How To Grow Your Business Using Email Marketing Strategies | Tom Kulzer

Matt Edmundson

00:00:08.880 - 00:03:36.270

Well, hello and welcome to the E Commerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmondson. The E Commerce Podcast is all about helping you to deliver E Commerce. Wow.

And to help us do just that, I am chatting with today's very special guest, Tom Kulser, who is the founder and CEO of AWeber about how to grow your online business using email marketpl marketing strategies. But before Tom and I get into that, let me suggest a few other e Commerce Podcast episodes that I think you're also going to enjoy listening to.

Why not check out a recent episode with Dan Badai, the Secrets of Retaining Customers with Email Marketing. What a legend that guy is. And also check out how to Optimize Engagement through Customer Lifestyle Marketing with Cath Pay.

I still remember Cath Pay being in a very tropical location when we recorded that episode, so do check those out. You can find these and our entire archive of episodes on our website for free ecommerce podcast.net and on our website.

You can also sign up to our emails newsletter which I feel very good about giving today's guest and each week we will email you these links along with the notes and the transcript from today's conversation with Tom directly to your inbox. Totally free. It's all good stuff. It's all totally amazing.

Now this episode is brought to you by the E Commerce Coach which helps you deliver e commerce well to your customers. You know what? I've come across a bunch of folks who find e commerce it's a bit of an overwhelming topic, shall we say?

You've got to keep up with the tech which changes so fast. How do you do customer service when everybody's tastes and habits are changing all of the time?

And to top it all off, you've got to stay on top of all the latest marketing techniques and ideas. So we talk about all of these things obviously on the E Commerce podcast.

But for those of you in e commerce you should Also check out ecommerce cohort.com it is a membership group for those who are in e commerce and it does guided monthly sprints that cycle through all the key areas of E comm. You'll keep up to date.

You'll be working on the key areas of your e commerce business, including your marketing and email marketing like we're talking about today. So whether you are just starting out in e commerce or if like me, you are a well established ecommercer, I encourage you to get involved.

Check it out. Ecommerce cohort.com that's ecommerce cohort.com now before I get into today's conversation.

I just want to, just want to read out the bio that's in front of me.

Tom is the founder and CEO of AWeber, the leading email marketing platform and automation platform for small businesses where he is actively involved in the company. That's not easy to say. Company's strategic direction, growth and evolution.

Over the company's 24 year history, Tom has nurtured AWeber from a small startup to a robust organization that we've all heard of, we all know about and has enabled over 1 million customers to grow their businesses, all without public or venture funding. Go Tom. That's amazing. Tom, great to have you here on the e commerce podcast.

Thank you for taking time out of your no doubt insanely busy schedule to join us here today.

Tom Kulzer

00:03:36.830 - 00:03:39.950

Thanks for having me on today Matt. Conversation.

Matt Edmundson

00:03:40.110 - 00:03:50.590

Oh yeah, it's going to be great.

So for those, you know, for the four people listening to the podcast that actually hasn't heard of AWeber, just tell us what is AWeber and what do you guys do?

Tom Kulzer

00:03:51.390 - 00:04:30.890

Yeah, we're email marketing platform. So think of us as the, you know, automation behind communicating with your subscribers.

So when you publish an email newsletter, you log into AWeber to create that newsletter and send that content out.

When you think about, you know, automation sequences that people talk about or automated follow up, our platform is the one that enables you to do that.

So when somebody clicks on an email or clicks on a link, you send a certain email, you know, they open a message, they don't open a message, you send a different email, et cetera.

So our platform is the one that enables small businesses around the world to be able to send those kind of communications out to the people that requested them.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:31.750 - 00:04:45.670

Fantastic. Now I'm kind of curious, where did the name aweber come from? Because it's not. Well it's not, it's not what I would have named an email company.

Do you mean it's not a sort of top? Unless I miss that off the head.

Tom Kulzer

00:04:45.830 - 00:05:44.530

Yeah, yeah. So back in early 98 we were calling it the Automated Web Assistant and this is where it launched. So now it's making more sense, eh? Yeah, yeah.

So Automated Web Assistant is a really long domain name and that's just not particularly catchy. So it kind of got shortened and it's like aweb. Aweb Ass. No, it just kind of turned into aweber. And historically it's one of those things.

It's like it begins with an A, it's short, it's catchy, it's unique and it's Just kind of a memorable thing when somebody hears it.

We always capitalize the A and the W but not the E because you know it's not the assistant part but yeah, no it's just it was one of those kind of funny naming historical bits that we've hung onto.

Matt Edmundson

00:05:45.010 - 00:05:55.730

That's really funny how that how these things sort of come about, isn't it? And the stories say how did you get started? How did aweber get started?

Did you just wake up one day and think I'm going to help people conquer the world of email?

Tom Kulzer

00:05:56.910 - 00:08:00.480

No, not at all. I was actually I was studying mechanical engineering in college and I was selling this wireless modem.

So this was back when we were still had dial up modems for connecting to the Internet. So like wireless technology that you could velcro to the back of your laptop was the latest greatest thing.

And I was selling this at computer shows and I was basically a sales rep for it. And you know, in the process being a college student I was kind of lazy and you know, actually selling things required follow up.

Like I didn't just see them at the computer show and they instantly bought this expensive device and then paid for an expensive monthly service. They had more questions or they weren't sold right away and you had to kind of follow up with them.

So I'd send these manual emails and that's a lot of work. Hence the lazy college student aspect.

I wrote a little program that would automatically send out the messages because 90% of the messages that I sent were the same message to each of the different people.

And I customize a little bit and yeah, so I wrote this and I ended up sharing it with other salespeople around the country that were selling the same product. And my payment for that was send me the messages that are working. I want to know what copy works.

Because that was not something I was particularly good at.

So we shared them and I would share them off to other people and we all sold more as a result of both this automated email tool and sharing copy that work. So we had the right messaging. One thing led to another. I ended up leaving that company to focus on school.

Somebody was telling me that was important parents and I stopped running the program that was sending out all the automated follow ups for all these other people around the country. And they started coming to me saying hey, I'll pay you for that thing that I was previously getting for free.

And I was like maybe there's a business here maybe. And that turned into our automated web assistant. That turned into a Weber Many years later, here we are.

Matt Edmundson

00:08:01.120 - 00:08:09.760

Wow. It's funny, isn't it? How. When, can I ask, when was it you wrote this first little program?

Tom Kulzer

00:08:10.400 - 00:08:11.948

So it was like 97.

Matt Edmundson

00:08:12.132 - 00:08:50.260

97. So in 98. In 98 I wrote my first ever website. It was around 97, 98.

And then that sort of one thing led to another and that I ended up writing an E commerce site, and then that led to something else, and then that led to something. And then here I am today. Right. And I find it fascinating, Tom, that you.

Kind of the amount of journeys that start off with I was in college or I was at uni, or I was young, had a lot of time on my hands, and I just played around with, and 20 years later, here I am. Do you know what I mean? Kind of really fascinating story to me. And that seems to be yours, right?

Tom Kulzer

00:08:50.500 - 00:10:57.140

Yeah, no, absolutely. At the time, I was single and racing bicycles kind of in the amateur level.

So if I was either not in school or not riding my bike, I was sitting in front of a computer messing around with code and just seeing what I could kind of hack away on. I was part of a number of different kind of newsletters.

I moderated a newsletter that basically took kind of entrepreneurial, just something that was always interesting to me. So I kind of. I created this little ecosystem around me that was other entrepreneurs.

So when I ultimately, I kind of launched jweber to a larger group, I launched it to this group of entrepreneurs that were in other businesses. And I, you know, instantly had traction as a result of that because I. They already knew who I was. Like, I had some element of validation.

Even though I was very upfront in the fact that I was a college student, I was still figuring this out. But I had developed this thing that was really useful for a lot of people, and they instantly saw the value in that and became customers.

So, you know, and I think there's. There's.

There's this path that happens for a lot of businesses that, you know, just getting a little bit of traction in, where you're actually adding value and solving your own problems. But solving other people's problems is really, really, you know, is. Is really the point that you need to get.

I think a lot of the media obsesses around entrepreneurs that raise money as like, you know, this. This level of success. And it's like, I've never looked at that as a point of success.

It's like, okay, I convinced a small board of people to give me a whole lot of money. That's very different than Convincing a whole lot of businesses that the thing that you're selling is valuable and they want to give you.

There's two completely different dichotomies.

And I think the press and the general public, you know, kind of romanticizes raising a whole bunch of money, which to me is just like a ticking time bomb. Because eventually if you don't have customers paying for whatever it is that you're selling, that money runs out.

Matt Edmundson

00:10:57.620 - 00:10:58.060

Yeah.

Tom Kulzer

00:10:58.060 - 00:11:17.050

And you have to do some big changes.

Either raise more money, sell the company, fold, whatever, versus building a business in a company that kind of has legs and can stand on its own two feet and continue to grow and perpetuate for as long as those customers find value in what you're selling.

Matt Edmundson

00:11:17.610 - 00:12:30.480

No, I agree. I think, like you say, it's been overhyped, the whole raising finance thing, and it's got problems. Right. It's not all glamorous.

And I know, like without E Commerce, we sold a big E Commerce business last year. I have another one still running both of those companies. Both of those. Right. I have a very simple philosophy in that whatever stock we have, we own.

So I don't buy stock on invoice. I don't. I don't do that. I prepay for everything, if that. I mean, the site we have now, we manufacture, so we definitely got to pay for everything.

But before when we had the beauty site, everything on our shelves we owned.

And so when you in effect hit those problems when there was downturns, I didn't have to concern myself with trying to scramble to find the cash to pay the invoices as well as payroll. And there's something to be said, certainly from my point of view, about, I just call it organic growth.

The ability just to go out, find some more customers, serve those customers, use the profits from that and go and find more customers. Right. So is that. It sounds like that's what you've done, if I understood that right.

Tom Kulzer

00:12:30.960 - 00:14:43.200

Yeah, no, absolutely. That's, you know, we're through and through a bootstrap company. So we've never raised outside funding.

And, you know, we serve future customers based on the profits from. From past customers and the revenue that they're paying us.

So, you know, at the end of the day, like, our costs are very different than, you know, a traditional kind of, you know, inventory type business. Like I don't have inventory sitting around.

But I think a lot of, you know, when you look at raising funds and so forth, it's the, you know, it's the dichotomy of how you're leveraging the business to grow.

You know, we've certainly grown slower as a result of that, I think in ways that, you know, we're both my own comfort zone, as well as in ways that I think change a company's kind of DNA when you grow too fast. You know, if I double the head, you know, I doubled our team size this year.

Like, that's going to impact the way that our team members talk to each other and how they relate to one another and how company culture passes from one to the other. And I think that.

That those things have to be balanced as, you know, as you grow a company over the years or you kind of lose who you are and what makes you special. I don't know, it's just. There's lots of things to think about, but that's just kind of some of the stuff that I've balanced over the years.

You know, if I. At the same time, like, if I went back to the beginning, I ran everything myself for the first two years.

I didn't hire anyone until we had was like 23 or 2400 customers. Like over 2000 paying customers. I'm writing code, I'm doing marketing. I'm doing all the customer service. Basically.

During the day, I did all customer service, and at night I did marketing, pr, you know, writing new code, et cetera. And it was like, I look back on it, it was like, that's insane. Why did I do that?

But for me, it was like, okay, at what point can I get to a revenue component where I can feel really confident that I can support. Support another person's livelihood? Yeah. And at the same time, it was like, well, hiring somebody, like, that's scary. How do I do that?

Like, how do I even physically do that? And it's like, you know, it's really not that hard when you look back on it.

But as a new entrepreneur and having never done that before, it's like, that's, you know, it's. It's a barrier, and you have to get through that. Yeah. So.

Matt Edmundson

00:14:43.760 - 00:15:07.490

Oh, no, it sounds. I mean, I. I could wax lyrical with you all afternoon. I think about just how you. How you build the business and the learnings from that.

I find the whole thing fascinating. It's why, between you and me, and I don't think I've mentioned this before in the ECOM podcast, we're launching a second podcast called Push.

In fact, by the time this airs, Push will be out. Push to be more where I just talk to leaders about how they've Led. I love it. It's great. The fascinating conversations.

Tom Kulzer

00:15:08.050 - 00:15:08.530

Nice.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:09.650 - 00:15:32.420

We'll have to get you on that one as well. Now let's talk about e commerce because, you know, that's why people have tuned in really. That's. Let's say you've obviously been around email.

Well, you've been around email longer than I've been around. I started in e Commerce in 2002. So you've been in email longer than I've been in e commerce.

Tom Kulzer

00:15:32.420 - 00:15:35.220

So you know, a lot of emails.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:35.380 - 00:15:41.140

Yeah. Have you, have you actually tried to calculate how many emails you have been responsible for being sent?

Tom Kulzer

00:15:41.700 - 00:16:03.820

Oh gosh, it's, it's not quite trillions yet, but it's hundreds of billions. So it's a lot of emails and I like to always make sure that I preface that with its permission based emails.

We don't send emails that people don't request. So you have to have permission to send emails. So we're. Yeah, we're not, we try very hard to not be part of the spam problem.

Matt Edmundson

00:16:05.580 - 00:16:12.020

Well, years ago, spam wasn't a problem. Obviously when you first started out, it wasn't, people were, I would say it definitely was.

Tom Kulzer

00:16:12.020 - 00:19:07.320

Like it's always been a contingent of something that we've had to deal with. You know, the, there was, there were different rules. Like there was a lack of rules back then.

I've always looked at spam and you know, the unsolicited email as, you know, taking care of the email ecosystem.

You know, if we do things as a platform that trashes the viability of email, as a marketing platform or as a communication platform, you know, it's, it's kind of like, you know, biting the hand that feeds you and that, that expression. It's like, why, you know, why would I want to make that a useless platform? Because ultimately then businesses aren't going to invest in it.

Email has really remained one of the top investments for businesses from a return on investment standpoint. You know, every dollar, you know, gets turned into $34 according to direct Marketing association and on, you know, investment in email.

So it's, it's one of those things that done right, it can be really profitable, can really connect with your users in ways that you just can't do across social and other platforms that are out there at the same time. Like you own your audience. You know, it's like everyone's got every other business's logo on their website these days.

Subscribe to my YouTube, you know, follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, like You know, you name, name them off.

Even now it's, you know, follow my podcast on Apple and you know, 14 different platforms and it's like as a business we don't own any of those platforms. If one of those platforms, like if Twitter decides they don't want you publishing on Twitter anymore, goodbye audience.

I can't take my Twitter following and like import them into a new platform and continue to communicate with them. Whereas email, you own the email address like they belong to you.

You can export them from our platform or any other platform that you're sending those email from and continue to send to those subscribers from a different platform. So if we for some reason decide that whatever it is that you're doing is not appropriate on our platform, you can continue to do that somewhere else.

Yeah, you can't, you don't have that same leverage with Facebook.

It's very much this, you know, when I go back to, you know, the 90s and the early 2000s, it's the same way everyone was trying to build platform around AOL and getting, you know, people to, to kind of follow you in that closed ecosystem. That was the paywall behind aol.

That was really kind of the leading, you know, a leading indicator of what then turned into all of these other platforms that are out there with Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and so forth in that you have to play exclusively by their rules and if you don't, you're gone. And it's as simple as that and you have no recovery. So it's a, it's a balance.

And, and I look at email as, as something that is more transferable, more ownable, has higher longer term economics. You know, an email subscriber is worth far more than a Twitter follower, you know, Facebook follower, etc.

Matt Edmundson

00:19:07.720 - 00:20:01.340

So I totally agree and it's what I mean, I like what you said there, how I mean I was, I was joking or jesting in some respects saying email. You've been doing email longer than I've been doing E commerce and it show I wasn't doing Twitter, I wasn't doing Facebook, I wasn't doing.

They didn't even exist when I was, when I first started out in business. But email did and email is still by far the biggest return on our investment from a marketing point of view.

And it's like people ask me all the time, what do you think about and this latest technique or this fancy idea over here? And you go, well listen, if you got the basics done right, what are the basics? Well, let's talk about your Website.

And let's talk about your email marketing. Right. They've been around since the start of E commerce and they're still here. But obviously email has changed, it's adapted, it's evolved over time.

I mean what are some of the things that you've noticed sort of change in the email marketing world?

Tom Kulzer

00:20:02.700 - 00:22:32.570

Yeah, there's a lot of overall changes.

When I first started messages where it was just a subject line and plain text and now you've got obviously HTML email where you can make an email have images and it can look like, you know, a lot of businesses send these brochure type emails.

I don't generally recommend most businesses send as you know, use email as more of a personal communication platform than you know, than just sending out brochureware. You know, it's, it's what would you want to get from businesses?

You know, there's lots of upcoming things that you know, a lot of businesses haven't even heard about yet.

There's something called AMP for email that normally when you send out an HTML email, the content that I write and then hit send on is the content that you as a subscriber receive and see. And no matter how long after you go back and read that same email, it will look the same in your inbox.

AMP for email is actually, you've probably heard about AMP when it comes to website load times and Google and so forth. It's a protocol that Google originally developed. But what it essentially allows you to do is as a sender I can make parts of my email dynamic.

So think you subscribe to a stock newsletter and you get in, you know, they list off different stocks and when they send that, you know, Google's trading in, I don't even know what it's trading at right now. Let's call it a thousand dollars a share.

And you know, tomorrow when you read it, their shares might be $1,000, you know, $1,020 and for it to pull in the real time stock, you know, quote for that. So in the E commerce world, think of, you know, you send out a promotion for a particular widget and you sell out of that widget.

Well now you've got all the, you've got these emails that you sent to, let's call 5,000 subscribers. You know, a thousand of them saw and you know, went and bought your Widget. But then 4000 haven't opened yet. But you sold out of that widget.

With AMP for email, what I could do is I could actually replace that widget A in the email with a widget B.

So the other 4,000 that hadn't opened it yet still have the opportunity to see something of value that they could potentially purchase versus like, you know, clicking on the link and then going, oh, it's sold out.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:33.610 - 00:22:34.570

So it's amazing.

Tom Kulzer

00:22:35.450 - 00:26:07.830

There's some really cool stuff. There's, you know, is that out yet for email? Yeah, absolutely.

It's supported on a number of platforms, Google obviously, and for most e commerce businesses that's, you know, a good 40 to 60%, sometimes 70% of a lot of subscribers lists or a lot of businesses lists. And there's other platforms that are, that are building in support for.

Yahoo has support for it and as well as others are in the process of adding it. But that's a really cool technology.

You know, we're going to see buying things in the actual email very soon instead of having to go off to another website to do the actual checkout process.

Because it's all validated, because I know I sent it to you as a subscriber, if you already have payment details on file, you could potentially even accept an order without having to make the user enter a credit card number because you've already got it on file and it's authenticated that you sent it to that particular recipient. There's some really, really cool things that you can do. We've implemented it in a lot of our own newsletters as surveys.

So like when you fill out the survey, you actually click the buttons in the email and when you hit submit on that, you're still in the email and it shows you the results of whatever survey that we sent out and whoever's responded to it so far. So it turns email from what was this static thing into a more dynamic and interactive process.

And that's really what is key with email and getting, you know, good results with email is it all comes back to engagement.

And when I think of, you know, when I say engagement, that means, you know, whether or not somebody opens an email, whether or not somebody clicks on links and goes to your website in the email. But so those are the two. Like as an email marketer, those are the two metrics that businesses often look at as engagement.

But there's a lot of other things, if you think past that, that, you know, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo are looking at, that kind of count as engagement. So think, you know, do you forward that email to somebody else? Do you reply to that email? Do you, you know, when you open it, do you scroll down?

Is the message bigger than my window? Do I scroll Down.

You know, when you're reading on Gmail, let me tell you, Google sees all those things, they keep track of all of those things and that feeds into the, their algorithms as far as what emails they're going to show you in the future.

But it's also setting that kind of engagement reputation for whether or not your messages continue to show up in the inboxes of all the other people that they sent that you sent to. Do you then save that email to a different folder or label it in Gmail or Yahoo or wherever it happens to be?

So there's all these different kind of cues that mailbox providers get from every interaction with your messages. Do they delete it, do they mark it as spam, et cetera.

So there's a lot of things that businesses do that are, you know, when you, when you put that engagement hat on that are actually hurting that ability to, to interact.

So you know how many businesses, particularly in the E commerce space have addresses that they send out to that are kind of the, what we call them as no reply emails. And I always call those, you know, the middle finger email address.

Matt Edmundson

00:26:09.830 - 00:26:12.190

Because you've got this email, don't ever come back to me.

Tom Kulzer

00:26:12.190 - 00:26:39.630

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like give me your money and go yourself.

Yeah, it's like, you know, that's not how I as you know, when I get messages in my inbox and it's like I have a question about something. It's like, oh crap, like how do I get this question answered? I gotta go to their website, I gotta figure out how to contact them.

Like just let me reply to the darn email you just sent me. You're in my inbox. It's literally two way communication platform and you're just giving me the finger and tell me to go away.

Matt Edmundson

00:26:39.870 - 00:26:45.550

It's the craziest thing. I've never understood why people have done that.

Tom Kulzer

00:26:46.110 - 00:27:53.100

It's so, so common. So it's the give me your money and go away kind of cue. And it's not, it's not a good way to build engagement with your audience.

You know, it's one of the, it's one of the most simple tricks that a lot of really good publishers, particularly at the like, you know, smaller level is when somebody subscribes to their newsletter, particularly in the like kind of creator economy, folks, you know, are writing based on what their audience's needs are, is, hey, what's your, what's your biggest struggle right now? Just hit reply and let me know. And while yes, that's going to Generate email volume to you.

It's also a great stream of ideas for content for you to write. It's as an E commerce vendor, it's potentially great ideas for products that you could bring that you might not have.

Or it's also great for increase, you know, improving your content on your website by using the terminology that your own customers are using to describe their problems. So there's a lot of things that you can do with that.

And at the same time, you're signaling to Google and others that like, hey, they want my email and they're engaging with what I'm sending, which is really valuable.

Matt Edmundson

00:27:53.420 - 00:28:29.630

So if I don't know if this.

I'm going too into the detail now you've got me thinking maybe I need to set up an email address which says, yes, you can reply to [email protected], but you get the replies from your customers, you send emails out and you encourage them to hit reply for all the reasons you mentioned, but you're all valid. Does that mean then that Google's going, 60, 70% of email going through Google?

You say Google are looking at that, going, this guy's got a little bit of engagement. People are responding, people are replying. Therefore, does the deliverability of my emails increase?

Tom Kulzer

00:28:29.710 - 00:32:19.010

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. When you think about. So deliverability means a couple of different things and it's often misquoted in the marketplace.

So like when you think about a social platform, If I have 1000 people following me on Twitter and I post something on Twitter, maybe 10% of those people are going to actually see that and it'll actually show up in their stream.

When I send an email, if I sent that email to a thousand people, if I only delivered it to 100 people, we'd have a lot of really ticked off customers. So deliverability, there's a component of delivering it to the platform and those numbers are usually in the 98, 99 percentile.

As far as those are all the addresses that are valid and we've removed any of the addresses that aren't valid, meaning, you know, address unknown and those sort of things. So the delirium. So that's one component that's often called deliverability.

Most businesses, you know, when you're thinking about it as a sender, are thinking deliverability as to what percentage of my mail goes from me to somebody's inbox. And that is the whether or not your messages go to the inbox is based on your engagement.

And the more you can have an audience that is highly engaged, meaning they're open Clicking, replying, filing them away and saving them for later, the more likely your messages are going to go continue to go to the inbox.

You know, one thing that we often get, particularly from E commerce merchants, is my emails go to the promotions folder and they think in their head like, oh no, it's the spam folder. Promotions folder is definitely not the spam folder. They're two very different beasts.

And a lot of our e commerce platform senders that, that go to the promotions folder, they get better results because they're there versus being in the inbox. Because when people go to the, when they look at their promotions folder, they're in a buying mood versus in the inbox.

It's like, well, I want, I want to read my email from Matt that where Matt and I were talking about what we just did this weekend. Yeah, you know, it's a different kind of thing.

And at the same time, as an E commerce sender, you know, we often get the question like, well, why is my email going to the promotions folder? And it's like, well, you're sending promotions. Google's kind of good at what they do.

So yeah, that's where it goes, you know, and if the content that you send is always promotions, it's always buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.

You know, here's my latest listings, here's my coupons for my grocery store, whatever it happens to be, you know, you're going to go to the promotions folder. You know, one of the newsletters that, that, that I subscribe to that, you know, you could think about as a, you know, as an e commerce sender.

It's called the Lyft Efoil.

It's a company out of Puerto Rico and they make these cool like, it's like a surfboard with an electric motor on the bottom and it kind of like flies out of the water. And I bought one a few years ago and I'm on their newsletter as a customer and they send me product updates.

But the reason that I engage with those product updates is because they also link off to YouTube videos and Instagram videos and those sort of things in their emails that are about other customers riding the Lyft E Foil in different parts of the world that are really cool and beautiful or people doing cool tricks on them that I haven't figured out. So it's like, it keeps me engaged as a customer.

And oh, hey, by the way, they've also got some new foils or a new motor or something that I can put on it. And I've bought a few of those because it's topical to me. But where does their email go?

It comes to my inbox because it's mostly content that is non promotional and it's also content that I engage with. I click those links, it's like at this point, it's like, oh, where are they now? That's really cool.

Or what trick am I going to learn this week that I can't do? And I'm going to spend all summer bashing my head trying to figure out how to do it.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:19.730 - 00:32:33.110

So it's not a case then of.

Because there's a belief, isn't there, that sort of floats around which says, if I send plain text emails, I'll go into, into their inbox and if I send HTML, I'm going into the promotions tab.

Tom Kulzer

00:32:33.350 - 00:32:40.390

That's not. No, no, if you sell things in your plain text message, you're going to end up going in the promotions folder.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:40.390 - 00:32:45.430

So, you know, say Google know what they're doing. They've seen every trick, right?

Tom Kulzer

00:32:45.990 - 00:35:22.420

Absolutely. So, and you've got to, you've got to understand they're also seeing all of the content that you're sending in total.

So, you know, you'll get, you know, sometimes you'll get businesses that are like, oh, you know, I went to this trade show and I got a thousand names of people that opted in to receive emails from all the vendors that were at the trade show. And it's like, okay, you were at the trade show, There were about 50 different vendors there.

Do you want 50 different vendors sending you emails as a result of having gone to the train show? No, I know I don't. But these businesses look at it as a shortcut to like gain subscribers. But think about this. So put your Google hat on.

Okay, that that particular business might have been, let's call it, they were sending to 5,000 people before, and on Monday they come back from their conference and they have a thousand names and they import them and they're now sending 6,000 people in email. Most businesses don't grow organically by whatever percent that is, you know, 20% overnight.

Like they don't instantly get another thousand subscribers. Google knows, you know, they may even see a percentage of that.

So let's say they were seeing 2,500 subscribers that you were sending before, and now with this new imported list, you magically got another 500 names.

Yeah, they know that those names have never gotten emails from you before and they're judging where to send those emails from an inbox perspective based on what the, you know, 2000 or 2500 were that, that we're already seeing those emails. So if those users were engaging with those messages, those new people might be likely to see them or they might send them to spam.

Just because it's like that doesn't look organic. You know, when we look at most businesses growth, it just kind of, it's a nice steady uptick of subscribers over time.

They don't, they don't jump up in big, you know, big jumps. That's not organic and that is more than likely them doing something that is not permission based and is going to cause problems.

So it's, you know, so there's, there's a balance in, you know, making sure that as an email sender and as a business, you put your customer hat on and think of what would you like to receive in your inbox. Your emails are not special. The entire planet does not want what you send just because it comes from you.

I hate to, you know, that applies to my emails, that applies to your emails, that applies to all of our listeners emails here. They're not special. We need to earn our way into people's information inboxes and earn our ability to stay in their inboxes.

Matt Edmundson

00:35:22.980 - 00:35:49.840

Yeah, that's such an important. We should maybe change the title of the podcast to your emails are not special. I think that's such a valid point.

So what would be some of the tips, Tom, that you would give to an e commerce business? You know, I'm an e commerce guy, I'm sat here, I'm listening to you and I'm thinking this is all great and I get some of the stuff you're saying.

How does that help me when I say come to sit down and start planning my email content. What are some of the things that I should be thinking about?

Tom Kulzer

00:35:49.840 - 00:38:28.920

Yeah, I think in the e commerce space I think a lot of people think about prospecting and like buy, buy, buy, buy, buy now. And you most people, most e commerce vendors get most of their subscribers from new customers.

It's very rare from what I generally see that somebody comes to an e commerce website and opts into your email list. So you know, usually those opt ins are coming from your customers and you're actually emailing customers.

So you know, going back to like that lift the e foil, you know, how can I educate people with the emails that I send about the product that they just purchased from me? Make them better consumers and more educated consumers of the product that they just bought.

Make them smart, you know, is what I, you know, when you when you make me feel like an expert at doing whatever it is that I'm doing, I'm going to come back to you because you make me look smart. That's a feel good emotion. And I'm more likely to go back to you again about buying your products.

If you sell me some fancy hair product and you teach me how to use it more effectively than me going to the grocery store and buying something, I'm more likely to continue to come back to you because you're going to continue to make my life better as a result. And that's where during that educational process is where you cross sell. You know, hey, you bought the shampoo but you didn't get the conditioner.

You know, like, you know, what other things can you do if you're a golf store, like, okay, you bought new clubs. Well, did you get a bag for your new clubs? Are you ragging around your new clubs in your old ratty bag?

You know, like, how can you cross sell appropriate things to people? And with, you know, with, with tools like, you know, we have conditional content.

So I can, I can save what it is that you bought and put content in each email that I send out that is specific to each user. So, you know, it's a little more work to do it if you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs.

But if you have a limited number of SKUs, it's easier to personalize the content that you're sending out to people and make it very, very personal and very relevant to each subscriber. Whereas you might have kind of wrapper text around it that's more generic.

But then you have something that's specific to each individual user that's going to get that engagement.

And even though you're sending a customer newsletter to a thousand people, there might be, you know, 15 different iterations that actually only took an extra 10 or 15 minutes to put together because it's not hard to do. It's all in one email.

As a sender, you send one email and the, you know, the back end at AWeber or whatever platform you're using is doing the magic part.

Matt Edmundson

00:38:29.240 - 00:38:45.230

It's figuring it all out. That's really interesting. That's sort of scooting back up to some of the things that you mentioned earlier.

You talked about, you know, how you'll be buying things soon, directing your email, hopefully. How far away are we from that?

Tom Kulzer

00:38:46.670 - 00:39:23.210

Depending. So it is technically possible. Now the tools, I'd say on the like, you know, business kind of consumer end of things aren't, aren't quite there yet.

Like we don't have something built into our platform to do that yet, but I see it coming very shortly. So I'd say in the next like 12 months you should be able to do that. Easy. Sign up for service. Hey, I can send out an email.

And you know, all, all the transaction stuff just kind of magically works. So the, the tech is there, it just needs a few more kind of integration points.

Matt Edmundson

00:39:24.330 - 00:40:08.050

Why do you think I was curious to understand this? You know, you've got, in the world of E commerce, you've got a lot of changes that have happened from a technological point of view, right?

Where I think about what E commerce sites were like back in 2002 to what they are now. And they're poles apart and they're very different. But email, like you say, seems to have been quite static.

You know, we went from plain text emails to all, I can put my logo and a picture. Oh, I can add a picture of a product. But really, has there been sort of any key innovation?

I like what you've been talking about with amp, where you can make it a bit more dynamic. I like what you're talking about with Shopping Cart. That all seems quite recent. Do you mean it seems like it's been, it's been static for a while?

Do you know why that is?

Tom Kulzer

00:40:10.530 - 00:43:38.330

I would say to a great extent a lot of that is the, the, the dispersed nature of email in that like no one platform owns email. You know, there isn't a central, you know, Google's probably the closest to it in that a lot of people have email boxes at Google.

So kind of what they do becomes kind of the standard.

There's a lot of things that have happened behind the scenes and platforms like Aweber try to remove that from something that our customers need to think about. So like, authentication is a big thing that we do. You know, we push folks to make sure that they're doing what's called dkim keys. It's dkim.

And that's basically just a way that, best way to describe it is it's a way for you to make an entry on your website or on your domain that tells a provider like Google that, yes, these are authorized emails coming from my platform. So it allows, you know, it prevents people from pretending to be you, from spoofing to be you, which again helps your email reputation as a sender.

So we encourage all of our users to sign their emails with dkim and we try to make that really easy and kind of walk them through how to do that. Only takes like 10 minutes to do, but it's a good step to do.

There are other tools that kind of layer on top of that there's something called bimi B I M I. And that is. Oh, Josh, I should know what it's like. Brand indicators. I'm blanking on it at the moment. It's Monday, give me a pass.

But basically for everybody that's listening, it basically means the ability for you to put a logo next to your email in the inbox.

So before somebody actually opens your email, when you're looking at your email in, in Yahoo or in Mac Mail and those sort of things, you'll see that little indicator down the side that'll have a, you know, your business logo. Yeah, there. And that's, it's a way of, of displaying that outside of the Google ecosystem.

So you might see that if you're in Google, you're just seeing the Google kind of avatar. But outside of Google's ecosystem, there wasn't a way for people to do that in an authenticated and secure way. And BIMI is a tool for doing that.

So that again is something that we encourage businesses to publish. So there's a lot of things that are kind of behind the scenes, but at the end of the day like an email is an email.

It's a subject line and some body content and what you send in that, you know, it's really up to every business and I think, you know, trying to make sure that you're sending as personalized content as possible. And that's where like the tech and I think a lot of the changes have come is how you go about doing that personalization.

Whereas before, you know, it was like I had one subject line and one set of body copy and everybody on my list got exactly the same thing. Now it can be compared to completely dynamic and completely different for literally every single subscriber based on their preferences.

And it's not that much extra work for a business to actually send out emails that are that relevant when you, when you've, you know, kind of tagged and, and you know, segmented your user base over time.

Matt Edmundson

00:43:39.210 - 00:44:10.940

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, geez, Tom, I'm, I'm aware of time first and foremost and I'm aware that I've still got 25 questions to ask you. So.

And I guess a lot of people have actually about email marketing because it has been around since the dawn of E commerce and it is still one of those things that people just don't get right. And it's a phenomenal thing. So if people have questions, if people want to reach out to you, what's the best way to do that? That.

Tom Kulzer

00:44:11.500 - 00:45:01.280

Yeah, you can find [email protected] I'm on all the social places. You can find me on Twitter at tkolzer, you can email [email protected] and you know, you give, give AWeber a shot.

We have a freemium offering for up to 500 subscribers. So if you don't have a subscribe form on your website, put one. It's a very minimum one. One going away tip here I'll have for everybody.

When someone subscribes to your email, if on your confirmation page after someone hits, you know, enters their email address and hits submit, the page that comes up after that is often this barren wasteland of nothingness is like, hey, thanks for subscribing. Put something for your audience to buy on there. So like in your, you know, in your case, Matt, put something about your E commerce cohort on there.

Matt Edmundson

00:45:01.520 - 00:45:02.000

Yeah.

Tom Kulzer

00:45:02.080 - 00:45:29.480

So that people have an opportunity to see what else you're doing.

They're more if they've just broken out their email address, their credit card is really only one step away from that and it's not that much farther away.

And we often see, you know, businesses that didn't have something on that thank you page generating 10, 20, 30% additional revenue just from that single page because it gets so much traffic and because those users are so much higher engaged than other people on your website.

Matt Edmundson

00:45:29.640 - 00:46:03.860

Yeah, top tip. I like that. I'll be checking with our marketing team now. I'm gonna go and fill out some forms on our websites. Oh, I wonder what it tells me.

Tom, thank you so much for coming onto the E Commerce podcast, man.

It's been great to meet you, great to hear your insight and thoughts and more than anything, if I'm honest, it's just lovely to hear your passion is still there for obviously for email even after all of these years. And that's actually something quite special. So thank you for coming and sharing it with us on the E Commerce podcast.

Tom Kulzer

00:46:04.420 - 00:46:06.580

Likewise. Thanks for having me, Matt. It's been fun.

Matt Edmundson

00:46:06.900 - 00:47:59.610

Oh, no worries, man, no worries. So let's play the music. There we go. Thanks again to Tom for joining me here on the podcast.

Listen, if you've signed up for our emails newsletter, one of the things that will be winging its way to you is this podcast goes live is the transcripts and notes from today's conversation. If you don't have that, you can head over to ecommercepodcast.net.

you can read it, you can get all the notes, all of the links to Tom and to Aweber and to all that sort of stuff. And of course you can sign up for our emails newsletter and let's see what happens when you fill it in. Absolutely. Let's have a look at that.

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Be sure to follow the Ecommerce podcast wherever you get your podcasts from because we've got even more great conversations lined up just like today's with Tom and I don't want you to miss any of them. And in case no one has told you yet, stayed in listener. You are awesome. Yes you are. It's just a burden we all have to bear. You, me, Tom.

Just the way it is. The E Commerce Podcast is produced by Orion Media. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

The team that makes this show possible is Sadaf Banon, Josh Catchpole, Estella Robin and Tim Johnson. Theme song has been written by Josh Edmondson and my good self.

And as I mentioned, if you would like to read the transcript or show notes, ecommercepodcast.net is where you need to head to. So that's it from me and from Ton. Thank you so much for joining us this week on the E Commerce Podcast. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.

Tom Kulzer

00:48:08.260 - 00:48:14.970

Sam.