Lara Schmoisman
00:05
This is Coffee Number Five. I’m your host, Lara Schmoisman. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Coffee Number Five. And today is all about email. You know that I’m a big fan of funnels and a big fan of collecting that piece of information that makes you someone from in that you don’t know you or they don’t know your brand, and to make it like a warm lead already because they give you that very unique thing that is your email address. But today I want to take it one more level, one more, let’s say, deeper and deeper, because what happened with that email address that I’ve been there sitting and we don’t know if they’re interested or they’re not interested in us. Can we reactivate them? Can we revive them? What happened to them?

Lara Schmoisman
00:59
So a little while ago, I met Dean through a group that were members, both of us, and I found fascinating what he was doing. He specialized in winning back leads. So welcome, Dean. Thank you so much for being here today. And, okay, I’m super excited about this talk because we’re going to be giving so much information that people will find so useful. So, hi!

Dean Ginsberg
01:27
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Lara Schmoisman
01:29
Thank you for being here. So tell us a little more about your journey and how did you get to win back?

Dean Ginsberg
01:38
Yeah, I’ve been working in growth marketing for over ten years now. I started brand side. I actually started as a first hire for a company that threw sober morning dance parties around the world. And I scaled that from like one city to 28 cities. And then that got me an opportunity to work with all these different large brands. So I worked with Nike to throw a series of parties around the country. I worked with Samsung and did like, a party with Gwen Stefani, and it was a trip. But also in doing that, all of the way that company grew was all through email. We did no paid media, so I learned a lot about email in that process. My boss and mentor at that company was the founder of General assembly and general GA is a big coding boot camp.

Dean Ginsberg
02:33
They sold that company for like $350 million or some crazy number. And that was primarily built off of email, too. So I kind of grew up in companies that were all about, like, word of mouth brand and email and really owning the really, like, the one to one relationship with the end user. And I saw the power of it. So eventually I branched out. I started a consulting firm where I was kind of brought, I was brought in by private equity groups to do digital transformation. So my focus was on data infrastructure retention growth at like a very vp level for large legacy brands. And I had, I worked with a lot of some of the biggest fashion groups in the world that have really strong brands but had a lot to do, a lot to improve on as it related to digital experience.

Dean Ginsberg
03:32
And that kind of led me down the path of particularly retention. And I went into win back basically from the perspective of, I want to narrow, narrow, and become like an expert best in the field at one specific thing. And pretty consistently I was brought into a room where the CEO would say, we need a big revenue bump this quarter. Why don’t we just email everybody on the list? And the retention team would be like, we can’t do that. There’s this thing called deliverability. We’re going to get paying for that. And the two sides didn’t really know how to have that conversation or really have a specific strategy for how to reactivate dormant audiences, meaning audiences that haven’t opened or clicked on an email in over three months.

Dean Ginsberg
04:19
And so I thought, why don’t I just build something from the ground up, like what technology stack would you leverage? What strategies would you use specifically targeting this audience? And can you build a productized service around that can scale? So that’s how I started win back and it’s been going really well.

Lara Schmoisman
04:37
That’s awesome. So let’s start from the beginning because there are a lot of people out there still questioning if email marketing works.

Dean Ginsberg
04:47
Yeah. Does it work? Yeah. So I have this funny story. So I was friends with the founder of a company called Morning Brew, and Morning Brew is a daily business newsletter. They’re very big now. He started it out of his dorm room, and were friends when he was back in college. And I remember when he was building that company, there was a moment where he was like, should I raise money? I’m getting all of these larger, more experienced mentors. I’m just out of college. All of these people are telling me that there’s no business in here. Email is dead. You should start doing long form videos on social. And he was like, I use this very simple spreadsheet and the numbers just go up every month. And if the numbers continue going up, I can have a serious business here.

Dean Ginsberg
05:39
And they sold that business to Business Insider for, I think it was reported like $75 million. And the business has grown much bigger since then. So he’s like under, he’s like pretty young and pretty successful. And I tell that story because that was when he was over ten years ago where everybody was saying, that email’s dead. And clearly proved all of them wrong.

Lara Schmoisman
06:05
People still saying that email is dead. I think. What is it that is not having a strategy for your emails?

Dean Ginsberg
06:14
Yeah, yeah. I think, like, if saying that email is dead, it means that saying that the primary channel to that where you own your relationship with your consumer is dead, it’s an unacceptable, like response. Right. So, like, it’s the only channel where you own the communications with your customer. It’s your only way to communicate with your customer base at scale.

Lara Schmoisman
06:41
Yeah. And, you know, own the narrative because remember, social media, which is great and it’s part of the ecosystem and absolutely should be used. It’s not yours. You don’t own that channel.

Dean Ginsberg
06:56
Yeah. Yes. And you’re at the whim of. You have to pay to get in front of people’s eyeballs. And paid social can be an incredible catalyst for growth and particularly for acquisition. But if you’re relying on paid social for retargeting, then your business economics are not going to work. You need to be able to have a direct relationship with the end user where you don’t have to pay every time you communicate with them, which means that you can tell a much longer narrative about who you are, who you’re for and what you stand for. And it can also be like very personalized in your targeting.

Lara Schmoisman
07:35
So let’s talk for a second about the structure of the emails, because I see this as a big mistake. People trying to overthink the emails that they sent and make them very long. And I always explain that once you put mostly a lot of CTA’s in an email, but when the consumer clicks on a CTA, they’re not going to go coming back to the email. So you need to be very diligent and very say, this is the conversion I want, that you need to know what you want from that email and not try to put everything.

Dean Ginsberg
08:13
Yeah, I mean, what’s great about email is that you have many, it’s part of a life cycle, so you don’t have to say, tell every single part of your brand in one email. There’s, you need to be able to identify what’s the right message to send to the right user at the right time. And oftentimes the email should really be focused one value proposition with one CTA.

Lara Schmoisman
08:36
Yeah.

Dean Ginsberg
08:37
And if you’re going to diverge away from that, it should be tested so that you are clear of like, what is the impact of bifurcating or sort of more adding more complexity to the email itself.

Lara Schmoisman
08:49
For the people out there that are maybe starting with emails. Let’s do some emails one one, and let’s talk about some terms that we’re going to put out there in this conversation. We’re going to be talking about flows, for example. And flows are.

Dean Ginsberg
09:06
So there’s two types of emails in the email program. One are your campaigns and the other is your automations. Yes. So your automations are triggered, a triggered series of emails. And that trigger is often related to a user action. So, for example, if you’re doing like an abandoned cart flow, that means that the user has added something to their cart and that they didn’t check out. There’s a lot of information that you have now about that user that is different than what you would have about everybody else. There’s a timeliness to be able to send that message. So you know what they added to their cart, you know when they added it to their cart. All the other information there is about that user, what they previously purchased, what are the items that they browse before they abandon.

Dean Ginsberg
09:56
And you can automate or build dynamic blocks inside the email to personalize the email for them. And you can set that on a trigger. So it just runs forever. That’s the difference between an automation and the campaign is an automation is triggered by the user and kind of runs ongoing. And a campaign is sent to a larger audience and it’s done sporadically. So you might run like three campaigns a week. And those campaigns could be like, we have a big sale coming up. We launched a new product. We want to tell you about this big event that we’re doing down the road.

Lara Schmoisman
10:37
Those are times they can be highlighting products and explaining about the products. It depends where your company is. I’m a big believer in to be informative, mostly when you are in a space that is very competitive. Why is your product different than others? And give it in little pieces? Don’t try to give me those long emails because it’s going to be too long. Dean rated, you know that. Then another way that we send emails are we have the lists and we have segments. Do you want to dive a little bit into that? Because I think that now we’re getting closer, about to understand when a customer is engaging with us and then when we’re about to lose them.

Dean Ginsberg
11:27
Yeah, yeah. So a list is really just static. So you’re adding users to a list and that list can grow over time, but it’s basically like a snapshot of customer definitions and then you’re pulling them into a list. Segments are basically like they’re, you can set a definition of a segment, and then as users qualify for that segment, they’ll be pulled in. So instead of like when you’re talking about your campaign sends, you can send emails to everybody on your list. And generally the messaging that you should have should resonate with the average person on that list. When you’re leveraging segments, you can get more specific. So you can say, I only want to send this message to people who have exhibited these previous behaviors. People have purchased before.

Dean Ginsberg
12:20
People have purchased more than three times before, people have looked at this specific product or purchased this specific product. And you can get a bit more targeting with your messages or even people.

Lara Schmoisman
12:32
That they haven’t engage with us in a while.

Dean Ginsberg
12:36
Yes, yes. Which is like my area. So all of our targeting is specifically for people who might have been engaging with email previously, but they haven’t opened or clicked on an email in over three months. They haven’t visited your website either. So generally, if you are targeting somebody who is not engaging with your email, it’s doing two things. One, it’s going to hurt your deliverability, which is a fancy word for just saying, are you going into spam or are you not going into spam? And then the other component of it is if you are emailing to people who are not engaging with your emails, it’s deflating your general email metrics, which makes it more difficult to identify what’s working and what isn’t working.

Lara Schmoisman
13:23
Let me ask you a question, because this is a big deal going into spam. How do you know that you’re going into spam and how can you avoid it?

Dean Ginsberg
13:32
So there’s metrics that are in, if you’re on Klaviyo or whatever, esp you’re leveraging, there are some metrics that are available that’ll show you if an email has bounced, if people are marking your email as spam, but those tools don’t do a good job of telling you if you’re automatically being placed into spam by the inbox provider. And the inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, they all have their own algorithms and their own set of rules. There’s an additional layer of deliverability tooling that will not only show you where you’re landing in the inbox, like if you’re landing in spam for individual inbox providers, but if you’re landing in the primary tab or the promotions tab. So most brands do not have those tools. They’re a bit expensive.

Dean Ginsberg
14:22
And so most brands are operating kind of on like top line metrics from Klaviyo and trying to troubleshoot to figure out what’s going on when they see a big dip in their open rates or their click rates.

Lara Schmoisman
14:34
Yeah. And that’s a big issue, not having those tools and not having that data because we are, it’s a guesswork.

Dean Ginsberg
14:43
Yeah. Yeah. And to be honest, it’s also a guesswork when you have the tools. So what’s cool is like when you leverage those tools, you can see if you’re landing in spam, but you don’t know why you’re landing in spam. And so what’s also great, there are.

Lara Schmoisman
14:57
Some things that we know that might land in spam. When you send, first time, you try to send too many people at the first time or when you send a lot of exclamation marks in the subject line or capital letters, those things, we know that. Well, anything else that you can think of that is a no in this case.

Dean Ginsberg
15:18
Well, so those are, yeah, those are examples of things that could land you in spam. But every inbox provider has a different set of rules and by design, those rules are a black box and they’re constantly changing. Right. So when you see that for a particular inbox provider you’re landing in spam, there’s sort of a next layer of, okay, what potentially could be the issue, right. You basically start troubleshooting. And so what you’ll do from there is you’ll run what’s called a seed list test. So you’ll send all the content that you’re producing, you’ll send to different seed lists. And those seed lists will tell you if they’re landing in spam for that particular piece of content. And if so, what ISP, what inbox provider you’re landing in spam for.

Dean Ginsberg
16:01
And then you can begin to triangulate, okay, this particular message is landing in spam for hotmail users. What about this message could be problematic. And then you kind of go into your like, oh, there’s all caps with like weird symbols like our HTML is broken on the email. Actually, the link that we’re sending is going to like an unsecure page. Right. There’s a long list of potential issues. The other component here is there’s a thing called DMarC. So a lot in February, Gmail and Yahoo required all brands to monitor.

Lara Schmoisman
16:38
I’m glad you mentioned that. That was my next question. Okay, yeah, let’s dive into it.

Dean Ginsberg
16:43
So DMarC is all these brands have to monitor their Dmarc. Now the ISP’s have basically said like you’re responsible for keeping an eye on this. And what it’s trying to do is to say, does the email, does the IP that is sending this email line up with the IP of the person who is, who this user subscribed to? So there’s a thing called spoofing where a hacker could basically extend emails on behalf of your IP address and now you’re responsible for making sure that isn’t happening. Similarly, you have to make sure that your IP address aligns with what is on your site.

Lara Schmoisman
17:29
Let’s explain exactly what this new thing is. Basically what you need to align your provider, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, whoever activecampaign, whoever uses you need to connect the DNS to your domain providers so they make sure that your website and your sender domain are aligned with your brand.

Dean Ginsberg
17:54
Yes, exactly. That was very well played. Thank you.

Lara Schmoisman
17:58
So let me ask you a question. Do you think that this will affect somehow in not affecting domains into going to spam if they are verified by the domain?

Dean Ginsberg
18:11
So it’s basically guaranteed that you will start to go into spam if you are not verified. That’s basically what Gmail and Yahoo have stated they are like you are now responsible for doing this. The thing that a lot of brands are missing is just because you’re verified. What’s essentially happening once you’re verified is that the inbox providers are going to send you a report. That report is going to say, these are the ips that are sending on your behalf. And this is where you’re landing in the inbox for those individual ips. That report is basically unreadable. It’s super complicated. So what these tools do is they basically take that report and structure it in a way where you can actually gain insights from it.

Dean Ginsberg
19:02
But sort of the next step from that is, yes, you have to verify your IP address, but then you’re also, by verifying your IP address, you were saying, I am taking responsibility to ensure that the IP address that are mailing on my behalf are good actors and continue to be aligned. And that’s the step that most brands are not well structured for at the moment.

Lara Schmoisman
19:23
Yeah, that’s true. Okay, so we have emails we talk about, but there’s something really important that I think a lot of smaller companies are missing out there. And we’re talking about the email, the structure of the email itself. But there to me, two big, really small pieces of information that they’re big deal, like your subject line and your preview line. If those are not interesting, people will.

Dean Ginsberg
19:55
Never open an email as it relates to deliverability. Right. The inbox providers are basically asking the question of, is this, are you sending emails that people actually want to receive? Right. That is there’s so many complicated components to this, but really what it distills down to like are you sending emails that people want to receive and are those emails safe? So engagement metrics actually have this snowball effect. If you’re getting high engagement on your emails, you’re more likely to land inbox and you’re potentially more likely to land in primary tabs. And once you land inbox and then in primary tabs, you get higher engagement. Right. So like that’s the game. So everybody should be testing their subject lines always, all the time. Like there’s no reason not to be testing a subject line.

Dean Ginsberg
20:42
It’s a very easy test to structure, very easy test to set up. And when I say testing it’s like you need to be monitoring it to see when you reach statistical significance and pick a winner. So it’s not just running a test at all times, it’s constantly updating your tests and there’s a bunch of strategies that you can deploy. When you’re thinking about subject line tests, something to consider is like try to create different categories of subject lines so that you’re not just testing subject line a versus subject line b. You’re testing something.

Lara Schmoisman
21:17
I want to interrupt you. And for everyone who listens to this podcast, you know how important for me are the people, and we’re going back to that deck to know who your target audience is, who are your pillars, and then it’s really easy to communicate with them.

Dean Ginsberg
21:33
Yes, yes.

Lara Schmoisman
21:36
So let me tell you a story. We have this client that came to us and it came without that deck. We created sort of pillars to send emails, but we realized that our target audience, just with testing things, that when we use more spicy words, people will click better. Our target audience was responding to those better. So of course you wouldn’t want to overuse it. But we knew that when we want to create a spike, we could have used those words well, even just like.

Dean Ginsberg
22:11
The way that you, like, the way that you structured that. We are going to test spicy words versus like non spicy words. That’s a well structured test, right? As opposed to like we’re going to test words against words, right? So the insight that you’re getting is not just this subject line performs better than this one. You’re saying that spicy subject lines perform better than non spicy one. So now we’re going to like be able to leverage that insight across many other emails that we’re sending. That’s like the big opportunity, the big step that I think a lot of brands can pretty easily step into.

Lara Schmoisman
22:45
Yeah, but it’s also one of the things that fascinate me about all this email marketing and SMS marketing world is that we can get a lot of data and we can learn a lot about our audience. There is so much information. So it’s about analyzing and reanalyzing who is listening to or who is opening our emails. That’s if you see my clients emails list, you’ll see that we have the list separated. Like if you went to an event that you know that you’re addressing to these people specifically because you got them in event you already have information from that people. So utilize that data. You know where they’re located. Depends. Are you in a store? Is geolocation. You have multiple stores also.

Lara Schmoisman
23:34
They are like, for example, if you have an event in certain area of the country, you don’t need to let everyone know. But if you’re segmenting all those lists, you really can use that in your benefit. And it’s not easy task and it takes a lot of work.

Dean Ginsberg
23:53
Yes, that’s what I love most about this channel is there’s so much data to work with and you can get personalized and you can get as advanced as you want in terms of your targeting. And the thing that I think brands should be aware of because it can be very overwhelming where it’s like, oh, I could do a million things but I don’t even know where to start. And sometimes brands can add a level of complexity to both their segmentation and their flows, where now they’re actually sending too small of an audience to make it worth it. And then the maintenance of those flows ends up pulling away from bigger opportunities that they could be tackling.

Lara Schmoisman
24:36
And so talking about flows, one thing that is really important is always to analyze those flows as well. Because they flows, if they are not engaging or if as you making changes in your campaigns and you learn about your audience, you always need to be tweaking those flows too.

Dean Ginsberg
24:54
Yes. What’s great about flows is that they’re evergreen. So when you launch a campaign, it can be pretty difficult to run a test on campaign that gives you insights you can work with because you send it and then it’s sent. It’s like, okay, maybe I can test the template type and get some insights. But it says flash in the bucket. Automations are running consistent though you can run tests on them and you can monitor those tests over time, and then you can try to beat your winning variants and improve it. Improve it. And you can optimize it to infinity, which is why I love working with something.

Lara Schmoisman
25:33
Also about the flows. I mean, of course you have the welcome flow, which is for the first time that someone come, but then you have the abandoned card. And I feel like if you have current customers, you should be updating those flows too, because otherwise you become boring.

Dean Ginsberg
25:48
Yeah. I mean, every single flow, you should be running tests on at all times. And not just tests. I think what you’re hitting on is important. It’s like, you shouldn’t just be running tests, you should be like, adding more content to it. Right. More touch points.

Lara Schmoisman
26:03
Yes.

Dean Ginsberg
26:03
Yeah.

Lara Schmoisman
26:04
And then let’s go back to win back, because we have that, we thought we’d lose them. I mean, when it’s appropriate to try to win back someone. And when is it worth it?

Dean Ginsberg
26:18
It depends on the brand. As like, a general rule, if somebody hasn’t opened or clicked on any of your emails in over three months, the likelihood that they’re going to click or open on the next email you send them is pretty low. Right. And so we like to work with, like, anybody who hasn’t opened or clicked on an email in over three months. That’s what we consider a dormant audience.

Lara Schmoisman
26:41
And how do you win them back? And I’m not asking you to give all their.

Dean Ginsberg
26:45
No, I’m happy to give, but it’s.

Lara Schmoisman
26:47
About how you reconnect with someone who maybe already cross you out from your list, how you convince someone to, hey, check me out again. It’s about the work that you use. It’s about the promotion, it’s about using different technologies so you land in the right place.

Dean Ginsberg
27:07
It’s. Yes, all of the above. So as it relates. As it relates to content. Right, because you could send emails to a billion people if you don’t have the right content, particularly for this audience, that are likely not to engage. So we think about three pillars. One is differentiated differentiation. By definition, these people are not engaging with the content they’ve been receiving. So the only opportunity we have to win them back is to do something different. The other is we think of clientelling over marketing. So instead of, like, pulling inspiration from a billboard, which may actually be the right approach for your more active audiences, we try to think of it as a store rep on the floor who is very overzealous and trying to get your attention to get you the right product in your hand.

Dean Ginsberg
27:55
So think about personalization over wide base messages. And similarly leveraging offers and testing what is the right structure of an offer goes a really long way. So we can take an offer that the user already received and we can just approach it from a different angle. So we’re basically giving the same value as it relates to the brand, but something, but there’s something different about it that catches their eye and is likely to drive a click.

Lara Schmoisman
28:25
Let me ask you a question, because this is something else I’ve been seeing lately. Brands, in an effort to get a lot of lead generation, many times they’re not targeting necessarily the right audience. And to me, it’s very difficult to try to engage with someone who is not your right target audience. How do you differentiate if that’s a valid lead or not?

Dean Ginsberg
28:50
So that’s where the tech comes in. So we run all of these emails through a scoring tool, and that scoring tool identifies what are engagement patterns that indicate that somebody is likely to be won back. That’s also saying like, is this a bot, is this a real person? But also is this just somebody who’s not going to engage with email or this brand? They’re gone. So what we do is we analyze, we have all this data on who’s run through our program and who’s reacted positively to the messaging that creates these different patterns. So we can see people who respond favorably have exhibited this previous engagement to hipers, and now anybody who exhibits those engagement behaviors, we should target more aggressively. That’s like, that’s the secret sauce. That’s like the tech that has been built out that makes all of this possible.

Lara Schmoisman
29:48
And how do you think that the changing the cookies will affect this data?

Dean Ginsberg
29:54
So I think the impact it’s less of. So the metrics that we’re working off of are all email related metrics, so we’re not relying too much on cookie based data. The other component around cookies is that every brand should be using server side tracking tool or something that is similar. And that’s less for your win back audience and more for increasing your abandonment. Your abandon flows sense. So if you’re not, if you’re using cookie based tracking right now, you’re significantly limited in terms of your ability to identify if somebody who visited your website is a returning customer and you already have their email. And you could generate a pretty significant bump by switching to server side tracking, because the more abandoned cart emails you send, the higher conversion rate from email is going to be. But it’s less relevant for what we’re doing.

Dean Ginsberg
30:58
And on the way back side.

Lara Schmoisman
31:00
That’s good to know because a lot of people, there are so many changes all the time in these ecosystems. So many times it gets confused. The data information that we get for emails, that we get for website tracking, which is there different formats of data?

Dean Ginsberg
31:17
Yeah.

Lara Schmoisman
31:18
So in order to work with someone like you, a company that has 6000 emails, is it worth it?

Dean Ginsberg
31:27
No. So we work with brands who usually have like a million emails. So we’re working with like medium to larger size brands. And the reason being that if you’re at 6000 emails, your biggest focus should be on growing your email list, improving your welcome flow, like improving your campaign sense. But really it should be like growing your list. The ROI on your inactive audiences is going to be significantly lower than your ROI on your active audience. The reason why we built this company is for large businesses, there’s actually a big opportunity. Because if you can get fifty cents per email in your inactive audience, that can be a significant amount of money. But if you think about it, if your list is 6000 people, $0.50 an email is not going to be really worth anybody’s time.

Lara Schmoisman
32:26
Let me ask you one more question before I go, because I think that this is a question everyone wants to know when we’re talking about email list, how can we grow that email list?

Dean Ginsberg
32:37
So it’s like all of these things are a waterfall, right? So like the easiest way to improve email, like email growth is to improve like acquisition traffic to site, which is also the way to improve, like so many other things. Right? So it’s a bit of a pop out of answer. The other piece though is like you should be testing your pop up on site. So you know, if you test your pop up on site and you can convert 50% more traffic into giving their email or SMS, then you’re going to, your rate of growth of that email list is going to grow by 50%.

Lara Schmoisman
33:14
Yeah, but be aware that just putting a pop up is not going to make the traffic come to your website. There are many other things that you should be doing.

Dean Ginsberg
33:24
Yes, but there’s another component of if the majority of your traffic is coming to your site through paid acquisition and you can improve your conversion rate to email by 50%, and then you can improve your conversion from when somebody gives their email 50%, for example, then the whole equation for your return on ad spend gets. And now you can justify spending more money on paid acquisition to drive more traffic to the site because you’re seeing the return on that. So it all felt, it all cycles together but, yeah, ultimately, like you’re going to have to drive more traffic.

Lara Schmoisman
34:00
The other question is how often you should be sending emails.

Dean Ginsberg
34:07
So my answer to this is actually more dependent on bandwidth. So the, in most instances, it’s like, you should send as many emails as possible. Brant, they’re not sending enough emails. But it takes a lot of work to, like produce a female campaign and you need to know that.

Lara Schmoisman
34:28
Right. Let’s talk about doing it right and do it with a structure.

Dean Ginsberg
34:33
Exactly. There’s no point in sending a crappy email. It’s a waste of everybody’s time and nobody. It’s a negative brand experience and it’s not going to drive the growth. Right. So what I typically tell brands to do is like, focus on your automations. Because your automations, it’s a money making machine. Every dollar that, every dollar of personnel time that you put into that, you should be getting a return. And you can measure that return over a long period of time. Whereas a campaign is like, you’re putting money into that campaign, it’s being sent and then it drives revenue or it doesn’t. So if you’re limited in your time, particularly if you’re a smaller brand, there’s a million things that you can and should be doing. I would focus on nailing your automated flows, your welcome flow, your abandoned cart, your abandoned browse.

Dean Ginsberg
35:22
Brands can add more touch points to those flows than they currently are. Most brands have like two. Yeah. They should have like six.

Lara Schmoisman
35:30
I agree with you 100% on that. But also I think that the key factor is consistency. If you’re going to be sending emails, you need to have a plan for emails and be consistent.

Dean Ginsberg
35:41
Yeah. Yes. And that relates particularly to campaigns.

Lara Schmoisman
35:47
Yes. If you’re training your audience.

Dean Ginsberg
35:52
Yeah. And if you can’t consistently produce three campaigns a week, then you should reduce it to one. So you can consistently produce one a week.

Lara Schmoisman
36:00
Yeah, but do it well. I always ask this to founders at a work is it worth, where is your money going? Like, is it worth it for your time to try to do a campaign a week and do it so with all these mistakes, not knowing how to use segments, not doing it well, or is it better to use that money and hire someone to do it well for you, even if it’s little, but do it consistent or. But you need to do your emails. Your emails need to set up, be set up. You need to have that engagement with clients. I mean, I believe that retail is fantastic for most brands, but also there is something to be said about your d two C, a new relationship and how you control the narrative with your customers.

Dean Ginsberg
36:49
Yeah.

Lara Schmoisman
36:52
So before we go, any advice you can give brands about emails?

Dean Ginsberg
37:00
I would say, particularly if you’re a smaller brand, there’s opportunity to double down on your automations and test your onsite pop up. And as it relates to, like, the biggest factor that is going to impact your email program is, particularly at the early stage, is driving more traffic to the site, which means improving your acquisition funnel. Right. And so if you have solid automations, a great pop up on site, and you’re producing one campaign a week, two campaigns a week, whatever that cadence might be, then it’s like double down on your unpaid social, get people, like, figure out your roas on that, because that’s how you’re going to drive consistent growth.

Lara Schmoisman
37:45
There is any ratio that you feel like this is optimal from five people that they get to the website. One will give you an email address. What’s your sweet number there?

Dean Ginsberg
37:56
I don’t have one because I’ve really seen it vary consistently for a brand. I’ve even seen a very pretty widely based off of what the pop up is. Right. So I try not to give, like, benchmarks to brands. But just one of the things that I would say is you should be calculating your cost per email acquisition, not just your cost per purchase acquisition. Right. And because most brands, they don’t even know what that metric is for them. Right. So rather than me sort of giving, like, you should look for a five to one benchmark, it’s actually like, first thing is you should be measuring it, right. You should establish what your current benchmark is and then you should be trying to beat it.

Lara Schmoisman
38:38
That’s very sage advice, because in each space, the cost per pay per click is different in where you’re competitive, so you need to stay in a competitive space and at the same time make sure that it’s worth it for you.

Dean Ginsberg
38:56
Yes. And an opportunity is, particularly for small brands, I’ve seen they’re getting gouged on retargeting, like on paid social, and that the amount of money they’re paying for retargeting ads is diluting their overall return on ad spend. And if you can rely on email as your primary retargeting channel, then you’ll end up getting a truer gauge on what your roas is, which is going to improve your whole company.

Lara Schmoisman
39:25
Absolutely. That’s something that we’re super aligned to. To me is the PPC is to get new leads and to get brand awareness. But mostly to convert them to a way of get that email address.

Dean Ginsberg
39:41
Yeah. Yeah.

Lara Schmoisman
39:43
All right. Dean, thank you so much for being here. And I hope you guys, I mean, I love this talk. And if you have questions, you know where to find us. And thank you again for being here with us and having coffee with me.

Dean Ginsberg
39:56
Of course. Thank you.

Lara Schmoisman
39:58
And to you guys, I will see you next week with more Coffee Number Five. Find everything you need at LaraSchmoisman.com. Or in the episode notes right below. Don’t forget to subscribe. Was so good to have you here today. See you next time. Catch you on the flip side. Ciao. Ciao.