Melanie Balke 10:57
I probably had fewer than other people, but I still think living somewhere and visiting somewhere is very different. The biggest challenge, I think, is around you know, people say German culture is very cold and American culture is very friendly, and that is absolutely true, but I think the difference is in German culture, it takes a while. It takes longer to really become friendly with someone. But once you are friendly, you really are friends. And I think in LA in America, but in LA, LA in particular as well, even more so than in other areas, you can go to a party and you can be like, oh, let’s exchange numbers and hang out, and you’ll exchange numbers and you’ll never hang out. That is totally normal here. And so I think in Germany, it’s much more like, when you’re friends, you’re really friends, like, that’s a real friendship, versus in the US, it’s a lot more superficial. That was really hard.
John Corcoran 11:55
Having grown up in Los Angeles, I can verify exactly what you just said for sure, definitely true. So you had studied marketing, actually, in business school. Did you know that you would eventually end up in email marketing, or is that something that you eventually got into through the different agencies you worked at?
Melanie Balke 12:13
Yeah, just a total coincidence. I mean, I didn’t even know that it was going to be marketing. I knew when I did business. I chose business because I thought, you know, law and med school were the other two options. And I thought business would give me the most. It interested me the most, and I thought it would give me the most flexibility as well. And then in business school, my first, you know, in Germany, your Bachelor’s is very general. So you do everything, you don’t really specialize in anything. And I just noticed that if it was around finance or accounting, I would have to, like, really study. And when I really studied, I still didn’t quite get it. I just knew how to solve the problems. But when it came to marketing and management, I’d open the book and I’d be like, yeah, like, Duh. This is so obvious. Why am I reading this? This is obvious.
And so then talking to a couple of friends of mine, I realized, like, oh, like, that’s not normal, that it’s so clear to me, is not how everyone feels. And so marketing interested me more and more. I thought it was exciting. And then I went into marketing consulting, so consulting for larger firms on marketing issues and challenges and had nothing to do with email. And then eventually, once I joined apartment 2b which was the the Econ brand that I joined in house as the first marketing hire for them, I did this whole consultant thing where I came in and I looked at their entire email, at their entire marketing and I said, here’s 100 page presentation, here’s your opportunities, and here’s what we should be doing. And so they went, Whoa, okay, what do you want to work on first?
And I said, I’ll do email, because I felt like, you know, they’re rolling so selling sofas and things like this, like high average order value items, and they weren’t really cross selling anything or touching on these customers again. So I said, Let’s do email. And then I did email. I taught myself with the teacher called the Internet, and suddenly saw, like, really good results. And that’s when I fell in love with email.
John Corcoran 14:12
And were you drawn to crafting the email? Were you drawn to the, you know, structure of like because it can get very complicated very quickly, especially when you’re talking about, like, you know, email commerce, that kind of thing you can have, like, you know, and I’ve done a fair amount of email, I know, you can go down these different kind of threads, or whatever you want to call them, different campaigns for different purposes, and it can get infinitely complex very quickly. Is that what you were drawn to, or is it drawing, or is it drafting the actual emails, the copy, or all of the above.
Melanie Balke 14:44
I think all of the above, I love that it had a very strategic piece where you had to look at data and understand the data, and then craft the life cycle of the customer and when and how he would be getting or she would be getting these emails. So I really enjoyed that piece, right? Like the strategic piece, but then I also love that you had a creative piece to it as well, right? Like you, you developed a life cycle strategy, but then you also had to put copy and design behind it. And I felt like it was a little bit full circle. And then I love the impact, right? Like you can see immediate impact with email, you send an email and you see how much revenue it brought in. I loved seeing the results. I’m very results focused, so that was a big thing as well.
John Corcoran 15:26
Yeah, and you end up going from there to a big agency. What led to that decision? Because that can, that can be a very different type of lifestyle for someone.
Melanie Balke 15:37
Yeah, I think I just felt like I wasn’t learning as much anymore and growing. And I’m always interested in learning and growing. And so it really happened organically, like we connected on LinkedIn. I connected with one of the co-founders on LinkedIn, and he was like, Hey, do you want to come interview for a job? And I was like, I guess. And so I went in there and interviewed and got the job, and loved how fast paced it was. That’s also what I wanted. I wanted to go back from in house, which can be great, but is not as fast paced, like consulting, to something that was more fast paced, like the agency space again. And I just wanted to grow and learn and grow and learn. And I felt like that would have been or that was a good place for that.
John Corcoran 16:23
Yeah, and you end up founding, founding your own company. After that, the email marketers decided to really drill down and kind of and focus on email. Let’s just ask, I just want to ask, kind of a very broad question, but it’s, you know, we’re recording this in the second half of 2024 I’m sure there’s some people who are thinking, like, email, why email? That’s so 2005 you’ve got Tiktok, we’ve got Instagram, we’ve got all these different channels now, like, why email? Does email even work anymore?
Melanie Balke 16:52
Yeah, I love this question. It definitely does. Um, we used to have stickers. I don’t think I have one here, but it’s like, at email is not dead because people have been saying emails dead since, like, 20 plus years.
John Corcoran 17:05
Probably right?
Melanie Balke 17:07
Yeah, it’s not dead. It’s still alive. It’s the channel of the undeads, and it’s still super effective, right? In fact, it’s become more important now as these other channels become a lot more expensive. So email is absolutely not a substitute for Tiktok or Facebook ads or Google ads or any means by which you bring new customers in the door, but email is absolutely crucial and incredibly cost effective to convert these people, right? Because you bring eyeballs to your website, let’s say, and that costs you a lot of money. It’s getting more expensive too. You don’t want those eyeballs to just disappear. You want at least another medium by which you can communicate with them. And email is very cost effective, because it costs you almost nothing to send an email.
John Corcoran 17:52
Because when they get to your website, statistically, they bounce within 20 seconds, or 30 seconds or something like that. So if they opt in, then you got them on an email list. You could communicate with them for years, exactly.
Melanie Balke 18:02
And that’s just one small piece. I think the even bigger piece is retention, right? So again, you could acquire a customer and sell them a t- shirt for 20 bucks, and you could acquire that customer for $5 back in the day, you had a $15 margin. A lot of E commerce brands now sell a $20 t-shirt, and it costs them $20 to acquire the customer. They made zero money on that, so they need the second and third and fourth purchase to actually make money.
And a cost effective way to bring a customer back to Buy and buy and Buy and buy again is email. Besides that, not just about bringing them back to buy again. It’s also the channel that crafts their experience with your brand, right? Especially if you’re online, only people used to go into a store and there was a salesperson and a smell and the design and you could see everything, and that was the experience with the brand. Now you have your website, you have email and you have social so the experience with your brand is a big piece, too.
John Corcoran 19:03
Yeah. What do you say to people? I find that when I talk to people about email, they have this subjective experience, because everyone uses email, they have a subjective experience with it. They say, oh, I don’t check my email, or I get too many emails, as if that is the definitive answer to whether EO email works or not. So what do you say to people who say that?
Melanie Balke 19:23
I mean, I would love to show them the dashboards of how much revenue we’re generating. I mean, the fact is, email works, and we see it across a bunch of people, a bunch of clients. It doesn’t work for every brand, right? But we see it for almost every brand. It works, and you might be deleting 90% of your emails, but I can guarantee, most people bought something off of an email they’ve received before.
John Corcoran 19:49
Yeah, and you have worked with some of the amazing brands here. Can you take us through like, one or two of these brands that you’ve worked with that maybe came to you and either weren’t doing it right? Weren’t doing anything with their email and kind of what you did, what you implemented in order to make it a more effective channel for them?
Melanie Balke 20:09
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thinking about what I could tell you guys. So apparel, big. With apparel, we work with a brand. They’re big shoes. Shoe brand. They came in to about 10% of the revenue coming from email. A good benchmark is about 30% so you can see there’s, there’s a big gap. A couple things we did for them was start at the beginning, optimize your email capture, actually make sure that you’re offering people a good incentive to get on your email list, and now suddenly, from their website visitors, we’re seeing a much larger percentage of people convert to the email list.
John Corcoran 20:47
It seems like a lot of times, at least on consumer brands that might be 10% off, 15% off their first purchase, or something like that, comment absolutely can be that.
Melanie Balke 20:54
Can also be something else. If you want to capture someone more top of the funnel, you can run a giveaway. You can give them a lead magnet. Sometimes, if it’s like a parenting brand, you can give a parent guide. It really depends on your audience, your brand, what you’re able to give and at what stage you want to capture people. But most often overlooked is like the first step of your email program is, how do I optimize how people get on this list? How do I make sure I’m squeezing the most juice out of that section?
John Corcoran 21:24
Okay, okay, so that’s So optimizing, making sure that they’re capturing the email. What else?
Melanie Balke 21:28
Yeah, so we did that for them. Now we have more people that we can actually target and reach via email. A big piece then is to look at the entire customer lifecycle, and we go, okay, people come in and then how do they engage with the brand, and what types of information do we send them at what point in their life cycle? So really talking about triggered things like when they subscribe, when they abandon their cart, when they look at a product, when they purchase, how do we elevate that experience and make sure that email compliments it at every level?
And then, of course, the campaigns, and for them, like, we went deep into the campaigns, we went, Okay, like, who are the people who’ve bought five plus times? How do we bring those people back if they haven’t bought in a while, and if they’ve bought many times and they’ve spent a lot of money with us, we can give them bigger discounts to bring them back and reactivate them, because they’re a higher value customer, right? So we did a bunch of that, and then slowly started moving up to 25% of revenue from email. So a little bit more to go. But definitely adding the 15% was huge.
John Corcoran 22:31
Huge, wow, over doubled the amount of revenue that came from email. Yeah. And then what? What do you say, or what do you advise in terms of, like, frequency of communication. You know, there’s a lot of people who have opinions about that. Are like, Oh, I get emails too frequently. What do you say to that?
Melanie Balke 22:47
Yeah, listen, it depends. You’re gonna hate this answer. It depends. It depends on the engagement metrics that you are seeing. They’re sending emails and you’re seeing good open rates, although unreliable, but let’s just keep it in there. Good open rates, good click rates, low unsubscribe rates, low spam, flag rates, if you’re seeing good engagement metrics, keep sending emails. However, make sure you’re sending to a segmented audience. Now, why do I say keep sending emails? Because people get hundreds and 1000s of emails a day. There’s a very, very high likelihood they actually didn’t see your email that day.
So as long as the engagement metrics are good and you’re not seeing in the numbers that you’re annoying people because they’re unsubscribing or spam flagging you, or they’re not even opening your emails anymore, as long as you see that you’re not annoying them with that, keep sending emails that, being said, quantity does not equal quality, so don’t just send emails to send emails. That’s my other piece, right? And I know they’re a little bit say they’re almost opposing thoughts. But don’t just send emails to send emails, because there’s got to be something valuable in there for your subscribers. That would be my second thought on that.
John Corcoran 24:00
So I imagine you mentioned, like parenting brands, a parenting brand maybe would have more email that’s educational, or talking about, you know, different stages of the life cycle for parenting, you know, young kids to toddler on up. Whereas, if it’s more of a, you know, one time purchase, like a couch or something like that, maybe that would be less educational?
Melanie Balke 24:22
Yeah, I guess the way I look at it is, how could I add value to this person’s life? How could I send an email that they open and they find so valuable or that excites them so much that they’re going to look forward to the next email I send them? And yes, that obviously differs from brand to brand. It can be more educational for one, it can be more fun for one for another, it can just mean, like, transactional stuff, right? Maybe there isn’t anything to do there, and you don’t have to force the issue, if it’s not natural. But I guess it’s a case by case basis. The question for me is always like, does this add value to their life?
John Corcoran 24:58
And then you mentioned. Um, 30% of revenue comes from email. Is that specific to, like, consumer brands?
Unknown Speaker 25:05
Yeah, predominantly e-commerce, okay.
John Corcoran 25:08
And then are there any other engagement metrics that you advise companies to look at?
Melanie Balke 25:14
Yeah? I mean, so the open rate’s a little bit more unreliable now. And what I would say is look at the open rate as a Katarina coal mine. So look at it as a rate that you want to see. Whether there are fluctuations in your own open rate across campaigns, we do see about 40 to 60% is what the new open rates are post iOS 14, that we’re seeing, 15 that we’re seeing across email clients. Click rate, about one to 3% is what we’re seeing. Unsubscribe and spam flag rate, Gmail just put out a new I always confuse these, so hold on. I’m going to Google this for you guys, because I always say these wrong, because they’re fairly low.
So your spam flag rate should be, I believe, below 0.02 Hold on. Below 0.3% is your spam flag rate. Okay, you want to keep that below 0.3% we like to do 0.2% just so we have some buffer. If your campaigns go above the 0.3% with the new Gmail and Yahoo changes, you can get dinged very quickly in reputation. So keep that, keep that below that bounce rate. You want to keep, I believe, below 0.5% don’t quote me on this. I’m very bad at remembering numbers. I have it written down somewhere here and unsubscribes. You also want to keep them, I like to keep them at least at around 0.5% and not go higher. But there’s also a pretty good benchmark around that that I’m happy John, if you want to look it up and send it your way later.
John Corcoran 26:59
Okay, cool. Thanks. And then this might be getting really into the weeds here. But what do you recommend in terms of, like, re engaging? So there might be some people listening to this who’ve got a bunch of, you know, email subscribers that they don’t even realize or not communicating with them. What do you recommend, like, warming up with a sequence like that?
Melanie Balke 27:22
Yeah. So re-engage people who used to be engaged but are not engaged anymore. Yeah. I just gotta have a little hack. And I shared this with a mastermind recently, and I got really excited because I got a friend of mine who then messaged me and said, Hey, I just reengaged 15,000 people with the free ebook, thank you so much. Nice. My hack is people love free stuff. You really want to know whether someone’s still getting your emails and just not opening or and or engaging, or whether they’re really not seeing you’re sending them emails, sending them free stuff.
And so we did this for a brand, and we sent their unengaged audience a giveaway, and we said, hey, enter for free. And this case, it was like, gummies, like gummies for children, enter for free, gummies for children, and we reengaged like 40% of their unengaged audience. I was like, Oh my god. So we’ve been sending them and by the way, we’ve sent these people, they’re like, Hey, we’re going to unsubscribe you. Hey, please tell us if you still want to get our emails like they’ve gone through the RE engagement flow. But when we sent them the giveaway, they got engaged. But you can’t say free in the subject line, right?
John Corcoran 28:38
So No, I’m not supposed to, so you have to say something else creative that isn’t using the word free. There’s a list of you want these gummies or something like that.
Melanie Balke 28:48
Yeah, no, in that case, we’d say like giveaway, because it’s a giveaway. In that case, it was a giveaway. I don’t know what he used for a subject line. When we do subject lines for free things, we just use different words, or we describe it differently without saying free.
John Corcoran 29:03
Okay, now I know somewhere, I think it was on your LinkedIn, you said you want to be like Ogilvy for email marketing or something to that effect. Are there classic copywriters that you look up to or that you admire, whose books you’ve read, that you are a fan of that you’d want to give a shout out for.
Melanie Balke 29:22
I mean, I really, really love, like I said, anything the Ogilvy company puts out. So there’s a book here. I have all my books. I almost forgot the word on my bookcase called alchemy, by the CEO, Roy Sutherland of Oli. That’s a great book. It’s not on copywriting, but it’s really on marketing psychology and people psychology. I personally not I don’t think I’m a great copywriter. I don’t think that’s my biggest strength.
I have a great team of amazing copywriters. If you ask my head of copy, you’d probably be able to give you good answers. I really like following Chase diamond. He does a good job on all things email, and he does a good job on all things copywriting as well. He has, I think, a copywriter on his team that sends copywriting specific tips and tricks. But otherwise, I’m more in the realm of marketing psychology and strategy than copywriting. I have a team that really focuses on copywriting.
John Corcoran 30:22
Got it and, you know, everyone’s talking about AI these days. Is that something that you are fearful of, or is that something that you think will make your life easier or harder? How’s that going to affect your industry?
Melanie Balke 30:36
Yeah, I think both and. I mean, am I fearful of AI? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a probability that AI comes and someone builds a tool that does everything that we do as a service, as a platform, absolutely. Um, do I think that’s probable? No, I think there will always be a need for the human service aspect in some way. Do I think our business model is going to change? Yes, absolutely. So we use AI to our advantage. It’s helped us be better and faster at what we do, whether it’s data analysis or copy or actually designs. It helped us create designs that before would take us 20 hours to do. Now it takes us five minutes not even to do that design. So it’s allowed us to be a better agency. I’m not fearful. I don’t think so. I think it’ll make us better, and I think sure it might change our business model and the way that we work with people. But I don’t think that. You know, I’m not in the doom and gloom kind of team.
John Corcoran 31:38
Yeah, yeah, you’re positive overall. I feel the same way. You know you have to be cautious. You got to study it. You got to know about it. But those who are afraid of it, look you’re going to have to deal with it one way or another. Well, this has been great. Melanie, I want to wrap up. I have a last question that I always ask, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of gratitude, especially recognizing people who’ve helped you along the way. And you’ve mentioned some people in this conversation, so you can mention some of those or some others. And then after that, my next question is gonna be about the dad joke. So first, gratitude. Who would you like to shout out and thank for helping you in your journey?
Melanie Balke 32:17
I mean, I have so many people from, you know, getting me my first jobs or my first real job, to my former bosses. I think everyone, or colleagues, everyone’s played such a huge role in where I am now, my family included. But I think this gratitude would go to my team, like anyone who currently works at the email marketers, or who’s ever worked at the email marketers, you can’t build anything alone. And so a lot of people’s hard work has gone into where we are today, and I know a lot of people’s hard work is going to keep going into where we’re going to be in the future. And yeah, I’m just grateful for the team that believes in the mission and works with me towards it.
John Corcoran 32:58
Okay, all right, CEO of dad jokes. Inc, what you got?
Melanie Balke 33:04
Okay, this is gonna be lame.
John Corcoran 33:06
You’re, you’re gonna I’m expecting lame. I’m expecting lame. If it’s not lame, I’m gonna be disappointed.
Melanie Balke 33:10
Okay, you were gonna expect something better, but I’m gonna say, what did the mom tomato say to the baby tomato as they were crossing the highway?
John Corcoran 33:19
I’m so bad at guessing these, see you later, or something like that.
Melanie Balke 33:27
Ketchup!
John Corcoran 33:28
Good stuff. That’s good. That’s good. I’ll have to use that one that’s good. All right. Melody, where can people go to learn more about you and the email marketers?
Melanie Balke 33:37
Yeah. Www.theemailmarketers.com, you can check out our website. A new one is coming out soon. Actually check me out on Twitter. Melanie Balke. Melanie underscore, Balke or LinkedIn, yeah, all good places to find me.
John Corcoran 33:52
Awesome. Melanie, thanks so much.
Melanie Balke 33:54
Thank you. Bye. Bye.
Outro 33:58
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, we’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.