#113: Scaling Business Using Email Marketing

Episode: 113 

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Ben Leonard, Founder Of Beast Gear, An eCommerce Consultant, Entrepreneur And A Speaker.

Subtitle: “Somebody’s Inbox Is A Personal And Private Place And They’re Not Going To Let You Just Get Access To It For Nothing.”

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episode-113-scaling-business-using-email-marketing-w-ben-leonard/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Ben Leonard, Founder Of Beast Gear, An eCommerce Consultant, Entrepreneur And A Speaker.

Ben is the classic millennial entrepreneur. He grew an international 7-figure brand and achieved the holy grail exit after 3 years. In this episode, he talks about email marketing; the do’s, don’ts and everything in between.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 5:03 : Ben’s Background
• 8:54 : Sonic the Hedgehog In Scaling The Business
• 11:50 : Translating Listings
• 14:37 : Tips On How To Drive Off Amazon Sales
• 19:29 : The Role Of Email Marketing In 2021
• 25:47 : Two Main Types Of Email You Can Send
• 30:18 : Collecting Email Address From Prospective Customers
• 34:04 : How Much Should You Pay For An Email Address?
• 37:57 : How To Build A Big Email List For Non Amazon Sellers
• 39:28 : Q&A With Ben
• 45:29 : Adding Value To Your Product

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjleonard/
• https://www.benleonard.pro/
• https://www.ecombrokers.co.uk/
• Klaviyo 
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
• paper.li
• MailChimp

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normanfarrar.com

Norman  0:02  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands.

Norman  0:19  

Okay, today we have a first time guest from Beast Gear, let’s try that again. Today, we have our first time guest from Beast Gear, Ben Leonard and we’re going to be talking about a variety of different things. But one of the things that’s really cool is that we always like talking to people that have exited successfully. So he’s gonna talk about how he’s done it, and how he hit the business holy grail, as well as email marketing and a variety of other topics. So before we get going, where are you Kels?

Kelsey 0:55  

Hello.

Norman  0:56  

Hey, like I said, just before we get on, right? The amber alert happened and it jolted me and my shoulder went out.

Kelsey 1:07  

Yeah, for those that don’t know, when there’s like an amber alert. It’s like a siren that goes off on your phone and it’s so sudden that, yeah, it’s sudden.

Norman  1:17  

Yeah. How do you throw your shoulder out?

Kelsey 1:19  

I don’t know. That is impressive, though.

Norman  1:21  

You think so? Yeah. Man, man. So what are we doing, Kels?

Kelsey 1:27  

Alright, so you guys know what to do, smash those like buttons. Follow us on YouTube. That’s where all of the good stuff is, the highlights, the full episodes. If you ever miss an episode, don’t know where to go, you just head over there. Welcome, everyone. We got a good group here already. We got Yarrow, Radd, Mero, Manny, Jalapeno bagel? I like that. But yeah, we have a price today too. So stick around for that. That’s a good one. We also have some giveaways from the eCom brokers that Ben is giving us. So yeah, we really appreciate that. So stick around for that and yeah, we have our weekly Clubhouse on Mondays. Actually, next week. We have a club and actually next week, we don’t have a Clubhouse because we are changing the schedule just for one day for March 15th. We have a Lunch with Norm at two o’clock. 

Norman 2:24

Why Kelsey? 

Kelsey 2:25

Because it’s my birthday. No, but we have a big gasp, we have Rand Fishkin from Moz coming on, and yeah, we had to change up the schedule a little bit. But, that’s going to be a great episode.

Norman  2:41  

If you don’t know Moz, check it out. So he’s the CEO, Founder of Moz and he’s going to be talking about some really cool SEO, just what’s happening, what to look out for in 2021.

Kelsey 2:54  

So let us know what you think of email marketing in 2021 in the comment section. Are you using it? Do you feel comfortable with it? We’re also gonna be talking about scaling too. So it’s gonna be a good episode.

Norman  3:08  

All right, now.

Norman  3:11  

There we go. We gotta get used to this mirrored image. All right. So if you have any questions, throw them over into the comments section. We’re gonna do our best to get to them. If you don’t, we’ll try to answer them in the group. All right. Hey, Tony. How’s it going, Simon? Good to see you again. Okay, so sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. Enjoy the show, and welcome. Where are you Ben?

Ben 3:37  

Hey, here I am. Thanks for having me.

Norman  3:39  

Yeah, no problem. I got to tell you. I’m sitting here and I’m trying to pick up my bloody coffee, my can coke and my shoulder is popped, I get it like it’s just so if you see me doing this, it’s not because I’m really excited. I am excited. I’m kind of just that, you get that shock going through your arm.

Ben 4:00  

What is an amber alert?

Norman  4:02  

Oh, there’s an alert when there might be a child missing. Somebody might have taken a child or so it comes up on your phone. But, it just doesn’t kind of go start up and slowly, it just goes bang.

Ben 4:16  

Is that a national thing?

Norman  4:20  

It’s a national thing. Yeah, I mean, it’s well worth it. But you’re driving in your car, and that happens or like what happened today. I was just doing something and all of a sudden, like I had this jolt, and now my arm’s out and complete, like, how does your arm go out listening to an amber alert? But anyway, just in case you see me grimacing or, just having this little shock, that’s the reason why and it just happened just before we came on today. So that’s one of the reasons I was a little bit late here. But hey, why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about yourself and what you’re going to be talking about?

Ben 5:03  

Sure. Well, thanks for having me. My name is Ben Leonard, and I’m over in Scotland in the UK. I built and scaled and then sold an eCommerce brand. I sold it in late 2019 and I can tell you quite a lot about it because a lot of its public domain because the buyer uses me and that brand and a lot of their PR, so it’s all public, so that was a brand of fitness equipment called Beast Gear. I actually had no background in eCommerce. I’m an ecologist by trade, I’m a fully qualified whale and dolphin geek and although I’m no longer a professional whale and dolphin geek, I’m still a whale and dolphin geek. In late 2015, early 2016, I got quite ill with a heart problem. Because the third time I had it, and I had to stop all my fitness hobbies like CrossFit, boxing, lifting heavy weights, running, and take a lot of drugs for about nine months and I needed something to do that will keep me in touch with those hobbies, although I couldn’t actually do them and so I had this idea to start a brand of fitness equipment and that was called Beast Gear, it turns out, I was actually pretty good at it. I’m pretty good at eCommerce. I scaled it up to mid seven figures I sold in late 2019 and that was actually thrust to second European acquisition and now I guess I’m doing three things. I’m building new brands, partly because I enjoy it. I want to build brands with a view to selling them again. Building new brands also because I need to still have skin in the game and still be kind of in the trenches in eCommerce because it’s such a fast moving industry and I need to have an understanding of what’s going on. If I’m going to consult with my clients, because I do consulting for business owners and if I’m going to help people exit their business, because I have started an eCommerce brokerage, or like to think of it as a brokerage plus really called eCom Brokers, which was started on the back end of selling my business and going through that process. So that’s me, that’s what I do and an important part of that brand was the off Amazon website and the email marketing that I did for that and we’re going to talk a little bit about that today.

Norman  7:18  

Just on email marketing, so I have a lead generation company, that we create lists, we use it ourselves just to target an email, they do email marketing, as well as Facebook ads and I’ve tried to market that list company to many Amazon sellers I thought could fit. I didn’t have a taker, because nobody knew all these names, knew nothing about how to market a list with either Facebook or through email marketing, and I was astonished and I’m not talking about one or two people, probably some very well known brands out there that were just not using email lists at all in their marketing. So when I saw what you were doing, and some of the topics you wanted to cover, that’s so important is that email marketing, I know off Amazon and people I mean, people are not doing it and there’s a lot of people saying it’s useless. Well, it’s not useless, you can get some great sales from it. So I would like to go down that but right now, one of the things I wanted to talk about because you were able to scale your brand really quickly, what were some of your main strategies and another thing here, so sorry about this is my bloody arm. What about Okay, this might sound a little crazy, but what did Sonic the Hedgehog have to do with it?

Ben 8:54  

Yeah, okay, so Sonic the Hedgehog. It depends who’s listening, right? Some people might remember the Sega Mega Drive right from the early 90s. But whatever you’ve hopefully heard of Sonic the Hedgehog, right? The little hedgehog, dude in the video games, he jumps through hoops or rings to score more points, right and one of the strategies that really paid off for me and scaling my business was jumping through hoops. So quite often in business, you will see a barrier on the road up ahead of you and your initial reaction is Oh No, like another thing, right another fire to fight, another problem to solve, another hoop to jump through. But if you take a step back and think about and take a deep breath, you’ll often realize that actually the reward for jumping through that hoop is worth it and many times your competitors cannot be bothered to jump through the hoop. So they turn around in the path and go back in the other direction. So, for instance, with my business I remember when I first had to jump through all the hoops, so I started selling in the UK, on Amazon and on my own website and I remember when I first had to jump through all the hoops to get VAT registered in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic, and later Austria, in order to sell in continental Europe and it was painful. I mean, the amount of bureaucracy, particularly in Spain, getting stuff translated by only selected translators who were registered with the correct authorities in Spain, and then having that translation notarized by a notary in the UK, right? Whatever that is really and then special stamps apply and all this stuff, which takes a lot of time and the process was so painful at one point, I thought they were going to come around and scan my retinas, that’s how much information they wanted. But after I jumped through all the hoops, my sales practically doubled and I emerged ahead of all the competition and there’s many things like that, right? Not necessarily VAT, but other issues that you come upon, where it would be very easy to just say, I can’t be bothered. But when you jump through the hoop, like Sonic the Hedgehog, the reward can be fantastic. So that’s what Sonic the Hedgehog had to do with scaling the business. 

Norman  11:20  

Okay, and that’s so true. I like to take a look at that, as barriers to entry. If you can create those, and the other people aren’t going to do it, then that’s awesome. When you were creating all these, because you had to register within all those countries, all the translations. I mean, how did you go about doing that? I know, like you said, in Spain, but did you just outsource to this single translation company? What did you do?

Ben 11:50  

So translating, like the listings or for like, actually translating the list? So a variety of things, I had some when I very first started back in 2016. I translated my listings, this was before. So to store my stock in Europe, I had to register for VAT across Europe, which was the big headache that I’d arranged. But I could still sell in Europe, but customers had to have it shipped from the UK. So I had to translate my listing straight off the bat and I get the classic thing that people did when they were learning about this back in 2016, I went on Fiverr and I found some pretty good people on there and eventually, as you do, you take them off of Fiverr and they become your team translator, and you do with them through Gmail and then, so I found several good people that way. Germans, Italians, and then one of them actually was fantastic and she started her own agency and she was able to get quite a lot of translations for me and then because of the UK, we’ve left the EU now, but we’re still part of Europe, as it were. With Europe being small, and me having contacts across Europe, just personal contacts. It’s possible once you’ve had your translations done that way to just run them past some native speakers of those languages and say, Hey, does this make sense A. as a translation, but B. from the point of view of a consumer, it’s no use just having like an academic translation done. Can you hear a two year old crying in the background?

Norman  13:21  

I can.

Ben 13:21  

Yes, that’s my two year old. I’m sure my wife’s doing.

Norman  13:25  

Doing what two year olds are supposed to do?

Ben 13:28  

Yeah. So then have your translations run past some actual other native speakers other than your translators, to check that it makes sense from the point of view of a consumer. Now he’s just having a translation academically translated, it needs to make sense as a good listing in itself, if you see what I mean.

Norman  13:50  

I made the mistake with one of my brands. So I was registering it in Japan. So I went out and I bought the name soap club. So okay. I thought that was good. I thought I got Wow, I got the name. I didn’t think I would. Well, the translation I use for soap meant brothel. I had no idea. So I guess I got a lot of external traffic just because of that.

Ben 14:21  

Yeah, maybe attracting the wrong sort of traffic.

Norman  14:23  

Yeah, maybe. But anyways, so let’s talk about off Amazon and external traffic. So why and how did you drive off Amazon sales?

Ben 14:37  

So the why I originally started, because I was trying to build for two reasons actually. Reason number one is I was trying to build a legitimate brand, right a group of products to solve a problem or a group of related problems for a particular group of people in my case fans of fitness and in particular, CrossFit, boxing and heavy weight lifting like powerlifting So it kind of three sub niches within that, rather than just building a group of creating a bunch of stuff to sell on Amazon, as a lot of people did in the early days, and to have that legitimate brand, I needed to have off Amazon assets like a website, like an Instagram and other social media accounts. The second reason was back with Brand Registry 1.0, we needed to simply have a website to register a Brand Registry. So that was one of the first things that I did in my first website was a terrible WordPress site, where you couldn’t even buy my stuff, you just clicked a button and landed on my Amazon listing and then later, I created a pretty good Shopify site and then the How was having a good developer developer that site and then, I treated that site as part of the overall picture. People say, should I do Amazon or should I have an off Amazon website? The answer is do both right. Amazon is where the eyeballs are, everybody’s going to Amazon. Not everybody is necessarily placing their final order on Amazon. Or if they are, they’re often reassured by seeing an off Amazon website, Oh, this looks legit. They’ve got their own website, there’s a YouTube channel, there’s their Instagram, there’s the Facebook page. So, that was very important. I guess I use Amazon as a way to acquire customers and then on the back end, drive them back to my site where they’re my customer, I can remarket to them. Jeff isn’t taking 15%. That’s not to say I don’t want my customers to go back and buy from you on Amazon, I know full well that a significant proportion of them will just because it’s easy, they’ve got a prime account, they’re comfortable, they like doing it, that’s absolutely fine. But if I can get them onto my website and get their email address, whether from a lead magnet or placing another order with me, because they’ve received the discount that was in the insert, then wonderful and I can now remarket it to them and use for instance, email marketing to drive sales, both on the website and on Amazon.

Norman  16:59  

Very good. One of the things I forgot to do right at the beginning, you’re giving away some pretty cool stuff today, we are and you want to just describe a little bit about what we’re going to do at the end of the podcast?

Ben 17:15  

Sure. I’m going to give away or I’m going to create for the winner, an automated email flow for your off Amazon store. So you’re going to need to have or be willing to get Klaviyo which is, in my opinion, the greatest invention. 

Norman  17:33  

Isn’t that great? That app is great, isn’t it?

Ben 17:36  

Oh, yeah, it’s the best invention since the wheel. Yeah, it’s absolutely phenomenal. So I use email to drive up to, around 33% average website revenue comes from email. So for all those people that say email is dead, or email is second to chatbots, they are simply wrong and an often higher percentage during particular peak times and much of that revenue like 20% is automated. Right? Set and forget. So yeah, Klaviyo right. I’m going to build an automated email flow for the winner for their off Amazon site and they need to have or be willing to get to Klaviyo which rocks.

Norman  18:19  

Awesome and what about, possibly guys that have garden gnomes? Would you do an automated email flow for them? No, no, no, just joking.

Ben 18:36  

But seriously, you can build a brand around any niche right and there are enough people out there that love garden gnomes, they will get super duper excited about receiving your emails about garden gnomes. 

Norman 18:45

Well, then we’ll have to talk.

Ben 18:47

Whoever has a garden gnome brand and they win then we’re going to I’m going to do some really good gnome emails.

Norman  18:53  

Oh so the best way to get a hold of or enter the account guys, I’m off today because of this bloody shoulder. So just before we came on, I just popped it and a little bit of pain here. Anyways, put in #I love Ben and to be entered in and at the end of the podcast, we can spin the Wheel of Kelsey and all is good. Okay, let’s talk about the role of email marketing in 2021.

Ben 19:29  

Sure. So I just mentioned a few minutes ago, I use email to drive a lot of revenue, in my opinion it is the most profitable and opportunity rich channel for eCommerce that’s even after we talk about SMS and chatbots, etc, etc. You can use email for an awful lot of stuff. So let’s just for a second, make some assumptions. You are building a legitimate brand, you’re not just selling stuff and you have an off Amazon website, okay? Because we all know that there are certain restrictions with what you can and can’t do with Amazon’s email system. That’s kind of a different kettle of fish. But certainly email marketing to your own list, which you’ve assimilated through your own site is an important part of the whole Amazon equation, if you like. So you can use email for a lot of stuff, you can use it straight off the bat, you need to be sending helpful, useful, engaging, free, compelling content to your customers and potential customers to help them know like and trust you and to to nurture them and to provide value and when you do that,

Norman  20:44  

You’re not just hitting them with promo promo promo, value value value.

Ben 20:49  

Yes, it’s the classic. As anyone, I’m sure a lot of people are listening. I hope they have read Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk. Obviously, that’s more of social media, but the premise is the same. It’s about give, give, give, give, give, ask, right? So you give tons of value through helpful, free, engaging, compelling, useful content and then you ask for the sale and when you do this, you’re building up this sense of reciprocity, so that when you do ask for the sale, people are like, Well actually, that has provided me with a ton of value and looking at all of that as reminding me about their products, which solve problems that I have, seeks my pain point, so I’m gonna buy from them. So that’s the first thing, right? Content. We can use email to, for instance, send social proof, right? Perhaps you’ve got testimonials, or pictures or videos that we can send to our list of people using our products. Of course, we can ask for the sale, right and there is that might just be seasonal sales because it’s Christmas, it’s Mother’s Day, it’s Valentine’s Day, whatever it is, it might be the end of season, or might be that you’re launching a new product. So you could use your off Amazon email list, which typically is buying from your website, to launch a product on Amazon. There’s no reason you can’t cross pollinate, the two people get into panic, they say, Oh, but if I launch my Amazon product, to my list that typically I’d send to my website, they’re all going to like never buy from my website again, and just go back to Amazon every time. Well, A, that’s not true and B, even if it is true, who cares? They’re still buying from you. Okay, you’re giving away 15% to Jeff, but you’re probably ranking better and you’re gonna improve your organic sales on Amazon anyway, right? So it’s win win win, it’s not something to worry about. You can use email to cross sell, right? We have the freedom when we’re emailing our own customers on our own website to cross sell can’t really do that very well and so somebody just bought your knitting needles, right? You have a knitting brand, and you’re going to cross sell them some wool, or you’re going to cross sell them a special case for their knitting needles, or whatever it might be. What about having a VIP club, right? You’ve segmented your list based on their behavior. This is the great thing about email right? When you’re using a powerful tool like Klaviyo, you collect so much data, you can segment your list based on lots of information about your customers and potential customers based on their behavior. So you could set up a VIP club, segmenting your list based on whether A, bunch of people have opted in to join your VIP club or B, just on how much they spent, how many times they’ve ordered from you whatever criteria you may wish to choose, email special deals to those people first and then there’s the really basic stuff, which is just no brainers and absolutely make some money while you sleep abandoned cart flows, or abandoned checkout flows really. So somebody has come on your website, they’ve added something to the cart, they’ve gone to the checkout, they type in their email address and phones rang, the kids crying, the dogs barking, the delivery guys come to the door, they just thought Oh I’ll buy it later, let’s send them some emails and get them back in there and get them across the line to complete the sale lots and lots of stuff. I can go on or?

Norman  24:04  

We can definitely go on. I just wanted to add that one of the things that we do is that we’ll create with these emails, a really beautiful newsletter and it takes two seconds to put the newsletter together, really it takes five minutes to put the newsletter together as long as you have content and we use a company called Paper.li, p a p e r.l i. We pay for a premium subscription. We can customize it and it looks great and once you get all these emails, you’ll never see we haven’t promoted anything in that email. You never see that we’re trying to push any products or anything like that. All it is is value. Its value about online marketing, how to become a better seller. Better digital marketing things that are not discussed so much even on this podcast, but it just adds value. People see that, and then they start checking out a bit more about you and it’s a perfect tool, if done properly and guys, I’m not telling you not to subscribe to my email, my email does not suck. It’s really good and if you want to subscribe to it, you can just go to Normanfarrar.com or Lunch with Norm and sign up with that email. But there’s no soliciting if we don’t go in and we only add value just like Wilfried Ligthart says, value value value. You have to be engaged before you get married and we can definitely continue with what you’re saying. I love everything that you’re saying so far.

Ben 25:47  

I think you should use that as some sort of a tagline. Lunch with Norm, my email does not suck. But you’re right, and there’s two main types of email that you can send. You can send email campaigns, which are specific one time email, sent in a scheduled time, so I want to send an email half an hour from now I go in, I type it up, I schedule it to go to a particular portion of my list, or my favorite type of email, automated email flows, right? These are set and forget, too good to be true, if you like, types of emails that will make you money and the more you understand your audience and look at the behavior of the people coming through your website, the better you can get these automated flows, because they are based on real data, based on their behavior. So you’re not just guessing you’re not just sending out an email to everyone and hoping you’re going to send very specific emails to the right people at the right time. Going back to the knitting analogy, suppose you have an arts and crafts brand and you sell products for knitters, sewers, and crocheters. Well, some people might like all three of those and that’s wonderful, you can send them emails about all three topics. But some people might only be interested in one or two, like just knitting or just sewing and you wouldn’t want to send them emails about the wrong topic, because they’re not going to get opened, or they will get opened, and then they’ll unsubscribe, you don’t want that. So what’s very powerful is sending the right emails to the right people at the right time, results in high open rates, which keeps you in the inbox, when you have a low open rate the email service providers they know and they will move your emails into the spam folder or the promotions tab, but you don’t want that. When you’re sending the right emails to the right people at the right time, you get high open rates, high click through rates and high conversion rates and this results in getting into the inbox and getting converted.

Norman  27:43  

Very good. So one of the things I wanted to ask you, thank you. I just got my coffee delivered. Thank you, Connie. One of the things I want to talk about too, is if you’re not using a Klaviyo, and you’re trying to do some email marketing on your own, and you’re putting it through your Gmail account, there’s a threat there that you could, I mean, you could get blacklisted or if you have an email account on a shared host, like if you’re using Hostgator and you’re blasting it out. Because you might get a spam complaint or a bunch of spam complaints. You’re not only your email, but your shared host could get blacklisted. Correct?

Ben 28:27  

Yes, absolutely correct and you also need to be careful about things like GDPR. So like, if you’re sending out emails through Gmail, well, where have you got that email address? Do you have permission to send an email to that person? Right? Whereas if they’ve signed up for your, whether it’s Klaviyo, or MailChimp, or whatever, presumably, they’ve come through either your website’s checkout, or a legitimate signup form and you have got permission to send to them and crucially, your email will have an unsubscribe link in the bottom and the recipient of your email has the opportunity to unsubscribe, whereas if you’re just paying something out through Gmail, they can’t do that.

Norman  29:07  

Yeah, that’s critical. I have seen this. I’ve tried to unsubscribe from an email and they have no unsubscribe or if they do, they make it so hard, and you’ve got to answer all these questions and there’s no options, these are things that you just report. Yeah, and that’s where those servers, these are people that don’t understand email marketing at all and like you’re saying, Are there any techniques you said going through and having that checkbox, will be sending updates, click the box if you accept or whatever any type of opt in. Are there any other opt-in methods that you can use for us, let’s say for the newsletter, it’s going to the site and actually giving us your email address, and we’ll send you the newsletter. Yeah, that gives us the option to send out the newsletter to the person and there’s not going to be a problem. What about other types of opt ins? Do you know of any?

Ben 30:18  

Well, ultimately, to get the email address, they got to give it to you somehow. So either, they’re coming through your checkout and hopefully they’ve checked out, in which case, they’re now a customer, or they haven’t checked out, in which case, they’re going to be getting your abandoned cart flow and then in the future, more emails to hopefully get them to eventually buy from you. So either they’re coming through your checkout, or they’re coming through some form of opt in or with on your site, like a pop up like an exit intent pop up or pop up that triggers after 30 seconds or after you scroll, you got to be careful with pop ups, that can get very annoying. Or perhaps you’ve collected their email address from some other marketing technique, like a competition. So for instance, for a product launch, you might have driven people from a Facebook ad into a squeeze page for a competition, collected their email address, where it’s been very clear that you’re asking permission that you will set in addition to the results of the competition, you’ll be sending them emails, marketing emails, and news, etc, about your industry or your brand. So, that’s another way to do it. But ultimately, somebody has to give you your email address, and my favorite way to get an email address is to give something in return for the email address, like a lead magnet, right? I see a lot of websites where so for example, you have a newsletter, right? People want to sign up for your newsletter because they’re interested in this industry. But suppose we’re talking about physical products brands. So let’s look at the knitting analogy again, right? You’re on the website, it says build a Shopify and you scroll down in the footer, there’s a little box that says sign up for our newsletter. No one will be signing up for that newsletter. No one in the world is interested in signing up for a knitting newsletter, newsletters are boring. But knitters might want to sign up for a guide on the 10 best practices when knitting a jumper. Right? Give us your email address, we’ll ping the ebook PDF over to you. That’s going to get a lot more signups than boring newsletters, newsletters are really boring. I recorded a video about this the other day. Well, newsletters and sales aren’t necessarily boring. But just the offer of signing up for a newsletter in itself is pretty boring. So giving something in exchange, whether it’s a series of videos, or an ebook, or some kind of helpful guide, that will get the email address and from there, you’ve got to nurture providing that free, compelling, helpful, useful, engaging content and then you hit them with the with the right hook, and you ask for the sale and that sale will probably be on your website, but you may well be launching a product on Amazon.

Norman  32:56  

We’ve talked about this on the podcast before where you can drive people over. Let’s say it’s just a simple insert over to your website, it could either be a landing page, or it could be a pop up. But where you’re going to be giving them let’s say it’s shampoo. So okay, shampoo, here’s a free sample of conditioner. But you give something that somebody wants, I’ve seen just like you said, so many times I’ve gone over to a website that’s promoting or asking for an email, and they give no value. I know exactly what you’re talking about and people want a free bar of soap. If you can give them a scent that’s not available on Amazon, they’re going to give you your email, you’re going to send them a free bar of soap, and you’re probably going to gain a customer because they are going to love your brand, or you can cross promote, just like you’re saying. So maybe some products that aren’t on Amazon, or that are on Amazon, and you’re giving away a sample, but it’s something of value. So, I like that and what comes with that? How much would you pay for an email address?

Ben 34:04  

I mean, you hear different things. I’ve heard people say that they pay 10 bucks for an email address. I don’t like sitting on the fence, but I’m gonna sit on the fence. The answer is it depends. Because it depends on your industry, right? Depends how much, what’s your budget, right? What’s your marketing budget? What’s your margins? Are you selling high end premium products? Are you selling more cheap and cheerful products? Neither of those is wrong, but it’s certainly going to dictate what you can afford to pay for an email address. Or what scale are you doing this? Are you doing this in massive volume? Are you not? So yeah, I’m sitting on the fence. The answer is it depends. But certainly, an email address is very, very important and it’s important that you recognize that people place a value on their own email address, right? Somebody’s inbox is a personal and private place and they’re not going to let you just get access to it for nothing. You have to give them something of value and that may well mean giving away even a product not just a guide. If you’ve structured your guest funnel, if you like, well enough, you can give away the soap and get them on the back end with the value letter, and play the long game and look at the long term value of that customer.

Norman  35:17  

It’s really just building a brand.

Ben 35:19  

Yep, building a brand.

Norman  35:20  

By the way, if I’m on the fence, I just say how long is a piece of string there?  So okay, just at this time, in case you haven’t heard, we’re going to be giving away a really great giveaway today. Ben is going to be offering to build you out an email workflow for Klaviyo and I don’t know what that’s worth. But you know what, that’s an incredible giveaway. If you want to join, just put, well, there we go Faye, #we love Ben, and you’ll be entered. If you put #we love Ben and I believe if you tag two people on this call, you’ll get an extra entry. Now one other thing, don’t forget and Oh gosh, don’t forget to smash those likes, subscribe, ring bells, whatever we’re supposed to do and Kelsey, I guess they took away your job. But this thing is driving me crazy here. I’m just gonna bang my head against the mic. You just get this bloody shock whenever you don’t expect it. Like you put your elbow up here or you put it down and all of a sudden

Ben 36:35  

I think you’ve trapped a nerve Norm.

Norman  36:37  

I don’t know what it is. But I’ve never had anything like this.

Kelsey 36:42  

Yeah, you might need to get that checked out. Yeah, that sounds pretty bad.

Norman  36:48  

Yeah, anyways, right now I’m fine. I move my arm just a little bit, and you’ll see, like it’ll just shock you. But anyways, that’s not the topic for today. I just know I’m not on par today. But all I wanted to do Kels was ask people to ring, hit, smash, do whatever you like,

Kelsey 37:11  

There you go. Well, don’t worry. I got you. Okay, you do have a ton of questions coming in.

Norman  37:18  

Good. Let’s get to those questions.

Kelsey 37:20  

Yeah, I know. We’re on a bit of a timeline today. 

Norman  37:22  

Oh, we have 10 minutes. Is that it?

Kelsey 37:27  

Yeah, about that. Okay. Yeah. So if we can just run through these a few. So from Faye, I know I’ve joined a little bit late. So I’m sorry if this was discussed already, honestly, an entire episode later. But how do you quickly build up a big email list? Say for someone who doesn’t sell on Amazon so you can drive traffic over to Shopify?

Ben 37:47  

So you’re not selling on Amazon but you do have a Shopify site? Is that right? Have I interpreted that correctly? 

Kelsey 37:56

I believe so. 

Ben 37:57

Okay, so who is your customer? You need to understand who your customer is and where they are and then get in front of them. So let’s do the knitting analogy again, because I like it. Perhaps they’re in knitting groups. Okay, so join knitting groups, provide value to those groups. Over time, right, you can’t do this straight off the bat, right? Provide value to those groups, ask permission from the people who own the groups to link your competition to those groups and drive people from those groups to the competition whereupon you put them in a squeeze page, and have their email address. You can run from that you’re gonna have an audience, right? Build a lookalike audience from that now you’ve got the people who are really interested in knitting, and run ads to the same competition and you can just do straight up Facebook ads to people who like knitting, right, but I’m a big fan of lookalike audiences. Build your own group, right? Run ads to get likes on your page, your knitting page, add those people to your group, get them to know, like and trust you in the group where you’re providing free, helpful, compelling, engaging, useful knitting content. Get their email address for a competition, or some other lead magnet, like an ebook, from the group to your site. Boom, you’ve got their email address. The possibilities are endless, right? I mean the easy answer is just all we’ll just run Facebook ads, but that’s gonna get very expensive. So, you need to think about other ways. It’s about building the audience. I’m a big fan of building an audience. So try and build a Facebook group.

Kelsey 39:28  

Okay. From Doctor Koz, what’s your opinion of grabbing an email for a monthly deal access?

Ben 39:36  

I’m not quite sure what you mean, are you saying you’re going to offer a monthly deal? I think that’s what you’re saying, you can offer a monthly deal to those people, that’s fine. I mean, your list is going to basically get trained to know that you’re doing a deal every month. So they’re only going to buy from you at the end of the month. But if you’ve worked that into your business model, then it’s absolutely fine but just be aware that your open rates might get pretty low if you’re just kind of hammering people once a month to buy your stuff. Make sure that you’re also providing people with free, helpful, compelling, engaging, useful content.

Kelsey 40:08  

From Manny, what about the ads in your email account? I’ve been seeing lately a lot more pictures. So I guess the content from the emails.

Ben 40:19  

Pictures and emails are great. A picture paints 1000 words. But I like to sprinkle in a good mixture of really nice organic feeling emails that are pretty much plain text, it looks like it was just written in Gmail, often those are signed off from the founder of the business and then mix that in with more branded content. So for instance, a thank you email might be something that you send with no pictures at all and it is basically plain text. But then everybody knows that the email that you’re sending for your end of season sales from the brand as a whole, and you haven’t typed it out personally, so make that nice and sparkly and branded with some nice pictures.

Kelsey 40:58  

Okay, great. Can eCom brokers help with an email campaign to get pre orders for a product launch on Kickstarter?

Ben 41:07  

eCom Brokers can’t because that’s my eCommerce brokerage, but I can. So if you want to sell your business, eCom Brokers can help you with that. But if you want help with email, that’s more my kettle of fish. So if you want to email support, head over to benleonard.pro, where we can talk about that type of thing and eCom Brokers is the brokerage.

Norman  41:27  

We’ll make sure that we post that in the notes as well.

Kelsey 41:31  

Yeah. Okay and from Nicolas, do you set up a Facebook pixel to know who visited your email list page, but didn’t enter the email to retarget them? Or the opposite? Can you somehow analyze their behavior, conclude that they’re not the kind to subscribe to an email list and stop marketing to them?

Ben 41:48  

You could do that. So suppose you had a landing page on your site, you could pixel that and then build an audience of the people who are pixeled, but not in your email list and there’s mobile ways to do that, we’d have to get pretty technical talk about it and you can retarget them, they will be reasonably warm leads since they’ve been on your site. But there was probably a reason that they didn’t enter their email address. Now that could be simply because they were too busy and the phone rang, or it could be because they decided they weren’t interested. So yeah, you’d have to play around with that. But hopefully, it’ll be pretty warm traffic. So that would be pretty cheap to retarget.

Kelsey 42:26  

Okay, this is from Radd. I have basic Klaviyo for my Shopify store, but I’m not getting any inquiries, what should I have to do? Do I have to get a subscription to Klaviyo to get an inquiry from customers?

Ben 42:43  

You don’t need to have a paid Klaviyo account to start using Klaviyo. So if you’ve correctly hooked Klaviyo up to your Shopify site, people coming through your checkout should be landing in your Klaviyo list and Bob’s your uncle and if they’re not coming to your checkout, then you again, you don’t need a paid account to do this. You can put either pop ups or embedded forms on your site to subscribe to a list, for example, in exchange for a helpful, free, compelling, engaging, useful lead magnet.

Kelsey 43:15  

From Tony, Klaviyo does not allow you videos to be embedded in the email. Is the deliverability of the video the main issue?

Ben 43:23  

Probably yes and I would not recommend embedding videos in emails. I know people are now thinking that it’s all the rage, I find it annoying as a reader of email and in my opinion, you know what’s way better than video and email? Plain text. Just sending somebody an email, right, with a link to something that’s useful, which could be a YouTube link. Right? You don’t need to put the video in the email.

Kelsey 43:47  

Okay, we just got a couple more. From Faye, something I’ve always wondered about, if I’m launching something on Amazon, and can use more sales for launch, should I send my Shopify customers to Amazon?

Ben 43:59  

Absolutely. Yes, you should. Do not worry about somehow losing those customers in the future. Oh, they’re only going to always go back to Amazon now. Well, some of them might, most of them won’t and even if they did, it doesn’t matter. They’re still going to buy from you. You still got their email address anyway. So if you want to get them back to your site, do a wonderful offer to get them back to your site. Yes, you should drive them to Amazon for your launch. 

Kelsey 44:23  

Okay and I believe this is the last one. From Brandon, does buying email lists work if I can run with an organically built list?

Ben 44:33  

I’m not a fan of buying lists for physical products. It depends what you’re doing. For me, I wouldn’t do it. I think an organic list of people who are genuinely interested in your brand because it solves a problem they’re a pain point that they’re experiencing is much better. I wouldn’t buy a list. You can do things like a collaboration, right? So if there’s a bigger brand than you or another brand in your space, who you can cross pollinate with whose customers would be interested in what you’re doing, do that, right? If you feel like your organic list isn’t big enough, but I wouldn’t buy a list.

Kelsey 45:15  

This is for Norm. Norm, you know my product, what would you suggest as an insert 20% discount on next purchases? I got very few takers.

Norman  45:29  

It might be Andrew, is that you might want to take a look at some other form of value added. If you didn’t get the taker with a 20%, that’s a lot by the way. I’d probably take a look at something else. We can discuss this afterwards. But is there anything that you can offer that like, for example, we’re doing this product right now it’s a beverage and it’s recipes, or we’re doing a knife and we’ve sent it out to chefs to provide us with different recipes, video archive of recipes, and that’s something that’s offered and you get an email, we get actually quite a few from just the recipe book, which is kind of interesting, I didn’t think we’d have that kind of result. But we’re building it out more and more and more and more. The other thing like with the one knife, we offer a smaller knife, or a cheaper knife for free and they’ll see that it’s a $40 knife on Amazon but they’re buying a $200 knife to go with it. So it’s great for us, we get the email, and it’s well worth it and also, the cost of goods is very, very inexpensive. But, we could definitely talk about that more Andrew and I don’t know if you’ve got anything further to say about that. But I think it’s right along the lines of what you were saying Ben.

Ben 46:53  

Yep. I can’t disagree. I love that, by the way, giving away the $40 knife. Because when people go on Amazon, and they see that, it’s just the perceived value of that. Well, the actual value of that knowledge, not just perceived, is extraordinary and so I imagine the conversion rate there is excellent.

Norman  47:09  

It is. Yep. Alright, so we are running out of time. Kelsey, can you do the Wheel of Kelsey?

Kelsey 47:16  

Okay and before I get started, I just wanted to say again, if you’re interested in Ben’s email marketing, if you want to ask him question, here’s his website here and then if you have any questions about the brokerage, I put the link in the comments as well for the eCom Brokers, as well as eCom Brokers are going to waive their listing fee for anyone who quotes the Lunch with Norm podcast, as well as you can get a free ebook for how to prepare your eCommerce business for sale and that link, put in the comments as well. 

Norman 47:53

All you have to do is provide your email address.

Ben 47:54  

Exactly.  

Kelsey 47:58  

Yeah, so I put the comments here and let’s get to the wheel. Okay. There we go. So I’ll mix everyone’s names up. There we go. 321. 

Kelsey 48:22

Bronwyn.

Norman  48:26  

All right, congrats.

Kelsey 48:29  

Okay, so Bronwyn if you can send me your information to k@lunchwithnorm.com, or just send me a message on Facebook and we’ll hook you up with Ben.

Norman  48:42  

I think that’s the first time you won. So that’s awesome.

Kelsey 48:45  

Yeah, we get a lot of repeat winners. So it’s nice to have someone new. 

Norman 48:51

The wheel is rigged. 

Kelsey 48:53

Yeah. There’s conspiracy going on in the group. 

Norman  48:56  

Okay, so I know that you’re on a tight timeline today. I wanted to thank you Ben, for coming on. I hope you come back. I mean, there’s so much we can talk about. I could easily spend another hour or two with you. So I really appreciate it. I’m gonna reach out to you probably today or tomorrow. Just to talk to you about a few other things about email and anyways, thank you. Thanks a lot for coming on. Thanks for such a giveaway. 

Ben 49:23  

It’s a pleasure and I hope your shoulder feels better soon.

Norman  49:26  

Yeah, it’s driving me crazy today.

Ben 49:29  

Get that looked at.

Norman  49:30  

I’m not usually this bad when I’m interviewing somebody. 

Ben 49:34

No you’re fine, you’re fine.

Norman  49:35  

All right. So thank you, everybody for listening and putting up with me today. But that’s the end of our podcast. Ben was awesome. Just check him out. Go to his website, check him out and Bronwyn, you got a great giveaway. So congrats again, Kelsey, what would you like to add?

Kelsey 49:54  

So yeah, first off, I can’t believe it’s been like 9 or 10 months that we’ve never talked about email marketing. on here before so, I think a lot of people really did enjoy the topic. So, I think we got to have Ben back. But yeah, like it smash those buttons, share this video out to your friends. Maybe they need some help with their emails. But you can find all of the episodes, daily clips on the YouTube channel, Norman Farrar, or you can just search Lunch with Norm, you’ll be able to find it or Lunch with Norm. But we have our weekly Clubhouse on Mondays at 1:30pm. Except for next week, which we have a Lunch with Norm, there is no 12 o’clock Lunch with Norm episode on Monday, it is being moved to 2 o’clock. We have a very special guest Rand Fishkin from Moz and he’s going to be talking with us on Monday, so it’s going to be changed a little bit. So it’s kind of conflicting with our Clubhouse, so we’re not going to do a Clubhouse on Monday, but yeah, it should be really fun.

Norman  50:59  

Yeah. Okay, fantastic and Mero, yes, I am getting old and that’s why this happened. Okay, so thank you everybody, for joining us today. We’re going to be having another guest on, when is it? Friday, we’re going to be talking about retail arbitrage, wholesale, reselling, and private labels. So join us then, until that time, join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Eastern Standard Time at noon and thank you, everybody, and we will talk to you soon.