Episode 53: Tips To Update Your Email & SMS Playbook With Sendlane’s Jimmy Kim

James: What’s up everybody? We are in June, 2023, and this month’s sponsor of the Spamming Zero podcast is Zowie, getzowie. com. So what do they offer? They offer SMS, email and chat for your customer support. They actually have a few different products that I want to go into just quickly. But also in addition to all that, they’re an amazing advocate for AI and teaching people about AI. So they have an entire knowledge center that’s called the AI Knowledge Center. You can subscribe to that. And they provide a bunch of different material on many aspects of AI, not just related to the realm that they focus on. But here’s some of their products. The first one is Zowie Automate, Zowie Care, Zowie Grow, and Zowie X1. And I find it really fascinating because their grow product, for example, can turn every interaction that your agent has into a potential revenue stream. It’s one of the most difficult things that we can do is trying to turn those interactions without it seeming like we’re hard selling. Zowie helps you do that. The automation piece is pretty simple, just gets rid of the repetitive tasks. We talk a lot about that at Flip, as well. They do it on the email, SMS and chat. They also on their website, have a one- minute chatbot builder. So go play around with that. Again, getzowie. com. I’m James.

Brian: And I’m Brian.

James: And this is Spamming Zero. Welcome to the show everybody. I’m James, your host on Spamming Zero. Thank you for joining us for another week of an awesome episode. I am excited because we are joined by Jimmy Kim, who is the CEO of Sendlane. Y’all ready to talk about email and SMS? Welcome to the show, Jimmy.

Jimmy Kim: Thank you, James. Well, great name there and thank you for having me on the show.

James: Yeah, it’s been quite a wild ride, actually, since we started the show. When we very first came up with the idea, it was the concept of the experience that everyone hates the most, which is calling the phone. And everyone wants to push zero, so Spamming Zero. And it’s interesting is like email and SMS are now known as a little bit of a spam trap for people, and we’re going to get into some of those details. But before we get into the meat of the topic, I always like to start the show off so the audience can get to know Jimmy a little bit. So Jimmy, what’s the most unusual or unexpected source of inspiration?

Jimmy Kim: Most unexpected? God, that’s such a good one. Unusual, unexpected source of my inspiration. What inspires me? I don’t think it’s unusual, I think a lot of my drive comes from my want and desire to… I mean, it’s a competitive thing at the end of the day for me when I do things. Like everything that I talk about around… okay, I guess my inspiration always goes down to my parents. It’s really cliche, but no matter what I think about it, it always comes down to them. Because I’m a first generation immigrant, so that means I was not born here, I moved here at a young age. And to watch the things that my parents do, and struggle through, and live and exposed to. And to still have me, and I think I turned out to be a pretty decent person. I think they did an amazing job. And I think my inspiration from them is to be a great parent. And that’s the most cliche thing, I guess. But I don’t know what’s unusual. I mean, I’ve got an interesting drive. I mean, if I’m not doing this, I’m either playing poker, which is my other thing. If I wasn’t an entrepreneur, I would be a professional poker player. And that’s also, again, driven around competitiveness. And then the other thing I like to do is I build cars. I like old cars or older cars or different cars. Right now I’m building a 1995 Nissan Skyline that I imported from Japan, that I work in my garage. And my inspiration there, I always laugh, my CFO always tells me to go work on your cars so you can come up with business ideas. And I’m always like-

James: It’s so interesting, because my wife, she asked me this question the other day. We were in the car, she has been so bored lately when the kids are in school that she’s like, ” I think I’m going to go DoorDash just to get out of the house for a little bit.” And I was like, ” You know what? If what you want to do, go do it.” So I was actually out DoorDashing with her the other night and she asked me a question, she’s like, ” What’s a hobby that you wished you could do that you can’t do and you wish you could get into it?” And I was like, ” This is a good question.” And honestly, the one that came to my mind the quickest, first thing that came to my mind was building cars. Because my stepdad owned a restoration car business. He would bring home like 56 Chevs and I got to go on a stroll with them and really, really old school American cars. So it was just… but I didn’t really have a dad growing up, and so I didn’t get the education that was necessary to truly build on myself. All of my friends were incredibly good at it, so I have a ton of respect for people that do that.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, no cars is… I always laugh, I tell my friends that my car thing is my midlife crisis really starting to form right now. I went into my forties and started to… I bought this car and I’ve been working on, wrenching on it. And you know what the number one thing I’ll say is? When I was 16, I didn’t wake up in pain the next three days from the soreness and the hurting of everything I did. So anytime I work on my car, I can only do a day and then I need like three days to recover, and then I start again three days later, it’s hilarious. And I’m like, how did I do this when I was 16? And secondly, the bigger thing that I took back from myself was, man, I was stupid. You ever look back and go, man, I was stupid. I look at myself now and I’ve got jack stands and lifts and all this stuff. Back in the day, man, I used to use that cranky old jack on the back of your trunk and lifted up and go work under the car. And now I look at it and go, dude, I could have died. I could have died every time I was under there. So I think, yeah, there’s a lot of it actually, if you ask me that, it might be my quirky inspiration of life and realizing a lot of my past. Maybe it’s not really much about inspiration, but retrospective that it provides me. It makes me think about my life and think about… in my forties I’m like, oh, 16, I was over half my life ago. But I still remember little bits and pieces of it. But a lot of those learnings have helped me become the person I am today. So yeah, maybe.

James: And you say, man, I was stupid back then. But actually I don’t know if that’s the case. See, because nowadays, we have all these innovations that have happened with engineering and the mechanical stuff. So I mean, all we had was the little jack, Jimmy.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, I guess you’re right. I don’t know, I guess maybe as humans we weren’t as much. And you’re right, a hundred percent. I always joked to my friends, how come a three cylinder engine back 20 years ago, we couldn’t make more than 90 horsepower. But now there’s a Toyota Corolla that has 300 plus horsepower that’s three cylinder. I’m like, how does that happen? Innovation. Innovation.

James: It’s true. And we’re going to actually talk about the innovation when it comes to email, so let’s dive into this topic. Before we talk about email specifically, I’d love for you to just talk about some of the brands that you currently work with in eCommerce with Sendlane and one of them that’s doing some pretty innovative stuff.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, absolutely. We work with… so let me just frame who we work with, so you have an understanding. So our core market is a mid- market company. So, sometimes we’ll call them large SMB or small and medium enterprise. They do generally around about a million to about a hundred million dollars a year. And they’re a D2C brand on Shopify or BigCommerce. Those are our typical brands that we kind of host. And they come to us because they’re looking to unify their email and SMS. And part of our vision in the company is more than email and SMS. Our next product review is coming out, we’re working on reducing the stack. I know that this is a marketer thing, but I actually want to kill the stack. So our vision is to kill the stack in the market and a little bit different, a little bit unique. But that leads us to the brands that come to us. So the brands that do come to us often are ones that are kind of more innovative, early starters. We’re the new guys in town, we’re not the billion dollar company. We’re the startup that’s kind of fighting our way up. However, we have some great brands like that. So our brands are things like MicroPerfumes or Jordan Craig, which is a really cool streetwear clothing company, Milk Bar cookies. I don’t know, we have cool companies like Veriheal, which is a little bit different, but they’re medical marijuana licensing company, a large company of ours. Cool things like Bunker Branding to Walking Dead, 80s Tees. I don’t know, we’ve got so many brands. It’s actually very humbling as a owner, like this has happened to us over the last 12 months. So it’s been really weird for me to talk about our brands because I still so close to those brands, if that makes sense. I work with them, I talk to the owners, I got to know them. And now I feel like they’re my friends, basically. These are the people that are most important in my life right now in helping and making go forward. So we’ve got a lot of cool things, we got CPG products. One of the ones that I would probably talk about right now would be like VitaCup Coffee. That’s a perfect one to talk about. They’re D2C brand, series D, E, venture backed, they’re all over Amazon and they have a D2C store. So we talk a lot with them about strategy and things that we’re working on. And one of the things that they have, which is really interesting, they’ve got four main categorized products. They’re essentially started as a vitamin infused coffee for Keurigs. That’s how they started and that’s their main product. But what has happened is they’ve categorized themselves into four main things. They have this thing called genius, they have a thing called slim fit, they have a thing called their normal roast coffee, and then they have a low acidity coffee. And those are their top four sellers. But they also have about 60 other SKUs between coffees and teas and other things that they have, where it comes down to it. So when they came to me, they were kind of in a place where they couldn’t… they weren’t generating revenue, they were still making the names, people are opening the emails, but nothing was actually happening. And I turned to them, I said, CPG is a really tough place. Consumer product goods like fast purchase, understanding your life cycle, understand your intent and everything else. And I said, let’s focus here first. And this is what I’ve been… and I preached this in the market and I talk about this quite often around the fact that our playbooks that we’re all using in email, especially in eCommerce, are very outdated right now. And what I’m talking about is very simple. I look back flash five years ago and I’m like, okay, no, we’re doing the same thing. Let’s go back another five years, still the same thing. You almost go back 20, 25 years and you realize two things. 20 years ago, we did drip campaigns and newsletters. Today we call those targeted newsletters and automated flows. But honestly, nothing has actually changed except a little bit better technology. So that conversation we had earlier about the fact that the car evolved, we basically have the same three cylinder now going a hundred horsepower to 300 horsepower. But it didn’t actually change the base foundation or the thought. But then I turn over and I’m always going over and saying, let’s look at the acquisition space. What’s so weird about the acquisition space? They changed like this. Every day they’re innovating. Every day, they’re changing. Every day. that playbook. There was a guy talking on stage at this event that I was at early this year, and he was talking about Facebook and I was sitting there watching him go, this is the same strategy from 2016 that I’ve seen. But this doesn’t work in market because I know what works in market right now. Why is he talking about it? Because he’s a professional speaker and they don’t change their decks and this is what they do. And so I’m like, cool, that’s fine. Like that’s what you want to talk about. But one of the things that I noticed about it was, the playbook has evolved so much. But in email and SMS especially, I’ll pick on SMS in a second and we’ll talk about the strategy here. But it hasn’t evolved. And so I talk about a market often and if you follow me on social anywhere, I talk about this everywhere. But I believe that evolution needs to start happening and the evolution starts with this. Let’s look at acquisition. What works really well? One, we prospect, we run the top of the layer, we run campaigns to get people interested in our product. Then when they give us, what? The click, the intent, then we start doing what? We retarget those people and we drive them down the sale and put them in blockers so they can’t see anything else and focused them on selling it. You’ve gone to a website, you get follow around the internet for the next seven days. That’s all you can see and if you really wanted to buy it, you might click and end up buying it. Especially if it’s enticing or the messaging is right. So I said, why can’t we apply a similar strategy into email? So before I can go out and spout it, I had to go work with people to make sure that this really works. Understands that the idea and the evolution of that strategy is working. And so the strategy is very simple. Think about your newsletter or your campaigns, it doesn’t matter if it’s email or SMS, think of them as top of the funnel. This is your net, you’ve built your target audience, you’ve built your messaging for that audience, and now you’re throwing your net out. They’re going to open, they’re going to click, or they’re going to ignore you or it’s going to go to spam. One of those four things happens. Obviously, all those things have different meanings behind him, and I’m not going to dive into that. But the only thing that I dive into is to click. Because to me, the click is the only reason that you should be saying that it’s working. Otherwise, all the other stuff, you can’t just open an email, that’s like saying a billboard influenced the sale. Sure, but it didn’t actually make the sale.

James: Well, and deliverability tools actually will show an open, even if it’s really not somebody actually opening it.

Jimmy Kim: Correct, with mail privacy and everything. Yeah, a mess. Opens are a flawed concept, it’s just a vanity number because it’s way easier to increase your open rate from 15% to 18%, than it is to get your click through rate from 1.1 to 1. 3, and it sure doesn’t look so good. But the reality is that little movement was way better of a movement than the actual open rate. Because they don’t click, they don’t buy.

James: 100%.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, so basically the idea is very simple. You throw it out in the net, and then based on the click and intent and the behavior, the contextual data that is being provided by the user saying that I want to learn more about a very specific thing on that email and the copy, we’re going to put them into an automated flow. And then we’re going to put the blinders on, just like we do. We’re going to exclude them from our campaigns, and we’re going to take them down. So I’ll give you a real life example. Okay, we’ll give two examples. I’ll give you two easy examples. The first example is simple, I’m walking down the street, and this is probably a typical story. I’ve got my phone out, of course, like everybody else, and I get a text. Oh, it’s my favorite shoe brand. They’re having sales on men’s shoes right now, I better click on it. Well, as I’m clicking on it, I’m walking to dinner and my wife starts yelling at me because that’s what happens to us because we’re entrepreneurs and that’s what happens.

James: Then it’s lost.

Jimmy Kim: And I forget about it. But I wanted to buy it. And then imagine just three hours later, an email pops up automatically in your inbox it says, ” Hey, don’t forget about those shoes.” That doesn’t happen today, just so you’re clear. Okay, most brands don’t do this. Simple. Now let’s think of bigger evolution of that thought process. I get an email of that 20% off coupon or men’s shoes, women’s shoes, everything’s on sale, click on one. A typical email says 20% off men’s, woman’s, kids, whatever. I click on men’s. Well, why do I, the next campaign I received from the company about their woman’s shoe sale that’s happening two days later and they forgot about the fact that I just clicked and didn’t buy that first time because I probably got distracted most likely. So instead, take them down, exclude them, pull them out like you would in a prospecting campaign, put the click action into an automated sequence. That automated flow is a very hyper- focused, categorized sequence that you can categorize exactly the products that they are most interested in. You said you are into men’s shoes. I’m going to only show you men’s shoes, I’m going to give you a coupon for men’s shoes only. And I’m going to push you down that funnel for the next seven days and basically retarget you for the next days on men’s shoes. And send you SMS and all that good stuff. Think about that experience. As a person on the other end, it only makes sense because if I’m clicking on an email on men’s shoes, that’s what I like in your brand. A lot of us, we go crazy on SKUs. And there’s too many SKUs going on, so you don’t know what the categories of all your customers are. But categorizing your customers, then you next naturally know, hey, the next time I prospect this user, this is what they look like. And if I’m going to do a woman’s one, I should exclude the people that are only interested in men ones. They’ve never shown intent of the user. So we’re using all these data points. The data that exists today, to be able to go and actually do something with it more and more meaningful. And then don’t get me started like on SMS, we’ve got a bigger problem in SMS. I’ll tell you why, ready? About seven years ago, we all decided that email was broken and we need to use segmentation, we need to do list hygiene, we need to be using the data to do something. But somewhere along the line, they brought SMS out and made it a batch and blast tool. Well, the reality is, yeah, it works, I’m sure, and I know the data supports it, and I know maybe I’m not the core demographic that is always involved in what SMS marketing really would be. But the reality is, we already have the tools, we already know the playbook. We already saw it in email, but we don’t start applying it in SMS.

James: That’s true.

Jimmy Kim: It’s crazy, right? It’s like we just saw this happen, we just saw how to evolve it. We’re humans, aren’t we supposed to evolve from the last learning, not from going back to 10, 20 years ago and doing the things 20 years ago? And you know what inherently I’ve learned is this is going to be biased, but as I learned the software market, a lot of things that are driven around what marketers are doing these days sometimes are software driven. What I mean by that is people in the software companies are telling them what to do. But the thing is, they’ve never opened a store and they don’t even know how to do email. They just built the software because smart product people from Harvard did their research and believed that this is what you should do. When I think about the strategy, and I go back to VitaCup. So what do we do with VitaCup? Well, they weren’t getting any revenue, nothing was happening, things weren’t working. So we re- architectured everything. And the idea was, let’s start thinking about things like top of the funnel. We know that an average CPG consumer, first seven days, you don’t want to bother them, they got to get their product inaudible. But within 30 days, they should be re- buying, 60 days they should be buying their second order. And then by the 90 days, if you can’t get them on a subscription or get them hooked, they’re probably going to go away. We already know those data points. So what’s their number one? We need to get them subscription, obviously. So we need to make sure that subscriptions, anytime they click on subscriptions, man, for the next 14 days, the only thing you’re going to get is notices on subscriptions. If you click on coffee, then we’re going to continue to show you all the different coffees that are available. But if you click on tea, we’re not going to show you any coffee, we’re going to only show you tea. You see what we started changing there? So it’s creating an experience for the user, a true personalized experience. But not based on did they buy? Did they not buy? How much did they spend? But we’re using, what are they interested in wanting to learn more about? What are they interested in wanting to buy? That’s like the real change in the mentality there. And that’s where I preach a lot in the market about exactly just that. That the evolution of the playbook is happening right now. And the way you have to start thinking about how email and SMS works is that it’s no longer about, I send a newsletter to make money because it’s Friday. It’s, I’m prospecting to get my funnel filled so I can generate revenue over a long tail over the next 30 days, not a single hit, but a multiple hit. Anything you do on the data, it shows. If you do it once and you hit the retargeting and you’ve got all these different people, you’re going to double your revenue with that campaign if you know, understand and how to take them down that journey. Yeah, man, that’s long- winded, but kind of giving you the big story of how this all came together.

James: I love it. Because it actually relates directly back to your guys’ name, keeping people in a lane and you’re doing nurturing sends that take them down the path. What’s interesting is like there’s so many businesses out there, even outside… I would say outside of eCommerce, especially, that have to make cuts. And I was in this CMO chat the other day and they were talking about where they’re focused and where their spend is being cut and things like that. And one of the first areas that people were talking about was they don’t know what they’re going to do because their paid media is being cut to almost nothing. Which is where, typically, a lot of marketers think about doing retargeting is in paid media. Well, we took a little bit of a different approach here at Flip. We doubled down on a few different channels and we found that email is still incredibly effective. So the last two or three months, we’ve doubled down in that channel for email. And it’s funny that you’re talking about building these specific nurture paths because that’s exactly what we have found to be effective at Flip.

Jimmy Kim: Yes.

James: It’s totally different and it’s not really spammy. When I get those coupon offers and the 15% off and 20% off all the time and SMS and email. And to be honest with you, it happens so often that it’s not valuable, like most of them get ignored. And that’s just the truth for all eCommerce brands. That’s something to really think about. How are you going to bring the message that’s going to be a little bit different than what the rest of the world is trying to do? And you got to think about it out of the box done differently. I love your examples that you gave because I think that they are… you’re right, there’s not a lot of brands that are doing it. I’m curious, like the other day you did a LinkedIn post and I found it to be really, really valuable. You talked about some of the common challenges that you’ve seen. One being the lack of understanding of your audience, two being a poor CTA, three being a lack of interest in your product, and four, it landed in spam. Those were kind of the four things you mentioned. I’d love for you to talk about maybe each one of these and hit on like how brands can tackle all four of these challenges in a little bit of a micro view.

Jimmy Kim: Sure, absolutely. All right, you’re going to have to remind me what I said there. So the first one was, what? We’ll go one by one.

James: Lack of understanding of your audience.

Jimmy Kim: Okay. That one is purely this. Okay, so when we talk about audience, it’s really interesting. Again, I’m going to go back and I’m going to pick on the marketer. I’m sorry marketers, I’m not here to pick on you, but the reality is I’m going to pick on you because I’m a marketer and I believe that I understand enough that I’m willing to do this. I’ve been an email marketer for 14 years. So again, we went weird is what I say. We took a weird pivot somewhere. Somewhere along the way, and this is what I see again with brands I’m repeating on over and over again. Somewhere along the way, we forgot to use the actual data that we have on the user and the actual thing that they did, like a purchase or a behavior. And we kind of lumped them all together into something we call it an engaged audience. But why? Why are you treating your prospects the same way you’re treating your customers, the way you’re treating your third customer? Which is your repeat customer or your subscriber. But you’re treating them the same, with the same message, with the same audience in the same thing. So of course, it’s not going to resonate when you’re trying to be broad with three different sectors. So when I talk about your audiences, your audience is not targeted. A buyer wants to feel like they’ve given you money and they want to feel that you know they’ve given them money, and that you want them to buy again. It’s a different ask. Or a VIP customer, dude, they’re already loyal to you, they’re buying already, they’re subscribed. Give them something special. And a prospect, and this is what I told a client just the other day while I was working with her. I said, guys, let’s step on the gas on these prospects. You got time to buy or get out. Don’t waste your time keeping these people on this engage list. Unfortunately, most of them, probably bots or people who have devices or mail privacy firing off and protecting them from ever getting removed. But we’re wasting time sending people messages. So of course, it’s hard to measure your impact, and you’re saying you see your CTR in revenue as the two impact points. But a lot of times it’s really hard to measure that because your CTR is based around the volume that you sent. But if you’ve got the wrong audience there and the wrong messaging there, well then it all kind of ties in together. So that’s what I meant by around audience selection. What was the second one? Let’s go down the second one.

James: Second one is a poor CTA.

Jimmy Kim: Oh, well that’s just easy. Above the fold, show it off. One CTA, stop showing them 40 things, they don’t care about those 40 things. Focus on, if you look at someone like McDonald’s, they show the Big Mac everywhere. But did you know the Big Mac’s one of the lower selling products? It’s just their frontline, it’s their brand image. There’s a reason for that. CTA I get it, I know we have a thousand SKUs, I know we have 5, 000 SKUs. But you don’t need to show your customer 5, 000 options. As humans, we can barely select when you have two options. Give them one option, it’s to click on one thing and one notion, and get it in front of their faces as early as possible.

James: It’s true. And the best example that I think about when it comes to this is, if you have kids, take your kids to a gas station and have them pick out their favorite candy bar. See how long it takes.

Jimmy Kim: 30 minutes later. Well, well. Yeah, I get it. Exactly.

James: Yeah, exactly. So, I love that. And then the third one is, lack of interest in your product or service.

Jimmy Kim: Oh, dude, this is a core easy one. What’s interesting about people is people think… and this is, again, I’m going to pick on a marketer. We marketers sometimes don’t go and look at our data enough and we just simply assume that people like this particular product or this particular service, it kind of goes back to knowing your audience a little bit. And we just assume and we hammer on it because we think it’s the thing. But sometimes you learn in your data often that people don’t like it. I was working at this brand, it’s called Braxley Bands, it’s really cool. I’m actually wearing one right here because I buy things from my customers. This thing right here is a band, it’s the most comfortable band in the world. And I don’t know what I did with my Apple Watch before that with the standard band. So I was working with them and I said, guys, why are we… what’s going on here? Let’s go ahead and tag every one of those links anywhere on your page and let’s go start observing your email. What I learned was really simple. Everyone clicked on UGC, like what other people were doing and how they felt about the product. They didn’t care about the fact that they’re in sale, they didn’t care about the fact that they had this color and that color, and this unique pattern, this unique. Everyone clicked on the UGC. So I said, our next email, we’re going to focus on how to put it on, how to use it, how it feels. And then we’re going to work on the next message around what do other people say about your product? And let’s focus on that. And every time we notice more and more, and I keep seeing it as we’re still tracking it, like people click on the UGC and that’s what they want. They’re don’t need to be sold on the actual quality of product, they believe you. They just want to know how to use it and why it’s so great for them. You’re selling the why. And that’s really… I mean, that’s marketing 101. You sell the why, you don’t sell the product. And I think that where you learn at a lot of times is, that’s what I’m saying, you’re trying to sell the wrong product or service when you should be selling the why around what you’re thinking about and why they should be purchasing it, and giving them the reason. And they are already telling you, your audience is telling you what they want the why to be. Just listen to them.

James: We have an example that happened to us at Flip just the other day. We reached out, it was kind of a cold reach out to a brand that looked really, really good on paper for us to help. And we got a really kind response back, which is like, ” Hey, thanks for reaching out, but unfortunately we’ll never implement automation on our phone.” And I was like, okay, cool. Do you mind telling me a little bit of why? And she’s like, ” Well, actually, yeah, I don’t mind telling you at all. The owner and the president of our company has made a promise to all of our customers that they will never get automation.” And I thought that was a pretty cool promise. It’s a hard thing to follow through with, but I was like, okay, cool. What’s that been like for you? And she’s like, ” It’s been hard to tackle, but it’s been very interesting because you will always get a human being no matter what. There’s no IVR, there’s nothing. It’s just a human being.” And they’re not this huge, huge brand, by any means. But it was interesting because we get that stuff all the time, and you just have to realize that everybody you may be targeting is not going to be interested-

Jimmy Kim: 100%.

James: And that’s okay and you have to be okay with that. All right, so your fourth one, was it landed in spam or false open rates and we kind of inaudible-

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, so this goes down to your data points. People are using the wrong data points often to build their list, the mail privacy side of things. And then of course, the spam side is like you might have a deeper problem. So it’s two things, you may be using the wrong data right now because you’re using the wrong segmentation based around mail privacy. Or you aren’t actually ending up in inbox right now and you’re focusing your CTR on something when there’s a very sliver of your inbox getting actually happened. So we talk about that often because most of the time, I see deliverability challenge being your number one problem is let’s just say… and Gmail is one of the tougher ones these days, which is funny. 10 years ago, Gmail was the easiest one. But now Gmail is one of the tougher algorithms to play in spam boxes and stuff like that. But most people have a high level of Gmail users with them. And Gmail consumers, just like Apple consumers spend more money. Gmail consumers spend more money than a Yahoo, six X more. Gmail six X inaudible Yahoo. So they’re doing great in Yahoo, they’re doing great in AOL, they’re doing great everywhere, but they’re Gmail is not so great. And sometimes your CTR problem’s not the fact that you just have a bad email, it’s the fact that you’re just not ending up in an inbox. So you need to work on that. And obviously, depending on who you’re working on, they need to help you or you got to go find some experts to help you do that. But yeah, that’s generally something that we see quite often.

James: What’s your advice for people that are ending up in spam? What’s your suggestion?

Jimmy Kim: That’s a lot. I don’t want to go into it all, but I will say that on LinkedIn or Twitter, I do talk about this quite often. Because I personally have learned everything and anything about deliverability. I’m still a student of the game, but I really know a lot about it. And really it comes down to 10 simple things that I always kind of preach about often, but off the top of my head, I’ll just kind of talk about them. It starts with the simplicity of your domain and setup. Just have your SPF, DKM, DMARC, all your necessary things set up. A lot of people don’t even have that set up often correctly. The second thing is your content and your links, those are things that you always have to think about. Where is it? Is your content spammy? Is your links going out to some third party? Here’s a perfect one, with TikTok coming up. The TikTok ban basically happening is state to state government officials. You realize that anytime you send an email with a TikTok link to a government official who now has a blocked one, your email goes to spam no matter what. People don’t think about that. Little things like that cause these things. So links. The third thing I talk about is always the image ratio to emails. I net it. We all want pretty, pretty branded, perfect font emails, perfect looking emails. But you got to play with the machines. The machines are the ones that are reading your emails. When you send them a bunch of images, they don’t read those images anywhere close as they’re going to read your written texts. So having a inaudible-

James: Plain text actually performs… I think there’s a lot of data behind this. Plain text usually performs better.

Jimmy Kim: Plain text always performs great. It’s industrial like 10 years, 15 years they do. The problem is you can’t have a good brand with a plain text email. So you got to find that branding line. And unfortunately, branding is very important, so it creates that weird problem there. So there’s that. What else? Overuse of emojis is one I’ve see quite often. This is what I tell people, just like an SMS or email. Emojis aren’t what you think it looks like just because a human eye see a little smiley face. What do you think a computer sees? They see this crazy little string of punctuation and language. And I get it, the world sees emojis and they like emojis. But an overuse of it often is what ends you up in spam quite often. I actually see this with a brand Fashion Nova, and I don’t have them as a company or anything. But I see them in my inbox all the time because I think it’s always good to follow some of the top brands. And they’re always in my spam box because they’ve got freaking 16 stoplight signs and whatever on their subject line or whatever it is. So emojis are definitely one that impacts you. What else impacts you? There’s a lot of other ones I talk about. I’m blanking right now. But let me give one more good one here. So you’re doing all that. And then I guess the last one, really, the most important one is it goes back to data. I get it, we worked hard over the last 10 years to build this huge list. But people from nine years ago, sending those emails are detrimental to your deliverability. And sometimes people don’t think that, oh, I’m going to hit my zombie list or my old age list and I’m going to sprinkle a little bit in. Well, let me tell you what happens to emails. Okay, I’m going to give you a quick learning with here. Emails have evolved over time. But as emails die, and what I mean by die is people are inactive, they just never log back in. They don’t kill these emails. These companies, they actually take those emails and they make them spam traps. And what spam traps are there for is very simple. No problem if you’re a regular sender to this email, you’re sending every couple days, every couple months, whatever it is, and your a normal pass. But when you pop up in their inbox with a different email or a different sender name suddenly, and these things are assigned to spam traps, it’s going to alert the ISP. So in this case, I say Yahoo for example, it’s going to alert Yahoo, this email just popped up, this is spam because we’ve never opted in. This inbox has been dormant for five years and this is the first time we’ve ever seen that. That’s how spam boxes start and they’re all over the place. And then you have the second layer of it. There’s all these expired email address companies out there, SBC Global, Hotmail. com. These five, 10 year old brands that you can still have the email for, but you can’t sign up for a new one. Well, those emails are inherently the scariest emails that are out there, but if you hit one of those wrong, you’re going to end up on a blacklist somewhere because they’re going to flag you because there’s a ton of spam traps there because that’s what people do. And then ultimately, ends you up in a bad place too. So there’s a lot of that data. It always goes back to data at the end of the day, but data is one that will come into play quite often, especially these days. Purchase lists, intent driven lists. There’s a lot of different lists that can cause you a lot of problems. And nothing wrong with any of this stuff, as I say, like buying lists or any of this stuff. But know what you’re doing if you’re going to do that. Too often people do it and then they just screw up everything. And so it’s a fine line, definitely a fine line.

James: Yeah, it really is. At the very beginning of the episode, you had mentioned getting rid of the tech stack or getting rid of the stack. Talk to our listeners and me a little bit about how that message has been resonating.

Jimmy Kim: Oh yeah. So when I started this company, it was never just to be an email provider or SMS provider. It’s just what I knew and what I wanted to start with. But the number one pain point I had as a merchant, I was a Shopify owner, retail store owner, all that stuff in my 2010s, I guess if we’re using some aging right now. And what’s that called, again? I hated the stack. I hated the amount of tools that I have detached to my Shopify store to operate my business, especially in marketing. So my vision when I started this company, and it is full- fledged ahead right now, is unification of the stack, the elimination of the stack. But I don’t say that we should just be eliminating the stack, we should also be giving you more tech. And what I mean by that is because we’re unifying it, we have better data, better things that we can do, that we can do better. So our next product coming out is our product reviews product. We all know Yotpo, Kendo reviews, there’s all these product reviews companies. Great, well, why can’t I do some of the cool things that I’m already doing? Well, I’m about to bring in this product and I can do things like an instant product block, that’s a dynamic product block for reviews that were collected based around the segment of category that you select. Or even deeper, the second level deepness would be dynamic product blocks for your abandoned cart. They left a product, why wouldn’t it be cool if I could just attach those reviews to that exact product at Five Star right there, so that you have social proof built behind it. And then the third thing is, now that I’ve got these reviews, why can’t I click a button and make it an MMS? Why can’t I make a review in MMS real quick? And make an MMS attached to my next message. It’s already there, why do I have to go put all this energy and effort to make and resize it and make it all pretty, when I could just click a button and make it show up? So thinking like that. We think about the future of all other things. We think about pop- ups and customer service and loyalty and all these things that people are using. They’re inherently, the number one thing I say about them is, they’re all owned marketing pieces. These are the things that you inherently own. You can go from platform to platform, the data’s yours. But you need a good tool to facilitate it. Why wouldn’t you want all your data on one platform? Why wouldn’t you want to operate your entire business in one platform? And that’s really where I started to go, let’s focus on that. Let’s focus on building that vision. And so we’ve been building that vision and now in golf three of the platforms, four here soon, and then five by the end of the year. So we’re moving fast, we’ve been working on this for a while undercover. And as we come into market now and we start releasing, I think it’s going to be really exciting.

James: Do you guys just handle the growth side? Or do you also do the support side?

Jimmy Kim: We don’t do the agency kind of work, we won’t do the actual work. But we’re known in the market for amazing customer support. We are your partner and we’re going to be a supportive and helpful as we can be, beyond just helping you with your billing questions and stuff like that. But actually giving you QBR’s and giving you detail what you see. And also making suggestions and sharing different things that we might see. Because, well, when you see a lot of cool brands, and they all do the same thing similarly, you can really just learn things from them strategically. You don’t have to throw anyone under the bus or share anything, but you know what’s working. So if you go back to another customer and say, ” Hey, this is working within this industry, take a look at this. Try it, might not hurt.” So that’s kind of how we work. But yeah, we don’t do the agency side, we leave that to our partners. However, we are more focused on just making sure we’re doing good job with our brands.

James: Love it. All right, Jimmy, so we’re close to the end, but I always got to ask this last question. What is the most memorable experience that you can remember, that you’ve had with a brand in your lifetime?

Jimmy Kim: So one of my favorite things that I relate some of my business history was, the first time I met Zappos way back in the day. And let me tell you the experience that I had with Zappos. I called them about a pair of shoes that I really wanted. I can’t remember, they were some Stan Smiths like Adidas or something, this is a decade ago. And I called them and I’m like, I need size 10 and a half. And they’re like, ” Sorry, we don’t have size 10 and a half in stock.” I was like, ” Oh crap, I really wanted those shoes.” He go, ” Well, hold on.” I heard him typing, ” Hey, if you just go to Macys. com, they’ve got them over there in stock.” And I walked away and I said, ” What?” I went and bought them, of course from Macy’s. But you know what I did after that? I always went to Zappos to look at my shoes next, regardless. And I still do to this day. Because that’s service, man, that’s taking it on and beyond. And so Tony Hsieh had a book, and I know he passed away and it’s been sad to hear that. But Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, he talks about a lot of this stuff and what he put the company in the mantra. And I actually take that playbook and I kind of reapply it within my business here and every one of my businesses. Because I realized that is the edge that any business can take to the nth degree of being supportive. And that word of mouth, me talking about this right now from a decade ago, experienced a decade ago, and one of my favorite stories. That’s true advocacy, that’s true word of mouth that’s happening. And that’s really it. And I don’t know if that’s how they operate today, I’ve never called them again since then. But I just do the online chat and they just usually help me out. But yeah, that’s probably my most memorable brand story. And this is back before Zappos was this trillion dollar conglomerate thing. I’m talking about way back in the heyday when 2010, 2011, when they were just kind of getting their shoe in and becoming eCommerce and buying shoes online. That was due, right? That was very new back then.

James: I love that example because you’re right, it’s very rare that you hear people going the extra level. A lot of people would’ve ended the conversation with, ” Sorry, we don’t have it in stock.” And that would be the end of it. So love that.

Jimmy Kim: And I would’ve been satisfied with that answer. Because they went beyond inaudible.

James: Yeah, because like what are going to do, right?

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I would’ve gone back on the internet, but back then, it wasn’t easy to go Google shopping and go find your stuff. You had to really dig to find your stuff back then in 2010.

James: So, Jimmy, where can people learn a little bit more about you and Sendlane?

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, obviously on our website, you can find us at Sendlane. com. Where I live socially is two places, I’m very active on Twitter, it’s YoJimmyKim, and then of course via LinkedIn, as well. That’s just Jimmy Kim because I can’t put the Yo there. So I’m just on LinkedIn there. But I do message, I post strategical things, I interact, I talk. And the biggest thing I always tell people, my DMs are always open. I always do respond to everyone, even if you’re cold emailing and pitching me, I at least tell you no. So I like it and I believe that, I hope that people do it for me, so I do it the other way. And hopefully this doesn’t create a bunch of spam for me. But yeah, I get hit up all the time and I talk to them, I help them, I help whatever I can. And it doesn’t have to be about Sendlane, it’s about eCommerce, I’m here for the industry, I’m here for the market, and I’m here as a marketer. And so a lot of this side of me is like, I want to help the market, but it just makes it better. And to your point, you help them later down the road, that will reciprocate for me one day. So I’m okay with that. So that’s where you find me.

James: It’s true, he really is a good follow. Just FYI, I want everyone to know that.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, I don’t pitch stuff. I really don’t pitch on my stuff, never. I don’t like pitching, I’m just here for value, man.

James: Love it. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us. If you have not yet subscribe to the podcast, please do so. We’d love to hear from you, as well. So if you have somebody that you want to have on the show that we haven’t heard from yet, like Liquid Death, I’ve been trying to get them for a while. Come on Liquid Death, answer my DMs. Let’s go here. We want to get you on the show. Let me know if there’s somebody that you want to hear from and we’d love to have you. Join us next week and we’ll have another episode. Thanks again. Bye.

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