How Top Brands Make Millions With Email & SMS — Jason Donapel | Why Retention Starts Before Conversion, How To Build Trust, What Makes A Strong Email List, How To Craft The Perfect Welcome Email, Why Simple Emails Work Best, What Email KPIs Matter (#380)

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Discover practical strategies to enhance customer trust and retention with Jason Donapel, founder of EX (the Email Experience). 

Jason reveals why businesses should prioritize moving audiences from expensive advertising platforms to owned channels like email and SMS. He shares insights on creating effective welcome flows, designing authentic lead magnets that attract true brand advocates rather than discount chasers, and implementing personalized messaging strategies. 

Learn how to measure success through message volume and revenue per recipient, and why minimal, text-focused emails often outperform heavily designed alternatives in driving customer engagement and lifetime value. 

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Why retention starts before conversion. 
• How to build trust. 
• What makes a strong email list. 
• How to craft the perfect welcome email. 
• Why simple emails work best. 
• What Email KPIs matter. 
• How email segmentation boosts sales. 
• Why you should send more emails. 
• How email insights improve marketing. 
• What makes a winning email strategy.

Links & Resources 

Website: https://www.jasondonapel.com/
Website: https://theemailexperience.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-donapel/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/exJasonDonapel/ 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/vyw8dbn9 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey there, welcome to the eCommerce Coffee Break Podcast, where we share actionable tips and strategies to help you grow your online store and sell smarter. I'm your host, Claus Lauter. In today's episode, we discuss practical strategies to enhance customer trust and retention. Joining me on the show is Jason Donapel, founder [00:00:20] of EX (the Email Experience)

so let's dive right into it.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today, we want to talk about practical strategies to enhance customer trust and retention. Now, for that, I have a guest on the show as always. And today it's Jason Donapel. He is the founder of [00:00:40] EX (the Email Experience), and he is on a mission to revolutionize how business communicate with their audiences and we will be very practical and dive right into it.

Hi, Jason. How are you today? I'm doing great Claus. Thanks so much for having me. Jason, um, keeping customers coming back to your business is probably the most important thing you can do in e commerce. What are mistakes [00:01:00] that you see that brands do when it comes to that topic? You know, I, I think that brands start thinking about it too late, right?

I think that all the emphasis now is placed upon, um, driving traffic to websites or media buying, you know, competing in the, on, on meta or Google's, Google ads or [00:01:20] whatever. Um, I think that's because they were cheap. And it was a kind of easy cheat code to scale a business for a long time. And, uh, yeah, what we ended up with is, is sort of backwards, right?

What we need to be doing is thinking of, you know, how do you move your audience off of those platforms and onto spaces that are more friendly to you, um, [00:01:40] spaces that the conversation between you and your audience, you just have more control over. So I think that retention actually starts way before even conversion at some, you know, you can, you can make the argument.

No, I would agree. I mean, the good times are over. As you said, um, all the platforms are not cheap anymore and retention has become more and more important to that. [00:02:00] Now, I think what you're leading towards is the factor of trust, building up trust, and there's different ways to do that. Tell me your take on that.

So, yeah, I think about, yeah, building trust. I think about it as growing your audience, right? Moving, I really, I picture if you're, if you're building your audience on Amazon or like I said, Facebook or even [00:02:20] TikTok, if you're an influencer that it has a huge following, I view it as you basically have a stand in somebody's flea market and you're hoping they don't, you're hoping that the regulations are the same, right?

You hope that the rent doesn't go up next month or whatever. So when we talk about building trust, I'm really thinking, I'm focusing on Building my audience and getting people just to first opt in [00:02:40] to, to what, who I am or what I am. So moving people from, uh, any third party onto a digital property that you own, giving them an option to interact with you, you know, join a newsletter, join an SMS, join a WhatsApp, join a discord.

It doesn't really matter the channel. We get hung up on email because it's so profitable, but it's, to me, [00:03:00] the first, before you start thinking about conversions and profits and revenue. You're thinking about moving my audience to these business owner friendly channels where you can control your communication and not have to spend 20 bucks every time you want them to interact with with your website or something.

So, yeah, you know, it's sort of, uh, putting the horse before the [00:03:20] carriage thing, right? We are so focused on driving conversions because, again, traditionally. Your, your communication is so expensive, you have to focus on conversions, but when you get that pressure off and you're communicating with your list through an email, through an SMS, which is a little more expensive, but still cheaper than Facebook or, you know, Google or whatever, that pressure is removed and you [00:03:40] don't have this, this, this, this noose around your neck of, I got to get the sale, got to get the sale, you can take your time and, you know, you have I really think of it as walking them through almost a syllabus.

Like, these are the 10 things I really want users or people in the world to know about me. And how can you do that in a Facebook ad? No, you have [00:04:00] to bring them through some sort of a conversation where you can control the flow of the information. Don't overwhelm them. Understand that. Oh, look, they maybe didn't see email number two or SMS number three.

Um, so I can actually retarget that later in a campaign. They didn't, they missed number three on the syllabus. Right. And it only happens in retention. It only happens on these channels that you own. [00:04:20] So yeah, conversions will happen. They're almost like a by product of just doing the right thing and building your list and audience the right way.

Yeah. I agree. It's getting people over. Obviously first priority on email, SMS, or what you mentioned, I think that's an interesting take to have a discord channel or slack channel to get them in there and have a way of communication with them. [00:04:40] Now, what is a way to get people over there? And obviously everyone is like, has an elite magnet there or a, uh, why offer or something like that.

And I know people are really just like, I have downloaded a thousand different PDFs and I do not even open them. What makes it attractive to get people on your list? So there's, there's, there's like the tactic that you [00:05:00] put up on your pop up or on your, right, your lead magnet or whatever it is, and I think before we start worrying about that, we have, there's a decision point, and it's again, what are we doing, what are, why are we growing this audience?

You see a lot of these 10 percent off and a lot of these spin to win and. You know, whatever opt in incentives, because the only thing we're thinking about is [00:05:20] conversion. So that drives every piece of the conversation. What I like to tell my clients to do is to understand what you're really doing is you're choosing the audience you're going to build.

It's not really about just driving for higher percentages for the sake of driving for higher percentages, right? Like a 10 percent opt in is [00:05:40] great. If it fills your list with people that care about you, right? Like it doesn't really so you're actually operating within some sort of like a little bit of a spectrum where the aggressiveness.

Or the meat of what you're putting on that opt in directly impacts what you're going to get out of it. So I like to use the example of [00:06:00] if you were given a free MacBook to everybody who's on your website today, you're going to get a big list and it might get out of hand and it could go viral and you could be it's whatever you want to grow a list, then you can grow a list, right?

None of them are going to buy anything from you, and it's going to be very. It'll be a quick way to close your business down. Um, and then, you know, so that's like on the spin to win wheels [00:06:20] and the stuff where people are giving you their email address, not because they care about you, but because they care about whatever this mechanism you placed in front of them is.

And, and is that really what you want? If you're a store like Wayfair or, you know, Groupon, I don't know if Groupon's still around, then sure, that might be what you want because you're just doing a, that's, that's your play, right? You got a bunch of [00:06:40] money and you can just pump it out and you're churn and burn.

You'll do your thing. It's fine. Um, most owners that I deal with don't have that, that luxury. And so we can talk about the other end of the spectrum, which is. Right. The complete opposite of that. Right. No offer, no anything. Maybe it's a behind the scenes. Look at how we make our handbags. Maybe it's, um, a [00:07:00] 30 second interview with the founder, or maybe it's like a video, you know, something that, you know, if Tony, if you're signing up for Tony Robbins list and he gives you a five minute personal consultation, like, Oh, I guess that's, that's, there's a monetary value to that.

But you know, it's, it's different than him throwing an iPad at you. I think all you need to understand is that once you're, You've In that [00:07:20] mindset and you know what decision you're making, then you can proceed and you can say, okay, I'm going to do the audience that I want is going to be interested in maybe like a free shipping on their first order with me because I don't want to devalue my product.

You know, I can maybe craft some message that says, you know, I'll, I'll take shipping, I'll take shipping this time and we'll, you know, the boat, whatever it [00:07:40] is. And then you have something like in the middle where you're getting somebody who's a little incentive driven, but they're also interested in your brand and you can play with that.

Like, I think the, the, the matter of it is you can play with it. You can start on the low. On the least aggressive side of the spectrum and say, I'm just going to, you know, everybody who signs up today is going to get some behind the scenes tour of my warehouse or [00:08:00] my facility or something, and then we'll see.

And then if they come back on visit to from whatever mechanism, then I can try the more, you know, the medium offer free shipping, 10 percent off, whatever. And you just decide how much do I want the lead? Like, what leads do I want? Do I want to chase them down with a free? Whatever free everything you can give it all away.

If you want, you can go as [00:08:20] far as you want. Right? Um, so yeah, we can go and I have resources and things to share exact tactics to put on pop ups, you know, but I really think before you understand the decision you're making, it honestly doesn't really matter because you can't communicate with the list anyway.

So you have to know what, what you're kind of building. So, um, my favorite offers [00:08:40] are not offers that are at all. They are sort of whatever brings people closer to your brand and closer to your production and your value and the solution you're creating and why you're creating it and things like that.

Yeah. So you want to attract the real fans of your brand or build up on the real fans of your brand instead of Just attracting discount chases that you will never see, [00:09:00] and they will never buy anything from you. I think that's a very important point because you see so many apps, um, for Shopify and other platforms with fear of missing out.

And they all play on discount codes on gaming gamification and so on and so forth. Now, when you build a list, when you have to sign up, might it be SMS or email? Um, [00:09:20] talk me about the concept of a welcome flow. How would you approach that? It's the most important. It is everything it is. So I, I think in football and like NFL terms a lot.

I'm a huge Eagles fan. So I'm always like I'm building plays and I'm thinking through my playbook and I'm thinking through things like that and I've said it. I've written blog post on my site [00:09:40] about it and dedicated a lot of time to message one and your welcome series. I call it. It's like having the first overall pick in the draft like it is A message that can move your entire.

It's amazing how top heavy it can be. Um, I've seen brands that are pulling in 50, 60, 70 K a month from revenue and 45 K of it comes from [00:10:00] that one message in their welcome series. And that's how important, and that's not ideal. Clearly you want more diversification than that, but when you're a brand owner, right?

You're a store owner and you have. 10 minutes to look at your email program in a day. If all you do is refine that message, then you've done, you've done something and you're done. So first and foremost, it's like, that's how important it is. Like, [00:10:20] make sure that you're, you understand. And then, um, it's really walking through that.

You know, I think of it as a syllabus, you know, it could be for a brand, it could be like for myself, I think about the syllabus of Jason Donapel, what do I want people to know about me when they go to my site or get an email from me or interact with whatever happened on LinkedIn or, you know, whatever's going on in the world.[00:10:40] 

And so a couple of my points are literally like, I want people to think that I'm way more obsessed with email and SMS than they are like, I just want that to come across without me having to say it. I just want them to go. Yeah, this guy's crazy. This is all he does. I get it. And, um, you know, and I had like 10 bullet points in my head that I want people to know, like, just from the interactions and welcome [00:11:00] series.

Number one is where that all happens. The tone of voice, you write it out in how heavy, how image heavy is it versus text based if you're a personality facing brand. That it better be like text text text heavy written from you talking about things, you know, if you are like a big box store like a target or a wayfair, then you know you're probably [00:11:20] merchandising it with the highest sales of the day or whatever it is.

So it's very dependent on who you are as a sender and who is receiving it. Um. But the real trick, I think, is duplicating that message. So when we just talked about those pop ups a little bit, and we talked about how you can think through different [00:11:40] offers and how the people coming through those offers are different types of shoppers, basically, and you've learned a little piece of information about that user just by which pop up they've gone through.

So the effort you've put in to building a better on site experience is Has now paid off in that, well, you're getting better leads, hopefully, but also you've learned a little bit before you even send message number one, [00:12:00] you know, oh, this person, all they needed to opt in was a 30 minute confessional from Claus, right?

This person like loves me. Okay, I'm going to write message number one to that person versus somebody who needed a free shipping or a 20 percent discount or something, you know, and then you have to welcome [00:12:20] messages to message number ones, you get a fresh crack at both of these audiences by knowing just this little, we get so hung up in how much data you need to personalize a conversation.

Just that is enough, right? Somebody who said, you know, I just love you versus I love a discount about the stuff you sell. Okay. You can, that message is a little different, and now all [00:12:40] of a sudden, instead of that message making, you know, in the scenario I gave, instead of that message driving like 35k, that little tweak, all of a sudden you can drive 60, 70k from it if you have, you know, heavy volume like that, you know, a more realistic scenario might be, you know, you go from 2, 000 a month to, you know, 25, 000 in a month just by shifting it out, and now [00:13:00] we're getting into like hyper personalization and it's happening Mechanically, because you're just making better decisions up front and it's all that's why I'm so hung up on decision making versus tactics.

We have so many brand owners and marketers, like every brand I meet is a bunch of tactics that's on top of each other and they're all doing their little thing. You know, it doesn't have, [00:13:20] it doesn't, it doesn't work. Like we need strategy. We need actual, the reason, the reason why. Okay. Cause we're trying to grow a list that does this.

Okay, cool. So we'll, we'll act this way around them. I like the approach that you really start from scratch. So depending where they sign up and what kind of offer or what kind of message is attached to that sign up, your, your, [00:13:40] um, flow starts from there. And it's not so difficult. All of the ESPs, Klaviyo, whatever, they all support that.

But I think very few people do that. Normally they throw everything in a database and then they think about segmentation and not as you one step before. Now I want to talk a little bit about the style of. Emails, artwork, text, [00:14:00] copy. What's your take on that? What do you prefer? Um, yeah, I prefer plain text with nothing else in it because I basically want to launch a new email every day and never get hung up on design.

So I feel like by the time we're getting down to optimizing design and stuff, that feels like a cherry on top to me. Like, I [00:14:20] feel that before you have the luxury of focusing on that, and this is, by the way, my personal opinion. I don't think this is a state of, like, Everybody should have a different approach.

My business partner is the designer, so he's like that half of the company that fights for design, by the way, if it was run by me, it would be all basic nonsense. Nobody would hire us ever. So [00:14:40] it is important to note that I'm an extremist on the set up data kind of side of things. I think that design moves the needle as much as it can.

I think that it's more for the brands than it is for The end user sometimes like I feel like it's it's very self serving at points like it becomes very much us just kind of Uh designing beautiful things and [00:15:00] then talking about how great they look Um, i've seen that minimal design Mostly text just straight up.

No nonsense Works better every time and it just is what I see in sms leaving Uh images off improves conversion rate and roi I see in [00:15:20] email I'm going very text heavy and basically writing from a first person point of like somebody writing from the company. Um, if you can fit those in those always inbox the highest and they have the highest click rates and that's that's all you can do in an email like you're, you're, you're not, you're, you're just getting click rates, right?

You're just moving traffic to the next phase. [00:15:40] Um, So that's what I've seen. I spent all of my time on that other part of like, who's getting the message? Why are they getting the message? What does it tell me about the next message I'm going to send them? And I find that once you're in that mindset, the content just kind of happens.

You don't really have to. The high wire act of copywriting is that we're trying to write these messages that [00:16:00] speak to everybody on our list. And it's so it feels very hard to do once you're not doing that anymore. It's very easy to do like if somebody comes in through, uh, through a widget on a blog post that I wrote about hyper personalization, I can talk to them about hyper personalization.

You know, I can just do it. It's very easy. I don't have to worry about how what's [00:16:20] going to get this person to click or what's going to. That's what they are. They need help with their beard. They told me, I'll talk about beards. Like, we'll just go for it. No, it makes perfect sense. I like the approach. I'm also a minimalist when it comes to that.

For me, every email should be a pure text email, but obviously there is brand strategists there and there's graphic designers there. They have a different take, as you said, on [00:16:40] this. And I think you need to balance it out. Um, I'm very low tech. I have an editor, a notebook editor. That's where I write my emails.

And that's about it. it. So when it comes to, um, your customers and you worked with a whole range of different brands in the past, um, what's the typical situation? When do they come to you? [00:17:00] Well, so there's been waves actually. Um, there was a big wave when COVID was going and e commerce was like gangbusters.

There was just a wave of people coming in and It seemed like everything worked, no matter what anybody did, it just all kind of worked. And, um, now what we're seeing is a lot of people, we're seeing a lot [00:17:20] of new marketers, not new marketers, but the people that were hired after that wave died, I guess. So the people who are now.

Competing with the year over year comparisons versus when everything worked. Um, so we're just seeing a lot of like correction in the space, a lot of truth, which I feel like is beautiful. And a lot of people coming back [00:17:40] to how can I be a scrappy marketer and not just pump ads on Facebook and say that I'm growing a brand.

Right. So we're seeing a lot of people kind of coming back, um, in terms of like the size of companies, like it's, it's all over the place. It's, it's really something we're seeing a lot of. I'm still seeing a lot of brands, fresh launches like, Hey, we're coming three [00:18:00] months in, we accelerated and we want to grow, um, our email list first, before we start, we're seeing more of that people starting to do it first, before they spend, um, I think it's because maybe they spent a month or two on Facebook and lost a couple grand and realized that I should change my approach.

Um, but we're seeing more of that. It used to not be that it used to always be. [00:18:20] Hey, we're doing 300 K a month and no email. And now we're seeing it a little bit differently. Like, Hey, we want to scale up. We want to add email. And then we're seeing some of the larger kind of legacy brands that have been around forever, um, that, you know, or maybe sitting at 10, 15 percent of revenue coming from retention and [00:18:40] they're seeing us like push 30, 40 percent and they want to get in on the action now, because again, the stuff they were using traditionally doesn't work, the VSLs, like all that stuff is so expensive now.

Is that, um, was retention 15%? And then you get from there, I take it from there. What are the metrics that you're looking into? What KPIs are [00:19:00] for you in focus for making it work? Yeah, I think the main KPIs for me that cut all the nonsense out because there's so much oversaturation of data where we just start spinning in circles and we're chasing our tails.

So what I really, really work on is two metrics that to me own everything in, um, in. And everything is just [00:19:20] nested underneath of it, right? So it can be as robust as we want it to be and complicated, but it is quite minimalist when we think about it at first. And that's simply the number of messages you're sending out every month.

And then you can break it down however you want to. And I track this simply because I know it's the highest ROI action that a business owner can take. And I know it because I just see it. I [00:19:40] see an email make 44 for every dollar you spend on it. I see our SMSs make Whatever 20 to 22, depending on how big and expensive they are, um, and then varying through other channels, WhatsApp and all that stuff.

So I know that if business owners. In a perfect world, if they could spend their time getting this perfectly right, it would move their [00:20:00] business more than any other metric that they have. And I believe that firmly. I believe it over every Facebook ad or Google ad or whatever. And I just believe that, um, it's not as pressing.

It's one of those, if you are like in the seven habits of highly effective people, you're thinking about the quadrants. Um, it's definitely, uh, uh, uh, important, but not urgent, so it [00:20:20] doesn't get looked at, right, because it just kind of chugs away, and your Facebook ads are spending every day. So, anyway, I said it was complicated, I said it was simple, then I went into a whole tangent about it.

So, number of messages sent, I think about very much, and then if I see it lagging, I start thinking about, Why is it because my campaigns are down or my automations are down? Is it because my list growth is down? And then you can see how it [00:20:40] spiderwebs into as complicated as I as I want it to be. And I can get down to, you know, we are retargeting strategy failed.

We didn't have and you can really drill down into why that metric failed. But at the number one is message sent. And then number two is that dollar per recipient, how much is every message I send worth? Because you can [00:21:00] raise your messages sent in a way that plummets the other metric, and then you've failed, like it's still, it's not helping the business.

So what we do is we track them both in tandem, and that is honestly how we left, like we, that's how we, that's how we became a personalization first, that's how personalization took over. That's, that's really how split testing can't exist in [00:21:20] that environment. Because the two metrics don't rise together.

You don't have control. You don't have enough control. You're testing and hoping and then you can control the one half of it. But your messages value could go down and nothing. You know, it doesn't work. But what we found is that when you're personalizing messages like I, you know, with the pop up example, you're doing little and there's endless tactics that we [00:21:40] use to get that to get that Goal across how do we make five abandoned carts instead of the one?

How do we get 10 post purchases in a year? So we're really drilling down. Do we have to get tender? Is it only three, you know, whatever it is That is how we find the balance of okay. Well, we used to send messages They were worth a penny for every email you sent [00:22:00] now there were three cents and we're sending Two X of them, boom, like now we've raised the ships and everything, all the reporting we do is nested under one of those two metrics.

Hey, we were down month over month. Did we send less messages or were they worthless? Oh, they were worthless. Okay. Why was the campaigns [00:22:20] worthless or the journeys journeys were worthless. Okay. Which journeys, why, why? And then you get to the bottom of it, you know, and you can make your adjustments. Yeah. And it shows that eCommerce email marketing is not just, um, set it up and fire and forget basically.

So you need to be in the numbers, you need to be really in the user behavior. [00:22:40] And I like that you say the, the number, the volume of emails you're sending out is a critical point there. I think a lot of brands. Out there merchants, online sellers out there are too scared to send many emails. Um, I hear a lot, just like how often do you send us like, yeah, once a month, every two weeks, uh, do you have the same experience?[00:23:00] 

Yeah, I mean, we're sending, we want to send three to four unique campaigns per week for every brand. We don't have, you know, not every brand does that because there's different service levels and, you know, the economy, you can't just send everything for free. But, um, yeah, I mean, ideally. If you have a nice sizable list, 20k plus, three to four [00:23:20] campaigns a week, again, not high level campaigns, text only, here's a, you know, it doesn't have to be, and not everything goes to everybody is the other, is the other thing.

I think that people are very afraid to send high frequency. Because you picture one person getting five emails from you in a week and you think why, you know, nobody's that important. Why [00:23:40] would I ever say that? Although like Kylie Jenner does think she's that important and her email program crushes yours.

So you should just send. It doesn't matter. Um, but if you are there. If you're personalizing though, and that's, it's, that's the way it is, like, it's the answer to everything I, it's kind of made my job kind of easy now, but if you're personalizing, um, [00:24:00] the, the groups you're sending to just, they demand to be sent to and you, you can't escape it.

So everything you want to do, you're doing in threes and fours. If you publish a new blog, you want to send one to your email group and then another one to your SMS group and then another one to like your e commerce people or whatever, however you split up your. And then it [00:24:20] becomes much easier to send two to three emails per week and then say, oh, I'm going to retarget this one or, you know, I'm going to, you email is so one size fits all because nobody, we don't pay attention to all the, all the levers we have to pull on it, right?

We, we, we segment by engagement because engagement is the only metric we create for ourselves to segment by, [00:24:40] right? But launch three pop ups and you have three segments and then all of a sudden you see is one more valuable than the other. Oh, it's interesting. It is. I'm going to spend more time on them.

How do I, I'm How do I grow that list more quickly? You know, it, it really spirals off. Um, if I split my audience up, let's just say email and SMS just to keep it a and B. But if you think of any [00:25:00] business, you can think that there's, they're coming to you for a solution, but they have unique problems and you can kind of group together.

You know, people are like, I think about like Mercury or like Terminator two on the T 1000, you know, comes back together. Um, and so when you start, even if you don't change anything in your first message, right? So The three pop up scenario. I have [00:25:20] three ABC. Let's say they all get the same exact welcome message.

And you start to see like, hey, group A clicks at a 15 percent click rate versus group B. Why? Why do people coming to me for email advice click at a higher rate than people coming to me for SMS advice? I don't know. But next month when I'm buying ads, I'm going to buy ads [00:25:40] for This group and not the SMS people because, or maybe you're seeing that email people click at a higher rate, but that's not our, that's not our, our, our, our king metric, right?

Our king metric is what's the dollar per revenue. So maybe I'm finding that, Hey, everybody on my email list is worth 50 cents per revenue percent in my welcome series. The [00:26:00] SMS people are worth 1. 75. I'm going to market to them and then you're changing your ads to meet what you're learning in email. And that's what happens when at a certain point, the data collection takes over and the momentum you flip like you flip, you flip over and you're no longer telling the program what to do.

It's telling you like you're no longer that's when we know [00:26:20] that we're like going to be with a client. Forever basically is when we have that monthly meeting where the momentum is shifted and we tell them, look, you really should do your next photo shoot focused on this because look what we're learning in the welcome series and the abandoned carts and the, and that at that point, you know, you've learned the truth that like retention marketing is the source of truth for this type of information.

Like you can't [00:26:40] learn on Facebook. You can't learn it on any anywhere. You're going to learn it through email and SMS when it's done appropriately. Yeah, I think that was just a masterClaus. And I think a lot of listeners now scratching their head and looking into their business because seeing the results from email marketing and then transferring the results or the knowledge, knowledge that you get out of it into other parts of your marketing is [00:27:00] something that not a lot of people think I do, or more people should do.

Um, let's talk about your customers. Who's your perfect customer? How does the onboarding work? How long does it take to get up and running? So the clients that we serve most frequently now are the e commerce. We're kind of built for that just because we've been doing it for seven plus years now. Um, we are at [00:27:20] this point, though, we've kind of broken free of that.

And we're working with honestly anybody building an audience. It doesn't conversion event doesn't really matter as much anymore because it's really like everything we're focused on is transcription. Audience building, activation, and when you break it down to that, we're just activating people to do different, you know, so we have some clients out of [00:27:40] like, you know, some filming a movie.

So we're just building up, you know, activation for that. And when it's time to go live, we'll activate the audience. So, um, but e commerce is still kind of our bread and butter. Um, onboarding is just a rolling process because what we have is our four step process to kind of get into, it's like a lane shift.

Like think of it as, [00:28:00] As shifting from one highway to another, right? It's like, it's like, uh, it literally is an on ramp where it's not so much of a tear down and build from scratch. It's more of like a shift you over into now we're collecting data from your journeys instead of just how they are. Now we're collecting data from your campaigns instead of just how they are.

And then we move into faith. You know, we're trying to set ourselves [00:28:20] up for that moment where everything flips over, um, which happens a couple months in, but you know, in the first month there's Fixing best practices. There is, um, fixing deliverability, which I mean, 30 percent of you'll get a 30 percent revenue bump just by doing that alone.

Um, so a lot of times what we'll see is like there are some major revenue [00:28:40] wins, you know, a lot of people do have their email on set it and forget it, unfortunately, and we'll uncover a 30, 000 mistake just in a setting, you know, Hey, your welcome series is not being sent to 50 percent of the people you thought it was because of this filter.

And that happens all the time. So a lot of that stuff is cleaned up month one. While data collection goes into play. And then, you know, we really start to see the results [00:29:00] of everything hitting at the same time. And it just shows to tell how important email marketing is and having the knowledge. And we're not going into deliverability as much as I want, but we need to do a separate episode on that.

It's so, I mean, what does email marketing help if your emails don't get delivered? And that's Sometimes a very technical thing, um, but it just shows how [00:29:20] important email marketing is. Tell me a little bit about your pricing structure. How do you charge? So our, uh, our agency, it's really based on the amount of, um, emails or messages you need every month.

So there's, there's, there's a tier starting at like 000 a month. And it goes all the way up to the enterprise level stuff. So there's a lot [00:29:40] of ways to customize the offering. The steps in the process are the same. It's really just a matter of how, how many journeys are being impacted a month. How many, you know, automations do we touch in a given month?

Um, honestly, the great thing about the process is that you can only. The prerequisites are built into it, like the things you learn in the Welcome Series. [00:30:00] You start to build in the abandoned and you start to build in that. So it's very nice how it stacks on, you know, one piece on top of another. It's very, I think of it as a very modular, it's, it's in my head, it's an Ikea project that, that's, you know, you're stacking up and you're putting together and then eventually you get to sit in it.

Great comparison. Cool. Jason, before our coffee break comes to an end [00:30:20] today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? Um, no, you know, I, I really think that. I'm going to say no, and then I'm going to immediately share something anyway. I think that the mindset shift is what I'm most interested in, you know, moving away from this emergency, you know, generating sales off of one click on a Facebook ad and really thinking more [00:30:40] through the opportunity you have to interact with an audience over a long stretch of time in such a meaningful way through a channel like email or like SMS if they've opted in and you have the opportunity to do that.

Um, don't be afraid of opt outs. Give people the chance to opt out, and then if they meet you again and not back in, that's beautiful. Mariah Carey wrote a song about that, I think it's called Butterfly. I [00:31:00] recommend listening to it when you're doing your list cleaning. And, um, yeah, I think that if you just go through your syllabus with your audience, be very mindful about who's getting the message and why you're sending it.

Um, the conversions and click rates tend to just fall into place. Okay, no, that's that's a good end to a very interesting topic today. Jason, where can people [00:31:20] go to find out more about you guys? Um, they can go to jasondynapel. com, they can go to theemalexperience. com. Um, yeah, I guess just Google, Google, LinkedIn, I'm on all the normal things.

Okay, nevertheless, I will put the links in the show notes as always, and you just want to click away. Jason, thanks so much, um, for the chat today. I think we could have talked, uh, spoken for [00:31:40] another hour about email marketing. Uh, one of my favorites, as you know. Um, but for now, we leave it like this, and I hope a lot of people reach out to you and, um, get their email marketing optimized.

Thanks so much. Thank you so much, this was great.