Email Marketing Guaranteed to Work with Ben Billups

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Spleckel, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is email marketing guaranteed to work. Today's guest is the founder of Noble, an agency that specializes in email and SMS marketing for e-commerce brands. A big welcome to Ben Billops. Hi, Ben.

Ben Billups:

Hey, Andy.

Ben Billups:

I appreciate you having me on.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, hey, thanks for coming. Now, I wanted to start with the bold guarantee that's on your website. And I saw that you guarantee to make your clients one dollars per subscriber within 90 days or less, or your work is free until you do. And I've never seen that kind of guarantee. So tell me about it. How did it come to be and how often do you not reach the goal of getting one dollars per subscriber for your new clients?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a fairly new offer for us, but it's based on a bunch of data that we collected from clients that we worked with. And so, so far, we haven't not hit the number, but in terms of where it comes from, I mean, it really just comes from our confidence that there's an application process to qualify for the guarantee, of course. So it's like we want to make sure that there's a few things that are in place, like your AOV, your margins, like a couple of those things are in a position. And then also in addition to that, we like to see at least a list size that's above 30,000 subscribers and monthly active users above 30,000 per month. In the US, when we see those numbers, that kind of gives us the basic indicator that it's like, okay, we know we can come in here, we can plug in our tools and our strategies, and we're very high confidence that we can create this result for our clients in a 90 day period, because what we, and we'll dive more into this further in the interview, I'm sure. But we typically, when we look into accounts, even accounts that are experienced fairly old, for bigger brands, there's almost always some pretty big revenue opportunities on the table when it comes to their list growth, their automations and their promos, promotional cadence, essentially their email campaign. So when we see those gaps, that's what we focus on in terms of these are the real revenue opportunities for the brand, and then that's what the guarantee is based on.

Andy Splichal:

You didn't mention conversion rate. Do you not take into account what kind of conversion rate a website is getting, or is it different? I mean, I know email marketing converts at a higher rate than new traffic coming, but do you consider that at all?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, it's a consideration. I mean, generally speaking, we're not really too worried if the global conversion rate of a website is above 2% on an ecommerce store, we say, all right, this is probably fine if it's under 2%. There may be some issues with the website itself, but to your point, with email, you're sending higher intent traffic from an existing subscriber list. And so it's not uncommon at all for your website conversion rate to be, say, 2%, two and a half percent, but then conversion rate from your email traffic to be, say, 5%.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So there's some wiggle room in that. And when we do these audits, we look at, obviously their ESP. We also look at, say, if they're using Shopify, we'll look at their shopify and we'll kind of look at the performance based on the traffic sources just to see if everything is healthy there. But generally speaking, with email, it's not something we have to worry too much about.

Andy Splichal:

Now, one of the biggest questions that ecommerce companies have is the ROI of hiring an agency versus doing it in house. How much do you believe that hiring an agency and the right agency can increase revenue?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, I mean, the short answer here is it can increase your revenue tremendously if you're working with experts, I would say if you're talking about a smaller brand, so say they're in the six figures, maybe the team is a little bit smaller. It frankly may not make sense for them.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

And we might actually recommend that they do a couple of activities in house while they build up their lists and whatnot. And part of the reason it's built into the guarantee, but part of the reason why we look for those numbers in terms of web traffic and subscriber lists is because we also know that when a brand is dealing with at least that level of volume, we can come in and provide disproportionate value.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

If it's operating at a level smaller than that, it's like maybe it'd be a little bit closer to break even on services, or it's just like you're not making quite enough to justify outsourcing it. But long story short, we have case studies on our site where we came in and we doubled a brand's revenue within a four month period of working with them through email and SMS. And then obviously, like a big case study is when I used to be an in house guy at a beauty brand called Bellamy. We five x their email and SMS revenue in a twelve month period when I was working there pretty much exclusively as their email and SMS guy. So I mean, we have very high confidence that the expertise we bring to the table when it comes to not even just say, setting up all the right automations, which is a big part of it.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

But also when it comes down to what is the actual content of the message, what is your promotional cadence? How long do you wait between automated messages? What automated message triggers do you use? That type of thing? When you really get into the nitty gritty of that stuff at scale, you can realize some value that you probably can't get in house.

Andy Splichal:

How do you learn the voice of the brand that you're representing?

Ben Billups:

So for us, we have a creative process that we go through. So I mean, obviously we do the basic part, which is collecting brand assets, anything that the brand has about their brand guidelines and whatnot. Sometimes we work with luxury brands where they have broader regulations about, we don't run these kinds of promotions or we don't do any type of discounting.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So we learn those things up front and then we work with great designers who really internalize that information. They look at what the brand is posting on social media, they look at the website, they look at the brand guidelines that are provided by the brand and they start to produce content. And at least we see alignment happen fairly quickly, obviously, as there's some expectation that there'll be more revisions early on. But as time goes on, we really start to nail the voice and approvals get easier and easier.

Andy Splichal:

So when you first take on a new client, what are you looking for? What's some of that? Low hanging fruit?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, I would say basically how I kind of prioritize email and SMS, even just structurally, the overall strategy behind it. The first thing I look at when I'm looking at a brand is their list growth. And I've seen big brands who are making tons of money through email and SMS but actually have a list growth that's net negative, which essentially means you're dealing with a ticking time bomb, right? You're generating more unsubscribes than subscribes. So it's like that can be a huge problem and it's something to actually keep your eye on outside of that. So we look at list growth first and we look for opportunities to grow their list faster. And obviously you can do that with opt in units by optimizing those. That's pretty standard practice. But then also we bring in some of these newer identity resolution tools which can really be a force multiplier to list growth.

Ben Billups:

And they are us only. It's can spam compliant but not GDPR compliant. And so we look at different tools that we could plug in that could potentially amplify list growth. So that's really like when it comes to email and SMS, that's the point of leverage is like how big can we make this audience, how big and how healthy and how quickly, right? The next thing we look at are the automations, which are the messages that are printing money while you sleep.

Ben Billups:

Right?

Ben Billups:

So it's not uncommon for us to come in and we'll see a brand running maybe three or four automations, right? They have an abandoned cart, they have a welcome series. Maybe they did a specific giveaway or something like that. They have a drip for that. But sometimes we'll come in and we'll recommend eight to ten, sometimes twelve different automations.

Andy Splichal:

Let's stop there and go through some of those because that I think especially for newer brands that might not have gotten into email marketing, I think that's important. So what are some of the automate, let's talk eight or ten automations. I mean that seems like a lot of it does. What are they?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, and I'll dive into each specific one here. But the real power of the automations is that you can kind of define any intent trigger that you want. Like anything you could trigger a message with, you can define that, you can build an automation trigger out of that behavior and then you can have personalized messaging that follows through based on that intent trigger. And so it's like, let's even say, for example, and we don't do this a ton, we really only recommend it for brands that are legitimately selling high volume with lots of SKUs. But let's say you're selling apparel and it's like you sell men's and women's. You sell pants and shirts and jackets and backpacks, right? You're talking about a lot of skus. Then you can even set up automations that are triggered based on interest that the consumer is showing in certain product categories, right? It's like, okay, this person has clicked on men's pants like three times, right? We should probably follow up with some more product education about men's pants if they haven't purchased yet, right? So you could go really in the weeds with automations about what is triggering these messages, but talking about the basics, those like eight to ten, it really comes down to a divide of pre purchase automations and post purchase automations. So your pre purchase automations are for prospects or customers who are showing intent to repurchase, which are ones people are fairly familiar with.

Ben Billups:

So like your welcome series would be pre purchase. And sometimes you may need two or three welcome series to support different lead channels. Generally speaking, it's a good idea, at least with your first message to make sure that that first email that they're getting acknowledges the lead channel they came through.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

If they signed up through a social media giveaway versus a pop up on your website versus an identity resolution tool that you're running, you want to treat them slightly differently. So you may need different automations for that. And then your other pre purchase automations are essentially variations of abandonment automations. So you've got abandoned cart, you've got abandoned checkout. And I see a lot of brands where, let's say they're running abandoned checkout, but they're not running abandoned cart, right. And it's like, okay, well, that's actually a huge revenue opportunity because you're still dealing with very high intent customers who are not making it all the way to purchase.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So making sure you have both of those set up is important. And then you can extrapolate further, right. You've got product abandonment. You can even do site abandonment. And obviously the level of aggression and the types of messaging that you're putting into those automations should be reflective of how high intent is the customer.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Andy Splichal:

How do you get their email? I mean, most ecommerce companies are running cart abandonment because they've already entered their email into the cart. How are you getting their email and sending them that on like a product abandonment or site abandonment where they haven't started filling out any forms.

Ben Billups:

Yep.

Ben Billups:

So there's two ways. The kind of the more traditional way is if the customer is already in your database, let's say, for example, you're using Klavio as your email solution. You can install a Klavio cookie on your website where if Klavio is able to identify that a user has visited your site and they already exist as an opt in your database, then it can actually identify that site behavior and you can trigger messaging based on that. So obviously, you're not going to get true one to one matchback with the Klavio cookie. But let's say somebody came to your site a month ago, they signed up for your opt in offer, they leave, they come back, they look at a specific product, maybe through advertising, retargeting, right? Then they leave again. You have their email in your database. Klavia was able to match them. Now you can trigger a message, right?

Andy Splichal:

So they would have to have signed up sometime, though.

Ben Billups:

In that case, yes, but not in the case of these new identity resolution tools, which are super powerful. So we're talking about Retention.com revenue role. There's a couple of these tools out there, and essentially what they do is they use an identity graph to pull the email address of the person who visited your site, and then they pass that email address back to your EsP. And so your matchback rate on that is actually going to be astronomically high. In some cases, 30 or 40% of your web traffic could be identified by a tool like this, in which case that customer actually didn't even necessarily need to opt in in order for you to have their email and start sending them messaging. And of course, we can get into the deliverability part of it as well, because you want to make sure that you're not being too aggressive with those contacts because they did not explicitly opt in. But it is a way to identify users on your site even if you don't have their email in your database.

Andy Splichal:

How often do those users opt out? And how aggressive can you be with those emails? If they haven't? You're getting into privacy issues. Sure. How aggressive is a marketer in a store? Can you be with those?

Ben Billups:

So all of these tools are like, can spam compliant and CCPA compliant? And broadly speaking, in the US, it is still kind of the wild west when it comes to data vendors and privacy. For the most part, things are slowly starting to tighten down, actually at the state level. But for the most part, we live in an opt out country, right? Which is, for the most part, you can acquire an email in any particular way. And then when you send that email, as long as you have a business address and an unsubscribed link in the email, it's legal right. But the next thing you need to control for is deliverability, which is if you're getting a ton of spam complaints or if your engagement rate is super low, then you're going to start landing in spam more and more as a sender. And that's something to keep an eye on. So I would say, let's even just say as an example, you implement an identity resolution tool and you actually have a triggered welcome series, which is not always the best idea, but let's just use that as an example. So someone comes to your site, they don't opt in, they leave your site, you collect their email, you initiate a welcome series.

Ben Billups:

Your unsubscribe rate on that email is probably going to be fairly high. In fact, I even encourage brands to actually put an unsubscribe link at the very top that says, hey, if you're not interested in this, unsubscribe, because I would take an unsubscribe over a spam complaint any day of the week.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

Your unsubscribe rate may be literally like 2% on that email.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

But that's of the emails that you are collecting through that tool. So most of them are staying on the list. And with the tool like that and a welcome series that initiates straight after they view the site, I've seen open rates as high as 50, 60%, click rates around one, two, 3%. There's a variance on the quality of the content and also the interest of basically how high quality your traffic is as well. And then with some of these tools, when you install the script on your site, you can also kind of control for quality as well by, say, requiring, for example, that before you collect the email address, they visit at least two pages or they stay on the site for, say, at least 90 seconds.

Andy Splichal:

Right, right, exactly. What are the name of those tools again?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, so actually the one that I've used the most is called retention.com, which is a phenomenal tool. They have a great e commerce solution. And then another one that we're testing out right now with a client is called revenue roll, which it seems like on the whole is probably lower cost for the same or like even a slightly better product. But there's a lot of vendors actually getting into this space. Retention.com really made a big marketing splash. They're probably the most well known.

Andy Splichal:

That was going to be. My next question is what kind of costs are associated with adding a software like that to your site?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, their pricing varies a ton. So if you're interested I definitely recommend just going to the sites and sort of punching in your web traffic and seeing what you get. So for example, revenue roll basically charges per identification and they're essentially charging five cents per identification.

Andy Splichal:

Wow. Okay.

Ben Billups:

Someone comes to your site and they're identified, and then you're either triggering an abandonment message or you're collecting their email.

Ben Billups:

Right?

Ben Billups:

Now, if you're gating it, you're potentially collecting five cent email addresses.

Ben Billups:

Right?

Ben Billups:

Especially if your database is small. Retention.com, they structure their contracts more in like packages. So it's like you're basically paying x dollars a month for a certain number of emails per month and then they tack on the abandonment resolution component as basically just part of the service. And so with retention, you're effectively paying somewhere around $15 to email, but you're getting the additional resolutions for free. So the pricing is a little bit all over the place, depending on which tool you're looking at. But really, I would say this is a slam dunk. If you have at least 25 or 30,000 US based visitors coming to your site each month, you're pretty much guaranteed to make at least a three or a four XrOi with a tool like this. I mean, our clients have gotten eleven Xroi on some occasions and I've seen a screenshot of a founder who got a 90 xroi with one of these.

Ben Billups:

I mean, it's a screenshot, right? So I'm not 100% sure about that. But long story short, if you're getting enough traffic volume, it could definitely be worth it to use some of these tools.

Andy Splichal:

Now, one of the things particularly, I mean, everybody struggles with it, but particularly smaller websites is how do you collect emails? And everybody almost has that sign up for our newsletter, which nobody really does. Why are you saying that it should have only higher volume ones? I would think even lower ones that had 5000 visitors a month would want to use something like this.

Ben Billups:

Yeah, I mean, it really just comes down to your ROI expectation. So I would say if someone's getting 5000 visitors a month, a tool like this could effectively ten x their list growth.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

And I've seen that happen before. So it's an incredible list growth tool. But the thing to keep in mind is typically if you're dealing with that level of volume for what you're paying for the tool itself, you may be breaking even or making like a 1.5 x ROI. And most of it just has to do with the fact that if you're not getting enough traffic coming to your site, even if you're collecting a ton of emails from it. It's not going to be triggering enough resolutions for you to be getting that revenue coming through those abandonment flows. So I would just say, I think if I was running a smaller brand and I just wanted to invest in building my list, I probably would do it. But it's like you just have to tamper your ROI expectations.

Andy Splichal:

Now, do you set that up for your clients to come on board with you typically, or do you tell them to go out and do this? You recommend it? Or where are you with this with your clients?

Ben Billups:

We like to set it up for them. I mean, we'll obviously tell them about it. And then when we set it up, we also basically create a strategy based on the brand, based on their traffic, based on their current list size, et cetera, to say, okay, how many emails do we want to collect, how do we want to handle them when we do collect them, et cetera. And there's variations in strategy that can make sense for one brand but not another. So we typically will do the implementation ourselves.

Andy Splichal:

Now, do you have a preferred ESP email service provider that you use with your clients or do you use what they're using? How does that work?

Ben Billups:

For sure? I will say that for the most part, unless you're using like a terrible ESP, generally speaking, the cost of migration doesn't add a ton of value. So we typically try to use the tools that the client is already using, unless there's just features or there's just something that's just not possible that really could make them a considerable amount of money. But when it comes to e commerce, I mean, Klavio is by far the biggest player in the space. It's an amazing ESP. And that's even speaking across different industries that I've used ESPs in for news publishing and whatnot, Klavio is legitimately fantastic. I mean, the other big player in the space these days is sendlane. I haven't had a chance personally to work with it very heavily, but I've heard great things about it, so it seems like a great alternative.

Andy Splichal:

Now, have you incorporated AI at all into the content writing or any other aspect of the email marketing?

Ben Billups:

In a fairly limited way. I mean, sometimes we'll use it even just to try to get some off the wall, like topic generation or some ideas or to get like a starting point for some copy. Sure. But honestly, we don't use AI tools that often. There are some interesting ones popping up that we're going to start experimenting with that are specifically designed for ecommerce where you could essentially you tell the AI like, hey, we're running a promotion. It's 20% off and it actually already has all your brand assets and it just generates designed creative. So I think that stuff is absolutely on the horizon. But a lot of it's in its infancy right now.

Ben Billups:

We're not using it heavily with a ton of our clients.

Andy Splichal:

Now let's talk about privacy laws and even email versus mentioned. You had mentioned earlier that as long here in the US, as long as you have the business name and unsubscribe, you're all right with email. Really. But what about SMS? Are the different privacy laws around that?

Ben Billups:

Yes, 100%. So with TCPA, there's really no such thing as cold SMS or even identity resolution SMS. You have to have a double opt in in order to send bulk messages. Like, that's a non negotiable. So to growing your SMS list is pretty much going to be based purely on the performance of your opt in units or different giveaways that you do. And even when you do have those opt in units set up, there's very specific requirements, even about the consent language that you display on those forms. The contrast ratio of the typeface, it can't be gray on, right? Like, has to be pretty clearly visible. It has to say certain things.

Ben Billups:

You have to have the whole stop to stop, et cetera. So with TCPA, it's no laughing matter like that. TCPA compliance is a real thing that you should take seriously. And broadly speaking, you should have double opt ins. There are a couple of interesting kind of like edge cases. So just to give an example of something that does kind of get around TCPA is what they call peer to peer SMS. And effectively what that is is if somebody actually clicks send, it's not an automated system that's sending a message to, say, 10,000 people. If somebody actually clicks the send button, it's considered peer to peer.

Ben Billups:

And that gets around some of the TCPA requirements. Not all of them, but some of them. And so there are actually platforms out there that essentially have managed service, peer to peer messaging for something like abandoned cart, where they actually will send an SMS message that otherwise is not a double opt in, but because it's peer to peer, they can get around some of the requirements. I would just say be very careful with those strategies and if anything, work with a vendor that either would take all the blame in the case of non compliance or that really has their compliance buttoned up, because with SMS, it's much more strict.

Andy Splichal:

Now, how does SMS versus email perform. I mean, as I'm thinking about it and I'm looking, I mean, this is a perieella shirt. It's one of my favorite brands. And they are so aggressive on SMS. I mean, they're one or two times a. I mean, what do you recommend and how does it perform, SMS text messages versus email?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, for sure. Generally speaking, the send volume is absolutely lower than on email.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

And a big part of it is just that SMS is a much more intimate channel. The open rates are still like 90 plus percent.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So it's like if you send an email and it gets 40% opens, you basically have to send two of those before, as many people have seen that on the same list size compared to an SMS message.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

The other factor that's great about SMS, and part of the reason why I think it's been picking up so much steam here in the ecom space, is that your revenue per recipient expectations on SMS tend to be much higher. Obviously, it varies based on AOV and list quality and whatnot. But I've seen SMS lists that are a half or even the third of a size of an email list generate the same amount of revenue as the email list. So it's not something to sleep on at all. And when it comes to the cadence, generally speaking, like, let's say we're sending two or three emails a week, we'll do about half that on SMS. The big thing with SMS is you want to keep an eye on your unsubscribes from messages. And if you start noticing that your unsubscribes are kind of getting out of control, you're probably sending too many or you're continually sending to recipients that just aren't engaged. So those are things that you want to keep an eye on.

Ben Billups:

But across both email and SMS, really finding the local maximum is about increasing frequency until you see degradation in the KPIs. And until you see degradation in the KPIs, one way to look at it is that there's money on the table. And it's one thing if you say as a brand, we just don't want to be that aggressive. But if you're really talking from maximizing revenue through these channels, from that perspective, that's essentially the best way to do it, is to say, okay, if you're sending one email a week and two SMS a month, try doubling it. And then basically keep an eye on your KPIs and see what happens. And if your KPIs are still healthy after that, try adding another message.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

And then just see, where do you actually start to see degradation? Your KPIs. And it's like, all right, we found the local maximum, now we can dial back from there.

Andy Splichal:

You really hit a big worry, I think, of a lot of ecommerce companies is they're worried that they're going to lose customers, good customers, by sending too many emails. And you put out a great way to test it and see. But I hate to speak in generalities, but on average, for your ecommerce customers, how many do you find that they can send a week before they start seeing negative returns of people unsubscribing?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, I mean, just in terms of, if we're just talking about ecommerce. Baseline. Baseline, I would consider to be two emails a week and one SMS per week. I would consider that baseline. If you're doing less than that, there's no doubt you're leaving money on the table. But I think part of the reason why there's so much variance is it can vary based on the relationship the brand has with its consumers. It can also vary based on the anticipated repurchase rate. It's like, it's totally different if you're selling something somebody might buy every six months versus every month.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

And how frequently you should stay in front of them. So it's like all of those are things you want to take into account, including AOV.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

If you sell more expensive products, it makes sense that consumers would buy those less frequently. Maybe you want to be a little bit less aggressive than more aggressive.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So there's all these different factors that can play into it.

Andy Splichal:

Now, how much do you segment your client list for clients? Everybody. Type of products where men or women, basic segmentings. But do you go further and segment recent buyers, multiple buyers, purchases for buyers. I mean, how much on past user behavior do you segment?

Ben Billups:

Yeah. So, I mean, the two big ways to segment are based on engagement and then the other one is based on their customer status effectively.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So you have prospects. And generally speaking, this is like a good structure. You have your prospects, you want to be aggressive with prospects. And actually Jimmy Kim is a big evangelist of this. He's the creator of Sunlink. You want to be aggressive with prospects, you want to be nice to your customers. So we're talking about one time purchasers and then you want to treat your VIPs very well. So that's two plus, for most brands, that's two orders or more.

Ben Billups:

So that's kind of one approach. Another approach that you can do separately and or layer on to that approach is based on the recency and frequency of engagement. And that's something that we do a ton, which is has this contact engaged with the brand in the last 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, all the way out to 180 days. If they haven't engaged in more than six months, we generally consider them disengaged. But there are even some cases where it's worth contacting those customers. So, I mean, when you're talking about segmentation, the short answer is we always segment. And then you generally want to build your message around the segment that you want to hit, right? So it's like, are these red hot leads prospects that haven't bought yet? Is this more so a message that's going out to our VIPs, that kind of thing. But I will kind of caveat all of this by saying you don't want to over engineer your segmentation.

Ben Billups:

And actually, Black Friday is kind of a perfect example of this where it's not an uncommon practice for, let's say, for example, you want to build your Black Friday segments and then during the course of the Black Friday promotion, you're pulling purchasers out of your email and SMS list. So it's like, all right, if you've already bought during Black Friday, we're not going to keep pestering you, right. Actually, if you test it and you look at the data, it's not uncommon at all for someone to buy multiple times during your Black Friday promotion.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So it's like you just want to keep those things in mind when you're building out exclusions, is to say, does this really make sense, or am I just making an assumption about our customers that may not be true when I'm building this segment?

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Now let's talk. I mean, there's so many changes going on now, we've talked about AI a little bit, but in the next twelve to 18 months, talk about privacy. Where do you see the email industry changing in the short term?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, I mean, short term, we just now passed those Google and Yahoo updates, which really, I mean, we could dive into the details there, but really it's about the enforcement of best practices. It's about making sure that your spam complaint rates are low and that all the emails you're sending are authenticated. Right. And more and more ISPs are probably going to implement that.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

So in the short term, that's definitely a reality. We also see a growing profile of states. So I believe right now the count is up to 13 states that either have or are in the middle of sort of passing their own version of CCPA, which is all about cookie consent, opt ins and whatnot for your email list. But a lot of that has to do with really like Pixel hygiene and website consent, least as far as I can tell. And I'm by no means am I a legal expert or a compliance expert. I just operate in this space quite a bit. But as far as I can tell, I think the United States will continue to be an opt out nation for probably at least another decade or two. I mean, it's possible at the federal level that something like GDPR could come through where it's basically impossible to build your list without just pure opt ins, running ads, doing lead Gen, et cetera.

Ben Billups:

But I think with everything happening at the state level, I'm honestly not too worried about it.

Andy Splichal:

Now, what is a piece of actionable advice you could give listeners that would give them some quick results with their email marketing?

Ben Billups:

I mean, I would say if you don't have identity resolution implemented and your traffic volume is decent, absolutely look into it, go to retention.com or revenueroll.com and just explore that possibility, because that can be massive. I guess I'll give three pieces of actionable advice. The other one is look through your automations and look for opportunities. And actually, I did an audit of an account that was fairly well built out, but really just spend time in your account and look for auditing. So I'll give you an example of one that I saw, which was in the case of this brand, their abandoned cart email was generating more revenue per recipient than their abandoned checkout email. And it's usually the other way around because abandoned checkout is a higher level of a 10th than cart.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

And then when I actually go and look at the two automations, I'm like, well, why would this possibly be true? The most obvious explanation, and we're testing this theory right now, was that in one automation, in the checkout automation, the delay between the abandoned checkout and the first message was 1 hour versus in the cart automation. It was 30 minutes.

Ben Billups:

Right.

Ben Billups:

Interesting. Even if you have a good portfolio of automations built out, I would just say go into, just look at them, look for anomalies, but also test different delays because sometimes the time delay can make a pretty big difference, too.

Andy Splichal:

And what was the third piece of actionable advice?

Ben Billups:

The third piece of advice would be to build a lot of core segments and just make sure that you're sending at least two emails a week and make sure that you're rotating segments when you do. We do a lot based on recency. So let's say if you're sending two emails a week, I would send one to your 30 day segment and I would send one to your 90 day segment. And then, so, functionally, what's happening is if someone has more recently engaged with your brand, they're getting two emails. And if someone is less engaged with your brand, they're getting one, essentially. And we actually build out our promo cadences with this in mind, too, where it's like the operating theory is that a customer that has more recently engaged with your brand is going to be more forgiving of frequent messaging than a less engaged customer. And we essentially build everything out with that in mind, and it tends to be very effective for us.

Andy Splichal:

Now, do you have a favorite success story you could share of people you worked on? You've given a lot of tips, but I'm curious on the practical, what has happened with some of your clients?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, I would say really the biggest success story is at Bellamy, that hair extension brand, they were doing 250,000 a month in email and SMS revenue when I came in. And a year later, when we wrapped up working with them, they were doing 1.2 million a month in email and SMS. And a big part of that, too, was that when I came in, they didn't even have SMS open as a channel. And I do see that with a lot of brands sometimes, too, where it's like, even if you literally just added SMS as a channel and put some thought behind it, you'd see a of revenue come through. But, yeah, I mean, I would say by far, that's probably one of the most, at least in terms of speaking to ecommerce specifically. That's one of the most explosive growths that I've been a part of.

Andy Splichal:

And we talked a little bit about what you look for in offering the guarantee. But who is the perfect client for you guys to work with?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, really ideal for us is beauty, fashion, health and wellness. And then it really just comes down to those parameters we discussed. I like to see an AOV over $75. I prefer that your margins be at least 50%, and then also that your email list is at least 30,000 and your web traffic is at least 30,000 in the US. And if you go to our site, we basically have an application that pretty much asks you all those questions. If you kind of tick all those boxes, that's pretty much ideal for us.

Andy Splichal:

And how does your fee structure work?

Ben Billups:

So there's two ways. One is we can just charge essentially a full service flat retainer to fully manage your email and your SMS channels. And for some brands, that's what they prefer. We also offer performance compensation, where actually we come down on the retainer and we take a percentage of last click attributed revenue to email and SMS. So it's based purely on results. With last click, they click the email and they bought the product. It's like there's no magic sauce in that attribution number, right? It's the most conservative. So some brands prefer that.

Andy Splichal:

And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you and your agency?

Ben Billups:

Yeah, I post all the time on LinkedIn and Twitter, so feel free to punch my name up. I'll pop right up. Or if you're actually interested in working with us or just learning a little bit more about our agency, you can go to Nobledigital Co. Well, this has been great.

Andy Splichal:

Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today, Ben?

Ben Billups:

No, I would say just send great emails and probably send more of them.

Andy Splichal:

That's some great closing words. All right, well, thank you again for joining us today, Ben.

Ben Billups:

Absolutely. Thanks, Andy.

Andy Splichal:

For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Ben or Nobledigital.co. You will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center, available at podcasts makeeachclickount.com. We have compiled all of our different guests by show topic and include each of their contact information. In case you would like more information on any of the services discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.