E105: George Kapernaros

Richard Hill:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One, and welcome to episode 105. In this episode, I speak with George Kapernaros, founder of GK Agency. George's tagline is, "Message us if your customers only buy once," and George and the team specialize in just that, retention. Myself and George talk email marketing, of course, and how to craft your messaging and campaign structure, how to rise above the typical noisy inbox, top things to avoid with email marketing, and the future of email marketing. If you enjoy this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode.

Richard Hill:
This episode is brought to you by eComOne eCommerce Marketing Agency. eComOne works purely with eCommerce stores, scaling their Google shopping, SEO, Google search, and Facebook ads through a proven performance-driven approach. Go to ecomone.com/resources for a host of amazing resources to grow your paid and organic channels.

Richard Hill:
Hi and welcome to another episode of eCom@One. Today's guest, George Kapernaros, founder of GK Agency. How are you doing, George?

George Kapernaros:
Really good, Richard. Thank you so much for having me.

Richard Hill:
No problem at all, no problem at all. We've been trying to get George on for a few weeks now, and so I'm really pleased for you to come on the podcast. Thank you for coming on and agreeing to come on. Now, George's in Athens today, which I'm not jealous of at all. I'm sitting here in the not-so-sunny Lincolnshire, but I think you are not having the best weather today either, from what I gather, so not too bad.

George Kapernaros:
Actually true. The weather is somehow colder now than it was in winter. I have no idea how that's possible, but it is.

George Kapernaros:
Don't be generous, guys, please. Don't be generous.

Richard Hill:
So yeah, we always try a weather check. It's a very British thing. I get told off for it quite a lot by the guys that help me with the podcast, but hey. Okay. So George, I think it'll be good to really get stuck in. I think we talk about email a lot on the podcast with our various guests on, but it'd be really good to let us know how you think you guys stand out at GK Agency and the way that you do things.

George Kapernaros:
It's a very interesting question because I don't think I have the correct answer, like if the correct answer is that we have a special methodology that has one specific framework that's better than anything else out there, we don't. What we do have is a broader understanding of eCommerce than most email marketers. My background, I was the marketing director for an eCommerce company, so I understand how advertising works, I understand how CRO works, I understand how customer support works even. So I guess that's our biggest advantage. We don't just look at open rates and click rates. We look at the broader picture.

George Kapernaros:
And, on top of that, I'm not throwing trash at other agencies, but what happens often in agencies is that they productize the services a lot. So what this means is that they create templates, they create playbooks of sorts, and they are able to almost outsource them to more junior team members that can just follow the playbook and then execute the service at a fairly standard level. That's good for the agency. That's really good for the agency because it allows you to rely on process instead of experience or brains, but it's usually not in the best interests of a client after a certain point because not every scenario is the case or case is the same, right? Like imagine that you're selling toilet paper. You would need a different approach than someone that sells refrigerators, right? And if you just go by the playbook, the template, you can't really differentiate so much between that. Our approach is also quite personalized, I would say.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So the big difference you would say is that personalized piece. Obviously, that experience of working very specific with eCommerce does, because I think that obviously, eCom@One, we're all in eCommerce in one way or another, whether that's agency side, running a business, marketing, et cetera, et cetera. eCommerce is very, very different to B2B. Of course, there are some fundamentals of the mechanics of the system that you may use to operate with, but the comms, the structure, the frequency, the segmenting, the language is quite different when you're talking about products, potentially. Obviously, we'll start to get into it. So...

George Kapernaros:
Absolutely. Just a note here because I really don't want to come across as arrogant or anything. For most companies, a productized sort of approach is actually correct, and the reason why is that they don't have anything, right? And if you don't have anything, it's best to have something. So templates can work, things like abandonments, welcome. All those things are important, and even if you don't do them perfectly, they will still produce results, so do that if you don't do it because it will work regardless of how well it is executed. But if you want, of course, to go to the next level, then you reach a point when you can't just go by templates anymore, can you? So that's basically my point.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So yeah, obviously, something is better than nothing, but something that's just sort of clicked and pushed into your enabled is obviously not email marketing, but of course, you may well get a return from having an abandoned email, where you will get, I think, is a short version that's maybe not been adjusted. We don't recommend you do that, obviously, from a default, but obviously, you want to spend the time on it.

Richard Hill:
So, okay. So why should a company spend the time crafting really strong email marketing campaigns? I think when we talk about email, we talk about some similar topics every time, but time after time, we get inquiries through our agencies and it flabbergasts me that people say, "Oh, we looked at email, but it's just so time-consuming and we've literally just enabled a couple of basic features," which is sort of what we just talked about, "but we've not spent the time crafting the emails." What would you say to those guys? Why is it so important to spend the time actually creating very specific campaigns and content?

George Kapernaros:
So I will take a step back in that question and I will say that, again, in the overwhelming majority of cases, you should actually not spend the time creating the campaigns. Rather, you should focus on the automations, even the basic ones, because those will have an infinitely higher return over time than a single one-off campaign. All that being said, if you do have that, the reason why you would want to invest in producing actual one-off campaigns, in my mind, is twofold. First of all, it's not that hard and it produces a result. Every campaign you send, at the very least, at the very least, is a brand impression. Even if nobody opens the email, even if it's just in the inbox, it's a brand impression. Then a lot of people will open and click that, and when they click that, you are not just driving them back to your website because of that campaign. You are also funneling them back to the automations you have set up, so you're feeding them, if you will.

George Kapernaros:
The second reason why I think it's important is because essentially, email is a way to have a conversation with clients, right? Like when you send campaigns, they can talk back to you. And if you do that intentionally, whether it is through like proper surveys or just simple reply campaigns... Like one simple thing we do for clients often, and it works every single time and actual people are very happy when they receive that kind of email, it's just a plain text email that asks, "How are you? Is everything okay? Is there something we can do to help?" People love that because nobody does that. And you can do this in a very personalized way that feels like someone actually took out your details, wrote your names in the campaign, and cared for you to do that. And you can't really do that so well in other channels.

Richard Hill:
So it's like a three-word email. I think there's a lot of talk about five-word or a seven-word email, isn't there? "How can I help you?" Simple, just obviously with the products. Yeah, it's an interesting one. So depending on what platform you're using, obviously, you can enable different automations, segmenting, and things like that, but ultimately-

George Kapernaros:
We can talk about platforms if you want.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, we'll come to that. I'm keen to talk about that. But I think while we're on the topic of spending time on things and crafting those emails, we'll move on in a second, but I think it's getting that message across and that brand across, I think, people struggle with. So what would you say to people that are maybe struggling to get that right message across? So, okay, we can use the templates, we can use the automation segment, we can use the technology, absolutely, and we can implement and put products in front of people, but obviously, if everyone's doing that, how do we get our messaging brand across, and why should we spend time on that?

George Kapernaros:
That's a really, really good question and it has a complicated answer in my opinion. I think the real answer comes to research.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
And there are three layers of research, at least in my mind. There's the user research, which is kind of the fundamental layer, which goes into asking the people who purchased from you and the people who haven't purchased from you and trying to understand who they are, like what causes them to purchase, what causes them to prefer you than other alternatives and so forth. Then there's the market research. By market research, I mean people who sought for the outcome you provide for your products. So if, for example, you have, I don't know, weight loss supplements, that includes the customers of other weight loss supplement companies, not just your own. And then the third layer is researching for insights, like common experiences between people that can be relatable and relevant on a broad level.

George Kapernaros:
So through this research process is how you find the brand's actual message and voice. Usually, it pays to start with the basic, the user research, but the more you do that, the problem is the more you become like everybody else, every other company. Because all companies that solve one specific problem, they have similar customers, right? So they say similar things to you and they say to others. So you need to look beyond what you already receive from your customers and you need to look at what people say in other places to expand, and then even if you do that, eventually, you hit a wall and then you need to start think bigger, like what is culturally relevant and topical. You get my point, right?

Richard Hill:
Do you find many companies in eCommerce sort of using their founders, their team, that brand, and that personality? So if we think about Gymshark as, obviously, a huge fitness brand and apparel brand, obviously, Ben Francis runs that brand, set that brand up, and obviously, he heads up. He's like his own personal brand. Big time. He's obviously doing a lot on social. I haven't looked at some of their emails for quite some time, but obviously, that works very well for them, using the personal brand of the founder. Do you find that works quite well with email?

George Kapernaros:
It does, actually. It does. I think it works well in general, not just in email, but it can also be very powerful for email. What I've seen some smart companies do, and I think that's the useful tip also, is that they create different voices for their emails, and those are real people, but they use them in the marketing way. They have emails coming from the nutritionist, emails coming from the personal trainer, emails coming from the founder, and what this allows you to do is really refine the style of message you give and also not annoy people, because it doesn't feel spammy if it's three different people. It's not always the same.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's a great tip, isn't it? And how many of you listening in are just sending emails from one email, whether that's marketing app, newsletter app? Obviously, quite bland, potentially, from the get-go in terms of that inbox that's coming from, but obviously, working into your sequences emails from different team members, departments, whether that's... It could be your purchasing team talking about new products coming in or about to come in, the roadmap of products coming in, the founder jumping on video every now and then on the email sequences. Yeah, the whole mix, mixing it up. Yeah, I mean, I know that works really well in B2B and in eCommerce.

George Kapernaros:
I would say one thing, and I won't elaborate because of NDA, but it's true. I know a company, they do extremely well, and they send 40 emails, 40, in the two weeks after you purchase something, and it doesn't feel spammy.

Richard Hill:
Wow. So in 14 days, they send 40 emails. Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
Yeah. And it doesn't feel spammy because they do what they just described. They do it in a way that feels like people actually care for you and they-

Richard Hill:
Wow, that's impressive.

George Kapernaros:
... do this in a really clever way.

Richard Hill:
Impressive, impressive. So when I turn my PC on every day, I'm probably sitting with, I don't know, probably touching 400 emails most days coming into my inbox, and that's just one inbox, and I'm sure everybody who listen here, they've got multiple inboxes, haven't we? Ones that are our main email, ones that we sign up for things with and to have a look who's doing what. I've got one email I've had forever, as I'm sure we all have, and when I log into that, there might be like 15,000 unread sometimes. But ultimately, as an eCom store trying to get through those busy inboxes, what sort of tips would you give to our listeners to get that click, to get our eCom emails opened? Is there any things that you would recommend that are very specific to get that initial open?

George Kapernaros:
Are you specifically referring to opens or just the clicks also after?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, so I mean, click. So to get the open and then to get the click. So we can go both, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
Okay. I'll just give an easy answer and then I'll give a more complicated answer. The easy answer is that, in my opinion at least, 99% of problems in marketing boil down to having good math and good content. In this case, we care about good content. So if your content is good, people will care. That's kind of an easy answer, though, so I'll try to make this more useful for the listeners.

George Kapernaros:
Generally speaking, what matters is segmentation, timing, and content. In terms of segmentation, you only want to be emailing the people that have interest in receiving your emails, and the way most people do that is that they create engagement tiers. They will say that people that engage in the last 30 days, and by engaged, you can have all sorts of actions, opens, clicks, visited website, I don't know, started checkout or whatever it is, are more engaged than those who did the same thing in the last 120 days, for example.

George Kapernaros:
So that's part of the equation. The other side of the equation is exclusion segments, because you also want to be excluding people, and the easy and I think actionable thing that people can do in case they're not doing already is to create what I call a 30-day sunset. A sunset is a flow, an automation that basically sends a message to people that haven't engaged in a long time and tells them that, "Hey, do you still want to be receiving our emails?" And if not, you mark them for separation and stop emailing them.

George Kapernaros:
But you can also do that in different stages of the life cycle, can you? So if someone subscribes, for instance, to your list, to your newsletter or whatever you want to call it, you can create a segment of people that do that and don't engage at all in the first, let's say, 14 days or 30 days. I usually do 30 days. And then you can try to engage those people, tell them, "Do you want to be receiving those emails?" And if they don't react, basically, you exclude them. So that automatically creates a much cleaner segment for you.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
Does this make sense?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So to improve the opens with segmenting people, sending very specific messages to very specific segments, and then if they don't do X, Y, Z, we're excluding them from that segment and then putting them on a different list, as you call sunset list. So is the idea behind the 30 days is sort of to, obviously, just to get them to open something then move them back.

George Kapernaros:
Yeah, because 30 days varies, right? It can be 14, it can be 40. But 30 days is usually good. They will have received a number of emails by that point. So that's what I say. It can be even 7 days if you want, but the logic is the same. So that's in terms of segments. You want to be engaging people who engage and excluding those who don't. That will increase your rates.

George Kapernaros:
In terms of content, you spoke of subject lines. Subject lines are actually not as important, in my experience and opinion, as the from name is in terms of opening an email, because it pops out a lot more in the inbox. People sometimes try crazy things like your future self instead of like... Stuff like that.

Richard Hill:
From the from name, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
Yeah, which I don't necessarily endorse. I think the brand should be recognizable in some way.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, it's an interesting one, isn't it? Because how many people are listening to this now that maybe got caught in a vat of doing and implementing various things that we're talking about. But that from name sometimes can be from an email that was set up five years ago that's maybe, it's just not even thought about because it's just not a setting you've even looked at. That email was set up with your provider and your email marketing platform however many years ago and it says "John Smith, who works in marketing, that left three years ago."

Richard Hill:
But ultimately, that's the first thing they see, isn't it? Obviously, is that who's it from and the subject line. So that who's it from, what is that, guys? Is it something that's clearly not relevant? Is it something that's not... Mixing that up, changing that to something that is new but then mixing that up with two or three options as you're putting people in different segments, whether that's an email to go from the founders, founder, from the marketing team, from the new products team. Yeah, brilliant.

Richard Hill:
So segmenting, we've talked about, but in terms of the best, well, obviously, there's a lot of different platforms out there for eCommerce stores, for email marketing, lots of different big brands, small brands, platforms get banded around, but what's your take on the different softwares and what are your recommendations for our listeners in terms of software for email marketing?

George Kapernaros:
So, as I said, I'll be honest, even though some people may not like that, the tool I use and the tool I usually recommend is Klaviyo, but, that is a big but, I have a very interesting relationship with Klaviyo. I have found that their support is quite slow sometimes.

Richard Hill:
Okay.

George Kapernaros:
And if that is an issue for someone... Because it can be an issue, right? Like if someone relies a lot on support and they don't really can figure out... Basically for beginners, that would be a big problem.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
I would consider working with a platform called Moosend.

Richard Hill:
Which one, I'm sorry? Moosend?

George Kapernaros:
Moosend, M-O-O-S-E-N-D.

Richard Hill:
Okay.

George Kapernaros:
It was recently acquired by Sitecore.

Richard Hill:
Okay. Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
It's a really good platform that has a lot of the functionalities of Klaviyo, but most importantly, it has really, really fast support. Support is actually technical. They can do all sorts of crazy stuff for you. So yeah, generally, that aside, I like Klaviyo for two reasons, basically. Number one is that it integrates really well with most eCommerce platforms, and this makes life easy both for the agency and for the merchant.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
It has a lot of depth that comes out of the box because of these integrations.

George Kapernaros:
The second reason why is that it's easy to use, really. It has a lot of functionality, but it's also easy to use. You can find probably more complicated, more in-depth solutions, but those are really hard to onboard people in or even use yourself. Klaviyo is really easy to use, even though it has this-

Richard Hill:
That's the key word, isn't it, I think, in everything that we do, is trying to make things easy? I think things have got and can get very, very complicated. This sort of crosses every vein of eCommerce stores, isn't it? And I think just when we look at things we do in our agency, some of the things have just layered so many different technologies or complications, which we are very big on making things easy, and obviously, if things are easy and it's easy to train people, it's easy to track, it's easy to manage, that's a massive, massive thing, and I think what you're saying with Klaviyo, that's what we hear and we use. In terms of like out-of-the-box integrations, that depth of integration and that sort of simplicity is so, so important, isn't it?

George Kapernaros:
Yeah.

Richard Hill:
I think people get a bit stuck. I know we've invested, personally invested tens and tens and tens, and it's definitely ten, ten, tens of thousands of pounds over the years in email marketing for my own businesses. Back in the day, Infusionsoft was a fairly big investment for us, HubSpot, things like that, which were for B2B moreso, definitely moreso. I'll probably get somebody down here arguing they're the go-to for eCom, but not in my mind they're not.

Richard Hill:
But Infusionsoft, I think we probably just spent about 20 grand on Infusion over the years, the implementation and whatnot, and we abandoned it because it was so damn complicated. It was so damn complicated, and I think that's the key, isn't it, to everything? Not just email marketing but trying to make things simple. Obviously, if those, automation, segmenting, syncing to the different platforms, obviously, people who are listening in are on whether that's BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, et cetera, just that simplicity, and I think definitely, Klaviyo is the one that we hear. I've had a few people on that really recommend that, so that's good to hear. Is there any little thing with Klaviyo that you'd recommend that our listeners should really dial in? What's the one thing about it? Obviously, there's a lot of things you could list off, I'm sure, but if there's one thing within Klaviyo that's super cool, what would that one thing be?

George Kapernaros:
I think that what people should do more of that they don't do enough of is that they should start profiling their users, and by profiling, I mean collecting data from the users themselves. That can be done on Klaviyo through the signup forms, that can be done inside an email itself, depending on what you just click. I really think there are a lot of things you can do with that, like you can personalize the actual content of the email based on that, you can create new segment, new automations based on that. There's a lot.

George Kapernaros:
And you can also learn, obviously, by that what the actual attributes and preferences of the user are. It has an insane depth to what you can do with it. For example, a common practice is to give discounts when someone signs up, right? You give them a discount, 5%, 10%, 20%, whatever it is. Some people, what they'll do is that they'll send a reminder for that. So you get your discount and like two days later, the brand tells you, "Hey, you did not use your discount." But what if during the sign-up for, you ask the users, "When are you looking to make your purchase?" And you have the option that's like today, in a week, in a month, or whatever it is, and then you time that reminder appropriately.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah, simple change, simple tweak, rather than just a bulk discount for everybody. Yeah, this is kind of the point.

George Kapernaros:
Just little things like that allow you to do much more complicated setups. Like for a client that was using a quiz funnel, the quiz was collecting info in every step. We created emails that had, if I recall correctly, like 20, I think, personalization blocks. So users were receiving basically completely different email.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Email immersions, yeah. Yeah, brilliant.

George Kapernaros:
You can do that. It's not too complicated.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I mean, maybe that's a good segue into my next question, which would be, obviously, you're working on a lot of different brands and a lot of tailored campaigns. Tell us about a project that you've worked on. If you can mention names, that's great. If not, I understand that. But step us through a project that you've worked on before and after, some of the things that you've done for that project.

George Kapernaros:
Yeah. I have an example. It's by a company called Keto Cycle. It's fairly big. They have millions of subscribers in their Klaviyo. And basically, it was when I was starting the company, I think I had one employee then. It was at the beginning, basically. I wanted to take them as clients and they were thinking about it, and basically, what I told them that, "I'll try to beat your abandoned carts content. I'll create a version of my own and we can test that. If it works, I'll sign you up as clients, and if not, you don't have to pay anything." So something like that.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah, prove your work before, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
Yeah, yeah. And it was really funny because I don't think I did something special. I basically asked. They were doing a lot of user research already and they had a lot of data. I basically wrote the cart abandonment, just changing the text, not the design, the timing, or anything, just to address the points that were preventing people from purchasing, and those were points like, "I don't really understand what the product is. They have a very complicated product." And just by doing that, actually, I think it doubled sales or something like that, and it was just the text. Now, if you think that this is a company that has like millions of subscribers and thousands of people receive those emails, that adds up to a lot of money, actually.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
And the reason why I'm saying that is not because I am a good copywriter, which I am, I actually started as a copywriter, but because there are simple things that can be done, simple things, and even if a company is advanced, successful, and has many, many employees and many, many customers, there are still ways to improve performance. The way to improve performance always is to see reality, basically, what people say, what they want, and give them that, basically, not be self-referential. I find that many companies are self-referential. They say that this is what we like, this is what we want, but that's not necessarily what the customers want.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
That's a really bad practice, I think. Anyway, I think that's a cool story, just rewriting it fixed.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah. So really looking at the types of products, explaining them in more detail. Yeah, it's interesting because I've been looking for a, what shall I say, a particular piece, like a body kit for a car, basically, and it's quite a complicated thing because there's so many different versions out there. Images don't quite do it on some sites. Other sites do. So a couple of sites that I've signed up to, I've obviously acknowledged the fact that it's quite a challenging thing, it's quite a high-price product. So one particular company has sent in their email sequences that I signed up to, acknowledged the problem, and said, "Look, it can be quite challenging to find the right piece, so we've created you this." And they've got various videos, explanations built into their email sequences and a big education piece.

Richard Hill:
It's quite a high-value purchase. It's thousands of dollars sort of thing, or pounds, and through that process, it really narrowed down, "Right, I know exactly what I want." I didn't actually buy from them, which is an interesting one, because they educated me but then they educated me on the fact that actually, what I wanted initially was not why I actually wanted it. I ended up spending quite a lot less on something else, but if they had a different product set as well, then I would've got the set, then they got the sale. But they're definitely on the right track. They just needed to broaden their products, maybe, or change the sequence a little bit. But ultimately, they engaged me, and when I'm ready for something else that they sell, it was a brilliant experience, so... And I probably spent maybe 15 hours or so researching this thing, and email-

George Kapernaros:
I've had that feeling.

Richard Hill:
... definitely played a cool part in that. But I think that's really cool. So obviously, emails on eCom, there's this piece where we're sending emails because we want to make more cash. I think the guys that are listening in, that's quite a brutal statement and I'll probably get hammered for it, but I don't care, to be quite frank. Everyone that's sitting here and listening to our podcast, we're looking at ways to build our businesses, and I think, obviously, sending emails and getting sales is the long-term piece. But ultimately, amongst those emails, we've got to be building our brand and building our, maybe, community. What would you say about getting that balance between that salesy emails and that sort of community aspect, that information aspect? What's the balance and what's your take on it?

George Kapernaros:
I will answer that, but if you allow me, can I please go on around for like two, three minutes to discuss the money-making aspect you just mentioned?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

George Kapernaros:
Because I absolutely feel really strongly about that. There are many narratives like in marketing, right? Like a good example is that conversion rate optimization is about learning. That's a big one. But I think those can be dangerous if they are pushed to the max, because at the end of the day, the goal of any business big, small, huge, is to make money. That's why businesses exist. So I don't think we should feel bad for wanting to make money. That's why companies exist, literally.

George Kapernaros:
And to take that example, specifically about CRO, yes, learning is super important. The more you learn, you can roll it out across organization, it's amazing, but it's also true that we're not scientists. Scientists perform experiments just to learn. We are marketers, and that's why we use language like winning test versus losing test. In science, there's no winner or loser. It's always learning. We use winner versus loser because we care about what makes money, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
So going back to the actual question, community versus sales generating channel, I think it can be both. Again, I think it's dangerous to say that it's just about building a community. No, it's not just about that. It can build a community that will generate sales. That should be the goal. Or it can create sales without alienating the community or annoying people. Why does it have to be one or the other? I think those distinctions are a bit dangerous.

George Kapernaros:
So to make this concrete, you can sell on email and give value also. The way to give value is to provide more meaty content than what a simple Google search would. For instance, let's suppose that you have, I don't know, runners shoes or whatever it is, right? I don't know. And your content, your email is about running tips. If the tips are actually valuable... By valuable, I mean, they're not like just a simple Google search away from the user. There's actual content there. Nobody will object to you having a section on your email that says, "You know what? Our shoes actually have a special footbed technology that actually helps you run without getting tired, so is having your feet being in pain." So you can both have content and also promote your shoes. It's not one or the other.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah, I think there's quite a lot to think about there. I think I sign up to probably, well, literally a good 50 or 60 fairly big brand email marked brands that sell physical products, and the ones that get it right, from my perspective, is just getting that balance. Ultimately, yeah, you've got to make money, haven't you? That's the brutal reality which I think not a lot of people maybe talk about, but I think ultimately, we've got to get the sales in, but we can do that by building a community around our brand and focus there.

Richard Hill:
So I think, obviously, you've worked on a lot of different campaigns, a lot of different products, a lot of different clients. What are some of the recurring things that our listeners need to avoid? What are some of the common mistakes you see people making? People are sitting listening to this episode now and they maybe got some basic out-the-box setup done, which is probably a typical client for you. They come to you, I assume, and they're set up, and I think that'll be a lot of our listeners, they're set up, they may be paying their monthly fee to Klaviyo, they've set up a few automations, whether it's one of the other providers out there. But what are some of the big things that, quite simply, that they should need to look at because you see that as a problem time and time again, potentially?

George Kapernaros:
Yeah. I wish I had an interesting answer here, but I'll have a very boring one, I'm afraid. I think the biggest mistake I see, and it's crazy that I see that because come on, it's 2022. We need to go beyond that. People still lack core automations, and by core automations, I'm essentially referring to three sets of automations, onboarding new subscribers, onboarding new customers, and retargeting people that interact with the website, and that goes beyond just retargeting people who abandon their cart, which usually is not even what we do. We retarget users that abandon checkout, not cart. Even though we name it wrongly, it's actually referring to the checkup. So those three sets are the most important thing that you can work on in terms of email/automation email.

George Kapernaros:
On top of that, there's also, perhaps even more important than that, is lead generation, the forms that get people to sign up. Many people just push out a pop up or a fly out. It has like a basic offer. Is it 5, is it 10, is it 20%? And then they just leave it there without doing anything, whereas you can have different designs depending on the device. You can have different offers, you can have different timing, you can have different frequency. An example of that, the default, I think, setting in Klaviyo, if I remember correctly, is that the popup should be triggering once a week, for example. So if you go today, you will see it, and if you go tomorrow, you won't see it.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
And the way people set those up, they usually pop up five seconds in, maybe seven seconds in, something like that, which means that users go in, they remove the cookie little box, then they remove that because it annoys them, and then they're not able to see that for an entire week, even if they go back to the store. So you need to do something there, right? You can't just leave it like that.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
So the biggest mistake, if any, is that we do all those things and we forget about them. Okay, now we have it. It's not like that at all. Listen, I promise to be honest, the reality is that email marketing is not an independent growth channel. It needs an acquisition source to funnel people into the engine, right? It doesn't work by itself, but it's still a marketing channel.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
It's a secondary, perhaps, marketing channel versus something like Facebook ads or, I don't know, Google ads, or SEO, or whatever, but it's still a marketing channel, and this means it requires dedicated people who spend time thinking about it and reiterating on it.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
And then I guess another problem I see is that people overthink the designs. They see brands that have like bespoke designs, every single email is looking amazing and very different, but it means that those brands have a dedicated designer doing that full-time, right? And you can't really do that if you're just starting out or if you have one designer for the entire company or even no designer for the entire company, which means that you need to work in a clever way. The clever way to work is through templates. You can create more than one template.

Richard Hill:
Different sets.

George Kapernaros:
Yeah, but it can still be a template which will allow you to kind of streamline your workflow.

George Kapernaros:
And the third, I think, problem is that it's actually, there are two sides of that problem, brands either send too few emails or they try to send too many.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

George Kapernaros:
If you send too few, like if you send like once every two weeks, for example, try doing that once a week. It's not impossible to do that. If you send too many, ask yourself, "Does this make sense?" Usually, this goes hand in hand with oversegmenting users. If you take a group of 1,000 people, you can break that into 1,000 segments, right? But would it have a financial return to send 1,000 emails? No. So in most cases, you don't really need to segment so much.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah. I think a good segment, we had a chat before we came on, didn't we? I think that's just a great thing you've said there, where obviously, quite often, if you've got the right tools, you're using Klaviyo, great, but what you might well have is some standard segments, some standard setup, which is better than no segments, but if your popup pops up, 5% off, and that's your standard setup, as an example.

Richard Hill:
But what we talked about also was, well, hang on a minute. Those people that are filling that in, different people are looking to buy at different time. I might be looking to buy it right now and I want a cheeky 5% off, which we're expecting nowadays. We've been programmed to try and find that 5%, 10%. But what if it's you, George, that's on the website and you're not looking to buy it for two weeks? Well, if I bang 5% to you now, in two weeks time, I've forgotten all about the brand, whereas if that 5% became 10% in two weeks, I get an email when I'm about to buy, which was, I think, that's just a really good example that you gave before we came on, I thought.

Richard Hill:
That segmenting piece and just using the functionality just to layer in, and I think that goes across all channels. It's a really good analogy because when we look at anything, whether that's PPC, SEO, you can do it to a level, but where you get that win is that extra 5, 10% at the top, which is really differentiating you as an eCom store to everybody else. Everybody else is doing 5%, 5%, 5%, 5% because that's a given. Well, hang on. How can we add that cream on the top? Well, what we can do, we can give very specific discounts at very specific times and very specific emails around very specific products at very specific times, rather than a bulk everybody-gets-everything sort of thing. So yeah, I think that was brilliant.

George Kapernaros:
Can I seamlessly mention something here? Something?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
To be fair, I haven't actually worked with them yet, but there's a company called Namogoo which I find really exciting. They use machine learning to time the discounts appropriately depending on when the user lands on the website, what kind of device they have, what kind of internet connection they have. It's kind of crazy. They have a really complicated system, and it's better related to what you were saying. I think it's something that's worth looking into if you're into eCommerce. I'm saying this for the listeners, Namogoo.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'll tag it up in the show notes.

Richard Hill:
So we're coming to an end, George. Last couple of questions. So we're sat here, we've got the crystal ball out, we're 18 months time. What are we going to be talking about in 18 months time? What do our listeners need to get in front of now, over this next few months, to get a jump-start and to get ahead in the email marketing game?

George Kapernaros:
I think, emphasis on the word think, I'm not entirely sure it will happen the way I think, that the more time passes, the more email marketers will need to understand other channels, too, and work with other departments. So I would suggest that people could dedicate themselves to email marketing, to start looking into other channels also.

George Kapernaros:
There can be a lot of synergy between channels. I'll give a concrete example. The way Facebook calculates CPM... Not CPM. The ads value, essentially, is the bid you have as an advertiser, the estimated action rates they expect users to do through the ad, plus the user value, which is kind of a black box and arbitrary on their side. They like some ads, they don't like some other ads. What does this mean? It means that if you can artificially increase the action rates that happen, so you scale an ad and you also do an email campaign at the same time, this will increase the total value of the ad for Facebook and, by extension, lower your cost because they consider it a better ad for the users. And this is kind of advanced, complicated, and all those things, but I mean to say that there's value in learning how other channels work.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
So this will be more important, and what will also be more important, I think, is what I mentioned earlier, collecting data, learning how to profile users in a progressive way and actually doing something with that. The big problem of companies is not that they don't have data. It's that they don't use the data.

Richard Hill:
Don't do anything with it. Yeah. I think that's a great finish there. I think everybody listening is thinking, "Yeah, that's me." Not everyone, but I think a high percentage of people, they're paying their monthly fee for X, Y, Z and they are staring at the same report, they are staring at the same segments, routines, email sequences they maybe built 12 months ago, so I think there's a lot of things to step through in this episode, guys, so I maybe suggest that you even pause and step back the last 15 minutes. A lot of things to be thinking about there. So George, I'd like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. What book would you recommend, George, to our listeners?

George Kapernaros:
Can I recommend two?

Richard Hill:
You may.

George Kapernaros:
I'll mention a book that has really helped me a lot as a business owner. It's called The Road Less Stupid. I don't recall who wrote it. I really don't recall who wrote it.

Richard Hill:
I had it in my hand this morning, actually, at home. I've got it at home, yeah. Red spine, yeah.

George Kapernaros:
It's really good, I think. And then I'll mention a book that has helped me a lot as a marketer. It has an incredibly tacky name. Please ignore the tacky name. The content is good. It's called Forbidden Keys to Persuasion by Blair Warren, a really, really good book.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. And I guess that sits very well with email marketing because we're trying to persuade, aren't we? So books on persuasion. Yeah, brilliant. Well, that's one that I've not heard of, so that's fantastic. So the guys that want to find out more about you, George, what's the best way to do that?

George Kapernaros:
I guess LinkedIn. Reach out to me. My name is George Kapernaros, K-A-P-E-R-N-A-R-O-S. I reply to everybody, so feel free.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So reach out to George on LinkedIn. And thank you very much, George, for being a guest on eCom@One. I look forward to catching up with you again soon.

George Kapernaros:
My pleasure.

Richard Hill:
Thank you. Bye-bye.

Richard Hill:
Thank you for listening to the eCom@One eCommerce podcast. If you enjoy today's show, please hit subscribe, don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter, and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce Marketing Agency.