In this episode, we talk to Val Geisler, the CEO of Fix My Churn. She's on a mission to increase conversions, and decrease churn. She drops a bunch of email and marketing knowledge that will help you now.
Val runs Fix My Churn, and they work with brands to... fix churn. And the main channel she uses for onboarding and customer communication is email. Lots of other great channels, but that's the main one.
Don't pit acquisition and retention. They're friends. Marketers need to learn to split their focus, and adjust it at different times throughout the year. And if you don't know how to approach your retention, ask yourself what you'd do if you could never acquire another customer again. I love that question.
I also appreciate the dinner party approach to building welcome and onboarding email sequences. Val calls it the dinner party strategy, and you can get her full guide for free.
If you don't follow Val on Twitter, you're missing out. Connect with her.
Roger: Today, I'm excited because I'm finally getting the interview Val Geisler. She's the CEO of Fix My Churn and she works with e-commerce brands to increase conversion, reduce churn. And she's a boss on Twitter; always sharing something valuable. Val, thanks so much for being here today.
Val: I'm so stoked to be here. And thanks for having me.
Roger: Yeah. Tell us about Fix my Churn. Tell us what you're doing there.
Val: Yeah. So, we are obsessed with churn reduction. So, the focus for us is email. Email is the main point of communication between you and your customers. Unless they're choosing to come on to your website, there's no real way to talk to them. I mean, you can do some retargeting ads and things like that, but there's no direct way to make sure that you're reaching people unless you have an email list.
And so, email is how we bring new customers in. It's how we onboard new customers. So, whether the like post-purchase flows, abandoned cart series; things like that, and then emails how we keep customers around.
So, I work with a lot of subscription brands. We work on their email campaigns, their SMS; kind of email is the center of it. And then there's this whole ecosystem that affects churn. So, that is are you linking to their dashboard? Well, what is the dashboard look like? Are you linking to a FAQ page? What does that look like?
So, we kind of start with email and then we look at what are you sending people to from email and what also works in conjunction with email (like SMS) to make this cohesive messaging that helps people feel seen and heard. Because ultimately, that's just what people want, is to feel like they matter and they understand and that they are understood.
So, that's what we do. And it centers around email. We work with DTC and source brands. And we tend to work with brands that are subscription-based, though we do work with those who aren't on occasion. And sometimes people who want to do a subscription.
I've worked with T-shirt brands that want to do like a T-shirt-a-month club. So, initially working off of kind of one-off sales of whatever T-shirt the person decides to buy at that time, to shifting more to like a membership model. So, a membership subscription, that kind of thing.
Roger: From your experience, what does it take to get a brand from one-off purchases to becoming a subscription brand? What are some of the steps you take to get there?
Val: Yeah. Well, literally just launching it; like your customers want it. And that's the thing. So, the T-shirt brand, they launched their subscription on a Friday and then by Monday, they'd like 1300 subscribers to get a T-shirt every month.
That is not something that you need in your life. You don't need 12 T-shirts a year, but it's something that they want, because they feel really seen and heard by that brand. And it's something that is exciting to them. It's new.
And so now, like, okay, yeah, they think that they want this. And so then three months down the line, four months, five -- now, they're starting to have this pile up of shirts that maybe they are not wearing, depending on what else they have in their wardrobe.
So, how do you keep them around? That's kind of the bigger question. I think it's less about like how do we launch the subscription? Because really, it's honestly like a logistics thing. How are you going to either bundle products or do, on your logistics side, on your shipping and all of that, are you prepared to do subscription?
If the answer is yes, then launch it, but launch it smartly. Because it's less about how do we start a subscription and more about how do we keep a subscription and not have it be like a failed experiment?
Roger: It's not about how do we start it, but how do we keep it? that is some good advice.
Val: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that that's like, you know, we see all the time and I'm getting these messages, especially right now, being like Fall, heading into Black Friday. Everyone's saying like, “Oh, well, you know, I know this is super important (onboarding, welcome sequences). All of this like is super important; I know. And I'm going to go focus on acquisition right now.”
And I'm not saying acquisition isn't important, but what are you going to do when you are acquiring all these new customers and spending money to get these new customers in the door and then they have the same kind of subpar experience that the customers you're already seeing leaving are having? They're going to have that same churn experience as well.
So, I think that acquisition and retention need to be friends and like exist together. So, you're not taking your eye off of retention to focus solely on acquisition, but thinking about retention while doing acquisition. So, maybe it's like a 70/30 thing, right? Like you're saying, “Okay, I'm going to do a 70 percent acquisition, but I'm also going to work a little bit on retention. And then maybe when acquisition slows down; like everyone's talking about holiday and how all the huge brands are going to be buying up all the odds. And so, acquisition is going to get more expensive and all of that. Okay, so then we won't focus as much on acquisition and we'll pay more attention to retention. We'll still obviously have an acquisition channel.”
But those things can flip flop, depending on the time of year and what whatever cycle you're in. But I think that they both need focus.
And I kind of think like, “What if you never acquired another customer? How would you continue to run your business?” And that's the question that I ask all of our clients is, “What would we do to keep customers around long-term that if we never got a new customer in the door?”
And it's an interesting puzzle. Like it's an interesting question to ask yourself, because some brands think like, “Well, we don't have a subscription model. I don't know how I do that.”
I was talking with some people who sell sheets. So, sheets; you don't need a new pair of sheets every month, but maybe you do every quarter or maybe you do twice a year; that's still a subscription. And then how do you keep people happy with that?
I get a box; like it's a subscription box with lots of different products from different brands in it. And it's quarterly. And I had that subscription for two years before. And I was using it as like gathering things to give as gifts to other people. So, I kind of had like a good backlog of gifts.
But I also wasn't actively gifting those things. So, I had that company written me emails about ways I could gift those things or like, you know, every day has some kind of -- it's like National Love Your Dog Day and National Left Handers Day. And there's like a holiday for every day of the year. Maybe talking about some of those things and like sharing some opportunities that remind me to gift the things that are sitting in a giant box in my basement that I've collected over the last two years from them. Maybe if that had happened, I wouldn't have canceled my subscription because I wouldn't have had this big backlog of gifts.
And maybe their audience isn't buying to gift, maybe their audience is buying to stock their own home, but they don't know that unless they talk to their customers. So, that’s a lot.
Roger: And interestingly, you just mentioned that because that's a use case that maybe they didn't think about. And I've heard you say this before, that sometimes, products are launched because of some need the founder had or some need that he heard of, but there's a whole bunch of other use cases that customers have that you may not know about.
And in this case, it's the simple kind of like regifting or kind of taking what's in a subscription box and then using it as sort of like a backlog of gifts that you can use for special through the year. Just know the different use cases that people have.
Val: Yes. And that comes down to talking to your customers and understanding what they're doing. And I could be the only customer they have that has that use case. It's probably unlikely, though, because they have this nice curated box of beautiful things that are giftable items; throw pillows and like salad tongs and candles and earrings. Like I don't need all those things in my home. So, there is a good use case for even if I'm not going to gift the entire box and keep a few things for myself.
So, it's like you don't know those things until you talk to your customers. And I can't tell you how many times we've done customer interviews and end up with an insight into, “Okay. Well, here's a…” -- We call them jobs. So, we use a framework called Jobs-to-Be-Done. And I can talk more about that.
So, here's a job that a customer has for your brand. And every single time, our clients are saying, like, “Oh, wow, I never really thought about that.” So, that's where segmenting a super powerful because you get to realize that this is a pretty solid job that your brand has that a decent amount of your customers are coming to your brand for this reason.
And if you can find out why they're coming to you and ask them either on your site, if you want to build that in. Sometimes, we do it in email, with clicking on a link. And then that segments them and then they get emails that are specific to their use case and they feel, again, seen and heard. Like that helps them feel like, “Okay, I am in the right place and these people get why I'm here” and they feel like they matter. Especially if you interview them and ask them their use case and then send them targeted emails based on that.
Roger: Absolutely. I totally agree. And I had this question here to ask you, but it is about the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework that you use because you talk about a lot of it. And I love it. I love to hear more about sort of why you think it's valuable.
Val: Yeah. So, Jobs is pretty widely used in the SaaS world, and that's where I learned the most about it. And I had the great pleasure of working with the one of the creators of jobs and observing him doing interviews. And it was fascinating.
So, the idea is that there is a job that your customer is “hiring” your brand to do. And it is typically not the job that we are marketing. So, we might say, “Oh, let's take like Bombas Socks, because everyone's always kind of pointing into Bombas.
So, let's say, like Bombas is saying that they have the softest socks that you'll ever wear, but there could be other Jobs besides just having soft socks; maybe socks that don't move when you're running; that don't slide down in your shoe, maybe socks -- and I don't know, but like some people are really annoyed by the seam inside of the socks on the toes; maybe socks that are seamless on the toes, maybe like socks that you don't think about your socks all day, you know?
Like there are certainly brands, I've worn them where I'm like pulling them up all the time, wiggling my toes around, trying to get comfortable, my feet are sweaty; all those things.
So, unless they do those interviews and know all those different use cases and those different jobs that people are hiring Bombas to do, then they can't speak to that. And they're just going to continue to talk about how soft their socks are. But unless I know that they're going to stay in place while I'm doing a high intensity interval training session, I don't care how soft they are. I care that they're going to not make me think about my socks when I'm weightlifting or jumping as high as I can, you know?
So, I think it's really important to understand the words that your customers use to describe why they are choosing your brand and then repeat those words back to them.
I've said this on other podcasts before and it's something that I semi-joke about. But I am not a formally trained copywriter. So, I always like to say, “I'm not a copywriter. I'm a copy-paster” because I literally take transcripts from one-to-one interviews and long-form qualitative data surveys and copy and paste those words into email subject lines and body copy and calls to action.
And then my clients get to take all of that with them, long after our project is over, and they get to copy and paste it onto their marketing site and onto their sales pages and product descriptions.
So, it's incredibly valuable to do research, not just from an email standpoint, but just from like an overall brand standpoint.
Roger: And I love that you’ve done this, because when I went to check out your bio on LinkedIn, this is what you say, “Take positive metrics to your Monday all-hands meetings, see that bar graph show more green than red.”
And I love it because you got in my head. That's exactly sort of the things that I go through as a marketer. I got to show up and I got to show more green than red.
And it does feel like you've done it. Like you're kind of eating your own dog food, in a sense.
Val: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know, like there is sometimes that case of like shoemaker's kids, you know, the shoemaker’s kids that have no shoes. And I hear this from copyrighter all the time, like, I so badly need to rewrite my website or all of my friends who run Shopify development sites are like, I need to rebuild my website, but I'm busy rebuilding other people's websites.
So, I think that there is a lot of case for that, but I also know how important the research is and I do it constantly with my clients and then I try to weave some of that into our own business as well. I mean, that's where Fix my Churn came from. It was like, “What are people wondering about?”
And this was when I was doing consulting, just me. This was kind of the question that people would pose in conversation.
So, they would come to me for emails and then they would say, “But you know what? But what I really need to do is fix our churn problem. And so, I want to do that with you through all these other things.”
And I heard that over and over again; we need to fix our church. Like, I want to fix my church. Great. So, I bought the dotcom. But it's because I heard those words over and over again. And I heard them for a year; you don't have to spend a year doing customer research. When I do it with clients, we spend about a month doing it. And I recommend doing it at least twice a year. But you don't have to put a ton of time into it.
And these were in regular conversations I was having too. So, it was like just observing the words people are using.
Roger: Absolutely.
Val: Be curious about the people who integrate with your brand.
Roger: So fundamental. And I find it astonishing that more marketers don't do that.
Val: Yeah, it's like you wouldn't be a brand without your customers. So, why would you not want to know who they are and what they think and the problems that bother them? And you might be a food brand targeting a particular -- like maybe you're targeting, let's say, busy families. So, like a Hello Fresh or something like that where you're saying, “Okay, let's take this cooking problem off your plate.”
But it's not actually a cooking problem. It's a like, “I have to (well, pre-Covid) I have to like go pick up my kids from three different schools and then we have an after-school activity and then we get home and “Oh, also tonight, I need to make sure they take showers and baths and now I have like 25 minutes to make dinner and they forgot to defrost something.”
And so, if you can tell that story versus just like, “Take the dinner prep off your hands”, it's just so much more personal. And people can see themselves in that car driving around, realizing they forgot to defrost some chicken. So, your customers have had similar experiences to each other. And when you can tell those stories through email and on your marketing site and then your blog posts and on your YouTube and wherever else you are, then it's incredibly powerful.
Roger: Totally.
Val: And a lot of brands have it already. Sorry, I was just going to say, like everyone talks about user-generated content all the time. For like Instagram, let's use UGC and in our retargeting ads and all of that; that's all your voice of customer research right there.
Like they're telling the stories. They're telling you the exact words they need to hear. And let's use those in emails. Let's use them in our retention campaigns and in your post-purchase flows; like what are people thinking about right after they purchase, before your product is delivered?
So, I think like we get wrapped up in use cases for like, “Oh, well, UGC is for these things.” Well, it's for a lot of things, you know? Sorry I interrupted you.
Roger: No, not at all. I love this. I made a note of that. I was going to say what I love about this advice here is that it doesn't really matter whether you're in SaaS or e-commerce, whether you're in B2B or B2C; it doesn't matter. Like this is true across the board. This is fundamental marketing. And I love that.
Val: Yeah.
Roger: You mentioned earlier that you work in SaaS and e-commerce. What are some things that you've seen? Some people pit them against each other. What are some things that transcend the SaaS/e-commerce fields that kind of like what else applies to both that you've seen?
Val: Yeah, it's super interesting to have a foot in both places because there's so much that e-commerce can learn from SaaS and vice versa. I see more and more SaaS companies coming to us for, they call them abandoned cart flows. And it's really fun because that's something I've wanted for a long time, is to see more SaaS companies doing essentially an abandoned cart flow, which e-commerce does all the time.
One thing SaaS does really well, in a lot of cases, is storytelling. Because they don't have 50 different products and their product line and beautiful images and packaging that they worked hard on and photo shoots of their clothes and all those things; like the things that we have an e-commerce. SaaS has like the dashboard and whatever is on the app. So, that's limited of what you can show on a visual.
So, SaaS tends to have to do more storytelling and like walking people through the app. And here's what you need to know; here's how you can be successful here. And that's something e-commerce can do more of.
E-commerce is like, “Look at our beautiful packaging, look at these pictures and then buy it.” But then there's a piece missing of like, “How do I use this?” Like onboarding is a norm in the world of SaaS. How do we onboard new customers onto this platform?
But it's not really a norm in the world of e-commerce where like, “How do we teach these new customers about our brand, about what they just purchased before it ever arrives at their house?” And then like also those first two weeks that they've had the product; maybe within the return period or something like that. There's like a period of time where they're kind of testing your product.
In the same way that if you use a product, you have a free trial that you're testing the product on. And your customers have that that ability to say like this works or it doesn't.
And so, it's our job as brands to say, “Here's how you can use this. Here are some other people using it. Here are some ideas for recipes, if you're a food company, outfit – like option; how to dress it up, how to dress it down, of you sell clothes. Something from makeup that's like a multi stick; all the different ways you can use it, you know, a day night look.
All those things; like if you think about how people use your brand, then figure that out and tell that story in the same way that a SaaS company is telling the story of how people are using their product.
Roger: I agree. And so, that's SaaS, that's e-commerce. Now, last year, you did something that doesn't relate to either, I think, or maybe it does. You checked out every single presidential candidate's email flow. You signed up for every single one.
Val: I did. It was like 25 candidates at the time.
Roger: Wow, who do you think the best user standard that you remember?
Val: It was interesting. So, I was doing that project and then Covid happened and my kids were home full-time with me and I had to abandon that, because it was a pretty intense, like daily thing.
But across the board, there were all kinds of different results. And big campaigns would hit spam and little campaigns wouldn’t and then it would flip.
So, like in my inbox and of course, there's also the like every inbox has a different reputation and every brand has a different reputation and that sender. So, like I was using a brand-new Gmail address, like Kamala Harris’ emails landed in my spam a bunch. She also sent more frequently than pretty much anyone else, except for Bernie.
And then like the little guys, they were doing more storytelling. They were incorporating a blend of asking for money, which is the number one job of political campaigns. They were doing that, but they were also telling stories.
And actually, I remember a campaign from Bloomberg, which, of course, everyone says, “Well, like, he doesn't have to ask for money. So, maybe he had more room to do storytelling”, but he had a bunch of storytelling emails. So, there is that case to say, like, “Well, he doesn't need to do as much asking”.
So, you might be thinking about the SaaS world like a VC-backed company might not need to do as much selling right up front as like getting people on free trials or a freemium kind of product.
So, there are that kind of like don't need to do it; like “don't need to do as much selling” happens in different industries.
But what I thought was really interesting in the political campaigns was that blend of how often are we asking for money and then how often are we making it about the reader and like talking to us about how we're going to use the money that we're donating. And like what we're doing, don't even talk about the money. Don't even say like, “Hey, here's how we're going to use the money you are donating.” But to say, “Here's what we're doing out in the community right now” and not “What our plans are, long term”, but “What we're doing right now.”
Tell the story of what's happening with you and your customers. So, donations; those are customers for political campaigns. Tell the story of what's happening and then ask.
And lots of the campaigns did that really well. Lots of them did not. It was a lot of campaigns at the time. And like in the course of working on that spreadsheet, I started it and over Thanksgiving and then it went until March and over the course of that time, lots of them dropped out. That was kind of like a big time for people to drop out of the race. And their emails were saying, like, “Hey, we're not reaching our fundraising goal; the ones who are dropping out.”
So, what was interesting, though, was people who had drop out, there was a set of people who would never email again. Once they were out of the race, we're done with this email list.
There's a whole other set of people who continued to email their list to either choose someone to support or to continue to push on their own issues. You still have a job, even if you're not running for president anymore, you still have a job and you now have this group of supporters and you can pivot. So, it was interesting to see like this split of people who never use the list again and then people who continue to reach out.
And that's an important piece to and the learning for other brands is continuing to reach out to people after they have bought from you. So, this happens a lot in SaaS. People convert to a paid account and then you never hear from that brand again. Never another email except for your receipt every month that you are paying. And then they like twice a year, when they launch a whole bunch of new features, and email you about it.
And then even on the e-commerce side, like, okay, cool, you made a purchase. Now you're just on our regular email list and you're getting our promos and that's it.
I think that that's doing your customers a disservice. I think that it's interesting to think about how do we continue to talk to people after they have paid us, after our, “job” has been done, like after we've done what we set out to do; whether it's convert them to a paid account or get them to buy our product or donate to our campaign, how do we keep talking to them and like what kind of content makes sense there?
Roger: I find it concerning, if a brand has nothing to say, like if I'm not buying and you have nothing to tell me or say to me, I find that very concerning. And it's not good practice. There's such an opportunity.
Val: Yeah. Well, and there's also that. Like we have to think about how email is received. Like think about your own email experience when you are planning your campaigns. You know, in real life, remember when we used to see people and you'd go somewhere and someone would be like, “Oh, hey, Roger, what's up?” and you're like, “I don't know who this person is” and they're like, “Oh, yeah, hey, you know, we met at Jessica's party six months ago. It's good to see you again.” You're like, “Right, right. Okay, cool. Now, I have a sense of I kind of remember meeting you.”
That happens in email, too. If you don't email people on your list for six months and show up in their inbox like, “Hey, what's up? Come by our thing” or “Here's our Black Friday campaign. We haven't talked to you all year.” You know, they're like, “How do I get on this email list? Who even is this brand? What am I doing here?”
And unlike in-person, you can kind of fumble around and figure that out, in an inbox, they're going to delete the email, at best, and mark you as spam at worst.
So, you have to continue that conversation. If that person who saw you six months later was like, “Oh, hey, what's up, Roger? Yeah, good to see you again. Actually, I need a job” You're like, “Oh, cool, I don't remember you at all, and here you are asking me for a job.” That's what we're doing when we don't email customers for an extended period of time. And even like two weeks can feel like six months in the world of email.
Ever since Covid, people are getting more emails than ever before because we're all doing e-commerce, we're all shopping online, we're all ordering groceries and food online. So, we're getting a ton more emails than we ever did. So, you have to make sure that in the course of a two-week period, have you talked to your customers and been in that mix of hundreds of emails they've received?
Because by the time you get around to talking to them, they could completely forget ever signing up for your list, ever having purchased from you, ever acknowledging your brand exists.
Roger: I couldn't agree more.
Val: It starts to look like you bought the list, you know, like I've definitely been in that situation. I was in that situation this morning; “How do I get on this list? I don’t remember this.”
And sometimes, brands pivot. They'll change their brand name and then they don't, like, announce that. They just kind of change it and hope everyone's okay with it. But, yeah, it just is like, I don't know, it feels awkward.
And the inbox is kind of the most personal way we can communicate digitally. And so, we have to think about it just like an in-person experience.
Roger: And I love that you make the analogy to real life because it sort of makes the point. Like if I haven't seen you in a year and you come in like, “Hey, how's it going? I need a job”
That's what we're doing on email. That's what it feels like to be the customer. That analogy, I think, helps empathize.
Val: Yeah. And it's also like that person you haven't seen in the year that you were introduced to in passing at a party; like I barely remember meeting you. And so, this is what happens when people sign up for our email list and they don't hear from us for weeks at a time. And it's the exact same experience. I love analogies because it does that it helps you realize, like, “Oh, that's what I'm doing to my customers.”
And I've talked a lot about the dinner party strategy in various different places. And if anybody's interested in -- So, dinner party strategy is kind of a very similar analogy about like how we do welcome people into our world; whether it's SaaS or ecommerce.
And it's that idea of like you don't greet people for a dinner party with a plate of steak at the door and like hand them a fork and knife and say, “Go ahead and eat” as they're like standing on your doorstep. But that's what we're doing as brands in email.
So anyways, I have a downloadable guide for the dinner party strategy, and I've definitely talked at length about it in other places. And I'm always happy to chat about that.
Roger: I'm going to link it in the show notes and on our website; I'm going to link it for anybody who's listening.
Val: Yeah, I was just going to say, if anyone's listening right now and is sitting in front of a computer and wants to grab it, it's at fixmychurn.com/tdps.
Roger: T-D-P-S; The Dinner Party Strategy.
Val: Yeah.
Roger: I love it. I want to honor our time together, but I did tweet that I was going to be interviewing you and if people had questions, they could drop them, that I would try to get them answered. So, maybe you could do a speed run here. Maybe you give me a --
Val: Speed rapid fire.
Roger: I'm going to throw you a softball to start. Rachel, she's asking; “Where do you get your T-shirts from?”
Val: She really means my email T-shirts. One I'm wearing currently is from Outdoor Voices. She probably means by email T-shirts though, and I collect those all over the place, email events and really good email sell some shirts some time. So, I'm always on the hunt for some good email shirts.
Roger: Awesome. Assad Assad asks; he's asking, “After you've moved from blasting to segmenting, what's the next logical step? Nurturing automation, if you like my email program is stagnant.”
Val: Yeah. So, I said on Twitter, I never blast people. Okay, so, yeah, maybe you were blasting and now you're segmenting. Great. Then you want to start looking at the life cycles. So, look at that customer journey; how are they moving through your brand and what kind of campaigns do you have in place to support those life cycles? So, life cycle would be like that post-purchase flow.
Reactivating a customer who hasn't purchased in a while, converting a regular customer into a subscriber; all of those things are based on the customer journey. So, I would start looking at those campaigns.
Because once you get those up and running, then they are automated and they just continue to support you, so that you can go back and put more focus into those one-off campaigns again, the “blast” and do your segmenting and all that. But those automations will keep running in the background and support the ongoing emails.
So, that's why we love focusing on those lifecycle campaigns because they get to support your business as a whole. What you get to go off and do other things.
Roger: Absolutely. Dana. She's asking, “What are some ways companies annoy their email lists and how can we avoid them?”
Val: Annoy their email list?
Roger: Yeah. So, what are some ways companies annoy their email lists and how to avoid them?
Val: Yeah, always asking for something. So, brands that do nothing but, “Hey, we're running a sale. Hey, come by this. Hey, this is back in stock.”
Like, we want those as consumers. We want to know when we can get something at a better price or when something's back in stock. But if that's the only message you have for us, that's about you, not about your customers.
So, do some storytelling, mix in some emails that tells success stories that talk about your brand. We're not (especially, probably most people listening to this) are not like Target or Wal-Mart or the giant brands of the world, Best Buy, you know?
We are smaller brands who have personalities behind the brand. And the difference that we can make, like, yeah, I can go on Amazon and buy something really quick, but if I can support a black-owned bookshop in my own hometown, then I'm going to order from them, even if shipping takes an extra week and a half or if I have to go down there and do in-store pickup. I'm going to do that if I feel connected to that brand.
So, use your company, not use it, but like talk about your company. Talk about the people behind it and why you started it and help them connect to you as a brand, so that they're not shopping on Amazon and doing all those other things.
Roger: Tiffany. She's asking, “How do you build a list from scratch when the market is saturated with some pretty amazing email newsletters already?”
Val: Yeah, it's a great question. It kind of just depends on your industry, but I think consistently producing really great content that your audience is looking for.
So, finding a niche subject and talking about it regularly. This is what I did. So, I was kind of a generalized marketer. I realized I loved email so much and decided to specialize in it. And then every week, for six months, I wrote a onboarding tear down on my blog.
So, I would sign up for email campaigns from SaaS companies and then write up a tear down of those onboarding emails during a free trial.
So, by doing that, by consistently publishing and having it be like it's the same format in every single one; I'm doing the same thing. It's just different brands across the board. So, there's different feedback.
But by doing that, I really establish myself as this expert in this area of email onboarding. And at the time specifically for SaaS. Because of that, I was able to build an email list of people who wanted those onboarding teardowns. They weren't going to go to my blog on their own without a trigger, which the trigger was me emailing them about it.
So, I think like pick an area that you can speak to and that you feel good about speaking to very consistently for an extended period of time and then keep publishing; keep talking to them.
Roger: Such good advice. Andrea Busoni; he's asking, “How often do you clean your list and how are you going to deal with new email services like, HEY, that block tracking, you know, open rate data?
Val: Alright, email marketers are not worried about Hey, mostly because, HEY, doesn't worry about us. So, there is such a small, like in our little bubbles in the tech world, that feels like everybody has a HEY email address. And not to say that they won't. I mean, everybody at one time had a Hotmail email address and like 12 people do now.
So, there's a shift, right? Like everybody shifted to Gmail. Nobody has AOL now, except for my grandma. So, like these things change over time. So, I'm not saying like, HEY, or something like it wouldn't come along and take the market share, but right now it doesn't. And so, we're just not worried about it. When it starts to take more market share, then we'll start caring about it.
We care a lot about big inboxes, like Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook; those are kind of the big ones. And Apple; Apple Mail. So, but there's like there's so many inboxes that we just can't worry about every single one.
And what was the other part of that question?
Roger: How often do you clean your list?
Val: Oh, yeah, as often as you need to. So, you know, I think, like if you're a product-based brand, probably at least twice a year. Look at, okay, they haven't opened our emails for six months. Are they just really not interested?
And then run a reactivation campaign before you clean your list. So, always email them to say like, “Hey, unless you click on this or do this thing, we're going to take you off our email list. We don't want to fill up your inbox with stuff you don't want.”
So, make sure that they have some kind of awareness of this happening. And then if they still aren't opening those emails, then you know they're not interested and you can just let it go.
So, I think at least twice a year, but you can always do it more regularly.
Roger: Amazing. The last one from John, “What's the one thing brands spend too much time doing that they should stop?”
Val: Hmm. Copying everybody else. So, we all are using the same like Klaviyo and Shopify templates and doing whatever is like handed to us; it's like kind of taking the easy route.
And I understand why. And I would challenge brands to dig a little bit more into why they're doing what they're doing. I had a Twitter thread about this last week, I think. You know, it's like we all are using a standard template of, “Here's our brand header logo. Here's the one-page or the one-image email.” And then we have our footer that has our social icons in it and all the stuff that like we see across the board. If you look at campaigns across the board, that's the kind of the standard.
But my question is, why? So, you need to ask yourself why more often of like, is this serving a purpose? Are the social icons, like are people clicking on those or is that click taking away from them clicking somewhere else in the email? Or if they click on the logo in the header, are they actually going to the homepage of the website or are they finding a png?
So, like why are we doing what we're doing? And then and like, how can we do it in a way that serves our customers? And you don't know that until you talk to them.
Roger: Absolutely. Val, it was amazing having you. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.
Val: I could talk to you all day. So, thank you for having me.
Roger: I think I went through, like maybe 20 percent of the questions that I had for you.
Val: I know. It's always like that. I this is like I can geek out about this stuff all day. If I could figure out a way to just get paid to talk to people all day about email, I would definitely do that.
Roger: I know you're a pretty amazing marketer and I love it. Not just email. You've got so much knowledge and wisdom. If people need help fixing their churn, where do they go?
Val: Mm hmm. They go to fixmychurn.com. You can reach out to us there. You can hit me up on Twitter @lovevalgeisler. Those are the two best places. So, there's an application form on the website. So, you can fill that out and we'll get back to you or you can send me a DM. Careful, because that's a black hole sometimes. But you can also email hello@fixmychurn.com. We'll send you a link to that application, just to make it easy.
Roger: Amazing. We're going to drop all of those ways of getting in touch with you in the show notes for today's episode.
Val: Awesome.
Roger: Thanks again, Val.
Thank you for joining. Thank you for listening. This is the DTC Growth Show by #paid.