Email Marketing for Web Builders and Businesses

Adam:
Welcome to Woo Biz Chat. I am your co-host, Adam Weeks, and I am excited for our very first guest. First guest, Ms. Emma Young. Would you mind telling us what are we doing today?

Emma:
Yeah, well I am not the lovely guest today, so this is a surprise. Surprise. But yeah, we’re going to dive in deep with our new pal that I will not introduce and let him introduce himself because he’ll do a much better job.

Adam:
Greg, tell us about yourself.

Greg:
You just don’t want to pronounce the last name.

Adam:
So true. You bound us out, Greg. I’m there on that, but yes, Greg, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from?

Greg:
Absolutely. So my name is Greg Zakowicz. Easy pronunciation there. It looks worse than it is. So I am a e-commerce expert at Omnisend, which is an email and SMS marketing automation platform. So they’re based in Lithuania. I’m jet lagged because I was just over there for the past week getting together, doing some team building stuff, which is always awesome. I love going out there. So we are a hundred thousand plus customers. We’ve been in business for 12, 13, 14 years now, and we are rocking a roll and so we are very excited about the WooCommerce community and general overarching WordPress community as well. So super happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Adam:
Well, we are glad to have you. It’s good to have someone who knows what they’re talking about. And for today’s topic, because our topic today is what even is email marketing, and we have all types of good questions that we’re going to grill you with. We’re going to put your feet to the fire. Awesome. No, we won’t, but I truly am and very sincerely glad to have you on because I have questions about email marketing and you also do SMS marketing and what is the state of email marketing in 2024? I will preface this by saying I currently am not happy with the state of email marketing in 2024. Tell me how are you guys doing with that? How do you think about email marketing right now?

Greg:
I’m going to answer the question, but I want to circle back to, and I will forget because old, so I had love to know why you don’t think you don’t love the state of it right now, but we’ll circle back to that afterward if we can. So this is crazy. I’ve been doing email marketing across a bunch of different roles for 18 years now, which is, to me, it’s kind of mind boggling. One that I’m that old, but two that I’ve been able to do something such as email for 18 years now. So where we say we’ve got a stats report, we put these things out, they’re non gated on Omnisend website, omnisend.com. So we launched one today. This will probably not be live today, but it is out now when you’re listening to this. So what we do is we capture emails and all the data sent by our customers throughout the course of the year.

I pull a bunch of spreadsheets together, I sift through it, I analyze it. So email is strong. You would maybe not think that, but it is strong. It might be stronger now than it ever has before and I think there’s a lot of different reasons for that. But obviously there’s a lot of, just across the industry there is a lot of noise, so many ad platforms where you can monetize now. So social media, you’ve got your paid search, kind of your standards there. You got all these different platforms if you’re a DTC brand and then there’s the old email kind of sitting in the back. It’s not as glamorous as TikTok and Instagram, but it works, man. It works. So I think the reason is I look at myself and I go to my email and obviously I’m signed up for tons of different programs and part of that is my job, but even if I weren’t, I’m going there for the sole purpose of seeing what a brand is there to offer me, whether it’s showcasing new products, just seeing what’s going on with the brand.

Maybe I like the brand, maybe I’m looking for a sale, but there is something with intent with a customer at that point. So this was the old thing when Gmail rolled out their promotions tab and I was doing client consulting at the time and it was like the world was on fire. They’re like, wow, we’re not going to get in the inbox. I’m like, no, this is a good thing for you. When people go there, they’re going there to shop or some indication of shop again. So the thing here is email is an opt-in channel. So people are saying, yes, here’s my information, send me some marketing messages and that same thing with SMS, right? And we’ll get into these topics and all this stuff, but that’s why it’s really, it’s doing really well now. I think there has been an evolution recently for what is working more so than other things and where that is trending from an email perspective, which I think from a marketer standpoint is really good because it makes your job easier. But there have been some very noticeable shifts over the last couple of years and that’s more around automated emails and how brands are using those more strategically and more effectively now. So I give you a lot there. Feel free to throw questions at me and we’ll rip into it.

Emma:
Yeah, so I mean going off of that, if you had to give more or less a definition of everything that can funnel into what email marketing is, if it was like somebody was Googling what even is email marketing in a sentence or two, how would you answer that?

Greg:
It is a direct communication from business to individual consumer. So simple as that delivered via email, right? Sounds simplistic can be simplistic can be very difficult as well based on how strategic and how in depth you want to get. But from a very nature, I build an email, I send it to the person who says, yes, send me the email, and they open the email and hopefully they buy.

Adam:
There you go. I’ll swing back around to the, give you the opportunity to answer my question or my statement that I don’t really like the state of email. And I’ll clarify that with, I hate my inbox currently I do not like my email inbox. I currently, lemme see on my phone Google says, I’ve got 40,000 unread email messages. It’s ridiculous at what I’m seeing and o sometimes when I look at this, what bubbles up inside me is this frustration of why are these companies sending me all this stuff and where’s the unsubscribe? How do you feel about being on the receiving end of that marketing?

Greg:
So I personally like it now I have two different things. I have my personal marketing inbox, which are brands that I love, and then I have mine that I subscribe to monitor other brands and I get about probably six to 700 emails a day from there. So I was just looking while you were doing this, I’m like, oh, what my unread is, it doesn’t even show it anymore, it just cropped it off. So I’m probably well over, I dunno how many digits they have, but I’m probably well over that. So I personally like it and the reason I like it is one, it’s I could do it when I choose. So I get an SMS message and I like SMS marketing messages. I’m a little more selective with who I sign up for, but I do like the messages. But the one thing with those, whether you have notifications on or off, you always get the little red icon, the unread thing.

So we all know those things drive me nuts. So I’m going to go look at the SMS message, even if it’s something I turn it off, I can ignore email for a couple of days if it’s not fitting in my lifestyle or I’m on vacation or whatever, but I go back to it. That’s what I like about it, but I always know where it is. I know it’s searchable. So today’s my mother’s birthday last week I’m searching for to send her some flowers so I know what I can search for birthdays, flowers, whatever, and I can kind of aggregate and see where my best deal might be coming from and things like that. And that’s what I like about it. It’s just from that standpoint, I can choose to engage when I want to engage, it’s always there for me and I can choose to ignore it when I want to ignore it. Never ignore emails, but it’s there.

Emma:
It’s the 40,600 unread. But out of that long list, what are some of the things that do catch your eye or what have you seen in a personal way? Is it something that would get you to click on it but also that’s worked for you in the past when you’re the sender? Kind of a two-sided question.

Greg:
Yeah, I always tell people, it’s a really good question because I always tell people and they’re like, well, I need the latest trends and all that. I go, well, what appeals to you? Which is exactly what you’re asking because it’s going to appeal to the other people as well. So things that get me, and we’ve seen a rise, I’ll give you a long answer, but we’ve seen a rise with brands doing this more over the past few years, but really leading into the social proof. So top rated products, five star reviewed products, things like that where you might have it in the subject line, those things capture my attention. I know it’s a good quality product or service, whatever it might be. We’ve seen a lot of those, but those generally catch my eyes and it sounds so simple, and you might shake your head when I say this, but use of emojis and subject lines, they’ve been doing it for years.

This is not a new concept, but there are a lot of brands that still do not use ’em or use ’em very selectively. And what happens, especially if you’re on your phone, it just makes it stand out a little bit more. So it’s none of it just like one Christmas tree or a one smiley face, right? Five stars in a row. It breaks up that black and white space. And even if I’m not going to open the email, I’m going to see it there. I’m going to visualize and it’s small. I always say the small stupid things win. It’s a small, maybe simple is a better word, but small simple things win sometimes

Emma:
Something small like a one word or ah, would that grab your attention?

Greg:
Absolutely. So this is where things change, right? It was 15 years ago, it was like don’t put, it was like the emojis, you could start putting ’em in subject lines and it’s like, oh, is this going to cause it to go to spam? I’m like, no, probably not. We test it, it turns out it doesn’t. But it was never use all caps, it’s going to get you in this. And my clients used to do use all caps and their open rates would go up dramatically. I’m like, well, don’t do it every time, but this is a good tactic, right? Yeah. Gmail, Yahoo. If you’re still using Hotmail or Outlook, right? Switch over. But they’re good at filtering out, well maybe less so outlook, but they’re good at filtering out junk versus other things. That subject line is not going to get you in there. Gaps where your eyes stop and be like, oh, why is there a gap there? It could be pre-header text and not the subject line as well, but that white space, the color, those are things that are going to naturally gravitate to people’s eyes. So short stuff, perfect all caps breaks it up. Perfect, right? It’s that difference in there.

Adam:
And this is exactly leading into my next question and you’ve begun to answer it because what I’m curious about is you have been in this industry for so long, you’ve seen all the changes. I think Covid probably accelerated some of the different issues and we’re seeing different things. So I guess my question now is here in still early 2024, what is working specifically? And you kind of mentioned that and then I’ll kind of follow it up with, do you have any use cases or specific companies that are just knocking it out of the park? Their open rates are really good and yeah, I’d love to know about some of the, Ooh, they’re doing it right.

Greg:
So I’ll give you both of these here. So the first one, what’s working for people? This is where, I mean automation has not new. It’s been around for my God almost the entire 18 years. When I first got into it, we were doing abandoned cards. It’s just a lot easier to do now than it was 18 years ago. Automation works though. So I mentioned the stats report, right? We sent 23 billion email marketing messages last year.

Adam:
Wow 23. Those numbers are nuts.

Greg:
So let’s roll into this a little bit. 23 billion marketing messages in a year. Alright, now we’re converting, we’re getting all those orders coming in. 41% of all email marketing orders last year sent by Omnis sign customers came from automated messages. So almost half from automated messages, the percentage of sends that accounted for 2%. So 40% of all orders last year generated from email marketing came from 2% of the emails and they’re automated emails. This is where brands we talk about WooCommerce, brands that are maybe looking for a place to start. This is where I always tell people, automation’s the new segmentation. Segmentation can be easy. It could also be extremely difficult. And I think the problem most companies face, even large ones that I’ve worked with, they have the exact same problem. Like okay, we can segment a little bit, we can’t do it consistently because if I segment four different ways, I need four different creatives.
Or maybe if I have more texts, I got to copyright for things. It’s time consuming. And most people are not just doing email, they’re doing paid search or paid social or they’re doing these other things too. Automation’s where you layer where you’re going to make your money. And that number has been going up that 41 to two a couple of years ago, it was like 36 to three. It’s slowly going up. The reason it works is because those messages are triggered, they are based on you’s behavior, which means they are relevant to you. I abandoned a shopping cart, we know the intent is to buy. I sign up for an email program, why am I signing up? Well, I’m probably going to buy from you or someone else, but I’m shopping for hours, abandonment, what am I doing? Well, I’m on your website, I’m browsing something, something in my life has gotten me there.

That’s why these things kill so much. So let’s say if you’re looking for a place to start, you’re looking for a place to pour some gasoline. If you’re looking for a new shift in strategy, go where the automation is. And then part B to that is follow the intent of the customer. So order and shipping confirmation messages, we see ’em drive a lot of orders. They are really effective messages. If you optimize the most of those orders coming from its three messages. It’s your welcome messages, your browse abandonment and your card abandonment. Now we send a lot more of those than other ones, which changes that ratio a bit. So it’s not just black and white, but that’s high intent. The one we’re seeing up and coming more sends last year than the year before. The conversion rate is the best conversion rate of any message, which this is surprising because card abandonment usually owns that one back in stock messages. And I’m seeing just anecdotally as well, getting more of these in that 400 program inbox. I’m getting back in stock messages, but it follows the same pattern, right? It’s fear of loss, it’s social proof, all rolled in one. And by the way, we got these things back in stock and before they’re gone and those things kind of capture people’s attention to what’s news. So companies doing well. So case studies, yeah, I’ll throw a few of ’em around.

So there’s a company called Fig Pin. They sold their products in brick and mortar stores. Covid hit, had to pivot, launched an email program. They really wasn’t a focus of theirs. They heard a guy like me going, Hey, you know what? Welcome browse cart abandonment, maybe we should try this out. But now they’re generating, I got this right here, but they’re around maybe like 22% of their 24% of their email marketing revenues coming from those automated messages, those three messages. So they’re having the wheels work in the background, they’re focused on other things, they’re focused on growing their list and that’s just going to accelerate those things. Edmondson Sports, so it’s a sporting apparel company over in, I believe they’re in Sweden, so they’re kind of seeing very similar things here. So order confirmation automation, right? They’re like, well, let’s optimize these things. We know their customers, can we repeat this?

So 17% of their revenue is coming from order confirmation messages now. So beauty about that is every single order is now a repeat customer. So we know once we can get that second one, we start to flip the scales on profitability per customer and things like that. And you get two, throw a post-purchase message in there and we start rolling the dice a little bit more now and I think there are about 30% of their email revenue coming from automated messages now as well. So it’s just a couple for you. We’ve got a bunch on our website. I don’t want to bore you to death here, but you’re seeing a similar pattern here. Kerrits is another example. Same thing. They’re like 25% ish of revenue coming on automated messages. They do some segmentation, they kill a little more specific with some of theirs, but the automation allows ’em to spend that extra time where we know we’re generating money in the backend. What do I not need to do now? I don’t need to obsess about, I have to get an email out today because otherwise we’re not going to make any money. And that’s one of the benefits of that as well.

Emma:
I’m curious about the subscribers or the clients that you’re sending them to. Do you ever scrub or prune the inactive subscribers and then there’s the second part to it. Do you often, if you have maybe a newsletter and your current clients, do you tend to separate those lists or merge them together?

Greg:
So I’ll answer the second part first because it’s a shorter answer completely client dependent. I think what we generally find is unless they’re really good at separating those two silos, most will mix in there and they might have, say they got a product in an informational type message, they might send it to everyone or they’ll send the product to everyone, but they’ll just send the informational to maybe the informational, but usually most brands will wind up mixing and commingling those things. The first question about, Hey, do we clean in active context? Super important question, super important that brands do this. Not all brands do it, right? They want to get a subscriber count. I worked at brand before and I’m like, her name was Vero. I go, Vero O, you got 20,000 contacts, you haven’t opened an email in over a year. And she’s like, I can’t get rid of it.

My boss wants a hundred thousand subscribers. They’re trying to get to a number. I’m like, this is going to come back and bite you in the backside and there’s a lot of negative ramifications from sending to inactive contacts. No, their Google and Yahoo just enacted new deliverability requirements as the February 1st this year got a little bit of a ramp up window before they start hitting you hard. So you’ve got authenticate your email, your D cm, your D mark, all these things to prove that you are a legit center. They’re trying to clamp down on spam. One of those qualifications is spam rate. And now if you’re inactive, you’re not marketing as spam, but there is a tie in here, I promise you. So very low spam rate, which means you need to grow your list the right way. If you’re doing a raffle for an iPad and you’re selling whatever, you’re going to get a lot of bad addresses on there.

They just want the iPad and then you start sending to ’em, they can hit spam. So you clean your list that way. Now the thing that Gmail has always done that people don’t take account here is that they will monitor open rates and a lot of the ISPs will do this, but the open rates, the click rates on here, and that is one of their qualifications to being one, are they treating their list the right way? But two, are they being responsible marketers? They sending to people who want to, and part of that is if I get a low open rate, I’m sending to an active contact, they’re not opening. It’s dragging that down. This has always been a major thing. What we used to see is your open rates in Gmail would go from 12 to 11 and then it gets to eight and then all of a sudden drops to one and eight to nine was around that cutoff.

And when it drops to one guarantee, you’re being bulked, you’re getting a very few to your inbox, it’s hard to get out of the bulk folder. So Google, yahoo got together and they said, okay, we got these other factors. We’re going to make companies comply with these changes, give ’em a little ramp up time, but we’re also going to factor open rates. We’re going to factor click rates, we’re going to factor spam rates. All these things go into whether you’re going to get in the inbox or you’re going to get bulk folders. So it is super important to clean your list. I’d recommend doing it twice a year and just get some of those out there. If I know brands are hesitant and they go, they sign up around December or November, they’re holiday shoppers, I don’t want to get rid of ’em because the holidays going to come around next year.

So it’s understandable. I get emails and then they drop off in February and I start getting hit again in November, December, and they’re doing the same thing to me, right? It’s just the brand. The simple thing to do there is put them onto a segment, still send to ’em, but send to ’em a lot less maybe once a month just to keep it going there. But you’re not sending emails, which are just repeat emails going to non openers of the initial message two days later. That’s the thing. You want to keep ’em on your list and if they don’t come back the next year, then you want to clean ’em out. But if they’re inactive, they’re not opening for 12 months, they’re doing more damage than good.

Adam:
Wow. This is just great value. If you are a product company in WordPress, this is really useful information. I would love if you could kind of dive in a little bit more to some of the stats that you’re looking at that we could expect. So if you have a product or something in WordPress and you’re sending out your email lists, what are some of the open rates that like, oh wow, we sent that out and that’s bad. That’s good. What are parameters help us understand a good campaign versus a bad campaign and what that range might look like.

Greg:
Yeah, so that’s a good question. So I’ll give you two answers here. The first one, I’ll talk out of both sides of my mouth. So when I was consulting, I would have clients ask me this all the time, like, Hey, do you have any benchmarks? And I just go, well, why do you want to look at benchmarks? They’re like, well, I want to see how I’m doing. I’m like, but they’re good to look at. But don’t compare yourself to it. But I’m going to give you comparisons and I’ll tell you why I say that. So I always say benchmark against yourself. If you’ve got a 16% open rate, your goal should be to get to 17 when you get there to get to 18. The thing with benchmarks, they’re good to look at, they’re good useful guides, but I always warn people don’t use ’em as the set in.

So standard. And the reason you do that is we talk about list cleaning. I could get you an 80% open rate all day long. Every send, if I segment and only send the people who opened the last email or clicked on last email, those are my most engaged. So when you look at other people’s benchmarks, you don’t know how they’re cleaning their list and how they’re aggregating that. So you could have a lot of low or artificially high numbers in here. So that’s always the caveat. Now that being said, I like looking at benchmarks too.

So across those 23 billion messages we sent last year, average open rate across, doesn’t matter, the industry was 25%. It was actually increased from 22.9 a year before. So we saw open rates go up year over year. So we talk about is email dead? How are we doing? Again, people, it’s obvious, and those rates actually go up higher during the Q4 season. So we’re seeing people use email as a place for product discovery. I place the fine, what the discounts are, what the sales are. So we’re seeing 25% open rates. I think that if you have 25% open rate, just from my experience, you’re doing pretty well. I think that’s a pretty good number to be at. I think most brands will probably, it’s always going to be niche based on industry and how often they send. I think most will be anywhere from 16 to 22.
I always used to do 18 to 20 as kind of like we get there. You’re probably doing okay. I think 25 is pretty strong, but that’s great. So if you’re under say 16, you should be looking at getting that up, probably a list cleaning will artificially help that, but it also, you might have a really strong engaged user base and you haven’t cleaned your list in forever and it looks worse than it actually is. You might have a really good open rate across the board and you’re sending the 20,000 people who haven’t opened in four years.

So open rate 20, 25%, I think you’re doing pretty well. Click rate, and I’m going to do this based on when we classify click rate, there’s also click the open rate click rate is click based on email sent. So the number’s going to be a lot lower. So last year, 1.5 is actually up from 1.2 the year before. Again, if you’re hitting, I think it’s a pretty good number to be at. If you’re around there, you want to be above one, but if you’re around there, you’re doing pretty well, right? People are engaging, always look at those ratios though. I can get you a hundred percent open rate and a 1% click or let’s just go 0.2%. Click rate doesn’t really do much for you. It just means you had a really good open rate or good subject line. Maybe you did something but the content didn’t match it there.

So you balance those two things out, you’re pretty good. So in the stats report I talked about, we break things down by industry vertical as well. So we don’t have every industry we reported on, but we do have verticals on there. There’s probably about 1520 of ’em. So you can see there are some wild differences between some of those, but that’s going to be product oriented and competition on there. But that’s where I would go from a metric standpoint. Automated messages, we have those broken down for you as well. They’re going to be significantly higher, right? 50, 60% open rates on most of ’em. You’ll see conversion rates 3000 times better than email conversion rates for just batch and blast ones. So we break all that down by the type of automation. So you can go over there if you’re looking for benchmarks in a baseline for like, Hey, where’s the bang for the buck? But I think you’re there from a metric standpoint,

Emma:
That’s such a great way to look at it, the ratios versus yourself. Because sometimes I look at these numbers and I’m like, oh, open rate is good. It’s going up. And sometimes I’m like, but actually the click it’s so low, but then I’m hearing happy numbers from you and I’m like, oh, we’re doing all right. Hey, but let’s say if your numbers were decreasing and you’re doing all of the things that are on everybody’s checklists, if you had to throw almost a Hail Mary to get it pumping again, what would you recommend that somebody like a company does?

Greg:
So from an artificial inflation standpoint, segment to the segmented people, get them a little extra email or something. Get your numbers up, make yourself feel good, and maybe get a little more juice there. I would say the other thing to look at from a long-term perspective is, again, we’re not talking about rocket science here, but we’re in a place now where it’s always been short attention spans. I mean, this has been a talking point since I was a kid. I’m in my mid forties now, so it’s like, oh, no one’s got attention spans anymore, but we have a lot of noise out there. I mentioned before if I’m on Instagram or TikTok and I’m scrolling, I’m getting ads, you kind of catch something catches your eye or doesn’t and you’re right by it. I don’t think email is much different than that. But as I mentioned before, people are going to email for a very specific reason.

They’re interested in a product. Maybe they’re shopping, maybe they’re doing some product discovery, comparison shopping, what it is. So I go back to the intent and I’m like, okay, let’s look at your email message. Let’s look at what we can templatize in the email that caters to that intent. And what I look at are competitive differentiators or your value adds. So a lot of people offer free shipping, some don’t. This is something that is changing in the industry and brands are trying to figure out what to do with free shipping. But if you offer free shipping or free shipping over a low threshold, promote that in your template. Highly visible. Let people see, hey, before they even click on the email, they know they’re getting free shipping. If it’s not free, but it’s fast, two days or less guaranteed, promote those things. 24 7 customers are promote ’em.

Return policies huge. So if I get a free returns in a company and I got to pay two bucks for shipping and the other one I’ve got to pay for restocking fees or whatever, but I get free shipping, I will generally spend the extra two bucks because I want to know I’m going to be taken care of on the return side. So customer service, values, return policies, whatever, promote those things, put ’em in your template, secondary content, whatever. But those things matter. When people are clicking or opening emails and deciding whether they want to click other things, I think you should templatize as well and you can roll ’em out there. But we talked about social proof before, right? Five star reviews, half sections with either a quote testimonial about how great the product was, how great the customer service was. You’ve got the content on your page because you’re collecting reviews for products.

Take the content, reuse it, plug it in there. And when I say templatize that, I say, okay, what are the challenges that we need to overcome from, I always say, what are the obstacles to conversion you need to overcome? So we sell clothing, people need to know if it’s going to fit. So if you have testimonials, be like, Hey, the sizing on the product was spot on, right? Use that testimonial there. It gives people comfort that they don’t need the bracket they’re purchased, they’re just going to order the large or the extra large, call it a day and you got free returns. So social proof, top selling products, customer testimonials, these things can all be templatized, but they can increase your click rates because it just builds that confidence. Now they might click and not purchase from you, but that’s okay, right? You got to get ’em there to get the juices flown.

Adam:
You got eyeballs and that’s big.

Greg:
But I’ll say this, this is where, so the movie Miracle is where I got this from. So I’m not going to steal this in my own quote, but I always tell people, I’m like let’s feed the wolf. I love the movie Miracle, by the way. So let’s feed the wolf. So I look at this and go, okay, we collected the email, I send you an email, I got these social proofs built in. You click the email and you go to the website and you don’t buy. That’s okay. What do I have going now? I’ve got a browse abandonment automation set up that I’m going to retarget you based on what you were clicking on and then viewing on my website before. Maybe I get you to come back and you cart the product, but you don’t purge it. Now I’ve got the cart abandonment triggering off to you. So I’m doing all these things from a very low cost retargeting perspective where the automations are feeding the wolf now, and at some point I’m going to recapture you and I’m going to recapture you for a heck of a lot less than it cost is to put you retarget on meta channels or paid search or whatever. So like feed the wolf.

Adam:
That’s good. That’s really, I like that and I think that’s just very helpful information as our audience is thinking about themselves and their own business. I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you’re a pretty decent softball player, so I’m going to toss you an easy one. So if a company’s out there and they’re thinking about, Hey, maybe we need is Omnis send right for us. So for instance, I was just getting off of a call earlier and they’ve got a million people in their email list. Is that too big, too small? What’s the ideal size company for Omnis? Send? Where’s your sweet spot?

Greg:
So we work with companies that we have enterprise customers and we have mom and pop solopreneurs working at different costs. A lot of our customers are on free plans. So we do have a free plan, crazy, and we still give those free people 24 7 live support. So we work across the board. I think the small to small mid-size business, the SMBs to the mom and pop, that’s kind of our sweet spot for it. But we have a tool that caters to every one of all sizes. Omniscience is a pretty legit and slick tool. And our whole goal, we are still privately funded. We always say customer funded because if you don’t like us, you don’t like our tool, you’re going to leave. And we don’t lock you in with contracts unless you want a contract. So we let you leave at any time and it makes us better.

It makes the support we give better. So what I tell people is we have three different plans. The pricing is transparent, it’s on the website. You can just go to the pricing calculator, plug in your number of contacts, see how much it’ll cost you with the same thing for SMS. If you choose to do SMS, you can see everything get there. So we have a free plan, we have a standard plan and a pro plan free is free. No credit card required to sign up. You just, when you need more, you upgrade and you choose to pay more. But you could use free for life if you want. And you get the full 24 7 support standards, kind of where most people fall. I would say it’s that middle plan there gets you more emails, gets you a little more tools, and then your pro is going to be your larger, you’ve got a hundred thousand contacts, you’re probably going to want the pro. We give you unlimited email sending with the pro plan. So at it send you an active, we don’t want you to send inactive context, but you can if you want to, right?

And the beauty of this is you want to play with automations, the free plan, you have access to all automations we have. We don’t make you upgrade to get those tools. We have popups built in. If you’re either a WordPress or WooCommerce customer, we have plug and play integrations with both of them. So you can literally install, I went through and did it last week. We were talking about WooCommerce customers three minutes or less. You can install and sync your contacts, sync all that historical data, but we’ve got a WordPress integration as well. So we are set for you and we pride ourselves in being transparent. You can go to the website, we don’t have to connect to the sales person to get pricing unless you want to, but it’s all there on the website for you.

Emma:
Nice. I really like that. Free is free. You don’t have to lock them in because that is probably the most frustrating thing when you’re trying to get out of a membership. They’re like, no, but free is free and that is awesome.

Greg:
So we don’t require the credit card too, which is something I love. I sign up for free stuff and I’m like, oh, that’s great. And they’re like, give me the credit card. And I’m like, oh man, I don’t want to accidentally charge for something here. So we always tell people you want to try us, create an account, play around with it, build a couple automations, see what you like. Contact our support, see if you like our support. We win awards to the support. But that’s the beauty of it. You can just try it out and if you don’t like it, we’ll wish you luck and we will see you in six to eight months or 12 months when you come back to us, but we think you’ll love us. And that’s why we do it.

Emma:
I agree. I think that they’ll love us, but we also want to hear some more cool info from you and maybe do a bit of a speed round to share your knowledge. And then maybe you can help somebody else hit a home run in their email marketing.

Greg:
Hey, so we’re still doing this baseball thing

Emma:
All day, every day,

Greg:
All day, every day. It’s a double header.

Emma:
There we go. You’re welcome back anytime. Okay, so I really want to know something that you would never do the worst one.

Greg:
What would if there was, oh God, is this in business or there’s a lot of things I would never do again. Yes or yes. You know what? This is simple, but this would be perfect for the topic. Something I will never do again. I will never not check an email before I send it out. So

Emma:
That’s true though.

Greg:
Everyone always tells you to typos happen. Mistakes happen. And especially when you’re looking at it so long, your eyes just, this happened to us today on something I’ve been looking at for two weeks and editing it and then we found the day in it today. I’m like, how did we miss this thing? But your eyes look at it. So I’ll give you a story. This takes me back, I dunno, 15 years. And I used to have a boss that would say, Hey, we were trying to come up with subject lines. And he’d say, okay, write 10 subject lines and then write three that you would never ever send to a customer. And I think it’s a really good practice to do because what it does is it gets you out of that mindset of how did you this five things here and you just rejuvenate the words doing this allows that creativity to spill a little bit.

And then ironically, you wind up coming up with a better title that’s not listed there. So of course we got to send test emails and there was a copy paste. It was one of those subject lines that you should never ever send to a customer. And then, I mean you test these things all day long back. So this is back in the day when segmenting used to be MySQL queries. So you would have to test if you had 40 segments, which sometimes we did, you’d have to test 40 different emails. So it’s so much easier now, isn’t it? So just like, all right, tested the first 20, I’m good. And then this subject line was in one of ’em, and I’m like, you know what? I will never not test an email again. So not very lightning round from me. My apologies.

Adam:
But that’s all right. I think it’s a good one, but it’s a great answer. Yeah, proofread your emails and have someone else do it too. So we want to make sure that we rank on the algorithm. So ai, is AI the end of us all, or is it going to be the savior of email marketing and SMS marketing? And I’ll preface that one curious thing about AI is we talk about AB testing. Does AI offer alternatives for A, B, C to E, F, G, infinite, more customized emails or it just means that we’re going to get more crappy emails?

Greg:
So is, we didn’t script this, but this is a shameless plug and piggybacks off what I just said. So Omnisend.com, under resources, we have a tool section. These are free tools, again, not gated, just go and play around with them. We have an AI subject line generator tool on there. So if you’re looking, you’re stuck from a creative standpoint and you want some proposed subject lines, use the tool plug in, Hey, what the deal is, whatever you want to say, it’ll come up with a bunch of ’em. So we also have a product description generator, which you could use if you’re looking to have a little bit of copy in your messages outside of just image-based ones and you want to highlight a product, maybe put some stuff in there and see if it comes up with something creative for you. Shameless plug, but it’s related now.

So these are things tied to obviously email and e-commerce in general. I think AI has the ability with tools like this or with use cases similar to this where it can help a marketer speed things along. I don’t see the day, and this is just me. I mean at some point AI is going to revolutionize the world more than it already has. I’m thinking more like medical side and things like this. But I think from a marketing standpoint, I think it’s going to be a tool, not a replacement. It’s going to assist. It’s going to be the cane that helps us walk. I don’t see it being a day where it’s just be like, okay, we’ve got to send an email to Greg here, spit me out some copy for Greg. I just don’t think we’re there. We talk about segmenting being hard. It’s like, okay, now spit something out that is going to be relevant for him that he knows is not written by AI and has an image that correlates to something like this. I can’t envision it.

Adam:
It’s not there yet.

Greg:
Yeah. It’s not there yet. But two, I can’t think of the person who’s designing this on the back end going, you know what? That is the problem I’m trying to solve, not this stuff. So I think it’s going to be more of a tool than a replacement.

Emma:
I agree actually with AI as a tool, I think at the beginning of last year, we kind of all went through, especially in content, anybody that works with words, I was like, oh dear, what’s happening here? I wish I could think of a baseball putt, but I can’t. And now I think we’re starting to learn how to use it and make sure that we get the bases fully loaded and hit it out of the park with our ai. I was just the advocate. I’ll stop. Stop.

Adam:
I agree with that. The hope I think I have for AI as that tool, as any good tool, if you think of a calculator, it helps you do the mundane things more quickly and more accurately and do it better. So for instance, my hope for email marketing and SMS marketing using AI is going to be emails that are more specific to me that will help the email marketer make sure that, Hey Sally, she’s getting this email that matches maybe her shopping habits better than Joe over here and his shopping habits. That’s where I would like part of my 40,000 unread emails are because a bunch of them didn’t get me to open them because it may be not as relevant to me. And I’m hopeful that AI will solve some of that.

Greg:
So I think we talk about product recommendations, right? Automated product recommendations and emails and it’s gotten so much better and we offer ’em as well. I think every email provider has some version of product recommendations in there. I think they’re important. AI can certainly, I think find those lookalike audiences and AI can serve as a better segmentation engine to feed things like that up. I mean they used to be terrible, right? Kidding me, I was like, Greg products rended just free and you open. It was just like this. It’s like people just chose 20 products through it in there. And I’m like, none of ’em are relevant to me. But to your point, I think that’s probably the one place where you could have a more noticeable impact. So whether it’s product recommendations or just sending a better fine tuning the segmentation. So I think about from a segmentation standpoint, I’m a big advocate of post-purchase emails.

I’m a big advocate of lapse purchaser emails. So hey, Emma hasn’t purchased in three months and she normally does, but it’s still somewhat of a crapshoot. I don’t really know that something in her life has changed. Maybe she was buying something for her car and that car died and now she’s got a new car and I’m like, oh, she hasn’t bought something for that car in a while. We still set up the rules to target at three months after the fact because that’s the history. This is where AI might be able to look at those other data points and go, okay, she’s browsing this site, she’s browsing this site, she’s doing this. You know what? Let’s wait two more months and we’ll target her with something else or something like that. So I could see something like that. But I mean it’s just kind of building upon segmentation engines. I think more than anything,

Emma:
Anyone that’s listening to this, Greg will like baseball things in his subject lines. Adam would like some numbers. Yes, please. And me puns. Yeah, no. Okay. So I have one last one for you, Greg. What was the one question that we didn’t ask you that you wanted to or share with the world?

Greg:
So not a question. I would say, if I’m thinking back on this conversation we had today, we’re talking about automation, we’re talking about the complexities and simplicity at the same time of segmentation. It can be both. For a lot of people, we talk about people having very limited time to do a lot of things with. I would tell people that the conversation might sound difficult. It sounds like doing something new is challenging and it is really not. So email can really be as simple and basic as you want it to be, and it could still be effective that way. So we talk about, say you are a brand, you don’t have an automation or you have one and you want to make it better. You can do that when you build a message or a second message. It doesn’t have to be the best message in the world.

Think about the MVP version of things, right? Can we send the MVP version, which is better than nothing and generate revenue in the background. So that’s the one thing I always tell people because it can be overwhelming, especially if you want to up it or you’re just not doing a lot of it and you want to do it more, just do it right, do it simply. You can always make it better, especially from the automation standpoint. This is the one thing where, again, I like to do it, but shamelessly plug, omni send. So we talked about automations there. We talk about small mid-size businesses. We are friendly for you. We actually templatize all the automations too. So if you don’t know where to start and you want to do a browser abandonment, you literally just click the template and hit create and it creates the flow with the best practice timing rules built in. You can customize ’em whenever you want, change the messages whenever you want, but they’re there for you. So you can literally get these things going in two minutes and then just improve ’em over time. So I know a lot of we talk about sounds complicated, it sounds overwhelming, but it’s really not. And I always tell people if you have challenges or you want reach out to me, I’m an open book and I’ll help guide you. But it does not have to be difficult and it’s not difficult.

Adam:
Nice. I like it. At the end of the day, just do it. Get out there, try it. Thank you so much, Greg for sharing your wisdom with us. So I’m excited that you guys are able to share your knowledge with us. I’m going to have high expectations that the emails coming into my inbox are going to be better and better and my click through rate, my open rate will be better because you guys are doing the good work, I think to help improve the state of email marketing and SMS marketing for everyone out there. So thank you for the work you do. As we wrap up, where can people find you? Where do they want to learn more about Omnis? Send about you? About baseball? Yeah, tell us about on your socials.

Greg:
So I’ll start with Omnisend, so omnisend.com. All the social handles are just slash omnisend. We’re pretty much all over the place, including TikTok. So myself, I’m on LinkedIn, fairly uncommon name in the US so if you misspell it, it’ll auto correct you. I’m on X @whatsgregdoing.

Adam:
What’s Greg doing? Okay.

Greg:
LinkedIn and I dunno, I’m out there, just find me. But as I mentioned, I’m an open book, just feel free to reach out to me. I’d be more than happy to chat with you.

Adam:
Alright, well thank you so much and for Adam and Emma here at Woo Biz Chat, that’s all we have for today. We look forward to another podcast here very soon. So we hope you guys stay safe and yeah, just to finish this out, just do it. Get in there, try it and we wish you all the best success. Alright, bye. Take care everybody.