How Email-Based Retargeting Works with Adam Robinson

So how the—well, I mentioned there’s a couple tiny companies in our space. How they worked, and how our product worked until very recently—like maybe a month or two ago—was that we would pass contacts once every 24 hours, and it would just have the landing page the person hit.

It really worked great for people with super high gross margin products who could spend a ton on marketing—like jewelry, supplements, stuff like that. But for things like nutrition products, if you just put that code everywhere on your site, it was difficult to back out ROI. You really had to value owning your audience.

Now we have real-time data, which is a major difference. It’s way better than sending it 24 hours later, which is just incredible.

In the next eight weeks, we’ll totally transform this for eCommerce. We’re already building it. We’ll capture the add-to-cart event for Shopify stores and actually pass the items in the cart along with the contact in real time. So you can say, “I only want to send cart and beyond-cart abandonment emails,” and it’ll actually send the cart.

And there are two types we can send. One is people not on your list yet. The other is people who are on your list, but Shopify’s cookie allows us to identify whether they’re logged in or not. So you’re missing a huge portion of cart abandonments if you don’t send to both people not on your list and people not logged in who’ve added to cart.

This is something I’m 95% sure will work for all Shopify stores. For what you’re paying—maybe a quarter per email—an abandoned cart is worth more than that. Period. Exclamation point.

Yeah. So that was kind of just starting with the original advice we gave people: throw it on your site everywhere, and then put the contacts in a warm-up series. The first email says, “Thanks for coming by the site.” Then warm them up however long you want.

That worked for a lot of people, but this allows for a level of precision that’s just unbelievable. I’m so excited about this next iteration of the product.

Exactly. It’s fantastic. I can’t wait for that last part of it.

Another interesting abandoned cart thing—you’ll probably think this is cool. I forget the company that does it, but if we end up being known for abandoned carts, we might do this too.

Apparently, with SMS, there’s no good way to maintain deliverability and send texts from a machine. So what people do is they have an overseas team—people in Singapore or the Philippines—who manually send texts from a MacBook. And since people often have their phone numbers tied to Shopify accounts, it works.

So when someone abandons their cart, they get a real SMS that says, “Hey, this is what you left behind.” And the conversion rate is just through the roof. SMS has a 95% open rate, versus email’s 30% if you’re lucky.

It’s cool. When I heard that, I was like, “Man, we should be doing that.” But managing overseas teams… it’s a can of worms. If it were just tech, no question. But I want to see how this cart stuff goes before we add more.

Yeah. The product has been taking these little leaps forward. One story I really liked was from Dr. Travis Ziegler, CEO of this eye drop company. He’s kind of an influencer too. He had me on his podcast after using our product and seeing the results.

He got 2x immediate ROI and a 6 to 10x return on the back end. Just did what we originally suggested—put the script everywhere and sent out three good emails with offer codes.

First was “thanks for visiting,” with a coupon. Second was a brand story, with a coupon. Third was best sellers, with a coupon.

That was great. He’s known in the internet marketing community, so we could send people a video of him talking about us, and they’d know who he was. That made it easier to start.

Another tip I love—this platform Clarity.fm. Have you heard of it?

Yeah, he sold it—somebody did buy it. And I think after that, the company that acquired it just stopped really investing in it. A lot of these guys, if you look, haven’t had calls on there in years. But I still think it’s amazing. I’ve used it to have some really interesting conversations. All of our employees and coaches are on it.

Right. It’s awesome. I started realizing I wanted to figure out if this would actually be a great tool for bloggers or not. So I found the founder of Wellness Mama on there—his name’s Seth Spears. We had a great hour-long conversation, and apparently, he went and posted about it in this mastermind group called Baby Bathwater. It’s this group formed by some big-name marketing guys—Joel Marion and a few others—and from that, like, ten people signed up.

We’ve got a 20% recurring affiliate program, so suddenly I’m thinking, “Wait a second—I can prospect on this thing.” I started going on there saying, “Hey, I’m doing some product discovery,” knowing these people would love it. And if I gave them the 20% recurring, they’d start referring me to all kinds of people they know.

So if you’ve got a product or you’re building something, I’d highly recommend it. That’s how you get in front of the people who are your dream users—the ones you think, “If I could just get them to try this thing…” But those people don’t take calls. They don’t reply to emails. They’re super hard to reach. But a lot of them, you can just pay $500 and pitch them. I was like, “I paid $350 to demo this to someone with real volume. I’d probably pay triple that. I’d pay $1,000 just to get in front of any of these guys.”

Yeah, I think it’s fantastic. I was kind of lazy about networking with Robly, and I regret that. But now—man, it’s a weird time with COVID—but when you have a great conversation with smart people, you always walk away inspired.

This is a fun conversation. Up until recently, I thought the best use case was simply fighting email list attrition. Everybody wants to own their audience, right? That’s kind of a given.

And just in case people listening aren’t publishers—Google and Facebook won’t let you move your retargeting audiences between platforms. You have to pay to reach them again every 90 days. You don’t own that audience—they do. But you own your email list. Nobody can take that from you.

Our tool helps you own that audience—the one the platforms have but won’t give you. That’s a big deal. You can move it across platforms, you can use it in different ways. And pretty much every publisher I’ve ever met would love it if no one ever unsubscribed from their list. But list attrition is real. At some point, it becomes impossible to grow because you’re constantly replacing unsubscribers.

If you have a million subscribers and your unsubscribe rate is 1%, you have to find 10,000 new emails every time you send a newsletter.

Right. So originally, I thought: okay, this is the cheapest way to get email addresses—80% cheaper—and the engagement is just as strong as your house list. It’s just the best way to stop list attrition.

There was one type of publisher I thought it worked best for—those who sell JV newsletters on a CPM basis. Like, if you have 33,000 contacts, you can sell your newsletter for $3,300. But I found out that’s a niche model. Not everyone’s doing that.

The more common model is selling eyeballs—publishers monetizing via affiliate deals or traffic volume. Even if they can’t track exactly where conversions come from, their revenue is almost directly proportional to how many people are clicking in their emails. So for them, it doesn’t really matter how those clicks happen. It works really well for publishers who drive a lot of paid traffic and monetize through email.

So that’s one clear use case—cheap, engaged email addresses that increase click volume. And then there’s also this bigger-picture value: reach. Just having more reach. You never know what kind of opportunities come from that.

Now, here’s a more recent case. I’m still figuring out how much I should say, but a large conservative publisher in DC—huge company, like 35 million uniques a month—absolutely loved the product. They said, “I can’t believe you’re telling me who’s on my site, and that these emails open so well. This is unreal.”

So I asked what they were planning to do with the data. I assumed they were going to plug it into social platforms. Because there’s this idea I like—kind of poached from someone else—your best custom audiences should be made up of the most engaged people on your website, and your best lookalikes should be built off of that group. Facebook doesn’t let you do that easily—you can’t just say, “Give me a lookalike of the top 2% most engaged users.” You need an identity resolution vendor for that, and they’re all enterprise-level.

I figured he was thinking along those lines—segment the data and build high-converting lookalikes. But he was like, “No, bro. The White House will literally buy all our readers at $1 per subscriber.”

So now we’re talking about a whole different use case. Not even about GetEmails directly. GetEmails is just the tool that unearths this audience—the audience you worked to drive to your publication—and that audience has undeniable value to all kinds of outside interests.

And when I bring this up now to some close friends—two in particular—one’s the CEO of Dotdash, which used to be About.com under IAC, and the other started Thrillist. Early on, they hated the idea of GetEmails. I remember thinking, “Shit, I don’t know if this thing is going to work,” because the initial reaction was so negative.

Clearly it worked. But when I talked to them, they were like, “Let us explain why this is horrible for publishers.” Basically, their ad sales team sells access to their audience. That’s the whole pitch—ongoing access to engaged eyeballs. Then there’s branded content—sponsored stories written in the publisher’s voice, designed to engage their readers.

So if you just sell a list, you’re undercutting your branded content pitch and cannibalizing your whole value prop around eyeballs. One of them said, “Not only would I never do this—if you go around pitching it, everyone’s going to think you’re a scumbag.” And I was like, “Well, that’s not that different…”

That’s not—both of them were like, “Look, it’s kind of a scumbag deal.” Like, there are definitely going to be people who do it, but just know that if you have, let’s call it, a more conservative view on publishing as an industry, this is a tool working against what you’re trying to do.

I think it’s unbelievable. I think this is—like—the potential is there, but the issue for us is figuring out how to make it so simple that it’s a total no-brainer. That’s how I like products to work.

Trying to design something that addresses this new need, though—what am I going to do, start a list brokerage? A marketplace? The problem with this part of the business is that it’s not about us. I’d feel a lot better if it were, but we’ll see.

This is all just what one guy’s talking about. Nothing’s happened yet as far as I know, but hopefully we can watch what he does closely and eventually teach others how to do something similar.

Yeah, I mean, that’s it. That’s the whole argument.

I mean, it’s not like all these businesses are killing it. A few are, but most are struggling. So, yeah—another monetization option.

To me, it’s like, you’ve got your class A advertisers, the ones you really want to work with. Then there are the “maybe” guys—like, if things got rough, we’d probably work with them. And then there’s a third group you’d never partner with on branded content, but you know they’d still love access to your audience.

So why not sell them the data? I mean, seriously—why not?

Another issue that comes up is engagement. The only complaints we’ve ever gotten are from people who wait like five, six, seven days—even two weeks—before sending anything. They rack up contacts and then drop them into a newsletter. At that point, people forget. They were only on your site once, and now it’s been a week. They’ve moved on.

So we always tell people—just send an automated email out nearly immediately after someone visits your site. If you do that, complaints won’t be an issue. It’s fresh in their mind.

But if you’re selling the data, the problem becomes: people won’t know the brand. Even if it’s a similar niche, they’re going to be like, “Why am I getting this?” So deliverability could be a real issue. That means the data might be better used for things like social targeting—custom audiences—or other non-email channels.

Comes quick. You’re just like, who cares?