Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Hosted by Scott Cohen and Garin Hobbs - Talking about the hot topics in and around email marketing.
Hello. Welcome to that inbox army podcast. I'm your host, Scott Cohen. And with me today, the star ski to my hutch is my co host, Garin Hobbs. How are you today, Garin?
Garin Hobbs:Stuffing and cupping them, Scott. Great to great to be here.
Scott Cohen:Today, I'm going to admit something very important. Email doesn't operate in a vacuum, and neither do any of the other marketing channels. And that's why I'm excited about our guest today because he's here to talk with us about really how email is the hub for digital communication and how it fits in. Joining us today is a man of the digital marketing people who brings his email and social marketing passion to conferences and his own podcast, Hank's marketing and business tips. He currently serves as senior manager of marketing operations at Kickbox.
Scott Cohen:I hope I got that right. And likes to call himself, and I love this, the digital marketing infotainer, Hank Hoffmeier. Welcome to the podcast, Hank.
Hank Hoffmeier:Thank you. Yeah. I came up all those terms and phrases and titles are fabricated for one reason or another. My title Nice. Talks is, totally made up.
Hank Hoffmeier:I'm a jack of all trades, master of many. I do so many different things. I do technical things. I I do things for support sales. I also do public speaking, have a podcast, all these great things.
Hank Hoffmeier:And I call myself the digital marketing infotainer because I like to make marketing fun and successful.
Scott Cohen:Amen to that. Well, let's let's dive into that a little deeper. I'd love to learn about people's stories, how they got to where they are. Tell us about your journey to today.
Hank Hoffmeier:Oh, that's I'll try to do the TLDR version because I could go on forever, and this would be a 2 hour podcast. But I grew up in New Jersey, with a passion for people. Right? People watching, meeting people. Just because it's so densely populated in the New York, New Jersey area, I've always found myself out and about.
Hank Hoffmeier:If you met me when I was young, you would probably call me an introvert, a wallflower. I'd always be out, you know, parties and my teens up against the wall, watching, you know, things happen and people talking. Unless there was food in the middle of the room, then you'd find me in the middle of the room. But now I'm a public speaker. I get on stages in front of 100 of people, maybe maybe 1,000, 1 or 2 times.
Hank Hoffmeier:I don't know. But I think it really goes to tell you, you can be an introvert, but yet you can be an extroverted introvert, which is what I am. I still struggle to this day, to do some some speaking engagements. So you might not see that, but it comes with confidence and experience. And I started off my professional career in staffing, which is something you you find out quickly if you love or hate it.
Hank Hoffmeier:I did that for 12 years for Kelly Services, which is a fortune 500 staffing company and multiple roles there, that seems to be a theme. And I wanted to get into technology because when I was a little bit younger, I I liked to build computers and like to figure out how websites worked, and I was actually trying to get into a company called Icontact, an email marketing platform. While I was at Kelly Services, I was trying to sell to them. Then I saw a role in presales that looked kind of attractive and allowed me to get into technology or SaaS. And I applied for the role and got it.
Hank Hoffmeier:And 13 years that I contact, 3 acquisitions, many layoffs, and I was still there. The last acquisition was Ziff Davis, which owns about 70, 75 different brands. Another brand they own is Kickbox, who is I who I work for now. We do email verification as well as email deliverability consulting. I was asked to move over from Icontact to Kickbox, so it's a sister company, about a year and a half ago.
Hank Hoffmeier:I have about 14, 14 and a half year tenure with Zip Davis, if you wanna say that. But yeah, all along the way with, Kickbox and I contact us learning about email marketing, email deliverability, email design, and I just have a passion for social media and regular advertising as well. And I just love to help clients. I love to bring new clients on board. I love to share from the stage.
Hank Hoffmeier:I like to share bits of information on the inter webs. Anywhere it can be found, I love to get it out there, workshops. But, yeah, I went from being an introvert to, highly executing extrovert somehow. I should probably write a book on it, but I don't have the how to or never took notes along.
Garin Hobbs:Excellent. I love hearing that path. It's we talked to a lot of folks on the show. We like to hear everyone's origin story. And while they all come from a different place and everyone's path certainly is different, the one quality, the one theme I see repeated throughout all of these stories is passion.
Garin Hobbs:It's passion that drives us to it. It's passion that keeps us here. And what a wonderful opportunity we all have, I think, to work in an industry that has so many different aspects to drive our passion and our interest and just keep us engaged. Things change every day. I love hearing that.
Hank Hoffmeier:And I know it used to be a badge of honor to call yourself a workaholic. And I have no idea if I coined this term or not. I never heard anybody else use it. I'm still don't heard anybody use it, but I and I have a hat. It's up on top of my shelf.
Hank Hoffmeier:I call myself a workafrolic just because I love what I do so much. And I feel bad if I go one day without creating content. You follow me on social media or LinkedIn, you'll know that because there's always content coming out for me. And I kinda blur the lines between work and personal. And then I I don't encourage everyone to do that.
Hank Hoffmeier:You know? If you wanna go surfing or something, if you live at the beach and you wanna turn off your, you know, content creation and go surfing, by all means, do that. But when I turn off my work, there's still content I produce whether it's for me or for Kickbox. But that's just me. I'm a workafrolic.
Hank Hoffmeier:I love what I do.
Scott Cohen:Workafrolic. I love it. Yeah. And I would say, Garin, you you you're very similar to Hank and the the extroverted introvert. When you have that passion, it's easy to talk about it.
Scott Cohen:Right? It's it's very easy to talk about something you're passionate about. You could talk to a whole room about it. You could talk to anybody about it. The instant you get away from that, you kinda go, that that's too much, bro.
Scott Cohen:Like, give me a minute. Right? So it's it's very natural to feel that. But, yeah, I would say, Gary, you're in the same boat.
Garin Hobbs:We have this con we had this discussion, this conversation just a few days ago, actually. So I would say the same thing, Hank. Like, one of the very first things that I think surprises people when they spend more time with me is the fact that I am an introvert. I like to talk. I will invite every opportunity to chat with folks and really kinda dive into subjects.
Garin Hobbs:And I think what I figured out is the the dividing line is the subject matter. Right? In a professional setting, I have no problem, to your point, getting behind the podium, speaking to a conference hall of 2,000 people won't break a sweat. Little bit of maybe pre, you know, pre presentation anxiety, but no problem getting up there. Take me out of that.
Garin Hobbs:Put me maybe in the happy hour mixer that happens after that. And there's I I I'd rather blow my brains out than try to make small talk with people. And I think the reason is is in the professional setting, the focus is on the content. It's on the topic at hand. Right?
Garin Hobbs:It's on the work. In that more personal setting, the focus is 100% on me, and that's where the discomfort begins for me personally. So, yeah, I could definitely understand that mix of introvert, extrovert that, that you mentioned there.
Hank Hoffmeier:Thank you. That Well, listen. That was great information because I think that that sums up me as well, and I guess I always thought it was a mystery as to why, but now I think you made it clear.
Garin Hobbs:Hey. The doctor is in. 5¢. Fantastic. Well, let's let's jump right in.
Garin Hobbs:You know, email does not exist in a vacuum as as Scott had kind of introduced here. It's part of this much larger and cooperative engagement ecosystem. Right? Email and social media. What roles do each of these channels play, and how do they play well with each other?
Hank Hoffmeier:Alright. I think 1st and foremost, brands need to figure out what channels work for them. And email marketing usually almost always fits into almost any industry, different types of companies and brands. But should I be on LinkedIn? Should I be on YouTube?
Hank Hoffmeier:Do I need to be on Pinterest? Right? That's one thing. And and we can call that social, then we can call it, you know, paid advertising, and then we can call it email marketing. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:Those 3 kind of big verticals, I would say. I think that each one kinda leaches into the other. In other words, you can grow an email list by posting on social media and asking people to sign up for your newsletter and vice versa. You can put in your newsletter, snippets of your social media, and ask people to follow you on social media. I I think collecting information as far as people's habits, wants, needs, locations for your segmentation, but as well as for your advertising and even some of your social media posts.
Hank Hoffmeier:All that data can live in one central hub and you can use that with all your different channels, your email and your social and your ads. One thing I like to think of with email is it's kind of like your main hub because you own that data. In other words, you're collecting it, it's portable, you can bring it with you wherever you want. You could put it in 1 CRM, move it to another one, put it in 1 ESP, move it to another. If you're on Instagram and you do one wrong thing, it might not even be wrong, you can get your account banned or paused and then you do not have access to those followers anymore.
Hank Hoffmeier:But then again, you have to gain an email address. Well, there's other ways to get them. But you have to get email addresses or permission to email someone. Right? To have I like to feel like a 1 on 1 conversation almost.
Hank Hoffmeier:Right? We all know computers are behind sending emails and we know it might inject your first name. But it really you can send one email to a 100000 people and make it feel like a 1 on 1 conversation by using personalization. Try doing that on x or something. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:You'd have to send a DM to every single person, which might take a little while. But then on social media, you have a way to get more organic reach. Right? If the algorithms are favorable to you on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, you can reach more people to help grow your email list. And I already went through how you can help each other grow along the way.
Hank Hoffmeier:You know, one helps one grow and then the other one. It's like having plants. Right? Watering the different plants as you go and giving them nutrients and make sure you're following best practices. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:You don't wanna feed plants acid. Right? So do you don't wanna buy email marketing list. That's a bad analogy, but, you know Not
Scott Cohen:a bad analogy. They're gonna
Hank Hoffmeier:hurt you.
Scott Cohen:Yeah. Like, what was the old thing? Like, every time you buy an email list, a puppy dies. Like, there there is
Garin Hobbs:a there's a little bit
Scott Cohen:of that for a while.
Hank Hoffmeier:I still save that image. I use it every now and then.
Scott Cohen:Yeah. It's I I wanna say oh, it's Jeff Ginsberg from the email company back in, like, 2010. I think he started it, and we kinda had this whole thing of, like, you know, we're we're we're in the pup. And Chris Donald, who started in box army, he he did for a long time, he did Greyhound rescue. So he was on board.
Scott Cohen:Like, yeah, we're gonna be we're gonna be rescuing puppies. Like, you know, save the puppies. Don't don't buy email list. And so save the puppies, everybody. If you might take one If you take 2 things from this call so far, 1, don't buy email list, and 2, there are people like you who are extroverted introverts.
Hank Hoffmeier:As tempting as it is, you know, you go to a conference, you walk outside to the parking lot, somebody comes up in a trench coat and goes, the last 2,000,000 email address is a $100. As much as that sounds like a good deal, don't do it. Run away. That's my spiel on stage. I love using that because it gets so many laughs.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the guy who's like, I got all
Scott Cohen:the AOL hours. You know?
Garin Hobbs:I feel like there's a correlation between people who buy email lists and people who just abandon their shopping carts in the middle of a parking spot.
Scott Cohen:Oh, I would love to get some empirical data on that one because I I might agree on that one. Yeah. That's if you ask me what one of my pet peeves is, that's one of them. Not returning your shopping cart is definitely one of them. And I didn't even work at a grocery store.
Scott Cohen:Although I worked at, like, it it wasn't a Bed Bath and Beyond, but it was a competitor. I don't know if you guys remember the the name Waccamaw. So there's a river in South Carolina in Waccamaw, but they used to there used to be, like, a, like, a Bed Bath and Beyond type thing called Waccamaw home place. And that was one of my first jobs in high school. And one of my jobs was to go cart retrieval.
Scott Cohen:And ever since then, I'm like, I hate all of you. I hate all of you.
Hank Hoffmeier:No. Because you're not Have you seen the cart narcs on TikTok? Oh,
Garin Hobbs:yes. Oh, yes. Right. You you're missing out after
Hank Hoffmeier:the show. Look it up.
Scott Cohen:Alright. Then I have to get on TikTok, and I
Garin Hobbs:No. It's YouTube.
Hank Hoffmeier:Might be on other channels.
Scott Cohen:It's, okay. If it's on YouTube or if it's on Instagram 2 weeks later, because I'm a grown up, that's fine. You know, it alright. Well, we talk about how they work well together. What does social do well that email doesn't and vice versa?
Hank Hoffmeier:Right. For both, if you do the right things, you'll be rewarded. With social, I feel like you have the opportunity to reach a lot of newer people and to get them into the fold and make them become fans and get them onto your newsletter. And again, with email, it's always that personalization and that you own the, the email list. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:I think I think email, 1st and foremost, is the most or or there's I wanna say it's the best tool for you to build a reputation brand and get the KLT, know, like, and trust, so that people can really figure out if they wanna do business with you. Whereas with social media, a lot of those TikTok ads, you don't know if they're legit or not or, you know, somebody says, hey, these little wireless lab mics are so great. They're only 99¢, and it sounds great, then you get them and there's all crackling everywhere. Right? I think that social media, the negatives there is everything can be a lot of things can be updated, edited, and and post production and things may not be as real as they look.
Hank Hoffmeier:Email, same thing because, you know, there is spam out there. But I think a lot of people are really knowledgeable now of what what spam looks like in some ways, and, you know, a lot of the providers now are filtering out that spam. You know, we could talk about authentication all day long too, and I know you probably have a lot of episodes on that, but that stops a lot of the spam from coming in. But I think there's not one that's better than the other. I think they work in harmony.
Hank Hoffmeier:I really do. In this day and age, almost every brand needs to be on social and they need to have an email list. And like I said, a lot of examples I use is using social media to grow your list, but then maybe you are looking at your email list of people who haven't opened and clicked in a certain amount of time. You might wanna say, Hey, well, maybe email's not your thing. Check out our Facebook page or follow us on Instagram.
Hank Hoffmeier:Get them to do that instead. And we know as email marketers, like that email might not even get into the inbox if you have deliverability issues. But then you can also take that list and do custom and lookalike audiences and grow your social media following and your email list that way as well. A lot of people forget about that. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:Taking that list of emails to subscribers you have, which is gold, and finding people that look and act like them, as well as serve ads to those people that might not be seeing your emails.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. So that aspect of force multiplication. Right? They're they're they're kinda handmaidens. I look at this as sort of team sports.
Garin Hobbs:Like, every position on the field is a certain role that it plays, and it's the, you know, sort of some contribution of everybody that really sort of delivers that win. So to your point, you know, social is a great place to source audience and really drive people to sign up for email where the brand could then control more of that brand experience, becomes more of that owned experience in email. It's also asynchronous. Like, in social, you kinda have to wait for people to come to your social page and decide to engage to for them to actually get the value of whatever marketing content you have there. Email, you push it, and it's there waiting for them whenever they decide to open it.
Garin Hobbs:To the point, you know, maybe socials where we get the audience, emails where we engage that audience or sort of begin to engage them, and then we kind of push them back out to social for that more in-depth kind of experience, that more richer media sort of supported experience. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:And one mistake I think I see people make is that they have, like, an offer deal or something to get people to follow them or to, you know, subscribe to their newsletters. They're offering the same deal on different platforms. I think you need to choose 1 and say, like, every time we have a new release or a new product or we have an incentive, it's gonna be an email. Sign up there first and then focus on email. Or if you wanna do it on social because maybe you have a great, video editing team and you're putting a lot of content out, always release that new information there.
Hank Hoffmeier:Because I think that confuses people as to where they're gonna get the best deal and Mhmm. Why should they trust where this content's coming from?
Scott Cohen:I would also argue be be intentional on social. Right? Like, I I think don't and you don't have to be everywhere. You don't have to be on every single social platform unless you can support it and provide value on all the all those social platforms in each of their individual ways. Right?
Scott Cohen:Because what what's what is worse than getting somebody on your email list and then saying, hey. Go follow us on Facebook, and there's nothing on Facebook. Right? Or you go, hey. Go check us out on Instagram, and there's nothing valuable on Instagram.
Scott Cohen:Or it's the exact same stuff that they get in email. It's like there needs to be and that's asking a lot because you need to support that kind of content.
Hank Hoffmeier:Yeah.
Scott Cohen:But it it it'd be the same thing of, hey. Sign up for our email, and then your email doesn't back up anything. Right? Like, don't get somebody on your list and then offer them crap. Like, you you can't so be intentional.
Scott Cohen:Right? If you're gonna be on Facebook, be on Facebook. If you're gonna be on Instagram, be on Instagram. If you're gonna do email, do email. Right?
Scott Cohen:Like, don't don't half ass anything.
Hank Hoffmeier:Pinterest doesn't make sense for me, and I'm this close to leaving x because I just feel like I don't have as much or as frequent engagement with people anymore. But every now and then, people come out of the woodwork, and I'm having great discussions and, you know, on different types of topics and stuff with what I'm commenting on or or threading on and then what they're doing for my stuff, and it kinda brings me back in for a little while. Then it kinda goes back to hell. I have these peaks and valleys with x, but I should probably just lay off because it's another channel I have to manage.
Garin Hobbs:I know exactly how you feel. Every day, I intend to shut down my Friendster account, but then something happens after I just decide to defer that decision to another
Scott Cohen:How is how is Tom from MySpace doing? That's what I wanna know. He's he's probably sitting on the beach doing just fine. You know? Just fine.
Hank Hoffmeier:It was the approach for being a movie, actually. And I don't know I forgot a lot of the details, but it was, like, something about technology and the history of it. And they asked him to be in it, but he said no.
Garin Hobbs:That's a pity. You know, they did that whole Craigslist documentary. It was fantastic. They had Craig Newmark in it and everything. So, yeah, you gotta you gotta talk to the folks who were there and made it happen.
Garin Hobbs:Well, if we have confused people enough by talking about the combination and even the juxtaposition of social versus email, let's confuse folks even more. Let's folks even more. Let's throw another channel in there. Let's talk SMS. Nick, where do you see SMS?
Garin Hobbs:Where does that fit into your own channel hierarchy?
Hank Hoffmeier:Well, if we talk about what what was it? Like, maybe 5 to 8 years ago, SMS is the email killer. It's gonna kill email. Right? That's what we heard, and it's always happened yet.
Hank Hoffmeier:I think the biggest part is that your phone is personal. Right? And it's a private thing that you view your data on. That's why they sell those privacy screens so some people can not show to people behind them what they're looking at. But I think that SMS does have a place.
Hank Hoffmeier:I think that for brands that we trust, we will give them a phone number and we will interact with SMS. I got an SMS this morning from my my dentist confirming an appointment. That's okay. If you go to a restaurant now, they're starting to use your cell phone to get on the waiting list. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:I'm okay with that. I wonder what happens if you say no. Maybe they do have those discs they give you, but I've never said no. But I think SMS is okay for the types of content that you're okay getting. In other words, I don't see people in droves signing up for SMS lists to get deals, like when they have people at 20% off.
Hank Hoffmeier:Because I think email allows us to say, okay, I'm ready to go in, look at my emails, and maybe now I'm in a purchasing mode, right? And everybody's freaking out when tabs came out in Gmail, now they're coming out everywhere. But if you're in a promotions tab, that's okay. If I'm in a mindset where I wanna buy something and you're in that folder, the promotions tab, it's okay. And the same thing with my phone, it's a little bit different, right?
Hank Hoffmeier:If I get a text that's 20% off, act now, next 2 hours, I might not go ahead and try to convert right then and there because it's an interruption to my day, that text message. Bloop. All of a sudden I gotta feel like I gotta look at it. Most people, I think, turn off alerts. I don't know about you both, but do you turn off alerts for every email you get on your phone?
Hank Hoffmeier:I do. I don't even have a sound or a vibration. But when I go in, I'm ready to interact with my email inbox. And I think a majority, not all, a majority of people are like that where I think SMS is for those trusted companies, brands that we do business with. And then you have WhatsApp.
Hank Hoffmeier:Right? And what I found is, especially in Europe, because I do a lot of international travel, is it's heavily used for customer support.
Scott Cohen:And I
Hank Hoffmeier:know it's gonna come over here at some point and people and brands are gonna freak out, but they're gonna have to get on board because it auto translates, it's got a good UI, it has a good way for the customer service reps to go ahead and handle those chats. I think that people are starting to warm up to SMS a little bit, but you know what actually ruined it for me recently to the thought about how well that's gonna take, it's gonna get more ground, it's gonna build more and more and more. It's starting to get all those political texts now. Are you voting? Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:And I never gave these people my email. Thank goodness Apple gave us a way to delete and report junk.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. Unfortunately, go ahead, Scott. I know you're probably
Scott Cohen:just They they wrote themselves out of the laws governing SMS opt in and opt out conveniently enough. So, you know, if you're wondering why you're getting them, it's because lawmakers went, it's good for you, but not for me. So it's Exactly. I will say to your point, there there's a couple of things around SMS that is that because of that interruption factor, there's a higher level of intent. Right?
Scott Cohen:So in in my experience, the people who are opted into both email and SMS are more likely to convert. That said, to your point, you see a lot of, like, get 10% off for signing up for email. Hey. Do you wanna make it 15%? How many folks most folks are pretty knowledgeable about waiting for things like cart abandon offers.
Scott Cohen:Yeah. And, hey, I saw something on social. I wanna buy it. Maybe I'll go to the site and see if I can get 20% off. Sure.
Scott Cohen:I'll give them my phone number for an extra 10% off for this purchase. My question would be, after that initial conversion, do they come back? And that's a question that I don't have data around, but I if somebody out there is listening, please please bring that data. Yeah. Yeah.
Hank Hoffmeier:How do you stay engaged with that consumer? Right? That's I think that's the next step, and nobody's figured that out. I've got a question for you though. Since you're see you're a data nerd.
Hank Hoffmeier:Right? What do you think has more conversions? Push notifications from an app? Like, in other words, if you got a push notification for a discount, heavy discount on a MacBook from Best Buy, and then or you got it via SMS, which one do you think has a higher conversion? I think it's a push push notification.
Hank Hoffmeier:I don't want the data.
Garin Hobbs:I I have seen some data on this, and it is in fact push. Right? I don't think there's enough analysis. I don't think there's enough breadth of data, but the data I have seen certainly favors push fairly heavily. Here's why.
Garin Hobbs:There are greater barriers one has to overcome to receive these types of push notifications. First off, you have to have the intent of of actually downloading the app. 2nd, you have to have the intent of actually enabling or in this case, not turning off push notifications themselves. So just as SMS typically signals a higher engaged audience even though it's a smaller portion of the audience, That same truth holds for push. It's gonna be yet a smaller portion of the audience, but their because their intent is higher, their consideration is higher, and so their engagement is therefore higher as well.
Scott Cohen:By percentage, yes. I would say. I agree. Being push, it makes sense. Right?
Scott Cohen:You there's so many steps you have to follow to get it. And then if your app has value, and that's another thing. Like, the if you remember 5, 10 years ago, everybody ran to do an app and 95% of them sucked because
Garin Hobbs:The storefront.
Scott Cohen:It it was just well, it was just a, hey. Now you go here and you go to our website. Like, it was basically an iframe, and you go, that's not apps are supposed to have value by themselves. So, like, Best Buy, for example, I use their app all the time. A push notification makes a lot of sense.
Scott Cohen:I have higher level intent. I'm one of their total tech nerd member people. So, yeah, I'm higher level of intent. They're gonna get me to use that. Although sometimes the purchase is big enough, I go to a desktop, but that's just because of my age.
Scott Cohen:Not not anything wrong with the app. You know that there's a certain level of I can spend this much money on my phone and then bigger purchases go to the big screen. Maybe that's just me. But
Hank Hoffmeier:Me just thinking like a marketer, and I know I'm tainted, right, because I've had all this. So maybe normal users feel this way too. I think with a text notification, you kinda don't know exactly what's gonna happen next. If I got a text from Best Buy, am I gonna go to their website? Is it gonna be easy for me to check out, find that product?
Hank Hoffmeier:Am I gonna have a good experience? Where I know just because of history, by clicking that push notification, I know it's gonna bring up the app. I know it's gonna bring up that product. I could probably simply just put it in a cart and then schedule to pick it up or get it delivered. I think that that user experience to me is more palatable whereas the SMS, I feel like it's still to me, it feels a little janky still, but maybe it's not.
Hank Hoffmeier:Maybe I need to give another try.
Garin Hobbs:Deep linking. I don't think it's
Scott Cohen:deep linking. You. Yeah. Deep linking is the big thing. Right?
Scott Cohen:So and that's you need that in email. If you have an app, the ideal situation, and there's company I think there's, like, Branch and a few other companies that Branch is the one I have experience with personally that you can do deep linking where based on what they know about you and where they're clicking, it brings up the theoretical best experience for what they have. So they're on their phone and they have the app. They go, hey. Push them in the app.
Scott Cohen:If they don't push them to the site, if they're on desktop, push them to desktop. Right? So that's the ideal scenario. But to your point, Hank, it's still imperfect, and not everybody's doing it right. So yes.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. I I feel like there's another sort of layer here that, I don't think a lot of people really take the time to think about. There seems to be, I think, an unspoken covenant, you know, about what belongs to whom. So for example, email. That belongs to the marketer, right, in my opinion.
Garin Hobbs:That's that's where I invite them to tell me anything they have to tell me at any time because I decide when I engage with that. And to to use the earlier word, it's asynchronous. Right? Just like my physical mailbox at the end of the street there. However, push notifications, SMS, that's my real estate.
Garin Hobbs:Right? If I invite you to engage me on my real estate, then it needs to be a value to me primarily, not the value to the brand. Not because you wanna say something, but because I need to hear something. And so that's a lot of the criteria I run with our own clients here at the agency, Scott, when we're talking about SMS or multichannel strategy. So the criteria are, is it time sensitive?
Garin Hobbs:Right? What happens if somebody doesn't see this message within x period of time? And is the value primarily for the recipient, not for the brand or the sender themselves? If the answer to both of those questions or most of those questions is yes, then it's okay to send that as an SMS. What's a big mistake to make?
Garin Hobbs:Just taking everything that you typically send out through email and deciding that SMS is another channel to which you can send this entire cadence of messages or using push the same way. So time sensitive things, alerts, updates, status notifications, you know, things of that nature. Your flight is boarding 5 minutes early. Your your order is on its way. And I would disagree slightly with, the some of the promotional permissions that we might see on things like push and, and SMS.
Garin Hobbs:If it is time sensitive and if it's a good enough, discount, you know, 25% off the entire store for 24 hours only, I would personally would welcome an SMS like that. I might not see the email until it's too late or until the best inventory is gone. But if it's something like 5% off of the next 5 days, that's not quite so urgent. The line does get a little gray, but I use that my value versus their value as the the true litmus set litmus test there.
Hank Hoffmeier:You just gave me a great idea, and I'm gonna kinda steal part of it. Right? I think I'm gonna can, like, email to the mailbox. Right? You're gonna put a letter in the mailbox, and I can go get it whenever I want to.
Hank Hoffmeier:Then you're gonna have somebody that comes to the door, and they're gonna have a door hanger. I'm gonna see it on a Ring doorbell, and just gonna put the door hanger or whatever it is on on the porch. And I see that on my ring, and that's the push notification. Right? I can interact with it if I want.
Hank Hoffmeier:Then there's the door knockers. Right? Those are the satellite salesman and all that. Right? Those are the people that are trying and I'm cooking dinner.
Hank Hoffmeier:Right? Do and I don't wanna answer that door right away, but may or maybe I do. I don't know. It just depends on when you actually rang the doorbell. Maybe I'm bored, and I wanna talk to someone for an hour about solar energy, and that's okay.
Hank Hoffmeier:And I'll interact with that. To me, that's my example.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. That's a really good one. You know, I don't I don't wanna disappoint anyone here. It's a marketing podcast. We have to talk about AI.
Garin Hobbs:Right? So, Hank, love the exactly. Right? It's the it's yeah. It's the demure of marketing.
Garin Hobbs:Right? What do you think the the impact of AI will be on email and and and the social channels themselves? I know we're starting to see some of it. Adoption is slow. Folks are still trying to figure out where could this be most impactful.
Garin Hobbs:What do you think that overall impact will be? What would that look like?
Hank Hoffmeier:And I like how you say, you know, what impact will it have, not does it have. Right? Because right now we could talk about, you know, we can go in and simply do simple things with with AI. And I think a lot of it comes down to with how you use the tool. And we're gonna see a lot of and for social as well, we're gonna see a lot of content come out and this is gonna be a lot of volume.
Hank Hoffmeier:But is it gonna be good? Is it gonna be crappy or is it gonna be good? And and you need to ride that line. You need to if you're in crappy now, get to good. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:And if you're at good, you need to get great. I think for smaller teams, this is a godsend. If you wanna go in and say, hey, I just started my business, my last talk and what I'm doing next Friday, I use the example of I I'm starting a hot sauce, Hank's Secret Sauce. Right? Because my talk is the secrets of email marketing no one's talking about.
Garin Hobbs:Nice. Part
Hank Hoffmeier:of it's AI. So I bring up the example. Hey. I'm just starting this business. I don't even have my product yet.
Hank Hoffmeier:Let's use ChatGPT to help me with marketing my product. And I go through and I say, hey. What kind of customer should I target? Right? Help me build segments.
Hank Hoffmeier:And what's interesting is I thought about, like, what is ChatGPT gonna give me? And I was like, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Hank Hoffmeier:Yes. And then I was like, oh, I didn't know that one. Right? Because I'd never owned a hot sauce company before. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:Or maybe people with allergies. Right? I wouldn't have thought about that. ChatGPT told me that. Same thing with segmentation.
Hank Hoffmeier:And then, obviously, you have your content creation, and give me 20 examples for a subject line that would entice people to buy my hot sauce. Include emojis, and make sure you're very descriptive. Because if you say include emojis, a lot of times it always just put it in the beginning or always at the end. Say put it in random places, never use the same emoji, make sure it's relevant to the subject line. You always have to use those descriptors when you're creating content.
Hank Hoffmeier:But I think the future is gonna be around data modeling, taking data and putting in and saying, okay, here's all my domains, and I'm gonna keep this clean, pg for data. In other words, you may not wanna add your PII or your personally identifiable information to Chatsy Piggy. I'll leave that to you, the audience, whatever they wanna do. But I could take all my domains. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:I have okay. Here's my domains, here's my opens, or or how many I have. Tell me how many AOL, how many Gmail, how many Yahoo, etcetera. How many people I have from each domain? What's my breakdown?
Hank Hoffmeier:Chat, Chikatita, give that to you in 2 seconds. You know, here's my statistics, you know, do an analysis for me. Tell me, the information which one had which which email did the best as far as opens and clicks. It'll tell you all of that. It's great and then it can fix formatting issues.
Hank Hoffmeier:Right? If you a lot of people that fill out forms, they might use all caps. You can ask chat gpt to transform that down into normalized text. Right? You know, first letter is capitalized and everything else is normal.
Hank Hoffmeier:Those are some of the things I think people need to be looking at. But really, you know, we need to make sure that it's valuable. And I know we haven't heard the word hallucinate a lot, right, where Chat GPT and these AI models hallucinate because they're getting better. I saw a recent graph that Chat GPT 4, like its data model, if it was like a little dot, it'd be like the size of maybe like like an eraser on a pencil. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:But 5 is gonna be like the size of a coffee mug. Right? It's gonna have so much data and more experience doing things. It's gonna start getting things right better and all the time. But again, it comes down to also humanizing your brain.
Hank Hoffmeier:I mean, your your brand brain. Make sure that you're not just using this content verbatim and copying and pasting it. Make sure that you're putting your brand voice in there, making sure that it stands out from the crowd, but use it as your superpower to help you do bigger and better things that your brands are not thinking about. Have it do competitor analysis. Have it look at a lot of different things, you know.
Hank Hoffmeier:Hey, Based on what I do, are are there other channels I need to be on other than than email marketing? It'll tell you. It'll probably I haven't done that. I just thought of it now. Like, I wonder how well it would do that.
Hank Hoffmeier:Hey. I sell a hot sauce. What other what other channels should I be on other than email marketing? And I'm probably gonna say YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, right? And maybe even Pinterest.
Hank Hoffmeier:I'm gonna test that out probably later or tomorrow, definitely, because I think that's a good option. But I think as the tools get better and as we understand these tools more, we need not even do we have to have these prompt engineers, when we need to have humans in general on a marketing team that know how to use these tools correctly, so that we're still able to provide a humanized voice for our brand, but help us be optimized and very strategic about how we're doing things. I know that was a lot of just fluff words,
Scott Cohen:but No.
Garin Hobbs:I I I love that. I wanna I wanna unpack that just a little. You go ahead, Scott. I see your your auto No.
Scott Cohen:I I I was gonna say AI is not capable of why yet. And that's where the human element comes in. Right? So you're saying do do find the emails that have the best performance. It can tell you what.
Scott Cohen:It won't tell you why. Not yet. Now if we get there, that's
Hank Hoffmeier:that's Yeah.
Scott Cohen:Skynet crap. But, you know, it's I I think that the danger that we've put in and and some of the things that we call AI today have been around in email for 5, 10 years. I mean, let's be fair. Send time optimization. Is it getting better?
Scott Cohen:Maybe. But is it new? No. Dynamic content. It's been around for 10 years.
Scott Cohen:Is it getting better? Yes. Is it getting is it new? No. So I think, like, everyone kinda needs to slow their role, and maybe it's just the proof of the the gray hair going on here that I can go.
Scott Cohen:We've seen this. We've seen this before. This is not an easy button, but it can make you faster. But it but the onus is still at least for a little while until proven otherwise. And I'm an email marketer, and I'm a tester at heart, so I'm willing willing to be proven wrong.
Scott Cohen:Although, I hope I'm not in this case until it can answer why we can never be fully replaced.
Hank Hoffmeier:Well, part of it is a change of venue too, I think. Because I remember when I used to be an account manager at Icontact, and we'd have a customer who wants to send an email, and they want subject line ideas. I get a group of other account managers together. We brainstorm. We'd have the most silliest ideas at first, then something comes about.
Hank Hoffmeier:Now since we're all distributed and everything, we can talk to the machine and brainstorm with the machine, and it's not gonna be as silly as some of the other people, and it cuts the crap out of the way, and it helps you. I think that that is part of it. Garin, you were gonna say something.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. There's just a couple of things I wanted to unpack there. First off, you know, using it for generating copy and subject lines and things of that nature. To Scott's point, I think the other thing that's missing from the why or or a big component of the why is the EQ. Right?
Garin Hobbs:The emotional quotient there. The why is so wrapped up in context, and the context is often about the impact, or the why is often about the impact. Most of the impact is usually about how it makes us feel. That's not really something that AI, thankfully, is currently postured to really understand and sort of infer and then include as part of their recommendation. Right?
Garin Hobbs:So, I would say some of the most successful use cases I see for AI for copy are not folks who use it to generate the copy, but folks who use it to check the copy that they themselves have written. Is there a better way for me to say this? Is there a more efficient way for me to say this? Is there superior syntax that I'm perhaps missing out on? Right?
Garin Hobbs:So I think that's sort of one thing. As far as what I would like to see from AI, I think it's what I, as a marketer and a lot of our clients struggle with most, and that is the what. What should I do? Right? There's no you can pull up any platform, ESP, CDP.
Garin Hobbs:There is no shortage of factual representation. Here is what this report here is what how your email performed. Here are the results from that particular campaign. What marketers need to know is awesome. What does that really mean, and what should I do next?
Garin Hobbs:Right? That's what I'd like to see out of AI is being it being more prescriptive. It offering the action that arises from the insight itself.
Hank Hoffmeier:And I think we're shifting a lot. And like you said, using it to say, hey, is this well written? Can I make this more concise? Because now we're starting to hear talking, we can't ignore the fact that a lot of these providers, Apple's doing it. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:The the, I just had it in my brain, the summer's email summary. Right? Not only of, like, summary of your inbox, but also each email. I I think now alt images are that much more I mean, alt text and images are that much more important. Right?
Hank Hoffmeier:Having your copy really, really tight and valuable, I think that's where we're at. You can't it's gonna be harder to tell stories in an email. These folks that are selling these these courses and everything, they're the long, long, long emails. Everybody's gonna say, summarize that for me. And I think that's what it's gonna come down to.
Hank Hoffmeier:It's saying, hey. Maybe the tool does it now or maybe chat GBT or someone's gonna model it. Like, when I send this email, what would what could the summary look like? And I know it might be different for each person, but that's gonna be a regular exercise. Almost like we use either litmus, email on acid, or something, right, to preview our emails and make sure it's gonna look good in the inbox.
Hank Hoffmeier:We wanna see what it looks like in the email AI summary.
Scott Cohen:Yep. Well, I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be really interesting because our new creative director came on, and he he talks a lot about designing specifically for code for email. So screen readers, things like that, you know, the h ones, h twos, h threes, all the body, like, all this sort there's a science behind all of this. And I wonder if that's gonna also be super crucial, not just for screen readers, but for AI summaries. To your point, those long newsletters, the morning brews that we absolutely love, how is Apple gonna summarize the summary?
Scott Cohen:Right? Because that's essentially what morning brew is. It's a summary of summaries, and it's gonna get really interesting to see how those are affected and how people use it. I mean, you probably have the beta, Hank. I don't yet.
Scott Cohen:So it'll be and I I I'm waiting for 18.0.1. Let's be fair. You know, I I wanna get through the the first batch before I go to 18. It seems like a much bigger bump than 17 was. But it'll it'll be interesting to see how that but all those pieces that a lot of us have been ranting about for best practices that people can sometimes like to ignore, you go, oh, no.
Scott Cohen:AI makes it that much more important.
Hank Hoffmeier:Yeah. Yeah. Sadly, sadly, 18/1 doesn't have a lot of the email stuff, so I can't say I know about it yet. And, actually, I created a video. I think I posted it yesterday about that.
Hank Hoffmeier:You know, what's the common I'm only speculating based on the information that's out there, but it's not in there yet at all, and it's something we need to learn about. And I actually, for the first time in a while, I jumped on 18 when it first came out in beta because I was on a 4 week road trip across the country. Numerous times, I did not have service, and I was actually able to try out the satellite texting, and it was awesome. Nice.
Scott Cohen:Well, that's cool. Well, they've been they've been promoting it enough during football games that you would think it would be an 18.1, but whatever.
Garin Hobbs:They're ready. Yeah. But all the
Hank Hoffmeier:AI, the heavy AI stuff, they're already saying it comes with the iPhone 16 that's not on it yet.
Scott Cohen:Yep. Oh, well. Well, I mean, let's let's let's stay in this sort of innovation's mindset. You know, nobody nobody here has a crystal ball. Well, not that I know of.
Scott Cohen:I I guess I shouldn't assume. But where do you think innovations are gonna come from in email? Is it really just AI, or do you see other innovations coming?
Hank Hoffmeier:Well, I think privacy is gonna be something that's gonna be important going forward. Now people will say, I want everything free. I want the biggest discounts, but I don't wanna give you any data anymore. Right? That's always gonna be a thing now.
Hank Hoffmeier:It used to be, oh, I can get a free app, but if I give you, you know, all this information, I can get it for free. We used to be okay with that. I'm still okay with that. If I know I'm willingly giving you information for something for free, fine. That's a good trade.
Hank Hoffmeier:But I think people are up in arms. And also, you know, we're lazy and, you know, we wanna make sure that we're getting what we not want when we need it. And, you know, we were talking about, you know, the, you know, the personalization of emails and and all the flexible data and information you could put in there. We're gonna want more and more of that. I think the tools need to be have more dynamic content in emails so that we're getting each person's getting what they want.
Hank Hoffmeier:Because we're all all day long, we can all talk from this podcast. We can get on stage and talk about personalization through through merge fields. It's not AI. Right? It's it's really just a play with injecting stuff into an email.
Hank Hoffmeier:But if you can say, Scott likes, you know, surfing. I I like playing pool, and and Gary likes swimming, and we all get we get to send one email as a marketer, and each of us get different content. That's gonna be great if we can really hone in on that better. I think if basically, I think privacy, consumer, and audience needs are gonna start creeping up more and more. And then AI hopefully will help us get into the mindset and develop the strategy of doing that.
Hank Hoffmeier:Now don't forget about augmentation in VR. Right? I don't know if you saw the the meta glasses, the new ones. Right? Where they're they're proof of concept, but they're like my glasses, but, like, 80 times thicker everywhere.
Hank Hoffmeier:But it almost does everything that the Apple Vision Pro does in a way. I'm excited for that. I'd you know, I'll be like, shut up, take my money as soon as that comes out. But I think we can't forget about augmented reality and virtual reality when that comes down the pipe, especially people maybe reading emails and in VR, and that's something to think about. I think newer technologies, and maybe there's a technology that we haven't even thought about yet that's gonna be coming around the bend.
Scott Cohen:Ready player 1 stuff is what you're talking about. Yeah.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. Very cool.
Hank Hoffmeier:And then, you know, we all forget about, you know, social media is video, video, video. Right? And I know that you had Lisa Jones on, right, from from Imail. We can put videos in email now, and I don't think enough marketers are doing that. I think that's something that we should be looking at is putting more visuals because humans are visual by nature.
Hank Hoffmeier:We need to get more visuals in our emails and not even just images. Cool GIFs, animated more animated GIFs of puppies and kittens, of course, and then, you know, videos. And that can be done. And unless you're on, like, what is it, Outlook 2010, you might not see video, but it's gonna be done.
Scott Cohen:Yep. Exactly. If you saw an Outlook 2010
Garin Hobbs:You got other problems. You got bigger problems than video.
Scott Cohen:Talk to somebody. Okay?
Hank Hoffmeier:Just talk to somebody.
Garin Hobbs:Call a friend.
Hank Hoffmeier:Call a friend.
Garin Hobbs:Yeah. I'd like to see things like video more as well. I think I'd like to see more intentful and purposeful use of GIF and sort of animation, things of that nature. For all the reasons we've been talking about, brevity is hard. Right?
Garin Hobbs:As the philosopher said, you know, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. That's really difficult to do in email and get your point across where, you know, with video, with GIF, that you can leverage that aspect of an image is worth a 1000 words type of thing and tell a full story. By the way, at the same time, you're still accessible, because, you know, you don't necessarily need a screen reader to play the audio, from a video. All you have to do is click play, and it comes through. And there's no loss of fidelity.
Garin Hobbs:There's no compromise to the, completeness of the message, and now you're delivering to a much broader audience. I think why we don't see it more is a, education, just I don't think that a lot of marketers or the majority of marketers really understand Mhmm. That video and email is now possible or is again, possible. Then it's almost time almost seem viewed as a bit of a burden. Great.
Garin Hobbs:Now I have to figure out what type of content is gonna work in video. I have to invest into the production of this type of content. I've already got my copywriters going crazy. How am I gonna tackle this type of thing as well? And, you know, so when you do see video, it's usually commercial.
Garin Hobbs:Right? It's usually like a I've got just a a version of their advertisement. When you see GIFs, sometimes it's because they wanted to include a GIF, not because it really enhanced the value of the of the actual message or, delivered more depth of the message itself, right, as well. So I think we just need more of that shift in thinking and a little bit of an increase in education.
Scott Cohen:Amen. And that might be where AI comes in, right, on video creation, things like that where you can throw a whole bunch of assets at it, and it produces something that may actually turn out well. I don't know.
Hank Hoffmeier:It's
Scott Cohen:Yeah. But that's that's where it could help is the asset creation. Right? So,
Garin Hobbs:you know Jayce Wells is showing us all the way with his, what is it? The virtual, disco roller disco sort of, picture studio
Scott Cohen:That was that was a fantastic photo, by the way. If you have not seen it on LinkedIn, go look up Jay Schweddelson. He will not be disappointed.
Garin Hobbs:You had me get rolled up jean shorts, Jay.
Scott Cohen:Alright. Last question. This is a bit more philosophical, but and you and you kinda touched on this a little bit earlier of, you know, the data being a data steward, sending it out for look alikes, things like that. But oftentimes and maybe I'm just a little jaded from my brand side days, but email marketers tend to kinda be often we make money and nobody cares land. How can email marketers make themselves more useful than they already are to the other marketing channels?
Hank Hoffmeier:Oh, that is a good question. Because I think, like, email marketing sometimes is viewed as the stepchild. Right? Because it's like, oh, you just get to put copy and images in into the little computer here and then send it out to a list and your work's done. We gotta edit video and and make all these images and make them pretty and fight these algorithms.
Hank Hoffmeier:Right? But, you know, I think it really comes down to educating the leadership team, the other people that how important number 1 is to own that email address. That it's that 1 on 1 and personal conversation you're going to have that you can highly target and automate a lot of the emails. It's not hard to do the content creation unless we wanna do more of what we were just talking about, you know, embedding the video, etcetera. But if if it's somebody that, you know, they are just getting started with an email campaign or they're only been doing a little bit, you can grow from there.
Hank Hoffmeier:I I think just that progression and making sure everybody knows how important it is. Because everybody says, you know, email's old and nobody wants email anymore, but you still need, for the most part, an email address to sign up for social media accounts. I mean, I say that now hesitating because now you can do the login with Google thing, right, or Facebook, right, too. So there's that Still tied to an email. But email is still important.
Hank Hoffmeier:You get invoices and receipts from emails, and I think there's just not enough weight placed on that channel. And I don't think people are looking at the analytics enough. Now I'm not saying in Mailchimp, in constant wherever you're using it. I'm talking about Google Analytics, right? How many conversions you're getting from email?
Hank Hoffmeier:That's not set up, you better go run and do that after this show. But also, you know, is it a supporting channel? I always used to talk to clients and they would say, well, we only made a $100,000 last month off of email. And I'll say, well, it also supported another $500,000 down here. How's that?
Hank Hoffmeier:And I would show them the journey. Or is it first touch, last touch, somewhere in the middle? Email plays a factor in a lot of the transactions people are having, whether it's just visiting your website or actually converting. And a lot of times, me as an account manager, when I spoke to a client, you know, I always told them my job's not done when you send that email. It could be.
Hank Hoffmeier:Right? Because we're an email marketing company and platform, but it's actually when that conversion happened. And when you send here's an important tip folks, if if you have a shopping cart, if you're ecommerce. Right? Somebody clicks on the link and goes to your website.
Hank Hoffmeier:Yay. You got that conversion from the email, but did they actually check out? I worked with a software company. This was years ago. This company had, Mac software.
Hank Hoffmeier:And back when CDs actually were able to be put into laptops, you could get the backup disc version and it was always pre checked and there was a cost for that. And he was wondering why he wasn't converting as much, and I said, well, let's do this. Let's make that opt in instead of forced opt in. We took the check mark off and made it look better and prettier. He, right away, got more conversions, and I told him, I told you, my job's not done until you get an actual conversion.
Hank Hoffmeier:So look at that whole process. Also, do the campaigns of saying, hey, we're on Instagram. Follow us over there. Trying to measure that. Hey, we sent an email.
Hank Hoffmeier:Did we get any more followers? You know, it plays nice with these other channels. It's not supposed to be this this in family fighting where it's email's better than you or Instagram's better than email. It's the channel that's supposed to work in harmony with all of your other channels and it's always segmented out, right? It's always this other thing, right?
Hank Hoffmeier:There's social media, there's SEO, and there's paid ads. Then there's this thing called email marketing that we do. Right? I think it needs to be part of the family. Let's bring it out of the garage and into the house, folks.
Garin Hobbs:It's a single continuum. And I think that's where we see we in terms of the customer experience, it should be all be viewed as a single continuum. Because what customers don't stop to think is I'm on SMS. Now I'm on social. Now I'm in email.
Garin Hobbs:Now I'm working within the app. It's a seamless experience, and I hate using that term because every, you know, SaaS salesperson out there uses that term. But in any case, if the customer experience is truly seamless in terms of the way that we perceive it. But then you look within the brand as an organization, and it's fighting over budget, fighting over, attribution, and things of that nature with and and then the only reason you fight over those things is because you fail to see this as a single continuum. These each one acts as a force multiplier.
Garin Hobbs:Right? Email pushes out to others. It takes insights back, and then it sort of, activates the other channels and the other the other channels then enrich that email. Right? And and it's never gonna go away or at least not until somebody comes up with something that is more direct, more personalizable, more measurable, and has a higher cost efficiency and greater ROI than email.
Garin Hobbs:Email is still king or queen in every single one of those aspects.
Hank Hoffmeier:Chat, g p t twenty is gonna do all that for us. It's gonna fix everything.
Garin Hobbs:As long as it mops my floors too, I'm in, man.
Scott Cohen:Right? Where where where is the cleaning? Where I mean, I know we got the Roomba, but but seriously, like, why can't it do my laundry for me and and do all these things that could free me up for the creative things? But back to the point of continuum, email also covers so much more than that purchase cycle. Right?
Scott Cohen:So you have the whole retention piece that's the paid channels basically don't worry about at all. They're all about acquisition. Right? So we're never I mean, how many Facebook ads have you seen for, hey. It's been a while since you've purchased.
Scott Cohen:Do you need to purchase again? You don't see advertising for that, do you? You don't see the
Hank Hoffmeier:ad for stuff that I've bought already, and I keep getting them.
Scott Cohen:Right. But you don't see ads for, hey. By the way, your your, product has been shipped. You'll see SMS and email for that. And if you have an app, you may use Push for that as well.
Scott Cohen:But you don't email covers so much more ground. It it helps not just the marketing channels and, I partially asked this question because I wanted your opinion, but also because I wanted a soapbox for a minute. And but it also helps customer service and customer support. Right? Because if you are over communicating or properly communicating during fulfillment, you reduce calls.
Scott Cohen:You reduce calls, people going, where's my order? You reduce you reduce so many so much more burden if you can use email effectively, not just in the purchase cycle, but in the fulfillment cycle. I mean, think about it. Are you doing ads for free trial? Are you doing ads for upgrading, from, you know, your silver package to your gold package?
Scott Cohen:You don't see any of that. Email does all of that. Right. And so you talk about education. You can literally walk in and go, who else is talking about this stuff?
Scott Cohen:Who else is talking about these upgrades? Who else is doing this? And you can establish KPIs to go, we drove from silver to gold this percentage of people. We drove from you know, you talked about your unchecked thing. We drove that CD to be delivered, you know, after the fact.
Scott Cohen:Like, hey. You you like this. Now do you want backup? Right? Like, that's where email would come in and try not today.
Scott Cohen:But, you know, that they would sell the CDs and stuff like that. It'd be hilarious if we went back. I mean, hey. Vinyl's back. But, you know, I don't I don't know about CDs.
Garin Hobbs:Vinyl never left, baby.
Scott Cohen:I I I I agree.
Hank Hoffmeier:An email is supposed to be a two way communication channel. So by all means, folks, don't use no reply. Don't end your. You know? Open up those conversations.
Hank Hoffmeier:If people wanna talk to you, even if you have to use chat gpt to reply to them, accept those emails because that can give you so much information. Maybe it's feedback. Maybe it's just, you know, oh, thank you so much for this, and it'll make you feel good. Right? It could be a testimonial it can turn out to be.
Hank Hoffmeier:Or somebody's personal pain point that you never thought of. You can get so much data and have so many great conversations just from a reply to an email.
Scott Cohen:Or you'll find out just how many people, you know, want to shove your product up your butt or say f you. Right? I mean, there's an f you quotient there that you can keep track of with replies.
Hank Hoffmeier:And then you bring that up with your product manager.
Garin Hobbs:Unless, of course, your product is specifically designed to be shoved up somebody's butt. In which case, good on you.
Scott Cohen:That would be a hell of an email campaign to run. And on that note, I think we're at a perfect place to stop before we go down that rabbit hole. Hank, where can people find out more about you, your podcast, and Kickbox?
Hank Hoffmeier:I have some of the best SEO for my name, Hank Hoffmeyer. Just search for Hank Hoffmeyer. Take up, like, the first 3, 4, or 5 pages. All my socials are there. Find me, connect with me.
Hank Hoffmeier:One thing I do ask is if you reach out on LinkedIn, personalize that message because I do not accept any type of blind invites. And if you do send me a blind invite or even just a little note, I may ask to have a quick call with you because I like to know each and every person in my network. I may not have the largest network, but I try to know almost everybody in my network, just that caveat. And I work for Kickbox. If you need to validate email addresses, whether it's through our API because you're doing a 1000, 2000, 20,000,000 a day, or if you simply wanna check one email address or upload a list of a 100, we got you covered.
Hank Hoffmeier:I'm gonna make this up on the fly. I'm gonna give away 5,000 free credits. Use the keyword inbox army 24. I'll go create that because it's not existing right now. Just made an executive decision.
Hank Hoffmeier:So if you need that, go ahead. I'm always up for talking about email marketing, social media, deliverability, and puppies or cat kittens, whatever you want.
Scott Cohen:Puppies or kittens. I might take you up on
Hank Hoffmeier:that. Sure.
Scott Cohen:Pupp puppies. Puppies. I'm a I'm a dog guy. I I will say that. Alright.
Scott Cohen:Thanks so much for joining us, Hank, and thanks to you, our listeners and watchers, for tuning in. If you'd like to learn more about Inbox Army, check us out at inbox army.com. Till next time, be safe and be well.
Garin Hobbs:Cheers, all.
Hank Hoffmeier:Bye.