Rethinking Email Marketing in 2022

Hey, I just want to do some light housekeeping and let you know that there were reason I'm recording this podcast This episode today is one Um I've been getting emails from you So thank you for sending me emails because having that sort of community feedback sort of area has been it's it's It's It makes me want to do this Does that make sense It makes me want to sit down here by myself in a cold basement And talk about email marketing and other things But that's but that's

why I'm recording this So thank you for emailing me and please please email me and what we're going to do Is I'm going to pose A question to you What do you want to learn What are you what are you what are you struggling with in your business and your online business What maybe you think I could help you with Instead of just emailing me and saying Hey you know I heard the end of the episode and you said the email and here I am I want to I want questions and I'm going to answer those questions

on future episodes of this podcast Uh so so email me matt@moneylab.co I'll say it again Matt at money lab.co it's so easy to remember Okay So uh today we're going to talk about uh email marketing and it's very top of mind for me right now in 2022 Uh and I have a story to tell but first I want to tell the story which you can read about over at money lab Why I switched from convert kit to active campaign But before that why did I switch from a Weber to MailChimp and then MailChimp

to convert kit and then convert kit to active campaign Well long story short A Weber is not my favorite Uh at least back in the day this is many many years ago Like when I first got into online marketing and online business Uh it was like the only game in town I think mainly because they had a very aggressive affiliate program and everybody in their mothers was mentioning it So that's kind of why I started with a Weber but very quickly Uh didn't like it

just the aesthetic of it And MailChimp was like kind of the cool kid in town and they had a really nice aesthetic Uh which is I'm kind of a sucker for switched to MailChimp And then I realized that it didn't have a lot of automation sequences and like fancy stuff that I wanted I'm sure they have that stuff now but um I switched to ConvertKit even though I thought I was never going to do it But I did Thanks to Nathan Berry Uh we jumped on a phone call And he was like look here's here's why I

think it'll work for you Boom I'm in Okay I'm in for ConvertKit for about a year And there was one big limitation for me I own a company called swim university We are a seasonal pool business And ideally I had this vision of creating this evergreen newsletter But unfortunately because it's seasonal I didn't have a way for somebody to get on the list And then get emails for like the April month you know the summer months

you know that sort of thing And and they didn't really have a way for me to do that That was automatic And I also really want it that To loop people through it So for instance and this is what I ended up doing I want it to have an evergreen newsletter That was the entire I could see the entire year Here are the emails you're getting in January here the emails you're getting an August And depending on when you subscribed you would just

get plopped into whatever month you were in And you will start getting your August emails and then going forward And then when the year reset like in December you just go right back to January and you would just keep going through this this automation over every single year Now I don't think people are Subscribed to my list for I don't know maybe five years whether it's getting the same emails over and over again but here's the thing

With this as like I I know that this content is useful when it needs to be useful Otherwise there's no point in getting an email about it So for instance why would you get an email about opening your pool in January but What's the what's the harm of getting that opening email every year Because every year you need to kind of like relearn it People are not in the pool industry or people that own pools They don't It's not like a hobby to them where they want to learn and retain the knowledge

They just they get the knowledge when they need it Which is which is what's great about some university is that knowledge just kind of I can just repeat over and over again because it's useful when they need it So it's like education on demand Convert kit you You know they they they do a lot of things Well they didn't do this one thing which I knew was like special to me And I'm like Doug Willow another company Can I do this I don't know Well that's when active campaign

actively reached out to me And they're like look Uh would you like to try it And I it's always been on my radar to do to to look at active campaign because I have some friends that use it and they're like this is like way way powerful And I was like okay I kinda need powerful I jumped on a call with active campaign And they showed me The usage of goals within an automation and with goals you can set people to move through your automation depending on what month it is

So I was like that's exactly what I need And you can loop people through the automation which at the time when I switched convert didn't do a deal I do think now you can loop people through the same automation Um which is also great for sales pitches You know like if you can you could have a flash sale that happens four times a year Why do you need to recreate that four different times when you could just have one Flash sale sequence and you just send the same people through it over and

over again You know when they need to buy it or w Or if they haven't bought it So the idea of sending people through the same Sequence Multiple times as long as you can control that I thought was very useful but the goals inactive campaign in the automations is great Um so that that was the big reason for Switching was lupus bull Seasonal automations It actually gave me exactly what I had envisioned for swim university

all this time The other benefit Hidden benefit was that it was actually cheaper for me because with convert kit I had to have three separate convert kit accounts And When you add those up Uh it actually costs more money for me because my other two lists are not nearly as big as my swim university list Um so I was paying a lot of money for the swim university list and then the base price For the other two lists with active campaign I'm sort of paying now per like group of subscribers

for all my brands So all the brands Live under one Active campaign account And I could do a lot of cool things with that Like if I design a good email for some university I can use those templates and redesign them Quickly for brew cabin or whatever which is what I did So it ended up actually being not much cheaper but a little bit cheaper for me to use active campaign and throw all three of my brands Under one roof as opposed to having three separate accounts

So That's why I switched from ConvertKit to active campaign But that's not really the story here Okay I kind of had it set up really easily I focused a lot of my time on email marketing in 2021 I was really uh doubling down on this idea of an a one-time offers where somebody subscribes to my email list they get sent to a one-time offer page you know 50 off my courses One of my flagship products And then they get put on a list And that's it now The you know that people

always say there's money in the list And I am now I used to like not really be good at email marketing and never really focused on it And then in 2021 I'm like come on I got to get good at this This is this is like What everyone says is the most profitable part of their business So I did I started like really aggressively collecting email addresses I create it Cheat sheets Like lead magnets For all my brands Which increased my You know signup rates I started running paid advertising to

opt-in pages to get people to subscribe I was in the business of collecting people Now if you go to money lab And you search for my untouchable business model It is Nally core principle of my business which is you know be super generous with your content and your time Uh collect the people that you're that come to your website because Here's an example You might be you might you might write this amazing article and people find it super valuable right

Cool You did well but maybe it didn't convert Maybe they didn't buy any of the affiliate links on your page Maybe they didn't You know buy your product that you're selling They just found the information super useful And that's great But how many of those people are actually going to bookmark that post There's just not going to do it So how are you Like what happens if you come out with a new product like you know that person was on your site and they found your stuff valuable but now you have

no way to communicate with them They're gone They came and they went So you're spending all of this time Writing this amazing content getting search traffic Which is really hard to do And then you're just letting those people disappear Like just go away No you have to like you worked hard Keep them there Okay Think about it this way You like let's say you have a brick and mortar store in in a small town And you have like street traffic people are coming into your store and they're just

they're just poking around just looking And then they then they leave Well What if you come out with a new product or you you know something was in stock that they maybe were looking for and then you know you didn't have it then but now you do well now you have no way to communicate with that person So you should be collecting email addresses Collecting a way to communicate with those customers And the best way I think to do

that Is through email marketing As opposed to say You know social media which you know you can't really one-on-one email people They may never see the message Super important So that's what I did I set up all these lead magnets I was collecting email addresses aggressively And When you signed up To let's just say some university You want it You're There was a cheat sheet I need help my pool I have a pool care cheat sheet Boom You sign up your email address I emailed you the cheat sheet but

meanwhile I sent you to an OTO page In case you want it My cores are 50 off You have 24 hours to get it whatever whatever that's a whole different episode And then once they got into the email list I sent them through a little automation that kind of filtered them out Are you were you just like serious about this Like did you really want to download this Whatever if they did click and download it then I move them through Into sort of an onboarding sequence

You know five day email sequence kind of showing the whole business and what we do and then moved them into my lupus seasonal newsletter automation Forever You know And that all works really well It's been working very well Uh Until I got an email from active campaign that was like Um You're getting a lot of spam complaints I was like oh you mean I'm getting spam complaint Well the people that you're sending this email to you know this first email of this cheat sheet they're

saying they never signed up for the list Y Okay Mom So it turns out and you know I kind of knew this I'm not going to lie I was getting a lot of bought sign-ups Now I thought I had put in a good automation that checks For clicks and replies and we'd at those people out So it was just sort of a pain to deal with right Like I might get like 500 signups a day but really only like 50 of those people were real in the restaurant bots

But what I didn't consider is What if those bot addresses were real people and then they were all getting I was sending out 500 emails With this thing they never signed up for of course you're going to hit the spam button How do you fix this You know I you know at the time I'm like man I really thought I had this all figured out But just having a form on your website Exposes you to bots now I'm thinking well I don't really want to implement

double opt-in meaning Somebody's email somebody signs up And before it sends them anything it sends them an email address or sends them an email that says are you real click this button to confirm And then once you confirm you're confirmed and then you start to get the rest of the emails That I hated that idea because it's like well oh the first email I'm sending you is just to make sure that you're just you're not you're you're real and that you

wanted this but here's the problem with that solution That's the same solution I'm doing except I'm doing it by sending them the cheat sheet First the downloadable And when then when they click that they're essentially confirming their email address So I was already doing that But that wasn't good enough because now there's 500 people You know 75 80 of which are all not didn't sign up for the list You know some of them are bullshit addresses But they're getting this first email

That's like dude I didn't sign up for this Spam Okay So what is active campaign recommend I do They recommend I add recapture To all my forms I'll I say come on Oh okay So now everyone who signs up their email address has to click a button that says I'm not a robot or they have to uh pick out fricking traffic lights and a bunch of pictures which is the most annoying thing ever I mean the I'm not a robot Checkbox is not that annoying And you see that you see that more often

I'm like I basically wrote back to him and said I'm not doing it because I care about page speed in my head I thought Well I'm I'm I'm not adding that to my forms on my website If you go and look at carpet in or any of my websites Before I implemented recapture It was just like where are you going to put it That would look good It just wouldn't look good anywhere And then you know you're adding JavaScript like a layer of JavaScript to the site and I'm just like I don't want to do this So I

thought okay let me look into it a little bit more And I found there's recaptured version three Which is this new version where the for the user they just sign up But in the backend you kind of send off And verify this email address is real or not And then it allows it to go through or not But the coding of that was way too complicated way above my skill level And I'm like all right That's and to have to do that across all three of my brands

I'm like that's sounds like A week's worth of work I could pay somebody to sort of implement that for me but what if it breaks And I can't control it Uh all this stuff So I ended up Um Saying Okay let me let me try something I had an idea So I tried it on money lab first Instead of having the form directly on the website like the actual box where you enter your email address instead of that What if that offer that's on my website in the middle of my post at the

end of my post What if that was just a button instead of like an actual form And that button just said click here to get your free cheap cheap And when you clicked it it took you to a landing page Now this landing page would have been implemented I use lead pages to do all my landing page work Uh because It's not attached to my server It can be its own independent thing I don't need any of these landing pages to be SEO ified If that's a word

And so I was like what if what if that's the case Because Lee pages you can you know you can integrate forms into lead pages with active campaign and with a single check Checkbox You can add recapture And so they're kind of handling all that coding and stuff So I was like let me just try it with with money lab because money led doesn't get a ton of signups but money lab was having one of the bigger issues where there was a ton of bots signing up But like you know

I might've got like a hundred emails a day but only five of them were actually real people you know trying to sign up So I thought let me see if if this is going to deter people from signing up like it was just going to kill my conversion rates I did it I set it up for a few days Actually It was working very well People You know it's I gave people like two extra steps So instead of people just typing in their email address and hitting submit They now have to click a button

which takes them to a page So that's the first step That's the first hoop And then it asked them for their email address So they typed in their email address And before they can hit submit they got to check a box that says I'm on a robot and then they submit it Honestly not a big deal But ATO not a ton of steps I'm not adding more things They have to type in like their first name last name You know a bunch of other check boxes I'm just asking for an email address And I

still keep those same checks in place If you don't download the cheat sheet within 33 days 72 hours then I don't want you on my list because clearly you went You did you took this action but then didn't actually download the cheat sheet So Why did you sign up Anyway So I did it on that And it were and I was like you know what I'm actually okay with this I'm actually I actually think this would be better I think my list is going to come in much cleaner It's going to get rid of that bot problem

Perhaps getting solve my spam complaint problem So I added on that and I added on my hot tub form Um some university A few days later Hey Active campaign sends me an email You're getting more spam complaints I'm like ha Well hold on now Give me a second here because I just implemented recapture They're like yeah you did And we appreciate that And that's a good move But You also have these other forms that don't have the recap on there and that's where it's coming from

I'm like all right fine So I spent a few days FA you know to me this is the most important thing This took precedent over all my other work because I'm like well if I'm getting all these spam complaints like what if after canteen's like dude you're you're it's too many complaints We're gonna have to shut you down Well there it goes that I don't want that That sucks So anyway I sit there and I set up recapture on every single form Okay I send them an email

back I'm like look it's everywhere now They're like okay we're going to monitor it and make sure it's okay Get another email from active campaign You're getting spam complaints Dude Aye I added it to every form They're like okay Yeah But Uh we think That there's still email addresses Like on your list that are that are just slowly hitting spam overtime The other problem that they did not make me aware of but I slowly Came to this conclusion Was I noticed just like in my personal email

I was getting like more spam email that was coming through And that was a little bit surprising to me cause I'm like I don't my inbox is pretty clean And all of a sudden I just noticed like oh this is more spam I'm like maybe it's just January I don't know New year Who knows or maybe some maybe cause I'm using front app as my email client I'm like maybe I don't know they're working on something and they're letting spam through I don't know

But then I get this one email which was really scary Okay So I'm in my swim university inbox which is actually my business inbox for all my brands And I get an email that says and I'm going to use salty language here Because this is the salty language that was used in this email It was a reply To an email that I had apparently sent And it said fuck you I know this what you're doing here You're scamming people But the email they were replying back to was not an email that I had sent

out It was a phishing email It looked like an Amazon template asking them to like fill out You know their password or something And then um and I wrote back to the person cause I'm like oh I didn't send this email This is not me Oh What's going on here Turns out or at least most of my thought process People are sending Spam and phishing emails Using my domain Using matt@someuniversityormadatmoneylab.co Well how the Now I'm like okay Is

that active campaign that somebody hacking my active campaign account to do that No So I had to learn I after doing some research into this I learned about SPF D com and DMARC Now I'll explain what these things are but basically uh this is something that I had to set up with convert kit but weirdly when I switched to active campaign I was I you know it was not like part of the onboarding process for me or at least I didn't see it So I didn't have it set up for active campaign

So SPF not really sure what it stands for It's not the stuff that you put on your skin to protect you from the sun It's some sort of like filtering mechanism To make sure that you are you own the domain name where you're sending emails from D Kim or D K I M is another version of this So just a different version So it's like two checks right To filtering things And then DMARC is the combination of those two things which sends reports So I had to set all of this up using my DNS Now

I'm not going to go into detail about all this year because it's super technical Um we're going to do a whole workshop on this in Money lab pro So if you want to sign up for that you can go to money lab.co/pro and that's my online community You could sign up for an annual subscription To join the community And that's where we kind of do you know online business stuff We have weekly happy hour calls on zoom and everything That's fun

But Anyway I had to set all this up And it's which which first I had to learn And then I had to set up which didn't take too long but um it forced me to have to like look into other software and learn about this whole world that I wasn't familiar with And I guess this is not going to be the same for everybody I think my list is like Just big And I just think it got hacked or whatever it was Somebody was just sitting on my behalf So I set this all up Spam emails have certainly slowed down Uh and

then the the last thing that I did Was I Jason's hook had emailed me So I had sent an email out you know a couple of weeks ago to everybody at money lab And I was like look this is what I went through And it's a problem It's a real big problem Uh and it was it forced me to do a lot of like stuff that I never thought I'd have to do a lot of technical work um to make sure that you know I could still send emails Not to scare anybody but I'm like eh I should probably do it It's probably do

all the things you know make sure you put recap show on your forums make sure that you got the SPF and D Kim and D mark all set up For your domains That you're sending emails through The last thing was well I mean I spent all of 2021 collecting email addresses this aggressively There's bound to be A ton of people on my list Who are either who either never signed up and are killing my open rates Right Cause they're not opening

anything Which you know I cleaned those people up Um or there's just bad actors bad email addresses or people that you know whatever So I found so Jason Zook had emailed me and said listen Uh yeah recapture socks I understand but I had to implement it but they had used this a service that I'd never heard of It's like email verification service right Which basically goes and does like Recapture tests on your existing emails So

you just import all your email addresses It does the checks that tells you which ones are good which ones are bad And then you can just go in and delete those Uh so I ended up using a service called emailable which was really easy to use It integrates with active campaign It's sucks in the lists sucks in all the email addresses checks them all cost money I had to pay like you know a couple cents per email address So I ended up spending like 500 bucks for this big check

I did this big bulk check And I think I had to like delete 5,000 subscribers It was an insane amount of subscribers And so I did Now the last email I had sent to money lab Had a 50 open rate which was Just very high I mean it's always been money lab emails you know back before I was started using active campaign When I was in convert kit I was getting like 40 to 50 open rates Once I started aggressively collecting email addresses obviously that

had gone down But it was I think because there was so many bot email addresses that I just weren't opening emails now I was trying to get rid of them but then they keep coming in you know so you're cleaning out The backside of it Cause like you know somebody doesn't open an email for a month I'm like get off my list Right Come on At least open my emails Or click something I'm putting stuff in there If you don't want it it's fine It's going to remove you So you know I

want you to open my email address I'm trying to like make I'm going to have a business here Um Is there anyway I use a service deleted 5,000 email addresses Boom Open rates back up hopefully at this point now I've solved all of the problems There may be some lingering You know spam complaints here and there but it's not going to it's not going to be a high percentage which is what's causing the red flags which is what's

causing active campaign The email me So I got So I'm I'm I'm I feel like today I'm set up I'm good to go Now I'm just slowly Cleaning up all my newsletters I'm rethinking and re-looking at my onboarding sequences And just trying to be incredibly helpful with my emails And then you know selling My services my products my Courses my physical products every once in awhile And it works you know I I Started selling physical products In

late 20 21 At swim university as a test I sent one email and blew out my inventory That's how powerful email marketing is I can't I literally couldn't replicate that any in any other marketing channel Without spending a ridiculous amount of money You know so Anyway That's that's it That's all I got And here's the thing I like I said in the beginning email me man@moneylab.co Um I want to hear from you Absolutely Check out money lab itself@moneylab.co And uh yeah I think we're just going to leave

it at that So I appreciate you listening to the podcast And leave me a review on iTunes or anywhere you can leave reviews Leave a nice review Don't be uh you know Naked negative Nancy Negative Nathan I don't do that Okay Um Anyway if you have any questions about this episode emailing matt@moneylab.co If you have any questions about anything I'm happy to answer them Uh I love hearing from you so I appreciate it All right See you next time Bye Bye