S5E106
· 29:10
Alright. It's Matt from Money Lab. That was a weird start. But, I'm gonna try to make this quick because I am currently working on this, and I wanna figure it out. So I had an idea for a podcast episode where I was going to talk about how to make emails, you know, marketing emails better.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? More better. Okay? And I had written down, like, all of these test ideas, like, the difference between, like, a longer, more newsletter style email versus, like, a short, quick, you know, punchy couple of tips, you know, email. And that was, like, the first one I wrote, and I was like because I saw an email from a food YouTuber, and I was like, wow.
Matt Giovanisci:This email is, like, I didn't say it was good. I said, well, I put a lot of time into this email. Now it wasn't like well designed or anything. It was kind of like it looked a little thrown together, but perhaps whoever put it together didn't have, like, a design eye and that's okay. But I was like, wow.
Matt Giovanisci:This email itself actually had some value in it. Now it was kind of like an article within an email, basically, is what it was. And then I've been getting this email from these creators that talk about the creator economy essentially or YouTubers more specifically. And they it's like nicely designed. It's very long.
Matt Giovanisci:It feels more like the hustle or morning brew or like those types of, you know, sort of newsletters. And my thought was, okay. So in the case of, like, that this one I'm talking about was called the published press and, you know, article or newsletters like Morning Brew and and, what do you call it? The hustle and things like that, you know, their entire business model, like, that is their content. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:It's their content. That's where that's where it exists. Whereas for me, our content exists online and exists, like, on our website and on our YouTube channel. So in in the past, I've done episodes where I'm like, okay. Our email our email system is really not a newsletter, but it's in fact more of a notification platform.
Matt Giovanisci:It's a notification system for our existing content. Now I've noticed that the emails themselves are good, well designed. Yeah. I could I always think they could be better, but I really can't I really haven't seen an email anybody's email where I'm like, wow. This is so well designed and so, like, well thought out that I'm gonna emulate it.
Matt Giovanisci:I just haven't found that. I find email to be weak in terms of, like, how it provides me value as a person. So I'm not a newsletter subscriber, maybe I should be. But, again, the business models over there is that is the business model. So I'm thinking, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, the closest competitor I competitor. The closest example that I have is Epic Gardening because I guess and it's not really a good example because it's a hobby based industry. Probably the best one would be Sunday, which is a lawn care company. But again, all of their emails are sales emails. They actually provide zero value in any of their emails.
Matt Giovanisci:It's all sales pitches. Now that's not, you know, like, that was just an idea of a test that I could do. Right? It's like, hey. What what would happen if we did a long article a long newsletter versus a short one?
Matt Giovanisci:And here's an example of that, and here's how I would do it. I could simply send out an AB test, right, with 2 different emails, to the same exact group of people, with the same exact subject line, and the same exact context of, like, the same exact topic. And I would create the and I would get the script from our short form version of the video and our long form version of the video. And so I would break it down. Do people like the short ones, or do they like the long ones?
Matt Giovanisci:The problem and the reason I'm even recording this is, okay, that part's easy. What's the KPI? What is the thing that I'm going to measure to determine whether or not that this style of email is better than the other ones. And that's where I'm a little confused. So obviously, it's not open rate, Because if I keep the subject line the same, then it doesn't matter.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? So that that's that number is not gonna change depending on the length. So I thought, okay. That you know, as far as, like, email metrics are concerned, the ones that exist in these email marketing platforms, the only one that has any merit is the click through rate or the click conversions. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:But the longer one versus the shorter one, like, is if the message is the same, I can already tell you that the shorter one's gonna win because that click is going to, you know, it's going to appear faster in the article because you know? So I don't think a longer versus shorter text, email is going to have an impact on click through rate, and so it doesn't really matter to me. Plus, I don't like, that's not the ultimate goal. What, you know, you ask or I ask, is the ultimate goal with the learning list. Because I can just say, look, I want my emails to be better.
Matt Giovanisci:Why? Well, I want my audience to trust me more. Why? Because that's a that's the that that builds a better brand. Okay.
Matt Giovanisci:Why? So that they buy from me. So that they support the business, so that they keep coming back, so that they tell their friends why to buy from me. End of fucking transaction. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:So that they buy again or continue to buy from me. That's the end result is buying. Okay? So if that is the ultimate goal of sending an email is to get somebody to buy something, the question is, does a longer email get more people to buy than a shorter email? That one's a tough one, although I you know, it's the easiest to measure.
Matt Giovanisci:But let's say I you know, the context of that is gonna matter. So if it's just a long nice email that, like, people are like, wow, that was really valuable, they might get so much value from it that they don't even want to buy. And so yeah. Fine. You I'm I'm contemplating this because that's just one example.
Matt Giovanisci:If I go to my other examples, I had what are they? Yeah. What first of all, it's like testing email formats, which what metrics are we gonna track? Is it just sales? Because if it's just sales, right, then how do you do that with a newsletter?
Matt Giovanisci:Or, you know, then it's just sales. Well, the like, the thing that's gonna sell more every fucking time is if you make a sales email where the email subject and topic is to sell something. That's its only goal. Like, I make more money doing that than I do, you know, when it's a just a standard newsletter, and it's a soft pitch. So I already know the answer to that.
Matt Giovanisci:Okay? But I thought, okay. Let's see here some test. Short form versus long form, meaning the text is long. Is it is it a true, helpful newsletter?
Matt Giovanisci:Meaning maybe not a newsletter, but let's say I use the topic of how to keep how to clear your pool in 24 hours. Is it, like, a handful of bullet points and maybe it's, like, a 150 words? Or is it, like, a full 1,000 word article baked into an email? I wanna know which one works better. What's the metric, though?
Matt Giovanisci:What do you what works better? In that particular case, is it getting more people to click to a video? Is it getting more people to buy the product at the end of it? Is it is there another thing I'm not thinking about? Like, I thought, well, I could put, like, a section at the bottom that's like, did you find this email helpful?
Matt Giovanisci:And it just has, like, a thumbs up and a thumbs down, essentially. Or maybe similar to like, I have this app called RealWatch or oh, sorry. It's called Real Good, but it's spelled r e e l. And it's for tracking movies and television shows on your streaming apps. If you don't use it, it's very, very helpful because I have multiple streaming apps.
Matt Giovanisci:But I'm like, woah. What the hell is on them? I don't feel like going through each one, so I use this app. But what's nice is when I'm done watching something, I can rate it. And I can rate it with 3 things.
Matt Giovanisci:I can rate it with like and dislike, which is thumbs up some thumbs down, but I can also write I can also add love. There's a heart. And so it's like a level up from like. That I feel like is a little I could add that to I could add that to the bottom of every single email, and then what I could do, what I that would be tough. I mean, that would be tough to, like, gather that data at the end, but I could just, you know, attach that value to their to their account.
Matt Giovanisci:So, like, I could basically say, alright. I could say, alright. This person loves our emails. And so it's now just a property. And it's like, you know, I could just have a property called email rating and then have like, dislike, and love as the text values.
Matt Giovanisci:And then depending on which image they choose, it will just automatically apply that to their account. Right? I could do that. I could do that. But then how would I go back in and know which people saw which email?
Matt Giovanisci:And, like, I that would be tough to do. I guess I could store the I could oh, man. That makes it so much tougher. It's like I could store the email itself, like the email campaign name or something, but then how do I associate that with that? I could I create a alright.
Matt Giovanisci:One idea is I could create 2 different type forms, and the type forms just have one question, which is the like, dislike, love. And, you know, obviously having 2 different type forms, I could split it up, on those emails and I could do it in, you know, I could do it as a test. Like, I could do, like, short form email as a as a type form, long form email as a type form, create those 2 different areas that go to this. So they wouldn't be clicking, you know, they would just have a box at the bottom that says rate this email, and then that would change depending on which AB test they were running. The URL would change to the type form.
Matt Giovanisci:I could do that, but then, again, I feel like what am I gonna learn from that? If if the the argument would be, okay, if everyone reads if everyone gets down to the bottom of the long form, well, then chances are they're clicking that and they're gonna either say like or love. They're never gonna say dislike. They got all the way to the bottom. If they disliked it, they wouldn't even get to the bottom to even answer that question.
Matt Giovanisci:K. It might not be it might not be it might not be something I can get from my audience. It might all of these might just be a massive collection form. So let me go through a couple of more ideas. So I had image based emails versus text based emails.
Matt Giovanisci:So, essentially, you know, not the the text based emails would include images, but I've done, like, image only emails that are, like, very, very highly designed. But they're usually for sales because I can get really clever with the design, whereas with a text based email, it's mostly for newsletter stuff. And then, you know, I I the other question I have is, does topics matter? So, I mean, of course, they do. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:And then do subjects matter? So if I send out an email that's like how to get rid of pool stains, that's a topic. Right? So if I send that out versus how to get rid of pool algae, the the the algae one's going to get more opens because simply more people are dealing with an algae problem than they are a staining problem. That is just the way it works.
Matt Giovanisci:Okay? So, you know, do the topics matter? Yes. Does the subject lines matter? We know that.
Matt Giovanisci:And then I have hard pitch versus soft pitch. So at the bottom of my emails, am I am I doing a long hard pitch and a hard pitch being, like, there's a discount, there's there's some sort of bet there's an offer, there's an incentive, there's a meaning, like, there's some urgency or there's some scarcity, and it's a little bit longer. You know, it's it's really trying to sell you versus just including, like, at PS, we have this course. But I can already tell you that I know the answer to that. Hard pitches are gonna work better.
Matt Giovanisci:So in this whole debate, what am I really trying to figure out? I think the better I think it's not so the metrics worth tracking, we're tracking all the metrics worth tracking. You know, Klaviyo tracks those ones. It they track revenue. They track click through rate, open rate, you know, the amount of they they track all that.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? So it's like, okay. That's clearly the important metrics for any email platform. Now are you now if you're a newsletter company, are do you really care about revenue? Probably not.
Matt Giovanisci:Because you're not really selling anything through it. You're tracking, open rate and you're tracking, you're probably not even tracking click through rate, to be honest. Because if you're like, who cares if they click or not? You're tracking open rate. You know, are we keeping our open rates high?
Matt Giovanisci:Meaning, are people still liking these emails? And the thing is is that, yeah, people still like our emails. Our open rates are high. Like, they're they're close to 70%. So it's like, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:That's not, you know, can we make the emails any better? One thing I think that we could do, and this would not be a big deal, but we could create a survey in type form, like a mass survey. And at a at the at the bottom of some emails, we could include just a link to that. Just like, hey. Take our survey about how you like our emails or something like that.
Matt Giovanisci:You know, we're not we're probably we'll get some people that click through and be like, hey. I wish there was you know, we could ask more open ended questions like, you know, what do you wish we sent you more of? And then we can kind of just learn what they want or what they're expecting, and then that way we can make them better. We could learn, you know, hey. Do we send them too often or just enough or, you know, like like, how often do you read email?
Matt Giovanisci:We could just kinda ask them, you know, simple questions about themselves, like, you know, how often do you email? Or how how often do you check your email? Or, you know, what I I guess we already know what email client they use. That is not really helpful. But knowing how often they check would would allow us to be like, alright.
Matt Giovanisci:It looks like the majority of our people only check email, like, twice a week. Like, it's probably not worth sending 3 emails a week because it's just not the audience that checks their email as much. Or, you know, which topics do you like? You know you know, which you know, and we could just have, like, a a list of ideas, like, you know, we want deals, you know, like deal alerts, you know, newsletters, like how to guides, links to our new videos, links to podcast episodes, you know, recommended products, things like that. And then we could sort of go, alright.
Matt Giovanisci:It looks like people don't really want us to send links to our YouTube videos. We're probably still gonna do it, but it's not that it you know, how to guides versus, like, short tips. You know, how to guides versus, like, short tips, you know, or I don't know. That that could be a better use of maybe instead of trying to throw a bunch of shit at the wall, let's let's start listening, which is something I talked about recently. It's like, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:We actually don't know the habits or the wants and needs of our email subscribers. You know, like, we we do collect a survey for all new email subscribers. Like, hey. What kind of pool do you have? And, you know, what what do you struggle with the most?
Matt Giovanisci:And what's your favorite part about owning a pool? And those are just things about their pool. But maybe we could start collecting things about the information they want to receive. And then instead of segmenting our audience, because I think that that gets really messy, and the last thing I'm trying to do is write more emails. In fact, I'm trying to do this so that I could write less emails, but make them way more effective and and make our audience go, fuck, yes, dude.
Matt Giovanisci:Hell, yeah, for sending this email. I needed this. This was awesome. I'm saving it. I'm telling my friends about it.
Matt Giovanisci:Like this email is sick. So I'd rather create those style of emails than create a a bunch of emails that are very thin, if that's even what they want. Who knows? Alright. So then let's take let's let's go down this road for a second because I wasn't I was expecting just to figure out what metrics to track, but I think I've landed on well, it's not about tracking metrics.
Matt Giovanisci:We're already doing that. Okay? The obvious metric that makes any sense is sales. Okay? Okay.
Matt Giovanisci:So if the obvious metric is sales, then I just need to listen. If I just need to listen, how do I listen? What questions am I what questions would I ask them? Let's say at the bottom of every the bottom of the next handful of emails, I'm going to put a little section at the bottom of the email that basically just says, hey. We wanna hear from you.
Matt Giovanisci:What do you think about our emails? Tell us, blah blah blah. No incentive. Just fill out this little survey, and obvious, like, if we get if we give 0 incentive, then the people who do it will really care about wanting to make the emails better. And we'll just say, hey.
Matt Giovanisci:We wanna make your emails better, but we wanna hear from you. What do you think about our emails? We have some questions. Fill our questions. That way we can improve.
Matt Giovanisci:Great. Okay. So pitch is there, very simple. And then what we can do is have a few questions. I think we gotta make the first question super easy.
Matt Giovanisci:I honestly don't need their email address. Maybe I could I get do I wanna know how often they check their email? No. Do I wanna know how often they check our emails? No.
Matt Giovanisci:Because that's not gonna help us improve. If they're like, I open up all of them. Like, well, okay. Then our emails are fine. Or, like, I only open up the ones that may you know, like that's also not helpful because we know that too.
Matt Giovanisci:We could say maybe we have to keep the maybe we have to keep them open ended at least in the beginning so that way we can just kinda get some context in order to build out better questions or better multiple choice responses. So that way we can start to, analyze the percentages. So, for example, we could say, what do you like the most about our emails? What do you like the least about our emails? And kinda get a sense of, like, alright.
Matt Giovanisci:Like like, we're not gonna ask, do you like our emails? Yes or no. Because that's I mean, the if you've gotten that far in the email and you click that and you wanna help us improve, then the chances are you like our emails. But let's take the people who so let's assume that the people who are going to be filling this out are fans. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:And what they're what they want is better information. Right? So we can say, what do you like the most about our emails? I think having that be open ended is interesting because we're gonna hear all types of things. And we'll say, what do you what what do you like the least about our emails?
Matt Giovanisci:Keeping it sort of semi positive because that's you know, it's not what do you hate about our emails. It's what do you like the least about our emails. And then from that, we'll probably get some ideas like, oh, I don't like how often you send them. Okay? So, like, alright.
Matt Giovanisci:So now we're starting to build out some multiple choices. I don't like how often you send them. I don't like how long they are. Okay? I don't like, you know, when you pitch our products all the time.
Matt Giovanisci:It's like, okay. So now we're starting to add some multiple choices in there because then that way I wanna give people the option to choose those, and then we can build out okay. It's actually, you know, like because it's like you when you read them all, you're gonna like, as soon as you read 1, and I think this is where data, like, qualitative data like this is not good, and I think a lot of companies do this and I'm guilty of it as well. So for example, like, you know, it's the it's like it's like, everybody's saying this and it's like, nope. One person said it.
Matt Giovanisci:But you read it and you're like and you thought, oh, everyone's saying this. So now take their words, put it into a multiple choice, you know, keep keep sending that, survey out, and all of a sudden, you'll start to see how important it go it's up the list. Because if you allow people to choose multiple things and they're like, yeah. You know what? Your you know, maybe they didn't even think your emails were long, but now you're like, you know what?
Matt Giovanisci:They are long, and they click it. And you and you go, everyone thinks our emails are long too long, so we should keep shorter emails. And it turns out that that's the least that's, like, the lowest on the list. And you're like, oh, well, not everyone's saying that. You know, only the loudest people, which is the ones, you know.
Matt Giovanisci:So I hear that from business owners all the time where they're like, our customers are like this. I'm like, okay. Did you just hear one thing or maybe 2 things and you just thought everyone's having a problem with this? And it's like, no. 2 people had a problem with it.
Matt Giovanisci:That's it. Out of all the people who have you know, it's like it's the comment thing. It's like, I always get negative comments on my videos. No. You got 3 out of 50.
Matt Giovanisci:That's not all negative. That's 3 out of 50. It's a low minority. So alright. I feel like that's not enough questions.
Matt Giovanisci:What do you like the most? What do you like the least? Oh, I like this question a lot. What would you if you had to describe our newsletter, our emails to a friend, what would you say? Because I feel like that always gives good that that what that does is it gives good sales pitches for us.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, it gives good copy. Like, we can say, hey. This is what you'll learn in our emails because we're literally using what other people are saying, and this is what they're saying. We could collect email testimonials where, you know, we have them, add a picture of their pool of them in the of them and their pool. That's not bad.
Matt Giovanisci:And then we ask And then we since we know what they like the most, we can just turn that in. That's not a bad idea. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Matt Giovanisci:Okay. We don't we don't have to make that mandatory, but that would be nice. Alright. So so far, that's 1, 2, 3, 4, and then we'll need their contact information. So that's 5.
Matt Giovanisci:I think that's enough. Alright. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a type form. I'm gonna write. I'm gonna call it, like, pool email survey, because I'm gonna do one for hot tubs that's gonna be different for sure, but that's later.
Matt Giovanisci:And then I'm gonna start collecting that information, like, ASAP. But for now, there's nothing that I'm gonna do to improve the emails. I'm gonna keep going with what I got and just include that little section now at the bottom of the emails. And, you know, I think that we'll get some trickles in, but by hopefully June, we'll have some ideas that'll collect it. And then I'll do another episode where I report back what we've learned about our emails, and then what my plans are to improve them.
Matt Giovanisci:If you have any questions or you have any additional information or feedback or things that you'd like to suggest, please shoot me an email, mad at money lab dot co. And while I'm at it, please email me, mad at money lab dot co. Because your emails make it easier for me to do these episodes. Not that they're hard, but when you you give me fodder. And I know you're listening, which makes me wanna do them even more.
Matt Giovanisci:So it's really helpful. And again, if I'm providing any sort of value to you, let me know. And if you have any questions, let me know. Ask them. Be happy to answer them in a future episode.
Matt Giovanisci:Mad@moneylab.co. Okay. Bye.
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