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How to personalize your email campaigns with Randy Levy
- Now is the time to regroup, have a hard reset on everything, question everything and learn as much as you can.
- Personalizing your email campaigns is primarily data-driven because data’s the name of the game.
- I look at design as a competitive advantage. The folks who design well are beating the competition.
- At the end of the day, with email marketing, it’s a test, test, test to see where you could generate more return on investment.
- In an email, you’re not competing with your competition, you’re competing with the millions and millions of emails that are sent out every minute. You’ve got to differentiate.
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SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
To increase retention and click-through rates for your email campaigns, especially if you have email deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience.
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Doug Morneau: Well, welcome back, listeners, on the episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. My guest joining me in studio today is Randy Levy. He is the Chief Revenue Officer for a disruptive one-to-one data-driven email marketing technology that specializes in real-time email technology. Zembula offers a suite of email tools that help drive improved performance in email, and they do this by delivering both interactivity and advanced real-time personalization. I connected with Randy through the Only Influencers group, that’s a private group of email marketers around the world.
Doug Morneau: Randy, like myself, has been in the email space for quite a while. He began his career at DoubleClick, and for the past 20 years, he’s worked with leading brands, including but not limited to companies like Amazon, Macy’s, Barnes & Noble’s, Jones New York, Uber, Coles, TGX, Priceline, Lowe’s and Western Union. It was great to connect with Randy. I had a call with him a few weeks ago to just discuss the tool and the platform that they were working with, and it was interesting to find out that he’d worked with another company years ago, I think 10 years ago, I worked with called EmailLabs.
Doug Morneau: We’ve both been in this space for a while, it’s like our paths have crossed a few times. We had a great conversation around email and some of the new innovative tools they got. I think you’re really going to enjoy this episode. I’d like to welcome Randy to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Well, hey Randy, I’m super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast. Welcome to the show today.
Randy Levy: Thank you, Doug. Appreciate it.
Doug Morneau: We’re connected through the Only Influencers group, both have experience in email, is great to have a discussion with you off-air, but EmailLabs is a throwback for me for sure when I started using an ESP or a bigger version to send emails. Do you want to share with our audience just a little bit of background on what you’re doing and how you’re serving your clients today?
Randy Levy: Yeah, of course. A little bit of background on me. I’ve been on email for 20 years. First 10 years I was working basically for the ESP space, including EmailLabs, as you mentioned. Those ESPs, obviously, their function is slicing and dicing email at the point of send. Zembula, my current endeavor, I’ve been here a little over a year. We basically empower companies to slice and dice and improve their email performance at the point of open. Primarily data-driven because data’s the name of the game, be it big or small, and we’re basically creating a ton of efficiencies for the email marketers because the biggest challenge in email, at least in the last 20 years, is there aren’t these huge teams running these email programs for most brands. Not all of them, but for the most part, they’re short-staffed.
Randy Levy: 20 years ago, believe it or not, very similar to what it is today. You could probably do a lot of the things that we can do now, but it might take six months to do it as opposed to 15 minutes to set it up today.
Doug Morneau: Yeah, I love how technology’s advanced to the point that, like you said, you’ve got a VP of marketing or somebody working in a company, and emails are one of the things that sits on the corner of their desk along with everything else they’re trying to do. And the idea of having to have a programmer to try to accustom, write code and build a database, and be able to serve images was a difficult task at best when most people couldn’t get the personalization of just putting somebody’s name in the email.
Randy Levy: Right, exactly. That’s what people think personalization is, but yeah, not so much.
Doug Morneau: Why don’t you share with us. I mean this is your expertise. Tell our audience what email personalization looks like if it’s done correctly.
Randy Levy: Yeah. I mean, there was a ton of angles in terms of what personalization can do. I’ll just quote a recent Gartner report, which basically says by 2025, pretty much 80% of the brands out there will abandon personalization, which I find intriguing. But at the end of the day, I feel like the 20% that doesn’t, if that’s really true, will really dominate.
But to answer your question, I mean, I look at design as a competitive advantage. I spent five years in the competitive intelligence space and I got to tell you, the folks who design well are beating the competition. This real-time personalization that Zembula is now offering really empowers the brand to dynamically adjust any point, any creative that they wish based upon all the data they have.
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SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
To increase retention and click-through rates for your email campaigns, especially if you have email deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience.
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Randy Levy: And a lot of folks are siloed, a lot of folks are not. A lot of folks are really looking for attribution for their own department. But the more advanced brands are like, “Let’s all work together. Let’s create one extraordinary customer experience, be it in email or SMS, or push you name it.” Even though we’re complimenting mostly the email space, you really want all your channels to mimic one another. I think the two biggest components that I’m seeing the greatest interest in today, one we call real-time shipping. Who’s the last brand that you ordered online?
Doug Morneau: Amazon.
Randy Levy: Amazon. Okay. All right. Amazon is a little different, but typically when we order anything online, we’ll get that order confirmation email, and it’ll give you the tracking code, and then it’s like figure it out. And yeah-
Doug Morneau: Yeah, that we go to the UPS site and I’m trying to find my thing, and I don’t understand, it’s now the orders have been boxed and now it’s sitting someplace, and I’ve tried to follow it around the country, but each time I’m forced to go back to my email or log back into UPS or whoever I’m using, whoever their shipper is, they want me to set up an account. And all I really want to know is, is my order on its way and where is it?
Randy Levy: Yeah. And that’s what we’re setting out to solve. And that’s really the most… I would say, one of the most intriguing aspects of our cloud form today under the… even under the current climate of everything that’s going on. Because at the end of the day, I’m like you, I just want to know where my stuff is. What we do is we’ll basically enhance that order confirmation where every time you open up that email, it’ll tell you exactly where your package is.
Doug Morneau: To the same email. You’re saying just so our listeners to understand. We order a product or service from… do you want to share one of your clients is using this or not?
Randy Levy: Yeah, let’s say, American Meadows.
Doug Morneau: Okay. From American Meadows, I get my emails saying, “Hey Doug, great, your order’s been received. It’s on its way.” And then I open it and that’s great. And then tomorrow I go back in and I log into that email, and you’re saying the information within that same email is going to have changed.
Randy Levy: Exactly. It might say, “It’s boxed, it’s shipped, it’s on its way or it’s delivered.” Now on top of that, that email in terms of open rates, you remember open rates back… I mean, you know it today, but back in the day, I mean, those order confirmation emails get a ridiculous amount of opens.
Doug Morneau: Sure they do, yeah.
Randy Levy: Let’s continue to enrich that experience. The more advanced brands, what they’re doing is they might throw in product recommendations underneath for the opportunity to obviously enhance sales. They could put those product recommendations based upon behaviors on the website.
Do you know how those ads follow you when you’re looking at the product? It’s the same kind of thing in email. And the thing is all the brands have the data, the challenges in the past, it would take three to six months to implement something this simple. Whereas with us, I mean our clients, it could take days, but at the end of the day, QA-ing and testing and just making sure it’s extraordinary from the start, you’re talking 5, 10 business days to set it up.
Doug Morneau: Walk us through for our audience so they get a clear picture of what this looks like, what are some of the other options? We’ve got a business and maybe it’s whether it’s online or offline, we’ve got some data from our customers, I guess it’s going to have to be online. We know who they are, where they live, what they’ve purchased in the past. We can see what offers we’ve sent out, which ones they’ve responded to. We might be able to see what pages they visited on our website, depending on what we’re you using, how deep we’re using our analytics. What are the sorts of data points would they typically collect and have?
Randy Levy: All these companies have invested millions of dollars in their tech stack. They’re getting data all over the place from all these disparate systems. And the way that Zembula built this real-time technology and email, is we want to make all of those investments like a merge tag within the ESP. Depending upon which ESPs you’ve used in the past, certainly, we’re going to be agnostic. It doesn’t matter what GSP you use. We want to make your loyalty platform a merge tag where you can pipe in loyalty points into that order confirmation email. Or maybe if I’m a few seconds away or a few points away from some threshold where I earned something, why not include that within a regular email or a notification on the top. “Hey, you’re 14 points away from a free gift from us.”
Randy Levy: Again, when you think of the ESP, you’re in there and you’re slicing and dicing, and we talked about that first name personalization where you’ll build drag and drop percent, percent F name, percent, percent. That’s not necessarily how every ESP uses the merge tag in terms of that definition. But yeah, we want the brand to not even have to talk to us if they don’t want to. We want to empower them to be able to say, “All right, I want to put points in here, I want to put product recommendations in this particular email.” And then just really just dragging and dropping the WYSIWYG editor. And then yeah, those are just some of the angles that you could do. You could also put in like live pricing or inventory.
Randy Levy: If you’ve ever gotten any airlines emails, you’ll see some of them, they’ll just scrape it off of the website where the pricing will be the exact same as the email, because nobody wants their call centers to be bombarded with, “Oh, it costs this on the website and this and email, like what’s going on?” And the same thing back to the real-time order tracking angle. We’re not just creating a better customer experience, we’re actually reducing the amount of Winslow calls, where’s my order calls into their call centers. A lot of brands from that perspective, forget about the revenue, forget about the upsell, they just want to create an extraordinary customer experience. That’s one way to do it.
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SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
To increase retention and click-through rates for your email campaigns, especially if you have email deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience.
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Doug Morneau: Yeah, totally makes sense. I mean, I remember early on using variable data, so we could insert images into the email based on where our subscriber lived. That was our attempts to get past, just insert the first name here, it was a search to recognize, “Hey, where are people? If we’re going to put an image in, that’s going to be a city, a city image for a business event and you live in Chicago while we should have a Chicago shot, not a shot of New York or Vancouver, or someplace else.”
Randy Levy: Yep. Yeah. And that can be easily done too. And again, if you’re using your vendor, your ESP, so to speak, you probably have most of that data. In some cases, maybe you don’t. What you could also do with our technology, is based upon where they open up the email, you can swap out the images. Like that example you shared, is if right now, I’m in Florida, if I’m in Chicago tomorrow, that entire email can adjust based upon where I am at that moment. Pretty powerful stuff.
Doug Morneau: In terms of features and what your clients use, utilize, I mean, not so often a company like yours that builds this great technology and not everybody uses all the features. Some people are really heavy users. What other features that would you want to share with our audience that people use, just to round out the picture of what this could look like?
Randy Levy: Yeah, I mean, there are so many angles. It’s really just limited to the imagination of the brand. But I think one of the bigger components that the brands are really loving right now is something we call a notification bar. I’ll give you an example of an abandoned cart email. Typically, if I go to a brand and I put something in my cart, and then I ditch, maybe in 15 minutes and sometimes the next day, depending upon how advanced they are, I’ll get an abandoned cart email, “Hey, don’t forget about this purchase.” And eventually based upon where they are in the journey, brands will maybe discount if I haven’t consummated buying that product. So a notification bar-
Doug Morneau: Absolutely. I’ve definitely seen that where I’ve logged in and abandoned the cart, and the next day it’s cheaper. It’s like, “Hey if I wait for a week will it be half price? I don’t know.”
Randy Levy: I mean, the email marketers in the room, they all do it because they know how it all works. But not everybody knows that. But the notification bar, the thing that I love about this is, all right, so today is Thursday and I abandon a cart today, and then Saturday I just get a generic newsletter from the company. But I’ve abandoned a cart, so they have that data. What they could do is on top of the email, it could be like with this one by one pixel and you could personalize, “Hey Randy, don’t forget about your order, purchase now.” And it looks like a little banner at the top of the email. It could be any size you want. And then yeah, if you got that same email but you had nothing in your cart, so one by one pixel, you wouldn’t even see it.
Randy Levy: Maybe for you, we’d have a different banner based upon your browsing habits. Yeah, it’s just another way. Certainly, you’re not going to stop those ‘abandoned cart’ triggered emails, but this is just another way to test. And I got to tell you in the 20 years that I’ve been in this game, it’s all about creative testing. Yeah, we’ve got all these features and there are plenty of companies in this space. But at the end of the day, email, it’s a test, test, test to see where you could generate more return on investment.
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SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
To increase retention and click-through rates for your email campaigns, especially if you have email deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience.
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Doug Morneau: Well, it makes sense. Like you said we’ve gone to the trouble as marketers to collect the data. However, and I’m just speaking from even for my own use. I mean, I don’t use all the data that I have and I think that’s the example you’re giving. These brands have collected the data and that it is basically using the contact information and just regularly mailing the list. To your point, a mailing in an email to my list right now twice a week. Tuesdays are all about marketing tips, techniques and Thursdays are about podcasts, and it’d be very simple then it’s a drop-in, like you said, a banner saying, “Hey if you’ve bought this, you might like that.”
Doug Morneau: It’s a great way to do the Amazon. These are the other titles that people have bought, into your regular email without a lot of effort, a very simple process. And I’m just thinking as a recipient, so I get my regular email from the brand that I like to shop at. I’ll use one example I like to shop, I like to buy stuff from Fitbit. It’d be very easy for them to go beyond just saying, “Hey Doug,” but also to put in a recommendation for another product or service that’s personalized to me based on my previous interaction with their company.
Randy Levy: Exactly. And do it in real-time. Even if it happened a few seconds ago, they could interact with you in real-time, which is really cool.
Doug Morneau: That’s pretty cool. How else can we apply this technology to get a better lift, a better response? I noticed looking through the details, I’m not going to let you explain it because this is your company, but I noticed there you have some way of leveraging this for sign up forms as well.
Randy Levy: Oh yeah. I’ll give you a little bit more background on Zembula. Years ago, seven years ago, my founders were ideating what could we do? What could we do that will really help marketers? And they came up with digitizing the lottery ticket to generate just engagement, because who doesn’t like scratching off a lottery ticket. What they did originally, they just had this scratch-off feature where they’d embed it into an email, you’d get the email and you’d click on it, and then you’d scratch off. Whether it’s on your phone, obviously very tactile. In fact, you feel like a 10-year-old in times square when you’re doing it because you’ve never seen it before.
Doug Morneau: Yeah. That’s funny.
Randy Levy: We’ve got some customers who’ve been using the reveal technology, the scratch it or the nine other kinetic interactive experiences as their secret engagement weapon. Because every time they use it in an email, they just see a massive spike in traffic back to the website, because again, people have not seen this before. From a retention perspective and from just increasing those click-through rates, especially if they have deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience. Now, from the forum, the question they asked about the forum, then we parlayed this into, “Hey, why don’t we put these kinetic experiences on the website.”
Randy Levy: If you go to Zembula.com and you scroll down and you’re about to exit, we use a little bit of exit intent, you’ll see a scratch it and you’ll scratch it off, and you’ll see the flow of it. But when folks have put this on their website, a scratch it, we could also have a zipper for the apparel brand, so you could see what that… there’s a cover image to entice and to create that FOMO. And when they scratch it off or they unzipper it, they get to the reveal, which can typically be promotional, 10% off, 15% off. You can A/B split test it too. But when folks have put this on their websites for acquisition, we’ve seen 20% to 22% lift in new subscribers, because again, we’re making it fun.
Randy Levy: And if you go to any website really on planet earth, they’re stuck in the ‘90s. Like, “Give us your email,” here’s a box. Sometimes they’ll have a form. But yeah, it’s fun when the brands use the newer real-time technology, they’re like, “Let’s do one of these reveal campaigns.” And then they complain to me that I didn’t tell them enough about that during the sales process. But it’s really exciting to be able to differentiate and use that kinetic experience as a competitive advantage.
Doug Morneau: Well, I mean, gamification has been talked about, but there haven’t been very many brands, to your point, that have executed well on that. And often it requires a major shift in technology. I obviously don’t know everything. I spend a fair bit of time online. I haven’t seen many opportunities to offer that gamification with a simple add-on without having to maybe shift to CRMs, for example, to achieve that
Randy Levy: And that’s our strength. I mean, we create bulletproof solutions. Like our reveal technology, I mean, to create soup to nuts, obviously, there’s some things you have to do on the website if you want to do it the best way. But at the end of the day, this is not time intensive. People can create these campaigns swiftly, quickly within the platform and then tie it into their emails or on top of the website.
Doug Morneau: Now, is there an example, like a real-life example that you can share with us and mentioning the brand or not mention the brand in terms of a before and after. How you transformed, here’s where we were today and this is what it looked like after an execution.
Randy Levy: Yeah, I mean, we have this apparel brand who I think, what were the numbers? I think it was when they use the reveal tech on the website, they 22Xed their lists, and when they used it within emails, I think they 4Xed their click-throughs.
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SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
To increase retention and click-through rates for your email campaigns, especially if you have email deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience.
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Doug Morneau: Hang on a sec. Let’s go back for a second. When they use it on their website, you said they 22Xed their opt-in?
Randy Levy: Their new subscriber opt-ins.
Doug Morneau: To your listeners, is anybody interested in increasing the number of people who currently hit your website and convincing them to sign up? 22X, yeah, that’s pretty good.
Randy Levy: It’s pretty spectacular.
Doug Morneau: Yeah. Wow. Okay. And then now let’s move along then. You said also with the email, what were the numbers for the email?
Randy Levy: Yes. Within email. I mean, I’ve been on a bunch of client calls, and well, back in the day when I was traveling a bunch of meetings. But yeah, it’s like everyone who uses us, they’re just totally blown away by every time they use it. They just see 3X, 4X click-throughs, totally crushing click to open rates. Again, because it’s so interactive, interesting, fun, and they were using FOMO and psychology, if you think about it when people engage in this, it’s just you know how we feel about brands who are doing it right. We’re enamored by them. Brands who aren’t doing it so well, we usually ditch and we give them their walking papers, and we go to the brands that we’re intrigued by.
Randy Levy: and I feel like this tech, while it’s somewhat surprise and delight, and certainly brands are, in the past, have wanted to move away from surprise and delight, because really, what do they want? They want the return on investment. But I feel like you got to use all your tools in your arsenal, whether you’re surprising, delighting or you’re just creating these really magnificent, personalized experiences, down to the one-to-one level, all that adds up and gives you brand credibility, so to speak.
Doug Morneau: Well, and the other thing is, I mean we don’t have to debate that the numbers and email over the years in terms of deliverability, clicks, and opens have decreased. It’s getting tougher, there’s more competition. But that’s happened across the board. That’s happened with Facebook advertising and Google advertising. There’s been nobody really been immune to the marketplace and the demand in the marketplace, and the competition for eyeballs.
Doug Morneau: I think it comes back to, if I’m subscribed to your email list, I’m likely subscribed to a hundred others. How can you, to your point, surprise me and delight me so when I see your email in my inbox, instead of scrolling past it, and listener, just to that point, if you’re just scrolling past my emails when I send them to you and you don’t want to read them, just unsubscribe. You’re affecting my deliverability numbers. But I don’t know, most marketers don’t ask people to unsubscribe, but I don’t mind. Yeah, to your point, if I’m delighted with your brand, I’m excited. That’s what makes you different than everybody else and I read your emails.
Randy Levy: Yeah, I mean, and you really hit it on the head. A lot of brands and all of us, we think of our competitors, right? I probably have, I don’t know, two or three competitors’ brands anywhere from 2 to 10. But guess what? In an email, you’re not competing with your competition, you’re competing with the millions and millions of emails that are sent out every minute. Yeah, you’ve got to differentiate. And yeah, you could have good subject lines to get those emails opened, but at the end of the day, if your emails are not compelling, if they’re not interesting, if there’s too much animation or too little animation, you name it, at the end of the day, you really have to differentiate.
Randy Levy: And what I love about this company, Zembula, is we really are helping clients not only differentiate but from a production perspective in email, one of the biggest challenges is it takes a long time. And nobody really likes doing production work. They like doing the strategy, they like testing. They like seeing the ROI coming in, they love their bonuses. The only way you’re going to really get those bonuses and get those emails to be really magnificent is to partner with a vendor like ours where we could really move that needle across many different KPIs that the brands and the marketers have.
Doug Morneau: Well, I totally agree with you, Randy. I spent a lot of time trying to convince my clients to test and what I typically do with every client, is I set aside a small portion of the budget for testing. And even with email, I mean, we had got to with one particular industry we’re working in, in the finance sector, we had built an opt-in database of about 100,000 names that were internal to us, and we would actually use those names to test subject lines. And then subsequently after testing a subject line, we would test the content, the email content before we would go out to do a larger media buy.
Doug Morneau: Yeah, I’m all about testing and most of the ESPs, like you said, have an A/B test available. Some of them actually, as you’re probably aware of as well, and listeners, I’m not sure if you know this, that you can set up an A/B test and the software will determine the winner in terms of opens and clicks and will switch the entire campaign over there. It will drip out maybe 10% of your list or 15% of your list, and based on the result, it will automatically raise that result to be the number one email and that will go out to everyone. The one that converts the best.
Randy Levy: Yes. Vital, that kind of technology.
Doug Morneau: Why don’t you walk us through the process? If someone’s listening to this going, “Hey, that sounds really cool. I’m not a super techie guy, I’ve got a million things on my desk already. We’re living in a chaotic time right now and this sounds good. Anything I can do to squeeze out a few more opens and clicks and a few more sales is great. How do I set this up and how long is it going to take?”
Randy Levy: Yeah. I mean, we recently brought on a brand who really was intrigued with the package tracking angle, and within a week it was all set up, deployed, done. We’ve got another client who’s using us a little bit differently and yeah, within days, their account was set up. I think for folks, especially now, things might be frozen, budgets might not be being approved right now based upon the climate. But I think one of the best angles that we’re accounting for is the cost of doing business with us. We’re like what we want to do it within this space, the real-time email technology sector has historically been very expensive, just really expensive. And when you think about email, you’ll never find a brand saying, “Oh, we can’t send this email. It will cost too much money.” That does not exist.
Doug Morneau: You can’t run an ad right now, but you’re right. Everyone thinks the email list is free, so just push the go button.
Randy Levy: Yes, that narrative is there for email. It’s always been really next to nothing to send out. But this real-time stuff, I got to tell you, it is very expensive. And thankfully what we’re doing is we’re setting out to disrupt that space and to make this technology a utility. We’re leveling the playing fields for all the brands that want to do this, but historically can’t, because it’s just the barrier to entry is so high. Whereas our barrier to entry is so low that you can test it, make sure it works, don’t just take my word for it, and then go from there. But yeah, from an implementation perspective, I’ve been in this industry for 20 years.
Randy Levy: There are tons of companies who will nickel and dime and charge you for everything they could possibly charge you for, that’s just not our mold. We just want to do extraordinary things for our clients and we know we’ll grow based upon taking care of the folks who are basically taking care of us. If that means talking to their loyalty platform vendor and doing all the work to set that up, to make those loyalty points a merge tag, we’ll do it. As opposed to, look, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, at other companies there would be a 10K, 20K price tag to do something like that.
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SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
To increase retention and click-through rates for your email campaigns, especially if you have email deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience.
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Randy Levy: Yeah, the barrier to entry is great, implementation times if you wanted to do… I mean, I’ve had people doing a reveal within a couple of days, but yeah, the more advanced stuff, really the data integrations, the loyalty stuff, that stuff will take some time, but it won’t take six months, it won’t take three months like the competition, because we just built this platform. We knew the challenges that all the brands had with the first movers in our space. We’re solving for that and making it as easy for the marketer, the designer to use our platform. It was built for them and maybe the CFO, but it was not built for the developer. And that’s what we find that our industry, that’s one of the sticking points. It’s like it’s so hard to get anything done. It takes too long. It’s just not agile enough.
Doug Morneau: Yeah, that’s certainly been the case, for sure. And you’re seeing as you said, there’s a lot of toolsets that have come along that are designed for the end-user without a development team. If you think of things like click funnels and lead pages and all these tools that came out on Unbounce ability to build landing pages without having to have a developer and implement quickly. Moving forward, what are you most excited about in the next 6 to 12 months?
Randy Levy: I mean, just, again, disrupting the space, enrolling new brands, contributing to the brands that have contributed over the last 20 years, whether they’re million, billion-dollar companies, even if they’re mid-market, they could potentially stay… mid-markets can certainly leverage our platform because the costs are so low. But yeah, it’s just contributing to more folks and getting the Zembula platform out there so more folks know about us. It’ll take time. But based upon everything that’s happening now and the fact that I think we added three retailers into our Rolodex in the last two weeks despite everything that’s going on, is very exciting for us.
Doug Morneau: Well, that’s one of the points that I’ve been sharing with some of my clients, is now’s a really good time. We’re in this lockdown, this pandemic, this health crisis and obviously there’s a people side of that. But for today’s episode in terms of business, there’s vendors like yourself that are still open, still doing business. I just did a live interview with a couple of the guys from the Only Influencers last week. And that’s what he said, “Hey, we’re around, we’re available to do a demo,” so now might be a great time to do some testing, have some conversations because, I don’t know about you, but I have obviously less face to face meetings. There’s none. They’re done by zoom, so there’s no commute time.
Doug Morneau: I find myself having more conversations with people like yourself saying, “Well, what else is out there? What else could we look at? What else could we test? Can I get a demo into my calendar?” And I think now’s a great time for exploration and preparing your business, and not only to work through their current situation but preparing it for one day we’re going to get them all free and we’re going to go leave our homes again and go out and meet people, and people are going to want to do business with us. How can we wow them when they come back?
Randy Levy: Totally agree. I mean, now it’s time to regroup, have a hard reset on everything, question everything and learn as much as you can. Certainly, you and I probably get way too much email then we know we probably have three different email accounts depending upon how trusted the brand is, and again, it now is the time to learn as much as you can. People probably have a little bit more time to do it and we’re excited because yeah, we’re talking to a ton of people. I’m using this time to jump on as many webinars as I can to raise my game, so to speak, as well. But yeah, I can’t wait to be the road warrior that I am because that’s what I love doing. I love traveling to the brands, the trade show, the meetings. I mean, that’s the best part of the job. Yeah, I’m looking forward to getting back out there. I’m excited.
Doug Morneau: To steal a Tim Ferriss question from one of his later books, what’s the bad advice that you hear around email, maybe email personalization, email tech? I mean, you’ve got experience in all those places, so what’s the bad advice that you hear out there?
Randy Levy: Yeah. Oh my God. The bad advice is probably, I don’t know. You know the one piece that I’m still shocked that I see in a lot of emails, like do this in your web browser, at this stage of the game, the email’s going to work. I don’t think you need that beautiful piece of real estate at the top right of your email redirecting people to a web form that’s showing the same thing in the email.
Doug Morneau: There you go. It’s funny you said that and I’m smiling. Obviously, the podcast, you can’t see that. And I’m thinking, “Yeah, I still see that come in some emails.” I remember doing that back in the day 10 years ago. No, we haven’t done that in a really long time.
Randy Levy: Yep. Yep.
Doug Morneau: Well, that’s really cool. Two questions then I’ll let you go back to serving your clients. One is who’s a guest that you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast that you could introduce me to?
Randy Levy: Oh, I got to be a little biased if that’s okay. But if you talk to my CEO, Robert Haydock, I think you’ll be pretty blown away by just as business acumen, and just what we’re obviously looking to accomplish here at Zembula.
Doug Morneau: Well, then that should be an easy email for you to send and introduce us.
Randy Levy: Yeah.
Doug Morneau: I’m sure he’ll open it.
Randy Levy: I’m pretty sure he’ll check that one out.
Doug Morneau: Yeah, okay. And then most important question, Randy, where can people track you down, learn more about what you’re doing, take a look at your technology, maybe sign up for a demo or an online meeting.
Randy Levy: Yeah, easy, Zembula.com, Z-E-M-B-U-L-A.com or Randy with a “y” @Zembula.com. Either will work. Certainly, I’m open to LinkedIn connections even if I haven’t met you, as long as you’re not scraping my email to spam me. I’m open to LinkedIn, email or just get on our site and sign up for a demo.
Doug Morneau: There you go. That sounds pretty simple. I want to say thanks for taking the time out of your day today and sharing it with our audience. I love new tech. I love what you guys are doing and the direction of the marketplace. I don’t know if the marketplace is going there yet. I’m certainly always looking to see where the marketplace is going and like to be a few steps ahead, and it seems like that’s where you guys are.
Randy Levy: Yeah, it’s really exciting and I really appreciate you taking the time with me today. This was a great call. I appreciate it.
Doug Morneau: Well, thanks again. There you go. Listeners. I hope that this shed some light on some new technology that you can use with an old tech in terms of email. Email has been around for a long time. It’s very solid. It’s not going anyplace despite all the people who said that it’s going to move, it’s going to disappear. You really need to own your relationship with your clients and not rent it on somebody else’s platform such as a social space. I just appreciate Randy taking the time. I’d suggest head over to the website. It’s very easy to navigate, very quickly get a feel for the technology that he’s talking about. And I did experience, hey, when I was going to exit up, came that scratch for me to experience, which was interesting. Thanks for tuning in. I look forward to serving you on our next episode.
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SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
To increase retention and click-through rates for your email campaigns, especially if you have email deliverability problems, you want to engage your audience.
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Get in touch with Randy:
- Web – Zembula
- Randy on LinkedIn
- Email – [email protected]
