897: Omnisend: Take the Shortcut to Revenue Growth From E-Commerce Email Marketing, SMS, and Automation with Greg Zakowicz

Robert Plank 0:00 Hey, and welcome back to the podcast, we're here with Greg Zakka wits, who is a veteran marketer, and the senior ecommerce expert at Omni send.com. And if you've been hearing about how email is dead after maybe stressing out about iOS 15, or SMS, or any of the above or similar related categories or solutions, then Greg and omnisend are your people to talk to, we're going to be speaking today about e commerce and about how you can tap into some of these technologies and so much more. So Greg, glad to be talking to you.

Speaker 2 0:32 Hey, thanks for having me, Robert. appreciate being here. I always love doing these things. So someone knew to do it with this time, you know,

Robert Plank 0:37 yeah, and you kind of have to these these days, right? Because if you're stuck in your own little bubble, your own little box, you're only gonna get so far you have to network you have to be a people person. Even if it's awkward doesn't come naturally, you have to market you have to do that outreach. So I'm excited to speak with you to find out about what makes you unique and what omnisend does and what problem it solves. So tell me about it. What the heck is ominous and then why should we use it,

Speaker 2 1:01 we just use it because it's the best but let me get to what it is. So just very quickly, we are an email and SMS marketing automation platform specifically built for E commerce merchants. So we always like to say if you have a shopping cart and website, probably a good fit for you. So we handle typical email marketing, like you would expect for most email marketing platforms. Nowadays, with segmentation automations, the whole nine yards. We also have SMS and Web Push notifications through the platform, along with retargeting or re syncing with, say Google and Facebook ad properties as well, which we'll probably talk about a little bit today. But obviously, all these are designed with the ecommerce brand in mind where we can take one piece of data simulated across different things, including making your retargeting more effective as well. So plug and play integrations with pretty much all your major e commerce platforms, Shopify, Shopify Plus Bigcommerce, WooCommerce. And like there, so hopefully, that's good 45 seconds skill for you.

Robert Plank 1:54 It is and you know, you're making me think that it probably happens about once per week when I and it's usually I'm on my phone, I see something on Facebook, I see an ad or something. And I click, and I leave the tab open on my phone. And I think to myself, like, I wish someone would retarget this to me, and then I forget about it. And then I'll be on my computer where like me personally, I usually like but I like browse on the phone and I buy on the computer. And then I'll just leave this atlas like, you know, browser tab number four, open on my phone for like a couple of weeks. And then I'll just let it sit, let it sit. And then it's like I would have bought, if I had gotten like a push notification or an email or an SMS or retargeting or something. And then a few months later, I just feel bad about seeing the same tab open on my phone again. And again, I finally I close. And I think to myself, if it's been this long, there must not be an urgency for me to buy this thing. And then I end up not buying. And I just think to myself, like, I wish I had gotten that little reminder. So is that is that typical? Or do you have any kind of data about how like how important all these additional little channels are just to like, get that last little stressor sale on these ecommerce sites.

Speaker 2 3:05 So Robert, you touched on the one thing, which I think is super important that a lot of consumers and marketers don't really talk about you. You talked about urgency, I'll use the word intent on here, right. So whether you're going to buy, I don't know what you're reviewing, but let's just say it's a sweater.

Robert Plank 3:17 So we got to that's that's how much does it disappear? Yeah,

Speaker 2 3:21 it's the book behind you. So intent here, there's something in your life that took you to that website, whether you're planning on buying that sweater that day, two weeks from now, or you're saving it for Black Friday, which is, you know, it's not three months from now. But we'll just say it's three months from now. There's something in your life that took you to that point. And there's some sort of intent there. And I think those reminders, whether they're browser abandonment messages, web, push notifications, whatever it might be, those are designed to just kind of feed that intent or urgency on there. Yeah, we need we know you're like it, we know there's something there taking you there, those things can just push you over the edge or reintroduce you words just feed into that intent. So I would say those things are extremely important, I would say from from an email or SMS standpoint, specifically email. So we have these data reports that, you know, I aggregate all this data and us as a team, we put these things together. And then we look at and we sift through it and try to figure out, hey, what's, what are the trends here? So these are on data reports, you can check it up, check them out on omnisend.com. So we're not going to ask you, you can just go read them, get some more insight into them. So browse abandonment messages are one of these things we track and we look at, you know how many we send, what are the click conversion rates, all these things on here, browsers typically one of those top three automated messages that perform the best right behind welcome messaging and cart abandonment. Also two other very high intent messages here. So you know, from a push notification standpoint, and give you general metrics on here, you can see those in the report but browse abandonment messages when people are going in viewing products or viewing categories of products and then they leave and they get retargeted with those extremely effective because they're the equivalent of right message right time Right place, right to channel so it's the relevant relevance that matters here for him.

Robert Plank 5:04 And why Omni sent to do all these things, because for some reason, I'm, when I'm thinking about, like, whatever solution to apply to my business, I'm afraid of moving to some new platform where it's unfamiliar, and I'm afraid of getting stuck and maybe like going down this path. And you know, like doing all this work that I might have to undo later. And my and I know that it holds me back to try to have like the piecing together mindset. And so when I hear about all of all the things omnisend Does the my thought process thinks, Well, why not just go and do a Facebook retargeting ad? Why not sign up for this email service, this SMS service? Why Omni send to and why have it all in one place?

Speaker 2 5:45 Well, I think there's two different things there. We'll start with the latter, which is why I have it all in one place. Because I think this is the thing that's probably most important for E commerce brands today is you want that data to feed the other data. So we know that, you know from paid social, great channel to market to right, there's fluctuating costs to play with that it's market driven. So we've seen over the course the past year, plus, a lot of brands go into, you know, increasingly going to social platforms for retargeting. The cost to return ebbs and flows quite a bit, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's less than less than good. And you just kind of marry it, their email is one of those things where there's more control costs, it's been like this for a decade, you know, they're if their platforms significant, raising prices on you out of the blue, there's really not a lot of reason for that, they'll give you a reason. But it's generally more cost controlled. And the returns have been have been pretty consistent over the past decade or so you kind of know what that ROI is going to be, you know, you can fine tune that you can get worse based on this hygiene, but it's generally there. It's also first party data. And this is the important part of like having it all in one place. So if you're marketing to me via email, you know, I've signed up to receive emails, I want to receive that communication, they can't be said on Google search, or they can't be set on social, you know, paid social, because it's part of the deal. But I don't go to Facebook, or I don't go to Instagram, to see the ads. Now, I might respond to them. email, SMS push notifications. On the other hand, I have to say, Yep, I want to receive those messages and raise my hand for it. But we can use that data to them. This is where we're talking about all in one place. And rethinking those ad properties, we can say, hey, this person has purchased from us because our email platform is integrated with the E commerce platform. So we have all that purchase data, we have that browse data. So we know if I'm Greg's abandoning, you know, pink fuzzy slippers, in his cart or on the product, you can then automatically sync that to Facebook property. So you know, Instagram, whatever it might be, or Google property. So search, YouTube, all those things there and say, Hey, as opposed to just having this segment of people who might have done something at one time, we can now have this real time updating segment saying, Greg just purchased pink fuzzy slippers, we don't need to retarget on Facebook this next week, or today on these things, or on the vice versa, I didn't purchase, we have all this data, but I clicked on this email and I browse this site over here, we can retarget me on those properties where I am actually there. And then we can create look alike audiences based on that as well. But it's using that single piece of data or there's multiple pieces of first party data to then feed all the other things. Of course, if email or SMS isn't their jam, and I want the purchasing on Facebook, right, that purchase goes to the comp platform. It then tells my email campaigns mass mass campaigns and my segments sync to those properties that are purchased. We can see is retargeting at that point. So it's a really long answer for you, Robert, on why all one place? I'll give you a quicker answer on replatforming you're switching providers because your concerns are legit concerns or concerns everyone has, we make it super easy, right. And that's the benefit of it, we can integrate your your Shopify store with Omni sent in literally two minutes or less, right, it's super easy moving over, there's always going to be a little bit of pain always going to be a little bit of time consumption going there. But if you can increase your sales, you can make your targeting more effective, you can decrease your spend on these other channels. That's all profit, it's all revenue, and we can make that better for you. And that's why you would want to switch you want to go for long term, short term and long term results. But you can make more revenue, more profit. And that's the end of the game, right? We want to we want to maximize those things as best possible.

Robert Plank 9:30 And then that makes a lot of sense that I mean, I imagine that like I'm probably on maybe like four or five of these platforms as far as like a browser as far as a consumer, right? Like I'm not on all of them because of you know, personality, age levels, awareness, all those things. But you know, I'm on YouTube Allah, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook a lot, Google, but it makes a lot of sense where if you were using separate services, you'd only get like a little sliver, but then if there someone like me who's on like five different sites, you're like getting the whole person. And so like you said, you, you get the reach to, to kind of wake them up everywhere to kind of get, you know, break the pattern everywhere with them to kind of so that you recognize the ad. But then also, as you said, you save money too, because once they buy, now it shuts off those ads in the other, the other locations for them. So that makes a lot of sense that you're, if there's one person on five platforms, you're not treating it as five separate people, that's one person on different platforms.

Speaker 2 10:30 Yeah, plus it. I mean, as the as the brand you're not paying for for different platforms, you're not paying for an SMS provider, you're not paying for an email provider, and then paying for whatever properties you're using here. Right, you're paying for one solution that is then going to feed all those things. But I mean, there's a lot of cost benefit to it as well. beauty here is, you know, 1015 years ago, having a sophisticated platform, for marketing purposes, it was a lot more challenging was a lot more complex, it was a lot more expensive than it is today. Those costs have come down, ease of use has gone up and it makes it affordable for mom and pops or, you know, 510 person teams all the way up to your larger companies. It's kind of democratized ecommerce from that perspective. And that's it. It's kind of the beauty the age we live in now where, you know, the big guys and the small guys, they can go head to head, they get the same solutions for them. And it's not costing me an arm and a leg for

Robert Plank 11:21 Yeah, and and it's easy to think like, oh, well, I'm not cheap. I'm not a penny pincher. But all of these $50 $120 A month services, it really adds up. It's no joke, when you're just saying, Well, I'm paying for this SMS service. And I'm paying for this email provider. On top of the paying for the ads, like you really think at first like, oh, well, I'm just paying 20 or 30 here for like the base starter package. But then as you grow, then now suddenly, you're you're paying more separately than you were together for a worse solution. Because with Omni send, you could pull up your one contact and see all the things versus trying to connect that. And I mean, you and I both know, Greg, if you have if you have to like manually piece all these things together, and you can't just look and see the number or the KPI, then you can't really make good decisions. If it takes you too long to get the answers, then you can't really like untap your creative brain so and it's underrated. But it's really important, I think,

Speaker 2 12:18 yeah, that's, I mean, you touched on to like the reporting aspect of it, right? I want to do a report in a month or every week or whatever you're doing reports, if I'm pulling a report on this system and this system, then you gotta you have to match those things together and be like, what are we doing here, right, you're getting kind of half or you're not getting the complete picture, right? Whatever that percentage is, you're just not seeing the whole picture, there were one platform that handles all these things, you get more of a complete picture. And then you can use that a little more strategically. So, you know, we talked about cost savings, but also time savings, time is money. So it allows you less time you're you're focused on doing the small things more time, you could focus on growing your business and doing those other things that it takes, like, you know, even the email marketer, they've got 40 Other things they're doing on a day to day basis as well. So whoever is doing the reports, whoever's doing the planning, they can focus that time elsewhere. And that's going to be a benefit to him as well.

Robert Plank 13:09 I agree, completely focus on growth, revenue generating activities, not just the day to day, the maintaining and so you and I have gotten into some really technical details here, which is fun. But it's also fun to kind of go on to the other extreme and kind of get into a fun story. So do you have any interesting, like success story or case study with one of these like E commerce or Shopify sites that that use Omni sense, so that way we can get a feel of what it's like to use your platform?

Speaker 2 13:36 Yeah, so we've got a few on the website, you can check out again, we don't get those things either. So you can just come and browse them. And we don't get a whole lot there. So you can just browse and like to make that information open people. You know, we didn't talk about SMS, I'll give you one an SMS, because they're doing really well on email. But it was an email kind of graduation story. And I could tell it very quickly here, but there's company called divatress. And generally younger demographic, they were doing really well with their emails, you know, increasing sales came around, he said, increase them further. And then SMS was one of these things where we're talking to the owner and goes, you know, everyone's talking about it, it's, you know, it's all the rage. He didn't think it was gonna be a valid marketing channel for him he's like, but it doesn't cost you anything to ask for the mobile number. So he just added that field to his pop up on his website, eight months, got 70,000 SMS subscribers 13,000, which were SMS only. So email wasn't their thing. But SMS was eight months 123,000 in excess cells, and as now their number two primary marketing channel behind the email. So you think about paid social paid search all these other things here. SMS is now number two for it. So it was able to increase sales. It's a growing channel, and he's like, Hey, I took a flyer on it. I thought there was no way we're gonna succeed with it. But it's now number two form and it's again, it's all one place so he can feed automation with or to email SMS into the same workflows. So when someone browse, you know, browses on the website and abandons, you can have a series that goes out for email and SMS to that person and get them back. Or if they're SMS, only he can have SMS or email only, he can customize that. But those flows then become a lot more relevant, less more personalized for him. So I think it's a really good story of, you know, a lot of people say, Well, you know, my audience would never do SMS, they would never do it a my mother's a baby boomer, she subscribes a brand SMS is it's unbelievable. I did not know this until I was visiting over winter and her phone counting and, and she's reading them out loud, and they're all from brands. And I'm going to go as everyone. That's the beauty. This is what the owner of the butcher is. Rob, when I was talking to him said he goes, you know, again, it doesn't cost me anything to ask for the numbers. But I always say it's a really good telltale, right, as for the numbers that have no one signing up for it, maybe your audience doesn't go for it, maybe that's not the channel for them. And that's okay. But you know, right. But if you start seeing it, like these guys did come in droves, you got something there, and then you can start playing around with how to execute and how to use it. And you don't have to go from zero to laundry, you can just to kind of dip your toe in the water, figure out where works best for you and your brand. And then your role. But it's a really good example of, you know, not resting on your laurels and going oh, emails killing a for us, we've got these other paid channels, we're doing really well with them. We don't need to add something else. Right. It's always about figuring out how do we maximize the revenue we can increase here.

Robert Plank 16:26 Yeah, and I mean, those are some amazing numbers. And your this is I think it's a really huge and important reminder, like you said, Do not rest on your laurels. And don't assume and don't hold yourself back and unknowingly self sabotage. Just because you think that the way you do it is the way everyone else does it. And that the way it's always been done is the way that it should be done in the future. I mean, I had this friend that for some reason for all the for many years thought everyone use Macbooks, just because he used a MacBook and all his friends did. And I looked up like the percentage of people that use MacBooks and number and they're great, but the percentage was really low. And I'm like, look at the data. And like when you think about all these, like visionaries, right? You think about like Walt Disney or Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates or whoever, but he always like did crazy things, right? They did things that challenge the norm that sometimes were maybe dumb ideas at first, but then it developed into something better or a wild guess and just trying something different. And so this is a important lesson here that you're telling us to just capture the SMS and just try it, give it a go for any number of days and just see what the results are. Because even if you have these assumptions already, you you can't predict the future you don't know what might happen. You might be like this company that got $120,000 Extra just by playing around. And by capturing the the message and bought by using it. I mean, just use the tool and see where it goes. That's great.

Speaker 2 17:51 Yeah, and I would say those examples you gave, right, they also had plenty of failures, but they're failures on like, anyone who might be listening this podcast, they're probably going to come with a lot. Like they will probably a lot more expensive than any failure you're gonna have, right? So you could get a few SMS out and be like man that crash and burn not my jam. But like, ultimately, what's that costing you? Right? It's not costing you 10s of 1000. It's not even costing probably 200 bucks. If that's so that's the beauty of testing it. And it doesn't have to be SMS, right, we see this, and I see it with brands that are just strapped for time I saw when I was consulting large brands, too. They had one or two people doing their emails they were doing for other things. And their time was strapped as well. So even though they had more resources, they didn't have a time resources on their side. So I would say even with email, right, we talked about automation, we've been hearing automation for 15 years, you could have sent a cart abandonment message 15 years ago, right, it was just a lot harder to do. So a lot of brands will have that now. But browse abandonment might be a good example we're seeing an increasingly use. But still, it's an opportunity for brands. Ultimately, you could try that out. And it might not be for your audience. But ultimately, what's that costing you cost you a little bit of time to create the email to actually create the email, which that content is probably all there choose your categories. But the automation takes five minutes to set up. So you're investing a little bit of time into it. And then you're rolling it out there and just seeing if it works, right. And if it doesn't work, that's fine. I'll guarantee you it will work. You know, so you'll be already there in Could you come yell at me if it doesn't. But it's it's an example of like birthday messages or post purchase messaging or whatever, right? If it's something you're not doing, it could be as simple as a very basic automation roll out there. See what happens? Doesn't work. Kind of kill it. Right, but you're not out 10s of $1,000. Right. You might be out a couple hours and five bucks and emails.

Robert Plank 19:38 Right? Yeah, yeah, the the cost of failure, if you could call it that is very small compared to what it was and also the time to get to that failure, which as you said like it probably won't be the failure but just get get to the point where you know if it'll work or not, and it used to be 10 times as much and take 10 times as long and now is the time To do these crazy experiments because like that, I think that the average person say they try three things. And then the two of them fail. And then the these legends that you hear about, they tried 30 things, and 29 of them fail, but because they they kept trying, and they got to the failure quicker than they were able to, to fit it all in and make it all work. So I think that we've covered so much, right, we've covered technical ideas, we've covered stories, we've covered motivation, we've covered strategy. So if someone out there says, This is amazing, I need to jump on this before my negative thinking brain talks myself out of it, I need to get dialed into the the SMS and the email and the retargeting and everything else that goes along with it. I need to check out omnisend today right now, not tomorrow, but right this instance, where should they go? And what should they do?

Speaker 2 20:50 So best place ami send.com Super easy. All the social handles, if you want to check those out, are all just Omni sends. So easy enough to find, if you're interested in SMS, or even different ways to do right, what the trends with email marketing, how they're converting things like that. Ami send that comm just go to Resources, those data reports on there. Again, they're all on gated, so you can just read them at your leisure. But we got them on even post iOS 15. Right, they came up we just crossed a year since that was released. But we did a separate one on just that to see the impact, great trends spotting there for your email and SMS programs, you can kind of see what the adoption, what the sends conversions, click rates, all those things are kind of compare him against yourself and see what opportunities are out there. And what kind of the the analysis that I put into that for what this ultimately means, like see how it applies to your program, but um, you suddenly come easiest way to do it. But we've got learning centers there for education, as well. So if you just want to get smarter, we've got free resources there for you as well. so.com.

Robert Plank 21:51 Fantastic. And that's why someone is listening to this podcast that we're on right now. Right? Because they want to get smarter, they want to have the facts. So you made it this far on the podcast, and you were interested about everything on this. And so this is a sign don't just, if you just learn all this stuff, and you just stop, then you're wasting time. But if you learn this and say, okay, so much of what Greg said, made a lot of sense. Now I need to go over to omnisend.com and just get educated and get some ideas and see the things that you're not doing. I mean, I know that me personally, Greg, I kind of feel bad on myself when I'm like, Oh, I'm not tracking this, or I don't know that number. And even just that alone is a good reminder when there's like these, this data and these percentages and these things that you're mentioning. And so I hope very much that when someone goes to Omni sends that they will be retargeted that you're capturing an SMS and all those things. Am I right on that guests.

Speaker 2 22:44 So we're not overly aggressive with you, which is why people love us, right? Even when we, when we maybe lose out to a competitor will wish you luck, right? And we'll say we'll see you in six months. But we're pretty, we're pretty laid back over there. So we're not going to be asking you, that's why we don't gate a lot of things. We just want to make it you know, we want to make our expertise shown. So we're not going to hammer you over the head with SMS and all that stuff. So don't be scared, come explore us. We treat each other like family over here. And we love it that way. And that's I think that's what makes us our customers love us.

Robert Plank 23:19 Fantastic. It's like Olive Garden. But even better, because it's a it's an SMS and email platform. So the place to go is Omni send.com. And we'll we'll see you there. And you tell Greg and tell the team that Robert plank from the marketer that a podcast sent you. So Omni send.com and Thanks, Greg for showing up and sharing some some cool ideas and data.

Speaker 2 23:38 Hey, thanks for having me. I'll leave you with one final thing and I'll make it super quick for you. This stuff does not have to be hard. It's it's really easy. It's just one thing at a time. So we talked about a lot of high level things and a lot of things today. Don't get overwhelmed. It's super easy. Just do one thing at a time. We can guide you through that as well. But anyone listening regardless of how many times how many resources you have one thing at a time and you'll get it done. I promise you