Matt Edmundson: Well, hello and welcome to the eCommerce podcast
with me, your host, Matt Edmundson.
The eCommerce podcast is all about helping you to deliver eCommerce.
Wow.
And to help us do just that, I am chatting with today's very special guest, Tom
Kulzer, who is the founder and CEO of AWeber, about how to grow your online
business using email marketing strategies.
But before Tom and I get into that.
Let me suggest a few other eCommerce podcast episodes that I think you're
also gonna enjoy listening to.
Why not check out a recent episode with Daniel Budai, the Secrets of
Retaining Customers with email marketing.
What a legend in that guy is, and also check out how to optimize
engagement through customer lifestyle marketing with Cath Pay.
I still remember Cath Pay being in a very tropical location
when we recorded that episode.
So do check those out.
You can find these and our entire archive of episodes on our website
for free ecommercepodcast.net.
Uh, and on our website you can also sign up to our email's newsletter.
Which I feel very good about given today's guest.
Uh, and each week we will email you, uh, these links along with the notes and
the transcript from today's conversation with Tom directly to your inbox.
Totally free.
It's all good stuff.
It's all totally amazing.
Now, this episode is brought to you by, The e-commerce cohort, which helps you
deliver e-commerce wow to your customers.
You know what, I've come across a bunch of folks who find e-commerce.
It's a bit of an overwhelming topic, shall we say.
Uh, you've gotta keep it with the tech, which changes so fast.
How do you do customer service when everybody's taste and habits
are changing all of the time.
And to top it all off, you've gotta stay on top of all the latest
marketing techniques and ideas.
So we talk about all of these things, obviously, on the e-commerce podcast.
But for those of you in e-commerce, you should also check out ecommercecohort.com.
It is a membership group for those who are in e-commerce.
And it does guided monthly sprints that cycle through all the key areas of E-com.
You'll keep up to date.
You'll be working on the key areas of your e-commerce business, including
your marketing and email marketing like we're talking about today.
So whether you are just starting out in e-commerce or if like me, you
are a well established e-commercer.
I encourage you to get involved.
Check it out, uh, ecommercecohort.com.
That's ecommercecohort.com.
Now, before I get into today's conversation, uh, I just wanna, just wanna
read out the bio that's in front of me.
Tom is the founder and CEO of AWeber, the leading email marketing platform,
uh, and automation platform for small businesses where he is actively
involved in the company's strategic.
That's not easy to say.
Company's strategic direction, growth and evolution.
Over the company's 24 year history, Tom has nurtured AWeber from a small
startup to a robust organization that we've all heard of, we all know
about, and has enabled over 1 million customers to grow their businesses.
All without public or venture funding.
Go.
Tom, that's amazing.
Tom, great to have you here on the e-Commerce podcast.
Thank you for taking time out of your no doubt, insanely busy
schedule to join us, uh, here today.
Tom Kulzer: Thanks for having me on today, Matt.
Matt Edmundson: Oh, no worries.
Tom Kulzer: Looking forward to the conversation.
Matt Edmundson: Oh yeah, it's gonna be great.
So for those you know, for the four people listening to the podcast
that actually hasn't heard of AWeber, um, just tell us, uh, what
is AWeber and what do you guys do?
Tom Kulzer: Yeah.
We're a email marketing platform.
So think of us as the, uh, you know, automation behind
communicating with your subscribers.
So when you publish an email newsletter, you log into AWeber to create that
newsletter and send that content out.
Uh, when you think about.
You know, automation sequences that people talk about or automated follow up.
Our platform is the one that enables you to, to do that.
So when somebody clicks on an email or clicks on a link, you send a
certain email, you know, they open a message, they don't open a message,
you send a different email, et cetera.
So our platform is the one that enables small businesses around the world to,
to be able to send those communications out to the people that requested them.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic.
Now, I'm kind of curious, where did the name AWeber come from?
Because it's not, well, it's not.
It's not what I would've named an email company.
Do you know what I mean?
It's not a sort of top, unless I'm missing something.
Tom Kulzer: It's not off the head.
Yeah.
So back in 90, early 98, we were calling it the automated web
assistant, and it's before it launched.
So now it's making more sense, eh?
Yeah.
So you know, automated web assistant is like a really long domain name
and that's just not particularly catchy, so it kind of got shortened
and it's like, aweb, aweb ass.
No, no, no.
It just turned into aweber.
And, you know, historically, it's, it's one of those things that's
like, it begins with an A, it's short, it's catchy, it's unique.
Um, and, and it's just kind of a memorable thing when, when somebody hears it,
we always capitalize the A and the w.
But not the e because, you know, it's not the, uh, assistant part, but,
uh, yeah, no, it's just, it was one of those kind of funny naming, uh,
historical bits that we hung onto.
Matt Edmundson: That's really funny how that, how these things
sort of come about, isn't it?
And the story.
So yeah.
How did you get started?
How did AWeber get started and did you just wake up one day and think, I'm gonna
help people conquer the world of Email?
Tom Kulzer: No, not at all.
Uh, I was actually, uh, I was studying mechanical engineering in, uh, college.
And I was, um, I was selling this wireless modem.
Uh, so this was back when we still had dial up modems, uh,
for connecting to the internet.
So like wireless technology that you could, you know, Velcro to the back
of your laptop was, uh, was, you know, the latest, greatest thing.
And I was selling this at computer shows and I was basically a sales rep for it.
And, you know, in the process being a college student.
I was kind of lazy and you know, actually selling things required follow up.
Like I didn't just see them at the computer show and they instantly bought
this expensive device and then paid for an expensive monthly service.
They had more questions or they weren't sold right away, and you
had to kind of follow up with them.
So I'd send these manual emails and that's a lot of work, hence
the lazy college student aspect.
I wrote a little program that would automatically send out the
messages because 90% of the messages that I sent were the same message
to each of the different people, and I customized a little bit.
Um, and, uh, yeah, so I, I wrote this and I ended up sharing it with
other salespeople around the country that were selling this same product.
And my payment for that was send me the messages that are working.
I wanna know what copy works, because that was not something
I was particularly good at.
So we shared them and I would share 'em off to other people, and we all sold
more as a result of both this automated email tool and sharing copy that works.
So we had the right messaging.
One thing led to another.
I ended up leaving that company to focus on school.
Uh, somebody was telling me that was important.
Parents.
And, uh, I stopped running that program that was sending out all the
automated follow-ups for all these other people around the country, and
they started coming to me saying, Hey, I'll pay you for that thing that
I was previously getting for free.
And I was like, Hm.
Maybe there's a business here.
Maybe just, um, and that turned into our automated web assistant,
uh, that turned into AWeber.
Many years later, here we are.
Matt Edmundson: Wow.
It's funny, isn't it?
How, um, when?
Can I ask when was it you wrote this first little program?
Tom Kulzer: So it was like 97.
Matt Edmundson: 97.
So 98.
In 98, I wrote my first ever website.
It was around 97, 98.
And then that sort of one thing led to another and that ended
up, right, an e-commerce site.
And then that led to something else.
And then that led to, and then here I am today.
Right.
And I find it fascinating, uh, Tom, that you kind of, the amount of journeys
that start off with, I was in college.
Or I was at uni, or I was young, had a lot of time on my hands, and I just
played around with dot, dot, dot.
And 20 years later, here I am dot, dot, dot.
Do you know what I mean?
It's that kind of really fascinating story to me, and that seems to be yours, right?
Tom Kulzer: Yeah, no, absolutely.
At the time I was, you know, single and, uh, racing bicycles,
uh, kind of in the amateur level.
So if I was either not, uh, you know, not in school or not riding
my bike, I was sitting in front of a computer, uh, messing around with
code and, you know, just seeing what I could kind of hack away on.
I was part of a number of, uh, different like kind of newsletters.
I moderated a newsletter that basically took kind of entrepreneurial.
Just something that was always interesting to me.
So I kind of, I, I created this little ecosystem around me
that was other entrepreneurs.
Uh, so when I ultimately, I kind of launched AWeber to a larger group.
I launched it to this group of entrepreneurs that were in other
businesses, and I, you know, instantly had traction as a result of that
because I, they already knew who I was.
Yeah, like I, I had some element of validation even though I was very upfront
in the fact that I was a college student.
I was still figuring this out, but I had developed this thing that
was really useful for a lot of people and they instantly saw the
value in that and became customers.
So, you know, and I think there's this path that happens
for a lot of businesses that.
Just getting a little bit of traction in where you're actually adding value
and solving your own problems, but solving other people's problems is
really, really, you know, is really the point that you need to get.
I think a lot of the media obsesses around entrepreneurs that raise money,
As like, you know, this, this level of success, and it's like, I've never
looked at that as a point of success.
It's like, okay, I convinced a small board of people to gimme a whole lot of money.
That's very different than convincing a whole lot of businesses that the
thing that you're selling is valuable and they want to give me money.
Yeah, it's two completely different dichotomies and, and I think the press and
the, the general public, you know, kind of romanticizes raising a whole bunch of
money, which to me is just like a ticking time bomb because eventually if you don't
have customers paying for whatever it is that you're selling, that money runs out.
Yeah.
And you have to do some big changes.
Either raise more money, sell the company, fold, whatever, versus building a business
in a company that kind of has legs and can stand on its own two feet and continue
to grow and, you know, perpetuate for as, as long as, as long as those customers
find value in what you're selling.
Matt Edmundson: No, I agree.
I think it's, um, I think, like you say, it's been overhyped
the whole raising finance thing.
It's got, it's, it's got problems, right?
It's not all glamorous.
And, um, I, I know like with that, um, e-commerce, we sold a big
e-commerce business last year.
I have another one uh, still running.
Both of those companies?
Oh, yeah.
Thanks.
Uh, both of those.
Right.
Um, I have a very simple philosophy in that whatever stock we have, we own.
So I don't buy stock on invoice.
I don't, um, I don't do that.
I, I prepay for everything.
If that, I mean, the site we have now, we manufacture, so we
definitely gotta pay for everything.
But before, when we had the beauty site, I, everything on our shelves we owned.
And so when you in effect hit those problems, when there was downturns.
I didn't have to concern myself with trying to scramble to find the cash to
pay the invoices as well as payroll.
And there's something to be said, certainly from my point of view about,
I'd just call it organic growth.
The ability just to go out, find some more customers, serve those
customers, use the profits from that.
I can go and find more customers.
Right.
So is that, it sounds like that's what you've done.
Have I understood that right?
Tom Kulzer: Yeah, no, absolutely.
That's, you know, we're through and through a bootstrap company, so
we've never raised outside funding.
Um, and, you know, we serve future customers based on the profits
from, from past customers and the revenue that they're paying us.
So, you know, at the end of the day, like our costs are very different
than, you know, a traditional kind of you know, inventory type business.
Like I don't have inventory sitting around.
Mm-hmm.
But I think a lot of, you know, when you look at raising funds and so
forth, it's, it's the, um, you know, it's the dichotomy of how you're
leveraging the business to grow.
You know, we've certainly grown slower as a result of that.
Um, I think in ways that, you know, were both my own comfort zone, um,
as well as in ways that I think change a company's kind of dna.
Mm-hmm.
, um, when you grow too fast, you know, if I doubled head count, you know,
I doubled our team size this year.
That's gonna impact the way that our team members talk to each other and how they
relate to one another, and how company culture passes from one to the other.
Mm-hmm..
Um, and I think that, that those things have to be balanced as, you
know, as you grow a company over the years or you kind of lose who
you are and what makes you special.
Um, It's just, there's lots of things to think about, but that's
just kind of some of the stuff that I've balanced over the years.
You know, if I, at the same time, like if I went back to the beginning, I ran
everything myself for the first two years.
I didn't hire anyone until we had, it was like 23 or 2,400 customers, like Oh wow.
Over 2000 paying customers.
I'm writing code, I'm doing marketing, I'm doing all the customer service.
This is basically during the day I did all customer service and
at night I did marketing, pr, you know, writing new code, et cetera.
And it was like, it was, I look back on it and it was like, that's insane.
Why did I do that?
But for me it was like, okay, at what point can I get to a revenue component
where I can feel really confident that I can support another person's livelihood?
Yeah.
And at the same time it was like, well, hiring somebody like that's scary.
How do I do that?
Like, how do I even physically do that?
And it's like, you know, it's really not that hard when you look back on it,
but as a new entrepreneur and having never done that before, it's like
that's, you know, it's, it's a barrier and you have to get through that.
Yeah.
So,
Matt Edmundson: Oh no, it sounds, I mean, I, I could wax
lyrical with you all afternoon.
I think about just how you, how you build the business and,
and the learnings from that.
I find the whole thing fascinating.
It's why between you and me, and I don't think I've mentioned this
before in the ecom podcast, we're launching a second podcast called Push.
In fact, by the time this airs, Push will be out, push to be more, uh,
where I just talk to leaders about how they've led, uh, I love it.
It's great, they're fascinating conversations.
Nice.
Uh, we'll have to get you on that one as well.
Um, let's talk about e-commerce because, you know, that's why
people have tuned in really.
Let's, let's, uh, so you've obviously been around email, well, you've been
around email longer than I've been around.
I started in e-commerce in 2002.
So you've been in email longer than I've been in e-commerce, so, you know,
Tom Kulzer: uh, I've sent a lot of emails.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Have you, have you actually tried to calculate how many emails you have
been responsible for being sent?
Tom Kulzer: Oh gosh.
It, it's, it's not quite trillions yet, but it's hundreds
of billions, so it's crazy.
It's a lot of emails.
It's crazy.
And I, and I like to always make sure that I preface that with
it's permission based emails.
We don't send emails that people don't request, so you have to
have permission to send emails.
So we're, we're not, we try very hard to not be part of the spam problem.
Matt Edmundson: Well, years ago, spam wasn't a problem.
Obviously when you first started out, it wasn't.
Tom Kulzer: Well, I would say it definitely was like, it's always
been a contingent of something that we've had to deal with.
You know, there was, there were different rules, like there
was a lack of rules back then.
I've always looked at spam and, you know, the unsolicited email, as you
know, taking care of the email ecosystem.
If we do things as a platform that trashes the viability of email as a
marketing platform or as a communication platform, you know, it's, it's kinda
like, you know, biting the hand that feeds you and that, that expression,
it's like, why, you know, why would I wanna make that a useless platform?
Because ultimately then businesses aren't going to invest in it.
Email has really remained one of the top investments for businesses from
a return on investment standpoint, you know, every dollar, you know,
gets turned into $34 according to direct marketing association on mm-hmm
on, you know, investment in email.
So it's, it's one of those things that done right, it can be really profitable,
can really connect with your users in ways that you just can't do across social and,
and other platforms that are out there.
At the same time, like you own your audience.
You know, it's like everyone's got every other business's logo
on their website these days.
Subscribe to my YouTube, you know, follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook,
like, you know, you name, name 'em off.
Even now it's, you know, follow my podcast on Apple and, you know, 14 different
platforms and it's like, As a business, we don't own any of those platforms.
If one of those platform, like if Twitter decides they don't want you publishing
on Twitter anymore, goodbye audience.
Yeah.
I can't take my Twitter following and like import them into a new platform
and continue to communicate with them.
Whereas email.
You own the email address like they belong to you, you can export them
from our platform or any other platform that you're sending those email
from and continue to send to those subscribers from a different platform.
So if we for some reason, decide that whatever it is that you're doing is
not appropriate on our platform, You can continue to do that somewhere else.
Yeah, you can't, you don't have that same leverage with Facebook, it's very
much this, you know, when I go back to, you know, the nineties and the early two
thousands, it's the same way everyone was trying to build platform around AOL
and getting, you know, people to, to kind of follow you in that closed ecosystem.
That was the paywall behind aol.
That was really kind of the leading.
You know, a leading indicator of what then turned into all of these
other platforms that are out there with Twitter and Facebook and YouTube
and so forth in that you have to play exclusively by their rules.
And if you don't, you're gone.
Mm-hmm.
and it's as simple as that.
And you have no recovery.
Um, so it's a, it's a balance.
And I look at email as, as something that is more transferable, more ownable,
um, has higher, longer term economics, you know, and email subscribers worth
far more than a Twitter follower, a, you know, Facebook follower, et cetera.
Matt Edmundson: So I, I totally agree and it's what I mean, I like what you
said there, how, um, I mean, I, I was joking or jesting in some respects,
saying email, you've been doing email longer than I've been doing e-commerce.
And it show I wasn't doing Twitter, I wasn't doing Facebook.
I wasn't doing, they didn't even exist when I was, when I
first started out in business.
But email did, and email is still by far the biggest return on our investment
from a marketing point of view.
And it's like, I, people ask me all the time, what do you think about
dot dot dot and this technique or this fancy idea over here?
And you go, well, listen, have you got the basics done right?
What are the basics?
Well, let's talk about your website and let's talk about your email marketing.
Right?
They've been around since the start of e-commerce and they're still here.
Um, but obviously email is, has changed.
It's adapted.
It's evolved over time.
I mean, what are some of the things that you've noticed sort of change
in the email marketing world?
Tom Kulzer: Yeah, there's, there's a lot of, you know, overall changes.
You know, when I first started, you know, messages where it was
just a subject line and plain text.
Mm-hmm, and now you've got obviously HTML email where you can make, you know, an
email, have images and you know, it can look like, you know, a lot of businesses
send these brochure type emails.
I don't generally recommend most businesses send this, uh mm-hmm.
you know, use email as more of a personal communication platform than, um, you
know, than just sending out brochureware.
You know, it's, it's what would you wanna get from businesses?
Um, you know, there's lots of up upcoming things that, you know, a lot of
businesses haven't even heard about yet.
There's something called AMP for email, um, that normally
when you send out an html.
You know, the content that I write and then hit send on is the content that
you as a subscriber receive and see.
And no matter how long after you go back and read that same email, it
will look the same in your inbox.
Mm-hmm.
Amp for email is actually a, um, you've probably heard for about
amp uh, when it comes to website load times and Google and so forth.
It's a protocol that, that Google originally developed.
Um, but what it essentially allows you to do is as a sender, I can
make parts of my email dynamic.
So think, um, you subscribe to a stock newsletter and you get in, in, you
know, they list off different stocks and when they send that, you know,
Google's trading in, I don't even know what it's trading at right now, let's
call it a thousand dollars a share.
Um, and, uh, you know, tomorrow when you read it, Their shares might be a
thousand dollars, you know, $1,020.
Mm-hmm.
, um, and, and for email would allow it to pull in the real time, uh,
stock, you know, quote for that.
So in the e-commerce world, think of, you know, you send out a
promotion for a particular widget and you sell out of that widget.
Well, now you've got all the, you've got these emails that you sent
to, let's call, 5,000 subscribers.
You know, a thousand of them saw and you know, went and bought your
widget, but then 4,000 haven't opened yet, but you sold out of that widget.
With amp for email, what I could do is I could actually replace that widget A in
the email with a widget B, so the other 4,000 that hadn't opened it yet, still
have the opportunity to see something of value that they could potentially purchase
versus a like, you know, clicking on the link and then going, oh, it's sold out.
Um, so it's, that's amazing.
It's.
There's some really cool stuff.
There's, uh, you know,
Matt Edmundson: Is that out now, um, amp for email?
Tom Kulzer: Yeah, absolutely.
It's supported on a number of platforms.
Google, obviously, and for most e-commerce businesses, that's, you
know, a good 40 to 60%, sometimes 70% of, of a lot of subscribers
lists, a lot of businesses list.
Um, and there's other platforms that are, that are building in support for.
Yahoo, has support for it.
Um, and as well as others are, are in the process of adding.
Um, but that's a, a really cool technology.
You know, we're gonna see buying things in the actual email very soon, uh, instead
of having to go off to another website, uh, to, to do the actual checkout process.
And because it's all validated, because I know I sent it to you as a subscriber.
If you already have payment details on file, you could potentially even, you
know, accept an order without having to make the user enter a credit card
number because you've already got it on file and it's authenticated that you
sent it to that particular recipient.
So there's some really, really cool things that you can do that is,
we've implemented it in a lot of our own newsletters as like surveys.
So like when you fill out the survey, you, you actually click the buttons in
the email and when you hit submit, You're still in the email and it shows you the
results of, you know, whatever survey that we sent out, um, you know, and, and
whoever's responded to it, uh, so far.
So it, it turns email from what was this static thing?
Yeah.
Into a more dynamic, um, and interactive process.
And that's really what is key with email and getting, you know, good results with
email is, it all comes back to engagement.
Uh, and when I think of, you know, when I say engagement, that means, you know,
whether or not somebody opens an email, whether or not somebody clicks on links
and goes to your website in the email.
Um, but so those are the two like.
An email marketer.
Those are the two metrics that businesses often look at as engagement.
But there's a lot of other things if you think past that, that you know, Google
and Microsoft and Yahoo are looking at that kind of count as engagement.
So think, um, you know, do you forward that email to somebody else?
Do you reply to that email?
Um, do you, uh, you know, when you open it, do you scroll down?
Is the message bigger than my window?
Do I scroll down?
You know, when you're reading on Gmail, let me tell you,
Google sees all those things.
They keep track of all of those things and that feeds into, um, the.
Uh, their algorithms as far as what emails they're gonna show you in the
future, but it's also setting that kind of engagement reputation for whether
or not your messages continue to show up in the inboxes of all the other
people that they sent, that you sent to.
Um, Do you then save that email to a different folder or label it in Gmail
or Yahoo or wherever it happens to be?
So there's all these different kind of cues that mailbox providers get from
every interaction with your messages.
Do they delete it?
Do they mark it as spam?
Yeah.
Et cetera.
So there's a lot of things that businesses do.
That are, you know, when you, when you put that engagement hat on that are
actually hurting that ability to interact.
So, you know, how many businesses, particularly in the e-commerce space,
have addresses that they send out to, that are kind of the, the what
we call 'em as no reply emails.
And, and I always call those, you know, the, the middle finger email address.
Matt Edmundson: You've got this email, don't ever come back to me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom Kulzer: Exactly.
It's like, gimme your money and, and go yourself.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, that's, that's not how I, as you know, when I get messages in
my inbox and it's like I have a question about something, it's like, oh crap.
Like how do I get this question answered?
I gotta go to their website.
I gotta figure out how to contact 'em.
Like, just let me reply to the darn email you just sent me.
You're in my inbox.
It's literally two way communication platform, and you're just giving me
the finger and telling me to go away.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Its, it's the craziest thing I, I've never understood Tom why people have done that.
Tom Kulzer: And it's so, so common.
So it's, it's the give, give me your money and go away kind of cue.
Yeah.
And it's not, it's not a good way to build engagement with your audience.
You know, it's one of the, it's one of the most simple tricks that a lot of
really good publishers, particularly at the, like, you know, smaller
level is when somebody subscribes to their newsletter, particularly in the
like kind of creator economy folks with, you know, writing based on,
on what their audience's needs are.
Hey, what's your, what's your biggest struggle right now?
Just hit reply and, and let me know.
And while, yes, that's gonna generate email volume to you,
it's also a great stream of ideas for content for you to write.
It's as an eCommerce vendor, it's potentially great ideas for products
that you could bring, that you might not have or, um, it's also great for.
Uh, increase, you know, improving your content on your website by using the
terminology that your own customers are using to describe their problems.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of things that you can do with that, and at the same time you're
signaling to Google and others Yeah.
That like.
Hey, they want my email and they're engaging with what I'm
sending, which is really valuable.
Matt Edmundson: So if, um, I dunno if this, I'm going too into the detail now.
I, you've got me thinking maybe I need to set up an email address which says, yes,
you can reply to this@whatever.com, uh.
But you get the replies from your customers.
You send, you know, emails out and they, you encourage 'em to
hit reply for all the reasons you mentioned, which are all valid.
Does that mean, then that Google's going 60, 70% of email going through Google.
You saying Google are looking at that going, this guy's got a little
bit of engagement, people are responding, people are replying.
Therefore, does the deliverability of my emails increase?
Tom Kulzer: Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, when you think about like, so deliverability means a couple
of different things and it's often, uh, misquoted in the marketplace.
So like, you know, when you think about a social platform, you know,
if I have a thousand people following me on Twitter and I post something
on Twitter, maybe 10% of those people are gonna actually see that and it'll
actually show up in their stream.
You know, when I send an email, if I sent that email to a thousand people, if I
only delivered it to a hundred people.
We'd have a lot of really ticked off customers.
So like deliverability there, there's a component of delivering it to
the platform, and those numbers are usually in the 98, 99 percentile.
As far as you know.
Those are all the addresses that are valid.
And we've removed any of the addresses that aren't valid, meaning, you know, the
address unknown and those sort of things.
Um, so the deliver, so that's one component that's
often called deliverability.
Most businesses, you know, when you're thinking about it as a Sender are thinking
deliverability as to what percentage of my mail goes from me to somebody's inbox.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and that is the whether or not your messages go to the inbox
is based on your engagement.
And the more you can have an audience that is highly engaged, meaning
they're open clicking, replying.
Filing 'em away and saving 'em for later, the more likely your messages are
gonna go continue to go to the inbox.
You know, one thing that we often get, particularly from e-commerce merchants
is my emails go to the promotions folder.
Yeah.
And they think in their head like, oh no, it's the spam folder.
Promotions folder is definitely not the spam folder.
They're two very different beasts.
Mm-hmm.
and a lot of our e-commerce platform centers that, that
go to the promotions folder.
Um, They get better results because they're there versus being in the inbox.
Because when people go to the, when they look at their promotions folder,
they're in a buying mood versus in the inbox it's like, well, I want,
I wanna read my email from Matt that where Matt and I were talking
about what we just did this weekend.
Yeah.
You know, it's a different kind of thing.
And at the same time, as an e-commerce center, you know, we often get the
question like, well, why is my email going to the promotions folder?
And it's like, well, You're sending promotions.
So, that's Google's kinda good at what they do.
So, uh, yeah, that's where it goes.
Um, you know, and if the content that you send is always promotions,
it's always buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.
You know, here's my latest listings, here's my coupons for my grocery
store, whatever it happens to be.
You know, you're gonna go to the promotions folder.
Um, you know, one of the newsletters that, that, uh, that I subscribe to, that,
you know, you could think about as a.
You know, as an e-commerce sender, I, I, it's called, uh, the Lift E Foil.
It's a company out Puerto Rico, and they make these cool, like,
um, it's like a surfboard with an electric motor on the bottom and it
kind of like flies out the water.
And I bought one a few years ago and I'm on their newsletter as a customer
and they send me product updates.
But the reason that I engage with those product updates is because they also link
off to YouTube videos and Instagram videos and those sort of things in their emails.
That are about other customers riding the Lift E foil in different parts
of the world that are really cool and beautiful, or people doing cool tricks
on them that I haven't figured out.
Um, so it's like it keeps me engaged as a customer and, oh, hey, by the
way, they've also got, you know, some new foils or a new motor or
something that I can put on it.
And I've bought a few of those because it's, it's topical to me.
But where does their email go?
It comes to my inbox because it's mostly content that is non-promotional, and
it's also content that I engage with.
I click those links.
I, you know, it's like, like at this point it's like, oh, where are they now?
Like, that's really cool.
Yeah.
Or, you know, what, what trick am I gonna learn this week that I can't do?
And I'm gonna spend all summer bashing my head trying to figure out how to do it.
Matt Edmundson: Um, so it's not a case then of, um, Because there's
a belief isn't there, that sort of floats around, which says if I send
plain text emails, I'll go into their inbox, uh, and if I send HTML,
I'm going into the promotions tab.
That's not, that's not right.
Tom Kulzer: No, no, no.
If you sell things in your plain text message, you're gonna end up
going in the promotions folder.
Matt Edmundson: So, um, you know, it's, say Google know what they're doing.
They've, they've seen every trick.
Tom Kulzer: Absolutely.
So, and you've gotta, you've gotta understand they're also seeing all of the
content that you are sending in total.
So, you know, you'll get, you know, sometimes you'll get businesses that
are like, oh, you know, I went to this trade show and, and I got a
thousand names of people that hopped it in to receive emails from all the
vendors that were at the trade show.
And its like.
Okay.
You were at the trade show.
There were about 50 different vendors there.
Do you want 50 different vendors sending you emails as a result
of having gone to the trade show?
Mm-hmm?
No.
I know I don't.
Mm-hmm..
But these businesses look at it as a shortcut to like gain subscribers.
But think about this.
So put your Google hat on, okay?
That that particular business might have been, let's call it, they were
sending to 5,000 people before and on Monday they come back from their
conference and they have a thousand names and they import them, and they're
now sending 6,000 people an email.
Most businesses don't grow organically.
By whatever percent that is, you know, 20% overnight.
Like they don't instantly get another thousand subscribers.
Google knows, you know, they may only see a percentage of that.
So let's say they were seeing 2,500 subscribers that you were sending before,
and now with this new imported list, you magically got another 500 names.
Yeah.
They know that those names have never gotten emails from you before, and
they're judging where to send those emails from an inbox perspective based on what
the, you know, 2000 or 2,500 were that, that were already seeing those emails.
So if those users were engaging with those messages, those new people
might be likely to see them, or they might send them to spam just because
it's like, that doesn't look organic.
When we look at most businesses growth, it just kind of, it's a nice steady
uptick of, of subscribers over time.
They don't, they don't jump up in, in big, you know, big jumps that's not
organic, and that is more than likely them doing something that is not permission
based and is gonna cause problems.
So it's, you know, so there's, there's a balance in, in, you know, making sure that
as an email center and as a business, You put your customer hat on and think of what
would you like to receive in your inbox.
Your emails are not special.
The entire planet does not want what you send just because it comes from you.
I, I hate to, you know, that applies to my emails, that applies
to your emails, that applies to all of our listeners emails here.
They're not special.
We need to earn our way into people's inboxes and earn our
ability to stay in their inboxes.
Yeah,
Matt Edmundson: that's such a important, we should maybe change the title of the
podcast to Your emails are not special.
Uh, I think that's such a valid point.
So what would be some of the, the tips, Tom, that you would
give to an e-commerce business?
You know, I'm, I'm, I'm an e-commerce guy.
I'm sat here, I'm listening to you, uh, and I'm thinking this is all great.
And, um, I, I get some of the stuff you were saying.
How does that help me when I come to sit down and, and
stop planning m email content?
What are some of the things that I should be thinking about?
Tom Kulzer: Yeah, I think in the e-commerce space, I think a lot
of people think about prospecting and like, buy buy buy, buy now.
And most people, most e-commerce vendors get most of their
subscribers from new customers.
It's very rare from what I generally see that somebody comes to an e-commerce
website and opts into your email list.
Mm-hmm.
. So, you know, usually those opt-ins are coming from your customers and
you're actually emailing customers.
So, you know, going back to like that, lift the, the E foil, you know,
how can I educate people with the emails that I send about the product
that they just purchased from me?
Make them better consumers and more educated consumers of the
product that they just bought.
Make them smart, you know, is, is what I, you know, when you, when you make me
feel like an expert at doing whatever it is that I'm doing, I'm gonna come back
to you because you make me look smart.
That, that's a feel, that's a feel good emotion.
Yeah.
And I'm more likely to go back to you again about, you
know, buying your products.
You know, if you sell me some fancy hair product and you teach me how to use it
more effectively than me going to the grocery store and buying something, I'm
more likely to continue to come back to you because you're gonna continue
to make my life better as a result.
And that's where, you know, during that educational process,
is where you cross sell.
You know, Hey, you bought the shampoo, but you didn't get the conditioner.
You know, like, you know, what other things can you do if you're a golf store?
Like, okay, you bought new clubs.
Well, did you get a bag for your new clubs?
Or are you ragging around your new clubs in your old ratty bag.
You know, like, how can you cross sell appropriate things to people
and with, you know, with, with, uh, tools like, you know, we have, uh,
conditional content so I can, I can save what it is that you bought and
put content in, in each email that I send out that is specific to each user.
So, you know, It's a little more work to do it if you have, yeah,
hundreds or thousands of SKUs.
But if you have a limited number of SKUs, it's easier to personalize the
content that you're sending out to people and make it very, very personal
and very relevant to each subscriber.
Whereas you might have kind of wrap a text around it that's more generic,
but then you have something that's specific to each individual user
that's gonna get that engagement.
And even though you're sending a customer newsletter to a thousand
people, There might be, you know, 15 different iterations that actually only
took an extra 10 or 15 minutes to put together because it's not hard to do.
It's all in one email.
As a sender, you send one email and the, you know, the backend at
AWeber or whatever platform you're using is, is doing the magic part.
Matt Edmundson: It's Figuring it all out.
That's really interesting.
That's sort of skiing back up to some of the things that you mentioned earlier.
Um, you talked about, you know, You'll be buying things soon,
directly on your email hopefully.
How far away are we from that?
Tom Kulzer: Depending.
So, um, I, it is technically possible now.
Um, the tools I'd say on the, like, you know, business kind of consumer end of
things aren't at, aren't quite there yet.
Like we don't have something built into our platform to do that yet.
Mm-hmm..
Um, but I see it coming very shortly, so I'd say in the next like 12 months, you
should be able to do that on, on the like, You know, easy sign out for a service.
Hey, I can send out an email and yeah.
You know, all, all the transaction stuff just kind of magically works.
Um, so the, the tech is there, it just needs a few more
kind of integration points.
Matt Edmundson: Um, why, why do you think, um, as curious to, to understand
this, you know, you, you've got, uh, in the world of eCommerce, you've got a
lot of changes that have happened from a technological point of view, right?
Where I think about what eCommerce sites were like back in 2002 to
what they are now and they're poles apart, and they're very.
Um, but email, like you say, seems to have been quite static.
You know, we went from plain text emails to, oh, I can put
my logo in a picture of me.
Oh, I can add a picture of a product.
But really has there been sort of any key innovation?
I like what you've been talking about with Amp, where you can
make it a bit more dynamic.
I like what you're talking about with the shopping cart.
That all seems quite recent.
Do you know what I mean?
It seems like it's been, it's been static for a while.
Do you know why that is?
Tom Kulzer: Um, it's, it, I, I would say to a great extent, a lot of that is the,
um, uh, the, the dispersed nature of email in that like, no one platform owns email.
Mm-hmm.
um, you know, there isn't a central, you know, Google's probably
the closest to to it in that.
A lot of people have email boxes at, at Google, so kind of what they
do becomes kind of the standard.
Um, there's a lot of things that have happened behind the scenes and platforms
like AWeber try to remove that from something that, um, you know, our,
our customers need to think about.
So like authentication is a big, uh, thing that we do.
You know, we push folks to make sure that they're doing what's called dkim keys.
It's D K I M, and that's basically just a way that, uh, It best way to
describe it is it is it's a way for you to make an entry on your website or on
your domain that tells a provider like Google that yes, these are authorized
emails coming from my platform.
So it allows it, you know, it prevents people from pretending to
be you, from spoofing to be you.
Um, which again helps your email reputation as as a sender.
So we encourage all of our users to sign their emails with dkim and we
try to make that really easy and kind of walk them through how to do that.
Only takes like 10 minutes to do, but it's a good step to do.
Um, there are other tools that kind of layer on top of that.
There's something called bimi.
B I M I mm-hmm..
And that is, um, Oh, Josh, I should know what, uh, uh, it's like brand indicators.
I'm blanking on it at the moment.
It's Monday.
Give me a pass.
Um, but basically what bimi for, for everybody that's listening, it basically
means the ability for you to put a logo next to your email in the inbox.
So before somebody actually opens your email, when you're looking at your email
in, in Yahoo or in, uh, MacMail and those sort of things, you'll see that little
indicator down the side that'll have.
You know, your business logo.
Yeah.
Um, there, and that's, it's a way of displaying that outside
of the Google ecosystem.
So you might see that if you're in Google, you're just seeing
the Google kind of avatar.
Mm-hmm.
. Um, but outside of Google's ecosystem, there wasn't a way for people to do
that in an authenticated and secure way.
And Bimi is a tool for doing that.
So that again, is something that we encourage businesses to, to publish.
So there's a lot of things that are kind of behind the scenes, but at the end of
the day, like an email is an email, it's a subject line and some body content.
And what you send in that you know, is really up to every business.
Um, and, and I think, you know, trying to make sure that you're sending as
personalized content as possible, and that's where like the tech, and I think a
lot of the changes have come is yeah, how you go about doing that personalization.
Whereas before, you know, it was like I had one subject line.
And one set of body copy and everybody on my list got exactly the same thing.
Now it can be completely dynamic and completely different for
literally every single subscriber based on their preferences.
Um, and it's not that much extra work for a business to actually send
out emails that are that relevant.
Hmm.
Um, when you, when you've, you know, kind of tagged and, and, uh, you know,
segmented your user base over time.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic.
Fantastic.
Well, geez, Tom, I'm, I'm aware of time, first and foremost, uh, and I'm aware that
I've still got 25 questions to ask you.
Um.
So, uh, and I guess a lot of people have actually, uh, about email
marketing because it has been around since the dawn of e-commerce.
And it is still one of those things that people just don't get right.
And it, it's a phenomenal thing.
So if people have questions, if people wanna reach out to you,
what's the best way to do that?
Tom Kulzer: Yeah, you can find us at aweber.com.
Uh, I'm on all the social places.
You can find me on Twitter at uh, TKultzer.
Uh, you can email me at tomk@aweber.com.
Um, and you know, you can give, give AWeber a shot.
We have a freemium offering for up to 500 subscribers, so if you don't have a
subscribe form on your website, Put one.
It's a very minimum.
Yeah.
One, one going away tip here I'll have for everybody.
When someone subscribes to your email, if on your confirmation page after
someone hits, you know, enters their email address and hits, submit, the
page that comes up after that is often this barren wasteland of nothingness
is like, Hey, thanks for subscribing.
Put something for your audience to buy on there.
Yeah.
So like in your, you know, in your case Matt, you know, put something
about your e-commerce cohort on there.
Yeah.
So that people have an opportunity to see what else you're doing.
They're more, if they've just broken out their email address.
Their credit card is really only one step away from that.
Yeah.
Uh, and it's not that much farther away and we often see, you know, businesses
that didn't have something on that thank you page generating 10, 20, 30%
additional revenue just from that single page because it gets so much traffic and
because those users are so much higher engaged than other people on your website.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
Top tip.
I like that.
Uh, we will, I'll be checking with our marketing team now.
I'm gonna go and fill out some forms on our websites.
Ooh, I wonder what it tells me.
Um, Tom, thank you so much for coming onto the eCommerce podcast, man.
It's been great to meet you.
Great to hear your, uh, insight and thoughts.
And more than anything, if I'm honest, it's just lovely to hear your passion is
still there for, obviously, for email, uh, even after all of these years, and
that's actually something quite special.
So, um, thank you for coming and sharing it with us, uh, on the e-Commerce podcast.
Tom Kulzer: Likewise.
Thanks for having me, Matt.
It's been fun.
Matt Edmundson: Oh, no worries Matt.
No worries.
So let's play the music.
There we go..
Thanks again, uh, to Tom for joining me here on the podcast.
Uh, listen, if you signed up for our emails newsletter, one
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Winging its way to you as this podcast goes live, uh, is the transcripts
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If you don't have that, you can head over to ecommercepodcast.net.
You can read it, you can get all the notes, all of the links to Tom and to
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And of course, you can sign up for our emails newsletter, and I'm, let's
see what happens when you fill it in.
Absolutely.
Let's have a look at that.
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Be sure to follow the eCommerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from because
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And in case no one has told you yet today dear listener, you are awesome.
Yes, you are.
It's just a burden we all have to bear.
Uh, you, me, Tom, just the way it is.
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The team that makes this show possible is Sadaf Beynon, Josh Catchpole,
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So that's it from me and from Tom.
Thank you so much for joining us this week on the eCommerce podcast.
I'll see you next time.
Bye for now.