Unleashing Email Marketing: Insights from Andriy Boychuk of Flowium

That's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I am your host, Brett Dyster.

And with me I have Andre with me and he is an accomplished entrepreneur and marketing specialist with years of experience.

And we're going to be mostly talking about, actually we're all going to be talking about is email marketing because even though that is a dinosaur, as I like to call it, dinosaur type of marketing, it's still very valuable in today's market.

But welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Thank you, brother, for having me here.

And the first question is, all my guests is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

Coffee.

Coffee.

That's like, I, unfortunately I have too much coffee and I probably need to scale down.

Gotcha.

Is it like what is like too much coffee in your world?

For me it's like the line is five cups a day, but sometimes I have a little bit more.

So it's not healthy.

My heart rate goes through the roof.

But it's not about because I do love coffee, don't get me wrong.

But now it's more like as addiction and because I'm sleepy or I need more energy.

I understand that.

I got a little puppy in training right now and I'm always eating that energy right now.

But I gave a brief summary of your expertise.

But can you give us, our listeners, a little bit more about what you do?

Sure.

My name is Andriy Boichuk and I'm the founder of email marketing agency called Flow.

We serve mostly e commerce brands.

We started back in 2017 and this is kind of our niche.

We specialize in email marketing, also known as a retention marketing channel, one of the most popular retention marketing channels.

And yeah, so we full service.

So we help from starting from deliverability and ending with kind of scheduling, creating strategy, copy design and scheduling those campaigns or automations for our clients.

Gotcha.

So like I said before, email marketing is kind of like the dinosaur of the digital age because email has been around for, I want to say like almost like two decades or at least two decades.

And it's.

And how can, what, what should you tell people about email marketing?

Is it still relevant today and is this a good avenue for like content marketing at the same time?

So like, what is email marketing?

Is it still relevant today for marketers as they're trying to navigate everything that's going on in the digital marketing world?

Sure.

I mean the quick answer, yes, it's still relevant and I mean if it's not, I would not have the business.

And now we have like thriving successful business.

And each year we're getting more and more clients who wants to implement the right email marketing in terms of content?

It's very interesting question because I never thought about that.

But if you produce some kind of content email marketing it's kind of amplify.

It's a channel to amplify it.

So it's easier to create email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing automations if you create some kind of content.

For example for you if you like.

Right now we are recording this podcast.

Yes, you will probably post on different social media.

But if you have a list, even if there's only five people on that list, you are not limited to send them this podcast recording and tell them to watch it, to listen it.

And nobody limits you.

Like there's no algorithm or extremely minimal algorithm which exists to limit your reach.

Gotcha.

And some what are some of your best tips and tricks for small businesses that just are starting out or even marketers themselves that are just starting out to build their list?

Because I know not everybody has a list but you got to start somewhere.

I mean first of all you need to collect that list somehow.

I mean the easiest if you have a.

If you have a website, optimize your website to add few options how people can opt in.

So it can be a footer, it can be pop up message, it can be slide in form.

Sorry, pop up form, Slide in form.

Those are just the ways.

But what do you put on those forms?

It's up to your business.

If you some infomercial space, maybe some kind of cheat sheet, some ebook, some video, some.

Course if you are in E commerce it can be discount free gift, free shipping.

So it depends on the business.

So it's probably the.

If you don't have that it's.

This is kind of step number one.

This is the basic.

I see so many brands that you don't have a sign up form in their footer and it upsets me because I do want to sign up for them to stay up to date what's going on with this brand.

Or I want them to send me offer to sell me something but they don't have a sign up form.

But if you don't have a website yet, maybe you just starting your business or some kind of theory that you want to start a business.

There's others tools like link tree or something like a very low cost where you can add the signup form in that like what's called like micro landing pages where people can kind of sign up and be added to your newsletter.

And should people or is it wise to purchase email lists?

Because I know there's a lot of companies out there that are like hey, we can give you like thousands of people.

So no, don't do that whatsoever.

Just like void.

So there's two, I mean there's, I mean there's one medium is called, I mean email but there's cold emailing approach and it's email marketing and those are two separate channels.

Cold emailing, it's responsible for awareness.

You know, like different marketing stages, like awareness, retention, conversion, blah blah blah, conversion, retention.

So cold email is responsible for awareness.

People know nothing about you.

You send them email, they're like oh it sounds interesting or oh, it's a spam.

Let me mark it as a spam.

Email marketing, it's a retention.

So somebody knows about you from social media, from Facebook ads, they met you in person, they know about you, they visited your website, they signed up for you for your emails.

So it's email marketing.

Should you purchase list to do email marketing 100%.

No.

It's a big taboo.

You will hurt yourself, you will hurt your deliver and it would be even if it's a short term positive return on investment long term, trust me, you will just damage your domain.

However, I don't want to like we do cold email, cold outreach for ourselves.

So we have different campaigns and we have outreach specialists.

But we are in B2B space.

When we sign a client, the lifetime value of the clients can be like fifty thousand, hundred thousand dollars.

So it works to us to do this but we don't do through tools like Mailchimp because Mailchimp is for example email marketing tool.

Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit.

Those are email marketing tools for cold email.

You need to use different set of tools, you need different set of talent, you need to different set of like training and learning.

So just don't.

Sometimes I see that people are confusing those two us.

Oh, it's an email, what's the difference?

You know, it's just send them.

Yeah, you did.

And so like the bridging the gap to build your email list is to cold email.

And so are there any like best ways of actually doing that?

Because I would not, I would not.

Recommend that like to call email to grow your list.

You called email to kind of to get to the client.

Again, depends what kind of business.

If you are e commerce, I don't recommend cold email approach whatsoever.

But for let's say B2B called outreach to create awareness.

So they know about you but Your goal would be probably to jump with them on a call, not to sign them up for your newsletter.

Gotcha.

And as we talk about email newsletters, is there like a flow to like putting the content in?

Is there like a header, like a block of text?

Is there a way of like making it visually good so people will actually read most if not all of your email?

Because I'm pretty sure we want everybody to read every single one.

But sometimes it never happens.

So the goal, I mean, so there's a few foundational blocks and let me start from the beginning because it would be easier.

So first of all, it's extremely important to take care of your deliverability.

Meaning that email that you are sending out, getting to people's inbox, not yeah, you can send out as many emails as you want, but if it goes to spam, nobody sees them.

Like, like do you check your spam folder?

Do you like go through those emails?

Probably not.

So the deliverability is like a milestone.

Number one, like to make sure you have good deliverability.

If you're just starting out, just follow the best practices and you should be good.

Next step is subject line.

Make sure that you have attractive subject line.

And right now there's ton of content about hooks, mostly hooks about social media posts.

But the same logic applies for subject lines.

Make sure to hook them to the goal of the subject line.

Not to tell what's in email but get them be curious what's the email.

So they are opening that email and in terms of email structure, if we talking about the designed email, not the text based but designed email like branded first thing is a logo.

Sorry, the entire structure of email should be kind of upside down pyramid.

So like you want them to scroll, scroll down.

So the major mistake I see people treat email as a website and they put the menu bar on the top.

It's a bad idea and subject taboo because you each button it's a call to action.

And per email rule of thumb, you want to have one call to action and you want people to scroll to that call to action.

So you have a logo.

Then you have a hero image and the hero image can, can have some kind of title title tags on top of it.

Then you have a short or long body.

It's up to you.

It depends what you're sending and then there's call to action.

So this is kind of very basic but this structure works the best that we found.

Yeah, so it's like the opposite of PR because PR is like a, is like a pyramid and you want you Want to do inverted pyramid.

So you don't want the most important thing on top, you want them to scroll down to most important thing on top.

Yes.

Yes, gotcha.

And then so LinkedIn has their own technical email newsletters.

Is it wise to do that or should you control it a little bit more and have your own type of a thing?

You don't own the customer data on LinkedIn.

I'm not against LinkedIn newsletter because right now it has higher like decent reach.

But don't treat it as your email list.

It's a newsletter, it's a newsletter, but it's not.

You don't own the subscribers email name.

You don't, you don't own the data.

And we prefer, we prefer that as a business it's important for you to own the data because if LinkedIn for some reason even by mistake shut you down, your business can go down pretty quick.

Got you.

So should it be like almost like a hybrid version like if almost a bridge version of your email newsletter of your actual one and saying hey, if you want to want more for your call to action, go to our actual email list and sign up for our email list.

Could it be like something like that.

Where you use, you can, you can, I mean like if you, you're a business owner, you want to have as many awareness channel as possible.

So yes, do whatever it takes to get most attention.

But your ultimate goal for people to go to your website and sign up for your email list.

And what's some good tips to get the highest open rates Because I mean obviously we want the most open rates possible because if you don't open it then you'll never go see the call to action and then it's pointless to actually have an email newsletter or you have to revamp it.

So what's the best way of getting the most open rates you can?

Sure.

So I would strongly recommend if you like want to take this seriously to investigate the your personal inbox.

Like let's say open the inbox and just check all the subject line that you can see.

Then check the same thing on the mobile and you even can check on different devices.

For example on I use iPhone so I have Apple Mail and I have Gmail because things look different on different platforms and see what catches catches your attention and think about logically like why.

So an example right now I'm volunteering for Ukrainian charity and I do, I provide them email marketing services pro bono.

And the hypothesis I came up with to include Ukrainian flag emoji at the beginning again I'M not saying that emoji works for all the brands, but if there is something that, I mean right because of the war, that, because of the war, probably Ukrainian flag and everybody knows Ukrainian flag now.

So.

And it's so distinctive in the email box without even worse, people know what is that email about?

And it's now it's up to them if they want to open or not.

I also found that some, some, some brands, they brand their subject line.

So some brands include specific either emoji or specific keyword.

And when you see that you like oh this is like this X, Y and Z brand, this is great way to do it.

But it sometimes it takes time and takes training to train your audience.

And as I said before, hooks make people curious.

Don't put like oh, 10% off only today our last sale.

Like I mean you revealing what you will provide in the email and sometimes feel like I don't care or if you say something like this.

We tested one subject line for abandonment card and the subject line was did something go wrong?

And person like you know it's a question and like oh, did I like what happened?

And we had the highest open rate for that spec for that specific brand for that specific email purpose to recover the abandoned card.

And sometimes people were replying and saying like oh I didn't order or you know like it was.

But it was something that sparked curiosity and people open.

So the biggest thing I would recommend to learn how to use hooks.

Hooks to hook person to open to get them curious.

And I'm not the best person to kind of teach you about hooks, but there's a lot of content on YouTube.

I mean check out the Mr.

Biz, the most famous YouTuber and check even his thumbnails, check his title it I, trust me, you would be curious what he's talking about.

Like you need to click to find out the answer.

Gotcha.

So is it wise to do like AB testing if you can on your subject lines.

On the subject lines for the emails so you can like find the best one.

And also does it matter like what time of day you also send the email out?

Because I mean if you send it like 3am in the morning, nobody's going to look at it for, for several hours.

But you also have to understand like time zone differences.

So are those two like also play a factor in getting better open rates in terms of.

So yes, you do need to split tests and we, I mean we big on split testing but if you have a very low bandwidth, let's say you have Only thousand email subscribers and you don't have much time to do email marketing.

You have other things in the business like don't bother about split testing.

I know some people probably hate me for saying this, but listen, you have other things, like more important things in your business to do.

So don't stress about it, just send those emails.

This is the most important thing.

But split testing in general, yes, they are important.

And if you start with a split testing, we strongly recommend to go with two crazy ideas like two different ideas.

Don't split test one keyword, don't split test comma or exclamation points.

Do something like crazy different and see like I mean relevant to your audience and see to which, in which direction your audience like go and go to and try to do the same split test few more times.

So it's not a glitch.

You can kind of prove your hypothesis.

So this is about split testing, about the time and the day.

It all, it all depends on the industry.

So here's an example.

If you sell like clothing for ladies, like women's brand, we found that Sunday, Sunday mornings is the best time for them.

Why?

I didn't know that.

But then I found out I spoke with few, few like Avatar, like few, few Personas for this specific brand.

And they say, they said that the typical routine and again I'm very generalizing and this is was for this specific brand they like to wake up in Sunday morning, have a cup of coffee on their tablet to browse different products, you know.

And will it work for everybody?

Like if you own the infomercial business and you're sending about funnel something on Sunday morning, probably you will have terrible results if you're in B2B Saturday, Sunday probably the worst time to send that email.

So it all depends on the business.

But yes, it does play the role.

But there's in the past people were saying like Tuesday and Thursdays are the best days or Tuesday through Thursday the best days.

Come on.

I mean everybody using this now everybody's mailbox is overloaded on those days.

So now I would say Monday and Friday is the best day because nobody sends emails on those days.

So you have to test and you have to see yourself.

So for the same company that for this volunteering for charity we were sending typically on Thursdays and I did the test on last Saturday and our open rate dropped from 50, 55% to 35%.

So like I can assume that Sunday is not the best time to send or Saturday is not the best time to send.

It gotcha and then talking about the frequency like where should brands actually figure it be like once a week, once a month, every day, yearly, bi yearly.

Like what's the is obviously it's gonna probably depend by the industry but what's usually the best frequency of emails?

The best one once a week it's the best frequency.

In the past I was saying if you have very you don't have bandwidth do once a month.

But nowadays with overload of information, social media things one month is like it's a lot.

So you need to stay on top of your customers mind.

So once a week it can be basic text based email.

We recently had Neil Patel on our podcast and we were asking about his newsletter and he has extremely simple email.

It's like one paragraph, one link, text based, nothing formatted.

It's probably taking him like maximum 30 minutes to do, I would say even 10 minutes to do.

So you don't have to overthink it.

Just make sure be consistent.

Try to send it the same day each week.

It trains not only your subscribers but also it trains inboxes that you are sending that email on specific date and time.

So I mean it's good to know for like small businesses and everybody else and maybe like small team of marketers that you don't have to have this like really long elegant email that's like got this like crazy like coding behind it.

You can just use like a text based and have your call to action for them to just go over to your website basically.

But it's correct.

But it's not only for small brands.

We spoke recently with one brand, their revenue between it varies but like at least 150 million a year and they do from every 10 emails they send two text based emails.

So this is their mix.

So it's not only about your business size.

I recommend it for small business because I know you're probably yourself and you might have your assistant.

You just don't have bandwidth to design beautiful emails.

But I don't want that beautiful email, that perfectionism to stop you without from taking the action.

Gotcha.

And then is there any like specific email tool that you like to use like mailchimp, aweber constant content.

Is there any specific that you like more than other ones?

Sure, I'll answer the question but at first I'll ask you what who, who are your listeners are mostly listeners are.

I mean mostly it's like it's still like PR and marketing people in the mix because I do have a degree in actual public relations so I unders I understand it and so for right now it's I'm still growing this.

So I do have a smaller audience because I just started this year actually and I do it once a month so it's a smaller one.

But it's usually about like people in the PR industry but they're in like the 25 to 45 age bracket.

I see.

So for PR I would.

I mean that's what I need that information to recommend the tool.

So for somebody like PR or marketing agency is probably something like convertkit activecampaign.

I mean HubSpot but HubSpot is like too pricey.

Something more kind of B2B thing.

If they are in E commerce space Klaviyo is the best of the best.

Mailchimp it's you know like in the past and maybe still now mailchimp it was a gold standard.

If you start with email marketing you sign up for mailchimp because it was always free but now different tools like ConvertKit they also have a free plan up to certain point and just convertkit from user it's more user friendly and easier to set it up.

But if you need some more complex solution I probably would recommend ActiveCampaign because it includes not only email marketing but different like robust automation marketing automation tools you can use.

But if you're talking about something free it's probably either ConvertKit or Mailchimp them got you.

And from your perspective what does the future of email marketing actually look like?

Do you mean the how's it going to be like?

Yeah, how's going to be like the next five years?

Oh I see future I think there it's already a very competitive space and there's more and more competition so everybody like fighting for the eyeballs on the inbox.

So last year or sorry two years one or two years ago the Apple releases the new privacy thing.

So right now the open rate is not.

If they are on iOS devices we are not able to track open rate.

Now they're releasing the new features so I think it will be more kind of controlled and it would be harder to get the statistics of your email marketing.

It would be harder to know if they're opening or not.

So our jobs as email marketers would be harder.

But that's why it's important to start as soon as possible for you to learn how it works and start to collect the data.

So right now that like the privacy thing affect the Facebook the other things that's why the first party data where you can collect on your signup form like who?

Like any information you want.

Like are they, I don't know, male or female, what the money is their birthday.

So you are able to collect on your form and you do own this information.

Gotcha.

I mean that is a good thing to talk about.

The Apple do not track thing that they actually implemented.

I don't know if Android's going to eventually do it I think but they haven't actually really done it yet.

So does that.

How do you get around that hurdle of getting people to actually allow for tracking?

So you can actually give them the best, I guess the best email or the best products for them.

So that feature when you install the app or like open the app for first time, where it says allow, do not allow.

It does not affect emails.

So it's not for email site of iOS but iOS release it globally.

So it doesn't matter what you click.

If you send email to to a device and where they read their email is iOS they use let's say Apple Mail.

By default the sender doesn't see if you open.

Oh, sorry.

By default all emails considered open because they go into proxy and then it depends if person opens it or not.

But in your system, let's say in mailchimp it shows like open so your open rate is inflated all the time.

So some tools we use Klaviyo we are elite master Klaviyo partner and in Klaviyo they have a feature exclude iOS devices.

So basically you have better understanding of the other list what the open rate.

But you don't.

You're blind.

But now it's extremely important to track not the open rate but track the click rate engagement with your email.

So yeah, so.

So the future will be like moving from open rates to ctrs or click through rates or for that.

Okay.

And then where can people find you online for more information about email marketing and you sure.

So our website is flowium F-L-O-W I u m.com or you can.

I'm very active on LinkedIn so just my first Andre and last name Bo.

Yeah, you just type in and you'll find me there.

I'm very active posting a lot and trying to engage with people and any.

Final thoughts for listeners.

No matter what you think about email marketing or email marketing channel like you like it or you don't like it, it's not unfortunately it's not what you think about it.

And if you like it or don't, it's important that it works and it will bring you more clients or potential clients so I strongly recommend for you to implement.

All right, thank you Andre for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on email marketing.

Sure.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

And thank you for listening to Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

As always, please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps and hit the subscribe button on YouTube and see you next month as we talk to another great thought leader in the PR marketing industry.

All right guys, stay safe, understand your email marketing list email marketing and see you next month.

Later.