Matt Edmundson: Welcome to the e-Commerce podcast with
me, your host, Matt Edmundson.
The E-Commerce podcast is all about helping you deliver e-commerce wow.
To your customers and to help us do just that.
I'm chatting today with Christian Simovic from Honey Badger
Marketing in the Land Down under.
Oh yes.
We're gonna talk about how to create a frothing at the mouth
email list with plain text emails and if that title doesn't intrigue
you, I don't know what will.
But before Christian and I jump into that conversation, let me suggest a few other
podcasts that I also think you'll enjoy listening to, cuz we have loads of them.
Now Christian, on the website, we've got a lot.
Uh, so check out why everything you know about email marketing could be wrong..
It's one of my favorite titles ever, Uh, with Gabby Rapone.
She was an absolute legend.
Love Gabby.
Check that one out.
And also check out the five essential emails for successful e-commerce email
marketing, which is no mean feat.
I think I did that one actually.
So check out those episodes.
You can find these and our entire archive of episodes on our website
for free at ecommercepodcast.net.
And whilst you are there on our website, why not sign up for our newsletter
if you haven't done so already?
Basically, If you're on our email list, we email out all of the links
from today's show, the notes, the transcripts, all of the things
that Christian's gonna talk about.
It goes straight to your inbox, totally for free, whole thing's
amazing how it all works.
And we don't spam it, all that sort of nonsense.
But we do try and be helpful in what we do.
Now.
This episode is brought to you by the e-commerce cohort, which
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Basically every week there's something around the topic of e-commerce
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It's just a beautiful thing and it is a membership, so do check it out.
Honestly, if you're involved in e-commerce, I can't recommend it
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I'm in there doing stuff.
There's a whole bunch of other people in there doing stuff.
Come find us, have a conversation, and if you've got any questions
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So do check it out ecommercecohort.com.
Now, Christian Simovic is a plain text email marketing specialist.
I like you I'm intrigued by plain text especially cuz I've not done
plain text emails for years, right?
Uh, but Christian is a specialist in this area.
He prescribes daily emails for his clients.
Uh, sends out daily email marketing tips himself, via his email.
I'm gonna give you the link on where to sign up obviously later on.
His clients have ranged from small organic skincare brands to reality TV stars.
I think I'm more intrigued about the small skincare brands than the reality
TV stars, but maybe that's just me.
Uh, all of that said, uh, Christian, welcome to the show.
Great to have you bud.
Thanks for joining us.
Christian Simovic: Hey Matt.
Uh, pleasure to be a part of the show.
And firstly, I just wanna mention, I thought my title was gonna be pretty
interesting, the frothing at the mouth, but that everything you thought was
wrong about email marketing, that probably takes the cake in titles.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, you can use that one going forward.
Christian Simovic: Uh, so that one yeah.
I'm gonna steal, I'm very sorry, Gabby, but yeah.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, I'm sure Gabby won't mind.
She's lovely actually.
So, uh, tell me, uh, Christian, uh, about Honey Badger Marketing.
Uh, what does it do?
Christian Simovic: Yeah, so I guess the Origin, Do you wanna
go into my Origin story or more?
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, let's do it.
Let's go for it.
Yeah.
Yeah, why not?
Christian Simovic: So, um, obviously I do email copywriting as a freelancer slash
agency role, but if anyone, who knows me.
I was into drop shipping I think in around November, December, 2021.
That's when I kind of got in mm-hmm.
and, you know, like, you know, all 22 year old kids, you know,
who think about drop shipping.
Oh, it's just easy money.
It's just, you just set up a website.
You get traffic and you get money, well, that's obviously not how it works.
I learned that the hard way actually.
Not really the hard way.
I didn't really spend any, that's the thing, I didn't spend any money on ad
I was just really, you know, anyways.
You know, so when I was coming up with my products I was like, well I
need to actually like kind of, I need to have, you know, words that sell.
And I kind of stumbled upon copywriting through that.
And I think I was reading the Gary Halbert newsletter and a few others at the time.
And then I kind of pushed aside drop shipping and eCommerce.
Uh, and then I kind of focused into copywriting.
And to this day I still do e-commerce copywriting cause I
do have a passion for e-commerce.
And maybe one day I'll do it, I'm not sure.
But for now I've got my sights here.
Matt Edmundson: In the email marketing copy.
So what is it about copy that draws you in?
What do you find exciting about that?
Christian Simovic: I think so, like, I'll go more deeper into my, um, Origin story.
So I used to be, I was never a real estate agent, but I've always worked
in the real estate kind of industry and the whole agency commission sales.
I just love being a salesman.
Copywriting is kind, I mean, I know it's a bit of a try, everyone
kind of says that, but it's true.
It's salesmanship in print to an extent.
Mm-hmm..
Um, so you are, you're applying the fundamentals of salesmanship
and understanding the psychology of why we buy and then applying
that to the written word.
Um, and, and that's just a, you know, and it's just a fun thing to do in my opinion.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
And I think actually, um, Christian if I'm honest with
you, it's almost like a lost art.
Because what has, and this is why I'm intrigued for this conversation,
right, But what I've, what I've noticed over the years, Email marketing has
become lazier and lazier and lazier.
And what I mean by that is it's just like, I'm gonna throw some products on a page.
I'm gonna discount it by 10% and I'm gonna email that out.
And that's just what I'm gonna do.
I don't really have to, and I can get plugins now, if I've got a Shopify
store that will almost do this whole thing automatically, I don't even
have to figure out the products.
Uh, I'm just gonna get some bot to crawl my database, figure out what
you've bought and I'll email that to you and I think you should buy it again.
Right?
A lot of automation.
But no real sort of creativity in the copy.
Um, certainly in the newsletters, in the offers, maybe I see creativity in the
segmentation in the, in the sequences, but I don't tend to see it in the
actual just plain old marketing anymore.
And I remember the days, and the reason I'm saying this is because before
this recording, I was actually on your website having a little look at your
landing page, and I remember the days, um, I wanna call them old school days.
Maybe it's showing my age a little bit, uh, where long form copy was
the thing to do and there was a real art to doing long form copy well.
An art to sort of writing stuff that made me wanna read what you wrote.
It's more than just like a quick 140 character soundbite,
Do, you know, what I mean?
And, and um, and so I'm really intrigued by this, that actually you are into
email copy and this was sort of an avenue that you chose to sort of express
your craft or your art kind of thing.
Christian Simovic: Yeah.
And I like how you kind of just said like, I'm just gonna trip,
rip into shreds about emails.
Um, I do agree with you on that, and I guess it kind of stems from the whole
short form verses long form copy.
Um, I guess I kind of come more from the direct response world of things like the
Ben Settle, Gary Halbert kind of way, and.
You know, the emails that I write for my clients, 500 to a thousand words.
And I know a lot of people, a lot of email marketers might think that's ridiculous.
And no imagery, no real graphics or anything, just really just plain text.
And the whole point of that is you can't, like you're kind of mentioning
long form, you know, you can't really be persuasive with short form copy, in
my opinion and in the stats opinion, but as well, just my opinion, um, So,
yeah, long form really is the way to go.
And, and I think a point you kind of meant about like just bringing back copy.
Um, you know, it, it kind of goes back to a lot of people believe in branded copy
and having like really short, not short headlines, but they think that shorter is
better and that's not always necessarily wrong or right, it's, it's just,
it's more of on a case by case basis.
But I'm gonna be biased here and I always think that long form works better.
Mm-hmm.
, you can kind of, you can, you know, we're talking about, you
know, the whole like copywriting framework problem agitates solution.
Well, you can't really do that with a hundred words.
You know, I've seen a lot of PAS or problem agitate solution examples on
HubSpot, for example, and it's just 50 words and it's just boom, boom, boom.
That's, it.
Doesn't really get into the specifics of why I should buy this
product, the problems I'm facing, you know, that kind of stuff.
So I really like that about the whole, and I try and put that into emails.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, that's pretty, So you are talking about a
500 to a thousand word email, and one of the things that we've noticed,
uh, with one of the e-comm companies that I've got is we do like the,
um, the, the lazy in effect here.
I really need to be careful.
They're not, Jen puts a lot of effort to our emails.
Actually.
She's not lazy at all.
I didn't say that.
Um, no, no, no.
Uh, I, I definitely know she's not lazy, but we do the sort of
the offers and the promos and once a quarter I do an update email.
So it's kind of like an update from Matt, you know, the MD
of the company sort of thing.
And they are 500 to 1000 word emails.
And when I started doing 'em I thought this is a bit nuts really, cuz
who's gonna read an email this long?
And you know, to this day they're some of our highest performing emails
is when I just write an update.
I don't even try and sell people anything.
I'm just writing an update about the company, about what's
going on, and people read those things and they email in and go.
Thanks for the update, Matt.
It's awesome, really, and it intrigues me that actually long form content seems
to outperform uh, even in that context.
Christian Simovic: Actually, I wanna make a point you just mentioned, you know, when
you do your emails, like from the founder types of emails from Matt addressing the
people, That's kind of, and where people respond, that's really the crux of plain
text emails is that it is a more personal engaging environment because, you know,
a lot of brand center emails, you know, they use the words like, Hey guys, and
then we, and they use a lot of words and not even just words, but like, let's say
from the sender name is like it'n not the founder's name, it's like, you know,
I don't, I'm trying to think of a brand name, let's say from Nike's support team.
It's not really personal.
Like I know this is coming from a marketing team that's not really personal.
Whereas when you Matt, the founder of the company, Matt, send out an email to
everyone, plain text, you know, using the words you and I, speaking to them on
a one-on-one, you know, kind of format.
That's a lot more effective and it really does help to build a loyal
and engaged list in my experience.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, that's brilliant.
I'm smiling when you called me Max there, uh, because Sadaf, who you spoke
to, the show's producer, um, she and I often laugh because a lot of people,
for whatever reason call me Max.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I say Matt.
When people say who are ouy, I say, Matt Edmundson, they go, Oh, Max.
Uh, and so it comes out a lot.
And so it's a little internal joke we have here, Sadaf and
myself about, so she calls me Max.
Um, and so, uh, I call her Sod off sometimes just
because, uh, why not, right?
Christian Simovic: I saw, I just wanna say I saw the, um, when you was
talking about your story, I heard for some reason I instinctively heard Max.
I'm like, I'm gonna say that.
I'm just gonna go for it.
And I realized my mistake.
I'm like, Oh crap.
Matt Edmundson: No, no, it's totally fine.
You're, you're definitely not the first person and you won't be the
last Christian to call me Max.
That's fine.
I'm glad.
Uh, but yes, no, it's fine.
If you wanna call me Max, I have no issue with that.
It's a cool name.
Actually, I quite like Max.
Um, and.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've got a friend actually not related to anything we're talking about here.
Uh, I've got a friend who called his son Max after, uh, the movie Gladiator.
Maximus Decimus Meridius.
Just so, um, he, he's trained his son in that, that whole speech.
My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, uh, which I think is hysterical.
Anyway, so plain text emails, so plain text emails.
Um, why plain text email?
What is it about Planet text email, which draws you in versus using the standard,
um, traditional e-commerce kind of, uh, marketing with images and offers
and grid layouts and graphics and logos and colors and all that HTML stuff?
What draws you in about it?
Christian Simovic: Yeah.
Okay.
So I'll ask you, I'll ask the audience this question as well as you, Matt.
So Matt, do you like salesmen?
Like, do you like when they come onto your door, knock on the door?
Do you like when that happens?
Matt Edmundson: Uh, yes and no.
Christian Simovic: Okay.
Well, most people say no, and I, I'll say why.
Most people in the audience will say no, You know, if, for
example, I come up and go, Hi.
Hi Matt.
By the way, my name's Christian.
I live down the street.
I'm selling some water purifiers.
Would you like to buy some?
Most people say no because salesman are annoying for the most part.
And, and, and this kind of stems from advertising.
You know, most people don't like reading advertisements.
They really don't.
They hate being sold on things, but they love buying.
Mm-hmm..
It's kind of a weird psychological thing, but I'll go back to the advertisements
thing and if so, psychologically speaking, we hate advertisements and you know, like
I always do this on my calls with people.
Like I just show 'em the promotions tab in Gmail.
I just show 'em every single, you know, every single ecomm brand is pretty much in
the promotions tab for a lot of reasons.
Mm-hmm.
One of the big reasons they use photos.
You know, I'm, I'll speak more about the psychological stuff.
When you open an email and it just has someone's logo, someone's photo,
10% of banner, you know, that kind of traditional stuff, it's very obvious that
it's an advertisement, or at least I'm about to be pitched to buy something.
So from a psychological point of view, you know, a plain text email is a much
better approach because people, like, obviously people know that it's an email
from a marketing company or from an ecomm brand, you know, from the get go.
I'm not instantly just inundated with pitching number one.
Um, so that's one reason for plain text.
And, and I was kind of mentioning as well that like personal, like.
Personal one on one connection, you know, Would you send an email to your
mom, Your mom, if you're American, um, or your dad, you know, would you send,
would you send like, you know, in, in fire, like fire sale emojis and 20% off
and you know, last Sunday deals like, and you know, like logos and stuff.
No one does that personally.
So why would you send that to your customers?
That's kind of my question.
Another reason for plain text as well is from a deliverability point.
Um, you know, Gmail and Yahoo, they have to scan for images.
Now, I don't know all the technical side of things, I'm not gonna lie, but,
um, you know, from a platform from, you know, if you have images and newsletter
kind of themes, a newsletter themed email, they really do end up in the
promotions tab, or worse the spam tab.
And, you know, a, a big crux of it is email deliverability.
You know, if you're not in the primary inbox, you're not getting
as many eyeballs as humanly possible because you know, no one.
I don't, and know, most people don't, We don't check our promotions tab.
Like that's just that, And I, whilst I'm kind of talking about this, there's a
concept that Gary Halbert had, um, the whole, like, this was more about direct
mail, like actual physical letters.
But, you know, he was sending out letters and there was this whole
concept of the A pileand the B pile.
And the B pile.
Or the A pile.
I don't know exactly which one it was, but one of the piles, I'm gonna
say the A pile was advertisements.
And this was very notorious.
Like you could just tell it's junk mail.
And then there's another pile, which is the B pile, which is like your
personal stuff, personal, you know, from your mom, your brother, or whatever.
Most people chuck out the junk mail, They don't even open it.
And that's kind of the point, you know, if you've got.
An email that just screams advertisement either they're not
gonna open it or they do open it.
It's just not, it's not the same from a psychological perspective.
Sure.
A long winded way of saying that, but yeah.
Matt Edmundson: No, that's fair comment because I sit here and I'm smiling cuz
every morning I open up Gmail and I check my emails and I've got the tabs.
You know, the inbox, the social and the promotions.
I open up the promotions.
There's at least a hundred emails, which some have accumulated overnight.
Now, I appreciate, I'm slightly odd because I get people's emails just
cause I wanna see what they're doing.
Uh, there is that sort of learning factor with it, but, Um, I will quite
happily go through all a hundred emails.
I'll select all, you know, on the, on the promotions tab, and I'll
just scan down the list and I'll untick the ones that I wanna keep.
I'll just delete the rest, right?
And the whole thing takes like 30 seconds.
So if I'm not captivated by your subject line, or in fact, I
rarely look at the subject line.
It's more who's sending it.
I'm kind of curious to, I wanna look for different companies,
just how my brain works.
Um, there's a strong chance it's getting deleted and not opened, right?
So I get this whole, You don't want to be in the promotions tab I and
you want to be in the main tab.
So does sending plain text emails then mean I'm more likely to get in
the main sort of email tab on Gmail?
Christian Simovic: Yeah.
For Gmail and yahoo.
I'm not sure about Yahoo, but, and to be fair, who uses Yahoo, but, um, bit
of a stab at people who use Yahoo.
I apologize.
Um, but grow up.
Um, but Gmail, yeah, Gmail definitely does, They definitely
do penalize, um, for photos.
and newsletter, kind of like the newsletter, graphics, that kind of stuff.
Mm-hmm.
Very good English there.
But yeah, they definitely do penalize and um, I've done my own testing as
well and, you know, moving from my clients doing more the traditional
style across our plane text.
We're hitting the primary not all the time because a lot of the
time, you know, spam filters a hit.
You know, one of my clients, he does, one of my clients, he's more of a, like
a hunting and like a hiking kind of stall with a bit of a pro firearm lean to it.
Mm-hmm.
naturally we do trigger a few spam filters or promotions filters,
whatever you wanna call it.
That's kind of unavoidable there.
I mean, I guess it could take it out, but that kind of spoiled the fun, I guess.
Matt Edmundson: Defeats the challenge.
Um, exactly.
So the, that you're hitting the primary tab more often.
What software are you using to send plain and text emails.
Are you just using the same email that, uh, like Kajabi or Active Campaign,
the same systems that people would use to send their newsletter style emails?
Or are you using something different?
Christian Simovic: Yeah.
So for me, pardon me, For me personally, I use, um, AWeber, or AWeber, but
for my clients, they're normally on Klaviyo, so I just stick with Klaviyo.
Um, I, most of my clients, or they're also using the Shopify email as well.
Mm-hmm.
, so most of my clients are on Shopify, so it doesn't really make sense.
You know, they've been using Klaviyo.
It's a pretty effective system.
Very good segmentation.
So I quite like Klaviyo for my clients.
I found deliverability is fine in regards to all of the major, major providers.
You know, MailChimp, um, you know, active campaign.
I'm trying to think of a few others.
Klaviyo, got me on the spot.
You know, those ones, they all, they're all pretty fine.
They're all pretty good for deliverability.
Um, I have no problems with them.
Maybe forget some dodgy ones.
I'm not sure.
I can't vouch for them, but, mm-hmm.
Do your due diligence on them.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, I, It's good to know that Klaviyo does that.
One of the things that I've noticed actually from blogs that I've sort of
subscribed to is there's been a marked shift from the send the blog post with the
image header with a nice HTML formatting to actually more and more coming through
as plain text emails, and I think partly because of what you've talked about,
cause of deliverability issues right?
Christian Simovic: Yeah.
Yeah.
And another point as well to mention, cause you're like, I'm not trying to
make fun of customers here, but a lot of them have like a short attention
span or they don't wanna take a certain action where, and people are lazy to an
extent, you know, if you put in a link saying, Hey, check out my blog, you
know, like, you know how some people do a little teaser and then, you know,
click here to read the full story.
A lot of people kind of go, Well, can you just put the whole story in
because I don't wanna click a link.
Which I know that sounds really like petty, but seriously, like I,
I instead just put the whole blog in unless it's, Well, no, even
still, I just put the whole blog in.
It's a, it's a bit better way to do it, in my opinion.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no.
Interesting, interesting.
Something else to test.
So you are using plain text.
Um, and it's interesting.
The question is, uh, why would you use it over traditional methods?
Whereas I would say plain text is actually traditional, uh, because
that's how when we all started out and that's what we had to do, we didn't
have such things as HTML newsletters.
I mean, it rocked everybody's world when we could add an image to an email.
Geez.
Um, so we're going back, I think almost to the early days of text
messaging, the sort of very traditional, Where would you use, um, plain text
emails in an e-commerce context?
Christian Simovic: Yeah, so I actually have an e-commerce or hunting client.
They'll, I'll, I'll continue with that story.
So I use purely plain text for him.
I don't have any images unless it makes sense.
So, you know, if you've got like a weight loss company or if you've got any kind of
before and afters, then it does make sense to use the photo there because it actually
is a very, it's a very persuasive image.
Um, you know, but when it, when it comes to, and I would risk a little
bit of deliverability for that, but when it comes to logo, like a logo
or just, you know, a photo of the brand, I would never include that.
Um, because again, so I'll kind of mention as well, you know,
again, people don't resonate with brands as much as people think.
Like, a lot of people think, Oh, it's the font, or it's the color,
or it's, is it Montserrat or Caliber, or whatever, you know.
I don't feel like brands, you know, we don't feel a sense of connection with
brands when that happens, but what we do feel a sense of connection with
is when a brand, for example, Matt, when you're talking about, you know,
having a personal from the founder type email, that's a lot more personal.
Now to get back on your question about when can use it, I personally don't
see a time when it's not applicable.
Like it will always work obviously for some companies.
Like I'll go with weight loss, you know, before and afters.
They're very, it's pretty crucial to have a photo there because that is a
lot of the persuasion is through that.
Um, but even still, you know, for most brands, a lot of brands might think like,
Oh, well I need photos to convince people.
I've never had that.
The case, you know, a lot of the times they'll read my copy, they'll click
the link and then they'll, they'll see an image anyways on the landing page.
Um, you know, people don't buy based on images.
People buy based on emotion, and that's for the whole point of long form copy.
It's to build and kind of get people not crying, but emotional to an extent about
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, you want 'em to feel something.
Right.
And you can, And words are a beautiful, I mean, this has been
around for thousands of years.
We use words, you know, to, poetry is made of words.
Shakespeare is made of words.
And so, you know, words work, don't they?
I'm intrigued because, um, I was smiling when you were talking about the logo.
Uh, I have this thing, whenever I do coaching with clients and I come
across their website, the first thing I do is minimize their logo.
Um, and I follow it up with a statement.
No one cares about your logo other than you, right?
They just don't.
And if you look on Amazon, and if you look on Apple, you look on Nike, look at how
small their logos are on their websites.
It's unbelievable.
Um, now you could say, Well, they've got massive brand recognition.
If you're a small brand, don't go for brand recognition
because it's just not worth it.
Right.
Just go for being memorable.
Go for, Just so I get what you're saying about logos and that makes me smile.
Um, and they don't buy cause of the pretty colors, et cetera, et cetera.
So have, is there a case then I guess for, um, I have an eCommerce store, right?
I sell stuff online.
Um, if I want to get started, but I'm slightly nervous.
Can I split test?
Should I send, um, you know, part of this audience, my traditional
newsletter and part of them a bit more of a long form content email and just
see what kind of results they get.
Christian Simovic: Yeah, absolutely.
Testing is great.
I think testing to an extent, you know, a lot of people, if you're, if
you've got a very small sample size, like 50 or a hundred people, then it
probably isn't the greatest sample size, like for testing purposes.
But absolutely, a lot of my clients go, I don't, I don't believe what you're saying.
I'm like, Okay, well we'll do a test and see what happens.
So a hundred percent, that's more than, more than, um, I think you should test
anyway, so yeah, no problem with that.
Matt Edmundson: Okay, so let me run through some quick fire questions for
you before we get into uh, actually how to write a plain text, email, you know,
and some of the methodology you you use.
Cause I'm curious to see how your brain works Christian, if I'm honest with you.
Um, But before we, before we get down there, what are some of the
common misconceptions or hangups people have about email marketing?
Like you mentioned in, um, or we mentioned in the bio, your proponent of emailing
every day and instantly, if I'm honest with you, there's a little, there's
a little voice inside my head going, Alert, alert, Do you know what I mean?
Dive, dive.
Uh, don't go there.
So, um, should you email every day?
Christian Simovic: Yeah.
Can I, I'll answer the first question cause you, you kind of alluded to it,
like, how do you write emails, I guess?
No, it's not a good way.
I'll, I'll talk about daily email.
So daily emails basically the thing is if you're sending, again,
20% off hard pitches every single day, I a hundred percent agree.
Daily emails are not, Really, they're not ideal at all.
In fact, you probably get a lot of unsubscribes.
Mm-hmm.
, Um, and unsubscribes aren't necessarily bad.
I'll kind of mention that in the future.
But, um, in terms of daily emails, why they're effective and why they're good.
And I'll try and, it's kind of hard.
Do you mind if I just say, how do I write an email, just like
my kind of way about it, just so I can provide a bit of context?
Matt Edmundson: No, let's do it.
I mean, let's go there.
We can always come back to these questions and I can grill
you about this for an hour.
So have at it.
Christian Simovic: Yeah, yeah, sure.
So in terms of making a memorable brand and writing emails a
lot, a lot of the thing is, you know, writing a long form email.
I like to talk about people's pains or people's, the market's problems.
Mm-hmm, for an example, I'll use one of my clients, again, I'll use this hunting plan
cause it's the easiest one I can think of.
I wrote his emails yesterday.
Um, and, and there's an issue of.
Um, waiting times in New South Wales in terms of the firearms
registry and applying for licenses and that kind of stuff.
There's a long waiting time and there's a lot of pent up angst and, and frustration
and not rage, but like a lot of, a lot of an annoyance with, with the bureaucracy.
And I kind of.
I, I like to take sides in email marketing in sort of saying like, Hey, I'm a brand.
I'm for this kind of person.
If you're not for that kind of person, then you probably
shouldn't be on our list.
Mm-hmm.
And in for that, for, you know, our list, you know, they are angry at
the firearms registry for whatever reason, and I go into forums, I go
Reddit, and I just read their opinions and then I write an email about it.
Pretty much agreeing with them, just kind of ranting and raving about the problem.
And so I, I kind of set up the whole thing with, you know,
here's little story about this.
This guy took him three months to get his firearms license and
then here the comments, people kinda getting angry with it.
I kind of agreed with him and then I said, Look, you know, we're selling
a slingshot, which it is legal in, in, in New South Wales and you
know, you don't need a license.
I was saying, you know, having a firearm is great and all, but you
know, an even better way, you know, to get something right now, you can
still kind of scratch that itch of, of shooting tin cans or whatever it is.
You can buy our Sling shot.
You can kind of see the way I've framed it there.
When you write like that, a lot of people respond back to our emails saying like,
Yeah, I really agree with your take, man.
I really like it.
You know, I kind of, you know, I can't agree enough with it.
So like, in terms of writing daily emails, you know, if you're writing,
again, if you're just writing, not writing for the sake of writing, but if
you're just writing just hardcore sales pitches, they do get very tiring quickly.
But if you're writing fun, informational, and entertaining, more
importantly, entertaining content.
Entertaining content could be anything.
But if you're writing entertaining emails that segue into a product.
You really can't go wrong daily emailing, in my opinion.
Matt Edmundson: And so the emails you send out daily, whether it's for the
hunting company or, or whatever it is, they're all 500 to 1000 words long, or
there's some shorter, some longer ones.
How do you do that?
Christian Simovic: Yeah, yeah.
So generally speaking, I do the short, So generally the thousand word ones
are more for setting up a big problem.
And I'll kind of mention that in a little bit.
But like, so these kinds of the normal, the daily correspondence,
about 300 to 500 words give or take.
Um, it can vary.
Some of them a hundred, some can even be 10 words.
Honestly.
We, we did one.
This was a cool, like, little trick you guys can use, or a little hack, I guess.
Uh, it's called like a deliverability booster email.
Um, basically you don't actually pitch anything in your product, you
just ask them a simple question.
So for this market, you know, we're based in New South Wales and the National Rugby
League, the grand finals on two weeks ago.
Okay?
So I simply asked, Hey, who do you think's gonna win Paramount versus Penworth?
That was the two teams playing.
Um, I didn't, there was no call to action, Nothing.
It was literally just a plain text email from the guy.
10 words and the amount of responses we got is ridiculous.
And it just, and the reason why we want responses, because firstly, they responded
because they think it's like I'm writing to them personally, which I'm not.
I'm sending to 5,000 odd people.
But, you know, another reason why we want responses is because we
can be put in that primary inbox.
Um, so that, that was that.
To go back to daily emails, I'm trying to just not lose my train of thought.
Daily emails.
The whole point of it is that, you know, on any list you've got the hyper buyers
and then you've got, you know, the people who are a little bit skeptical.
Um, and you know, you can send emails to the hyper buyers and they'll
buy pretty much straight away.
It, it really doesn't matter what you send, they just want the product.
But the hyper, the non-hyper buyers, the kind of the skeptics,
they need a lot more convincing.
They need a lot more time before they buy.
And I know I've seen on some people's lists, you know, it might take 110.
120 days before someone actually, like, that's the average it takes for someone to
buy on, on some one of my friends' lists.
Oh, wow.
Um, so that's kind of the whole point of daily emails.
It's kind of like a rock, you know how like a water cut through rock?
It's not just one go, it's, it's just gradually over time.
Um, and so that's the whole point of daily emails.
Matt Edmundson: So you, you're sending out these daily emails.
They're plain text emails, they're various lengths.
Short question.
Some sort of three to 500, some 500 to a thousand depending on the kind of content
you're sending out, what's gonna work, what's gonna resonate with your audience.
It's gotta be information or educational type stuff.
It's gotta engage.
You can't just be pure sales because no one cares.
Right.
Um, so you are sending out these daily emails.
One of the things that you said, which I thought was interesting that I wanted
to circle back to is you take sides.
Uh, in the emails, um, and I was talking to, uh, Adam, who
was, until recently actually.
He's moved on to bigger and better things.
Bless him.
Um, the marketing director of one of the companies I'm involved with, and
he was talking about how as a brand we need to become much more polarizing.
We need to sort of take sides, take a stand on something.
And so the fact that you've mentioned this intrigues me.
Is this something that actually, um, as brands we should do is sort
of almost take sides in things and sort of become a little bit more
polarizing rather than beige and trying to be all things to all men.
Christian Simovic: Yeah, so that's, This kind of brings up a point.
I always see a lot of, you know, when you, whenever you go to some,
an e-commerce store and they'll say, you know, 10% often join the tribe.
And you know, I love this idea of a tribe, but the reality is, you know, like.
In order to become a part of a tribe, you need to feel like there's
a group of people that you are in.
And if you are appealing to everyone, then you can't, There's simply, you
just can't have a tribe for everyone.
Mm-hmm.
, you have to pick a side.
And an example of this, you don't have to be really controversial.
I mean, an obvious example is Alex Jones.
He's probably too far, but like, maybe let's talk about golf.
You know, and, and so, you know, in the golfing niche there's,
there's like, there's lots, lots of different buyers, but let's just
say you've got the golfing purists.
You know, the guys who don't like laser range finders, they don't.
Fancy gizmos or do dads, they just like the purest sport of golf.
Mm-hmm.
And then you've got the other guys who are golf like technicians and they love
every little trick and hack and any kind of thing to one up and get better.
And you know, if you're a golfing e-commerce store, you could say,
You know what, I'm gonna pick the purest side and then I'm gonna
write purely for the purest.
And I'm gonna start, I'm not saying to rag on the the technical side all the time,
but you don't even have to rag on them.
You know, if you don't want kind of controversy.
But you can always just say, Look, we're for the pure side, we're
gonna stock purest stuff only.
And the whole reason why we do this to be polarizing is because, you
know, building a loyal and engaged list, there's this kind of factor.
It's called like the know, like and trust factor or klt factor.
A lot of brands have know and trust, but they don't have like, you know,
do you like, I'll give you an example.
Like I don't really like Coke, the brand like Coca-Cola.
There's nothing to like.
Now when we talk about Elon Musk, very polarizing figure.
I personally.
I don't like him or hate him.
I don't, I'm pretty indifferent to him.
But you know, a lot of people don't like Tesla because it's the brand.
Tesla.
They like Tesla because it's Elon Musk, you know?
Yeah.
It's this polarizing dude, just says what he wants.
Same thing with Donald Trump.
Same thing with any kind of really out there politician.
Really.
Um, so building a, like a loyal and, Okay, so the whole point of why you should be
polarizing because when you build like an in group, like a people, that's for me,
like, let's talk about the golf purists.
All of a sudden the golf purists on your list, they start to like you more.
And when they like you more, they'll, they will buy more.
They will have either, either more increased average order volumes
potentially, but more importantly, when they like someone and they, they
like to buy from them more often.
You know, as a golf purist, I'd rather buy from the guy who talks the stuff that
I agree with and I actually like than the guy who's just schilling me stuff
or, or you know, just a corporate brand.
Matt Edmundson: It's interesting, isn't it?
This whole polarization thing and taking sides.
And actually one of the things that I came across recently was, um, something
called the trust report from Edelman.
And it was a really interesting survey.
38,000 people, something like, I mean, a lot of people around the,
around the world, uh, Australia, the uk, New Zealand, um, Thailand,
I mean all kinds of places, right?
So, they did this survey, uh, and they were, they were asking people about trust.
Who do you trust?
Right?
And obviously, as you would've predicted, given the times which
we're living in, our trust of politicians is falling at a rapid pace.
Um, what's interesting is when they start talking about trust of companies,
Um, like, do you trust companies and the big companies are losing
trust in the eyes of the consumer?
What is gaining trust are the smaller brands who stand up and not only try and
sell you something but have a cause, have a just cause which they're involved with.
Right?
This comes down to the polarization.
So taking a stance on certain things.
So, um, a lot of consumers now think companies should take a stance on, uh, say
salaries and the environment's a popular one, like, you know, um, whether or not
it's sustainable and so on and so forth.
And you can either be pro sustainability or you could give a
fly and flip, but it in effect creates a tribe, like you say, of people.
And actually it starts to build trust.
Um, and it's something that I think the stat was something like 60 odd
percent, 70% of consumers think companies should be doing this more now.
I mean, it's a lot of consumers that.
That, think that, right?
So, um, I'm intrigued by this whole person, uh, this whole
polarization thing, you know?
And, and, um, and how, so how did you, how else have you seen that work?
You talked about it with the hunting thing.
Where else have you seen that work?
Christian Simovic: Yeah, and I, I actually wanted to mention as well,
just cause I kind of thought of that idea, talking about the corporate world.
Um, and a lot of trust is kind of falling in the bigger brands.
Probably a good example would be like greenwashing for example.
Like a lot of the brands, the larger brands like to talk about where an
environmentally friendly, sustainable.
In reality, their practices are pretty, pretty negative.
Um, so that's kind of a mention.
I want to talk about that.
Um, well, a good example, this is actually kind of one of my, my mentors,
I guess I'll talk about Ben Settle.
Um, a lot of his, his kind of email newsletters, very polarized in the
sense that he doesn't really cater towards, like beginners and newbies.
He kind of, he doesn't really make fun of people, but he
does, I guess, troll people.
If someone, you know, has a, a silly question, he's not afraid
to roast them in the comments.
I'll give you an example from my other client.
Um, I'm not gonna say his name, but he has like a, like a Psilocybe.
He doesn't like the term, but magic mushrooms essentially.
Mm-hmm.
, Um, it does sound a little bit derogatory, so I get that.
But yeah.
So basically magic mushroom company, and we kind of in our emails like the
villain, so this is a good way as well to kind of build a tribe, is to have
a villain and in, in our case, for the, you know, for magical mushrooms
and the, and the alternative health fare, Big pharma is a perfect villain.
You know, that is the ultimate villain.
And I wanna go back to the firearms one, the villain in my
case was the firearms registry.
And in, let's say in the case, , let's say in the case of like an e-commerce
company, just a generic one.
You know, the villain could be drop shippers, you know, in the hunting company
one, I, I did an email kind of just saying that drop shippers, um, the whole
process of what drop shipping is and, and how it kind not riling up the customers,
but getting them to understand what, you know, what drop shipping is and why
it's ineffective compared to e-commerce and just showing them the negatives
and kind of painting the drop ship is as a bit of a villain in this case.
But yeah, the, the magic mushroom one, that was an awesome villain.
Big pharma was a great villain.
And I don't always like talking about pains because, you know, you
don't wanna always be depressing.
You know, we live in a very, very like, fractured society
nowadays, especially after Covid.
You know, a lot of people still are kind of depressed and very isolated.
So I like to provide uplifting stories.
And one of the stories for this, Psilocybin Magic mushroom company
was we, we did a story with this woman named Janet Li Chang.
She was someone online and this was kind of her effect.
She, she basically told the great benefits she got from.
She, she received from, um, it's called Microdosing or Magic.
That's what the whole, the whole thing is microdosing.
And it was kind of just an uplifting story of how she went from, you know, depressed,
nearly suicidal to, you know, just feeling alive with energy, talking to people.
She even spoke to, apparently she spoke to a barista at an airport
for like four hours straight.
She was just that full of energy.
So I like telling those stories as well.
And it does hit a problem the market is facing as well at the same.
Matt Edmundson: So, um, I mean, magic mushrooms aside, uh, having a villain
I think is quite an interesting idea.
Who, who's the villain in the story?
And I think about every well written story.
There's always a villain, right?
There's always the arch nemesis.
Uh, and so, um, when you are writing these stories of heroism, um, have you
come across a guy called Don Miller?
Don Miller's a really interesting guy.
Story brand.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And his whole theory isn't it, is.
That, um, when you write, you write as though the customer
is the hero, not the brand.
You're not trying to make the brand be the hero.
He likens it to Luke Skywalker.
He's, he's like, the brand is Obi Wan Kenobi, the customer is Luke Skywalker.
Right?
So you are writing them into your story as the hero.
Um, but he always talks about the villain.
Who's the villain in the story, Who's the Darth Vader, right?
Who we got to overcome.
And that can be people, that can be other companies, that can be a particular
problem, it can be a limiting belief.
There's all kinds of things that that villain can be, and that's
part of the story of being the hero, which I think is quite interesting.
So you send out daily emails, which I'm really intrigued by actually.
Um, do you get many unsubscribes?
Christian Simovic: Yes, we do.
And I'll be very blunt.
So a lot of people go, you know, unsubscribe, wouldn't
you get a lot of unsubscribes?
That is very true.
Um, but, you know, checking the Klaviyo, the software, what we noticed, um, when we
were first doing this, cause I was worried the first time I ever did this, I'm like,
Oh crap, we're getting like 1% unsubscribe rate, which sounds really high, but the
reality was we checked out all the buyers.
Or the buyers.
I'm doing air quotes, if anyone can't read that , every single person who unsubscribe
had never even bought a product.
Or if they had, they hadn't bought since 2018 and they bought
a $30 item five four years ago.
Um, you know, this whole concept of, you know, like, Oh, we don't wanna offend, you
know, like, we don't wanna unsubscribe.
As I understand where that's coming from, but it's not really coming.
It's coming from a bit of like a, like you're playing to lose, not
playing to win kind of mindset.
Mm-hmm.
Like, instead of what, what I personally think and what I've done
with a few of my clients is that, you know, Get those people off the list.
Cause they'll never gonna buy anyways.
That's the best sign that they're never gonna buy.
Unsubscribe straightaway and then fill, fill up their place with people who are
going to buy, whether that's through paid advertising, SEO, or whatever.
Just constantly build the list, constantly build a list of buyers,
which is even more important.
You know, a lot of people like to think like, Oh, I've got a 10,000 or 20,000,
I had one client shed an 80,000 person list, and that sounds really impressive.
But none of them were buyers.
They were all just a mishmosh of random people.
You know, when we're emailing, the results weren't great
because they just weren't buyers.
Um, I'd much rather have a highly responsive list of 3000 or 4,000
people than 10,000 people who were just kind of there for the
ride and not really responding or not buying or anything like that.
Matt Edmundson: That's really interesting.
I like your theory on unsubscribes.
And do you, do you then segment, do you send the same email to everybody
on the list or do you go, cuz like with Klaviyo you mentioned, or
Klaviyo, however you pronounce it.
Um, you mentioned that you, you know, it's got good segmentation,
which it has, we use that ourselves.
Um, do you send the same email to your best customers that you do for
those that haven't bought from you since 2018 and bought ones for $30?
Christian Simovic: Yeah, so how I segment is, so I've, I'm, I said
Klaviyo's got great segmentation.
I don't really take full advantage of it, and that's something
I should be trying to do.
But I normally have a buyer's list, a non-buyer's list, and then
like a hyper buyers list, which is that kind of that VIP buyers.
Maybe they've bought three or four times more.
Um, generally speaking, everyone gets the same list and I say everyone gets the
same email and I'm trying to experiment a bit in actually kind of writing a second
email, like two emails in a day for that hyper buyer's list or potentially.
Let's say, So it kind of depends on what you're selling for e-commerce.
Like let's say there's like the flagship product, which is, let's
say a slingshot, you know, and you get everyone on your list, everyone.
So once they buy that slingshot, then they get moved onto a new product.
Maybe like some kind of an upsell, I'm trying to think like slingshot
coaching or slingshot, whatever.
But like, I'm trying to think of another way.
So maybe the buyers or the buyers in this case, and then the non-buyers
would get just the normal standard daily email, whereas the hyper
buyers might get a more expensive up, like, what's the word, high ticket
product or maybe even a second email.
That's something I haven't really toyed, I'm kind of thinking
around as well on the go.
But to answer your question, I send, right now, I just send the same email
to everyone, so an email to everybody.
Okay.
So probably not that segmented, but still.
Okay.
Matt Edmundson: Um, I've got here a little note saying, Ask
why, Uh, Sadaf put this in.
Why using spell check can make your emails less profitable.
Uh, I am super intrigued by this cuz I spell check everything
like, cuz my spelling is awful.
Awful.
So I use it all the time.
Christian Simovic: So it comes from two things.
So number one, You know, it kind of goes down to the brand and the
corporate, kind of the corporate look.
You know, a lot of people, whenever you see a corporate brand speaking,
it's very perfect, crisp, no slang, no jargon, and it's very
corporate and that's totally fine.
But you know, I'm gonna liken them to Dua Lipa or Brad Pitt or you know,
Chris Pratt or any of these guys.
Any of these like famous actors.
Can you personally relate to them?
Like they've got a six pack, they've got perfect teeth, you
know, chiselled jaw, all this stuff, You know, they look perfect.
I can't, I personally can't relate to them, but you know who I can relate to.
I can relate to the guy, you know, waking up at 3:00 AM he's a little
bit overweight, he's eating ice cream.
Probably shouldn't.
So his wife's gonna try not catch him outta bed.
You know, like I, his wife's like, Where are you?
Like he's just getting ice cream.
Like that kind of guy is a lot more relatable.
And when you use spell, when you use typos, when you use slang, when.
No jargon, just slang and typos and, and purposely, I don't purposely
misspell, but sometimes I'll misspell and I won't fix it up.
You're making mistakes in a sense that, Have you ever watched,
you know, Colombo, that TV show?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like the, Yeah.
You know, the detective, he kind of comes and he looks like a bit
of a bumbling fool here and there.
That's on purpose because he's kind of telling everyone that, Hey, I'm not okay.
You like in the interrogation, the interview, you are
better than me in a sense.
Like you are more okay than me and people feel more comfortable with that.
You know, people, I know this is kind of a weird thing, but when you're in
a social environment, when you see someone who's really like in high
school, like let's say the really cool guy, I'm not comfortable with that guy.
I don't want to say a joke.
I don't wanna like say anything that could get me in trouble.
You know?
That's just psychologically speaking.
But when I'm with someone who I don't perceive as.
As, as okay.
You know, then it's, I feel a lot more relaxed and comfortable.
And then I guess that sounds kind of bad cycle, you know, from like, it doesn't
really sound nice, but that's just the way humans are and that's the whole point of
spelling, uh, spelling mistakes and typos.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
It's disarming, isn't it?
I mean, Colombo was disarming, that's probably the word you
would, that you would use.
So I think that's fascinating.
So can you run us through, uh, Christian, your process for writing an
email then that, you know, customers are gonna want to, gonna want to read
that they're gonna enjoy reading.
What's the sort of, If I'm sat there at my computer, um, I'm staring at it.
Writer's block blank screen, you know, where, where do, What are
some of the things that I can do?
What do you do?
Christian Simovic: Yeah.
Okay.
So the answer to all your questions are in the market.
And I know that sounds really simple, but it's true.
If you spend all of your time knowing everything about your market, the
problems, their pains, what they want, all that kind of stuff, their
little slang, their little jokes.
It writing daily emails or just writing emails in general is
very easy because you understand.
You understand what they wanna talk about.
And this whole writer's block notion, I had that.
The real, the reality is, you know, when you do a lot of research and
understanding exactly what their problems are, it becomes a lot easier.
So let's talk about, I'll do like a sample right in front of all of you, . Um,
let's talk about magic mushrooms, cause that's what we're talking about before.
And let's talk about the pain of, So the real problem is depression and anxiety.
Uh, a lot of people who microdose, they do it because they're depressed,
they're anxious, maybe they have ptsd.
So the problem might be, I might, I might go on Reddit or Quora or a YouTube comment
and I might say a really popular trending.
Like question, Let's say the question is, I don't know.
Let's talk about like, you know, like, I've tried antidepressants
before and I don't feel any better.
I'm gonna try microdosing.
Like, so that could be the whole point of the email.
So the email could be basically saying like, you know, Maybe you've
tried, like they're called SSRIs or antidepressants, you know, you've
tried antidepressants before.
Here are some of the negatives of antidepressants, and just kind of get
into their head and get into their world about the problems they face.
You know, again, if they've got any talking points, if they've said any
opinions I'd, I wouldn't copy and paste it, but I'd kind of rewrite what they've
said just to understand exactly what you know, to just to show that I'm on their
level, like I'm getting in their head.
I understand what's going on through them.
Um, and then from there, like I can't explain it off the top of my
head cause I'm really bad at that.
But I kind of just go from there.
I'll come up with a topic from the market.
I'll talk about their problem.
Maybe I might even insert a story about a problem.
You know, someone on antidepressants, here's this shocking story.
You know, they gained weight, they can't fall, sleep, whatever.
Maybe there's a funny kind of story.
Maybe there's, trying to think of something else.
That's what I can think of.
Let's go with funny story and then I'll kind of just segue that into
my product, which is microdosing.
And then I go like, Look, if you've, if you're, if you're sick and tired of these
symptoms, you should try microdosing.
And that's a really crap, you know, kind of, um, like a synopsis of what I do.
But that's just the general framework at this point.
I kind of just go into autopilot and just write 'em up, I guess.
Matt Edmundson: So when you write and you know, you talked about your
mentors that you've looked at, is there a framework, uh, earlier on you
mentioned about PAS, The, what was it?
The problem, agitate, solution.
Um, is there a framework like that, that you are thinking of
when you write the email so you've got some kind of structure to it?
Like a beginning, a middle, and an end?
Christian Simovic: I guess like now that I look back, I probably do.
I just don't, I don't consciously think about it, I, now that I'm, now that I'm
kind of the way you said it, I probably definitely to follow just a very, very,
like a PAS problem, agitate, solution.
Um, you know, there's another thing.
You know, this comes from like the legendary, like negotiator.
He actually, his name was Jim Camp, um, one of the world's most feared
negotiators, and he had this whole concept of building a vision,
which is essentially just PAS.
You know, instead of pitching the benefit straight away of my product,
you know, he would, he'd talk about, you know, just provide a, and he
did obviously in selling, but he'd provide a vision of the problem.
Um, and that's kind of the whole point in the emails.
Like, I always try to make, make sure the reader knows that, hey,
there is a problem, or agitate their problem and then provide the solution.
Um, but in terms of frameworks, I, I don't have any off the top of my head.
I know a lot of copywriters out there like, Like the 18 step framework, you
know, if X, Y, you know, like if then Z and I, that's just too complicated and
convoluted even for me and especially for, you know, e-commerce business owners.
Like you guys have a lot on your plate and there's no point, you know,
worrying so much about copywriting books.
I think the best thing is just to start, just start writing and
understanding your market and, mm-hmm . Yeah, that's probably the best way.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, I've like, I mean, going back to the founder email,
which I, uh, well, the, uh, the, the MD email, I'm not the founder.
Um, but going back to that email that I write, I don't have a framework.
I'm just trying to be authentic.
Uh, and I think people respond to that.
And for me, that includes telling a lot of stories, um, because I think stories work.
Um, but I, I'm in, I'm curious about the PAS thing.
I've, I've seen that a few times, actually, I can't
say as I've ever used it.
I've come across a few of them, like, you know, Ada, you know, the, uh, attention,
interest, desire, action or whatever.
There's a few, isn't there?
There's a few different frameworks out there that you can look at, but I think
the bottom line is, um, my, my sort of takeaway, I think from the conversation,
Christian, is email marketing.
I sort of got into a bit of a rut, and one of the things that you
can do to try and do something different is the plain text emails.
Uh, and just try and be a little bit different in how you write them.
Try and be a little bit more creative and try them and see what the responses are.
And you can do that probably with your existing email provider, like, um,
Klaviyo, um, or you know, Aweber or a few of the others that you mentioned.
So I'm intrigued by it.
Uh, and I'm intrigued by, um, how we can use this now as an e-commerce brand and
how we, we might sort of try and mix this up and change things around a little bit.
So thank you for that.
Um, I'm kind of curious, I ask this question, uh, to all my
guests at the moment, Christian, cause I'm really curious to the
answer, uh, as I'm aware of time.
You're standing before a live audience, right?
You've just delivered your best keynote speech ever.
Um, the crowd's going wild.
You know, we're sponsored by the e-commerce cohort.
Um, these guys are sat there in front of you, you know, all the members
are sat there in front of you.
You've just delivered your keynote.
And so you take a sort of a little bow and you go, Listen, this is fantastic.
I would just like to thank dot, dot, dot.
Um, yes, because without them I wouldn't be here.
Um, whether that's a book, a podcast, a mentor, family member
who is on your list, I'm curious.
Christian Simovic: Yeah, I have to say it's probably my copy chief at the moment.
Um, his name's John Brandt.
He's very slept on.
He's a very good writer.
He doesn't promote himself enough.
Um, um, his name is just John Brandt.
Copy.
Uh, he's, he's an exceptional copywriter.
He really, I work for one of, like, as a client, one of my clients is the podcast
factory and there's a group of writers and he's the copy chief and he really has
just transformed the way I look at copy and more importantly, business, honestly.
Um, you know, a lot of people like to spend money on coaches and masterminds,
and there's nothing wrong with that, but I, I don't think you, you can't
beat like one-on-one mentorship.
That's why it's so hard to find though.
But if you can, you know, having a mentor really is game changing
for any kind of business really.
Matt Edmundson: So, John is your, John Brandt is your mentor then, Um, I'm
curious, what does that relationship look?
Oh, unofficial.
But what does that relationship look like?
Christian Simovic: Yeah, so for the most part, you.
It's, it's not, We kind of met in a weird circumstances, like
it wasn't like I was signing up for a mentor program or anything.
It was more or less I was working for this client.
We have a group of writers and then at the time, he stepped up to be the
editor, I guess, of all of our writing.
Um, He edits the writing and then, you know, he also does similar to
me email, freelance copywriting.
Um, I kind of just asked him a few questions and he's very receptive
to my ideas and asking questions, and he's always, always free to
jump on a call or, you know, provide a bit of advice in, in the dm.
So yeah, it's, um, I, I never like, to be honest, I never would've
thought that this would've happened.
You know, it's not like, it's not like I kind of, you know, press X to get mentor.
It is just kind of, it just naturally occurred and yeah, I'm forever grateful.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
That's really interesting.
So, John, thank you.
If you're listening to the show, um, I, I'm always intrigued by
the response people have, uh, when I ask em this question.
So, um, Christian, listen, uh, how do people reach you?
How do they connect with, if they want to do so?
. Christian Simovic: Yeah.
Yeah.
So I have my, um, my email list.
It should have been in the show notes somewhere.
Um, sign up to my email list.
I provide daily.
That's daily Email tips.
Email tips and tricks.
Matt Edmundson: And you have to, right after, just after this conversation,
you've gotta provide a daily email.
Christian Simovic: Yeah, yeah.
Holding me to account now.
Um, but yeah, it's, it's daily email tips, but more importantly, more
marketing tips more than anything.
Email and just general marketing tips.
Um, because marketing really is, the fundamental.
Email is just a tool to get you there, but you know, the fundamentals is marketing.
Matt Edmundson: That's great.
Um, how long does it take you to write those emails?
Christian Simovic: So it depends.
At the start it took me about an hour or two.
There was a lot of second guessing.
Um, but when you don't spell check, maybe 30 minutes or so.
No, I like my 30 minutes to 40 minutes, depending if it's research top, like
research late and then probably longer.
But if it's more of just a rant style email, probably 30 minutes.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic.
Well, we, uh, will of course link to Christian's, uh, links in the show notes,
which you can get for free, along with a transcript at ecommercepodcast.net.
Or if you're signed up to our email newsletter, we don't
email you every day maybe yet.
Maybe, uh, need to rethink this.
Uh, but if you wanna sign up to our email newsletter, you can get
all of this direct to your inbox automagically as it comes out.
So, yeah.
Christian, thank you, uh, so much for joining us on the podcast.
It's been great.
Uh, and I think really challenging because what you've done here irrespective of
whether people agree with you or not.
Um, you've challenged the norm, you've challenged the default, and you've said
people think about this a little bit.
Uh, and I've got a lot of respect for that.
So well done, and thank you for coming onto the show and sharing your thoughts.
Christian Simovic: Appreciate it, Matt.
It was really Max Matt.
Good fun.
It was good fun.
And I think I gotta check out, um, Gabby's podcast to see if I
can be more polarizing next time.
Cause I gotta be the most, I gotta be, I dunno who.
The Alex Jones of email writing.
That's what I wanna be.
Yeah.
In fact.
Matt Edmundson: Well, it's good to have a goal, right?
It's good to have a goal.
So there you go.
So there you have it.
What's a fantastic conversation.
Again, huge thanks to Christian for joining me.
Also, a big shout out to today's show sponsor, the e-commerce cohort.
Do head over to ecommercecohort.com.
That's all one word, dot com, ecommercecohort.com for more information
about this new type of community that you can and probably should join
if you are involved in e-commerce.
Be sure to follow the e-commerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from because
we have yet more great conversations lined up, uh, like today's one with Christian,
and I don't want you to miss any of them.
And in case no one has told you yet today, dear listener.
You are awesome.
Yes you are.
It's just a burden you have to bear.
I have to bear, Christian has to bear it.
We're just awesome.
It's just the way it is.
Uh, and so, uh, you can take that with you throughout the rest of the day.
The E-Commerce podcast is produced by Aurion Media.
You can find our entire archive of episodes, uh, on
your favorite podcast app.
The team that makes this show possible is Sadaf Beynon, Josh Catchpole,
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Our theme song is written by Josh Edmundson and my good self.
Uh, and as I mentioned, if you would like to read the transcript or show notes, head
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changing it to daily, hashtag the same.
Uh, that's it from me.
That's it from Christian.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Have a fantastic week, uh, wherever you are, and I will see you next time.
Bye for now.