Matt: Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the money lab podcast.
My name is Matt.
And today we're going to talk about rethinking email marketing.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, I want to talk about why I switched from convert kit to active campaign.
Um, how, how I was collecting email addresses before then I got
some spam complaints and then I had to do all this sort of, uh,
additional email marketing stuff.
And then finally, we're going to talk about email marketing in 2022 and beyond.
So let's get into it.
Hey, I just want to do some light housekeeping and let you know that
there were reason I'm recording this podcast This episode today is one
Um I've been getting emails from you So thank you for sending me emails
because having that sort of community feedback sort of area has been it's
it's It's It makes me want to do this
Does that make sense It makes me want to sit down here by myself in a cold
basement And talk about email marketing and other things But that's but that's
why I'm recording this So thank you for emailing me and please please email
me and what we're going to do Is I'm going to pose A question to you What
do you want to learn What are you what are you what are you struggling with in
your business and your online business
What maybe you think I could help you with Instead of just emailing me and
saying Hey you know I heard the end of the episode and you said the email and
here I am I want to I want questions and I'm going to answer those questions
on future episodes of this podcast Uh so so email me matt@moneylab.co
I'll say it again Matt at money lab.co it's so easy to remember Okay So uh
today we're going to talk about uh email marketing and it's very top of
mind for me right now in 2022 Uh and I have a story to tell but first I want
to tell the story which you can read about over at money lab Why I switched
from convert kit to active campaign
But before that why did I switch from a Weber to MailChimp and then MailChimp
to convert kit and then convert kit to active campaign Well long story
short A Weber is not my favorite Uh at least back in the day this is many many
years ago Like when I first got into online marketing and online business
Uh it was like the only game in town I think mainly because they had a very
aggressive affiliate program and everybody in their mothers was mentioning it So
that's kind of why I started with a Weber but very quickly Uh didn't like it
just the aesthetic of it And MailChimp was like kind of the cool kid in town
and they had a really nice aesthetic
Uh which is I'm kind of a sucker for switched to MailChimp And then I realized
that it didn't have a lot of automation sequences and like fancy stuff that I
wanted I'm sure they have that stuff now but um I switched to ConvertKit even
though I thought I was never going to do it But I did Thanks to Nathan Berry
Uh we jumped on a phone call And he was like look here's here's why I
think it'll work for you Boom I'm in Okay I'm in for ConvertKit for about a
year And there was one big limitation for me I own a company called swim
university We are a seasonal pool business And ideally I had this vision
of creating this evergreen newsletter
But unfortunately because it's seasonal I didn't have a way for somebody to get
on the list And then get emails for like the April month you know the summer months
you know that sort of thing And and they didn't really have a way for me to do that
That was automatic And I also really want it that To loop people through it So for
instance and this is what I ended up doing
I want it to have an evergreen newsletter That was the entire I could see the
entire year Here are the emails you're getting in January here the emails
you're getting an August And depending on when you subscribed you would just
get plopped into whatever month you were in And you will start getting your
August emails and then going forward
And then when the year reset like in December you just go right back to January
and you would just keep going through this this automation over every single year
Now I don't think people are Subscribed to my list for I don't know maybe five
years whether it's getting the same emails over and over again but here's the thing
With this as like I I know that this content is useful when it needs to
be useful Otherwise there's no point in getting an email about it So for
instance why would you get an email about opening your pool in January but What's
the what's the harm of getting that opening email every year Because every
year you need to kind of like relearn it People are not in the pool industry
or people that own pools They don't
It's not like a hobby to them where they want to learn and retain the knowledge
They just they get the knowledge when they need it Which is which is what's great
about some university is that knowledge just kind of I can just repeat over and
over again because it's useful when they need it So it's like education on demand
Convert kit you You know they they they do a lot of things Well they didn't do
this one thing which I knew was like special to me And I'm like Doug Willow
another company Can I do this I don't know Well that's when active campaign
actively reached out to me And they're like look Uh would you like to try it
And I it's always been on my radar to do to to look at active campaign because I
have some friends that use it and they're like this is like way way powerful And
I was like okay I kinda need powerful I jumped on a call with active campaign
And they showed me The usage of goals within an automation and with goals
you can set people to move through your automation depending on what month it is
So I was like that's exactly what I need And you can loop people through
the automation which at the time when I switched convert didn't do a deal
I do think now you can loop people through the same automation Um which is
also great for sales pitches You know like if you can you could have a flash
sale that happens four times a year
Why do you need to recreate that four different times when you could just have
one Flash sale sequence and you just send the same people through it over and
over again You know when they need to buy it or w Or if they haven't bought
it So the idea of sending people through the same Sequence Multiple times as
long as you can control that I thought was very useful but the goals inactive
campaign in the automations is great
Um so that that was the big reason for Switching was lupus bull Seasonal
automations It actually gave me exactly what I had envisioned for swim university
all this time The other benefit Hidden benefit was that it was actually cheaper
for me because with convert kit I had to have three separate convert kit accounts
And When you add those up Uh it actually costs more money for me because my other
two lists are not nearly as big as my swim university list Um so I was paying a
lot of money for the swim university list and then the base price For the other two
lists with active campaign I'm sort of paying now per like group of subscribers
for all my brands So all the brands
Live under one Active campaign account And I could do a lot of cool things with that
Like if I design a good email for some university I can use those templates and
redesign them Quickly for brew cabin or whatever which is what I did So it ended
up actually being not much cheaper but a little bit cheaper for me to use active
campaign and throw all three of my brands
Under one roof as opposed to having three separate accounts
So That's why I switched from ConvertKit to active campaign But that's not really
the story here Okay I kind of had it set up really easily I focused a lot of my
time on email marketing in 2021 I was really uh doubling down on this idea
of an a one-time offers where somebody subscribes to my email list they get sent
to a one-time offer page you know 50 off my courses One of my flagship products
And then they get put on a list And that's it now The you know that people
always say there's money in the list And I am now I used to like not really be
good at email marketing and never really focused on it And then in 2021 I'm like
come on I got to get good at this This is this is like What everyone says is the
most profitable part of their business
So I did I started like really aggressively collecting email addresses
I create it Cheat sheets Like lead magnets For all my brands Which
increased my You know signup rates I started running paid advertising to
opt-in pages to get people to subscribe I was in the business of collecting
people Now if you go to money lab
And you search for my untouchable business model It is Nally core principle of
my business which is you know be super generous with your content and your
time Uh collect the people that you're that come to your website because Here's
an example You might be you might you might write this amazing article and
people find it super valuable right
Cool You did well but maybe it didn't convert Maybe they didn't buy any of
the affiliate links on your page Maybe they didn't You know buy your product
that you're selling They just found the information super useful And that's
great But how many of those people are actually going to bookmark that
post There's just not going to do it
So how are you Like what happens if you come out with a new product like you know
that person was on your site and they found your stuff valuable but now you have
no way to communicate with them They're gone They came and they went So you're
spending all of this time Writing this amazing content getting search traffic
Which is really hard to do And then you're just letting those people
disappear Like just go away No you have to like you worked hard Keep them
there Okay Think about it this way
You like let's say you have a brick and mortar store in in a small town And
you have like street traffic people are coming into your store and they're just
they're just poking around just looking And then they then they leave Well What
if you come out with a new product or you you know something was in stock
that they maybe were looking for and then you know you didn't have it then
but now you do well now you have no way to communicate with that person So you
should be collecting email addresses
Collecting a way to communicate with those customers And the best way I think to do
that Is through email marketing As opposed to say You know social media which you
know you can't really one-on-one email people They may never see the message
Super important So that's what I did I set up all these lead magnets I was
collecting email addresses aggressively
And When you signed up To let's just say some university You want it You're
There was a cheat sheet I need help my pool I have a pool care cheat sheet
Boom You sign up your email address I emailed you the cheat sheet but
meanwhile I sent you to an OTO page In case you want it My cores are 50 off
You have 24 hours to get it whatever whatever that's a whole different episode
And then once they got into the email list I sent them through a little
automation that kind of filtered them out Are you were you just like serious
about this Like did you really want to download this Whatever if they did click
and download it then I move them through Into sort of an onboarding sequence
You know five day email sequence kind of showing the whole business and what we do
and then moved them into my lupus seasonal newsletter automation Forever You know
And that all works really well It's been working very well Uh Until I got an email
from active campaign that was like Um You're getting a lot of spam complaints
I was like oh you mean I'm getting spam complaint Well the people that you're
sending this email to you know this first email of this cheat sheet they're
saying they never signed up for the list
Y Okay Mom So it turns out and you know I kind of knew this I'm not going to lie
I was getting a lot of bought sign-ups Now I thought I had put in a good
automation that checks For clicks and replies and we'd at those people out So
it was just sort of a pain to deal with right Like I might get like 500 signups
a day but really only like 50 of those people were real in the restaurant bots
But what I didn't consider is What if those bot addresses were real people
and then they were all getting I was sending out 500 emails With this thing
they never signed up for of course you're going to hit the spam button
How do you fix this You know I you know at the time I'm like man I really
thought I had this all figured out But just having a form on your website
Exposes you to bots now I'm thinking well I don't really want to implement
double opt-in meaning Somebody's email somebody signs up And before it sends
them anything it sends them an email address or sends them an email that says
are you real click this button to confirm
And then once you confirm you're confirmed and then you start
to get the rest of the emails
That I hated that idea because it's like well oh the first email I'm sending you
is just to make sure that you're just you're not you're you're real and that you
wanted this but here's the problem with that solution That's the same solution I'm
doing except I'm doing it by sending them the cheat sheet First the downloadable
And when then when they click that they're essentially confirming their email address
So I was already doing that But that wasn't good enough because now there's
500 people You know 75 80 of which are all not didn't sign up for the list You
know some of them are bullshit addresses But they're getting this first email
That's like dude I didn't sign up for this
Spam
Okay So what is active campaign recommend I do They recommend I add recapture To all
my forms I'll I say come on Oh okay So now everyone who signs up their email address
has to click a button that says I'm not a robot or they have to uh pick out fricking
traffic lights and a bunch of pictures which is the most annoying thing ever
I mean the I'm not a robot Checkbox is not that annoying And you
see that you see that more often
I'm like I basically wrote back to him and said I'm not doing it because I care about
page speed in my head I thought Well I'm I'm I'm not adding that to my forms on my
website If you go and look at carpet in or any of my websites Before I implemented
recapture It was just like where are you going to put it That would look good
It just wouldn't look good anywhere And then you know you're adding JavaScript
like a layer of JavaScript to the site and I'm just like I don't want to do this So I
thought okay let me look into it a little bit more And I found there's recaptured
version three Which is this new version where the for the user they just sign up
But in the backend you kind of send off
And verify this email address is real or not And then it
allows it to go through or not
But the coding of that was way too complicated way above my skill level And
I'm like all right That's and to have to do that across all three of my brands
I'm like that's sounds like A week's worth of work I could pay somebody to
sort of implement that for me but what if it breaks And I can't control it
Uh all this stuff So
I ended up Um Saying Okay let me let me try something I had an idea So I
tried it on money lab first Instead of having the form directly on the
website like the actual box where you enter your email address instead of
that What if that offer that's on my website in the middle of my post at the
end of my post What if that was just a button instead of like an actual form
And that button just said click here to get your free cheap cheap And
when you clicked it it took you to a landing page Now this landing page
would have been implemented I use lead pages to do all my landing page work
Uh because It's not attached to my server It can be its own independent
thing I don't need any of these landing pages to be SEO ified If that's a word
And so I was like what if what if that's the case Because Lee pages you can you
know you can integrate forms into lead pages with active campaign and with
a single check Checkbox You can add recapture And so they're kind of handling
all that coding and stuff So I was like let me just try it with with money lab
because money led doesn't get a ton of signups but money lab was having one of
the bigger issues where there was a ton of bots signing up But like you know
I might've got like a hundred emails a day but only five of them were actually
real people you know trying to sign up
So I thought let me see if if this is going to deter people
from signing up like it was just going to kill my conversion rates
I did it I set it up for a few days Actually It was working very well People
You know it's I gave people like two extra steps So instead of people just
typing in their email address and hitting submit They now have to click a button
which takes them to a page So that's the first step That's the first hoop
And then it asked them for their email address So they typed in their email
address And before they can hit submit they got to check a box that says I'm on
a robot and then they submit it Honestly not a big deal But ATO not a ton of steps
I'm not adding more things They have to type in like their first name last name
You know a bunch of other check boxes I'm just asking for an email address And I
still keep those same checks in place If you don't download the cheat sheet within
33 days 72 hours then I don't want you on my list because clearly you went You
did you took this action but then didn't actually download the cheat sheet So
Why did you sign up
Anyway So I did it on that And it were and I was like you know what I'm actually
okay with this I'm actually I actually think this would be better I think my
list is going to come in much cleaner It's going to get rid of that bot problem
Perhaps getting solve my spam complaint problem So I added on that and I added
on my hot tub form Um some university
A few days later Hey Active campaign sends me an email You're getting more
spam complaints I'm like ha Well hold on now Give me a second here because I
just implemented recapture They're like yeah you did And we appreciate that And
that's a good move But You also have these other forms that don't have the recap on
there and that's where it's coming from
I'm like all right fine So I spent a few days FA you know to me this is the most
important thing This took precedent over all my other work because I'm like well
if I'm getting all these spam complaints like what if after canteen's like dude
you're you're it's too many complaints We're gonna have to shut you down
Well there it goes that I don't want that That sucks So anyway I sit
there and I set up recapture on every single form Okay I send them an email
back I'm like look it's everywhere now They're like okay we're going to
monitor it and make sure it's okay
Get another email from active campaign You're getting spam complaints Dude Aye
I added it to every form They're like okay Yeah But Uh we think That there's
still email addresses Like on your list that are that are just slowly hitting
spam overtime The other problem that they did not make me aware of but I slowly
Came to this conclusion Was I noticed just like in my personal email
I was getting like more spam email that was coming through And that was a little
bit surprising to me cause I'm like I don't my inbox is pretty clean And all of
a sudden I just noticed like oh this is more spam I'm like maybe it's just January
I don't know New year Who knows or maybe some maybe cause I'm using front app as
my email client I'm like maybe I don't know they're working on something and
they're letting spam through I don't know
But then I get this one email which was really scary Okay So I'm in my swim
university inbox which is actually my business inbox for all my brands And
I get an email that says and I'm going to use salty language here Because
this is the salty language that was used in this email It was a reply To
an email that I had apparently sent
And it said fuck you I know this what you're doing here You're scamming people
But the email they were replying back to was not an email that I had sent
out It was a phishing email It looked like an Amazon template asking them to
like fill out You know their password or something And then um and I wrote
back to the person cause I'm like oh I didn't send this email This is not me
Oh What's going on here Turns out or at least most of my thought
process People are sending Spam and phishing emails Using my domain Using
matt@someuniversityormadatmoneylab.co Well how the Now I'm like okay Is
that active campaign that somebody hacking my active campaign account
to do that No So I had to learn
I after doing some research into this I learned about SPF D com and DMARC
Now I'll explain what these things are but basically uh this is something
that I had to set up with convert kit but weirdly when I switched to active
campaign I was I you know it was not like part of the onboarding process
for me or at least I didn't see it
So I didn't have it set up for active campaign
So SPF not really sure what it stands for It's not the stuff that you put on your
skin to protect you from the sun It's some sort of like filtering mechanism To
make sure that you are you own the domain name where you're sending emails from
D Kim or D K I M is another version of this So just a different version So it's
like two checks right To filtering things And then DMARC is the combination of those
two things which sends reports So I had to set all of this up using my DNS Now
I'm not going to go into detail about all this year because it's super technical
Um we're going to do a whole workshop on this in Money lab pro So if you
want to sign up for that you can go to money lab.co/pro and that's my online
community You could sign up for an annual subscription To join the community And
that's where we kind of do you know online business stuff We have weekly happy hour
calls on zoom and everything That's fun
But Anyway I had to set all this up And it's which which first I had to
learn And then I had to set up which didn't take too long but um it forced
me to have to like look into other software and learn about this whole
world that I wasn't familiar with And I guess this is not going to be the same
for everybody I think my list is like
Just big And I just think it got hacked or whatever it was Somebody was just sitting
on my behalf So I set this all up Spam emails have certainly slowed down Uh and
then the the last thing that I did Was I Jason's hook had emailed me So I had sent
an email out you know a couple of weeks ago to everybody at money lab And I was
like look this is what I went through
And it's a problem It's a real big problem Uh and it was it forced me
to do a lot of like stuff that I never thought I'd have to do a lot of
technical work um to make sure that you know I could still send emails
Not to scare anybody but I'm like eh I should probably do it It's probably do
all the things you know make sure you put recap show on your forums make sure
that you got the SPF and D Kim and D mark all set up For your domains That you're
sending emails through The last thing was well I mean I spent all of 2021 collecting
email addresses this aggressively
There's bound to be A ton of people on my list Who are either who either
never signed up and are killing my open rates Right Cause they're not opening
anything Which you know I cleaned those people up Um or there's just bad actors
bad email addresses or people that you know whatever So I found so Jason
Zook had emailed me and said listen
Uh yeah recapture socks I understand but I had to implement it but they had
used this a service that I'd never heard of It's like email verification service
right Which basically goes and does like Recapture tests on your existing emails So
you just import all your email addresses It does the checks that tells you which
ones are good which ones are bad And then you can just go in and delete those
Uh so I ended up using a service called emailable which was really easy to use
It integrates with active campaign It's sucks in the lists sucks in all the
email addresses checks them all cost money I had to pay like you know a couple
cents per email address So I ended up spending like 500 bucks for this big check
I did this big bulk check And I think I had to like delete 5,000
subscribers It was an insane amount of subscribers And so I did
Now the last email I had sent to money lab Had a 50 open rate which was Just
very high I mean it's always been money lab emails you know back before I was
started using active campaign When I was in convert kit I was getting like 40 to
50 open rates Once I started aggressively collecting email addresses obviously that
had gone down But it was I think because there was so many bot email addresses that
I just weren't opening emails now I was trying to get rid of them but then
they keep coming in you know so you're cleaning out The backside of it Cause
like you know somebody doesn't open an email for a month I'm like get off my
list Right Come on At least open my emails
Or click something I'm putting stuff in there
If you don't want it it's fine It's going to remove you So you know I
want you to open my email address I'm trying to like make I'm going to have a
business here Um Is there anyway I use a service deleted 5,000 email addresses
Boom Open rates back up hopefully at this point now I've solved all of the
problems There may be some lingering
You know spam complaints here and there but it's not going to it's not going
to be a high percentage which is what's causing the red flags which is what's
causing active campaign The email me So I got So I'm I'm I'm I feel like today
I'm set up I'm good to go Now I'm just slowly Cleaning up all my newsletters
I'm rethinking and re-looking at my onboarding sequences And just trying
to be incredibly helpful with my emails
And then you know selling My services my products my Courses my physical products
every once in awhile And it works you know I I Started selling physical products In
late 20 21 At swim university as a test I sent one email and blew out my inventory
That's how powerful email marketing is I can't I literally couldn't replicate
that any in any other marketing channel
Without spending a ridiculous amount of money You know so
Anyway That's that's it That's all I got And here's the thing I like I said in the
beginning email me man@moneylab.co Um I want to hear from you Absolutely Check
out money lab itself@moneylab.co And uh yeah I think we're just going to leave
it at that So I appreciate you listening to the podcast And leave me a review on
iTunes or anywhere you can leave reviews
Leave a nice review Don't be uh you know
Naked negative Nancy Negative Nathan I don't do that Okay Um Anyway if you have
any questions about this episode emailing matt@moneylab.co If you have any questions
about anything I'm happy to answer them Uh I love hearing from you so I appreciate
it All right See you next time Bye Bye
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