In today’s episode, my guest is Adam Robinson, the CEO and Co-Founder from GetEmails. They are a software that helps shopify merchants acquire email addresses from their anonymous website visitors …. that don’t even fill out forms!
GetEmails acquires and identifies 45% of your anonymous web traffic and sends you deliverable email addresses of people that didn’t purchase or fill out a form.
Your open and click-through rates will be better than your house lists, it will be your highest-ROI channel, and we can give you an ROI guarantee.
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What You Will Learn Today:
- Acquiring 40% of your anonymous target consumer visits
- Building a brand out of targeted email marketing with the GetEmail software
- Understanding the landscape of e-commerce branding on Shopify
- Valuing connections with your audience and converting awareness to loyalty
- Benefitting from GetEmail and increasing your revenue in months!
Links and Resources Mentioned:
- Shopify
- Shopify Plus
- Apple Podcasts – eCommerce Fastlane
- Stitcher – eCommerce Fastlane
- Spotify – eCommerce Fastlane
- GetEmail
Connect with Adam
- Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @usegetemails
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-robinson-64409348/
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Well, hey there, my name is Steve Hutt. I’m senior merchant success manager here at Shopify. And welcome back to season five of eCommerce Fastlane, whether this is your first time listening or your weekly subscriber, I seriously appreciate the fact that you’re taking time today and listening to the show. I know there’s plenty of podcast choices out there in direct to consumer and e-commerce and it’s all marketing.
And you know, just the fact that you’re here today definitely means the world to me. And I know it does for my featured guest today. If this is your first time listening, this is an e-commerce show. We have honest and transparent conversations about building and thriving with your store powered by Shopify or Shopify plus. Now, if you’re an ambitious, lifelong learner, which you likely are since you’re here today, you’re definitely in the right place. Now new episodes are available twice weekly and they’re available from your favorite podcast apps like Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, and more. We’re also streaming live on Amazon music and YouTube. So, you can actually go and check that out too. I also highly recommend getting the full value of today’s episode that you click through from your podcast app to the show notes. And it will be at ecommercefastlane.com and there you’ll find the show transcript, all the links and all the resources that we mentioned today.
So, in today’s episode, my guest is Adam Robinson. Who’s the CEO and co-founder of a company called GetEmails and they’re at getemails.com and they’re a software. What they really do is they help Shopify merchants to acquire email addresses of their anonymous site visitors and you do not have to fill out any forms. All these pop-up and accident hands and all the things that I’ve been teaching for quite a while, about how to build your email list, build your SMS list, get your push notification opt-ins, all of these things are very important for building a brand, but today’s a little bit of an interesting departure about what about those people that you don’t get those things? How are we able to re-engage those people? And so, I know these are going to be lots of questions today. We’re going to unpack a lot of this though.
So, hi, Adam, welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.
Hi Steve, thanks for having me on.
My pleasure. I hope it didn’t butcher at the top of the show about what GetEmails does, but let’s talk first on a high level, and then I’ve got a couple more interesting, deep dive questions around what I believe you’re solving, but I’d like to hear from a founder first about some of the high level problems.
Well, you nailed it with your description. Before this company actually owned an email marketing app that served not Shopify customers, but it’s something like MailChimp or Klaviyo. It was, it serviced sort of like the main street, you know, flower shops and restaurants and everything. And one of the biggest problems in email that I observed is people’s lists shrink, people unsubscribe, emails are really hard to capture, even if you’re really good at driving traffic to your website. And you’re really good at pop ups. You’re going to get three, maybe four, maybe 5%. If you’re at an absolute genius of people to log into your website. And quite frankly, like that’s not good enough.
Everyone needs more emails than that. So I learned of a technology that was being used in a different way that would allow Shopify stores, any business for that matter, to capture 40% of their anonymous website traffic and resolve that anonymous website traffic to a deliverable email address and in the USA, meaning, not necessarily companies in the USA, but for traffic and USA citizens in a, you can in a totally legal way start retargeting these website visitors, over email.
Gradually warmed them up and move them down your funnel and convert them. You know, it’s, it’s a really easy technology to implement. Uh, it plays nicely with any sort of tech stack, you know, Shopify, MailChimp, Klaviyo, Yotpo, any of the other, email merchants. And, you know, it’s a simple implementation on the messaging side too, we just say, copy the welcome series you already have, change the subject line of the first email to thanks for coming by the site, and if the user, if the visitor, if the subscriber opens an email in that welcome series, keep retargeting them in your newsletter. And then whenever you go back and calculate the ROI, two months, three months later, you will see that it is phenomenal, very straight forward.
Yeah, no, this is lovely. And I noticed too that there’s quite a few, three or four different parts. There’s the acquire part, what you’re talking about, but he’s collecting either kind of anonymous, like visitors and kind of retargeting to them. I just, I think that’s really interesting. There’s another part, I guess that’s the engage part, this triggered emails.
It’s interesting. We’ll dig into that in a few minutes. And then there’s the expand part, which creates more word-of-mouth expansion through other different channels. Um, you have a thing called a social ID graph, which I thought was quite interesting. Then the reactivation, how to safely re-engage emails that maybe are people that have not opened lately with some kind of special offer for them.
So, it’s kind of unique. When they want to talk about first is the origin story, because I think people listen to this podcast, they always wonder, like, you know, I think it’s a lot more than, ‘Hey, I want to own a SAS company with recurring revenue’ that I think a lot of times annually mentioned at an email marketing company, our solution at one point kind of early on in your journey.
And that’s what kind of got you here today. So, I think it’s a lot more than just MRR for you. I think there’s a larger story around willing to help brands. Based on the kind of where we’re at today. So maybe you can let us know about how the pieces came together for you and your co-founder like the desire and the expertise around wanting to build this software.
Sure. Well, without going into the two-hour long version, um, I was a wall street trader. I worked at Lehman brothers and traded credit default swaps. And after the financial crisis, my job effectively went away for all intents and purposes. And my roommates in New York, they started Vimeo the video sharing website in the apartment that I was living in.
So, I was obsessed with this idea of being a tech entrepreneur, because I watched these guys have this, you know, fantastic ride. And then, you know, long story short, I had no idea how to do this. You know how to rework my life from being a trader to a tech entrepreneur. So, I just started trying to hang out with people that were doing stuff and made a bunch of bad investments really, and you know, I came across this one opportunity where we were basically able to build this little email newsletter app and systematically acquire customers from, you know, the, the competitor. I’m actually not allowed to say this because of something that I signed, but the competitor to MailChimp the first email marketing app.
So, like we were bringing in these customers to this newsletter app and I really liked the nature of the business. I liked building software for people. I liked making it better, for these businesses. And, you know, one thing, a problem that I sort of ran into was with that part of the market in particular. And it’s like, kind of under the Klaviyo market and these were brick and mortar businesses that were not e-commerce, they weren’t making money in their email is difficult customer base to really add features for, for somewhat frustrating and MailChimp absolutely owns that market. Like there’s no, you know what I mean? It’s just, they have a free product. It’s the best they’re spending a billion a year on advertising. It’s just so hard to compete. Would that be offering when they’re building faster than you, they’re doing everything better. So anyway, I started focusing on trying to do stuff that they weren’t doing, and I tried a few things they, you know, sort of did okay. And then, you know, I found out about this identity resolution space, and it was just captivating to me, this idea that you could do this, you know, it just seemed like magic. You know what I mean? Like when I first saw I’m like, what do you mean you can get the email addresses for 40% of your anonymous website visitors and okay.
Surely, they would be crappy email addresses and it turns out that’s not true either. Like they deliver better than your house list does. So, it’s like, it just keeps getting better and better. So, you know, my original plan was to use this feature to grow my email marketing application, which there were so many lessons in there. I mean the email marketing space is very, it’s mature, been around for a long time. The products have not changed very much in a very long time. There are 200 vendors selling virtually the same thing. And then there’s a couple brands that have the best brand, the best product, the best people, and they crush everybody.
So, and they’ve been up all the channels and, you know, you’re competing with 150 different vendors. So that’s a hard environment to compete in, you know, just trying to be different. And this product really is different and no one else is selling anything like it. But when we made it a feature in the ESP and the email marketing application, people were signing up for the email marketing application because of the feature using it, downloading the CSV of the leads and then putting it in their email marketing app, Klaviyo drip, whatever, and saying it was an incredible product.
So that to me, you know, I love like reading the Y Combinator blog about how to like, build a great startup or whatever, that, to me is a great indicator of product market fit. Like it’s these users who are willing to endure a horrible user experience and they’re still giving it like a 10 NPS score. So, like, okay, like clearly I’m not going to be able to get people to switch. They don’t want to switch email marketing apps from Klaviyo to my email app that was never designed for e-commerce people in the first place, because that’s, who was really loving this? So, this would be a great product if I spun it out, connected it to everything and made it its own thing. So, in January, 2020, we did that.
And then I ended up selling that email marketing application to private equity. And since then, we’ve been almost two and a half years bootstraps, 10 million ARR with six people, which is so awesome. It’s just been such a fun thing and just product keeps getting better and better. You know, like the ferocity of the word of mouth and the speed of introductions we get.
It’s just, it’s such a great, like, you know, as an entrepreneur, you don’t want, that’s the best ego stroke possible, you know, very clear that it’s working for people and it’s driving ROI and like, you know, it’s just, so I selfishly want to do that for Shopify merchants. Like, you know what I mean? It like, it like makes me excited that I’m selling something that they’re making 10 times their money on.
Yeah, I’m going to talk about the legal side of this, because I think I just gonna be devil’s advocate. You mentioned that, you know, 40% of the are anonymous site visitors are able to somehow extract an email address that’s legally available and usable, here in North America. I think, you know, just obviously it’s on a lot of consumers’ minds is GDPR is overseas, but CCPA is California privacy protection. There are all different things going on. So just would like to understand from your side, because if 40% of these emails are, that are unknown and then you have them, through your technology, this kind of like identity thing, you mentioned, just walk us through how this is legal.
Sure. So, the critical difference between the US and Europe is that at a federal level, email in the US, the CAN-SPAM laws and opt-out legislation, whereas GDPR, that their federal level, if you want to call it, that is opt in, opt in for data collection on the internet, everything in the US in this CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was reviewed in 2019. It’s not changing anytime soon. It states that you are allowed to send an email if it has an opt-out link in it. So, the question is, well, why don’t I just spam everybody then? And the reason is because what matters in email is not the law. What matters in email is what Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail want, and you know, what they want. They want high opens, high clicks, low unsubscribe, low spam complaint.
It doesn’t matter where you get your list and who they opted into, through where, a list that is high open rate, high click rate, low unsubscribe, low spam complaint. That list no matter where it came from is better than the opposite, even if those were all first party opt-ins, right?
But the consequence of violating a CAN-SPAM law, that’s not what people are concerned about. People are concerned about blowing up their deliverability. So, but I think. It is confusing. So, moving on to the California legislation, that’s also opt out legislation. They would love for it to be like GDPR.
It can’t be, because if it was people would sue California under federal law for creating a law that directly opposes federal law. So, it’s very similar to GDPR in that it’s, you know, provides consumer information disclosure to the consumer. It sort of allows the consumer to opt out, don’t sell my information, please delete my data, all that stuff, but it does not say that consumers have to opt in or via collection or email. So that is what makes all of this sort of untouched by, by legislation in look, if somehow there was a sweeping federal mandate that like made this illegal, like I would, you know, we’d be selling different products than this, but, um, I don’t foresee that happening just because it’s like, once all of the other states are now enacting legislation that emulates the California legislation. And it’s sort of moving in this direction. Like it’s not clear to me or any of the privacy attorneys that I use, that train is going to do this massive like shift anytime soon. So yeah, but strictly from a legal perspective, 100% legal.
Whether or not, you believe that doing this tactic of de anonymization is ethical, is a different story. I have found that most Shopify merchants, when they find out what the ROI is and how good the engagement of the emails are, they’re law-abiding citizens, and they’re happy to do it in the US. That’s been what I’ve seen.
Going to unpack a story. I think in a few minutes, I snooped around a bit on your site, and I noticed a couple of case studies and stuff, but maybe I might get you to expand a bit more on that one in a minute. So, if I’m clear then, so brands still have their creative that they’re. I guess through Klaviyo, if that’s or Omnisend or whatever kind of platform they’re using, they have certain flows, either cart and browse recovery, and just kind of, it’s almost just lifecycle marketing and it’s just like my active, my at-risk, my churn customers and how I’m and how I, the playbook through email of how I deal with these different cohorts of customers that is all a constant, am I correct with that?
More or less.
So, what changes now, if I have, cause there’s going to be many brands listening right now that have a decent flow, they’ve got product market fit, they’re doing their thing. They’re on Shopify plus probably doing their thing. I’m now saying, hey, get emails might be an interesting opportunity for you. And so I want to make sure that the lift isn’t too much. I know the ROI we’re going to be there. We’ll get into the case study in a minute, but I just want to join us, say, hey, I’ve got all this creative over here and flows and triggers and all these different things. What happens when your platform is kind of added on as part of the tech stack.
Let me tell you how light of a lift it is just to try it out. Right? That’s all that we’re suggesting. We’re not saying that you should, you know, do anything other than that. I want you to try it out in a way that is totally safe. You believe that it’s totally safe and it doesn’t take a lot of effort and you just see that it’s working.
And then we build from there, we scale out to other stuff. So, the simplest way to try this out would be to put the code either just on every page or just put it on, you know, some lower in the funnel pages, whatever you want, but cap the email flow to something that is such a small amount of emails per day, that it couldn’t possibly hurt you even if you didn’t believe me. And I was wrong about how good the deliverability is, right? So, you don’t even have to believe me, just cap it at a level where you can’t get hurt and you can tell us what that is. And we will cap it for you.
So, we’ll let the script run for an hour and we’ll come up with an amount of money that you want to spend for the slight trial period. So, let’s say it’s a few hundred bucks and literally all you have to do is put the script in the header of your Shopify site, or we have, you know, instructions or in Google tag manager. If you use that, if you want to get a little bit more sophisticated say, well, I only want people who viewed two pages or like, I only want people who stuck on my website for five seconds, very easy to program Google tag manager.
So, get the, you get this pixel on your site. Whether it’s Klaviyo or MailChimp or Omnisend, like you said, we just, in our app, you hit the integrations tab. You build up, it’s like a one-click integration and you basically send these contacts to a journey in Klaviyo. Now on the Klaviyo side, before you’ve turned everything on, what I recommend do for this trial period, and this is a super light lift, is just take your existing welcome series. Copy it. Change the subject line of the first email, ‘thanks for coming by the site’, instead of thanks for subscribing to my list and let it run. And then anybody who opens in that flow, add them to your active list and then what you have to do to see the total amount of money that you made.
You can’t just look at the welcome series flow. Klaviyo only does attribution at a campaign level. However, the only way that makes sense to look at this would be to let a period of time to go by. And let’s say in 60 days, you go into Klaviyo, you take this entire segment of emails and you sum their customer lifetime values, the total purchases these people have made.
And then you look at how much you’ve paid us, and you see that it’s like, you know, five or 10% of the money you made and everybody’s happy and you sort of, you know, keep going, grow, try some other products, whatever. But like that is to me, I think somebody can get this thing stood up in under one hour. If they’re like mildly proficient. And then it’s upgrade, downgrade, cancel anytime. It’s like, I’m not, we’re not, you know, we’re making this as easy as possible to prove the value to yourself.
Okay. I like this. Now, do you feel that, um, every Shopify brand is worthy to want to start using GetEmails or is there a sweet spot that really makes the most sense at scale?
Well, there’s certainly a sweet spot. So, if you don’t have any US traffic, it won’t work because it’s only a US database and it’s all in the IPS or ring fence, the US. So that’s one.
If you don’t have traffic in general, if you just started your website, it’s not going to work, because we’re resolving emails out of people’s traffic.
If you don’t have a profitable email program, you’re going to end up buying these emails, sticking them into an unprofitable email program. And you’re going to be like, I’m wasting even more money than I was before, it’s not going to work. Right. So, I think that the combination, if you’re like gun to your head, what’s the revenue level where, you know, there’s a 90% shot that this is going to work for Shopify store. I’d say probably 5 million, you know, like the plus audience, if you have a Shopify plus store, there is a 90% chance that this will work really well for you. Like if you have made it far enough to be that level of merchant. So, and it totally can work with people smaller than that, but like, that’s just the sweet spot. It’s, you know, usually it’s like, you’re good at email by that time, like, you know, you have real traction product market fit with the product in general and you know, it works.
Now you brought up a few things about some existing tech stacks, I think is one of the comments that always my merchants, I have a book of business and Shopify, and I always, I have monthly calls with most of my brands and my talk about it. You know, I do a couple shows a week and so it’s eight episodes that I’ve recorded. And then I come on and, you know, let them know. And, you know, we usually one or two episodes usually resonate with the brands that I manage in different orders. And so, you know, for example, one’s going to, a lot of them say to me, Steve, okay. ‘This is great. Thank you for recording this stuff. And I think this is great. I always want to learn about new and exciting piece of technology that can help us move the needle or be early adopters’ and these sorts of things. And so, they get that part of it that always the pushback from engineering or the marketing team is just, okay, do you play nicely with other pieces of tech? And so, I went and I checked, obviously there’s a link on your website for slash integrations and I see there’s lots of partners. So can you walk us through the intentionality behind. What you do as it relates to the partner ecosystem and other solutions?
Sure. I mean, my approach this entire time has been, you know, it’s pretty simple. The more people we connect to, the more valuable this thing. So, you know, we connect to everybody and if you go to that integrations page, you’ll see. I mean, there’s, you know, every messaging platform under the sun, There’s basically an integration too. And you know, the reason why it’s, it’s just a really simple integration.
All it’s really doing is sending over a contact in real time, which is then triggering a journey in the messaging platform. So, it’s, you know, we have a guy that builds these things and updates them full time. It takes them 48 hours to build a new one. If there’s anything not on there that a merchant wants, it’s a super simple built. And, you know, that’s part of the reason why this thing works so well just to kind of activity.
And also, I noticed too that you have a Zapier there. So, for those that maybe don’t have a direct connection, there are ways of pushing that data through Zapier too or to another tool of choice. So that’s interesting.
And then from the CRM side, so I see Zoho is listed here, I think in Ontraport. I think what’s interesting. I think in the Shopify world, you know, there’s quite a few solutions. The customer, obviously with a K that’s, the, you know, a Facebook property for CRM, a gorgeous is quite big. Um, as a few others out there, would there be a benefit in connecting your solution to a CRM? Like what sort of records would be in there that would be actionable and important for someone who… I don’t know who’s a customer support rep that has access to something that’s being triggered or an email has been revealed, through a CRM. I just, I guess, want to understand the logic behind it, I guess.
So, we built those, the Zoho one we’ll build anything that literally anybody asks for. It was definitely not an e-comm store that asked for the Zoho integration. What I would say is that the majority of the people that we’ve sold to are this Shopify plus Klaviyo type of guy, these guys. The simplest way to implement this is just to go straight into the messaging app.
I would say a much larger brand and we deal with a couple of them. If they have a CDP, which is, you know, a CRM sort of deals with both anonymous and known there’s things that they would want to do, that would be really interesting for them. For instance, we can tie together, you know, if it has, you know, three different email addresses and they’ve laid first party pixels on two of your devices that are anonymous.
We can tie that all back to one email address of you, which is very interesting and compelling. It’s just for a much bigger company, you know, somebody is huge, but yeah, I mean, you don’t see a lot of CRMs that Shopify and Shopify plus merchants would be using because there’s not, you know, it’s what we’ve been selling so far is also sort of a prospecting tool. It’s like, they’re not really customers yet when we’re adding the record. And, you know, by the time they become customers, so much more information is like filled in at bat, goes to the CRM. So, you know, I just, for what we’re doing right now, the CRM integration is. I think it adds more complexity than benefit that brim
Just end of the day yet. So, it seems like it’s all the marketing automation tools, the biggies, Klaviyo being the biggest one, you know, and then the Omnisend and others, you know, other different ones that are out there. You’re allowed those flows to be triggered copying over the campaigns over at least the easy lift with the welcome sequence. And then, uh, yeah, so, okay. So that part I get, I think that’s awesome. That’s easy to implement. I want to make another pivot over to a story now, because I think, I think this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Cause I think people listening to the show go, okay, wait a second. ‘Who else has kind of like made the choice to start with, GetEmails and get rolling on the platform and why do they do it? Are they a Klaviyo customer?’ So, I don’t know. Hopefully I saw a few on your website, so I’ll let you choose who you want to chat about, but it just like to understand a bit about like what motivated them from their current process. What were they missing out of the Klaviyo side of welcome sequence and lifecycle marketing that good brands are executing on well? Like what were they missing and searching around. They found you and now you used you. And then what happened? The other end? I’ve I’ve read the, I’ve read the case study, but I want to hear it in your own words, as you share with our listeners.
Sure. So Cariuma was one of our first customers and I think they’re just such a cool brand. You know, they raised venture and they’re growing super fast. And, you know, even right now, it’s kind of a challenging environment for some e-com brands. And these guys are still absolutely crushing it with their growth. We cold emailed them and they, I’m not sure that they were actively searching for our solution, but I think when they heard what we could do, they were just like, Okay, like…
“Really?”
‘I’m going to try this.’ Yeah, exactly. ‘I’m going to try this.’ And then it very quickly became something where it was like an absolutely, you know, central part of their whole, you know, marketing effort, general. I mean, their ROI is phenomenal. It’s I don’t even like it should, you know, we have a dashboard and there’s times where it’s 25, 30 X ROI its case study says 13.
It gets higher over time because people make repeat purchases on the same email. It’s this like snowball effect, but they also value the first party data in owning it, irrespective of the ROI, which I think is, you know, somewhat unique about them versus the rest of the, the customers, you know, most chocolate brands like, okay, this is another channel, you know, if it’s outperformed on other channels, great, I’ll do it.
If it doesn’t, then I don’t really care. I think these guys would do it. Even if the ROI wasn’t quite as good, because they believe that we’re going into this world where you need to own your audience. So, they want to have as much of this information as humanly possible. So, yeah, I mean, they really only do the process that I described to you.
They warm people up with this welcome series and then they just retarget them daily and their newsletter. And, you know, by virtue of having been added to their email list, there’s all these flow-through benefits to the down the funnel, you know, abandonment emails that, that these users get sent and yeah, just, it works phenomenally well for these guys.
Yeah, and this is lovely. I had a question about the regulated markets. Is there any issues with cannabis or hemp or CBD kind of products if you’re still doing it? Legally adults is another whole industry. So, like, I just want to make sure that you still play nicely with those. If you’re able to do it through your email marketing solution. Currently, this is just concatenates along with it and such as the same workflow, but you’re the one helping uncovered this, these missing 40%.
So, the, the cannabis definitely is fun. We’ve only had a couple people try it and emails and interesting thing. It’s not like the adult; I think is just a really hard industry to email to in general. Emailing an anonymous website visitor adult related content is something that I never think would work. Period. Full stop. That’s just my opinion and what it seemed from like two people trying it. But the cannabis has done, you know, delivers great. You know, these guys love it, obviously because they’re restricted in what they can do in the, the ad platform.
I see now, the reason I ask, because I think I said, I think pink cherry is a large kind of adult company. And I think pink cherry in Canada, I think launched on Shopify plus. And I think they’re doing their thing. I just was curious if there’s any value to them, but then once again, I could see people that may have gone to the site and they want to be there, but they just want to be emailed about the fact and they’ll come back if they want to.
It would be really interesting. This is not the type of site that tried it before. You know, it was less of us. It was more of a publisher adult that *inaudible* for. Yeah, I mean, but I could it would be…
Oh, I see. Sorry to interrupt you. But there also is like the sexual wellness brands too, that are available that are like CBD infused products, whatever those are, arousal things. The only other things that *inaudible*, you know, it is what it is, but it’s just like, I just want to make sure that. Anybody listening today, they could be in all different industries. I just wanna make sure that oh yeah, I’m in CBD or I’m in this, I’m a Nadia. I can see myself using it.
Sure. If you’re listening, I would love to see its worth.
Yeah, no doubt.
The small size, you know, it would just be so interesting to know this is great stuff. I mean, this is like real. Yeah. You may have to make the content of the emails. Was, you know, you’re probably sending pictures of, I dunno.
Yeah. That’s a little bit different than their typical welcome sequence. No doubt. All right. So, thank you for sharing that case study. I’m going to link these all up for sure. In the show notes, just, and there’s a whole bunch of others, like, gosh, I don’t know, 20-ish case studies up there. So, like alcohol brands and like, you really do take care of like a lot of markets. Fashion, accessories, you’re into alcohol.
You’re in. Yeah, so it’s good to all, make sure you have all that and show notes. And if you talk about the future, because I know you’re saying that you’re mostly focused right now on this kind of anonymous 40% and really helping with that. And that’s where the most kind of product adoption is happening right now. There are other parts of your platform. This, like I mentioned, the engage, the expand, the reactivate, these sorts of things just would like to know where do you see the platform headed? Cause right now you’re, you’re very acquiring these email addresses through, you know, your method. Aligning them all up and just giving brands that extra nudge, they need to kind of get higher conversions, but where else do you see it going? Like is SMS part of this at some point? I’d probably more opt-in challenges, but
So, we’re, we’re beta testing, this product, which you mentioned earlier engage. And you know, if you want to think about what we’re doing right now and what we sold for the last two and a half years, it’s very top of the funnel, email marketing.
It’s like, people are hitting your homepage. We’re giving you an email. You’re sending them a welcome series and then you’re putting it in your newsletter. Another problem that merchants have is abandonment emails, cart product category. Those are the most lucrative emails you send out. You’re not sending out emails to these people unless they’re logged in. Even if you have their opt-in. Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah it does.
So, our tech right now, as it stands, we can help people send out four or five times more of these emails. The people that are already on their list just by identifying them in popping that the vent over to Klaviyo, or for example, SME brought up SOS attentive, right? If we can send an email to attentive of someone that is known to the Shopify merchant, and if they have the phone number and attentive and they bail on a product, they can send product abandonment through attentive. And then that’s a super high *inaudible*. So that to me is like the most obvious next step.
It’s like, we just need to move down the funnel and start, you know, giving our brands more ROI that way. And then, you know, we have this incredible, this only really works for people who’ve been mailing for like a long, long time. Like Warby Parker is our biggest customer. They have 6 million inactive email addresses that they’re not mailing because they went stale, if you want to call it that. And the problem with the stale email list is it’s full of spam traps. If anyone’s tried to email a stale email list, you know what happens, it can just blow you up. We can actually, we’re buying a bunch of open and click data from the email ecosystem to make the first product work, because we only give an email address to a brand if it’s opened or clicked in the last 14 days.
So, then that’s really why that product works so well. It’s a super hot email address, super hot in the email ecosystem. A brand can give us their inactive file and we can listen for open events that are happening in other emails out there in the email ecosystem. In for someone you’re not emailing, we can send an event in real time when someone’s clicking on something else and you can hit them with a reactivation email that says, ‘Hey, here’s 15% off’, come back or whatever. It’s crazy high open rate. It’s a really great technology. So, you know, the idea over time would be, you know, building more and more of these things that just help people with their retention and LTV maximizatio through messaging, you know, involving identity resolution and data, you know, that’s the, that’s the future of the platform, you know, it’s sort of diversifying away from this one thing. Some people think is sketchy and having a whole suite of products that really helps people increase LTV and retain.
I think in listening to that’s interesting Shopify in the last, uh, well, I think they’d been alpha and beta testing, the Shopify audiences where Shopify is making the decision on behalf of a brand where they believe their next sales going to come from. And I think anonymously, they’re sending email addresses too, to Facebook for Facebook, kind of top of funnel campaigns and some retargeting campaigns and lookalikes and things like that. I know it was anecdotal at the beginning, but the Roaz is significantly better doing a prospecting campaign from Shopify audiences. Mostly this is for Shopify plus brands where they have the app installed and you kind of pause your existing Facebook ads campaigns, but use your creative, but then let Shopify then supply encrypted to the email addresses of who we believe your next customer is going to be. And I know it’s working. I could see there being value with GetEmails.
Like, you know, if 40% are unknown, regardless of your Shopify audiences, customer or not. And that’s kind of what you’re doing for acquisition strategies of just paid ads, paid social kind of thing. I think it’d be interesting to have your tool revealing these 40% of this browse, a cart recovery kind of things. And then sending out campaigns to Facebook based on that, like, is this a possibility?
So, you know, this is an area that we just haven’t even gotten to, yet. But it’s better than 40%. Facebook can accept SHA-256 hashes, and we can give our customers SHA-256 hashes on like 80% of their website visitors. So, it’s a little different than the Shopify audience product, because they’re giving you people who they think are buyers, right? I would be giving people a retargeting audience that’s persistent, and my pixel is not blocked because I don’t have an app in the apple app store. And it can be used for your retargeting audience. So, you know, we have the integration built. It’s just the email ROI sale is so easy that like, uh, I just haven’t even gotten there yet, but that’s absolutely, you know, sort of at the same time, we’re beta testing this lower in the funnel stuff, trigger stuff. We’re going to be getting people to start running Facebook traffic against these retargeting audiences to see. Yeah.
All right, open up a can of worms to help, but it’s just, you know, it’s one of those things. I just think brands are really, really chomping at the bit, just with the cookie list thing. And I always 14.5 and all the craziness and blended Roaz and all this stuff, they’re trying to figure it away. And you know, obviously with, you know, in a pandemic is still here, but retail is opened up that buying habits. I think some brands are feeling a little bit, you know, e-commerce is down, it’s overall net up year, over year, but it’s not, the gangbusters have been for two years. And so knowing that brands are trying to get crafty about, well, how do we maximize LTV? Or how do we improve our conversion rate, our average order value. And like, there’s lots of main KPIs that are important. It sounds like you’re have a great tool just to help reveal a lot of this unknown site, visitor traffic that they are getting and, or are paying for, but they don’t know who they are. I think it’s a no-brainer. I think it’s pretty cool. I’m sold. I’m sold!
I do too.
Sign me up, sign me up.
I mean, I might be talking to my book, but I think it’s incredible. I don’t know why every, you know, we hear all the time, people, like, I don’t know why everybody’s not using this, like, golly! I mean, stop telling me that. So, I know it.
Well because they weren’t on this podcast yet. They gotta be, they gotta be on eCommerce Fastlane, first. So here we are. So we are nearing the end of the show. Where do you want to send everybody? Like where can people get more information and can they get rolling on this thing? And then I understand you want to have a little offer for those listening today. If they want to kick the tires and kind of get going on.
Sure. So, there’s just tons of information on getemails.com, resources section, tons of case studies, tons of blog posts, educational stuff, go podcasts.
Okay, perfect.
So, the offer the fast lane offer. If you go to getemails.com/fastlane, they’ll show you how to get 25% off for your first three months. However, I want to do one better. For anybody listening to this podcast, if you haven’t 5x what you’ve paid us, in six months of using the product, I will literally just hand you all your money back. I won’t even ask a question. So, remind me if you don’t make that money and come in to cancel and I will just give you your money back.
Yeah. Okay. That’s a good offer.
Mean that’s how certain I am that it will work, especially if you sort of meet that criteria of being like, kind of a plus type.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, this is great. Well, you know, thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, I apologize maybe if I’ve asked a lot of questions, just kind of off the cuff, but the idea is that, you know, I had this life of learning kind of mantra too, and you know, you’re newish on my radar, but it’s very clear that you’re doing something very unique in the marketplace. And that’s the goal of this podcast really is to educate these DTC brands that there’s things out there that, you know, if you’re willing to take a small risk and try something new, there’s the tried and true plus technology partners. And we get all that part of it, this is a unique add on you’re already a Klaviyo or Omnisend kind of customer or .digital, whatever you’re using, you know, this is another piece that can add on just to help with conversions. I just want to thank you. I think you’re really onto something. I, hopefully this is one of many podcast recordings that we can do into the future. As you keep iterating on you. And we figure out the opt-in legal compliance of SMS, but I think you’re onto something really unique here. And thanks for coming on the show and sharing.
Steve. Thanks for having me.
I hope you got yourself a great day.
Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. It’s my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value. Through growth strategies, tactics and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms.
All with my personal goal, to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify. Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey.
Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.
