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Your guided tour of the world of growth, performance marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth, marketing, and life.
Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and have some fun talking about data-driven growth and lessons learned!
Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty DeGrange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door,
and have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm
your host, Ty DeGrange. And today, we got Bobby Callahan. Hi, Bobby. Hey.
How's it going? Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Had some really good conversations and, excited to dive into the world of email
marketing and SMS, man. Hell, yeah. Everyone's favorite topic.
Exactly. I I don't think enough people I think people have started to
talk more about it and share more, and and I think I think you are smart to
to tackle that space. I'm excited to dive in with you. Hell, yeah.
Absolutely. How's how's your week going? It's going well, man. Q one's an exciting time. A
lot of conversations happening. And, coming out of q four, we crush it for our clients. And
then coming into q one, we can kinda build the agency more. And there's a lot of turbulence, a lot of
people talking about different things, and so it's a lot of fun to build in q one. And and so this week has
been full of q one type things. How about you? Yeah. Similarly, I I definitely
feel you. It's I think people are got their their stuff together. There are
still folks figuring out budgets and plans and strategy, but it's fast and furious
in a good way, all the ways that we want it to be right now. So I couldn't agree
more. Maybe tell the audience a little bit. So what is it you do and maybe
explain, like, very simply, what how would you break down what you do? Yeah. So my name is
Bobby, and I run an agency called Retentio. So that's the word retention without the
n. And so we do retention marketing. Email and SMS is, like, our our main
lever that we pull, but we work with subscription brands. We do direct mail. We do a bunch of other stuff,
loyalty, etcetera. That kinda falls under that retention ecosystem. But our
main kinda tools are email and SMS. That's awesome. And
when you look at email and SMS, what are some of the things that just
kinda breaking down super simple and high level. Like, what is it you're
you're really focused on? What do clients task you with doing with an email and
an SMS? Yeah. So high level, you know, we send campaigns.
We set up automations. Our whole job is to make sure that we're collecting emails.
People spend a lot of money on traffic, and so we wanna make sure those leads are collected at some
rate. And then we do our our best to nurture an audience. We're not about
just selling all the time. We try and nurture people through content and really build the funnel up.
And then when there's a big moment, whether that's black black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Father's Day, or anything
like that, we look for opportunities to clear that funnel out. And so we build the funnel up by nurturing these
leads. And then when we can, we clear it up. And so kinda rinse and repeat, do that, set
up automations. And at the end of the day, just try to send the right message to the right person at the
right time. That's awesome. So nothing really acquisition focused, all
centered around the retention ecosystem and kind of keeping customers. Is that
accurate? I would say that's kind of our main positioning, but a lot of email
is is the pop up collecting enough emails. How's the welcome flow doing? And so
although the name of my agency is Retentio, retention starts at acquisition. That
is, like, step one of retention. And so we do need to acquire people properly so that we can get them
to stick around. And so although retention focus, Retentio branded, acquisition is
a big part of this that we take on as well. Awesome. Very cool. And how
did you get into it? How did this all come about? So my big thing is whenever
I have to make a decision, I usually try to figure out what is my weakness, and I
try to make that into my strength. And so going into COVID, I owned my own small
brand. It was in home fitness, and so it really grew. All the gyms were
closed, and I was just acquiring customers as quickly as I could. And when the
post COVID hangover happened and I didn't focus on retention or email
or these things, that brand, unfortunately, passed away. It did not make the cut.
And so looking at that, I really was like, why did this happen? What could I have done
better? Like, what was my blind spot and weakness? Email, SMS, retention, all those sorts of
things, that was the answer. And so I said, you know what? I'm gonna now try and turn that into my biggest
strength. And so I started started just learning as much as I could, started working with brands.
Couple years later, here I am, and, I think I did that. That's awesome, man.
I I love the idea of taking a a weakness or a or what may
may, you know, be deemed a failure into more of a learning, and that's just you know, it's
central to what I think many of us as marketers and business people have experienced
in life and in business, and you you kinda turn those, you know, those challenges or
those learnings into new opportunities and some of your bigger biggest ones. And so
congratulations for viewing things that way, and it's commendable. Not everybody does that.
So that's really cool. Yeah. It sucks in the moment for sure. But then with enough, like,
compounding, when you start to feel like, oh, now this is no longer a weakness, it's a pretty good
feeling. So I try to do that as much as I can. Yeah. I think it kinda sharpens
the the edge and and your see, you have less blind spots
after you go through some of those challenging times. They they make you stronger and smarter
and a better better operator in a lot of ways, so commendable. What
about in terms of looking at talent? You know, you're building out a team. You're you're
courting really interesting, exciting customers. Like, what do you look for with
with email marketers? What do you what are some of the things maybe you train for
or optimize for, interview for when you're bringing together, you know, teams and
talent and systems for clients? There's a lot of things for sure. Email marketing specifically,
I would say, you're kinda combining art and science. In a lot of marketing, that's what you're
doing. And so there's, like, the design eye, the creative eye, the creative mind, but then there's
also, like, the analytical opportunity to, like, review what you're
doing, hypothesize how things could be better. The name of this podcast, always be testing, like,
that's very important to me. And so being able to kinda switch from a creative
to an analytic, we we have a small team, so people wear multiple hats sometimes. And
so kinda just being able to switch between the two and kinda hang in both of those conversations is
something that I look for. Because sometimes when a creative talks to a more technically minded
person or analytical person, it's, like, not apples and oranges, and they kinda
don't see each other eye to eye. And so I really look for people that can kinda see both sides of the coin,
and I think that makes for a lot more synergy and and better execution, when we try to communicate
things through email. That's awesome. And and do you think, like, in your stage right now,
you're able to kind of find folks that are able to be pretty good at both the analytical and
the creative, or are you finding you have to kind of be more focused at this
stage? So we're just onboarding like a creative person. I would say we're starting
to segment a little bit more. I think at the beginning, it was definitely wearing both hats.
Mhmm. But as we grow a little bit more, it's like, yeah. We have a creative person. We have a
strategist person. And really segmenting those things out so that they can stay in their lane and
really work deeply there. But that being said, it's still very important to me that a
strategist and a creative and whoever else can have organic conversations together and see
each other's perspective as much as possible. So trying to foster that even though they work in
totally different ends of the spectrum. I like where your head's at with that. I feel like it makes sense to
have more generalists early on. As you grow, you're kind of getting more
specific, very laser focused individuals over time to
enable that scale. But still, there's a kind of a benefit
to an analytical person really understanding elements of the creative side,
understanding what levers that you can pull as an email marketer and as a
retention expert and conversely on the other side. So I really like
I really like that framework that you're coming up with. Yeah. Totally. I, personally, I really
enjoy ecommerce. So ecommerce is a generalist game. So I do my best to be a good
generalist, which allows me to kinda get someone who's a creative and get someone who's a
strategist and sit them down and be like, hey. This is how you see things. This is how you see things.
I might not be the best at either one of them as a generalist, but, it's being able to speak the language of both
is is something that I think ecommerce operators should be able to do. Yeah. We
we've talked about that concept of, like, generalist versus specialist a lot on our team. And
one teammate, and I talk a lot about there's a book called Range. I don't know if you've you've read that
one. Pretty good. Check it out. Yeah. Definitely talks a lot about, like, the value of
being a generalist, and there's definitely, hot takes and strong opinions on
that one if you talk to people in the, d to c ecom
marketing world, but it's a worthy one regardless of where you stand on the topic.
Cool. Cool, man. Love it. What what kind of client are you finding
kinda, you know, nails it for what you're doing for them or on in the world of retention and
email and SMS marketing? What kind of challenges are they facing? What kind of stage are they
in? We take brands that are doing about a hundred twenty k a month to three hundred k a month,
and we look to to grow them. So we take smaller brands. What's naturally happened for
us is we're seeing that there really is, like, a business model channel fit.
And what I mean by that is a a lot of the clients that we crush for the most are subscription. They
have a subscription d to c product. And in retention, it's, like, it's easier to get someone
to not unsubscribe than it is to get them to make another purchase. And
so we deal a lot with churn, and we deal a lot with, keeping people rather than
winning people back with those kind of customers. And I think that direct to consumer subscription,
there's just a synergy there. And, like, they have healthy repeat order rates, healthy
margins. They're able to really grow, and it's just yeah. We've
just seen that naturally, that's kinda where we've niched into. Like, not really on purpose. We just
kinda crushed it for a subscription brand, took on another took on another, and now over seventy percent
of our clients are subscription. Love that. Not to say we don't work with anybody in
direct to consumer, but just naturally, subscription seems to be a really good business model for the channel.
Absolutely. There's so many benefits to it. The LTV, the the value gives, the
opportunity to kinda play with a little bit more, and, it it's hard when you're
when you're chasing that next one off one off purchase. It can be a little bit more difficult.
That's awesome. With your evolution in your career, you know, you we talked about
this a little bit. Was there kind of, like, a sliding door moment? I think I think I might know what you're gonna
share, but can you share a little bit about, like, those intersections in your career where you could have gone
one direction and you kind of ended up going to another and kind of how those what
learnings kinda came out of it? My end goal is to start a
brand, portfolio brands, similar to, like, Homestead, Zach Stuck. I really admire what
he's doing. I started off, like, starting brands and doing that and really running,
like, small business type brands. And, yeah, when after the COVID hangover,
and it was like, do I start another brand, or do I go agency? That was a big moment for
me because I had to take a different route to get to where still where I wanna get to. I still wanna get to the
same place, but building the agency and starting to build the team and learning all these things. And now
I'm in a way better position to start a brand now if I wanted to versus if I just keep trying
to start brands over and over again. And so that moment of just moving from
brand to agency, knowing that eventually I wanna go back to brand, that was a huge
moment for me. And, It's awesome. Honestly, very happy I did that. Yeah. I think one thing
that's awesome, feel like with agency, if you're really in the, you know,
higher percentile of performance, if you're being, you know, candid and
and solving real problems and going after the right customer, you know,
cohorts. Like, it can be a business that does quite well and is very
stable even through challenging times. I I was talking to folks recently about I feel like
the winners are emerging in on the, you know, brand side and winners are emerging
on the agency side. And we're getting in a very stringent financial environment where people
are very, you know, careful about every dime they spend, which is how it should be
and much more stringent than the zero interest rate rental fantasy land
world we were living in a few years ago, and I feel like it's not a bad thing. It kinda shakes out
folks. And, if you can be in that winning category, I think it present a lot of opportunity. And I I
just love how many learnings there are to be had on the agency side. You could then take those learnings
back to the brand side down the road if you want to. Yeah. Like, fair
enough. I would start a subscription brand if I was to start one, and I wouldn't have known to do that if I didn't
naturally fall into that niche based off what I'm doing. And there's just so many things that
I'm seeing on the agency. So I feel like I'm cheat like, it's a cheat code. Like, I just get to see all
these things, and I'm like, okay. This is good. This is bad. I can kinda create, like, a
mental checklist of if I didn't wanna pursue a brand opportunity, what would that look
like? Yeah. So, yeah, that eight the agency experience is honestly priceless.
Yeah. I love that. The volume of stuff we've learned in the last ten years is is insane,
and it's been fun to kind of have that, you know, combination of in house and and agency
experience. Switching gears a little, thinking about, like, you know, the learnings aspect of the
pod, like, you're running experiments all day long in email. You're doing AB tests. You're
doing testing with SMS and other, you know, retention levers.
I'd love to hear can you share some of the some of those moments or maybe some
surprising tests or maybe experiments that you are really were were impressed
by the performance of, like, trying to give the audience some things that have really worked well
and some tactics and strategies that really were were surprisingly good for you?
Totally. So the first one that comes to mind is there's the question of
one call to action versus multiple call to actions. And so when you make an email, should it be
focused on one core thing, or should you focus on a couple of things because you don't know what the person is gonna click
on? It may you could argue it both ways. If anything, I feel, like, blindfolded, I could
argue that more CTAs might be a better thing. But through testing, like, what we've seen is
sometimes when you just focus on one call to action, one message, one offer, one
anything. It can be a lot more powerful and directed than if you give someone, like, three different
blocks of content or offers to choose from. It's not always the case, but it's just an interesting test
to run is, should I be laser focused on this is the piece of content or offer I wanna push
and make sure people are singularly focused going down that path? Or do I give them all these
options to click from, which sometimes can cause a little bit of paralysis by analysis? Yep.
This isn't always the case. Like, there are brands that if you show, like, a lot of different things, like, it's it's awesome.
They have a great catalog, etcetera. But it's a very interesting test to run because it kinda
varies brand to brand, and I'm starting to lean towards team one CTA over
multiple. Got it. So you actually seen that some cases, multiple
CTAs cannot perform one CTA for some brands even though that's counterintuitive.
Is that right? Yeah. I've seen it both ways. So sometimes if you offer a lot of different
options, different products, etcetera, like, that's the best way to move. Or there's other
cases where if you only offer one call to action, just make the, email very
simple with one product, one offer, one whatever, that can now perform as well. So I kinda would
urge people to think about that for their brand and kinda run that test and see, should I
be overwhelming people with all these buttons to click, or do I just stay laser focused on one
message per email or piece of content? Yeah. And talk a little bit about subject
lines and kind of, like, you know, I think that's hotly debated. You you see all kinds of weird
stuff now in subject lines, like forwarding and exclamations and Yeah.
There's the Obama marketing campaign, like, legendary stuff they talked about.
Yeah. It was seems like ancient history now. What has worked well in subject lines,
and what are some of the learnings that you've had there? I can kinda spitball them. So one
that is very fifty fifty is emojis. We've done a lot of emoji testing, and it
really just lands fifty fifty. Like, if you remove it, it didn't really make a difference. If you add it, it didn't really make a difference.
I think that's a fun one to point out. Being very direct, I think, is important. Making sure
people click on something, and then what they're about to click into is congruence with that. There's a little bit of
dissonance when you kind of are very click baity, and then, like, the content of the email
is not aligned with that. And so a lot of the time, like, we have a hero headline, a lot
of that DNA is baked into the subject line. Like, we wanna make sure there's a lot of congruency because the reason they're
clicking it is to get what they think they're clicking into for the subject of the email. So
being direct, make sure you let people know if there's an offer inside. You can get
cute with it, but sometimes we get too cute. That's where that dissonance happens where it's like
Mhmm. You clicked on it, and then, like, it wasn't really what you expected. And so, yes, you got the
click or you got the open, but, that's where it'll stop. And so I think there's a
lot to be said about the congruency between the subject line and the actual content
itself, and that will yield better results because people are literally micro,
yes, clicking into that piece of content. If they are then served that piece of content, it's gonna perform better. And
so you gotta be careful not to get too cute would be my big learning.
Yeah. I think that's a good, good piece of advice on a number of things.
What are some of the things that you think a lot of, you know, brands get wrong
in email and SMS marketing, and you have to kind of
educate, test, advise? Like, what are some of the biggest pitfalls that you see? Maybe a
hot take or or people might disagree, but I really don't want my brands to become discount brands.
That could be a slippery slope. And so there are times where people get themselves in a
situation where their audience has offer fatigue. Like, they just have been
shown offers all the time. And if you really wanna give them a purchase, you have to, like, one up yourself again with
an offer. And so being very intentional about when you discount,
how you discount, how often you discount, You don't wanna get yourself in a situation where you
have offer fatigue and you have to, like, fight your way out of that because it's just really
hard. And so I would say, be intentional about that. Build the funnel and then
clear the funnel. You're not always trying to clear the funnel and offer offer offer offer. Like, your
automations and your flows are built to kinda convert people naturally.
And so on the campaign side, like, that's where you have an opportunity to
nurture and do cool things. If you're trying to compensate on the campaign side,
that can hurt you sometimes. And so the biggest pitfall that I see is brands
accidentally become discount brands, and then they'll have a softer Black Friday, Cyber Monday. They'll
have a you know? So do your best to build the funnel and then clear it
versus always just hammering an audience with offers. Yeah. Interesting. So you're saying
clear it more sustainably rather than forcing a clearing or forcing a purchase.
You're you're trying to do things to build up the funnel and then
clear them out when it makes sense rather than forcing it upon them. Totally.
Absolutely. And it's just a little more organic. You'll have bigger days, and
people will just respond better because they're like, I haven't seen an offer in a minute. Mhmm. And
I've been seeing all this cool stuff about this brand. Now is my time to jump in. Versus
if they're always getting an offer, there's not like that now is this time to jump in. And so,
like, you can't as intentionally clear the funnel on a certain day. Yeah. No.
That's really cool. When you ingest, you know, phone numbers and, you
know, emails in your system and you talk about this funnel that you're monitoring,
Are there things that you do to validate those numbers, not
just technically, like, that they function, but, like, how was this customer acquired?
Why did they come into the ecosystem to make your funnel more quality?
Or is it kinda like, let's kinda see how they behave downstream based on what we're doing
with our marketing and messaging and and time and timing of those messages? Like,
can you share a bit more about how you think about kind of, like, the acquisition when it comes
into your ecosystem? So the main way we collect is through pop ups.
Shout out to AMT and Matt. Great pop up software. It has changed a lot
of my clients' email SMS programs. But pretty much, you know,
we don't we're we don't really look at it by source. So we're not like this phone number came from TikTok. This
one came from Facebook, etcetera. It's more so when a number comes in or a
email comes in, they're gonna go through, like, a welcome flow. They're gonna go through these automations, and then they're
gonna self bucket based off their behaviors. So if they're highly engaged, if
they're not engaged with the that initial automation, then they're gonna be put
in the corresponding bucket. If they made a purchase through the welcome flow, they're gonna go into a
different segment. And so things are dynamically set up that once people come in regardless of,
like, where they came from, they go through this automation. Their behavior is
then shown through the automation, and then they're gonna dynamically be put in a segment. And then those
segments are what we'll, like, look at. And so people are always moving from segment to set
segment dynamically. And I never know, like, did they come from TikTok? Did they come from this or
that? Sometimes Yeah. If we wanna run a test, maybe we'll do that, but, traditionally, not as
much. Got it. That's super interesting. When you are doing segmentation,
what what are some of maybe the learnings that you you and your team have learned from that
process, and what does that segmentation kinda look like? Segmentation is
slippery slope. It's good to start out simple. So prospect,
customer, VIP Mhmm. Engaged. Just stay simple. And then there's
opportunities for you to, like, overcomplicate segments and, again, get cute.
That's kind of something I say a lot is when you get cute with something. And so with segments, you can I can make up
an infinite amount of segments? I can think of all these different reasons why I can think of this,
of this kind of behavior, this kind of behavior, this kind of person, this kind of person, and I can
accidentally create way too many segments and get yourself in a situation where you're trying
to make tailored content for all these different segments, and it's not producing any sort of lift. And so you have
to be careful not to overcomplicate segments, but there is some cool learnings you can
get. An example is, let's say there's a subscription box and there's different tiers,
bronze, silver, gold. Mhmm. Sometimes it's good to segment those out and see how
they respond differently to different things just to get learnings out of it. But if, you know, over time, what
you'll see is you end up rolling them back up into simple segments. And so, I guess,
just to say that a little simpler is starting out segmentation very simply,
trying to overcomplicate it to find learnings, but then what always ends up happening is you end up
rolling back into the simpler segments. And so prospect,
customer, VIP, just engaged in general Yeah. Usually,
that that's enough. And if you wanna do more than that, you you gotta be careful not to go, slip
down that rabbit hole. Yeah. No. That's awesome. And appreciate you diving in on some of these
things. It's super interesting and definitely the spirit of the pod. In terms of other
learnings, like, when when people you know, I've been on internal teams where they're assigning, like, a revenue
number through some of their email efforts. Like, how do you think about that email
attribution to the retention process? There's definitely I mean, you can imagine it's
it could be massive if you buy a one off thing and then these emails are kind of, like, nudging
you down the path of, like, adding the whole suite of products. But how do you think about
revenue attribution and and kinda stating it in an accurate way?
Yeah. Attribution is very tough in today's day and age in ecommerce, in my opinion.
There's a few ways. Actually, there's two. So new customer revenue versus
returning customer revenue, understanding that as, like, a number and a percentage, what
percentage of people that ordered this month are returning versus versus new?
And then just overall attribution to email SMS. We see that, like, thirty percent
is, like, a pretty healthy place, goal to get to. So if you can get your email
attribution to about thirty percent of your revenue, that's great. You can get towards fifty. That's awesome. But
sometimes you can have too much email attributed revenue, or you could have too much returning customer
revenue. You always need to be acquiring customers at a certain rate because if you're not and
you're only relying on email or returning customer revenue or whatever the case may
be, to me, it's actually the sign of, like, a dying business. We've had clients that, we we had
seventy percent attributed revenue to email, and that was, like, a bad
situation to be in. Although we were doing a great job, they weren't acquiring customers. They weren't
doing things through other channels. They didn't have meta running. There there was things that, like so
it's interesting. You wanna have a healthy balance of new customers and returning
customers, and you also wanna have a healthy balance of channels. So top of
funnel, email, like, all these different channels. There's kinda like a natural
healthy position to be in for all these kind of metrics. And so we try to aim
for healthy returning customers so that we feel there is enough new customers coming
into the system and healthy email attribution. So we feel like the other channels are still
kinda carrying their weight, which is very important. That's great. Are you
do you feel like you're able to help kind of when people
look at retention, obviously, there's there's brands that have all ranges of retention, some very good,
some not so good. How much do you feel like your efforts can kind
of move that band and move the needle in an area that is obviously dependent on
a lot of things that are not necessarily in your control? I guess the answer is
I wish I had more control, but the truth is that a great product,
just a great product in general, is gonna carry most of the retention. Even good shipping,
like, so if someone got something in two days versus ten days, like, good product experience,
good product in general. These things are most over attention. My job is just
to remind people, hey. Let's say it's a beverage company, and the
average consumption cycle is thirty five days. So they get a case of beverages, and it takes them on
average about thirty five days to consume them. On day thirty six, I'm just that gentle reminder that's like,
hey. Did you run out? Like, time to restock. Here are other flavors. So, you know,
if they didn't have a good time with that initial twelve pack of beverages, on day thirty six when
I remind them, it's not gonna do much. And so I'm just that extra
twenty percent of polish just to really send the right message to the right person at
the right time and make sure they're being introduced to new products and etcetera, etcetera. But at
the end of the day, the product and the product experience, that is most of the retention. I'm
just here to kinda fill in the gaps. When you think about levers you have control of, you got
subject line, you got image, you got copy, You got when it's sent. You got the
segmentation. There's other factors too. You got images, buttons. How much
does copy play into that? I would say it depends on the audience.
Maybe if it's a female audience, like, you can maybe be more, again, cute with
it. You can be more designed. You can be more aesthetic. You can be more, etcetera. And so you
kinda just have to understand the audience. Like, does this audience operate and the problem that you're solving and, like, the
category that you're in? Is this something where, like, brand and design and aesthetic can
really push the needle to acquire a customer, or do I need to figure out a
pain point, agitate it, and then solve it? And so it totally
depends as much as that sucks to say in marketing. But if you can identify who your audience
is and what you're trying to sell and whether you're solving a problem or you're selling something that's more luxury,
you can kinda then use copy and design more so as a tool rather than one or the
other. There's plain text emails that rip, and there's design emails that
rip, and it's more so understanding when to use them. Mhmm. And so, yeah, if there's
a if there's a problem that you're solving specifically, like, PAS is like a
framework, pain, agitate, solve, it does very, very well. But if you're not solving a product as
much, then it's more so more so about maybe the aesthetic or the brand or the whatever that case may
be. And so I guess my answer more so is understand what you're trying to
do and accomplish, and then use copy and design accordingly. There's gonna be brands where
we're very heavy on design, and then there's gonna be brands where we're very heavy on copy. And so
kinda not a one size fits all situation. Awesome. That's super interesting. Yeah. I think
what are some of the the copied angles or or directions that you guys do
take or kind of have internally, or do you rely on I'm guess I'm kinda
curious to know, like, what do you try to do internally versus maybe rely on other other
areas outside of your control when it comes to copy? Marketing angles is definitely, like, the
word. We're trying to think of the different types of problems that
this solves and the different kind of relatable situations in which this product can exist, and
we're trying to spin it up in a way that resonates with people.
And so angling and marketing angles in general, very important. And so
something we're starting to offer is just image ads in general because we're starting to get good at, hey. Like, there's this
product. Here's all these marketing angles. From those marketing angles, we can create all these
headlines. From those headlines, we can create all those body paragraphs. And so
getting really good at, like, angling a product, like, marketing angles, and then turning those
into headlines has allowed us to, one, get better at email because we can spin
things up in unique ways. And then two, it's actually helping us with image ads because at the end of the day, once
we have a good marketing angle and headline, to get to a good image ad is is easier
because that's a big strength of image ads is you're really focusing on, like, the headline. And
so, yeah, we're just trying to ID it as much as possible, look at as many marketing angles as possible, and
kinda go from there. That's awesome. Do you how much different do you obviously,
text and SMS and and email are very different. How do you kinda get those working well
together? Do you view them as completely separate things, or is there some kind of connection between
them? Yeah. No. We wanna connect them for sure. Sometimes when we go into a brand,
like, we fix email and then fix SMS and then connect them, but
end game, we really wanna connect the two. They're very different. Right? Like,
with SMS, you really need to have something worth saying to actually, you know, send
it. Yeah. I don't wanna be sending crappy SMSs that have no relevance. Like, it's either my
best offer or it's something really worth texting about. And then on email, you can
kinda send more fluff or content or just, like, nice to have stuff to be sent
out the door. And so that's kinda how I think about it is when do we have something that's amazing
to say? Let's support with an SMS. And then the base of the funnel is more like email
built. And then we kinda plug in SMS when it's like, okay. This is important. Let's send it
out. But we're very sparing with the SMS. Yeah. That's an even more extreme example
of clearing the funnel. Like, if you and that's a place where you can get offer fatigue very easily. It's just blasting
SMSes. Like, I can't name a more annoying thing than getting blasted SMSes. Yeah.
And so we're very intentional about we are clearing the funnel, or this is
just something that's worth saying, or this is a moment that we really need to dig deep, with the
offer. So that's how we think about SMS, and then we just, yeah, we use that to support email. And so
it's they work together, hopefully. That's awesome. Very cool. And, just
switching gears a little bit. Fun fun question. What what's a product you bought a hundred bucks or less
that you just love right now and you're stoked about? Hundred bucks or less. Oh, I
have it right here. It's the Shopify counter. Have you seen this?
Amazing. I have, but I I I don't think quite in this context. We're doing
a a brand launch with a client right now, and we launched yesterday. And so I have this counter next
to me, and it's, it's in real time. And so I've I'm keeping tabs on it even if during
this podcast. Oh my god. Cool. Great addition to the to the office.
Definitely get one. I think we're gonna need to talk about that. I think we need one for for everybody,
for all of our clients. I love that. It'd be a great gift to give a client. Brilliant.
Good call. What, what books have inspired you lately? Anything on
human behavior. I have this book, priceless, William
Poundstone. It talks about, like, the myth of fair value and how price isn't a real thing and
everything is relative, and it it just talks about human behavior in general. And
those are the kind of books I like to consume. I think it kinda shows me that I am interested in brand building
because I am interested in human behavior and consumer behavior. And so, yeah, anything in that
realm, I I like to consume. It's very interesting to me. I love it. This has
been really interesting and fun and lots of learnings that you've shared. Bobby,
it's really, really appreciated. Excited to see, all the success of your
agency, now and in the future, and we'll probably see you, touting
some really cool brands down the line as well. Hell, yeah. Thank you so much. This has been a
pleasure. Heck, yeah. For folks in the audience that wanna connect with you and,
and follow you, where would they where would be best to find you? Probably Twitter. So Bobby
Callahan underscore. I I like to tweet. Not much of a presence on LinkedIn
yet. So maybe one day you can find me there, but for now, just Twitter. Rock on, man. It's been a
pleasure. I really appreciate the time, and, have a great day. You too. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Bobby. Bye.