Email Marketing Is Better Than It’s Ever Been

November 17, 2020

Meet The Speakers

Dean Dutro

Co-founder of Worth eCommerce

Listen to the podcast

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Dean Dutro discusses the email marketing services his company, Worth eCommerce, provides
• How Dean helped one of his clients dramatically increase sales and profits using a powerful email marketing system
• Why email marketing has been getting more effective over the years
• Dean talks about optimizing email campaigns for the customer lifecycle
• How Dean helps business owners who are selling on multiple platforms
• Dean’s advice to new entrepreneurs looking to build an email marketing empire
• The four emails that e-commerce sellers should send to new subscribers
• Dean shares his favorite client success story
• How a company should evaluate itself before reaching out to Worth eCommerce

In this episode…

An email list is an incredibly valuable asset for e-commerce sellers. Email marketing has proven results, as well as a low cost compared to other advertising methods. In addition to driving leads and boosting profits, a good email marketing campaign can also give you valuable insights into customer behavior and data.

According to Dean Dutro, the first step to creating an effective email marketing system is ensuring that you have at least four emails to send out to new subscribers. Once website visitors have signed up for your email list, these four emails will inform, engage, and, hopefully, convert them into loyal customers. So, how can you create email marketing campaigns that drive real, long-term results?

In this episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast, host Eric Stopper is joined by Dean Dutro, the Co-founder of Worth eCommerce, to talk about the power of email marketing. They discuss optimizing emails for the customer lifecycle, increasing conversion and open rates, building a long-term email list for your e-commerce business, and more. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Buy Box Experts
• Worth eCommerce
• Dean Dutro on LinkedIn
• Dean Dutro’s Email Growth Training Course
• Relationship Commerce Podcast
• Mugsy Jeans
• Klaviyo
• Justuno
• eComEngine

Sponsor for this episode…

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.

The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity in the marketplace–not only producing greater revenue and profits but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.

Buy Box Experts prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.

Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:09

Welcome to the Buy Box Experts Podcast where we bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.

Eric Stopper 0:18

Hey, welcome to the Buy Box Experts Podcast. This is Eric Stopper. Today’s episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. We’ve got a team of consultants, I am one of them, please reach out to us. I know you have questions, it can get hard to manage these many, many marketplaces that you are forced to sell on as an e-commerce seller. And so go to buyboxexperts.com, click on the free analysis button, and you’ll be connected with me or a member of my team. It’s a very strange time for everybody. I know that. People are worried about tariffs and taxes. And the election is happening right now as we speak the electoral votes, like it’s like 230 to 219 or something like that. The impact on your business, right? Like the economy will keep going. And I have always felt like and I’ll ask our guests about this today as well. I’ve always felt like a monkey just turning the wheel. Just like keeping the economy on like trying to just generate as many sales as possible. The best thing that you could ever do in uncertain times, is just to keep on buying stuff. Just don’t hold on to your nickels. Just buy something, give a gift, buy it on Amazon, buy it on the person’s website, whatever you can do. I think that if everyone just comes together and just continues to operate and by products, then the economy will keep on humming along and we don’t have too much to worry about. But I’ll leave all my political opinions aside for now. Today, I’m so pleased to have Dean Dutro on our show. He is the Co-founder of Worth eCommerce, a platinum level Klaviyo partner that works to improve sales and profits for their clients using powerful email marketing. They focus on driving results and achieving ROI many times higher than what their service costs. They’ve worked with over 500 stores, and they’ve built two of their own that have reached the seven figure mark. Dean, welcome to the show.

Dean Dutro 2:26

Hey, thanks for having me, Eric. I’m excited to join and have this conversation.

Eric Stopper 2:31

So I’m a seller, everybody on the show knows that I sell a couple of products and I’m a dirty cheater. Honestly, I try all the newest tricks that I can find out there. But email marketing has always evaded me. And it’s because I don’t have an email list. I’ve tried to capture emails using or I’ve tried to capture text messages, like cell phone numbers, actually, with QR codes and like I have this product insert that says text plugs to two to 333. To get like, I don’t know, it’s a free offer. I think it’s pretty compelling. And I get there, I get their numbers. And then from there, I’m at last, I’ve had MailChimp. I’ve used a couple of other services before. And so Dean, talk to me just about email marketing, like, what do you guys do first of all? And then what kind of services do you offer the clients that you work with?

Dean Dutro 3:31

Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. And thanks for bringing that up. You know, there are a lot of like, every six months, there seems to be some sort of new tool or new strategy or new way to cheat the system and get sales. And, you know, like, for examples, like the spindle wins that you saw on websites or now text message marketing is building up. And, you know, really, what’s interesting is that email marketing is actually the oldest form of digital marketing. In fact, the first advertisement was like a one page email sent back like decades ago and that was the first mass digital marketing effort by some auto repair shop or something. So it’s, it’s been around for a long time. But I kind of think it’s just now getting good. And you know, what we do is we help e-commerce stores, build their email list, create a strategy, using the customer lifecycle within e-commerce. So starting from from prospect to new customer to repeat customer to VIP customer to lapse, customer lapse prospect, and we say, hey, in each of these stages, how can we target them with specific emails and content, right so that they become more likely to buy but more likely to buy faster than they would through traditional, not maybe not traditional but through PPC ads, things like that. And we’ll do everything from strategy, design, copywriting implementation, email capture, essentially full service to create this system for you that starts to work pretty much on autopilot. And, you know, I think one of the things that I like to talk about in regards to email is that if you’re focused just on PPC, you’re focused just on the front end channels, right, you’re limited in your profit and your sales based on how much you can spend. Right. So the only way you can make more is if you spend more, what happens with email is, if you go from a list of 1000, to 10,000, to 50,000, to 100,000, the cost to send 10,000 versus 100,000 emails is maybe a $500 difference, right? But your earnings go up, not just your earnings, your margin goes up, because it costs dramatically less to send to your email list than it does to send out a Facebook ad or an Amazon ad or some sort of PPC ad. So what happens over time, I hope my Siri just came on. What happens over time is as you scale, and as you scale, your email list, your profits start to scale, you can take that profit rien sir, or my series going crazy. You can take that profit reinvested in your front end channels, and then all sudden you got this massive growth curve. And a lot of people don’t realize that. So for example, we had a client years ago, I worked with him for years, he was a pet supply store, just selling pet products online. And when we met him, he was doing like $20,000 in sales. And, you know, this was maybe five or six years ago. So he thought it was pretty good. He’s doing 200 grand in sales, we started implementing this email system. And right away, we started seeing results. You want to be at, you know, 30 to 40% of your total online sales coming from email in order to achieve this, this scalability. But what happened is he went from 20,000 to 100,000 a month to 300,000 a month to half a million dollars a month in sales in just four years, with email driving the majority of those profits, right. And we were able to grow with his scale of fame he went from, you know, he was a nurse working by himself to now he’s got a team of like, 1520 people to get a CEO, he does triathlons. And you know, he’s really built this business. Really what i think on the back of an email, of course, there’s been SEO, there’s been PPC, things like that. Another piece of that story is that while he was scaling, there was a point where he was about $150,000 a month. And a lot of his traffic was coming from Google, Google changed their algorithm. And his SEO and his traffic dropped, just almost to zero. And we had this email list of about 75,000 people that held him afloat for two to three months until he could get his SEO back up and get some traffic coming from Facebook ads. So not only is it a profit lever, it’s a bridge during those times when Amazon or Facebook or Google or whoever else changes their algorithms changes the rules, the rules of email have been the same, you know, for decades, and it’s probably not going to change, you know, much. And any business that is sold at some point usually has a massive email list because they know they can send one email and make you know, 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is pretty wild.

Eric Stopper 8:20

Okay, a lot to unpack there.

Eric Stopper 8:24

I thank you, by the way, first of all, now, you send that email like it’s getting better than it’s ever been before. So talk to me about the buying preferences and the customer journey of this social media generation, right? The millennials and centennials. Just, I don’t look at my email very often. Maybe I’m a single iota of data that is completely cast aside, and I wouldn’t be a good target. But are our people buying more from email? Like, what has the conversion rate changed? Has open rates changed? Like, tell me why you think it’s getting better?

Dean Dutro 9:07

Yeah, there’s, you’re hitting a few points that are good. And there’s a wide variety of reasoning. The first one is data collection. Right? So you’re now able to see when someone opens an email when someone clicks an email, where they’re located, how many things they purchased from you how many times they’re visiting your website, and all this data is collected. And you can use that to segment these people to make sure you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Right. And that’s key to email is hey, if I know you’re interested, there’s a segment we call like window shoppers, these are people that come to your website, they’ve looked at three or four different products, but they keep looking at this one product. Well, we’re going to make sure we have something in place so that if we find that they look at the same product four times over the course of a week, they’re gonna get an email about that product. Right? They’re going to get more information on it. It’s not going to be a sale, but it Could be information, it could be testimonials, maybe it’ll be a sale at some point. But we’re targeting that person with exactly what they’re looking for, and providing them value at the same time. And so that’s one example is data. The other is email, email design looks better, right? So if you go on your phone, it’s much easier to read your emails than it was, you know, five or six years ago on your iPhone, or on your galaxy, or whatever. And so you can basically see the promotion or you can see the info right there and click it. And there’s something else that’s interesting that a lot of people were nervous about is in Gmail, you have this promotions tab. And I’m not sure if you use Gmail. So in Gmail, and your personal and usually in your business, they have a promotions tab in which a lot of people thought that was gonna ruin email, that is, if there’s a setting you can create, so you can have like promotions, updates, social kind of segments for the user. But uh, what happened is because of that, people started to expect newsletters and expect these things and look for them. Whereas before, if it showed up in your inbox, direct Jesus, I’m tired of getting all these newsletters, let me delete them, spam them all, it actually reduced spam rates dramatically across the board. So with that data your sender reputation started to increase for many, for many people, and in terms of sending out Gmail or sending out mass emails. So your deliverability started to go up. So your open rates started to go up more people started to see your emails,

Eric Stopper 11:30

simply because they segmented the emails into different sections, like I have important and unread and starred, and then my general email inbox. And that’s it. But I can add a promotion section that just like, neatly organizes all my nice newsletters from all the people that I’ve signed up with. So I don’t have to worry about spam, I’ve got all my spam, just like sitting in a nice little box that I can. There, I can control it. That’s that’s kind of the idea behind this, like people, it’s not in their way anymore. It wasn’t as interruptive.

Dean Dutro 12:01

Yeah. And Google will do these, like little nudges. Now that will say like, hey, like this email says you only have four hours left to get this offer. It’ll be like, top top promotions, right. And so if you can get there on Google, right, then your emails start performing really well. So it’s, it’s getting better across the board. And I think it’s getting better because of the data. And because we can make it more used to spray and pray you’d send 100,000 emails, or you know, an email 200,000 people have no idea who they were. Now you kind of know what they’re up to, and what they’re looking for. Yeah.

Eric Stopper 12:35

So you guys as an agency, right? Like, you look at the data, and seek to understand these customer journeys, and you’ve got these, I imagine almost like a Kanban style, like, oh, they’re, you know, they’re prospects, and they go to a customer and then go to a VIP customer. And inside each of those stages, you’ve got this variety of emails that you’ve developed that will help transition that person into making a sale. Have you just like, absolutely, like, made it scientific? Is it just totally like, Okay, if you’re here, like, these are the three types of emails, we’re gonna, we’re gonna multivariate test these three for each of them, the one that has the highest conversion rate, or click through rate, that’s the one that we’re going to use for that, and then just build that campaign out for somebody and then just, it just rides for the rest of forever.

Dean Dutro 13:31

Yeah, pretty much. You know, it’s taken years to get to that point. But so every so if you think about every part of the customer lifecycle, across any business, really, across any industry, the customer lifecycle is really the same, right? And there’s different jargon and different things. But since we’re the back channel, you know, it’s usually people who have been to a website, they’ve seen some ads, now we’re giving them more information, more urgency, we’re using different conversion tactics. But you know, if you think about it from a perspective of, hey, what types of content overall can you get, you can give informational based content, you can give social proof, right, you can give urgency, you can give sales if you want to. And then also you can get unique messaging from the founder, right, or unique messaging from the business, which is becoming more popular because a lot more people are wanting to shop from not just local, but like more independent sorts of brands. I’ve found, you know, people like there’s a great, great company called mugsy jeans, which, when I buy all my jeans from them, they’re awesome. They’ve got a great email system. I don’t know if they saw it on Amazon, but they like, you get messages from the owner. You know, I love that type of stuff. But we can say okay, if you’re in this part of the customer lifecycle, you know, we have kind of figured out it’s going to take about four emails to get the most ROI, you know, on autopilot, and each email is gonna have its own goal, right like email, one, information, email to social proof, email three, hey, we’re running out of stock email for, hey, we’re having a flash sale, something like that, right. And it’ll be different for each category. And that runs the same across most e-commerce stores, which is, you know, if you’re thinking about strategy, you’re thinking about big picture philosophy, versus like these little cheating tactics a lot of people try to use, that’ll be stable across time.

Eric Stopper 15:26

Is this what I mean? this is all existing inside of the email. But let’s say that somebody clicks on a piece of the content that’s offered, and they end up somewhere. Do you have insight into what they do once they’re there? Or does the portion of like email transaction insights stop at the point that they like, engaged and clicked on something? And then it’s the job of the website? To convert? Do you guys look at that? Do you look past the point of click inside of the email? Or do you mostly just stick to like, Okay, do we get them to click on the thing in the email? No,

Dean Dutro 16:05

we’re looking at conversion too. But we’re also looking, depending on the goal of the email, right? So if the goal of this email is to educate people, we want them to go to the place where they can be educated, and then likely they will purchase, right? So that but that purchase period may be, you know, a couple of days, whereas if it’s like a sale email, we’re going to track that day who’s purchased from that email, and we can attribute it directly to that. Right? So it kind of depends on the goal. And obviously, you know, it’s up to the website to collect the data and information and the better the on site conversions are better, the email is going to perform naturally. Right? So also they’ll start to lift each other up. That’s it, that’s a big thing that I think has been hard in the digital spaces. Where do you attribute revenue? And especially, you know, if you’re using email, or Facebook ads, or Amazon or whatever method you’re using, how do you attribute it? So we’ve come to the point where it’s like, hey, like, let’s just look at overall lift. If you have more money in your bank account at the end of the month than he did last month, it’s a win, right? give more profit. Right? Like, that’s, that’s a huge win. So we’re always, you know, talking more about overall lift and margin, which you don’t always see right away. You know, of course, it depends on the financials of people and things like that. But that’s, that’s one thing we like to look at.

Eric Stopper 17:24

Sure. I wonder like, if somebody was working with both of us, for instance, they’re paying us money to lift their sales? Yep. Would you look at sales on their website? Would you look at sales on Amazon overall sales? increases in pios on their brick and mortars, you know, what I like? Like, what is the thing that you can point to as an email marketer, and say, I made the most impact in this channel?

Dean Dutro 17:50

Yeah, I would say on like, what we call owned marketing. So if you have a Shopify store, people are coming to your Shopify store, getting on your email list, we can send out emails and no purchase, right? But let’s say we only collect, you know, 10% of visitors that come to your site, the other 90%, we don’t know where they’re going, they could be going to Amazon that could be going to Walmart, or wherever, you know, you have your channels outside of your store. And so we’re not counting any of that, right. We’re only seeing what’s being purchased on store, and how our emails are impacting that. But unfortunately, I can’t see like, Oh, they click here, then they went to Amazon, you know, I could say, Oh, this section of people came from Amazon. We got their emails, but we noticed they’re not purchasing here. likely they’re purchasing on Amazon, right? Something, something like that. So you may want to create a segment where you target people saying, hey, like we sell our products on Amazon, if you prefer that. That’s one kind of method of going about it.

Eric Stopper 18:55

Interesting. Yeah. in your, in your emails that you send out, right? You have information. I imagine that information. You’d either want them to consume the content in the email, or you’d want them on the website, right? Where you got lots of capabilities of adding video and like you can really dive in on the culture. But then when they’re ready to buy, right when you’re trying to send an email that is meant to get them to transact. Right, the final, the final nudge. We found that conversion rates on Amazon are typically higher than a website. Do you guys ever send traffic directly to Amazon With that in mind, or do you typically prefer to send the person to the website?

Dean Dutro 19:39

We actually never, never did that. And I’m curious about it. I’m curious if there’s a way to track it and curious if there’s a way to see that information to attribute it because obviously, you know, as an agency, we’re looking at, hey, what can we show that we’ve increased if we have access to Amazon, for example. I think that would be a really good pilot to do a really good case study to try and figure out because everyone’s trying to figure this out, do I sell on Amazon? Do I sell my own site? Do I sell on both? What marketing is going to be the best? What lovers? Do I need to pull? That could be another indicator for people?

Eric Stopper 20:15

Yeah, I think that begs the question to like, let’s say, cuz, I mean, in 2000 22,021, right, like, a single person could run a really powerful e-commerce business. And they’ve got their Facebook and Google company, agency, they’ve got their Facebook agency, they’ve got their email agency, they’ve got their freight forwarder, right, they’ve got all these pieces, and they basically assemble this team. And most of them are saying, Look at this great work that we did for you like, wow, this, you know, can we make a case study off of this great lift that we made for your business? And I would be curious to understand how we would be delineated and say, okay, most of the attribution, most of like, your highest ROI really comes from this channel. Do you have any insights into how a business owner can come to that conclusion to determine which of their things is lifting their business the most?

Dean Dutro 21:17

There’s, you know, there’s a lot of different software out there that helps with that, you know, Google Analytics is pretty accurate. But there’s some more specific ones, I can’t remember the names of them off the top of my head. But it’s, you know, it’s tough. I think that’s one of the problems right now is figuring out attribution. And so that’s, again, why I like to talk about overall lift, right? What I do know is that a channel like email, as you grow it, your profitability increases, right? So even if we’re not, like, let’s say, directly impacting gross sales, perhaps you will see the added benefit of more cash flow, because again, as you go from let’s say, for example, you’re doing $100,000 a month in sales 30,000 on your Shopify site, right. 30,000 of that could be coming from email, if you’re doing it right. Then if you go from 100,000 to 200,000 60,000, that should be coming from email at no additional cost, huh? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Eric Stopper 22:21

That makes sense to me. Yeah. You You, you were able to, to send the additional emails because you’ve got the additional people and it didn’t cost you that much. It just scaled with the amount of sales that you scaled with it.

Dean Dutro 22:34

Speed itself.

Eric Stopper 22:36

Hmm. Um, so talk to me, like, I’m a couple of different types of business owners. So let’s first say, I’m giant, I got a big company, multiple lines of products, I sell on my website, I sell on Amazon, I sell on Walmart, I got some eBay I mess with, you know, I did a couple promotions on wish.com, I thought I was gonna get in a lawsuit over it, you know, maybe not gonna mess with that guy, my whole business. I’ve got a bunch of people on my team. I get on a call with you. And I say, you know, like, I’m generating 15% of my website traffic from email. What are some of the things like, how do you talk to me? In that scenario? What kind of questions would you ask me? How do you get to the bottom of how you can help me?

Dean Dutro 23:28

Yeah, so, you know, I try to figure out how important is your website to your overall business structure? Right? So if you’re just if you’re just on Amazon, or just on eBay, does it make sense to invest in an email? At the price that we do it right? Or do you need to start kind of slower and start with some basics? Ultimately, if you’re at that level, people are probably searching for a website, right? People are gonna search for more information. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been on Amazon, you’ve seen a company. And you’re like, oh, like, I actually want to go Google this company to see are they legit or not? Right? That happens all the time. Now, same if you’re on like, like, huckberry is like a really popular e-commerce kind of marketplace. If you don’t realize those brands have their own websites. And then, you know, you can get different products or better deals and things like that. So how important is their own new marketing? I would say, hey, Heather, has there ever been a case where you’ve been on Amazon and your accounts been flagged or paused? What did that do to your business? Has there ever been a case where you know, Google’s algorithm changed and your organic traffic dropped to almost nothing? Is every case you’re going on Facebook, and your ads have stopped? Right? Or have you heard stories like that often? Almost everyone’s gone?

Eric Stopper 24:53

Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes, yeah.

Dean Dutro 24:54

Right. So it’s like okay, I ever thought about or imagined it would be like If you had an email list that you’ve been collecting over five years of 100,000 people from all this money, your spam traffic, right? And if those situations happen, how nice it would be to send out a single email, and make all your revenue back that you just lost? Like, would that benefit you? Would that be important to you? Or what if we could generate $60,000 a month? You know, in sales, it only costs you 4000 bucks, right? To send that many emails? Like, do you think that’s worth the ROI? Well, if so, like, here’s how we get there, right? Here’s, here’s the plan of action, here’s the time it’s going to take based on the numbers. And we can basically predict, you know, down to a tee as long as especially if they’re large businesses, we’re going to know their conversion rates, their visitor traffic, the only thing we have to worry about is building up sender reputation, which takes about 90 days at that level. But we can basically predict it’s gonna take us 90 days to get this much revenue, about six months, you’ll be here in about two years, you know, you’ll be here. But it’s not just about the revenue, it’s also about the profit. So if you can increase again, it feeds itself. So the more profit you make, the more you can invest in the front end channels, the more emails we collect, right? So out a year from now, if you’ve got double the amount of emails, it just just keeps growing. It’s absolutely nuts. And we’ve seen that happen over and over. There is kind of a break even, there’s a point where it’s very difficult to generate 30% of your email. Because of the different types of segmentation you have to do and the expertise it takes to keep your sender reputation up. That’s a completely different story that isn’t relevant to most people.

Eric Stopper 26:45

So now let’s, let’s take the example of somebody who’s brand new. Yeah, right. They, they’ve, they’ve got this product that’s going to change the world, and they want to sell it. And they heard that email marketing is great. Maybe they watch some, some YouTube videos or something, and they come to you or a member of your team. And they say, okay, Dean, where do I start? What do you tell that budding entrepreneur in regards to building an email Empire and setting up their business for success in the long term from an email perspective?

Dean Dutro 27:17

Yeah, keep it simple, right? Like, use a tool like clay vo, that’s what we recommend for all e-commerce stores, and all of our clients are on it. MailChimp doesn’t integrate with Shopify anymore. So it’s like, Why use it? Craig’s got data, it’s relatively inexpensive, uses really good pop up software, we use justuno as our main one there, they’re an awesome team, again, really expensive, especially for entry level. But you need to get a pop up going as much as people say they hate pop ups. Everyone expects them now, right? Everyone expects to see if they first visited a site to get 10% off or free shipping or a bundle or something right? Like, talk to anybody? And they’ll say, yeah, I’ve seen a pop up and I love getting like that first deal. Right? It’s like, what are your margins? What can you afford? Can you do 10% off? Can you do free shipping, do you know whatever your business model is cash off, you know, like, offering like a $5 coupon is kind of cool. That converts pretty well. And make sure you have at least four emails to follow up with people who sign up to your email list, at least four. And a lot of people are gonna hate me for saying this, don’t give the coupon code on site, force them to go to their email to collect it. Right? what that’ll do for you long term will have dramatic effects on your email system, your open rates will be significantly higher, there’ll be like 60 to 70% versus 30 to 40%. And that, that open rate, that high open rate will indicate to Google to Gmail to Outlook to Yahoo to whatever email service people use, that you’re a solid sender. Right? And you’ll show up in the inbox more. So a lot of people don’t know this. If If, if you do sign up for a brand and you start opening their emails over time, Google will start to automatically send those to trash, right, you know, and novel automatically ask if you want to unsubscribe, it’ll go literally say, hey, you haven’t opened these emails, these people? Would you like to unsubscribe? Right? Or they’ll just send it to trash? It’s not spam, right? But it’s just saying, hey, like these people aren’t engaged, why flood their inbox with your emails. But if you get that really high open rate on that first email that trickles down and has a benefit to your entire system down the road,

Eric Stopper 29:37

it can still happen though. Like if you know, 5050 emails down the road. They’re not opening like you’ll still end up in trash. But that first it’s that first transaction, I guess we have something similar for Amazon to there’s something called the search the search by method and I’m skipping a step there. Everyone’s gonna demonize me for this and forgetting the third word search. Search find by method where you, you encourage the person to go search for a specific keyword. Find your product in the list of keywords, sometimes you gotta go to like the seventh page or whatever, and then click on it and buy it. Right? Because then it tells the system, hey, this keyword like, this listing should be higher up in the rank. So it’s something very similar. It’s, it’s gaming, it’s gaming an algorithm, right? It’s using the algorithm to your benefit. So at least four emails, you’re saying, like an intro, informational type of email, a coupon email, kind of following the flow of what you said before?

Dean Dutro 30:40

Yeah, so it’s like he could do you know, like coupon information, welcome to the tribe, welcome to whatever company has some basic information in there, have some recommended products bestsellers, right. The second email could be like, a message from the founder, you know, like, just in tech space, you know, like, hey, like, thank you so much for subscribing, really appreciate it, we work really hard to make these products. If any questions, let us know, by the way you haven’t purchased yet, here’s your coupon code, you know, use it within 72 hours, etc. Email for can be Hey, check out our top sellers. Here’s some reviews, here’s some reviews about our company, here’s some social proof, by the way, haven’t used your coupon, you know, like use it. And then email five could be either another sales push, or it could be more information, could be at any questions, email us, you can’t play around with it. But keep it simple, that like, email doesn’t have to look amazing anymore. Right? Like it’s trending simple, because people are so used to mobile that you don’t need, like this amazing superior design, you know, from $100 an hour designer, to have an impact on email, it can literally just be, you know, hero image, some text and a call to action. That’s all you really need to get started. And, you know, for emails, that’s going to generate more sales, we think about it, you know, if someone comes to your site clicks, there’s a few people are going to purchase right away, most people are going to leave and some people are gonna sign up for email, and they’re going to purchase but there’s still like, of the people that sign up for for your email list, get the code and purchase, there’s still, you know, 80% that aren’t going to purchase yet. But they will go down the road. Right? So you’re creating a long tail effect, which is super impactful.

Eric Stopper 32:28

So I I had this question when we first met and I’ve been itching to ask it. Typically people get paid, right? during some specific times, right? The 10th? The 21st, the fourth, right? Those are some of the critical pay dates. Do you find the process of getting somebody to buy a product easier when you I don’t know aggregate your I’d like to place those emails at those payment dates. Have you guys ever experimented or anything like that, like basically saying, hey, like, you probably have more money right? Now. Here’s a promotion, right? Here’s that thing that you were looking at before? Do you guys ever mess anything like that?

Dean Dutro 33:13

Not exactly. That’s a great idea. But what we have done is, for instance, when the stimulus checks can, you know, we sound stimulus emails and some clients there are this guy, he sells Auto Parts he made like eight times his daily sales on stimulus. Right? which is amazing. And we sound like two emails or something. And then on tax day, usually, you know when when people are getting their tax returns during that week, we’ll send out kind of like tax return doesn’t work for every brand, you know, so it’s kind of the ones that have some more flair or personality that you can do it with pretty successfully. Otherwise it just seems kind of like cheesy or scammy but you know, there’s always like brands that have that kind of edge. Sure. That did well. But I like that idea of payday timing.

Eric Stopper 34:02

Look at everybody. Yeah. Your website has all kinds of testimonials and examples of people. I just wanted to ask you about one or two of them. Lat & Lo there’s a video it’s about a minute and a half of her talking about what you did for them. I kind of like to know the story behind that and about the founder and kind of the situation and where you’re able to take them.

Dean Dutro 34:27

Yeah, so Lat & Lo was you know an awesome company actually. There’s one I want to talk about that I like more. planner perfect. I really like this story a lot. Most stories are also awesome. I don’t know the full details of that one. So I want to give you one I know more about so this company planner pervades their front from like the Midwest somewhere. I can’t remember exactly Ohio or Oklahoma or somewhere and they live on a farm and she’s got several kids. She works from home. Her husband is a farmer, and helps. And they came to us some I can’t give specific numbers, but they’ve been working with us for over a year. And they started at maybe 400,000 500,000 in sales. And, you know, since then, through launching email, you know, we’ve more than doubled their business in a period about six months and continues to grow, we actually had a pause, emailing, because she was selling out too quick. It is a phenomenon that happens when you get to a certain point of emails, of new email subscribers, all of a sudden, you sell out really quick. And then you got to send like out of stock emails and things like that. But that was a prime example of of, you know, a person who started on business started on products, try building it got to a plateau couldn’t figure out how to make more profit, we came in and said, Hey, like, let’s do some emails, you’re really not doing anything, the biggest complaint most e-commerce stores make is they wish they would have done email earlier. I hear that all the time. So like, hey, like, let’s build out a system. Let’s start sending campaigns, let’s start collecting emails, we think like you’ve got a great brand within, you’re gonna have a great following. Let’s get people from social media on your email list. Let’s get people from other channels on your email list. Let’s see what we can do. Well, that exact process I described was not only making them make more revenue, they started making more profit, those profits can be reinvested on the front end, and it just became a snowball effect really started. I think that they quadrupled in size. Amazing, you know, pretty quick. And that’s a pretty common story. When you start implementing email, you know, it’s not unknown.

Eric Stopper 36:45

Before I forget to ask this question. I’m wondering, would you encourage somebody to buy an email list? Or should it be totally driven by ads or organic? I should be ads or

Dean Dutro 36:55

organic. The days of buying email lists are far gone. You know, maybe 15 years ago, you could?

Eric Stopper 37:03

Wow, 15 years ago.

Dean Dutro 37:05

Yeah, it just doesn’t work. And it messes up your sender reputation. Most emails are crap, you know, you got to pay to verify them, and I just don’t work. You know?

Eric Stopper 37:17

Okay. No, I mean, that makes sense. So what if I’m, if I’m a company that should come to Worth eCommerce, or should consider coming to Worth eCommerce? What’s the question I should ask myself to, to self select or to, to validate whether or not it would be a good idea for me to reach out to you and your team?

Dean Dutro 37:38

Yeah, what, uh, how much traffic? Are you driving? Right? And is it 10,000 visitors a month at least? If seldom, like, typically, we should be collecting emails now. And we can do it fast. The other is, do you see like, I guess, depending on where you are in revenue, do you see growth happening? Right? Like, where do you want to actually go in your business? Do you want it to be a little thing, where it’s just you and you’re running it? Can we help with that? Do you want it to grow faster, you know, different plans, depending on sort of your lifestyle goals. Because we know how powerful email is. And once you start getting it live, it starts to move pretty quick. The other thing that I would add is, companies that perform really well with email, they have to have content, right, they have to have either blogs or videos or any sort of good information that we can actually send out. If they don’t have any content, they don’t have any branding. It’s really tough. I think that’s tough for any e-commerce store, exam, any branding to succeed, and to be honest. So you got to have some basics in place, you want to have your other foundations in place. And traffic, otherwise, email just sits there does nothing

Eric Stopper 38:50

like that. That makes a ton of sense. Make sure you’re optimized. I can’t count the amount of people who are looking for traffic when they should be focused on conversion. If there’s a if you’re worried about that at all, and you’re listening to this, reach out to us or reach out to Dean and his team. How, how can everybody find you in the e-commerce team? Where should I send everyone?

Dean Dutro 39:15

Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn, just Dean Dutro. Or they go to worthecommerce.com. We’ve got a free webinar up and we got a strategy call with you to figure out if something makes sense. I also have a course called emailgrowthtraining.com if you’re interested, let me know. We actually use it to train our own team. So it’s very powerful. But those are the three core places you can find us. Awesome.

Eric Stopper 39:42

Go to worthecommerce.com, or emailgrowthtraining.com and go find Dean and his team. Mr. Dean, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, appreciate it. To finish today’s podcast, I want to share some final thoughts. For third party sellers to be successful on Amazon, you’ve got to get reviews. We at Buy Box Experts are really big fans of the team over at eComEngine and it’s tools that help Amazon sellers simplify the process of soliciting reviews from customers who purchase their products. For more information, go to ecomengine.com. Thanks for joining us today.

Outro 40:15

Thanks for listening to the Buy Box Experts Podcast. Be sure to click subscribe, check us out on the web, and we’ll see you next time.