Sandy Donovan | The Email Lady

Sandy Donovan - otherwise known as “The Email Lady” - helps ecommerce brands get better customer acquisition and retention results with email. Her work generates an average 68X return on brands’ investments in popular email marketing platform Klaviyo, and she’s been able to increase revenue by 600%+ in under 60 days.

How does she do it?

On this episode, Sandy explains why it all starts with proper segmentation of your email list. Whether you’re an ecommerce marketer, or a B2B marketer, the same lessons apply. She breaks down the demographic and behavioral criteria any marketer can use to segment their list, along with strategies for activating and nurturing different segments, guidance on how often to email your contacts, how to craft a winning subject line, and more.

Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Resources from this episode:

• Connect with Sandy on LinkedIn

• Visit The Email Lady website

Sandy and Kathleen recording this episode

Kathleen (00:17):

Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Sandy Donovan, who is known as The Email Lady <laugh>, uh, for her awesome work, helping brands get better, uh, customer acquisition and retention results with email. And I am super excited to talk about that today, but before we do Sandy, can you just tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and your story and what The Email Lady is?

Sandy (00:45):

Yeah, so first thanks so much for having me today really excited to be here. Um, so yeah, I started off, um, doing copywriting and marketing and all that for a number of different brands. Um, I had an e-commerce store of my own a while back, um, and basically just, I really enjoyed the whole marketing aspect, the whole, um, copywriting creating. I, I like, I like learning why people do things and, and what I can do to influence that behavior. Um, so I kind of landed on, uh, email marketing as like my main thing. And that's where The Email Lady was born in 2020, uh, right before everything shut down. So we were focused on e-commerce stores already. And, um, that just kind of turned out to be, um, really beneficial in 2020, even though, you know, I had no idea what was going to happen, but a lot of people ended up going towards, um, eCommerce actually, you know, that year. Um, and that's yeah, so that's The Email Lady kind of focuses on, uh, email marketing for eCommerce stores, mostly, although we can help others as well, but that's like usually who we focus on.

Kathleen (01:57):

Yeah. And I, it's interesting because this is not an exclusively e-commerce podcast, but I, I always love talking to e-commerce people because I actually think that that's kind of the headlights for the rest of us. Right. Like e-commerce because they get a hundred percent of their revenue through their online efforts. Those efforts have to work. Right. Yeah. And whereas I think a lot of other B2B businesses, they try different things. They, they have a lot of them have sales teams that can do direct outreach. And so it's just a different model that isn't quite as dependent. So I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned here. And when I was reading your bio, what got me excited was things like you generate an average 68 X return on people's Klaviyo investment. And for those listening who are not in e-commerce Klaviyo is like an email, um, an SMS marketing platform think like a little bit like HubSpot, but for eCommerce.

Um, and then you had some other stats like of customer situations where you were able to increase their revenue by 630% in less than 60 days. And just other crazy returns like that. And I always love hearing those stories cuz I think that's what we're all trying to achieve and what interests me is like breaking it down and getting kind of nerdy about it. So when you and I first spoke, um, we talked about, you know, kind of what would be some aspects of what you do that, that my audience would be interested in. And I always tell listeners, or sorry, I always tell guests for those who are listening, that the, my audience is fairly advanced. Right? And so we have to talk about things that are not your day to day stuff. And one of the things you and I discussed that would be potentially interesting was segmentation. So let's start and just hit on to you. Like how do you think about segmentation? Why is that important?

Sandy (03:48):

Yeah. Well, I mean, segmentation essentially is just, we're taking a whole and we're breaking it down into pieces and we're targeting people based on either their engagement, their behavior or other custom metrics that we have depending on your brand. You know, every, every brand is different and have metrics that are important to them. And why that's important is because, well, a lot of times when I talk to people, they're a little nervous about emailing their list too often, too frequently. They're afraid to get on people's nerves. They're afraid that everyone's going to unsubscribe. And that is a potential problem, especially when you are sending out one message to everybody all the time. Um, you have situations where people in your list just naturally phase out, you know, they, they naturally age out where they don't need your product anymore. They're not interested. They've moved on from that time in their life, you know, things like that happen.

Um, but then you also have people within your audience who are interested, but maybe, you know, are at different places in their customer journey with you. So for all of these reasons, it's important that we're thinking and being intentional about who we're sending a message to, but it's, it's more than just, um, good marketing. It's also really good to keep a healthy list because, uh, I, if you start growing your list, like say you've been in business for 10 years and you started growing your list right away. Right. And at this point in time, now you have people potentially, if you haven't been segmenting, haven't been cleaning, haven't been doing all that. You potentially have people on your list who are, who have been there for 10 years, who maybe haven't opened an email since you're nine, you know, or, or, you know, nine years ago or, um, maybe they gave you a work email address that doesn't even, you know, work anymore. They don't go to anymore. So you start ending up with really low deliverability if you're not really, uh, intentional about sending it to people who are engaged, who are interested, who are interacting with your brand. So it's, it's good marketing, it's good, a good customer experience, but it's also just on the tech side, it's just good because you're keeping your list healthy and clean. And if you don't have a clean, healthy list, you don't have a profitable list. And that's really what it comes down to, you know?

Kathleen (06:12):

Yeah. You know, it's funny listening to you talk about this. It, it strikes me that email is one of, in my opinion, the top two things that inspires fear in the hearts of marketers. Um, and what I mean by that. And by the way, the other one is social media. What I mean by that is like, it has this incredible potential, right? And it's very easy to just gen up an email and send it to your whole list, but it strikes fear in our hearts because yes, there is so much that can go wrong. And there are so many unintended consequences that can happen. Like we, we might send a giant email that has like, I don't know, a misspelling or a bad subject line or something happens and, and you can't take it back. Right. And it's the same thing with a lot of social media.

Like it's really hard to take that back once it's out in the world, but the other dimension of email, that's a little different than social is what you're talking about, which is, you know, on the surface you have this big list of people, but really you don't wanna always email them all. <laugh>, you know, it's like, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Um, that's a phrase my husband loves to use. Um, so you talked earlier about everybody has different segmentation. Let's call them parameters based on the business and based on their goals. So if somebody comes to you and wants to work with you, and you're starting to talk about this, like how do you suss out what should be the way we segment your list?

Sandy (07:36):

Yeah. Well, it'll really depend. First thing that I'm gonna wanna know from them is have they been emailing previously, like, do we have data to look at and to work with basically, um, if you haven't been emailing before that's okay. But there's just a different starting point because essentially what we wanna do, we wanna weed out people who are engaged versus people who are less and less and less engaged, right. And kind of put them into tiers. Uh, and we wanna make sure that we are putting our marketing efforts towards, well, one towards people who are gonna keep your list healthy, but two towards people who are more likely to take action and more likely to take action sooner rather than later, right? Like that that's the people that we wanna, uh, focus on. So if we don't have any data, the first thing that we need to do is collect some data.

Right. So we need to, um, be a little careful, but we also need to make sure that we have some touch points with everyone on that list so that we can just kind of see, uh, what we can collect from that if we already have, uh, data on when they've purchased and what they have purchased before. That's great. Um, if you're a business that doesn't track all of that, so maybe there are things happening offline that you aren't tracking. There could be things happening offline that you are tracking if you have the right software. But if you're not, you know, that's okay too. Then we wanna look, just look strictly at engagement, who is clicking on these emails, who is visiting your site? Um, those are the people who we wanna focus on more so.

Kathleen (09:15):

And I think that's sorry to interrupt, but I think that that's sort of universal whether you're talking about e-commerce or, or B2B, right. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> that basic level of, if you do have email history going back and looking at it and it, hopefully you're using some kind of a platform that supports your ability to slice and dice your email performance at the contact level. So like talk me through, cause I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this soon. Right? Like, um, you know, I came into this role that I'm in now on January 3rd and we've been doing some emailing, but I've been very hesitant to like push anything to the whole list. Um, but we're getting ready to launch a newsletter. And so I do need to kind of look back and cleanse. Yeah. So when you start that process, do you, let's start with like past engagement with emails, you have a big list. Are you looking at like who, who hasn engaged and who hasn't like who's opened, who's clicked. And if you're looking at those things, like how recent do you wanna see that activity?

Sandy (10:13):

Yeah. So when you're first, if you haven't been emailing consistently yet, and you, you haven't proven that people are going to engage with your list, um, then you wanna be more on the conservative side. So if we're going to start working with a brand and they don't have a lot of, um, history, but maybe they've emailed a little bit in the last, uh, you know, couple months they've emailed here and there, but there hasn't really been a strategy. We don't really have a ton of data just because there weren't any emails sent or weren't a lot sent. So what we would do in that case is we wanna again be really conservative and just look at the last 30 days who has, and really at this point, we're looking more at click would be the stronger engagement metric, especially since, um, there's been some changes in privacy and open rate is no longer.

Kathleen (11:06):

Yeah. It's not as reliable.

Sandy (11:08):

Yeah, we can't. And we don't know, um, open rates are inflated across the board from what they were, and we just don't know what's accurate. So if you can, if you have enough people where you can, you can still gather a good amount of, um, your list based on who is engaged and who has clicked. That's a good, strong metric. If you need to drop down to opens just to get enough people like on that initial list, then that's okay too. Um, but I would look at click first, then look at opened, end clicked. So yeah, 30 days is who we're gonna look at first and we're going to send an email just to those people who have engaged in the last 30 days. And we're going to look to see that we can get a strong, uh, engagement out of them if, if it is strong, if there's no indication that I don't know, people are just completely ignoring you or that, you know, no one's engaging at all. There are no red flags, right. Then we're going to move it back and we're gonna keep moving it back by 30 days each time, uh, we send an email just so that we can make sure that we're finding kind of that sweet spot.

Kathleen (12:16):

Do you, is there ever a time when, like, have you ever come into a business where they have a big database, but they've not, they don't have any recent, like, let's call it last six months, even history of emailing. Is there ever a time where you would just like send some sort of an email to everyone just to see like, what happens? <laugh> like how many bounces and how many respond? Like I'm so curious about that.

Sandy (12:40):

Well, the danger in doing that, if they have a list above, I think like 10 to 12,000 is usually around the cutoff point. If they have a list of that or more you risk hurting the deliverability, meaning that you're going to get marked as spamer basically. So we don't wanna do that. Now, if you only have a thousand people on your list or 2000 people on your list, I mean, yeah, it, it's not as big of a deal to send something to the entire list and, and just kind of start breaking it down from there. But, you know, if you're at especially higher, like 50,000, a hundred thousand, and that tends to be the brands that more. So we interact with that. Like, haven't done anything in so long and it, and I mean, really just because it's taken them a while to accumulate all those people, but if they weren't emailing, then they, they weren't cleaning.

They weren't, you know? Yeah. So everyone just kind of stacked up. Um, but it happens, but yeah, no, I wouldn't recommend just blasting it to everybody. If you have a decent size list, because if you do run into a problem where you're fighting landing in, in junk and spam all the time, that's hard to recover from. It takes a little while. It's not like a switch that you flip that, like now you're in the inbox. So, um, and you could be losing money that entire time that you're trying to, you know, be in favor with Gmail and Yahoo and outlook and all that. So you wanna avoid doing that if possible?

Kathleen (14:14):

Yeah. Okay. So we're looking at clicks first and foremost, we're starting with last 30 days. Um, and then if I understand what you're saying correctly over time, we might start adding in. Okay. It was 60 days ago. Let's see what happens if we add them in, it was 90 days ago. Let's see what happens if we add, like, is that what, what you're talking about? Like phasing in adding in like older kind of clicks,

Sandy (14:40):

If you will. Yeah. And it doesn't even have to take long. I mean, you could do this all in a week or two weeks. So depending on how big your list is, but you just start. Yeah. If you have good metrics with your, um, most recent engaged people, and then you can just keep adding it until you're to the point where you don't wanna drop much lower in engagement. And then there's a different strategy to reach out to people who, um, haven't engaged in quite some time. And then that's when you wanna start cleaning out people too, who just are just not, they're not interacting at all, then they can probably go.

Kathleen (15:16):

So on that topic. Sorry. And I keep interrupting you, but I'm so interested in this. This is like, selfishly, I love getting the answers to these questions. So you're, you're watching your numbers like on, I, I have HubSpot, so I always like to build lists like smart lists that are like, okay, self updating, anybody who hasn't, you know, clicked in 60 days, anybody who hasn't clicked in 90 days. And of course I think that there's, everyone has their own line. Right. But like, you have to decide when is it so long that we should consider maybe like getting them off the list. So let's just imagine for a moment that that's 180 days, I'm just gonna pull that number outta nowhere. Um, if I'm thinking of removing them from my list, is there like, do you have a tried and true? Like what I would call the last ditch effort, email where like the subject line is, you know, time to say goodbye or, well, I don't know. Like what, how do you handle that last ditch effort?

Sandy (16:08):

Yeah. Um, well, so first we wanna make sure that we are reaching out to them. Usually I recommend like every six months that we try to reach out to them through a campaign email, um, make it just a text only. So nothing heavy on, you know, not heavy on visuals, nothing like that. Um, but give them something really valuable that would make them come back. So in eCommerce, typically that would be some sort of incentive to purchase. But if you are, if, if people have come to you because of like your blogs or because of your podcast, or for more information than just like buying something, then you can send out something, um, you know, a really juicy podcast or blog or something that, you know, if your audience is still your ideal audience, that they're really going to wanna click on that. Right. So that's how we would try to get them to reengage first, but then we always have a sunset flow set up for our clients too, which is basically just, uh, a three email sequence.

And they get different treatment, slightly different treatment, depending on if they have purchased before or if they haven't purchased before. Um, we assume if they haven't engaged and they haven't purchased ever, they're probably pretty cold. So it's just like a one chance, like, do you wanna stay or not kind of thing? Um, so you ask for tried and true. I mean, the way you mess you brand this and, and your messaging can change depending on, you know, your brand personality, your brand voice, but basically you wanna give them a forced choice at the end of this. Like, do you wanna stay or do you, you know, or do you wanna unsubscribe? And I make a lot of people nervous when I send them these emails to, you know, approve for my clients. Like, Hey, this is what we're putting in your sunset flow. And they get really nervous of asking, like, why is, why is there an unsubscribe, but why are you asking them to unsubscribe? I don't wanna lose anybody. And I'm like, no, you do. Because if they're not, you're just paying for them at this point to, for what? For nothing. Like, they're not, they're not engaging. They haven't engaged in, you know, half a year. They've never purchased from you.

Kathleen (18:23):

Yeah. It's a false sense of accomplishment.

Sandy (18:27):

It is. It really is. And yeah, and I know it's hard, especially if you've been in business for a while and you have that big list and that's kind of in your mind of like, you know, I have a hundred thousand people on my list and that's great, but if, you know, a thousand people are opening your emails, then that's really who's on your list. And those thousand people not, you know, not all the other people who haven't engaged. So, um, yeah, I would say a forced choice. However you want to create that if you wanna be, uh, like cute with your messaging, or if you wanna be a little bit more serious, depending on your brand voice, it doesn't really matter, but you need to, you need to ask them straight up. Do you wanna stay, or do you wanna unsubscribe and

Kathleen (19:07):

Any, any tips on subject lines that work really well? Cause I mean, these are, we're emailing people that have proven that they don't open our emails. So like, how do you, like, even if it's regardless of personality, is there anything that you've seen perform well with subject lines for that?

Sandy (19:21):

So across the board, what we see work best with subject lines. And it doesn't really matter when this is, if it's for re-engagement or what, um, anything that's clear, direct with a clear benefit to opening that email is going to work well and anything that creates a curiosity gap. So those are typically the two types of subject lines, and you're always looking to get just the next step. So you don't wanna be looking to in the subject line, get, get them to think about unsubscribing yet. Right. But you wanna just get them to just take the next step of opening the email and then worry about getting them to click once they're in the email. So don't worry. So like,

Kathleen (20:01):

What would be an example of that for a sunset email?

Sandy (20:05):

Um, I mean, if it was gonna be something a little more, like you could say, like, are we really breaking up or something like that? Like that could be some something that's like, kind of on the cute side. Um, you could say, if you wanted to go with something more, uh, urgent, you could say something like, I don't know, you could do like something like this is your last chance to stay or something like that. As long as, like I said, either clear or curiosity driven, which I know sound complete opposites, um, but clear, concise benefit or a gap between a knowledge gap between like, I wanna open that to see yeah. What they're actually talking about. Like last chance for what I might wanna open that and see, um, what I'm missing out on, you know?

Kathleen (20:48):

Yeah. Okay. So, so that's around like when you first get started and you're trying to figure out like those initial segments, but then let's say you're, you're going right. And you mentioned there are behavioral segments that we wanna create. Talk me through. What are, what are things you look at when you're digging into the email data to figure out okay, that's something that we should be like separating out.

Sandy (21:13):

Yeah. Well, so first I will say engagement is something that we focus on throughout. It doesn't matter if you're just starting email or not. We still always have engagement segments when we're creating campaigns. Uh, and that's in the who we're including and who we're excluding too. So, uh, but then when we get a little bit more advanced and go into the behavior based that's for us, we're looking mostly at purchase behavior. Um, there could be other metrics that you're looking at, like, um, pages that they've visited potentially, but really you're looking at what's important to you in terms of a metric that would indicate they're interested for us in eCommerce. Again, it's, it's purchasing have they purchased before? And we don't wanna just look at if they've purchased before, but we wanna look at how frequently they purchase, how recently they've purchased and what their average order value is. So those are three ways that we can kind of slice it and make combinations of those three areas to look at that would indicate, um, you know, how hot this lead is. Right. Um, if you,

Kathleen (22:25):

I feel like in any business, the question is always like there's a million things we could measure and report on and segment by, but then the question is always, if you had that information, what would you do with it? So like having all of the information, you just talked about a bunch of different parameters. How does having that information help you make the emails better?

Sandy (22:45):

Yeah. Well, one ,we wanna be using any sort of incentive strategically, right? So we're less likely to send out a deep discount to someone who purchases regularly at a very high, average order value, right? Like we don't wanna send them the 30% off because they're coming back all the time anyway. But what we do wanna send them is something like, um, ask for a referral, you know, or we want to ask them to take that next step and sign up for SMS and engage with us that way. Um, you know, there are different things, there are different asks that we might have at that point when that person is a very loyal customer. Um, and again, whatever you sell, I, if you can tag a profile with that information, as far as purchasing behavior, that's really useful in terms of, you know, what is your ask for that person on the other end?

Uh, if we have somebody who has potentially, you know, say visited the site three times in the last week or two or something, but they've never purchased before, uh, there are some things that we can try to kind of push them over the edge. So sometimes what might push them over the edge is just seeing maybe reviews, case studies, testimonials, things like that. So just building up that trust factor, you know, we know they're interested, um, they've been poking around what's, what's gonna push them over the edge. That's one potential before moving to an incentive, uh, you know, a financial incentive, like a discount or something like that. Then at the same time, um, you know, in terms of incentives, we do offer deeper incentives to say our re-engagement campaigns, people who, who have purchased maybe before, but maybe a year ago, but haven't engaged recently.

You know, we might be willing to offer kind of a last chance incentive, a deeper incentive discount than we normally would to get them to come back and be customers again and, and engage with that brand again and, you know, try it out. So yeah, I mean, you just wanna kind of think about, and, and there are a million different ways to segment, right? So it's hard to answer all of that, but really you just wanna think about what would be the next logical move in this relationship, given the information that we have about this person.

Kathleen (25:09):

Yeah. Now what happens if you send an email and you've gone through all this process of segmenting and you feel like it's highly targeted, right. And you send it and somebody doesn't open it, um, do you have a process for like either resending the same email with a different subject line or, you know, like to sort of maximize the number of eyeballs that get into the email? Is there, is there anything there as well?

Sandy (25:34):

So sometimes very infrequently. We will send out the same email with the different subject line to people who haven't opened. And this is usually around emails that are very high value for the brand. So product launches or, um, you know, black Friday sales, things like that, um, any kind of brand announcement, a big announcement or something that you wanna get out. Those might be worth resending again. But I would say for standard emails, we're not going to do that. We're really just going to wait until the next email that's being sent to them, which should be pretty frequently. You should be sending to your engaged, your hot list, uh, at least once a week, but often you're, you might be sending more than that. So they're still gonna get an email, you know, two or three days later. Um, and if it's, if, if it is still important to you, there's probably gonna be a thread throughout that month of similar topics that you're talking about. Right. So, I mean, they're going to get another way to see that information, but yeah, if it's something that's high value to you as a brand that you really wanna get the word out about, then it wouldn't hurt to either resend that email or you can also tweak the content a little bit and resend it as well.

Kathleen (26:52):

Yeah.

Sandy (26:53):

Cause there's always a chance that they're gonna go back and open too. Just keep that in mind. So you don't wanna be sending yeah, exactly. Email all the time.

Kathleen (26:58):

And you just talked about, um, you just talked about sort of, uh, frequency and you mentioned you wanna be emailing your really hot customers at least like once a week. What, what is cadence is interesting to me because there are, you know, for your hot customers. Yes. Like I, I have certain brands I buy from, I will not name them. I get emails from them all the time and I open them all the time. But if you're not such a hot customer, what is an acceptable frequency that isn't going to frustrate that recipient?

Sandy (27:31):

So I, I still would say at least once a week, but to see if you wanna go more than that, or even to see if you wanna drop down, it's really all about your engagement rate. If you're sending three times a week and we do have brands that send that frequently, if you're sending three times a week, you just wanna make sure are people still engaging and once that starts dropping, then you can start looking at, okay, I'll pull back a little bit. You know, um, rarely though to an engaged list is less than once a week. Ideal once a week is usually the minimum that I would say you need to not just your very, your hottest audience, but I would say typically anyone who's engaged in the last 120 days is usually around that sweet spot that we're sending to, you know, at least once a week, but we're pulling in other segments too, right.

We're pulling in some of those behavioral based segments. Like we're pulling in, um, people who have high order value, people who have, um, stopped at certain high value pages in the last couple weeks, you know, where even if they haven't engaged in email a lot at that time, we still wanna make sure we're reaching out to them. So there's a lot of different ways to look at not just your, your very hot audience, but you know, your warm audience, too, people who are still interested, um, who are still engaging, who're still popping over to your site. Uh, we still wanna be on their radar in front of mind, uh, as often as we can, but if we start to see any sort of increase in well complaints, we definitely wouldn't wanna see any sort of spam complaints. But if we see a decrease in clicks or dramatic decrease in clicks, or even slowly over time, then we can start looking at, should we pull back a little bit? And it's always, you need to see, is it my messaging? Is it off? Is it the cadence? You know, you need to kind of play with that. It might not be your cadence

Kathleen (29:24):

Now, does that change based on like the nature of the product and the frequency of purchase. And what I mean by that is like, if you're selling TVs, is that, is that like a totally different frequency than if you're selling cosmetics or apparel? Like, how does that change by industry?

Sandy (29:44):

So if you're selling something that is a big ticket item and you are, you don't have other things that are going to kind of fill in the gap and you don't have any valuable information, so, you know, educational, uh, or entertaining information, then you're probably, yeah. It's, it's going to be a little bit more difficult for you to keep those people engaged that entire time. Um, but again, those are a lot of big ifs, you know? Yeah. So hopefully you do have stuff that you can send out to your audience in between sales. Um, and I don't, when I say sales, I don't just mean discounts, but I mean in between their purchases, right? So hopefully you do have content that you can send out that is valuable, you know, still staying in front of mind. Um, remember too, people still talk about your brand.

So you still wanna be, you know, on top of their, you wanna be in their inbox. You want them to see you, you wanna reco you want them to recommend you to their friends and family. So there are still other reasons to be sending. Um, but I'd still say it all comes down to what you're seeing in the numbers, because if you are able to send out that valuable information and people are still engaging, why would you pull back? You know? Yeah. Because you're just going to, again, you're gonna get those referrals. You're going to get people to come back. If you ever add any products in the future, then you have a warm audience to launch to. So yeah, if, if they're engaging in your emails, I, I wouldn't pull back. Even if you don't think they're going to purchase for a while.

Kathleen (31:26):

That makes sense. So you have all these amazing stats in your bio around like the ROI that has come out of some of these email campaigns. Do you have any, um, really interesting stories you can share of, of, you know, kind of things that you guys did and, and the outcomes that came out of them?

Sandy (31:42):

Yeah. Well, so first I wanna say, you know, we do get a high ROI, sorry about that. But email overall gets 41 to 42, uh, times ROI. Like you're getting a huge return on your best investment from email. Email is a very inexpensive form of advertising. I'm really sorry. I had this tickle in my throat morning.

Kathleen (32:06):

Take your time. It's okay. Um, we keep it real on this podcast. So we, we keep the coughs, we keep the dog barks. We keep the doorbell rings. It's all good.

Sandy (32:15):

<laugh> oh, good. So yeah. Um, email on a whole gets a really good ROI. Um, now if you're working with somebody, you know, like us or an agency, hopefully they're gonna get you higher than that 41 40 2%. Right. Um, just cause that's the average. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's really, email's a really good thing to invest in now in terms of any interesting stories, one of the stories I really like to tell, or, you know, one of the brands that I really have enjoyed following, um, they have been with us for over two years now. So we started with them. They only had one product at the time that they started with us and they only had a little over 2000 on their list. So a very small list, one product, which was, um, a decently priced product. Um, but you know, it wasn't like a $10 item or something.

It was around the 75 to a hundred dollars mark. Right. And, uh, they did well right in the beginning, just from us setting up their automated flows because they were sending traffic to their site. And that's one of the key ingredients that you need to really be successful is you need to be having traffic to your site. You need to be having fresh people on your list. Otherwise, again, everyone's gonna kind of age out. So they were sending traffic, they're doing everything right. Um, they work mostly with influencers, so that's where they get their traffic from. Um, they work with, uh, influencers mostly on like TikTok and Instagram to send people over. Um, but watching them grow over the last couple of years has, has really been cool. They, they got a return on their investment the very first month that they ran those automated flows.

So the first 30 days since the flows turned on, uh, and that's when they started adding, you know, campaigns. So for the longest time, the only thing that we did for them was just six campaigns a month. So not a lot. Um, and they didn't have any SMS until recently, you know, um, but again, they were able to get that return on their investment the very first month. And we were able to get them sitting somewhere between 20 to 25% of their revenue generated just from email starting within those first 30 days. Um, and it's just continued to grow ever since then. So again, it's been really fun to watch them grow. They've been able to launch, uh, a few more products. They've grown quite a bit since, um, since the beginning and now, you know, in what was it last month, four or five weeks ago?

Um, we, they, they had a product come back in stock and we were able to generate over $70,000 and 48 hours just with email for them. And that's not counting everything that they sent over from social media and all that. Wow. But that was just from email. And while some brands do generate that normally, um, you know, fairly regularly with their email, from seeing them grow basically from infancy to, you know, what they are now in just two years, um, was really cool. And email has always been a really strong part of that revenue for them. And it was really cool to see that they still, you know, we were able to keep a lot of people warm throughout that entire time, um, and use that email and really leverage it to get a lot of revenue for them in such a short period of time. So, yeah, that was, that was really cool to see.

Kathleen (35:41):

That's a good story. All right. Well, we're coming up to the end of our time and I wanna make sure we leave a few minutes for these questions that I always like to ask my guests at the end, the first being, um, the marketers. I talk to just say that, you know, everybody's so busy these days and, and there's so much, that's constantly changing with the world of digital marketing. How do you personally, um, keep yourself educated and stay on top of everything?

Sandy (36:05):

Hmm. Um, well, I would say, unfortunately I'm a little bit of a workaholic and <laugh> just, I'm constantly, you know, reading and scrolling. And I know a lot of people complain about their social media it's full of negative stuff or cats or food or whatever. My social media is really full of, uh, marketing articles, business articles, um, things like that because that's what I'm constantly reading. So I don't know, just curating my environment to be supportive of, of that, I guess is, is the only thing I can say.

Kathleen (36:37):

Yeah. That makes sense. It's the network and it's, it's who you put in your feed, right? Yeah. Um, alright. Second question. This podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I define as anything that naturally attracts the right customer to you. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days?

Sandy (37:01):

Ooh. Um, that's a really good question. A great inbound marketer. I don't know. I'm trying to think of who I'm I'm like normally drawn to. Um, I don't know. I'm sorry. You've stopped. No, that's okay.

Kathleen (37:21):

<laugh> that's alright.

Sandy (37:23):

I know. Yeah. I'm trying to think of people who I would like really look at and maybe not business brands though. Maybe somebody who's like really doing, um, like more to an everyday person. I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't have a good answer for you. That's all. And we can come back to that. Maybe I'll add something.

Kathleen (37:44):

Let, if you think of it, just stop me and let me know. Okay. Um, alright, well, so then the next is really how do people find you? So if somebody is interested in learning more about what you do through The Email Lady, or has a question or wants to connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Sandy (38:01):

So you can just stop by the site at theemaillady.com and then, um, around social media. My handle is The Email Lady.

Kathleen (38:11):

I'll put as always, I'll put those links into the show notes, which are available at kathleenbooth.com. Um, and if you enjoyed this episode, head to apple podcasts, and I would be so grateful if you would leave the podcast a review so that other folks can find us here as well. Um, and in the meantime, if you know somebody else, who's doing great marketing work, tweet me at @Kathleenlbooth because I would love to make them my next guest. All right. That's it for this week, Sandy. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been a ton of fun.

Sandy (38:44):

Thank you, Kathleen.

Kathleen (38:45):

All right. Have a great week.