E116: James White

Richard Hill:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to episode 116. In this episode, I speak with James White. Director of partnerships EMEA at Clavio. With rising acquisition cost and the obvious importance on lifetime value of your customers, this episode is an absolute must listen.

Richard Hill:
James and myself dive into why should customers be spending resources on their email marketing strategy, how can companies use email to build relationships with their customers, how can companies improve their automations and reengage/disengage customers and James' insights into the future roadmap for Clavio and so much more in this one. If you enjoy this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button, wherever you're listening to this podcast, you're always the first to know 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. Hi, and welcome to another episode of eCom@One. Today's guest, James White Director of Partnerships EMEA at Clavio. How're you doing James?

James White:
Very good Richard. Very good. Thank you. Very good to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Richard Hill:
No problem at all. I've been looking forward to this one. I know we've been liaising with you for a few weeks now to get you on. Very excited to chat all things email marketing, something that we are super passionate about here at eCom@One or eComOne. So I think before we get into the nitty gritty of email, it'd be good to introduce to the listeners and give us a bit of a background and tell us what attracted you to the Clavio?

James White:
Yeah. So I've been working in eCommerce for probably 5, 6, maybe 7 years. Losing count now. Started off more on the paid marketing side, kind of fell into eCommerce through paid marketing for very small businesses. Got in touch with a company called Nosto, who I ended up working with through some of my consultancy clients. Got into sales, tech sales, through joining Nosto and partnerships, partner marketing, sales, etc, within the tech ecosystem.

James White:
And then Clavio had been on our radar as a partner for probably 3 or 4 years, and they expanded into the UK maybe 3 years ago now, 2018, '19 time. And I'd seen the growth sort of firsthand as a partner and seen the product market fit firsthand. And when the opportunity came along, I thought now's the time to jump on board the rocket ship. You only get one go to sling your hook on and catch the ride. So I thought now was the time.

Richard Hill:
I think you're absolutely right. I think we've just got back a few weeks ago now from the IRX and obviously you had an amazing presence there, there wasn't many merchants I think that I spoke to. It seems like they waved the Clavio flag, and there's Clavio this and Clavio that. It was definitely a massive talking point of the brand at the expo. So it's been a real as you put it rocket ship journey this last few years for Clavio.

Richard Hill:
Obviously massive upturn in eCommerce, but obviously the email marketing side, I think there's been quite a lot of, I would say, without saying any names, quite a few big players that have come and gone over the few years that I've been doing, well I've been doing this a long while, but definitely going to these big expos, I think it's quite normal to see a lot of the big well known brands have the big 50 grand stands say for example. And it did dawn on me this year when I went and I was like, "Hang on a minute. None of these guys are here. But yeah, challenging market at the moment, I think. We've had COVID where you couldn't do marketing, you couldn't do in person events, which can create a lot of leverage, even if you don't have that great product market fit. Whereas, when you are fully reliant on, does the product work and the network affected that and you can't really do much outside like a webinar and a wine and cheese tasting online, that really does rely on the product to lead the growth. And I think that's where CLavio really has come into its own.

James White:
We couldn't have predicted COVID and the tailwinds that gave us, but what the team have worked on and I don't put myself in this bucket, because I wasn't here at the start of COVID, but the product team and the rest of the commercial team, marketing team, they've really put Clavio in a position to succeed with that tailwind. And I think that's something that we've seen a huge upside from versus maybe some other technologies that weren't quite as well structured to benefit from that growth. I think everyone in eCommerce to most cases benefited from COVID, either right at the start or with a bit of time, once it fully got going. But yeah, Clavio definitely was in the perfect spot to capitalize, for sure.

Richard Hill:
I would say, absolutely. As I said, the amount of clients we have, that use it, brilliant success story. So for those that are listening, I think obviously we all know what email marketing is.

James White:
My mom doesn't.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. There's probably a few there. I think most of our listers are there, they'll be doing something or everything, but why should companies be investing their resource into email marketing from your point of view?

James White:
I mean, look, there's a few reasons. One of which is frankly, it's relatively cheap. It's a relatively cheap way to market to your customers. And when you think email and SMS as a kind of channel package, the customers have given explicit consent to hear from you. Now with email, lets just assume that people kind of just go yeah sure, to email without a huge amount of thought. But with SMS, people generally are very much considering giving their mobile number to you before they give it. And so, the consent there, is even more explicit, let's say than email. So these customers have given consent to hear from you. They want to hear from you. So you now have this privilege to access to their inbox. And it's like you said, a cheap way to access customers. You own them, you own your relationship with them.

James White:
And more importantly, you own the data that surrounds them. So it might be their interaction with your eCom store, their interaction with your physical store and any other technologies that you are leveraging that also integrate with Clavio, have all this data in the platform and with other mediums. So I know your agency also does email services, but a whole bunch of paid acquisition. Those channels are great and they are necessary as well. But you have far less control over what you know about the customer. Sure, the audience tools are pretty exceptional, but with cookie changes and everything going on there, there's just a lot more ambiguity. And I think those channels are never going away. Let's just make sure that's like a fact, but email is one channel where you today have almost even more leverage than you have previously, because of some of those recent privacy changes across the different platforms.

Richard Hill:
I mean, I had a merchant on a recorded episode two weeks ago, and basically he just said what you've just said, in that obviously the cost and that level of detail and the data, those two things compounded together to be able to then really segment an existing customer list or potential customer list, which you've acquired relatively cheaply and then able to contact them for next per person or per a 100,000 people. It's literally nothing in comparison to a lot of channels. Absolutely, if you're trying to get in front of a 1000 potential customers on paid ads or send an email to a 1000 people or 10,000, obviously the costs are just night and day.

Richard Hill:
And knowing that, those potential emails are hitting them at a very specific time at a very specific segment of a product set, the intent is just so... And that chap, the numbers were something like 25% of revenue, which they do over a 100 million a year. They're a UK based company. So 25 million a year from email, give or take a mill. So absolutely crazy, cost that segmenting piece. But obviously you're dealing with a lot of different merchants there, James, a lot of partners that are dealing with a lot of merchants. What would you say about some of the biggest mistakes that our listeners need to avoid? A lot of the people probably run an email, already that are listening, there're different levels obviously, it's doing things, then doing things absolutely well, but what are some of the things that our listeners need to avoid?

James White:
I mean, I would say less avoid, it's normally do something you're not doing. So with email, it's pretty simple. You acquire your customers through popups, through a variety of different consent methods. Well first don't, is make sure you acquire proper consent on email and SMS. That's the first thing that you need to tick off, because that can get you in hot water very quickly. So first don't, is don't buy lists, don't buy bad lists, don't send boring bland newsletters to unengaged customers. Use the tools... Tools like Clavio offer to segment your audience. Firstly, by high intent, highly engaged customers versus unengaged. We're all super familiar with the, again, very simple 80/20 rule, 20% of your customers often drive 80% of your revenue. And that's no different in email. And the goal really is nurturing the 80% into the 20% whilst using those other acquisition channels to continue to build your 80% as you are funneling people into the 20.

James White:
I think consent number one. Number two, is I think if you're doing the basics, you're sending a newsletter every Friday at 9:00 AM or whatever. That's great, but where the real efficiencies and that merchant you are talking about doing 25% of their revenue through email and we see customers doing 40, 50% of revenue through email. One of the things that so many brands don't do and you can do this, whether you started your store yesterday, or you are a 100 million brand, you should be leveraging automations. So the data that you have in the platform, that own data that you've gathered through consent, through shop integrations like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, etc. That data you've gathered through those shopping platforms or let's say you've integrated Clavio with a reviews provider or a personalization provider, you've got a huge amount of data on these customers.

James White:
There's no excuse to be able to send them... You might even have five versions of your newsletter based on whether they're male, female, they like red, blue, green, like insert variable here. You can do some very simple tweaks to your newsletter. You can trigger email flows that maybe tie into SMS if they don't activate on the email the first or second time. So using flows, they take up a bit more time to set up, but the payout is far greater than any manual campaign sending that you'll ever do. They're a much higher leverage activity, to reach out to those same customers, to the same level of depth would require you to be online, sending a campaign pretty much 24/7. With automations, you can have cart abandonment, browser abandonment, reactivation, one star review, five star review automations that just run evergreen.

James White:
I think those are the things that a lot of brands don't do. I mean, I was in Germany last week and Germany I think is a little bit behind the times with email, they're very much campaign sending to sending. And we were talking to 30, 40, 50 million Euro turnover businesses who are still sending that newsletter on a Monday and a Friday, and that's it. "Oh, we don't send abandoned cart emails, because we haven't really got round it or it's too difficult." We've got Shopify customers, Magento customers, all customer types doing literally a hundred grand turnover who have already got those automations in place. So you are losing out from an engagement point of view to a customer or to another competitor that could be a 10th of your size. And that to me is just mind blowing, because it's such an easy high leverage activity to take up.

Richard Hill:
Literally, that is mind blowing when you speak to merchants. And I think if you're listening to this now and you are paying for X, Y, Z, you're paying for Clavio and you've got maybe one or two weekly, just regular things running and no automation, there's no segmentation. Obviously, you run through all sorts of options there and different sort of things that you can run. It's literally free money. Where I talk about free money quite a lot of the time, if you're not running certain ad types on your Facebook ads or on your shopping ads, it's free money. It is literally free money.

Richard Hill:
Bought from you once, the chances of them... Your top 5% of customers that have all spent over X. Wow. They're used to spending hundreds of Pounds with you. What's going to stop them buying the next thing they've bought from you two, three times, or there's obviously so many sort of playbooks we could run through. But I think obviously it does depend on that quality of data that you've got to start with. So if you've got any sort of good examples or tips or you talked about integrations, obviously with specific integrations seamless, but is there anything else you can say on getting better data to start with, that will then help in the long run?

James White:
Yeah and I know this from a B2B marketing perspective as well. When I'm talking with my Clavio hat or my hat from previous roles, you kind of think about capturing data and you think, "Oh God, I want to minimize the amount I capture just to make sure I get someone in the door. I only want to ask them two things, so that they press submit as quickly as possible." And there's definitely some argument for that. But I think if you are a business that would really benefit from and provide your customer with a better experience by asking for more, ask for more, because then you that, let's say you are doing baby clothes for example.

James White:
Now, if I sign up for my new child, Hey, I've got a young son they're four months old and you are sending me in six months time, you're still sending me the four month old clothes, I'm going to be start deleting those emails. But if you are sending me the clothes that are relevant to the six month old, the eight month old, the 12 month old, those emails are relevant to me every time. So it's worth asking me, "Hey, welcome to baby whatever.com, how olds your child? What are you interested in? A boy or a girl?"

Richard Hill:
You use the name of the child.

James White:
Exactly, simple things like that. I mean there's loads of examples, extrapolate your vertical and then insert data point here. That's just one vertical where adding that second or third part of your form, is so important. And then straight away then that speaks to automations. Straight away from day one, when you've set up that form, the next action is how do I set up nurture flows, so that every three months or how often do people buy baby clothes? Seemingly constantly, if you're a parent of a young child, but there is probably a cadence to that. You work out the cadence using some predictive analytics, which you can get in Clavio FYI, predictive analytics. You can work out how often that customer is likely to buy every three months. And every three months you send them a new email with some product recommendations for that category of clothing, 6 to 12, 12 to 18, whatever the relevant age range is, and suddenly you're away.

James White:
And the second thing and I touched on reviews earlier, reviews are a really simple tool, but we all know people check Amazon. 70% of purchases are checked on Amazon for reviews or something. It used to be like that. That might be a bit of an old dated stat now. Check Amazon before you buy or check a brand name before you buy. And if you're not on Amazon, you need to have reviews, because people respect reviews, wrongly, or rightly because of Amazon's prowess in that space. And so, being able to understand having review data in your platform, I think is one of the first things that we'd recommend and then being able to speak to that. So if someone gets a one star review, you treat them with the respect that they need, the feedback they've given you. And if they don't give you feedback and they just give you one star, you make a huge effort to request that feedback and repay them for it, because that improves the experience for the next customer.

James White:
And likewise, if you get a five star, they probably just endorsed like three or four more people. So you thank them for it as well. And there's a whole bunch of data enriching mechanics. I'm not going to go into them all again, but I think that first step requires you to have no sort of technology integrations. The next steps often require other technologies for data enrichment. You can find a whole bunch of use cases on the Clavio website and in our integrations tab. But there's a huge amount out there. Basics first and then think about what's next. Talking to people like you guys to find out, what's next as well.

Richard Hill:
I think that's going to resonate with everybody listening. I think obviously we're talking about baby clothes there and we have a lot of clients in the baby niche and we speak to a lot of children clothing brands, etc. Straight away, it's obvious that when you're buying something for a child, there's that cadence and that journey of growth, if you want to call it that or growth style. A baby wears a certain thing, a 3 month old, a 6 month old or 12 month old or 2 year old, a 4 year old and so on. You've got a 10 year cadence maybe.

James White:
You have.

Richard Hill:
We spoke a little bit off before we came on, when we talked about the pet industry, that's something we are massive in and we've got huge clients for our agency in that area. And it's a very similar thing. Ultimately, you've got a child, so you've got the name of the child. So you can be selling emails to the actual child. There's a whole discussion there already, but on the pet side, sending an email to a typical dog's name now, but Boris.

James White:
Panda, that's my dog, Panda.

Richard Hill:
So we're sending an email to Panda every month and obviously last month you bought the flea treatment and then hang on, the different times of year or different things for pets. So flea treatment, flea's rampant in, let me get my timeline here, but I think it's March time, I think from memory. So flea treatment's obviously specific brands that we focus on for flea treatment and then fireworks night, you've got the products that calm the animals down a little bit, which is a bit of a different one. And obviously different things are on a six week cycle. You've got prescription things. So it's building out that cadence depending on your perfect scenario, but obviously not everything goes perfectly, does it. So when somebody drops off, is then building these other cadences to pull them back in, to get them back to that... I love the sort of analogy at the beginning of the 80/20.

Richard Hill:
If I got up now, we've got a book over here that we've written, well, my colleagues written should I say, Henry. And it's the 80/20 approach to running Google shopping. We're very much the same. That's something that runs through our whole agency. Obviously, you can do a lot of things in any digital marketing strand, whether that's email Facebook, whatever, but there're things that really can move the needle. So it's focusing on those things, but focusing on those customers, trying to move them over and we believe that the 80/20 is fractal as well. So it's more like the 4% and getting people... And I guess emails similar in that you'll have that 2, 3, 4% of super fans of your brand that will probably buy dozens of times, potentially depends on obviously the product set.

James White:
And they're the ones that often refer out. They become your free marketing channel in so much as you don't need to tell them to people to go to Google ads. You don't even need to tell them to people to go and sign up. As long as you look after them, they go and tell people to come and buy from your brand. And that costs you well, it's cost you the great product. It's cost you the marketing, the way you position your brand and the way you market for them. But it's actually cost you nothing really to get them to have that conversation. Those are in many ways, free customers. You've already paid for that customer in the process. So I think it's a massively undervalued, especially with the boom I think that's gone in the last 12, 24, 36 maybe, can't even remember how long it's been going on now. 36 months. It's very easy to get obsessed with new acquisition, because there's been such great new acquisition.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

James White:
It's come because no one's had a choice to go somewhere else. Whereas, now there's a choice. There's the high street. The high street is not booming, definitely not, but it's an option for people now.

Richard Hill:
Option that wasn't there.

James White:
And so, I think everyone probably needs to just pivot back a little bit to, let's just focus on looking after our customers and sure, we need to acquire new ones. That's how we grow. But we should also really focus on looking after our new ones, because they've got more options now, they're leaving the house. They're not just staring at their shopping feed and emails all day. So let's really make the effort to engage with them in a meaningful way. So I think that's just an important note to self and note to everyone else.

Richard Hill:
And I think that and the big thing with that is yes, so the customers they're then buying more of, that's the outcome, but then that can enable you to possibly spend more than your competitors to acquire the customers in the first place. And I'm a massive believer that the person that can afford to spend the most on acquiring the customers are going to win the race sort of thing.

James White:
100%.

Richard Hill:
So comes back, doesn't it? Cost of acquisition is rising. Obviously, it is up and down all the time, but ultimately it's not really going down in most verticals. So if you are then getting 2, 3, 4 times the order value out of a customer, you can then afford to spend more to acquire that customer. So it comes round while people are maybe... There's been a lot of brands that have struggled this last couple of months, particularly a lot of using the press. And ultimately it boils down to cashflow at the end of the day, but obviously there're various factors, but cashflow dries up. So I think a lot of it obviously then boils down to, I mean, there's a lot of stuff there, so I'm just trying to pick where to go next.

James White:
There's one thing I would add actually, I think, which is again very important at this time and going into potentially some tumultuous times for many of us. One of our private equity partners who are obviously extremely balance sheet driven when they're looking at investing in eCommerce businesses. They focus a lot on high margin customers. How do you drive more focus on high margin customers? Customers that spend more, that refer people more? How do you understand who those customers are and make more of those, because to your point around cash flow, those are the most profitable customers.

James White:
Now, some of those can come from new acquisition channels as well remember. So there'll be like high margin new acquisition and there'll be high margin existing. And I think taking the time to understand what a high margin customer is to your business on both sides of the funnel, so new and existing, I think is a worthwhile exercise. And there are many ways to do that depending on your business and what constitutes high margin or not. But I think that's a good call out again for good fiscal responsibility over next 6 to 12 months.

Richard Hill:
I think that's ultimately where the focus will be this next 3, 6 months. The bottom line at the end of the day, I think things are getting quite interesting out there. The different rises in costs, whether that's in cost of product, cost of fuel, but also cost of product, labor, etc. So it's going to be keeping our listeners profitable. Obviously, there might be months where we need to maybe go minus for a bit potentially while we recalibrate things. And maybe we through that in most instances, but ultimately we've got to come out that and we've got to sustain and be profitable. So I think that life cycle piece is absolutely key, which obviously Clavio and email marketing play huge part in hundreds of thousands of merchants. So I guess we're segmenting really, really tight and we could list probably hundred different cool ways to segment, but what would be some of the things you've seen and you would really recommend that maybe some of our listeners haven't heard of. When you tell us we're going to go, "Oh my God, that is so smart."

Richard Hill:
I'll give you a second to think about it. And I think ultimately it is, obviously there's the segment piece, but it's like the building the relationship with the clients via email and an example I would give, its not quite there, but it's the sort of thing... Back in lockdown, I subscribe to all sorts of things. Now if I can think a sort of things. And I had to have a little word with myself to be honest at Christmas. It was like, "Richard, this is getting ridiculous." And I'm not actually joking, I think we had 305 orders on Amazon last year and that was just Amazon. So I was just like all right. But a couple of the things I did, one of the things, well, two of the things was coffee subscriptions, various ones and socks. I'm a big sock fan. If we ever meet, which I'm sure you will face to face, you won't see me in a dull pair of socks. I think I've got bright yellow socks on today.

James White:
Love it.

Richard Hill:
But some of the reasons I'm obviously still with those people are the way that they have interacted with me on the deliveries that they've sent me and the ways that they've interacted with me and really sold with that brand story around their brand and the quality of the product. And I'm still with two brands, particularly that stand out for probably about two and a half years now. And I get my socks and I get my coffee and I'm happy.

James White:
And you're living, you're surviving. That's all the matters.

Richard Hill:
So in terms of really deep segmentation, but that sort of messaging in the marketing, what advice or what sort of real goal could you give us?

James White:
So I think segmentation's a difficult one, because it can be very specific to different brands. So I'll come back to that maybe in a second. But I think the first one that really resonates with me and most of my colleagues and friends will attest. I'm a massive Patagonia fan. I'm surprisingly only wearing one item of their clothing today, but I could honestly probably wear a whole outfit, which would be pretty lame if I'm honest. But anyway, they do a couple of things really, really well, which allows them to do some really cool things like being closed on Black Friday and like giving you free repairs on clothes or cheap repairs on clothes. And what they do I think which is what lots of brands are starting to have to do now, because there's a bit less demand. Customers have more options, retail's back. That kind of thing.

James White:
What a lot of brands have maybe taking for granted is actually being able to build a brand, taking the time to build a brand. What's my voice? What's my message? Most people, even if you've never worn Patagonia or never bought from them, you know that they're an ethically sensible brand, because you've probably heard someone like me talk about it, because I'm a massive fan or you've seen something in the news or you've seen that they don't sell on Black Friday or something like that.

Richard Hill:
I didn't actually know that, that is genius.

James White:
There you go. So they basically tell you, they close the shop, online shops, everything they give the team, the whole team, warehouse team, everything you're basically on holiday for Black Friday, when everyone else is trying to make more money than they've ever made.

Richard Hill:
Exactly their focus is sustainability, environment.

James White:
Exactly. And so, I think a lot of brands they're great at the early hype and they often mature into a great brand story, but they sort of forego the middle part, which is building your brand. They sort of forget in the middle while they're so busy growing and selling and hitting their numbers. And I think the brands that actually have the most longevity and success, which is really important in times like today and the next 12 to 18 months, when things get tough, is actually people understand what you are really about. And they understand that you stand for something. And whether you stand for the fact that you are going to brighten up someone's day with great socks, you just know that's a fact. So you buy from them or you know that coffee tastes amazing and you're going to get up for it and enjoy making it and the ritual of making every morning, that is something that resonates with you.

James White:
And I think when you are X clothing brand and there's 50 brilliant clothing brands, why choose you? What's your story? So actually this doesn't necessarily come down to email marketing, it comes down to, if you don't know really why you're doing what you're doing, but you're kind of doing well, why don't you sit down and think about why you are doing well and what the underlying mission you have is to deliver to your customers. And that doesn't necessarily have to relate to selling product. It doesn't even have to be in Patagonia's case about the product. The product is a means to save the planet. I know that's quite a grandiose idea, but often grand ideas have the most sort of drive behind them. So we are producing sustainable clothes, if we're Patagonia, to save the planet.

James White:
Now that's a huge mission. Obviously, a lot of people resonate with. One company isn't going to save the planet, but they're trying to build a movement. So people buy into that movement. If I buy it from Patagonia and I know I can get my clothes repaired and I know that it's recycled plastic, I'm doing my part. And I think that is the single piece of advice that I think counts for every single person, segmenting, it's kind of topical, it's different for everyone, but building a brand, whether you are pet products, you stand for something. You're helping people support or helping people look after the thing that means the most to them in life for example, your best companion. Brightening up your day with socks, saving the world with whatever you call this piece of clothing.

Richard Hill:
James, that is genius. I would say, stop what you're doing. Rewind and listen to the last four minutes again, because that is absolute gold. It is absolute gold. I think so many tactics and things. And obviously we talk about those, but ultimately, what do you stand for? What are you about as an individual, if you own the business and what is it about? And I think that's something I've pretty passionate about the way that I've run my business and the way that the people that we attract and the business that we do or the decisions we make daily all come back to our sort of values as a business. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Last couple of questions for you.

James White:
Go for it.

Richard Hill:
We've got this great list of people on our email database, but ultimately there's still going to be a glut of people that just aren't responding. They're just not opening their email. They're not hitting the 5, 10, 15%, whatever it may be, depending on the niche, just aren't engaging. What are some tactics, some things that you would say are working to just reengage the people that maybe just don't, they're definitely not moving to the 80/20 look on the other end.

James White:
I mean, there's some fairly rudimentary ones. If they haven't bought from you, are they discount sensitive. So you might be a brand that doesn't discount very often. You don't like sending discount emails, don't send discount emails. But if you really want to try those customers out and you've sent them relevant messaging, you've sent them brand story, you've given them every single chance to get to know you. And there's quite a few things on that list. So you've highlighted your brand values. Why should they buy from you. You've highlighted products and the value of those products and the joy or technical value or whatever it is they'll bring to that person's life. If you've done those kind of fundamental things and they're still not engaging, I mean, I would always default to, are they discount sensitive? And if you're not a discount person, then those customers aren't your customers. If you've done everything you think you can to highlight why your brand and your product is great, don't spend time on those people.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

James White:
Don't waste your effort. Spend it on acquiring new ones. Use the cohort that you've got that are highly engaged, export that to Facebook and Google and go and acquire those similar types of customers. So my kind of best advice is, if you've tried everything and again, there's a few ideas in there, three, brand, products, discount. If you tried those three things or one of them isn't for you for whatever reason, then just sack them off, go to the next thing. Don't waste time on things that aren't working out. And by the time you tried two or three goes, you've tried enough times in my opinion, unless you're a salesperson and then you should call 50 times to make sure you get. So when that person's given consent and they've got a busy inbox, if they're not replying.

Richard Hill:
Just move on.

James White:
I mean the only other thing I would say is subject lines. If you're a playful brand, you can try subject lines, but again, if you're getting engagement but not conversions, like onsite time, post that email click, they're still probably not for you. And it's just knowing where that line is and what tactics are worth trying to get there.

Richard Hill:
That's brilliant. So obviously I think we'll have a lot of merchants that work with Clavio or thinking and work with Clavio, but have you got any snippets or any sort of under the radar things that are on the roadmap with Clavio that are maybe not known yet, that you could maybe let us know about or as close to the wire as you're allowed to go with any sort roadmap functionality and things that are happening in Clavio?

James White:
So I think one of the things that is exciting and not sort of top secret, I'll get locked up for if I tell everyone. So today I think as many people who've come across Clavio will know we do SMS as well as email. And today we have pretty extensive functionality in the US, but that isn't quite the same in the UK. And so, we are launching a bunch of features that are available in the US, in the UK, in the next couple of months. So that's, things like two way messaging, for example. So you can integrate your help desk. Let's say you're using Gorgias or Zendesk for help desk. And you'll be able to use two messaging.

James White:
So you'll essentially be able to run that help desk chat from Gorgias or Zendesk through Clavio SMS. So that, classic thing of, "I sent a message on the help desk and I had to go feed the dog and then pick the child up. And then I lost the chat." You don't need to have those kind of horrible feedback from customers anymore. So that's, something really, really simple. I think one of the other things is Clavio's always iterating on its flows, its automation, segmentation options, new eCommerce platforms. So for this audience, wherever you are in the world, there's always something new coming in the platform. Look out for our KPE events, every quarter Clavio product events. That's when we launch most of these features. I think those are probably the two things to look out for, Clavio product events, which you'll see, just follow us on LinkedIn or sign up to a newsletter. You'll get relevant content. That's where to catch us.

Richard Hill:
Lot in our newsletter. So I would say sign up for our newsletter.

James White:
Yeah, there you go.

Richard Hill:
Brilliant. Well, James it's been an absolute pleasure. I like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. Do you have a book that you recommend to our listeners?

James White:
Oh God, I have many books that I would recommend. I think one of the ones that I think resonates with a little bit of my brand talk track that I was talking about earlier, I really like Ray Dalio's: Principles. It's a great book. It has some great stories around his principles for life, they're sort of life and business principles for anyone that's not read it or thinking about reading it. And he also summarizes all the principles with some very short snippets in the middle of the book. So you read the stories that help give context to the principles. Then you'll also have the snippets to go back and remind yourself on. And he's just a super smart guy, great investor, seemingly good person as well, which seems to be quite rare with people that have made ridiculous amounts of money. I'd recommend it to most people, I've gifted it to quite a few people as well.

Richard Hill:
I would second that as well. So brilliant. So the guys that want to find out more about you more about Clavio, what's the best way to do that?

James White:
You can message me directly. I'm on LinkedIn, James White. You can go onto clavio.com. You can email me, james.white@clavio.com and I can help you directly or pass you on to one of the many more talented team members than myself to help you in whatever place you're at, whether you're a customer or someone interested in Clavio or becoming a partner one or the other. So hit me up directly or clavio.com and reference this podcast and we'll get you to the right place.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Well, thanks for being on the show and I look forward to catching up with you again. Thanks James.

James White:
Thanks so much for having me Richard, cheers.

Richard Hill:
Bye. Thank you for listening to the eCom@One eCommerce podcast. If you enjoy today's show, please hit subscribe and 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.