The Crazy New Way to Capture Emails — Adam Robinson | The Ideal Timing for Black Friday Email Campaigns, How to Warm Up New Subscribers Before Black Friday, How to Safely Integrate New Email Addresses into Your List, How to Prevent Duplicate Emails (#334)

In this episode, we explore email marketing strategies for e-commerce, focusing on Black Friday preparations. Our guest, Adam Robinson, CEO of retention.com, discusses the impact of Apple's privacy changes on Facebook ads and email remarketing. He explains how to overcome challenges like Klaviyo’s reduced cookie tracking window by using innovative methods to capture email addresses from website visitors. Adam also shares tips for warming up these new contacts to boost engagement and ensure a successful holiday sales season. 

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• How intelligent tracking prevention cut email tracking from 2 years to 7 days 
• What’s the ideal timeframe to start Black Friday email campaigns 
• Why a personal brand via content marketing is crucial for SaaS growth 
• How to warm up new email subscribers before Black Friday 
• How Dr. Squatch generated $1 million in revenue using retention.com's services before Black Friday 
• Why broad targeting ads might be more effective than hyper-niche targeting 
• How to safely integrate new email addresses into existing email lists 
• What retention.com does to avoid duplicating email addresses in your list 

Links & Resources 

Website: https://retention.com/ 
Shopify App: https://retention.com/support/integrate-with-shopify-integration-app/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/retentionadam/ 
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/RetentionAdam 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://t.ly/PneSl 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the eCommerce Coffee Break podcast. In today's episode, we share the secret how to capture every possible email address for Black Friday. Joining me on the show is Adam Robinson, CEO of retention. com. So let's get started.

[00:00:15] This is the eCommerce Coffee Break. A top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants. And business owners looking to grow their online stores. [00:00:30] Learn how to survive in the fast changing e-commerce world with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google.

[00:00:39] Welcome. Welcome to the show. 

[00:00:44] Hello and welcome to another episode of the e-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to dive. Steve into email marketing because you force coming up like Friday's coming up and we want to find out how you can capture every possible email address that is out there for your business.

[00:00:58] Now things have changed in [00:01:00] the email marketing quite a bit since Apple did some big changes and I think not everyone is aware of what kind of implication that has on collecting email addresses and doing email marketing. So with me on the show today, I have Adam Robinson. He's the founder and CEO of retention.

[00:01:13] com. He has bootstrapped retention. com to 20 million. Average annual revenue in working is working in public and post daily on LinkedIn. That's where you'll find him and is making a docuseries called the billion dollar challenge. Chronicle his journey was retention. com. So let's welcome [00:01:30] Adam to the show.

[00:01:30] Hi, Adam. How are you today? 

[00:01:31] Hi, I'm great. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:34] Adam, iOS 14. 5 and everything that followed really messed it up for marketing, specifically for email marketing. And we want to dive right into it. Give me an overview of what really happened. 

[00:01:45] So, um, this is how, this is what has gone on from being someone who, who sells into these e commerce vendors, but it's not one myself.

[00:01:56] Um, iOS 14 happened, which [00:02:00] In my observation had took everyone's Facebook. And by the way, we sell into Shopify stores mainly. So it's mainly a Facebook ad exercise that people are doing to grow their businesses for the most part. Um, CAC LTV or whatever return on ad spend or whatever, in my observation, if you were to go before iOS 14 versus now, it's like gone up by 50%.

[00:02:28] Right. The, the, the [00:02:30] cost to acquire a customer on average, I'm sure there's some cases in which, uh, it's not that. Um, and interestingly, so iOS 14 prohibited, you know, the user had to opt in to being tracked across websites. So a thing that it did, which was so punitive was it just made targeting harder because it made it harder for Facebook to put someone in a bucket of.

[00:02:56] Interest and build a profile and it made it harder to show them in our [00:03:00] targeting ad. So they were just new every time. Um, I think everybody gets that and the brands who kill it today. In my opinion, it's like true classic is this t shirt company there. They were founded under three years ago and they're doing 150 million run rate revenue.

[00:03:22] I think they kill it because they can serve a broad ad. If that makes sense, they're just showing t shirt ads to men, [00:03:30] period. It's not like, you know, men who have a gluten intolerance, who have a, whatever, you know what I mean? Uh, which is kind of like, uh, I just wanted to say that because I don't think all hope is lost.

[00:03:43] It's just this Facebook thing before I was 14 had this incredible ability for a brand to create this hyper niche product and then just find those people who would buy it, like, like very quickly. Right. So that was a big [00:04:00] change there. And it's in meta. I don't think people are aware of is that Apple's doing other stuff.

[00:04:06] Other than this iOS update, they have this thing called intelligent tracking prevention, and that has been ratcheting down on what are called third party applications. So things like Meta, Klaviyo, Shopify, these third party apps, ability to track users on their website. Let's talk about email because that's what we're talking [00:04:30] about today.

[00:04:31] Why would it matter? If so, what has happened is Klaviyo, for instance, who everybody knows just IPO and everybody uses, they used to be able to track someone on a merchant's website for two years. And if you go, they did it with a cookie. If you search Klaviyo's help docs and type Klaviyo cookie, the first thing that you will see is this warning banner that says, [00:05:00] as of April 23rd of this year, due to intelligent tracking prevention, instead of two years, Klaviyo's tracking only lasts seven days.

[00:05:09] So why is that a problem? Well, the problem is if someone clicks on a Facebook ad, hits your website and browses around And put something in their cart and leaves, they will get the best email that exists in the world today. They will get an abandoned cart email. [00:05:30] That's amazing. If eight days later, they come back on their own volition and they don't click through from an ad.

[00:05:40] You don't know who they are. They can click or eight days later, they can click around, put a pair of shoes in the, in their cart and leave. And you can't send them that email. A year ago, they could have come back nine months later and done that [00:06:00] and gotten an abandoned cart email. So if you have to start at zero every seven days, the amount of people that you actually have tracked and the ability to send these messages to relative to the amount of people that there would be, if you could track for two years.

[00:06:20] Is smaller by two thirds, approximately I've seen from the data because this is what we do. This is what we sell. So, um, I just want to [00:06:30] raise awareness of this problem because I think most merchants know what iOS 14 was and that it hurt them and that it hurt them in the meta. I don't think hardly anybody is aware of this intelligent tracking prevention and its effect on you in your email program.

[00:06:51] So it's a problem. You need to fix it. You know, check out redemption. com. This is what we do. We track [00:07:00] people. We help, we have four different ways of identifying people and we identify people on your website, help you track them for longer. And, uh, it just makes, you know, the, the, the biggest thing it does with respect to this Apple thing is it makes all of these flows that you set up, which Klaviyo makes you set up an abandoned checkout flow, which is I would recommend setting up an abandoned add to cart flow, an abandoned browse flow, and a welcome series.

[00:07:28] These automated part of the magic, [00:07:30] most of the magic is Klaviyo is of Klaviyo is the ease with which you can set up these messages to go out over email and SMS from people taking action on your website, because those are timely. They're contextual, they're relevant, they resonate, right? Like the, they, they are the magic email.

[00:07:49] Um, so, so yeah, there's. Another way to use this technology, which going into black Friday [00:08:00] is, I think it's, it's, it's just like a hack, but there's no other way to describe it. So our, our original product, um, if a visitor hits your homepage and they leave without filling out a form, we can resolve that to a deliverable email address only for USA traffic.

[00:08:24] Um, and we can just put it in your email list and we can grow your list that way. [00:08:30] Everybody's like, how's that legal? How does it work? And what do I send? And, you know, aren't these emails just going to be junk or whatever. We are incredibly judicious about cleaning them and we know how to make them deliver well.

[00:08:42] So like that's number four with the legality part in the USA only. Um, if you have an opt out link in the email, you're not actually legally, legally required to get an opt in. So this is not Europe in Europe. You're required opt in for data collection on the internet. It's not [00:09:00] Canada. Um, opt in for data collection and email.

[00:09:03] Uh, it's only USA technology. Um, and then number three, how does it work? We have a publisher network who do banner ads and. We basically have the ability to take anonymous digital identifiers in the ad tech world and connect them to profiles, which include emails of people that have opted in to receive emails from the publisher network.

[00:09:29] That's [00:09:30] 10, 000 feet how it works. Um, and. It's incredible. Dr. Squatch, for instance, which I'm, I think people have heard of this big soap company. They were doing a lot of ads. They got acquired. Um, they onboarded this 90 days before black Friday last year, we were responsible for over a million dollars of incremental revenue in October alone.

[00:09:52] And we were 5 percent of their revenue from the whole black Friday period, which is. Just awesome. 

[00:09:59] It's [00:10:00] insane. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:10:01] It's incredible. Um, so yeah, that's, that's the, the long and short of the, the, the message, you know, it's, it's, there's, there's a lot that can be done with this onsite visitor identity, um, you know, we mostly focus on email, um, We also have some products that feed audiences into meta because of the shortcoming of the retargeting pixel.

[00:10:25] Now, um, you know, they're blocked. We're not, cause we don't have an app in the apple app [00:10:30] store. Um, but yeah, I mean, this is what. I'm trying to do, just make sure everybody knows at the very least that these possibilities exist for them. 

[00:10:42] Hey, Claus here, just a quick one. If you liked the content of this episode, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter Shopify merchant in just seven minutes per week.

[00:10:50] We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you stay on top of your e commerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends. Every inbox, a hundred percent [00:11:00] free. Join now at newsletter. ecommerce. com. That is newsletter. ecommercecoffeebreak. com. And now back to the show.

[00:11:08] Now, obviously we are exactly in this time screen, Black Friday, there's still a little bit of time. Um, I think a lot of merchants are already very late to the table when it comes to their marketing preparation for Black Friday. Now, if we want to collect more email addresses, your system obviously is a complete new way on how to find email addresses where you actually otherwise wouldn't have to use a form, [00:11:30] for instance, and forms have, I don't know, 2%, 3 percent signup rate.

[00:11:34] If you're on a good day, I 

[00:11:36] think that on a homepage, that's a pretty good average. You know, if you're the best in the world at it and it's like way down the funnel, then you're going to get higher than that. But it's, it's, it's no more than single digit, you know, collection, right? Like mid, doesn't get above.

[00:11:52] How would, how would you go about warming up, um, these new acquired email addresses to really get them into the funnel? 

[00:11:59] So [00:12:00] this is an interesting, this is hard to get your head around a little bit. These emails have very high. Positive engagement, but they have negative engagement. That's like a bit too high to just send to these emails alone.

[00:12:23] The way that one cold emails in consumer in e commerce or whatever, you can't [00:12:30] just like start a company, buy a list and blast to it. That doesn't work. You know what I mean? It just, for whoever's tried that, you know what I'm talking about. It just causes endless problems. Um, email is a game that is built on reputation.

[00:12:46] If you establish an email program and you're regularly mailing to a list, it cleans itself to the point where the engagement of that list or your 30 day active openers is like very high. You can sprinkle in this type of email that has [00:13:00] very high and, uh, very high positive and slightly high negative engagement at a rate where it's like, you know, a few percentage of the overall flow per day.

[00:13:08] And it just works beautifully because the emails are inexpensive. Now, these people are just going to start getting newsletters. What we've learned over the last four years is that works. Um, it's kind of like straight, you're like, well, [00:13:30] you know, we had been telling people until about a year ago to send a welcome series that says, thanks for stopping by the site, take them through a three part welcome series, then put them in your newsletter.

[00:13:43] We actually found that everything performs better and the conversion rate is higher when you just start mixing them into a newsletter, which is odd. Um, but. I'm just a numbers guy, so I'm going to go with what, with what works. Um, but that works. [00:14:00] And you know what I tell myself is it's probably just brand impressions, right?

[00:14:07] Like in a weird way, email is, you know, initially, maybe not as much about what it says, but just the fact that, you know, you're, you're sort of warming people up with the same compelling content that the rest of your newsletter is getting. You know, something like that. 

[00:14:26] What's your take on warming up to people [00:14:30] going into Black Friday?

[00:14:31] When would you start a campaign? When would you send out the first of notifications to make people aware that Black Friday is around the corner? 

[00:14:39] If this is not to do with our product with emails we're giving you, I would send to them as soon as possible as it pertains, not. Um, it's a good question. I think about, I think, [00:15:00] you know, I kind of treat the internet as though people's attention and their memories are incredibly short.

[00:15:12] It's almost like longer than a week in internet time in my opinion, is like, I, I have no, when I say I have no idea what I browsed or saw. Last Thursday, I'm not kidding. I don't know [00:15:30] what I was looking at, you know, like I get gun to my head in I'm 42, 43, maybe I'm losing some, some short and medium term memory or whatever it's called, but like, I have no idea what I was doing last Friday on my computer.

[00:15:45] Or Thursday. So. I think you can start, you know, warming them up a little bit a week in advance or whatever, but in my opinion, if you're talking about black Friday, two weeks before black Friday, that's an eternity. That's like, uh, [00:16:00] that's light years from black Friday. I think you probably even get away with a few days, you know, Telling them something's coming up a few days in advance.

[00:16:10] Okay. 

[00:16:11] That's one man's opinion. Right. And by the way, I'll qualify, but saying I'm not actually in the game. I'm like a guy who's a vendor to these people. So 

[00:16:21] exactly. Yeah. Cool. Now with a fast list grow, um, there might be some risks also involved Queens, like list cleaning, making sure that [00:16:30] everything, uh, gets delivered.

[00:16:32] How do you deal with that? 

[00:16:33] So generally speaking, We, we, we usually only sell that product to somebody who's got over 3 million of, uh, sales per, per year going through their store. The bigger you are, the better the Dr. Squatch example is like a great one. There is usually a magic balance between the amount of traffic they have that we can turn into emails, the amount of emails they've collected over the [00:17:00] years.

[00:17:01] Can sort of take this amount of traffic we're giving them. And we also never want to give somebody more than like 2 percent per day. On average of what's going out. So we have a throttle that we can, there's several different ways to throttle what's coming in. You could, for instance, only send emails to the brand after they've seen two different pages, which cuts the volume by three quarters.

[00:17:28] Right. Or you [00:17:30] could say, I'm only going to give this brand 500 per day, for instance. So, um, Long story short, we make sure that it's not going to, to the, there's so far below what would overwhelm their delivery reputation that it doesn't even become part of the discussion 

[00:17:48] ever. 

[00:17:49] But you know, if you're in, in my position, it pays to be as conservative as possible, you know, like the last thing I need is like a bunch of brands out there talking about how I blew [00:18:00] up their deliverability, right.

[00:18:01] It's, it would literally destroy everything I'm doing right now. So yeah, we're unbelievably conservative in that department 

[00:18:08] with your hack on getting anonymous, um, people, the email address from them. Um, how do you prevent that you basically get email addresses that you already have in your list? 

[00:18:19] So that's part of the product.

[00:18:21] Uh, we, we use their existing list as a suppression list. So you'll never get an email that you already have. It checks, it checks Clavio first before it [00:18:30] like puts it 

[00:18:32] in to 

[00:18:32] make sure it's not there. 

[00:18:34] Okay. Now, obviously Klaviyo just had a huge stock market event yesterday or two days before. God bless him.

[00:18:41] Congratulations. 

[00:18:42] Um, yeah, I totally appreciate that. I went there, um, myself using Klaviyo for years and Shopify, are you also working with other platforms? What's the tech stack that you support? 

[00:18:53] So, yeah, it's mainly Shopify Klaviyo, just because we're fairly young and have [00:19:00] low penetration in this market.

[00:19:01] Um, the future for us, you know, we. You know, every vendor who sells SAS wants to go at market Salesforce is, is the place to do it. Um, we have the integration built out already. Big commerce, WooCommerce. We do a lot of, um, not so much square. They're kind of like small, you know, ish to, to make our stuff work.

[00:19:29] But yeah, those [00:19:30] other platforms where we're all over and then all the corresponding email applications that they use, you Um, iterable braze, blue core, you know, Salesforce marketing cloud. We have integrations for all of them. 

[00:19:46] Okay. Sounds great. How does the look at the typical onboarding process look like?

[00:19:52] Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty quick. I think it's like, it's a few hours of work. [00:20:00] Um, we do most of it, but like, there's things that the brand, you know, we need clavio permission, Shopify permissions, whatever. So it's like, I think start to finish, it usually takes seven days, but it's probably only an hour of the brand's time.

[00:20:13] Um, it's just kind of like getting permissions and permissions and then waiting for some work to be done and then, you know, sort of approving it all and flipping it on and that generally. Again, it's like, if you just had someone's undivided attention, it would happen in a few hours, but like, that's not how [00:20:30] onboarding works in my experience, you know?

[00:20:34] Very true. Yeah. How does your pricing structure work? What's the pricing look like? 

[00:20:38] Yeah. So we, right now we have our starter plan is 500 bucks a month. Um, and. You know, the largest people are paying 20 grand or whatever per month, but they're massive, they're like, you know, several hundred billion a year brands.

[00:20:55] Um, we are creating a Shopify app. That's like a 77 a month [00:21:00] price point. So it's, you know, much more entry level, which is by design. And it's just a monthly subscription. 

[00:21:09] Okay. That's very straightforward. Kind of, kind of based 

[00:21:11] on the size of your company. So like, you know, a couple million in revenues, like 500 bucks a month.

[00:21:19] Uh, what's your take on where this whole thing was iOS and third party cookies is going? Um, what, how will it change that or will this [00:21:30] change the landscape? 

[00:21:33] Uh, Apple is going to try to make it harder to, uh, do all of this stuff. Like it's fairly clear they, they, you know, privacy to them means anonymity.

[00:21:47] Which privacy can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. It doesn't mean that to Google, right? Like it doesn't mean that to me, but I think the internet works, you know, I think the next [00:22:00] generation of. You know, two generations from now, all of this stuff that Apple's talking about and doing, I don't think anyone's going to care about it at all.

[00:22:07] Cause we will have all grown up in this world where, you know, of the four main tech vendors, only one of them cared about this and everybody else has been tracking us since we were in the womb. So like who, who gives a shit, right. But, um, Apple still has. They have a lot of traffic in this iPhone thing is like real.

[00:22:25] It's like they have 60 percent market share in the U S or something. And they're [00:22:30] going to keep making it harder for everybody to do all this stuff. So it's exciting for me. You know, the problem is going to keep getting bigger. So, um, I think there's always, I'm here to solve it. 

[00:22:43] Exactly. There's always bright people to find a solution to, to these problems.

[00:22:46] And, um, what I'm saying for now, about two years since iOS came out is like, at some point we will see a ad platform coming out from, I'm wondering, I'm wondering that it takes so long, but [00:23:00] that's my prediction for the last two years. Let's see where it ends. Okay, cool. Before we come to the end of the coffee break today, is there anything that you want to share with the listeners that we haven't covered yet?

[00:23:08] No, I think we touched it all. I just want everybody to know that that is a thing that is happening, you know, like this thing is happening and, uh, you can do something about it. So that's the major message. 

[00:23:21] Okay. One thing that I want to touch on is the billion dollar challenge that you, um, sort of chronic thing.

[00:23:27] So what's that about? 

[00:23:29] You [00:23:30] know, about a year ago, I thought businesses have these interesting trajectories that went from, this is like going to be a really good lifestyle business to like, this thing could be a unicorn. And I had seen people doing this work in public content creation. And I thought that it had a very unique way.

[00:23:55] It's like on the simplest level, it's like [00:24:00] anyone can build anything that you have. And in one second, basically now probably faster, right? Maybe not one second, but it's getting easier to build whatever you're you have and you're selling. And, um, you know, brand and trust are synonymous, my opinion. And like the only thing, you know, it's like the, the, the biggest differentiator you can have is, is this brand these days.

[00:24:26] And it's like, okay, when you're nobody. How what's the [00:24:30] quickest way to create a brand. And somebody had said this and I agree. It's like, well, people are on social media platforms to connect to people, not companies. Right. So I was like, I think I'm going to try to just make a docuseries chronicling my life as I undergo this transformation from a six person lifestyle business to someone who's trying to like aggressively scale unicorn and it, you know, people, maybe they're blowing smoke up my ass.

[00:24:56] I don't know, but like it's, it's a really well done. There's [00:25:00] 10, 10 minute episodes and 10 more 10 minute episodes are going to be launched starting in three weeks from now weekly. And it's just about what it's like being in the middle of this. Madness, you know, it's like me in my life trying to, you know, will this thing forward, uh, in all of the nonsense that, that comes from it, you know, and trying to juggle everything.

[00:25:26] Everybody's trying to juggle in this position. So that's, what's [00:25:30] all about. 

[00:25:31] Okay. Great project. 

[00:25:34] Yeah, if you go to my LinkedIn page, retention, Adam, it's in a feature post. It's like the whole playlist of the episodes that has happened so far. And also on my YouTube page, but I don't have any, I'm putting all my content creation into LinkedIn right now.

[00:25:46] It's so like, I don't have an audience there really. 

[00:25:49] Okay. No, that's a great story. Um, I wish I have done that. I mean, I'm in business for as an entrepreneur for more than 20 years and it makes for good stories. But [00:26:00] on the other hand, also, it gives for good lessons for people who want to follow in your footsteps.

[00:26:04] So well, well done on that idea. 

[00:26:08] That was my hope. 

[00:26:10] Cool. Where can people find out more about you guys? 

[00:26:14] Retention. com. Pretty good domain. Can't miss that. That is a good 

[00:26:17] domain. I will, I will put it in the show notes for the people who can't spell. Thanks so much for the time today. I really enjoyed the chat and I hope a lot of people will come over and follow you on your [00:26:30] story and check out retention.

[00:26:31] com. Thanks for your time, Adam. Thank you. Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the E Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast.

[00:26:48] Simply like, comment, and subscribe in the app you're using. using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter Shopify merchant in just seven minutes per [00:27:00] week. We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you stay on top of your e commerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends.

[00:27:08] Every Thursday in your inbox, 100 percent free. Join now at newsletter. ecommercecoffeebreak. com. That is newsletter. ecommercecoffeebreak. com. Thanks again. And I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.