing their customers
Reinis Krumins 22:02
12 campaigns a month is a golden standard. Again, that depends on how big your email list is, we had a conversation with a company doing 100 million a year, they send three emails a day. And that’s obviously because their emails are so massive, they can have a bunch of different segments. And you know, keep up this frequency. If you are doing under 100k a month, 12 campaigns a month is good. If you’re doing like less than 50k, you could even do four campaigns a month. That’s my recommendation.
Ben Donovan 22:34
Even that 12 campaigns sounds a lot when you say campaigns, it’s not necessarily discounts. But it’s like not a product update or newsletter. Yeah,
Reinis Krumins 22:41
it can be product updates. Again, it can be a lot of times different angles, we have Mother’s Day, Mother’s Day coming up, we can have two campaigns we send out we can predict the gender of people who are likely to be male and likely to be female, send them to different themes, different angles, we can showcase the best selling products of the month best selling products of the week, we can take the same product and maybe write an advertorial style email around it. We can write a value email teaching our existing customers how to use this product or maybe how a supplementary product and then make their lives even better. So there’s there’s an infinite amount of angles that we can use. And really, that’s why I previously talked about giving customers ideas because once you realize you can do that, that’s central what campaigns aren’t, you never end you never. You never lose ideas to send your customers you just keep on generating new ones. You can have a Frequently Asked Questions email, right answer, you know, diamonds that have frequently asked questions. You can have emails that get sent to buyers, you’re gonna get have emails to get sent to non buyers, emails, engage customers, emails, unengaged customers, and through this you fill in the month clients quite easily.
Ben Donovan 23:44
Yeah. Good. Okay. And then in terms of the actual email itself, like to just sort of finish up by talking about what are the success factors with the actual email, subject lines, copy images, hooks, that kind of thing? What’s driving the most? What was the what are the key things there?
Reinis Krumins 24:04
Yeah. So the first thing you want to focus on is like the subject line. It’s the same thing as you enter website or you enter or you start watching a Facebook ad. It’s the hook as a headline, subject line, it’s what captures the attention of the customers. Then once you’ve captured attention, you want to get them to click and open the email. Once they’ve done that, boom, you’re in there and they can start reading it. This comes down to things copywriting and graphic design. How well can you write copy? How well it can you sell the click. That’s the main premise of the email, you want to sell two clicks, the first click you sell is a subject line and the preview text to get them to click the email. The second click is for them to click the CTA within the email, so they get taken to the product page. So you need to build enough curiosity. Sometimes this can be done with very, very short emails that don’t say much. But you know, if you’ve if someone ever subscribes in the open Neil Patel’s email list, that’s what he does. He sends like, you know, four or five lines of text and a CTA. That’s because his his goal is just get people to click the email as much as possible. Sometimes for more complicated products, you can write longer copy that explains the product a bit more. And then you can get more, sell more within the email. But I would say those are two types of emails you can sell and just thinking about how can I get more people to click and open up my email? How can I get more people to click and open up the product page? Those Those are the things that make an email successful. That’s the fundamentals. It’s as simple as that.
Ben Donovan 25:31
How much does design play a factor in I know a lot of email marketers. More traditionally, in like the info product space, we’ll talk about text based emails, but then brands and then a lot of image heavy emails. What are your thoughts?
Reinis Krumins 25:46
We do both we do text and image base, even for e-commerce. Even for larger brands, image bases, SRA, tanks base can be very good to build a personalized feeling between the customer and the brand. So you can get customers feel like the actual owner or someone from the company is messaging them, it looks like an email that was sent by a colleague, visual based emails, it’s as the name and sells, they show visuals, they showcase the product itself. And they can showcase different benefits and show that to the customer to get them to click, I recommend mixing both together. Design great design is important as well. Because even if you have an email that just texts, that is still great design, because then it just all comes down to the copywriting of it, it comes down to the style, the way you will write an email with an image and a design would be very different the way that you would write a text based email. So I would say Good design is important. But you know, it doesn’t mean that ugly things are bad. If you’ve been in print marketing space, you know that a lot of times ugly stuff converges better than the pre stuff. So you gotta test and find find stuff that works. Me actually a while back before the email agency we had we were selling courses, there’s actually parallel to the email agency. So it was not like making money online. It was like dancing courses, painting courses, fitness course, we were involved in a course with the Jennifer Lopez this private trainer, some like really cool stuff. And a lot of these programs they did very well like 20k, they something like that. And with a dancing course we had problems converting it, the conversion rate was very, very low. And us testing landing pages we saw like we had this professionally designed landing page by graphic designer, and we switched to like a very simple Click Funnels page that look like crap, but it converts a lot better. Because it’s, you know, you got to test you got to test different audiences respond different things. Typically older people respond to uglier things better, because they’re kind of more used to it. There’s a younger audience, you know, we have the blacked out, we have the dark mode turned on. So our phones are more blacked out. So you kind of want to mimic that celebrates more as well.
Ben Donovan 27:53
Nice. Yeah. Cool. In terms of you mentioned earlier, some companies, you’ve worked with some kind of case study stuff. Are there any case studies that you can kind of spring to mind if people that just got started with email marketing, deployed some good solid strategy and since a real solid growth with an email channel?
Reinis Krumins 28:11
Yeah. So to answer your question, question specifically some people who start out the email last year we have a skincare company with which we did 136 day and sales with just one email campaign send. I think it was like a month after working with us. So so that was massive. We saw another company we scaled from 661k to 61k A month 990k A month in sales, just by working with us as well as case these actually on on the site as well. It just happened in the first 30 days we implement the emails that made 300k extra a month. And and to be fair, there has been been quite a lot of them. We had another hearing aid company. I think on average a month they’re doing like hundreds hundreds K we see around like 140k a month so that helped out a ton. Because obviously the the money they made from emails, they can reinvest back into paid advertising and make more money. So it’s it’s a flywheel that helps helps you grow. We actually had another company did a pre we did a pre sale for Black Friday, Cyber Monday deal with an email list of 4000 people we collected I think it was to 200k in sales with one email send or 200k or 160. Like in that range. I forgot on top my mind. Keeping up with 60 clients is not the easiest thing.
Ben Donovan 29:34
So in summary, email marketing still works.
Reinis Krumins 29:37
Yes. That’s an entire podcast. I believe this part of the cropped out this email marketing work. Yes. The end.
Ben Donovan 29:45
That’s all we need. Just to finish up, do you have you seen any significant changes in the last 12 months and maybe do you see significant changes coming up? I know obviously there’s potential has been some issues With email tracking, etc. are there significant changes that are taking place in the industry? same as three years ago?
Reinis Krumins 30:06
No. Well, there have been some changes, its government goes down more to the content and consumer behavior rather than like technicals. Like you would see maybe on Facebook ads, iOS 15, that didn’t impact emails that much, primarily, because email marketing and open rates and tracking, tracking open rates specifically was never liable. It was kind of like an an eyeball thing. And still most tools the way they would work. Now, I’ll explain a little bit more about this. But when you send out an email, there’s a pixel that tracks when someone opens the email or not. So what happened previously, pre iOS 15, there were a lot of bots and security tools don’t open emails before the person sees it, to scan for malware or some issues. So most of the emails sent sending providers they had already calculated and that the first open rate is not legit. It’s not the real, and we’re gonna assume the second open rate. So that countered a lot of issues. We saw it, for example, like if you sent to Apple Mail, like, oh, we’d see 100% open rates, when in reality, it’s not true. This does, for example, bypass it, this was set by the owner of send lane as well on Twitter to for them, this wasn’t an issue, most email tools have have some similar mechanisms. And even an even before that it wasn’t open or it wasn’t accurate. It’s the same as like, people say for SMS SMS has a 98%. Open Rate, it’s bullshit. There’s no way you can track open rate, for example, in SMS. So you can’t say email SMS open rate is better than emails on SMS, it’s 100% assumed it just a random number, like really just some random number that gets spit out, you can only look at the click through rate with emails as well, like click through rate is what you really want to push for. It’s a bit more difficult to track open rates than it was previously. But really, it wasn’t the best metric to go after I know everybody. Everybody who’s new to emails always asked like, oh, what’s the average open rate you get? It doesn’t matter. It’s not the question or the metric that really matters. What matters is your click through rate and your placed order, right.
Ben Donovan 32:02
Yeah, that’s good, solid advice. If you could leave people with one bit of takeaway key action item for the end of the episode, what would it be?
Reinis Krumins 32:12
Watch all of Ben’s podcast episodes. If I have to give another another great piece of advice, for emails, I’d say is know when to use emails properly. So there are people who start emails either too early or too late. Too late is less frequent, but too early is what we see more often, if someone is starting out, or they struggle in their business, they try to find a new marketing channel, a new marketing tool to save it, it’s not gonna be, you know, just the email or Pinterest ads, a lot of times you have to look at the fundamentals and improve those and it’s, and it’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s, you know, like, like, when you’re trying to become rich, you think that there’s going to be like a course you’re gonna watch and you’re gonna, you know, wake up with a million dollars in your bank account, it’s not going to happen through that. A lot of things happen do happen through through great strategy and thinking and problem solving, the same thing goes for same thing happens there, with email,
Ben Donovan 33:11
just a quick follow up to that, wait till someone gets to that stage. So they’re doing 5-10K a month on their website sales, they should obviously still be building the list. But what do they do with it just a weekly update email, or,
Reinis Krumins 33:23
I would say, I would say if your 5-10K a month, focus on growth, focus on getting the 30-50k like emails, set up flows and forget about the rest, like it’s not going to be it’s not going to be worth is for you really like really, it sounds like counterintuitive as an email marketing and selling you not through emails, just mathematically, your time and the effort you put into writing emails, when you’re doing 10k a month, you know, you could 5x your revenue by learning how to do paid ads better or you know, adding crafting better offers, or adding more skews and creating bundles. So that’s what you need to focus on first. And once you have the offers down, email marketing is not going to fix a bad offer. That’s, that’s all I gotta say. And no marketing channel will ever ever fix a bad offer. So you have to start with the fundamentals, craft them. If you’re a 10k a month, I’m sorry, but your offer is not good enough. You know, if your offer was good enough, you’d be at you know, 500k a million a million a month, even if you’re 100k a month, your offers still not good enough, you need a better offer. And it’s something that you know, people don’t get sold often. But like really speaking, we’ve we’ve we’ve been into over 250 Klaviyo accounts, like I think even like close to 400 Klaviyo accounts at this point. And this will we see the most successful ones have They have great offers. And they’ve nailed you know, acquisition and offers in the product before they try to really scale or they deal with while scaling and they figure it out. And that’s how they get like a million a month. And those kinds of revenue numbers.
Ben Donovan 34:54
Good. That’s the kind of honesty we like appreciate that. The candidness and Uh, I’m sure that’s gonna be very helpful for a lot of people as well this whole episode will be I feel like we’ve kind of you know talked about a lot of the fundamentals there’s probably a million further questions we could have but if people do want to kind of follow you for more inspiration, find out more about the agency where can they find you?
Reinis Krumins 35:16
Find me on Instagram at Reinis so just my name or you know, you can type in you can go to agencyjr.com/call and talk with me there. So it’s agency J as in Jacob, R as in Reinis .com/call. And we’ll have a chat and see if and how we can help out with email marketing specifically. I’m not gonna be able to be your life coach. Unfortunately, it’s not it’s not it’s not a service yet that we offer.
Ben Donovan 35:44
Yeah, I just want to catch up otherwise. I won’t book it there. For now that’s but it will leave all of those details in the show notes and description etc. Reinis thanks so much for coming up, man. You can tell it just oozes out of you this email stuff so I appreciate you taking the time out and sharing with
Reinis Krumins 36:02
Thank you for having me my friend. Alright
Ben Donovan 36:05
Alright, guys. You heard it. Check out the details in the description in the show notes below. Get into this email marketing stuff, and we’ll see you in the next episode real soon.
Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of the brand builders Show. Today we’re going to be talking all things email marketing, an absolutely huge topic in the world of E-commerce. And I’m glad today that we’re joined by a reignest, who is built out quite a name for himself in the email marketing space. Reinis. Welcome to the show today.
Reinis Krumins 00:19
Happy to be here.
Ben Donovan 00:21
Thank you. I mean, everybody says that, but yeah, hopefully, hopefully, you actually mean that. And we’re gonna get you some.
Reinis Krumins 00:28
Yeah, I mean, I mean, of course, it’s always a pleasure to because like from these podcasts is not simply not just a one sided conversation, you know, you can give your comments and I can learn from that as well. So it’s always a pleasure.
Ben Donovan 00:39
I’ll try. I mean, I’ll try my best. But we’re here to learn from you today, because you are an expert in the world of email marketing. And I’m interested to hear a little bit of how you got to be the expert. What’s kind of the story? Where did you start with email? How did you find yourself on that particular vertical in a wide e-commerce space? Give us a bit of a background to your story.
Reinis Krumins 01:01
yeah, for sure. So essentially, actually, this is my business partner in the background as well working. But we got started, I think it was like two and a half years ago, initially, we were working on Facebook advertising. But long story short, I had a client that needed work outside of Facebook. And, and chatbots, which I was doing at the time, there was email marketing. And as it wasn’t a chatbot scene, everyone was talking about how email marketing is dead, it’s dying. It’s old, no one cares about it anymore. But when we set things up for them, I realized that, you know, they’re making 60k a month and and all of a sudden, like 3k from emails, and I was like, Okay, this is pretty cool. And the letter downline as they scaled up to over 100k, a month, that number grew to 14k, etc, etc. And I realized that there’s a lot of opportunity here, everyone is providing Facebook ads as a service, etc, etc. But no one’s focusing on retention on the back end on emails. And that’s essentially where we swooped in, and we started doing it. Now, at this point, we’ve grown to around 60 clients. And at peak, we had 55, team members and our team, we’ve worked with companies who sell in the US, Europe, even Japan, Israel, all over the world in a bunch of different niches, and that just show that we were at the right place at the right time. And I do believe those also a factor of our success and of our meteoric rise.
Ben Donovan 02:21
Yeah, nice, man. What does that team look like? Now? You said pizza? 55. What is that on? Is it on? Obviously, we can get into all the details. Yes. What makes it good email process, but is that copywriting? Is it designers? What kind of team is it?
Reinis Krumins 02:35
Yeah. So as an agency, it’s not just the writing side, we also have to manage clients. So it’s accounts managers, it’s project managers, copywriters, graphic designers, all these different elements that get put together to build the team.
Ben Donovan 02:48
The year you said, you’ve been doing it two and a half years, the agency?
Reinis Krumins 02:50
Yes, that’s correct. And closing up on on three years soon.
Ben Donovan 02:56
Yeah, good. Good. Do you see yourself doing it for the long term?
Reinis Krumins 02:59
Yes, of course, there will be probably a time where just as a business, like the agency business model itself, you know, we have broke it, and we can move on to something that’s bigger and more, that has higher opportunity for us. But now for the foreseeable future. Yes. There is no reason not to. I mean, the only reason would be if there’s something like a different opportunity, which is just a lot better. Yeah.
Ben Donovan 03:22
Can you sell an ad agency? Agency, JR
Reinis Krumins 03:25
So Jr. Doesn’t stand for junior stands for Jacob Rhenus. It just sounds very good. But then as we started working with more and more people, people say the agency junior. junior. Now it’s not. It’s not that though.
Ben Donovan 03:38
Can you what you’re talking about the kind of long term plan are just like to get into the minds of entrepreneurs. Right. But the agency model is is it’s sellable? Can you sell a business that you build as an agency? Or are you just restricted to just keeping as a cash flow business?
Reinis Krumins 03:53
Are you ultimately you can sell any business? It just depends on what price and to whom? Typically, agency businesses aren’t the main business people would like to buy how I’d say it’s something that people just associated with clients working gruntwork. And they might not be the it might not be the most favorable, but it can be sold. Yes, I mean, any business can be sold. It just depends on what price and what’s multiple. There’s some businesses which are less value than others. For example, for e-commerce, you can get great multiples for SAS, you can get amazing multiples for agency that’s typically at the bottom of the tier list. Will we sell it possibly, but you need to build in a specific way. Ideally, you want to build it as an asset for people to buy because no one wants to buy a job. They don’t want to go in and fulfill the client work talk to the client, they just want to buy something that produces income and they don’t have to think and worry about it. They might be able to implement an operator to make the business grow and function but they don’t want to, you know deal with all the clients management stuff, which which is probably the main reason I believe why people are not not big fans of agencies because they just think agency client’s work me working, no go compared to e-commerce. You know, you might be actually doing more work when you buy an e-commerce business and sometimes even make less money than an agency. But it just the association by default that makes I believe people flocked those businesses more.
Ben Donovan 05:17
Yeah. This isn’t meant to be an agency podcast, I know, how much are you working?
Reinis Krumins 05:21
Personally. Like, I can work less, but there’s still a lot of room to grow. I, frankly, work all the weekdays and on weekends and work on Sundays. On weekdays, I typically wake up at like 6:37am. And I go to sleep at nine where most of the work is most of the time is being spent working. Some is like, you know, some degeneracy or some social media stuff, which I, you know, bucket and bucket and with the degeneracy side of things. But most of the stuff is still working, because I’m focusing also on building my personal brand, like, you know, even doing podcasts like these works on that.
Ben Donovan 05:59
Yeah, that’s good, man. Thanks for answering those questions. I know, a lot of people listening will be entrepreneurs and maybe wondering, could I get into the agency space as well as ecom? is a popular kind of, kind of thing to consider. So no, it’s good, man. Let’s talk about email marketing. Obviously, that’s the topic. That’s your expertise. Why, firstly, why is email marketing so important?
Reinis Krumins 06:21
Look, it’s, you know, as a business, you’re always going to be focusing on acquiring customers. And that’s probably the most difficult part of that journey, you need to build trust, you need to get people to give you their credit card details, which they feel are very, very confidential. And they need to believe that your product they’re buying, it’s going to be valuable to them. Once you convince them if you don’t talk with them at all, you’ve lost a client. So really, for a business, we have a we have a company, this is around 3 million a month, and I think 1.2 mil came from emails, right. So if they had no me email marketing, they just be missing out on a million a month. Right. So like, fundamentally, the bigger your business, the more important email marketing is going to be. Because you already have a customer base, you already have your loyal audience loyal fans and, and what you need to do is communicate with them. And not always is going to happen through paid advertising. Paid advertising is great for customer acquisition. But for attention, email, SMS is where it’s at. And really, as we dive more and more into the future of E-commerce and online business, more and more people in the companies are going online, like you know, five years ago, we saw more companies be you know, on a brick and mortar scene, and now all of them are online. So there’s a lot of competition and all the costs are going up. The place where costs are more fixed, you could say as emails because you don’t need to pay when somebody you know opens an email you don’t need to pay when someone views an email. When someone clicks an email, you just pay a monthly fee, for example to Flavio or whichever tool you’re using. And to send out messages whenever and to whom whomever you want, and you don’t really have regulations. You can communicate with a customer, you can make sure that the people you communicate communicating with they get your messages, the same thing goes for SMS as well. So it’s a it’s a tool for you to be more profitable long term. And also just to help you scale more, you know, email marketing and paid ads, they supplement each other they go together and to help you make more money ultimately,
Ben Donovan 08:16
and most of your clients using Klayvio
Reinis Krumins 08:21
Yeah, yeah. Because we use Klayvio hum meant to be fair for E-commerce. It’s the best tool. I don’t see any reason you’d be using any any tool other than Klaviyo freecom.
Ben Donovan 08:31
Yeah. And you mentioned SMS is obviously growing a lot. I think a few years ago, it was seen as a little bit of like an intrusion, intrusive kind of marketing, but a lot more brands are doing SMS marketing. Now, again, most of your clients doing SMS a few of them, how’s the structure?
Reinis Krumins 08:49
Not everyone, I’d say the ones in Europe or not, because in Europe last semester, regulations are a lot more strict, it’s more difficult to follow. However, in the US, I’d say around like 30-40% are the ones who are not. There, SMS lists might not be big enough at the moment for them to work on it or it just like nature of their business. It’s a one product shop and you know, SMS marketing plus emails can be a bit too aggressive. Or sometimes the business owners don’t think it’s necessary. So there’s no way to convince them bucket them all together. I’d say around like 30% of the customers use SMS. I actually had a stat that I was in a panel where someone from Klaviyo is also in discussion and they opened my eyes or is SMS because they said typically one person is only subscribed to four SMS lists, meaning that if you have someone’s phone number, it’s very valuable, biggest compared to email, you’re gonna give your email to a lot of people you’re gonna see a lot of messages. So, you know, not always you can see the highest conversion, but through SMS, you have fewer lists and you get messages, you know, less often, especially in America, everyone who uses iMessage. So the message you’re sending via via The next is going to be seen as well. Now, the the only trick with SMS is you can’t be as aggressive as frequent as you are with email. But you got to balance them. And you got to really use the two marketing channels together to get the most benefits.
Ben Donovan 10:15
Do you see it as something that is a bit of a fad? Or is it going to keep becoming as popular?
Reinis Krumins 10:20
If it was a fad? If would have died off by now, then that’s my answer. Yeah, good.
Ben Donovan 10:25
Okay. What kind of revenue? Do you really aim to get clients generating through email? And in terms of percentage? What was kind of healthy aim for you?
Reinis Krumins 10:35
Depends on the shop itself. The biggest variables are number one, how many products you have? And then number two is, are you a niche down store? Or do you have like a more general general shop? Because ideal scenario is you’re in a niche. For example, if you look at Lululemon, they sell athletic clothing. So if someone goes to buy from them, you know, they’re into whether it’s fitness, and you know, they want to get clothing from you. So email marketing for that company could be massive, it could be over 50 60% of their online revenue. Not including, obviously brick and mortar. But for example, for shops where let’s say you might sell headphones, it’s a one time purchase. After a while it’s good to reengage his customers and maybe sell them a new, a new product, but you wouldn’t be getting as much sales to answer your question. I will stick to the usual like 15-30% on what you see on average for some brands, maybe the different, the more consumable CPG brands brands weakened byproducts more often. That’s where you dive more into the range of like 24, top to 40% from the total sales.
Ben Donovan 11:39
Okay, that’s good. Those are some good benchmarks. In terms of let’s do a little bit of a workshop, you walk into a new client’s business day one of setting everything up. What are the core fundamentals? A business that has zero email setup right now? What are the core flows and campaigns you set up? And maybe you could just nobody that’s, I knew that email marketing just to find campaigns and flows, the difference between
Reinis Krumins 12:07
Yeah, so campaigns and flows, think of email flows as automated, you know, behaviorally based triggers for emails. So if someone goes to the site, they look at a specific product and leave, we can send them an email, they abandoned checkout, we send them an email and think of email campaigns as disruptive based marketing, like the same thing as you’re on Facebook, you’re scrolling through the feed, you see posts you want to see. And then there’s an ad is disruption based disrupts your your your daily flow, if you will. That’s what email marketing campaigns are with campaigns, you decide when and whom to send them to flows are being sent if someone fits a specific criteria, or they do something on the site. Now, for someone who is who has no email marketing, first things first, I there are two mechanisms we install and declines businesses, we work with ones the front end sales booster, the other ones, the repeat, buyer, and profit generator. So the front end sales booster is very focused on getting people to want to focus on boosting a row as simple as that. So this, this taps into the funnel you have on your website. So what we install is a pop up on the site to capture the people who go through the site, but don’t end the buying. Because if your conversion rate is 3% on pop up can convert anywhere from five on the lower end on average, like seven to 10% where you know, all sudden you have a lot more traffic, you can retarget through emails and also through paid ads. Then the next thing is an abandoned checkout secret sequence pretty straightforward. For people that were down the funnel and abandoned checkouts, then the thank you, thank you emails. So once someone places an order, we send them emails, reminding them about their order, that you know, we received it, setting the right expectations for when the order can arrive, and also try and upsell and cross sell the different products that might be interesting to them. Those would be like the core. Because like, if you add more, I would say it’s best to work with someone else, then then for you to do with yourself. This is what you I would recommend you do. And I’d recommend you set up if you do it by yourself. Obviously, the setups we run, they’re they’re more complicated than that. And I would say depends on the businesses size as well. If you’re doing less than 30k a month, I would say don’t think that much about the email, set up these flows and forget about them. Because mathematically speaking, if you do 30% Max from emails, you might make 9k a month in sales. So you scaled like 39k which is cool. But if you hone in on your product market fit and improve your ads, you can scale to hundreds K a month, and then all of a sudden focusing on emails or getting the 30% mark can be 30k extra month. So that’s the main difference.
Ben Donovan 14:40
Yeah, I think obviously, setting up the flows is just a one and done thing, isn’t it? Obviously you can optimize over time but it’s work you do once that can then pay off you know, so it’s
Reinis Krumins 14:50
at lower scale. Yes. And lower scale. Yes. At a higher scale. It’s like imagine you have a racecar. If you buy a racecar and just let it sit. It just all going to it’s going to run Stop, and it’s not gonna be you know, it’s only gonna be functional after a while. So you do need to maintain it at higher scales. But if you have something that if it was sharp that smaller, yes, you set it up and you forget about it because mathematically, you’re doing 1% optimizations like 30k a month is not going to make sense for you make like 30 bucks. Whereas if your a million a month and do 1% optimization is 10k extra sales a month, which over the years 120k Extra, it’s like hiring it’s a budget for hiring a new employee at that point.
Ben Donovan 15:31
Yeah. Okay. The flows before we get on to campaigns, just quickly on the flows, email signup, and that kind of orientation kind of flow. What are you seeing the best opt in rates for? Is it like a discount free gift? join the newsletter, what are some recommendations?
Reinis Krumins 15:49
Well, I’m gonna subscribe to the philosophy most OG marketers subscribe to just test. Really, it can depend like you can have the suit of same offers for one brand works for that it doesn’t work. But I would say the main ones, as you mentioned, yes, is a gift that can be a discount, it can also be a giveaway, we’re seeing giveaways become more popular, especially for higher ticket products. If for example, you’re selling a chair, you don’t want to like give them a 10% discount, you know, in the first order, because it might be their only order for next four or five years. However, you can do a giveaway where every three months or every month you give away a product, they can opt in to get a chance to win that you know that month, that month product for free. Obviously, if you’re operating a lower scale, it might be too expensive for you. But those are a couple of ideas. So you need to take into consideration your margin, whether it’s a one time buy, or you have multiple purchases, getting a free gift also with with the first order can be can be really good. There was a supplement company and how they, I think, I think that’s what they increase their conversion rate and abandoned checkouts by 17% by having a pop up that shows up when people are about to exit. And it tells them like, Hey, if you buy this order, and if you opt in, we’re gonna give you a free keychain with your order. It was a keychain it was like a small shake like a small shaker bottle keychain, something like that. Protein Shake bottle. And that helped them improve the conversion rate on their abandoned checkouts. So these are a couple of tests you can do those would be the main ones. I wouldn’t really deviate too far away from these could things could just get way too complicated, more complicated than you might need them to be.
Ben Donovan 17:30
Yeah. Okay. Are you collecting SMS at the same time as email on sign up when for people that are using SMS?
Reinis Krumins 17:37
Good question. So we would do two step opt in. So step one is they enter their email. Step two is we ask them to ask for their phone number bizim. Because email, it’s something that’s easier for people to give out. Phone number is something that people are a bit more lenient, they want to they don’t want to give it out as easily. So with a two step, you’re able to get their email and their phone number if they want to give it if not, you know, we already have their email. So we’re 50% done on the way.
Ben Donovan 18:06
Yes, good tip. What tool are you using for like pop ups and email collection.
Reinis Krumins 18:10
Right now, Klaviyo’s improved their pop up tool like very, very, very much. There is also Privy OptinMonster but for simplicity we use Klaviyo just because we can go into one tool see everything for you know each one of our clients. It’s and also you don’t have to pay anything extra and Klaviyo is raising their prices is getting a bit more expensive. So just using all the functionality is good. Typically I’m against using you know tools do everything all in one tool, because they don’t do most things well. But with Klaviyo it’s a bit different because crop Klaviyo does everything well when it comes to email and they’re improving their tool and their pop ups are really good now.
Ben Donovan 18:50
Yeah, their pop ups were the targeting wasn’t the greatest on them before was it preview would be much better for targeting and different flexibility. But you’re saying Klaviyo has improved a lot on that,
Reinis Krumins 19:00
ya know, the targeting and targeting is still fairly basic. But in most cases the targeting works it was primarily the the editor side of things which was very basic previously with the fonts you could use designs you could add now it’s improved by a ton. And the customization is a lot better.
Ben Donovan 19:18
I’ve seen quite a lot of comment on Twitter lately about the Klaviyo prices so it’s
Reinis Krumins 19:22
yeah, they’re raised prices all the time now. But that’s primarily I believe it’s because Shopify acquired a stake in them and then whenever private equity comes in or like larger companies come in they look to increase profitability cuts costs. So that’s one way to do it. Just increasing increasing prices
Ben Donovan 19:42
yeah for sure that Shopify actually had a like an integrated email tool they released didn’t they have a bad tried out? Is it is it really
Reinis Krumins 19:49
I didn’t try it myself but I just I just read the reviews I don’t think I saw a single positive review. And again, it’s something I believe, I believe that tried to mimic Klaviyo and they tried to get rid of Then because they saw how much money, you know, was in emails. So they tried to make their own soul, they understood how complicated how difficult that is. So they just, you know, it will be easier for them to invest in Klaviyo and just just get the same benefit.
Ben Donovan 20:15
Good stuff. Okay. And then moving on to campaigns, then what type of campaigns Would would you be running?
Reinis Krumins 20:22
Oh, that’s a very broad question. But I would say the the campaign, I would say fundamentally, the way I like to talk about campaigns at the moment, is for someone to understand the best campaigns to send out imagine as you’re giving it the rest of your customers. So right now, Black Friday, and you know, we just came out of Black Friday, Cyber Monday at the time of recording the podcast. And on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, if you want to get more sales, and you don’t want to promote the same products, or the same discounts, you can promote different angles. So one of them is, you know, it’s maybe Saturday or Sunday, you could send them an email saying, Hey, are you running out of your bike? Black Friday’s budget? Well, don’t worry, because you can buy now and pay later with after fail. Now on our shop, you know, it’s giving these customers at ease, because they might think, Oh, I don’t have any more money to buy, you know, this, this, this, this nice hoodie, but you tell him, hey, look, you’d have to buy everything upfront, you can get on a payment plan. Or even we had a conversation with a company to sell senior skiing equipment. For them. Skiing equipment was one of the one of the products they sell sold, and they also started selling shorts. Now with the shorts. Once someone places an order for skiing equipment, you could tell them, hey, look, you know, if you bought skiing equipment, you’re probably gonna go to a resort in that resort, you’re gonna have a sauna, you’re gonna have a spa. So get these swimming shorts as well. So you can enjoy a nice relaxing evening at the spa after a full day of skiing, you know, just giving customers these ideas. And they’re like, oh, yeah, cool. This is a good idea from you. And they’re more likely to purchase.
Ben Donovan 21:55
Yeah, good. And how often would you suggest a brand is emailing their customers
Reinis Krumins 22:02
12 campaigns a month is a golden standard. Again, that depends on how big your email list is, we had a conversation with a company doing 100 million a year, they send three emails a day. And that’s obviously because their emails are so massive, they can have a bunch of different segments. And you know, keep up this frequency. If you are doing under 100k a month, 12 campaigns a month is good. If you’re doing like less than 50k, you could even do four campaigns a month. That’s my recommendation.
Ben Donovan 22:34
Even that 12 campaigns sounds a lot when you say campaigns, it’s not necessarily discounts. But it’s like not a product update or newsletter. Yeah,
Reinis Krumins 22:41
it can be product updates. Again, it can be a lot of times different angles, we have Mother’s Day, Mother’s Day coming up, we can have two campaigns we send out we can predict the gender of people who are likely to be male and likely to be female, send them to different themes, different angles, we can showcase the best selling products of the month best selling products of the week, we can take the same product and maybe write an advertorial style email around it. We can write a value email teaching our existing customers how to use this product or maybe how a supplementary product and then make their lives even better. So there’s there’s an infinite amount of angles that we can use. And really, that’s why I previously talked about giving customers ideas because once you realize you can do that, that’s central what campaigns aren’t, you never end you never. You never lose ideas to send your customers you just keep on generating new ones. You can have a Frequently Asked Questions email, right answer, you know, diamonds that have frequently asked questions. You can have emails that get sent to buyers, you’re gonna get have emails to get sent to non buyers, emails, engage customers, emails, unengaged customers, and through this you fill in the month clients quite easily.
Ben Donovan 23:44
Yeah. Good. Okay. And then in terms of the actual email itself, like to just sort of finish up by talking about what are the success factors with the actual email, subject lines, copy images, hooks, that kind of thing? What’s driving the most? What was the what are the key things there?
Reinis Krumins 24:04
Yeah. So the first thing you want to focus on is like the subject line. It’s the same thing as you enter website or you enter or you start watching a Facebook ad. It’s the hook as a headline, subject line, it’s what captures the attention of the customers. Then once you’ve captured attention, you want to get them to click and open the email. Once they’ve done that, boom, you’re in there and they can start reading it. This comes down to things copywriting and graphic design. How well can you write copy? How well it can you sell the click. That’s the main premise of the email, you want to sell two clicks, the first click you sell is a subject line and the preview text to get them to click the email. The second click is for them to click the CTA within the email, so they get taken to the product page. So you need to build enough curiosity. Sometimes this can be done with very, very short emails that don’t say much. But you know, if you’ve if someone ever subscribes in the open Neil Patel’s email list, that’s what he does. He sends like, you know, four or five lines of text and a CTA. That’s because his his goal is just get people to click the email as much as possible. Sometimes for more complicated products, you can write longer copy that explains the product a bit more. And then you can get more, sell more within the email. But I would say those are two types of emails you can sell and just thinking about how can I get more people to click and open up my email? How can I get more people to click and open up the product page? Those Those are the things that make an email successful. That’s the fundamentals. It’s as simple as that.
Ben Donovan 25:31
How much does design play a factor in I know a lot of email marketers. More traditionally, in like the info product space, we’ll talk about text based emails, but then brands and then a lot of image heavy emails. What are your thoughts?
Reinis Krumins 25:46
We do both we do text and image base, even for e-commerce. Even for larger brands, image bases, SRA, tanks base can be very good to build a personalized feeling between the customer and the brand. So you can get customers feel like the actual owner or someone from the company is messaging them, it looks like an email that was sent by a colleague, visual based emails, it’s as the name and sells, they show visuals, they showcase the product itself. And they can showcase different benefits and show that to the customer to get them to click, I recommend mixing both together. Design great design is important as well. Because even if you have an email that just texts, that is still great design, because then it just all comes down to the copywriting of it, it comes down to the style, the way you will write an email with an image and a design would be very different the way that you would write a text based email. So I would say Good design is important. But you know, it doesn’t mean that ugly things are bad. If you’ve been in print marketing space, you know that a lot of times ugly stuff converges better than the pre stuff. So you gotta test and find find stuff that works. Me actually a while back before the email agency we had we were selling courses, there’s actually parallel to the email agency. So it was not like making money online. It was like dancing courses, painting courses, fitness course, we were involved in a course with the Jennifer Lopez this private trainer, some like really cool stuff. And a lot of these programs they did very well like 20k, they something like that. And with a dancing course we had problems converting it, the conversion rate was very, very low. And us testing landing pages we saw like we had this professionally designed landing page by graphic designer, and we switched to like a very simple Click Funnels page that look like crap, but it converts a lot better. Because it’s, you know, you got to test you got to test different audiences respond different things. Typically older people respond to uglier things better, because they’re kind of more used to it. There’s a younger audience, you know, we have the blacked out, we have the dark mode turned on. So our phones are more blacked out. So you kind of want to mimic that celebrates more as well.
Ben Donovan 27:53
Nice. Yeah. Cool. In terms of you mentioned earlier, some companies, you’ve worked with some kind of case study stuff. Are there any case studies that you can kind of spring to mind if people that just got started with email marketing, deployed some good solid strategy and since a real solid growth with an email channel?
Reinis Krumins 28:11
Yeah. So to answer your question, question specifically some people who start out the email last year we have a skincare company with which we did 136 day and sales with just one email campaign send. I think it was like a month after working with us. So so that was massive. We saw another company we scaled from 661k to 61k A month 990k A month in sales, just by working with us as well as case these actually on on the site as well. It just happened in the first 30 days we implement the emails that made 300k extra a month. And and to be fair, there has been been quite a lot of them. We had another hearing aid company. I think on average a month they’re doing like hundreds hundreds K we see around like 140k a month so that helped out a ton. Because obviously the the money they made from emails, they can reinvest back into paid advertising and make more money. So it’s it’s a flywheel that helps helps you grow. We actually had another company did a pre we did a pre sale for Black Friday, Cyber Monday deal with an email list of 4000 people we collected I think it was to 200k in sales with one email send or 200k or 160. Like in that range. I forgot on top my mind. Keeping up with 60 clients is not the easiest thing.
Ben Donovan 29:34
So in summary, email marketing still works.
Reinis Krumins 29:37
Yes. That’s an entire podcast. I believe this part of the cropped out this email marketing work. Yes. The end.
Ben Donovan 29:45
That’s all we need. Just to finish up, do you have you seen any significant changes in the last 12 months and maybe do you see significant changes coming up? I know obviously there’s potential has been some issues With email tracking, etc. are there significant changes that are taking place in the industry? same as three years ago?
Reinis Krumins 30:06
No. Well, there have been some changes, its government goes down more to the content and consumer behavior rather than like technicals. Like you would see maybe on Facebook ads, iOS 15, that didn’t impact emails that much, primarily, because email marketing and open rates and tracking, tracking open rates specifically was never liable. It was kind of like an an eyeball thing. And still most tools the way they would work. Now, I’ll explain a little bit more about this. But when you send out an email, there’s a pixel that tracks when someone opens the email or not. So what happened previously, pre iOS 15, there were a lot of bots and security tools don’t open emails before the person sees it, to scan for malware or some issues. So most of the emails sent sending providers they had already calculated and that the first open rate is not legit. It’s not the real, and we’re gonna assume the second open rate. So that countered a lot of issues. We saw it, for example, like if you sent to Apple Mail, like, oh, we’d see 100% open rates, when in reality, it’s not true. This does, for example, bypass it, this was set by the owner of send lane as well on Twitter to for them, this wasn’t an issue, most email tools have have some similar mechanisms. And even an even before that it wasn’t open or it wasn’t accurate. It’s the same as like, people say for SMS SMS has a 98%. Open Rate, it’s bullshit. There’s no way you can track open rate, for example, in SMS. So you can’t say email SMS open rate is better than emails on SMS, it’s 100% assumed it just a random number, like really just some random number that gets spit out, you can only look at the click through rate with emails as well, like click through rate is what you really want to push for. It’s a bit more difficult to track open rates than it was previously. But really, it wasn’t the best metric to go after I know everybody. Everybody who’s new to emails always asked like, oh, what’s the average open rate you get? It doesn’t matter. It’s not the question or the metric that really matters. What matters is your click through rate and your placed order, right.
Ben Donovan 32:02
Yeah, that’s good, solid advice. If you could leave people with one bit of takeaway key action item for the end of the episode, what would it be?
Reinis Krumins 32:12
Watch all of Ben’s podcast episodes. If I have to give another another great piece of advice, for emails, I’d say is know when to use emails properly. So there are people who start emails either too early or too late. Too late is less frequent, but too early is what we see more often, if someone is starting out, or they struggle in their business, they try to find a new marketing channel, a new marketing tool to save it, it’s not gonna be, you know, just the email or Pinterest ads, a lot of times you have to look at the fundamentals and improve those and it’s, and it’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s, you know, like, like, when you’re trying to become rich, you think that there’s going to be like a course you’re gonna watch and you’re gonna, you know, wake up with a million dollars in your bank account, it’s not going to happen through that. A lot of things happen do happen through through great strategy and thinking and problem solving, the same thing goes for same thing happens there, with email,
Ben Donovan 33:11
just a quick follow up to that, wait till someone gets to that stage. So they’re doing 5-10K a month on their website sales, they should obviously still be building the list. But what do they do with it just a weekly update email, or,
Reinis Krumins 33:23
I would say, I would say if your 5-10K a month, focus on growth, focus on getting the 30-50k like emails, set up flows and forget about the rest, like it’s not going to be it’s not going to be worth is for you really like really, it sounds like counterintuitive as an email marketing and selling you not through emails, just mathematically, your time and the effort you put into writing emails, when you’re doing 10k a month, you know, you could 5x your revenue by learning how to do paid ads better or you know, adding crafting better offers, or adding more skews and creating bundles. So that’s what you need to focus on first. And once you have the offers down, email marketing is not going to fix a bad offer. That’s, that’s all I gotta say. And no marketing channel will ever ever fix a bad offer. So you have to start with the fundamentals, craft them. If you’re a 10k a month, I’m sorry, but your offer is not good enough. You know, if your offer was good enough, you’d be at you know, 500k a million a million a month, even if you’re 100k a month, your offers still not good enough, you need a better offer. And it’s something that you know, people don’t get sold often. But like really speaking, we’ve we’ve we’ve been into over 250 Klaviyo accounts, like I think even like close to 400 Klaviyo accounts at this point. And this will we see the most successful ones have They have great offers. And they’ve nailed you know, acquisition and offers in the product before they try to really scale or they deal with while scaling and they figure it out. And that’s how they get like a million a month. And those kinds of revenue numbers.
Ben Donovan 34:54
Good. That’s the kind of honesty we like appreciate that. The candidness and Uh, I’m sure that’s gonna be very helpful for a lot of people as well this whole episode will be I feel like we’ve kind of you know talked about a lot of the fundamentals there’s probably a million further questions we could have but if people do want to kind of follow you for more inspiration, find out more about the agency where can they find you?
Reinis Krumins 35:16
Find me on Instagram at Reinis so just my name or you know, you can type in you can go to agencyjr.com/call and talk with me there. So it’s agency J as in Jacob, R as in Reinis .com/call. And we’ll have a chat and see if and how we can help out with email marketing specifically. I’m not gonna be able to be your life coach. Unfortunately, it’s not it’s not it’s not a service yet that we offer.
Ben Donovan 35:44
Yeah, I just want to catch up otherwise. I won’t book it there. For now that’s but it will leave all of those details in the show notes and description etc. Reinis thanks so much for coming up, man. You can tell it just oozes out of you this email stuff so I appreciate you taking the time out and sharing with
Reinis Krumins 36:02
Thank you for having me my friend. Alright
Ben Donovan 36:05
Alright, guys. You heard it. Check out the details in the description in the show notes below. Get into this email marketing stuff, and we’ll see you in the next episode real soon.
If you got this far, there’s a chance you enjoyed the episode… if so, please consider subscribing, leaving a review and sharing our content – we really appreciate it!
