Podcast - Email Marketing Platforms

• [00:00:00] Introduction & The Importance of Email Marketing
• [00:02:10] Key Criteria for Selecting an Email Platform
• [00:08:25] Deep Dive into Automation & Segmentation Features
• [00:16:06] Challenges of Migration & Integration with Other Tools
• [00:22:24] Compliance, Privacy, and Ethical Marketing Practices
• [00:28:30] Wrap-Up: Final Thoughts and Additional Resources

[00:00:00] And we are live. It's that time again, and it's time for Geeks Week. This week we are talking about email marketing platforms, the long awaited sequel to email marketing. I think it was 101, I forget the exact title, but we talked about, the, what to do with email marketing, and now we're going into how to pick your platform.

[00:00:19] What are the things to consider What are the ways to plan it out? Because you do want to plan it out a little bit before you actually jump into any platform and start sending out emails. Yeah. And should we introduce [00:00:30] ourselves? Yeah, I think so. So my name is Phelan Lewis. I'm at Seymour Digital Media where we focus on search engine marketing.

[00:00:38] I am Rina little from little works indie media agency. And we are in Vancouver. All right. You're right. I was actually on session one. I put it in the Greek speak the cyberpunk marketing mixer. Facebook group. I put it out of a few places. I put it at the bottom of the it'll go also on the bottom of this [00:01:00] linked back on this on this episode, once we're done but the topics we did cover were things like what should go in an email, what makes an email castle compliant how to, organize your list and basically basics on how to, or we could actually do a whole another.

[00:01:15] On how to organize your list, we talked about what content goes where all of that sort of fun stuff. And you're right. So now we're going to and the thing that came up from the questions that came out from that episode where which platform, and it's true because you get into one [00:01:30] the way platforms all work.

[00:01:32] Doesn't matter if it's email marketing or whatever, you have to start by signing up and signing in. There's not enough information to tell what's happening on a platform until you actually get in there and then you figure out, then you get all invested in it and then you figure out that it doesn't function in the way that you want.

[00:01:49] or it doesn't have a feature that you want, or it costs too much money to have the feature that you want, or something happens like that. So that's why Phelan was talking about knowing where you're going is always the [00:02:00] best way to get there. You need a plan. And so what we were talking about the other day is there's not going to be a one size fits All for platform.

[00:02:10] There's not one platform that either of us could agree that we loved best for all clients or even for just ourselves, I think. And you're always going to make some little compromise on something and figuring out what that's going to be is where is your superpower. And planning that out first.

[00:02:27] So what are the criteria? Cause it feels [00:02:30] like I'm doing a lot of talking. I'm doing a lot of rage talking. I just had a meeting. But what are the criteria Phelan in your mind? To how, when you're assessing a platform, do you want to kick us off on one or two points? Yeah. So the kind of the way, and I think when we talked about this when we were preparing for this, is that we thought of it like a flow chart where basically you're doing basically, are you e commerce yes or no because that'll be immediately out of the gate because and then how well does that ecom Email marketing platform integrate with the e commerce right because there's a bunch [00:03:00] of dynamic. Thank You know follow up like getting reviews because that's huge for email marketing and so I think that's gonna be a huge one like right off the bat are you e commerce or not because that'll it's almost Kind of the fundamental one, because from there you, that really decides a lot of where you're looking, which platforms you're looking at, and how well they perform with the web service.

[00:03:23] And then secondly off of that is, do they integrate with your website platform? So and how [00:03:30] you're doing, so it could be if you're focused on courses and you're on an external course platform, then you might want to consider that. So you need to first consider what are your goals, what are you doing and and what are your future plans?

[00:03:42] Because you want to build your future into your present so that when you decide to make that shift into the future, you don't have to. Make massive changes. You just want to add a module or add a plugin or add a something or upgrade to something else. You don't want to have to [00:04:00] abandon ship and move everything over because that's that comes with quite a cost.

[00:04:04] Usually if you're not doing it yourself and if you are doing it with yourself yourself, then you need to know the tech well enough to understand how to do it so that you're not. You're creating problems and you have all of your castle compliance due diligence done. So that's the thing that's really the most, one of the most important things.

[00:04:24] And I would also say off of that as well, if you get to a point where you do have to move platforms, and [00:04:30] you haven't future proofed yourself of realizing oh, it won't be able to scale with me, I'd say the biggest issue you're going to run into is the cost of time, right? Of rebuilding all these Systems that you've set up and moving the actual emails isn't going to be difficult, but it's the setting up email campaigns, such automations that if they sign up, what's the email sequences, those can be, those aren't easily migratable between systems.

[00:04:53] And so I think that you have to really be cautious of that as well. That is correct. That is correct. [00:05:00] Yeah. And then also you want to look at things like how long has your platform been around? How fully developed is it? Does it have a good backing? Is the team behind it going to stick around? Or is this going to be sunsetted or bought out by somebody else?

[00:05:14] That's also really important to think about if you're getting into it, but the more important things are, what are you doing right now that needs integrating or organizing? So usually there are two different three different kinds of campaigns that you would be running. You would be running maybe a newsletter, an e blast that's [00:05:30] one off things to let people know about promos.

[00:05:34] Specials, new features, all that sort of stuff. Oh my gosh. You're hilarious, Pip. Okay. And then go see number, scroll back when you get a chance. And okay. So the first thing is that, that, that sort of e blast slash newsletter. Send that's usually where people are starting in their business anyway.

[00:05:56] So they pretty much usually have that organized. And when you're thinking [00:06:00] about those things, you're thinking about how many people can I have on my list for free? How much does it cost for me to add a list members? Are they counting just the people that are subscribed and receiving the email?

[00:06:12] Are they counting the all the contacts that are unsubscribed? That have unsubscribed over the time. So that's one of the things. And that was one of the big exoduses off of MailChimp. In fact, was they used to not charge you for your unsubscribed contacts. They would only charge you for the [00:06:30] contacts that received the email.

[00:06:32] there was a big exodus a few years ago. And then the other thing that you might want to consider are segmentations and how you your list organization is. Is it lists or is it segments of a main list? So there are two ways of organizing. I personally like to have all one list and segment. From that list, but some people like to have very separate lists and what you want to make sure is if you're going to the one thing about having very separated lists is you want to make [00:07:00] sure that when people opt out of one list that they mean to opt out of the other list.

[00:07:05] So you're signed up. Your signup letter or your opt out letter might have just those, they have each list listed so that they can see that still opted in on another list so that they don't mistakenly get or, rightly get an. An email from another list, but think in their head that they actually opted out.

[00:07:24] So you want to make sure that is a very clear, or I know [00:07:30] constant contact. If you opt out of one list, you opt out of the whole thing in which actually sounds weird now that I say it out loud, but that's what the support told me. Yeah, it does. It does make sense to have it. If you unsubscribe, like you're basically unsubscribing from the whole.

[00:07:45] I don't want to hear from you. I don't care which list I'm on, but generally if someone's doing that they mean the whole thing, not Oh, I don't want to hear about this specific list. I want, uh, most people, when they're thinking of I'm unsubscribing. Yes, [00:08:00] but I, yes, it's true.

[00:08:01] But I like the prompt. So you need the prompt if you have multi lists and you're unsubscribing from each list independently, you need that prompt. So when you hit the unsubscribe, you go to that prompt and you have that. Selection to make that's good. What's not good is having just a one sign up and then, Oh you unsubscribe, it says you're unsubscribed and then you receive an email from another list.

[00:08:25] So that's bad. Okay. So that's one, one consideration. And [00:08:30] then so that's the list. Then when you want to get a little bit more fancy, you have other kinds of campaigns. So you would have maybe a drip campaign for leads that don't buy on the first go. So you might've done an opt in offer. So like a downloadable or some a contest or any of those kinds of list building techniques that are out there, they might opt in to get that one thing that, that contest entry or that.

[00:08:56] Downloadable or whatever it is. And and then and [00:09:00] then if they don't opt out right away, like I do, then you might want to send them through a series of info emails that will prompt them to do business with you in a different way or join you on a different list. So that's. Always possible. So you want to know the things that you want to know about your platform for those again is there a limit to how many sends I have?

[00:09:21] Is there a limit to how many opt ins sorry, campaigns I can run on my platform? Is there a limit to how many, um, [00:09:30] messages that are on that sequence? Do you get three? Do you get six? Can you do as many as you like? All of those things. And then the trigger, like what triggers it.

[00:09:40] So is it first day, three days later, five days after the first one, that type of thing, or is it done by date or is it done by action? So those are important. So an action one would be more if you have a product or if you're signing up for something like a course. That type of thing.

[00:09:59] You [00:10:00] can sometimes and the course is sold on your website. You can actually organize your automation on some platforms according to the date that the sale was made. I'd say also building off of that is making sure going back to the trial thing that how they build these automations and workflows is something that you can easily understand.

[00:10:21] Like it's not like super complex. There's some ones where I'm forgetting the big one. It starts with an I, I just hate it so much that I've, I just blot it out [00:10:30] from my brain, but it was like one of the And it was, yeah, one of the enterprise ones that like you needed to hire someone like setting up a sales force.

[00:10:37] Yeah, that's it. Yeah. And yeah, good job. Cause that was one where we had an issue with Amy Porterfield where they didn't, they had, we had signed up to a couple of lists and then it would fire the same email sequence. And so we were getting like the same emails and it was just like, it was a mess that they should have definitely figured out.

[00:10:56] And so I think that's another one as well is. [00:11:00] When we talked about email marketing platforms and thing, things to consider as well as try not to go for one that's trying to like MailChimp is trying to be like an all in one doing everything, but it's you wind up not doing. All of them well, and so you'll be, you'll build it out to a plot, like a certain extent, but because you have so many other things on the go, you're, you don't really finish, close the loop to really nail down what's going on with the, all of these platforms and, or all these components to your all in one.

[00:11:29] And so [00:11:30] it feels incomplete or it's a limitation that it's why didn't you fix this? Expensive. Here's the other thing that just recently happened to me. They also bundle these things into buckets that might not work for your business. So for example, if you're using, if you're using a store and the commerce store to sell a course and not the course section of their platform to sell the courses, because you're not running the courses online, which happens, it's actually quite common [00:12:00] then.

[00:12:00] You might need to buy the you might be buying the autumn email automation for your product, but then you can only organize the automation in it only triggers from the actual purchase. So if your course has a date and you need to send the reminder email two days before that date, that's going backwards.

[00:12:20] The only way you can do it is when they buy it, you can set up an email 10 days after. They buy it. But if people buy two months in advance and then they buy two days in advance, then that [00:12:30] email is not going to work. That automation is not going to work for all of them. So then there's more manual stuff involved because you haven't got the package that you're supposed to have.

[00:12:40] So you either have are forced to buy a second package that you're not working. So you use one piece of this package and one piece of that package and then it just, the cost goes up. Hacking your website Squarespace, I think is the worst for it. So people will get onto Squarespace and they'll choose the thing that suits them because it's the cheapest.[00:13:00]

[00:13:00] And then they'll try and do the next phase of marketing. And then they can't do it because there are these limitations. And and as a Purdue provider, this is the one thing that I cannot make clear enough. We don't know what the limitations are until we get in there. We have to pay for the module and get in there and figure it out.

[00:13:18] There's no complete how to that answers all of our questions before we get in there. And even my experience, the support staff also can't help to the [00:13:30] degree that we really need to know before we. So it's really good to go in and test all these things and then pull out if you don't need them. But the expectation that you can buy one module and have three things, three disparate things organized with one module is pretty, pretty low.

[00:13:48] And then. We're sorry. I know. I know. I keep doing this to you failing. I'll stay one more sentence and I'm gonna stop. It's even worse if you buy one platform that does one thing and then another platform that does another thing. And the sinking between [00:14:00] those two platforms is also another sticky spot that providers cannot always help you with an out of box solution.

[00:14:08] So quite often I get pulled in and what we do is we build code to sink different platforms together. We build the thing together. From scratch for you because they might sink in one direction because they don't play nice together. They might not sink at all because they've had a fight. What was that fight?

[00:14:27] They were telling me about. Bailin that. [00:14:30] So it was with Shopify and MailChimp. So a few years ago, they basically MailChimp made a deal with square. And they were going to be an email marketing provider for Square and Shopify hate each other because they're both going after the POS market and so they don't like each other at all and the CEO of Shopify decided to pull them from the, just take them off that it wasn't, they weren't delisted, but they were unranked.

[00:14:57] Basically, you couldn't find Mailchimp in the app [00:15:00] store. There was still an active app if you had it, but you couldn't find it and add it to a new one. And so they got into a huge argument about this and they just pulled it off the platform, which is, left a big wake because MailChimp was actually fairly deeply integrated with Shopify to do all of this Oh, bummer.

[00:15:15] Yeah and but, it was good for Klaviyo and OmniSend, who were the next two, and they took over since then. And I think they've built a better a better deeply integrated platform with Shopify than MailChimp was, because MailChimp always had its foot in the door of being with [00:15:30] the WordPress people as well, because it's, Oh, when I looked it up, it was the most popular, the MailChimp to WordPress plugin is one of the most popular email marketing.

[00:15:40] Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Okay. So there are three things now there are like, besides price. So there are what apps, where are you going? What do you need? There are, how does it integrate with your other pieces? So if you're, especially if you're using a CRM, so check with about. website, check with your website [00:16:00] integrations, check with your CRM integrations and make sure that they're that those are functioning or even available.

[00:16:06] And make sure that things sink in both directions or if they don't sink in both directions, what is your manual plan to make them sink so that You're not doing that awful thing that happens where somebody is working the contacts in the office, and then they're just sending an email list to their marketing person.

[00:16:25] And the marketing person is just simply uploading that and sending an, up uploading [00:16:30] list into the current. MailChimp list or constant contact list and just doing an e blast because that doesn't work that well. That doesn't work that well for tagging, for segmentation, for castle compliance.

[00:16:45] Things get, there are problems that arise in that situation. And then the worst problem is when nobody's sending you. Emails to update the constant contacts. So you're taking in a whole plethora of new leads and clients into your CRM and [00:17:00] they are not getting any newsletters from your e blasts or information at all because those contacts are not being sent over.

[00:17:07] So that's even worse. Yeah, I would say also that just coming off of integrations and putting into your larger marketing is that also using that email list into your ads and for Facebook and Google ads, especially people who purchased from you making for Google, they have a specific one is called customer match list [00:17:30] and they've opened it up to everyone now it's super important, especially as things get more automated to give signals that say, Hey, This person converted or find me more people like this.

[00:17:42] That really helps with the automations. Yeah. And the same on Facebook, it's not quite as specific that like that, or at least they don't tell me it is, but you can definitely put up your email list into, and this is really good. I just want to flag this for people who have opted out, if you [00:18:00] want to retarget the people who have opted out.

[00:18:02] Especially if you have something, a service that begins and ends. So I'm working with an education company at the moment. And so what ends up happening is people will get on their email list. And then when they graduate from the course and they're certified, they will opt out of the list and then we lose them.

[00:18:19] So what we want to make sure everyone is doing is actually, if you had something that you wanted to target that particular graduate with upgrade courses or maintain your certification courses or [00:18:30] whatever it is or anything that's an addition, then you would want to be able to reach those people if they've opted out, the best way to do it is on a MailChimp sorry, is on a Facebook.

[00:18:41] Ad campaign that is organized for those opt outs and your opt ins and you can send them that message and get to them. And it's not against CASA compliance to use our opt out list in this case because you're not sending an email. Yeah, because you're not sending an email and you didn't, you're not targeting them.[00:19:00]

[00:19:00] In that way, you're not sending the email, like you said, and you acquired the email through the compliant means, right? They handed you the email. So it wasn't well when they opt out. Yeah, when they opt out, it doesn't matter But you can yeah, you don't there is no as far as I know, there's no castle regulations around advertising using emails Do you know how many?

[00:19:19] No, I read I skimmed over I gotta do another deeper dive on the because google does have a little warning That says like hey, you did get these emails or phone numbers in [00:19:30] Yeah yes, and so it's Even if it's like technically yeah, it's bad. It's bad etiquette to to scrape the internet and send ads, but it's not, I don't think it's okay.

[00:19:41] Just a second. I gotta look that up now. Now you're making, but I would also,

[00:19:48] uh, so I would also say the reverse is also very useful as well, taking your email list and then making exclusionary lists out of those people because you can also save your Facebook [00:20:00] dollars and your Google ad spend by not having this ad shown to these people because they've already been through your program, so why waste money on sending them the ad sending them the ad.

[00:20:10] Scoop those people out because they are technically the right audience, but I don't want this specific person. Just find me more people like them. So you could say, don't find me this person, but find me more people like them, which is another tactic you can use as well with your email marketing.

[00:20:25] Exactly. Okay, I'm actually just pulling it up here [00:20:30] and, and, baited breath. Yeah, it's not actually totally clear, actually. They've adjusted this since the last time I looked. I will get back to you on that. Let's just say that. Yeah. But definitely make it compliant with the platform's regulations as well. But generally, just don't scrape emails and you should be fine.

[00:20:49] You know provided that you're not being malicious with it then. Yeah, you should be okay. Oh, here we go. Oh Do we find the [00:21:00] no, that's just regular social posts, which is hilarious because how can you, uh, yes, I know that social media was first organized because when you send messages on LinkedIn, it goes into people's inboxes and same with messages on a messenger, they go into people's inboxes but it really depends on how people have their Facebook account.

[00:21:23] Accounts organized as to what notifications they actually get through regular means, but they definitely don't [00:21:30] get ads sent to your inbox There would be no notification for that. So i'm pretty sure it's okay Yeah, though gmail technically does have you can do ads to gmail So I wonder if that would how that regulation would go.

[00:21:45] Oh interesting But I guess it clearly identifies that this is an advertisement. It's not like a traditional email. It says all that stuff so it's not like a like they're not trying to fool you and pretend that it's an email like they don't use like the gmail They just [00:22:00] have it show up in the inbox.

[00:22:01] So I think that would Get around the any sort of castle Policies that you would have to worry about i'm sure that the google and facebook, ads people are being as compliant as they need to be with these regulations because They're yeah, they're motivated not to upset it too much Okay Great.

[00:22:24] Yes. All right. So I'll, I'm going to check with my lawyer and get back to you. That's what I'm going to do. Cool. [00:22:30] Yeah. Okay. Cause they are always updating castle legislation anyways to keep up with technology. So things do change. It's absolutely true. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, but I'm confident that as long as you get it through I'm, yeah, I'd be 90 percent sure that as long as you've got the email through legitimate means that you would be able to use it for advertising purposes, because people had opted in for that part and as long as you're not sending emails to those people after they unsubscribe I don't, you should be able to use it in this means.[00:23:00]

[00:23:00] Yeah Okay. So, all so we've covered platform syncing lists. All so we probably just want to do a little overview of some of the top platforms that we know about. We just have a few more minutes left. I guess for e commerce, what are your go to ones? I like using MailerLite, Klaviyo, those have been pretty useful for us that are do a lot of like pretty well integrated with Shopify.

[00:23:27] So I like them. I know [00:23:30] that MailerLite has a pretty good integration with WordPress as well. So if you wanted to do WooCommerce, it's a pretty good one for that. And it's got a pretty generous free tier, which I like for getting started and learning how to do email marketing. Oh, that's good. I didn't know that.

[00:23:43] Okay. So I just used MailChimp with WooCommerce and also Clavio with WooCom with Shopify and I liked both. I don't really find that there's that much difference between platforms. I feel like for me, my clients, it really just comes down [00:24:00] to budget and and what I do like about MailChimp, cause they really got.

[00:24:05] They were the bad guy for a while there because there were so many free accounts, right? And then they just need to reel that in. But what I like about them is that you can pause your account. So if you do like a few months of really good Marketing and then you get overwhelmed and you just can't do it for whatever reason.

[00:24:23] You don't have to keep paying that monthly payment. Once you get above the 2000, I think, is it 1200 or 2000? I don't, I forgot what the [00:24:30] number of free contacts is. So you can pause and you can pause for an infinite, like an, You don't have to say how many months and and then you can set it up to go again and then you can pause it again.

[00:24:41] There's no, there doesn't seem to be any restriction on pausing your account. And they also have a pay as you go plan where you buy, it's a lot like stock photos where you buy a whole bunch of credits and then those credits cover a certain amount of So there's a little, in their pricing, I guess they realized they must have lost a lot of people when the free ones went [00:25:00] away, but I guess you don't really want free ones.

[00:25:02] A lot of free ones hanging on and never growing their business or never growing their contact list to get to that place. Your free stuff should be really a conversion spot, not a. Hang on spot. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean you do. It's good to have a little bit of a free tier I think that's always a good way to go just get people's feet wet and learn how to use the platform before you start trusting them Yeah, and but yeah, so going back there.

[00:25:27] So we also you mentioned constant contact active [00:25:30] Campaign monitor is another one. I've heard of I never i've used active campaign and constant contact. I haven't done campaign monitor Yeah Really all the same. Sorry. They've even changed to be more like Facebook in providing a really good drag and drop editor system.

[00:25:50] So you don't really need to have any coding or you don't go through and get somebody to code you a free, a template like you used to in constant contact, [00:26:00] for example, all of that's gone and you can easily manage your own. Space if you want to. Yeah. And and then if you want to bounce up and you're have you have these really complicated emails, just like campaigns that you're going to be launching that go into like big product launches and stuff like that.

[00:26:19] There's like entreport and fusion soft, but you basically need to hire someone of one point on entreport. And it's absolutely a nightmare to like, just to. Behold everything that goes [00:26:30] on with it Yeah, so usually crms come with representatives when you sign up for a crm That's a decent one. They come with a representative that helps you set things up and get things going it is good to have a marketing person on there and They work through it's like a referral based payment.

[00:26:46] So the person that reps you will it will get kick back on whatever you're paying on your monthly fees. And so generally they're pretty good and they're they're really super knowledgeable about the tech stuff. And if they can't figure it out, they can find [00:27:00] somebody to figure out. So you don't have to figure it out.

[00:27:02] But having a marketing person in there in the mix is really good. Cause they'll, the one thing that the CRM support people won't do is give you the advice of when you should do what you should do, how you should do it. They'll just tell you the technical ways of how to do it. And so you want those two pieces, the tech support and the, and I think that's one of the things that I like about the about the paid MailChimp one accounts is that there's tech chat support.

[00:27:26] I love chat support. [00:27:30] Squarespace has its own sort of e commerce platform in there that does some automations for certain things. It seems pretty good if you actually set your site up correctly to be organizing your products and your. Your offerings according to their rigid structures. So if you have an online course, then use the online course section and use this course space marketing that goes with that.

[00:27:54] The automations that go with that. That's really great. If you have an a product that is actually a [00:28:00] product, then use the product section, but they don't have a very good integration for in person ticket sales is what it would actually be. There's ticket sales. So that figured out that doesn't work that well.

[00:28:12] And and they have an excellent support. So I always go for who I look at price. I look at what do I need? And then I look at how available is the support and how untech is their support service? Will they be able to speak to someone like me and get me to understand what needs to happen? Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:29] I [00:28:30] think those are all good things to consider when you're picking your email marketing platform. And so that is time for us. Time? I didn't even notice. So yeah once again thanks for joining us. If you want to continue the conversation, come and meet us in Cyber Marketing Mixer Facebook group.

[00:28:47] And we'll be happy to answer any comments you guys have. Anyway, that's all the time from us. And my name is Phelan. And I'm Reena. See you next week.