Honest Marketing

Andrei Marin and Alex Melone: How to Craft Emails That Convert and Drive Sales

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 36

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Are you ready to master the art of crafting emails that don't just secure conversions, but also drive significant sales?

Join me as I dive into the world of email mastery with Alex Melone and Andrei Marin, the Co-Founders of CodeCrew. Their insights have the potential to revolutionize your approach. From harnessing the power of A/B testing to understanding the psychology behind transforming readers into active buyers– it's all on the table. If you're into email marketing, this is the good stuff.

Alex and Andrei have been shaking things up for tons of businesses, and now it's your turn to put their knowledge to work and start crafting emails that not only convert but truly shine.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Transitioning from pushy sales to a value-driven approach
  • The science behind attention-grabbing subject lines
  • Navigating the art of persuasive email content

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And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Andrei Marin [00:00:00]:

We've kind of found that a lot of businesses spend so much time fine tuning their website to be the best version of the website that they can be, and for good reason. You know, you want it to look good. You want it to have the best CRO it possibly can have. But then why don't you apply exactly the same principles to email? What's the disconnect there?

Travis Albritton [00:00:22]:

Welcome back to the Honest Marketing Podcast. You learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton, and today we're diving into all things email marketing. My guests Andre and Alex work with the agency CodeCrew US, where they specialize in performance email marketing for brands and businesses that are looking to drive tangible results in their business from their emails. And so I pepper them with all kinds of questions as far as how do you do a B tests and what kinds of emails do you send? What key indicators do you look at to decide if an email is working or not, and then just the general landscape of how are brands and businesses using emails right now to drive results for their business. So if you are a business owner that is engaging in email newsletters and weekly newsletters and promotions and campaigns, you'll definitely want to stick around for this episode because there's a lot of really practical things that they share that they do internally with their agency that I think will really help you in your business. As always, make sure to stick around to the very end where I'll give you my number one takeaway from the interview. But here it is. Let's dive in. So, Andre, Alex, the reason that I'm so excited to talk to you guys and about the work that you're doing at Code Crew is because even though I've been doing email marketing for seven or eight years, I still feel very much like a novice because there's always things that are shifting, there's always things that are changing. And so I'm just really excited about kind of getting the current state of what's working for brands, ecommerce brands, B, two B brands, and all the kinds of clients that you work with. So thanks for taking the time to come on the show.

Andrei Marin [00:01:52]:

Thanks for having us.

Alex Melone [00:01:53]:

Yeah, thanks for having us. And yeah, to your point, email is shifty. Well, maybe that's not the right term for it, but it's always changing. It's funny because even though it's probably one of the oldest digital marketing channels out there, it's always evolving every single day. I mean, what a couple of years ago? Well, I say every single day. And then I referenced something a couple of years ago, we had the iOS what was it? 1514? I'm too old to remember anymore. Change going on. Then there's some Gmail stuff going on recently. I mean, yeah, every single day is a new day, and it's pretty fun, pretty awesome. That we get to work with such a historic channel, but we always get to learn something new every single day that we come to the office. So, yeah, we're enjoying it.

Andrei Marin [00:02:34]:

Tell you that.

Travis Albritton [00:02:35]:

Yeah, because I definitely wanted to ask about the Apple stuff because that's something that I know about. But I think what I would really love to learn right off the bat is how are businesses using email right now to effectively drive sales and growth in their business? Because email marketing has kind of become one of those basic things that most people know they should be doing alongside SEO and having a website and having some social media presence. Email marketing typically fits in there, but that doesn't mean that they're doing it well, right, just because you're doing it. So I would love to hear, how are businesses leveraging email marketing right now specifically to drive business and drive sales?

Andrei Marin [00:03:19]:

Great question, and honestly, it kind of makes me laugh because we've been working for this financing client recently who is pretty much the grandfather of financing as a brand name. And something that very frequently gets referenced within our texts is that anybody can give you financing advice, even your mother or your grandmother. That doesn't mean that they know squat about it. If you're going to invest in the next best stock that a friend recommends, you're always going to have quite a risky endeavor at trying to grow that capital, right? So it's kind of the same with email. I actually remember not too long ago, somebody getting back to us from a cold email outreach that we had done saying pretty much, why would I ever pay for email marketing? It's something that I can do in my sleep. And it's funny because that's very true, but also very untrue because you never know when it hits you. And by it I mean things like deliverability issues, things like inboxing issues, when do you actually break your list without knowing that you're doing so and will eventually be unable to sell them anything more because you've been doing it wrong all this time. So I think that a lot of folks are unfortunately kind of taking email for granted a lot of times because it's such a powerful channel, you have the data available at your fingertips. If the CEO wants to send an email by 02:00 P.m., they do that every single day out of the week, and very few people can tell them not to. And that's where an agency like ours comes in and not only gives brands a lot of structure, but a lot of strategy as well. Because doing things just because you wake up on a certain side of the bed every single morning is definitely not a strategy to go by or just by referencing your PNL and spotting the fact that you're a little down on the monthly. So let's shoot out an email to everybody. Let's see how that does probably not the best email marketing strategy out there that you can employ. So we're doing a lot of things from segmentation to making sure that we know who every single customer is. We're obviously building all sorts of different automations and flows. And I think as of the last three to five years here, it's been a lot more about learning on a more personal level, who your customer is individually and being able to deliver them emails that they will truly care about, rather than just batch and blasting, which has definitely been a practice that is thankfully in the agency space. Deprecated ish unfortunately in the non agency space. A lot of brands are still batch and blasting their email lists to the ground. So I'm not sure if that fully answers your question, but it's definitely kind of a small negative information. If somebody doesn't take anything else out of the entire podcast, this should definitely be something that they should be focusing on, just having more structure and more segmentation and sending proper stuff. It helps.

Travis Albritton [00:06:30]:

Well, and I think you touched on the thing that makes or breaks the effectiveness of email is, is it the right email sent to the right person at the right time? Because nobody wants a newsletter that they don't care about even if they signed up for it six months ago. Right? And when I've seen people say email marketing doesn't work, then I ask more questions. It's well no, we don't segment, no, we're not cleaning our list frequently, no, we're not personalizing it and making it relevant. We're sending an email because it's good for us to get more sales, not necessarily because it's good for them to read and consume and it's helpful for them. So I love that you highlighted that and pointed out some of the core things that I do want to dig into a little bit, which is when you're working with a new client, you've kind of touched on some of these things. What are the common mistakes that you see them making prior to working with you? Because I imagine the reason they approach Code Crew or an agency like yours is because they're like, we know email is important, we're not doing it as well as we could be doing it and we don't necessarily know why it's not working, otherwise we would be trying to do those things ourselves. So what are those common mistakes that you see when you bring new clients on and you start taking over their email marketing?

Alex Melone [00:07:48]:

Well, it's funny you ask and it's funny Dre was just talking about what he was because as he was, I was thinking, oh, I know which client this was, I know which client this was, I know which client this was. But all in know, I think everything you touched on is really something that we see in one shape or form come in the lead pipeline as an issue with that contact or that client. So I tell you, some of the most common mistakes that we see is definitely improper segmentation, which leads to spam issues, which leads to deliverability issues, which leads to just the program not even working. Then the client or the lead ends up coming in our door saying, hey, why do I get no revenue anymore when I used to get, I don't know, ten grand from every single email? And usually it's just improper practices, just snowballing into something that unfortunately just kind of kills a program, to put it as simply as I can.

Andrei Marin [00:08:43]:

On top of that, we've kind of found that a lot of businesses spend so much time fine tuning their website to be the best version of the website that they can be, and for good reason. You want it to look good, you want it to have the best CRO it possibly can have. But then why don't you apply exactly the same principles to email? What's the disconnect there? You see brands that have really amazing websites and really great flows throughout those websites, and then you go to their email and they're basically just a piecemeal of things that somebody with not a lot of experience put together using a drag and drop builder. So again, where exactly is that disconnect? I think obviously the biggest mistakes, as Alex was mentioning, segmentation, making sure you're actually saying something proper. But then a lot of times we're seeing things like the email itself being subpar, there's no calls to actions, there's very little in the realm of actually trying to put some time into designing those emails. And it's kind of funny because design is a big part of what we do here. And we've actually found and proven through a B testing on our end that taking the time needed to build a proper design that actually is attractive, can pay dividends. And we've seen engagement spike just because of the fact that we were more attentive with the designs that we were putting out there. So I think it's a lot that brands that are doing email don't really realize they're doing wrong, because we tend to build an audit every single time we talk to a lead before we even sign them. We like sending our thoughts across just so we can kind of align on what we think the priorities are and what they think the priorities are. And a lot of times, again, these audits tend to be at least a couple of pages long, filled with really things that don't take a lot more than five minutes each to make sure you do right. But people just don't treat email with enough TLC to be able to kind of make sure that they tick those checkboxes. With regards to some of these best practices again, things like making sure you have a CTA, making sure every single image throughout that email is hyperlinked. Making sure that your logo doesn't cover, I don't know, 1000 pixels of heights throughout that email so you can get bored before you actually get to the email itself.

Travis Albritton [00:11:09]:

Things like that. Okay, so a couple of things I want to double back on because I'm genuinely curious. I've heard by everyone and their brother, you got to segment your list. It's like, okay, how to what degree? How many layers, how complicated of a web am I creating here? Do I need to segment down to like, okay, this person from Des Moines, Iowa, who has two kids and is a soccer coach, is that the level of segmentation, or is it how do you approach that? Because you can segment to the point where it's not even helpful anymore because then you're just sending an email to like, three people out of 5000. But you do want some segmentation so you can tailor those email messages to the right audience, especially from a sales perspective at the right point in their buying journey. So what is your approach to segmentation? How do you segment lists in order to balance that really well?

Alex Melone [00:12:14]:

So we aim for those two soccer coaches in Des Moines. That's really all of our segments. Fun aside, as part of the audit, actually, that Andre was just mentioning, we dig into the segmentation that's existing, and honestly, no two businesses are the same. And we have some businesses that we work with which are just entirely subscription based subscription models. We have some which their cadence is already high. They don't want to lower it. So we have to base segmentation more on just engagement. Overall, it really depends. We have purchasers and non purchasers. Again, these are some of the most common ones that we see actually working well. But that being said, again, every single business is so different that what's actually going to drive the revenue.

Andrei Marin [00:13:02]:

And actually, something really important on that segmentation note is you need to look at the business model itself, right? So, for instance, just to give a proper example here, and then people can probably extrapolate from it, we used to work with this CBD company that literally had CBD for everything and anything for people, chewables edibles smokables for pets, for horses. So you probably don't want to send, I don't know, dog CBD to somebody that's never bought dog CBD in their life, ever. Because the likelihood of them having a dog or a horse even, is pretty slim. So unless they've bought horse CBD, don't send them horse CBD related emails would probably be a pretty straightforward, pretty easy thing to do. So that's where segmentation can come in and kind of categorize the type of different items that somebody might be able to buy from you. Even more recently, we've been talking to somebody that's in the jewelry expensive watch space. Again, if Alex went on to look for, I don't know, a 50 grand Rolex and you happen to have him in your email list, he's probably not going to be interested in necklaces. I'm just going to take a wild guess here, unless he specifically looks for necklaces on your website, in which case you can look for that user activity and target him specifically for that and make sure his wife is going to love him a little bit extra throughout the next few weeks. Otherwise just send him watches, get that 50 grand from him, I guess.

Travis Albritton [00:14:33]:

No, that totally makes sense. Because the way that I've always thought about it is, at the very least, you want to segment people that are kind of they've popped on your list through a lead magnet or some kind. Of free offer. They know who you are, they haven't bought anything from you yet. Versus people that have bought from you and then knowing which specific products or services they've bought. So that way you can tailor future communications with that context. Right? Because like you said, if you are trying to sell a new product or sell an existing product to a list, you don't want to send that sale to someone who's already bought it. Right? It'd be like if you bought a car and then the next week you got an email saying, hey, why don't you come by and buy a new car? I was just there, I just bought a car. Why are you sending me an email to buy another car? So that makes sense. I'm really curious how you commingle website data. So time on the website page they looked at maybe abandoned cart, capture, things like that and bring that in your segmentation. Are you building automations for those things? What platform software are you using or have you seen that work? Well, specifically thinking about if someone's wanting to do this for themselves because if they work with an agency like yours, you're going to handle all this. But if they're wanting to implement some of these best practices, what are some good platforms and software they can use to bring some of that data in to help with their email segmentation?

Alex Melone [00:16:00]:

So we're fortunate that as one of our founding pillars, we'll work with literally any platform out there. So we've had the ability to work with everything, the greatest to the worst. I think Andre and I can both test to a few of them being better than the rest over time. We've been working with these two in particular for a good five or ten years now. I think closer to ten and every single year they're always at the top. So I definitely would love to shout them out just because they are going to be best for anyone starting, anyone who's interested in email marketing and anyone who's also a data nerd. So the first one of the two, probably the one that I'd recommend definitely most strongly for anyone just starting out or anyone who isn't at that state where they can go ahead and hire an agency, which would be Klavio I'm sure a lot of people have heard of it. It's Klayivo and it's just a really simple use platform. It has literally everything you can imagine as far as being able to gather that data off your website. Go ahead and create those automations you were speaking to and just make sure you have a good solid foundation for whatever you intend to do in your email marketing program. And then the other would be iterable, it's much more data intensive. I'm not necessarily sure if it would be the best for someone just starting out just because it's so robust to the point of even some agencies out there not using its full capability. But if I were to recommend any platforms to anyone just doing it on their own, definitely these two. I think honestly, ever since the Shopify MailChimp split, you're going to be missing some data there. So probably wouldn't recommend monkeysam MailChimp. But yeah, Clavio is definitely going to help you there. It's going to give you all the tools that you need.

Travis Albritton [00:17:55]:

Okay, yeah, we'll link those in the show notes if you want to check those out and see if they're a good fit for you. Now Andre, you brought up that a well designed email, when it's done correctly, will outperform a poorly designed email. Because one of the questions I was going to ask you is graphics intensive emails versus plain text, because I know that was a big debate for a long time. It's like, well, if you send an email and it feels like your pen pal sending you an email, it's more likely to be read and consumed versus the ones that look like full page magazine ads. But I know just because somebody anecdotally might have seen that doesn't necessarily mean that's wholly true. So walk me through that. What are the kind of the benefits of going with a fully designed email versus a plain text and vice versa? Because they each do different things well so someone listening can figure out what's the best approach for them and their goals. I'd just love for you to break that down.

Andrei Marin [00:18:51]:

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why we don't necessarily ever recommend one or the other. We actually send out a number of different types of emails, the fully designed one being one of them, plain text being another. We also very frequently send emails that are designed, but we call them hero only because of the fact that they literally are extremely short and kind of the hero is the entire email. It's more of a poster rather than a proper email that you get a lot of buzz out of. And just to give a couple of examples here, if you're going to have a bogo on your website, something that you only do once yearly, let's say for Black Friday, you're not going to want to have a gazillion. Other things for people to read, get bored by, and potentially navigate away from. If you're having that bogo. Let's stick to a hero. Only buy one, get one free, big large call to action. You click on it, you go to the website, you buy yourself something nice if you want. However, to, let's say, I don't know, founder stories or founder written emails have kind of gotten to be a bit too cheesy lately. I think a lot of people are abusing those. So we are definitely trying to guide our clients away from those types of emails, although they still have their time and place. But let's say you're a B, two B company, you're somebody selling drones, you would want to probably be able to personify the salesperson a little bit better than a fully designed email could. And so making sure that those emails are either plain text the way you were phrasing them, or at the very maximum, I would say, have the company logo as a header and then it's you actually quote unquote. Writing the text to the person you're emailing would probably be a bit more efficient than just something that's highly designed magazine looking. They would feel like they're on a list for email marketing per se. They might not have signed up for or maybe forgotten that they did. And so the plain text is definitely going to be a lot more efficient for your kind of salesperson approach, for your approach that wants to maybe communicate something that's a bit more personal, a bit more heartfelt for that one brand. Now obviously if you want, if you're a closing brand, you're going to find it pretty tough to convert people by sending plain text emails, although we have done it in the past. And again, there is a time and place for every single type of email. But I would probably say just use best guidance, best judgment on some of those things. I think that as long as you feel like it's a good fit for the purpose that you are intending that email to achieve, your customers will feel that as well. So that's why there's not really an umbrella answer here that covers everything. I think you need to get specific and need to understand what you're trying to achieve with every single one of.

Travis Albritton [00:21:53]:

Those emails well, and even taking the time to test different formats, right? So if you always send plain text, experiment with creating some more graphic intensive ones where you're following the best practices, linking out things like that so that you have your own data to look at.

Andrei Marin [00:22:09]:

Exactly.

Travis Albritton [00:22:09]:

Because it's also true. Like what works for one company exactly might not work to the same degree for yours.

Andrei Marin [00:22:14]:

You're preaching to the choir. It's something that we keep saying for such a long time in every single lead pitch that we have out there, we just tell people that we are doing an A B test with every single email. It's so easy with today's software to set something like that up that not doing so is just a missed opportunity. We are shocked to see how many brands out there aren't really doing much testing at all, and we've been doing it for the past five years, I think if we haven't ran 10,000, 20,000 a B tests, we haven't done a single one. So even with all that benchmark data, obviously we have a NAC, we have a database of what we know works the best, but even with all of that database and information behind us, we still have data points that contradict what we know every single day. And so we always like staying on our toes and adjusting to not just how every single brand differs, but also how the different life changes that we all go through. And I know it's already a talking point that's been digested by quite a few times over, but COVID coming around actually changed a lot of buyer behavior. And we've seen email practices and email expectancies in terms of order rates, in terms of open rates, change quite heavily from pre COVID to during COVID to post COVID. So it pays to always keep an eye out for data and see what it's telling you because you might be wrong in your assumptions.

Travis Albritton [00:23:50]:

Yeah, and that's a great pivot, because the next thing I want to talk about was, how do you measure a campaign's effectiveness? Because it used to be, oh, well, if you're in this kind of window with an open rate, you're doing good. If you're in this window for a click through rate, you're doing good. And then when the iOS update, it was like, man, everybody's opening my emails now. No, Apple's just not telling you if they opened them or not. So platforms are always shifting around, but internally, what are the measuring sticks that you use to determine if a campaign is working for a client or not? I'm thinking specifically within the email itself, because obviously, if you're measuring it by how many sales we generated from clicks from this email, then there's more variables. There like, well, how did your checkout convert and how did your product match the segmentation? And things like that. But when you're just looking at the emails themselves, what are the metrics that you look at? And where do you expect a high performing email to land in general, knowing it'll obviously shift if you're ecommerce versus b to b, but what are the general ballparks people can expect to look for?

Alex Melone [00:24:57]:

Man, I feel like every answer to mine says it depends. It really depends. It does, unfortunately, or unfortunately. So every single platform, or I'm sorry, every single company is so different. That what they have historically been doing, what their product is, this all has to be taken into account. So for one company, we'll see maybe a 60% average click rate being standard for them, which is wild for another company. But I think Klavio's most recent benchmarks are somewhere around 35% open rate is what you should expect. But then again, it depends on the industry. So I mean, again, there's so many factors at play that you never have a single good way to determine what is best. And you should never measure yourself or your company against just the general populace either. You should always look at the industry and more than that, look at your own business and your historical data and then try to improve upon that. So I know it's a non answer answer, but again, just always aim to improve in business and in that's that's something we should always look forward to. And then I forget the rest of.

Andrei Marin [00:26:03]:

Your so andre yeah, no, I definitely can help know. Apple coming around is definitely threw a curveball there. But if you think about it, SMS never had open rates to begin with, right? And you were still able to track whether or not your SMS campaigns were successful. And so we're taking the same gauges in what we do here as well. First off, we look at benchmark data. There's a lot of benchmark data out there and if you're underperforming your competition, you're underperforming that's pretty black or white. Now in terms of open rate specifically now you can do a lot of things to gauge the true open rate of your email sends nowadays, even excluding Apple and kind of gauging the rest of the audience or looking at Apple. Then there are a couple of tricks that we hold close to heart here to actually be able to tell which Apple open was a real Apple open and which Apple open was that generated by a proxy email address. So that's an interesting, more nerdy discussion for probably another time. But yeah, I would say just look at benchmarks and look at month over month and year over year trends. As long as you're outperforming what you were performing the last few months over, you're probably on the right track to greatness there.

Travis Albritton [00:27:23]:

And are open rates and click through rates the two basic indications that you're looking to improve?

Andrei Marin [00:27:31]:

I mean basic, sure, and there's a lot of A B testing that we do around those just to make sure that we do get people onto the website. But ultimately it depends, I'm sorry, on the goal you are meaning to achieve with your email. Maybe it's more brand awareness rather than conversions. So click rates don't really matter. As long as you get kind of real reporting type open rates that are closer to, let's say 35% to 40%, it means that your email achieved its purpose. Now, if you're looking for sales, obviously average order value, kind of order rates are going to be the guiding lights. I think click rates are a little bit overrated because of the fact that you don't truly know what you achieved with that click. And I'm just going to throw a funny little reference here because we ran some Facebook ads. For ourselves not too long ago and we got a ton of click through if I recall correctly. We probably got like 5000 people to our website, but not one single outreach to our form to tell us who they are and what they were there for. So I don't know if they were grandmas knitting, if they were people just looking around for the next best thing, I have no clue. But click through rates can sometimes be deceiving for sure.

Travis Albritton [00:28:54]:

Yeah, I've definitely noticed that too, where it's like, oh man, I got all these clicks and then nothing happened. Okay, well then they weren't the right kind of clicks. Maybe I had the wrong incentive, the wrong call to action for what I actually wanted them to do. So yeah, I think that's really smart. So when you're thinking through A B testing emails, what are the key things that you're testing? I imagine subject lines are a pretty common test where you want to see what do we need to tell someone to get them to open and engage with the email? Is it composition of the email? Is it the content? What level of A B testing are you typically doing? Because if you test everything at once and then one works and one doesn't, you're like, well which one was it? Which of the five tests that we ran is the thing that put it over the top? So I'd love to hear your process for how you approach A B testing to know that you can not only see different results and be able to make determinations, but also drill down to what is working so you can focus more in those areas.

Alex Melone [00:29:53]:

So we have a slew of AB tests that we run. We have an internal document, someone that has over 100 different types that we'll run. Eventually we'll get to all of them if we have a client for long enough, but I think it'll take years to get there. But as far as EBTs go, we always want to make sure that we're really understanding if something is a winner. So in quite a few cases we'll see ourselves running the same EB test three, four, five times just to make sure that, hey, even though there was a marginal difference on one or two of those tests, there was a much bigger difference on the third, fourth and fifth. And then from there we go ahead and say, hey, this test definitely is a winner. We're going to go ahead and leverage this as much as we can moving forward. That being said, you also don't want to just silo yourself within a winning determinant of a test because lo and behold, a few months later, maybe even a year later, it's the entire exact opposite. Just based on old new context within your list. Yeah, A B testing is a deep, I wouldn't say dark, a deep rabbit hole, really fun place to go. But as far as a few good A B tests just for a new business to run or someone who doesn't have an agency. Start with the lowest hanging fruit, really. Testing subject lines is always a very quick and easy one. We oftentimes test just the text within the message, the way that the text is framed, question versus statement sometimes. As far as the CTA text, what that's trying to invoke within the customer as well? And it just goes from there. Email is nice in that you can test literally anything you can think of. And so we've thought of quite a bit of stuff. I think there's maybe one client all time that we've exhausted our list and just begin retesting from the beginning again.

Andrei Marin [00:31:40]:

Yeah, and to add another couple, because we are frequently hearing these maxims from a lot of our clients of oh my God, I've read somewhere that Wednesdays are the best days test. What are your best days for sending? And try to understand that data not just from an open rate perspective, because open rate would be the winning determinant basically in a send day, type A B test, but look at revenue numbers as well. Maybe people open a bunch on Wednesdays but don't purchase for the life of them, and they do purchase on Thursdays or Fridays. So make sure that you look at the data from different angles as well. So just a couple that I wanted to add to the list would be best send day throughout the week and best send time throughout the day because again, a lot of maxims are thrown out there with regards to what are the best send times. And actually, I don't recall three clients live to date where the best send times were exactly the same. So that goes to say a lot about some of these Maxines that you can read out there.

Travis Albritton [00:32:46]:

No, I totally agree. It's like, oh yeah, if you're sending B to B, make sure it's available first thing in the morning when they first log in. But then I also know people well, if you wait 30 minutes when they're sitting in their computer, it'll pop up at the top of their inbox when they're reading their email. It's like, well, which one is it? I don't know, try both. Right now, when you're capturing this data, what would an internal process look like for okay, we just ran an A B test. We got some data, we want to capture it in order to implement it moving forward. Is that just like throwing it in a Google Doc of here's our processes or Here are lessons learned? How do you actually take that data and make it actionable moving forward if this isn't the only thing that you do in your core expertise?

Andrei Marin [00:33:30]:

Yeah, it's a big item and honestly, we are a bit protective about that. It's a bit proprietary the way we do it here. But the key of it is to figure out a process that allows you within a minute, literally, to understand exactly what are your best open times, best open days, best types of subject lines. Like, you need a process that, I don't know, maybe categorizes them somehow and you get the result you're looking for. I think there are a million tools out there that can achieve it, but again, the way we do it is a little bit our own, so we're a bit productive about that.

Travis Albritton [00:34:05]:

Sure. So if you want their unique proprietary process, you'll have to reach out to them and work with them. That's the core takeaway. Yeah, as you should. So one more question before we wrap up. Is there anything that I haven't even thought to bring up? Questions I haven't asked, things that you're seeing that are really important for a business owner that wants to get more serious about email marketing, that you want to make sure that you communicate. What have I missed, I guess, in this interview?

Andrei Marin [00:34:34]:

Yeah, I've got a really big one because it's crazy, but even in 2023 there are very many businesses and unfortunately very many even industries or verticals out there that don't do email at all. So I think the biggest question that needs to be asked is what percentage of revenue from my overall business should I be expecting from email? And the answer obviously depends a ton on industry, on your vertical, on how you're selling your product and what AOV you have and what type of product you're actually selling. But the answer we've found throughout the years is anywhere between 15 and all the way up to 45 50% of your overall business revenue yearly can be driven by email. So if you're not doing email, or if you're doing email in a lazy way, you're probably leaving a lot of cash on the table. So I would definitely encourage you to get a bit more serious about that, whether you hire a freelancer or ten or whether you decide to go for an agency which is definitely going to give you a lot more bang for the buck no matter how good that freelancer is. So yeah, I would say that's probably the primary question I would ask.

Travis Albritton [00:35:47]:

No, that's a great question. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. I'm like, well, of course they're doing email, but no, not everybody is, so I definitely appreciate that. Now, if somebody's listening to this and they want to learn more about you, about what you do, about what your agency does, where's the best place to go? To learn more about code crew, to learn more about the kind of clients that you work with to take that next step, where should they go?

Alex Melone [00:36:07]:

I'd say our website. We have a pretty nice one. We try to keep it updated and nice and clean and fancy. It's CodeCrew us, but we're also really hip, really cool guys. We're on all the social media, so you can always follow us, know, just reach out to us on what we got. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. On Instagram and Facebook. We're CodeCrew us on Twitter. We're at CodeCrew us and LinkedIn, we're CodeCrew Inc. And oh, bonus if you go ahead and come through Lead Pipeline, reach out to us so that you found us on this podcast. We'll give you a 10% discount. So go ahead and yeah, mention that on this marketing podcast. Let's talk.

Travis Albritton [00:36:46]:

Awesome. Hopefully we get a couple through there. That would be great. Well, Andre, Alex, thank you so much for your time sharing all your expertise. I know I personally learned a lot and I know our listeners did as well. So my number one takeaway from my conversation with Andre and Alex was to not neglect A B tests. It's so easy to just send an email out without really any kind of strategy or intent, but then not have a measuring stick to determine if it worked or not or how well it worked, so you can compare. It to previous campaigns. See what's working, see what's not, and then lean into the things that are working so you're not having to make the same mistakes over and over again. You can build on the experience that you gain over time as you send more emails. So definitely make sure that you're split testing that you're capturing the results from those tests and then implementing them moving forward to get the best results. Now, if you want to connect with them, you can go to CodeCrew US, make sure you mention you heard them here on the podcast to get 10% off if you end up being a good fit and take them on as a client of yours. But yeah, just so grateful for their time and their expertise and sharing it here on the podcast, I know that you learned a lot as well. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening. And as always, this be honest.