Product Startup Podcast Episode 133: Email Marketing That Sells Products

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product inhibitors. Today we learn from the co-founder of an email marketing agency on best practices for selling hardware products through email lists.

00:00:10 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,

00:00:19 Narrator: product developers, manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial

00:00:28 Narrator: idea to getting your product on store shelves. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business.

00:00:37 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, onto the show.

00:00:46 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today, I'm very excited to introduce Jacob Anson to the show. Jacob is the co-founder of Agency JR, a firm that has helped sell tens of millions

00:00:54 Kevin Mako: of dollars worth of product for product companies. Today, Jacob's going to share some valuable knowledge in how inventor, startups, and small manufacturers,

00:01:00 Kevin Mako: and understand email marketing, learn the different types within, and know how to use email marketing effectively. Now on to the episode.

00:01:09 Kevin Mako: Hey, Jacob, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me on. Well, we're looking forward to talk to you today about email marketing. I mean, I love having

00:01:16 Kevin Mako: different types of tools to sell products, especially for startups in the hardware space or scaling companies that are building or trying to sell more units.

00:01:24 Kevin Mako: And email marketing is one of those ones that we all hear about. We all get hit with these emails online. But if you've never done email marketing,

00:01:32 Kevin Mako: There's a lot to it, a lot that happens behind the scenes. So I'm really excited to break all that down to first describe what email marketing is,

00:01:39 Kevin Mako: then how it fits into the overall landscape of the actual digital sales world, and then how to actually do email marketing well.

00:01:46 Kevin Mako: So why don't you just give us a bit of a background on your experience in the email marketing world?

00:01:50 Jacob Anson: I think the best way describe us, like at this point, I think we have generated over or multiple eight figures at this point for our clients.

00:01:57 Jacob Anson: Right now we're handling about 80 to 90 clients. actively on a month-to-month basis in terms of email marketing and to

00:02:05 Jacob Anson: basically work with any kind of store stores from selling gadgets to clothing to shoes to cat-dog products with every niche every vertical

00:02:15 Kevin Mako: you can imagine it's amazing it's a lot of experience you get to see what happens behind the scenes what works what doesn't work so first

00:02:20 Jacob Anson: and foremost just break down what is email marketing yeah i think the best way to explain email marketing for people that are not so familiar with the online space i would

00:02:29 Jacob Anson: essentially put it as the best and easiest and the cheapest way to reach your customers.

00:02:33 Kevin Mako: Cheapest, the fastest and easiest way to do so. And this can work as well with leads or pre-orders or all this sort of stuff.

00:02:41 Kevin Mako: Like basically, once you've got an email, you can now email market. But the key is first to get that email. So why don't you break down how that works?

00:02:49 Kevin Mako: How do you first get the contact information to then start selling via email marketing?

00:02:54 Jacob Anson: This is an interesting, interesting topic. So most of your email list is always, if you have a. online store. Most of your email lists are going to come through the checkout.

00:03:02 Jacob Anson: So mostly it's going to be existing customers. So customers go to the checkout page, they leave their email, and that's you get the buyer emails.

00:03:10 Jacob Anson: And of course, also sometimes people leave their email, they're not going to buy. So those are going to be non-buyers and they're going to get retargeted

00:03:16 Jacob Anson: by an abandoned checkout flow. The next thing is through pop-ups, some various lead gen gen forms. A pop-up is something I think everybody has seen.

00:03:25 Jacob Anson: For most of us, it's an annoying thing. With if it's set up correctly, it's really going to be a big value at your company. Here are the first actionable tips.

00:03:34 Jacob Anson: So if you have like an online store, I would suggest you have the pop-up on exit intent because it can't really annoy customers which want to leave the site anyway.

00:03:42 Jacob Anson: So it's an extreme value add either way. And the second thing, don't always try to have the pop-up on an extremely low pop-up rate.

00:03:51 Jacob Anson: So maybe not five seconds, but maybe have it at 30-40 seconds because those customers are going to be more happy to leave their email.

00:03:57 Jacob Anson: and you're not going to scare off that many off. And the last thing is you can run any lead gen campaigns with paid ads, Facebook ads,

00:04:05 Jacob Anson: Google ads, where people can sign up in your list specifically.

00:04:08 Jacob Anson: That's the third way, but like the main ways are through the checkout,

00:04:13 Kevin Mako: which is going to happen either way. And the second thing is through the pop-up. So there's basically three different categories of people that you can target here.

00:04:20 Kevin Mako: There's the hot leads, which are people who have bought your product, the warm leads who are the people who showed interest in one way or another,

00:04:27 Kevin Mako: but didn't actually formally buy your product. And then the third is just cold lead generation, which is lead generation lists.

00:04:34 Kevin Mako: Are there, I imagine, as we get into it more tactically, there's probably different ways that you would want to approach each of those different types of email lists

00:04:42 Jacob Anson: once you acquire the list to start email marketing into. Oh, yes. This is a very, very good question.

00:04:49 Jacob Anson: So basically how we use the approach to us. So if somebody has bought from you, they already have an experience with the shop.

00:04:55 Jacob Anson: So they see how when you're shipping times, they see what's going to, products you sell so they already know what they expect from you.

00:05:00 Jacob Anson: If the experience is good, you don't have to be as pushy so you can offer them less discounts and be less push in terms of your marketing.

00:05:08 Jacob Anson: But for like colder leads or people that have not yet bought something from you or have bought

00:05:12 Jacob Anson: something a long time ago, for these customers, the most important thing is to get them over the edge so they can experience the brand, get the good experience out of you,

00:05:21 Jacob Anson: and it's going to be easier to have them come back on later on. So short or simple, for non-buyers

00:05:29 Jacob Anson: of people that have not bought from you, you can be more aggressive through marketing, give better, more and bigger discounts, target them more frequently.

00:05:38 Jacob Anson: Of course, if they're opening emails. And then for existing buyers, it doesn't make sense to give them as big of a discount because

00:05:44 Kevin Mako: they already want to buy from you. So usually we just give smaller discounts to get a healthier profit margin on the repeat purchases.

00:05:51 Kevin Mako: So I guess the colder that they are, the more you really want to hook them into your brand, be more aggressive, be more creative with how you're actually describing the value

00:06:00 Jacob Anson: of your product. Whereas with the people who are existing customers already, those ones you can take a little bit softer approach, more of a community approach.

00:06:08 Jacob Anson: Exactly. Because the most important thing, people have bought premium. They already know what to expect.

00:06:14 Jacob Anson: They know what can a brand you are, what are already shipping plans, how is the product. people have not from Botfield, they have all of these concerns.

00:06:21 Kevin Mako: You just have to get them over with the edge. And if the experience is good, it's going to get much easier for you to get them, come back and come back and so on. I like that.

00:06:30 Kevin Mako: Now, let's focus on the cold leads because I think especially for an inventor or an emerging hardware startup that's first getting into email marketing,

00:06:38 Kevin Mako: obviously the one thing that we talked about before you get to email marketing is building those lists. You need people to email to, of course, in order to email market.

00:06:46 Kevin Mako: What have you seen in terms of best practices for getting new customers both into your list software

00:06:52 Jacob Anson: and then break down some of the best practices, as you've mentioned, in that aggressive cold selling so that we can kind of figure out how to sell a new product for the first time

00:07:02 Jacob Anson: with a new brand? Amazing. So in terms of acquiring a lead list, here you need some traffic to go to your store.

00:07:10 Jacob Anson: This most is going to be done through paid ads. So Facebook ads, Google ads. or even like offline campaigns if you want to or any other like paid media traffic

00:07:20 Jacob Anson: source where they can set up paid media campaigns so you can generate a list then once you have this

00:07:26 Jacob Anson: list here it very much depends i think we can split it up like this so you have like a product

00:07:32 Jacob Anson: which makes sense for people to come back and buy again maybe like a consumable gadget there on the

00:07:39 Jacob Anson: first purchase i would even suggest you can even go on break even if you really have to if you can

00:07:45 Jacob Anson: really give the customer a great experience because then they're going to return, you can make profit on the repeat purchases.

00:07:52 Jacob Anson: If it's usually like a more for one-time buy thing, then give a lot of

00:07:56 Kevin Mako: value. Value is always good to educate the customers on the product and the pain points. Why do they need it? What does it solve?

00:08:04 Kevin Mako: And then give them a great offer, obviously. So value, offer, the most important things. And what do you find are some of those things that make up a great

00:08:12 Kevin Mako: offer, especially in an email campaign. So you get them hooked by some sort of an online digital

00:08:17 Kevin Mako: advertising method, whether it's Facebook ads, Instagram ads, some other way you've driven people to your site and you've collected these email lists.

00:08:24 Kevin Mako: Now you're trying to hit those folks.

00:08:26 Jacob Anson: What are some of the things that you've seen, especially for hardware products that promote

00:08:31 Jacob Anson: value? And I know that's a bit of an abstract term, but I imagine that you've seen some things over the years that really can break down to do and not to do, especially via email.

00:08:40 Jacob Anson: Yeah, within our agency, we have a couple of best practice what we do with these kinds of emails. We usually keep it extremely simple, always pretty much the same structure.

00:08:49 Jacob Anson: It's the three-tip email. So if you have a hardware product, maybe there's a specific sub-neach within that hardware product or that hardware products.

00:08:57 Jacob Anson: It's a thing of like three tips, which might be interesting for the potential buyer. For example, we had like recently a client within the football niche.

00:09:05 Jacob Anson: There, we had basically just some fun, three football tips. And then at the end, we just promote the product at the end of that.

00:09:12 Jacob Anson: The best thing, if it's like a problem solving product, if it's part of solving a specific problem,

00:09:17 Jacob Anson: then at the end, it's very easy to transition the email from value over to sales.

00:09:23 Jacob Anson: But a three-treat-ep email, then the product promotion works really well.

00:09:28 Kevin Mako: In terms of the best offers, here with offers, usually the higher the offer, the better it's going to convert. But some examples of offers are buy one, get one free.

00:09:38 Kevin Mako: then obviously flat discount offers, flat dollar offers, and so on. I like the three tips you mentioned.

00:09:45 Kevin Mako: Now, this is providing value within the email itself, not necessarily value about the product.

00:09:51 Kevin Mako: You're trying to give somebody value by taking the time to actually read through your email.

00:09:56 Kevin Mako: So you're giving them something up front, essentially, which is this knowledge and information.

00:10:00 Jacob Anson: It could be three tips in and related to the industry and then tying that into how your product, of course, is going to help the tips that you enable.

00:10:06 Jacob Anson: But the way that I heard it from you is whether or not they buy the product, they gain value from that email. They've learned something new that day. Yes.

00:10:14 Jacob Anson: Like always, ideally, the goal of the email is to sell them a product.

00:10:18 Jacob Anson: This obviously is done through value. Like, first of all, they have to be interested in the niche or in the topic. If that's interesting, they're going to read through the email.

00:10:25 Jacob Anson: Then through that, they're going to get the better understanding how the product helps them. But the initial goal obviously is to sell them.

00:10:32 Kevin Mako: In the worst case scenario, if they don't buy, they'll still get like a positive experience from the brand.

00:10:36 Kevin Mako: So maybe if they're not going to buy now, they're going to come back and buy later because they know that you're not there just to sell them something all of them.

00:10:43 Kevin Mako: You also want to give them value. So, yeah, obviously that's the bonus of that. I like that they start to build brand appreciation, especially over time.

00:10:51 Kevin Mako: I imagine as you're running these campaigns over weeks or even months, you're continually providing more and more value to these folks to the point where

00:11:00 Kevin Mako: you may convert them. And the beauty of email marketing is whether you're marketing to one person or 100,000 people, it's the same. amount of effort up front.

00:11:07 Kevin Mako: So you might as well do your best, put your best foot forward,

00:11:10 Jacob Anson: create something great, create a drip campaign or something where you're hitting them with a strategically planned out set of these emails over time

00:11:18 Jacob Anson: so that you continue to provide value. And of course, eventually that person gets to that tipping point where they've built enough

00:11:24 Jacob Anson: brand trust with you that they'll then hit that purchase button. Exactly. This is exactly what we did for one client. They were within the survival niche.

00:11:33 Jacob Anson: There was a 60 day drip campaign. For them, it was a bit more aggressive than usual. There were daily emails for 60 days. Wow.

00:11:41 Kevin Mako: It was mostly value-based. If I remember correctly, it was basically value, value sale, like two very heavy value emails,

00:11:51 Kevin Mako: and then like a very heavy sales email, and just like that, like rinse and repeat for 60 days. So, yeah.

00:11:56 Jacob Anson: So two value emails and then a hard sales email, do you find that emailing somebody every day, did you see a lot of those readers drop off?

00:12:05 Jacob Anson: Is there a point where it's too far down the curve or what kind of insight do you have from being on the backside of these sorts of transactions?

00:12:13 Jacob Anson: Yeah, so 60 emails and 60 days, that is definitely very much on the higher end. That's not something I recommend for most brands.

00:12:21 Jacob Anson: I would say maybe for 99% of the online shops because that sort of has a very high inflow of leads.

00:12:29 Jacob Anson: And they're within the survival nature. The marketing could be very much more direct.

00:12:34 Kevin Mako: there in that scenario it could work but usually the best practice is not higher than 15 emails a month

00:12:41 Jacob Anson: the highest is like an email every other day but ideally it's something closer to 12 emails a month

00:12:48 Jacob Anson: or roughly about three emails a week that would be the golden spot which we usually do three emails a week and that's considered kind of the gold standard or like a good balance

00:12:58 Jacob Anson: of providing value but

00:12:59 Kevin Mako: not being too pushy exactly so like 12 emails a week is what we do for most of our clients, 90% of our clients, that is what they also usually recommend.

00:13:10 Jacob Anson: Three emails a week, that goes perfectly well. So 12 emails a month,

00:13:14 Jacob Anson: or depending on the month, but three emails a week is what we usually do. Now, if you're doing that three emails a week, are you still under that

00:13:22 Jacob Anson: format, value email, value email sales email, or is there some restructuring to that or a different approach?

00:13:29 Jacob Anson: Here, again, it depends on the scenario. So if it's like a lead, and campaign connected to like an email automation, then most of times

00:13:37 Jacob Anson: like value, value sale is good. But if you have like an up and running online store with like incoming orders and you can get

00:13:44 Jacob Anson: a lot of like also warm leads, cold leads and so on like existing customers and customers that have shown interest, then it makes sense to go into list segmentation.

00:13:53 Jacob Anson: So you have like a big customer list, then you can split it into or put it in different back buckets. You have your buyers, you have

00:13:59 Jacob Anson: your repeat buyers, you have your non-buyers, you maybe have your specific product buyers.

00:14:04 Kevin Mako: And then you can think of like specific campaigns to target each one of those specific parts of your list to convert them better. And then it gets a bit different with those

00:14:12 Kevin Mako: spell emails a month. There could be one reengagement email a month, maybe two to three value emails a month, maybe two to three like sales emails a month.

00:14:21 Kevin Mako: And then maybe two to three like very specific emails target and very specific parts of the list. This is really good intel. If you're

00:14:28 Kevin Mako: just starting out and you're trying to do this on your own, maybe you know, We only have a hundred person lead list or something like this.

00:14:36 Jacob Anson: And you say, okay, I want to build this structure out. What's the easiest way to do this as an individual? I presume starting with that 12 a month model, three a week, building

00:14:46 Jacob Anson: into that platform. Is that something or are there other tips that are relatively easy for somebody to at least

00:14:52 Jacob Anson: try to get the ball rolling at home before they get into the more complicated lists like segmentation and all that? Yeah, for sure.

00:14:59 Jacob Anson: Like the absolute, like the essential female marketing through starting out. of an e-commerce shop, I would recommend you setting up a couple of automations, which I'm going to

00:15:07 Jacob Anson: name just now. For now, like, if you're starting out, your main focus absolutely should be put

00:15:12 Jacob Anson: on to paid ads acquiring customers, and then the email marketing, you can really squeeze out as much profit as you want, essentially.

00:15:20 Jacob Anson: But in terms of like the essential automations, you would always want to set up an abandoned checkout flow. That is for the customers who go to the

00:15:26 Jacob Anson: checkout stage, but don't complete their purchase.

00:15:30 Jacob Anson: If you've stopped online, you obviously know, you've probably should know what I'm talking about. If you go to the checkout site, sometimes you're going to get those annoying,

00:15:37 Jacob Anson: annoying reminder emails.

00:15:39 Jacob Anson: And you might think that they don't really work, but they actually do work pretty well. So that's one thing I'd recommend setting up. The second thing I would recommend sitting up

00:15:47 Jacob Anson: is a pop-up collection,

00:15:50 Jacob Anson: an email collection pop-up on your site and have like a two to four email automation connected to that. So if you collect leads,

00:15:59 Jacob Anson: then you automatically target them with two to four emails

00:16:02 Kevin Mako: with this email automation, and then maybe like a really quick two to four email post-purchase

00:16:07 Kevin Mako: automation, just so you can communicate some points with your buyers, maybe to upsell them on something or maybe informed them no chipping times.

00:16:15 Kevin Mako: Those will be the automations. And then with campaigns, if you're starting out, 12 campaigns a month would be ideal. But if your email lead list is below,

00:16:23 Kevin Mako: let's say 1,000 people, then even like six campaigns a month would be rates. I love how you mentioned that this stuff works. We all get hit with these things,

00:16:32 Kevin Mako: And the reality is the reason we do is because they're effective, especially at volume and with scale.

00:16:37 Kevin Mako: When you mentioned the online website or store or whatnot, this can be as simple as a one product Shopify website, as long as you have these things built in so you're not losing

00:16:47 Kevin Mako: those leads. Take it from some of the best in the world who have very efficient marketing campaigns who run through agencies like yours.

00:16:54 Kevin Mako: If they're doing it, then you on your hardware startup should absolutely be doing it because these are incredibly valuable folks. You don't want to waste those leads.

00:17:02 Kevin Mako: If they came to the site, they almost checked out, or if you had a pop-up window that collected that information, that's a really easy way to grab a very, very

00:17:11 Jacob Anson: warm lead. And then, of course, you want to follow up through these campaigns. Now, let's talk about scaling this.

00:17:17 Jacob Anson: So if you've started and you're starting to see some traction, and maybe you are now starting to build either multiple products or you're trying to sell more regions or bigger drip

00:17:24 Jacob Anson: campaigns, at that point, you probably need professional assistance. How does an engagement start with an agency and what are some of the best practices?

00:17:33 Jacob Anson: What can people do to prepare for, be a really good customer of yours, for a very successful working relationship? Yeah, that's a great question.

00:17:40 Jacob Anson: So, like, in the ideal case scenario, so if you're starting out, they recommend you setting up these things just so you have the base set up and there's actually something

00:17:47 Jacob Anson: already working there. So an agency comes in after a while, once it's maybe too tedious for you to work on,

00:17:54 Jacob Anson: they already have stuff to work on, I see what's working, maybe what's not working, working so well.

00:17:59 Jacob Anson: But the Pure Essentials, first thing,

00:18:02 Jacob Anson: if you have in Shopify, sign up in an email marketing software. From our side, I think Clavio is the best.

00:18:08 Jacob Anson: Through there, you can set up a pop-up. Through there, you can set up the email automation. Through there, you can send out the campaign.

00:18:15 Jacob Anson: It's everything you need, and it's the best software we've seen out there so far for email marketing.

00:18:21 Jacob Anson: The next thing, in terms of agency engagements, it's really much dependent on the case-to-case basis. as an email marketing agency like we overtake,

00:18:29 Jacob Anson: we build out the complete email automation setup from A to Z,

00:18:32 Kevin Mako: everything you need, everything we think you need, and of course on top of that, anything you think you might need as well.

00:18:39 Jacob Anson: And on top of that, we also do 12 to 15 monthly email marketing campaigns to your list. Here, again, this strategy is going to be discussed specifically with you.

00:18:50 Jacob Anson: How aggressive are you going to be with your customers? Maybe not as aggressive, we'll discuss that,

00:18:54 Kevin Mako: come up with the strategy and then make sure you're getting repeat purchases from your list

00:18:59 Kevin Mako: and generate the next revenue for your store from your collective email leads. That's amazing. Much appreciated for that overview.

00:19:06 Kevin Mako: Folks who want to reach out to learn more about what you do or your agency, where can they go? Yeah.

00:19:11 Jacob Anson: So the website's name is agency J.R. So agency J as in Jacob, R as in RANUS.com, that's the agency name.

00:19:19 Jacob Anson: You can schedule a call with us through there. And also the thing Kevin mentioned that the agency link. is going to be in the show notes for easy access, right? Yeah, you bet.

00:19:28 Jacob Anson: I'll put it in the show notes. I'll also put that piece of software that you mentioned as well. If anyone's curious about getting the ball rolling,

00:19:34 Jacob Anson: then I'll put your LinkedIn in there too. Jacob, thanks again. I really appreciate all the words of wisdom today. Give us a high level on email marketing.

00:19:40 Jacob Anson: And we'll look forward to talking again. Thank you. Bye-bye. Take care.

00:19:43 Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market

00:19:51 Narrator: and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design and

00:19:58 Narrator: Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors,

00:20:07 Narrator: and small product business clients. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako -design.com.

00:20:15 Narrator: That's M-A-K-O Design dot com for a free consultation from one of Mako Design's Ford Design Studios from Code. to coast.

00:20:24 Narrator: Thanks for listening and see you next time.