Optimize Your Email and SMS Marketing Before Black Friday with Nikita Vakhrushev

[00:00:00]

Nikita: there's a huge misconception in that. Some people think that you need all the different fields and everything to be, you know, hyper segmented and custom. We still try to do that, but at the same time, you kind of have to portion that out over a certain given amount of time. Meaning.

we can still get a pretty good amount of data, but we don't do it all at once

Allan: Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Allan Dib, and today we're speaking to Nikita Vakrouchev. We're going to be talking all things conversion. We're going to be talking email deliverability, SMS, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So welcome to the show, Nikita.

Nikita: pleasure to be on, Allan. Thanks again for having me.

Allan: Of course, Of course. So, do you want to give us couple of sentence rundown on what you do and who you do it for?

Nikita: Yeah, of course. So I specialize in email and SMS marketing. So essentially retention marketing for e commerce and online businesses. That's all we do. We don't do ads. We don't do TikTok or anything like that. Purely [00:01:00] retention.

Allan: Nice.

Um, and so emails marketing has definitely been a workhorse for me and my business. It's generated and continues to generate millions of dollars thousands and thousands of leads every month. And more and more we keep hearing about new platforms, you know, there's, whatever, TikTok, Instagram or new platforms coming out all the time.

Email seems to have been like this workhorse that's just stayed and stayed. And despite being declared dead many times continues to really crush. What are your thoughts on this and how does email play a role with other platforms and things like that?

Nikita: Yeah, fantastic question. The way I like to describe it is emails is one of the rail networks of the Internet. You know, it's almost like your personal home address. there's got to be something that ties back to you, especially in the digital footprint side of things. So even though so many people and so many publications say that email is dead, it's like further from the truth because

like it's the main way for [00:02:00] you to communicate with people.

Anything, whether you sign up for a service, whether you're trying to chat with a friend, a pen pal, et cetera. And email is one of those channels where once you have someone's email address, you have that first party data and you can reach out to a person at any given point in time. Obviously you don't want to overdo it 'cause you might burn that list, but.

You can't really do that with Tik Tok and Instagram. you have DMS, but even with DMS, your account can get banned and you can never reach those DMS again. And if you don't have their contact information, you can't really reach those people ever again, either.

Allan: totally agree. I often call email an owned asset, whereas a lot of those other platforms are really rented assets. You're a tenant rather than a landlord on those platforms.

So with email, as powerful as it is, it's becoming and has become much more challenging. And so, there's two main challenges the way that I see it with email marketing.

So there are The technical challenges, so getting it technically set up correct, and that includes [00:03:00] things like SPF, DMARC, DKIM, all of those sorts of technologies, which usually someone in your tech team or your IT person can really help you set up properly. And then there are uh, Content factors, so making sure you're not using spammy keywords, you haven't got tons of images and links and things like that'll get you caught in spam filters.

But let's say we've got those covered. We've got the tech covered. you know, emails are being signed with DKIM or DCIM. DMARC and they're all properly configured. We're writing emails that aren't spammy. They're providing value. Still, we're seeing in some cases very low open rates. And I know open rates are maybe not a perfect indicator now because a lot of email clients block the pixel that tells you whether an email got opened or not.

But we're seeing that. How are you getting around landing in promotions folders, spam folders and things like that? Especially on platforms like Gmail, which are very aggressive with spam [00:04:00] filtering and things like that.

Nikita: Yeah. Fantastic question. And you are correct that there is still a lot of steps that you need to do in the modern day in order to have. really good email working systems, the tech and the content side.

Now, one thing that most people don't really think about on the email side is the actual segmentation part.

So, tech content, cool, everything makes sense, but if you're sending it to the wrong audience at the wrong time, people are just not going to open up that email. And what I tend to see whenever I audit client accounts as well as any prospect of client accounts is they don't have specific segments in place to.

avoid sending to any potential spam traps or any potential like blacklisted emails that could hurt your deliverability because what would happen is let's say you have a list of a hundred people and let's say for those people are just invalid emails. When you send those emails out, Gmail still has a record of everything that's going out or [00:05:00] Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, et cetera.

So if those emails bounce, that's going to tell Google that, okay, you're sending to bad providers essentially, or you're sending it to emails that shouldn't be sent to because they're no longer active. And if you fail to filter those people out before you send out, that could start to rupture like the credibility of your email on the backend.

Once that happens, you start to see open rates start to dip. And if you do this enough times if it dips far enough, then you kind of have to start from scratch. So segmentation is a really big part of deliverability that most people don't really consider. Not only on the people you shouldn't send to, but also the people you should send to.

Meaning, sending it to the highest engaged audience possible within your entire list. And if you want to improve your deliverability, you would probably start out with the highest engagement possible. And then you kind of work your way up as you start to see your open rates and your click through rates and revenue.

Start to stabilize. You start to open up that pocket of audience even more and more and more up until you have, [00:06:00] your entire list that you're sending to.

Allan: And so presumably to get the segmentation right, that's at the opt-in stage. Someone's opting in and you maybe have a dropdown box or something like that saying, who are you? Are you the CEO? Are you the CTO? Are you the marketing manager? Or whatever else? So that you're sending relevant stuff in that you are segmenting them.

Is that where you normally think about segmenting the list?

Nikita: That's the best way to do like top of funnel segmentation is to get that data right away because it's very hard to do so. Once they're on the list, you can bombard them with emails as much as you can. It's very low likelihood that they will answer any surveys or any questions.

Without any incentive. So you'd want to get that right up front. But another thing that we do on the segmentation side is we track activity and engagement within, like, we use Klaviyo, for example, for most of our clients, and we can track to see. If a person subscribed, if they visited the website, if they've added to cart, checked out a product page, and for [00:07:00] example, like one segment that I always recommend clients to implement is someone that has subscribed, never opened an email in the last year, never clicked on a link on a website, never visited the website, never viewed a product page, never added to cart, because that to me is a telltale sign that that is a spam trap and that is a person that's never going to engage with your emails ever again.

So you might as well just get rid of them and never send to them.

Allan: So explain spam trap a little bit. these uh, dummy emails that are in there from what some of the platforms are like looking for people, you know, emails that are sent to people who haven't opted in or how does that work?

Nikita: Yeah, pretty much. like it's emails that are just dummy emails there to, you know, record and add you to blacklist, but also they're there to hurt your domain reputation as you send out more emails. If you don't filter through them, it just shows that you're unaware of your audience.

Allan: So how did those emails get into my Klaviyo or HubSpot or [00:08:00] whatever I'm using? Did someone put them in there? Is this an automated like scraping thing or how did they get into that list in the first place?

Nikita: It's usually an automated scraper because even if like a VA or a person that does data entry for a living, was to submit that email. a good comparison to that is like how Google has the Captcha platform. They're not trying to see whether or not you can notice a motorcycle between all the different images in that nine grid.

They're just trying to see the mouse movement to see if you're a legitimate human. So in the same sense on the email side, if we were to see an actual person submit something, we would see other movement on the website, whether they checked out different pages. or loaded up different things. So 99 percent of the time, it's like a scrape and automation tool.

Allan: And so are those run by the email platforms? Like, so is Gmail running like a scraper tool where they're submitting forms with dummy emails or where is that coming from?

Nikita: So it's a mix of email service providers, but also people that are [00:09:00] just being nefarious and trying to ruin your reputation could be competition. It could be just at random. Sometimes you don't even know who would submit this dummy email address. Sometimes it could be a DDoS attack.

We've seen pretty much all different types of cases, but. it's a variety of different ways that you get like a spam trap email on your list.

Allan: So let's say we've had a, our list, we've now, you know, over the years, we've 100,000 200,000 subscribers, whatever it is. What sort of maintenance do you recommend with the list? presumably periodically to run it through tools like Neverbounce or something like that to see whether there are invalids, whether there are suspicious, whether there are role based addresses, things like that.

And how often do you recommend doing stuff like that?

Nikita: Yeah, fantastic question. On the B2B side, I would definitely recommend using something like Neverbounce. On the B2C side it's a little difficult, especially with the amount of credits that it takes. I don't know how much like 200, 000 credits would be on [00:10:00] Neverbounce. I'm sure it's a little expensive. But what we do is we base it off of engagement.

Mainly because we're working with consumers, normal everyday people, that, you know, if they open an email or don't open an email, we can track that. So if they don't open an email for a long enough time, we can see that they've dropped off. And what we try to do is we try to re engage them with a windback flow or a sunset flow.

And if they still aren't, like, budging to open anything up or engage with us, then we just clean the list out. We obviously make a backup of it and download and give it to the client so that way they can store it. But we then clear that out. And in most cases we lower their email marketing bill because they're no longer paying for, 200,000 contacts.

They're not paying for 180, 000 contacts. And we try to do this on a quarterly, if not bi yearly basis.

Allan: And so, what's your view on, cause I know there are some email addresses that clearly come back as invalid or bounced or whatever. Okay. We clear those out. Then there are the ones in the green that are [00:11:00] all good. They look fine, but then there's always the, those in the middle that are kind of maybe role based addresses, maybe, you know, unsure or whatever.

What do you do with those?

Nikita: On the consumer side, we don't really touch those. We still send out emails to people on the B2B side. We try to clear those out. As quickly as possible, or at least work with the team that we're working with on the client side to see if they can find someone. Cause typically clients in the online business space already have their own data entry people.

So we would probably, we would export them the list of info at or team at whatever emails and see if they can find some sort of decision maker or someone in the team that. We could reach out to and add them on to our like email newsletter or marketing list.

Allan: And on the opt in side how much info do you ask for? Because obviously every piece of info you ask for, you're going to get a lower opt in rate. in some cases, in extreme cases, you might do just email address in other cases, like you said, we may choose what their role is.

We may have name, [00:12:00] we may have phone numbers, all of that sort of thing. But we know that every added field that we ask for, we're going to have a higher drop off rate. What's the balance?

Nikita: Yeah, that one is, there's a huge misconception in that. Some people think that you need all the different fields and everything to be, you know, hyper segmented and custom. We still try to do that, but at the same time, you kind of have to portion that out over a certain given amount of time. Meaning.

we can still get a pretty good amount of data, but we don't do it all at once. You know, you're not going to eat a whole big steak in one go. You're going to take small bites and you slowly get through that steak. So the first step, we always have to collect the email address. The second step is the phone number or SMS number that we're going to use for SMS marketing.

And then third and fourth steps is that's when we capture any extra data. And that's where we layer on an extra incentive. So for example, if the intro offer is you know, let's say get free shipping, sign up and give us your email [00:13:00] address and then join the SMS club. They give us our phone number and it's like, do you want an extra 10 percent off?

And then we have like a survey of like, which one describes you best. And it's like, I'm C-suite I'm VP, I'm management role or whatever it is just to get some more data. And then on the next step, it's like, you're almost done. And it asks another question or another data point that we might want to know about the customer.

And then at, that point, we give them the discount code and the free shipping and whatever they might need. So we kind of layered on different steps. We don't have all of it on one specific form because that's just too overwhelming. You're going to have conversion rates drop off.

Allan: Yeah, we found that works really well on our website as well. the first step, we have a multi step opt in. So the first step is email address. Then we've got phone number and then I think it goes to like, potentially book a strategy call or whatever else. So, even if they don't fill in the phone number field, we've still captured the email address.

So in case they abandoned the form halfway or whatever.

So let's talk about SMS for a moment. It's kind of a little bit of a controversial subject. I know, for example, like [00:14:00] I was in the car with my wife the other day and she gets an SMS from somewhere that she'd ordered e commerce.

She goes, Oh, how annoying. I hate it when companies just text me or whatever. And I said, well, it is very effective though. It's annoying because it's irrelevant because you're not in market for that product. But if you were, you would be like, Oh, cool. They've got a special on whatever it is.

Right. So how do you get that balance right between, not being annoying, but also being effective with things like SMS marketing? Because I mean, SMS gets past a lot of the spam filters. It's almost immediate. It's got almost. probably close to our 100 percent open rate. So it's, it can be very effective, but like all powerful tools, it's sort of a double edged sword.

Nikita: Yeah. So SMS, like, you mentioned, has a high open rate, but at the same time it has a very high unsubscribe rate because of that example you mentioned about you and your wife, people don't like getting spammed on SMS. We try to have a once every other [00:15:00] week, or maybe once a week at most, depending on the list size cadence with SMS.

We try not to overdo it. The only times we do overdo it is during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, which is, you know, coming up in a few months or a few weeks. So that's like the only time where we are like, okay, cool. We need to utilize this as much as we can. Utilizing balance, but also understanding what your customer wants.

So we split SMS into two buckets and that's mainly based off of nurture and a discount-based like SMS text message. So for higher ticket brands, so brands that are selling anything above 200, 300, 400, That's when you do a lot of nurture on the SMS side. You provide value on the SMS side. you're likely not going to get a instant conversion because someone finally, you know, they have 400 burning in their pocket and you got, they saw your SMS like, Oh, perfect.

I'm going to buy. Usually most of the purchases that come through SMS are on the lower ticket side, meaning purchases under a hundred [00:16:00] dollars, something that's very instantaneous, grabbed your attention. It's on sale and it only makes sense to buy. So that's how we split it off the SMS side.

Allan: The sales side seems obvious. It's like, okay, it's Black Friday, you've got an hour, you've got, you know, 20 minutes to go, whatever. What does a nurture SMS look like? And

Nikita: Yeah, it's usually bullet points of like, if we're doing like an electrolyte drink brand, like it would be like reminders on like, drink lots of water today, sweat out, like touch grass, that sort of thing. So like simple bullet points or it leads to a blog article that we just recently published.

So it's a mix of. Very quick, short bullets because you obviously have a 140 character limit or some sort of information piece that we've already done, or it could lead back to email. It's like, hey, check your email. We sent you something informative. It's a very expensive way of doing that. We try to avoid doing that unless it's a very important email.

But it does work really well to get them back onto email as a channel.

Allan: what about a SMS for B2B?

Nikita: So SMS for B2B mainly works well for, for me, like [00:17:00] we, we do it a lot for appointment booking. So anytime on an appointment's booked, it's a great reminder to chat with the booking because number one, like if they're late, they can easily text that number and I can see them, I go high level that they've texted me back.

Okay, cool. We can reschedule. But also it's a great way to just keep following up with people. If you've booked something, I don't know if I got an SMS alert from you, but I feel like I did on booking this podcast.

Allan: Probably nice. Okay. so you're capturing email, you're capturing phone number you're, you're reaching out via SMS. So that's a lot on the e commerce side.

On the B2B side, how does that differ from like a B2C kind of scenario? So like consumer facing, great, get 10 percent off or get free shipping or get your first order, there's a lot of promotions.

On a B2B side, let's say we're selling, you know, much higher value stuff, the sales cycle is much longer, maybe we're selling enterprise software or whatever. So [00:18:00] how are you going about that compared to the consumer side? Where the consumer side, I'm assuming the sales cycle is much shorter. It's like, Hey, here's the dog bed.

This is why it's great. Here's 10 percent off coupon. Here's a abandoned cart, all of that sort of thing. So, with B2B where it's more relationship based, where the sales cycles are longer and more complex, how are you thinking about that?

Nikita: A lot of it just comes down to nurture. Even like with clients that we've worked with as well as my own business, just having some sort of like longterm nurture where it's just like a weekly newsletter that goes out on the email side that drives some sort of value or give some sort of value to the potential client or customer.

On the SMS side, that's where personalization comes in, where, I sometimes just text like old prospects that I used to have calls with and maybe they didn't convert, but I'd reach out to them via like GoHighLevel and say like, Hey, what's going on? We haven't talked in a while. How's your business doing?

Or something along those lines. And I see it on my [00:19:00] end too. So if there's a service provider or a vendor that I wanted to work with, didn't convert. I'd get a text from them like in a few months, just like, Hey, this is Ryan. Wanted to see how you're doing. I know we didn't really work out but just hope you're crushing it with your business.

So small little personal touches like that go a long way to the contact and SMS obviously has a high open rate. Or it could be again, something as simple as like, Hey Nikita, I saw that like really interesting article and it's just like a link to an article or like, Hey Nikita, I I sent you an email about this specific problem that you were having on our sales call. I think it would be really effective if you read that email. So it could be something as simple as that. That could go a long way on the B2B side.

Allan: So these are more like manual sort of process. We're not squeezing them through a funnel or a

specific sequence. We're like.

Nikita: You could technically automate it like, if someone actually uses the notes section in their CRM or like the tag section in their CRM, so For example, if you found out that a client is having trouble with, I'm using agencies because that's the best thing I know, but if someone's like, I'm having trouble with Facebook ads, or [00:20:00] I'm having trouble with CRO, obviously you tag them as CRO and Facebook ad problems in your CRM, so next time when you send out a newsletter, they get one based off of Facebook or CRO problems, or how to fix CRO in your website, or how to fix Facebook ad targeting problems.

And then you can automate that on the SMS side. So, you know, if tag matches CRO or if tag matches Facebook and you have their phone number and their name, you can easily automate that text that's coming from you specifically, but you kind of didn't really do it. It's just an extra bump.

Allan: So talk about like email content. So, one of the biggest challenges people have is what to write. there are certain ways of formatting email. Like you can format an email as a, like a HTML newsletter with lots of graphics, lots of links, lots of all of that.

And then the other, end of the extreme is it's just a plain looking email that's got no branding, no, nothing like that. And it just looks very personal. So what are your thoughts on both? When is one [00:21:00] appropriate versus another?

Nikita: We try to do about 80 20. So 80 percent branded content. Cause we want like the branding is what brings the customer back to purchase. And it's the easiest recognizable thing that you can use. but on the flip side, the text only emails are so powerful. Like we've done text only campaigns that have brought like 30 grand from like a single send.

So it's like, it depends on the angle and like the reasoning for emailing on the text only because it has to make sense. So for example, a campaign that's crushed for us was like, like there's no point designing an email around a message that you're trying to send someone. And this text only email said something like, Hey John, we accidentally ordered three times the amount of stock that we needed to and this would probably be the best.

We're having our overstock sale and everything's at like 10 percent off and that email crushed because you didn't really need to design a whole email to get the point across that you've, you know, you overstocked on your product. So something as simple like that, or [00:22:00] something that maybe you want something to sound like more personal, like a message from the founder, that is a really great approach on the text only side.

So we try to balance it out between mostly design focus, but sprinkling in a little bit of text only for performance and engagement.

Allan: So with a designed email, one that's, you know, got graphics and links and things like that presumably that's definitely a signal to Gmail, the email providers, but also to the recipient, Hey, this is a promotional email, You know, my best friend sending in me an email.

It's not going to be branded. It's not going to have a logo or whatever. It's just going to be a plain text email. Hey you around on Friday night or whatever. Right. So, how do you think about that and how do you have that not hurt your open rates or what concerns me more is action rates.

You know, I want someone to read the email, take action.

Nikita: right. Yeah. That's a solid question. I think a lot of it just comes down to not necessarily [00:23:00] worrying about whether it's going to end up in promotion or the inbox. I mean, I've seen text only emails end up in promotions. So it doesn't really matter on the design side of things. It more so comes from the domain that it's coming from.

if you're branded domain is already tarnished to go for promotions, you really can't do much about that. So what we try to focus on is the actual subject line and these first content paint of the email. So like above the fold, essentially. So we want the subject line to strike a nerve, not only be personal, but also something that is relevant to the person.

And then deliver on what the subject line promised in the first half of the email and make sure that any sort of urgency or scarcity tactics are used. And I'm not saying like to manipulate them, but more so like if there's a sale going on 24 hours left, we're going to have a timer at the header of the email to just signify that.

At the same time, we're going to have all important information, like any coupon codes, discount codes, or any relevant info. above the fold and then finish it off with a call to [00:24:00] action where people can immediately take action. And with using kind of that thought process, we haven't really seen a difference in drop off on the revenue side.

Granted the text only emails do perform really well. They have a higher open rate on average than the designed emails. But we've also had text only emails that have done really well engagement wise and flopped on the revenue side and the inverse on the design side where maybe open rate wasn't as good, but it drove a ton of conversions.

So it's a case by case situation,

Allan: And what about, who the email is coming from? Do you have it coming from a role based address like sales or info at or something like that? Or do you have it coming from Nikita at? And what have you seen the differences in deliverability, open rates, all of that sort of stuff?

Nikita: Yeah. So we don't really see a difference in the deliverability side. The only times we've used a. name at domain type email is if it's a personal brand that was built off of a single like [00:25:00] creator or an influencer, that's where it makes the most sense because they're buying because of the influencer and it only makes sense that they would contact them and write it from like a first person perspective.

But for the most part, we really didn't see a difference in using a name versus a like a branded domain, like an info at, or a mail at, or a newsletter at type email.

Allan: Okay, fair enough. And um, from a domain perspective, do you use the same domain as the company's domain for email or do you use maybe the NET variant or some other variant for email because there'll be, for example, corporate email, which someone would manually send and then there's kind of your marketing emails and things like that.

So do you send from the same domains or do you have different domains for like the. Corporate sending and the email marketing.

Nikita: It's a yes and a no. So we use a separate sub domain, but we use the main root domain. So for me, it's like aspectagency. com for all [00:26:00] of our emails, we do mail. aspectagency. com.

Allan: and so the subdomain has its own deliverability and domain reputation and all of that sort of stuff. Great.

Nikita: correct. Yeah. Yeah, so you're not really affected by anything if your subdomain is affected. your root domain shouldn't be affected.

Allan: Nikita, anything else we should know from a conversion, deliverability open rates, anything like that, that we should be aware of that, that we haven't discussed already?

Nikita: I think just going back from how to deliver the emails or what separates deliverability to what kind of content to send out, you know, which email addresses to send it out from. I think maybe like timing would probably be a good subject. So for example, like sending it out on times that people are actually active, which.

I recommend sending out during the weekdays. Try to avoid Friday nights, Saturdays, and Sundays, because that is, those are like dead zones on the internet side. People are away from their jobs, trying [00:27:00] to, you know, party or whatever they got going on, families and whatnot. So, try to send it out during Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Mondays, people are back at work, trying to work. and do their job. So emails may not be the highest priority on their list, but Tuesday, Thursday or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, that's when it's like caught up on work, kind of chilling at work. If it's nothing, it's not like a busy week and they're more likely to open your emails during the midday or during lunch break.

Allan: Nice. Well, Nikita, it's been a pleasure to have you on. You've been a wealth of wisdom. We're going to link to your website, of course. Where can people find you and find out about more about what you're doing? Oh, Nikita,

Nikita: Yeah. Best YouTube. I, you know, put out weekly videos on all things, email marketing. Just look up my name, Nikita Vakhrushev, and you'll be able to find me. If you want to work together or get audit on your email marketing side aspektagency.com, A S P E K T A G E N C E D O M. Nice, well, Nikita

Allan: it wass [00:28:00] a pleasure speaking with you and we'll link to all of those resources. Thank you

Nikita: Yeah. Pleasure, Allan. Thank you again.

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