A Conversation With Josh Kropkof of The Email Agency

Want to learn a magic trick for email marketing? Marketing agency CEO (and former magician) Josh Kropkof of The Email Agency shared a great one: personality beats ‘personalization’.

If you have a copywriter with wit, verve and a passion for your business/customers, put ‘em in charge! (If you don’t…invent one and put them in charge!). Too many brands think that the marketing they do in the email channel should look like the marketing emails in their inbox. Trouble is, too many of the latter are limp and lifeless, with faked-up customer intimacy (“Hey Bob!”) and nothing to say but “Sale!”, over and over and over.

Messages can be — SHOULD be — conversations between companies and customers, according to Josh. The numbers they put up for their customers — many of them DtoC brands — strongly suggest that The Email Agency is bang-on with this approach.

What's particularly striking about this conversation is Josh's commitment and connection to his agency's approach. He -knows- this stuff works, and it's really compelling to hear him talk about the ongoing journey of putting it to work for clients.

True story — the conversation continued for at least half an hour after recording stopped :-) Check it out.

BONUS — if you want to learn more about this, sign up for The Email Revolution newsletter at https://email123.club

TRANSCRIPT

A Conversation With Josh Kropkof of The Email Agency

Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. My guest today, Josh Crok, c e o of the email agency. Welcome, man. Thanks for having me. Matt, tell me about the Wolf. Oh man, there's a wolf over your shoulder if

Josh Kropkof: you're listening. No, that's cool. That's funny. Every once in a while somebody asks that.

Yeah. It's just a cool, I I did not like having a, a blank wall behind me, so. Yeah. Yeah. And I also don't like the whole, like the fake backgrounds where sometimes my hand disappears or something when I'm, I'm talking to you. So I like having a nice. Painting,

Matthew Dunn: I've, I've got the blurb background and my, my earlobe keeps kind of flicking in and out of the universe.

It's like being splined in Harry Potter or something like that. Hey give people the top line about the email agency. I've read up on you a little bit, so I'll ask annoying questions, but always good to hear directly from the top.

Josh Kropkof: For sure. [00:01:00] And, and just have to say before we start, you pronounce my name perfectly and you had never asked me, so I'm actually really impressed because Most people.

Woo. It happens. Yeah. No, most people don't say my name. Right. So

Matthew Dunn: I was ah, okay. pH And I should have asked you beforehand, so my bad.

Josh Kropkof: No, no, it was great. Cool. So yeah, the email agency, we are as our name suggests, we do email marketing. Shocker. But we are mostly e-commerce focused. So we, we do email and s m s marketing for direct to consumer e-commerce brands, although we do work with several that are a little bit more in the B2B space or the wholesale or like a combination.

Yeah. And a few others that aren't even considered that. But but yeah, that's, that's our main thing and we've been doing it since 2018. We're. I'd say pretty, pretty much still new, you know, it's, it's been a few years. Yeah. We are a small team. There's eight of us, and we don't you know, we're a boutique agency.

We, we service kind of a, a smaller group of [00:02:00] clients, but we're all about getting better results than whatever you are getting now or were getting before.

Matthew Dunn: So, yeah. Yeah. What What led to the focus on mostly D two C companies? Did that just happen organically?

Josh Kropkof: Sort of. So I like, we kind of come from a background of direct response marketing, which is not as traditionally a part of e-commerce D two C but are some of our mentors who were more in the space of like Digital, I guess like digital marketing, digital products things like that.

They sort of Started to steer us in the direction, I guess of, of e-commerce. And this was, this was back in like 20 17, 20 18. We were actually at the time trying to start a business selling our own products online and didn't have a lot of success at it because, We had no idea about traffic.

We just were Oh, okay. Yeah. New business owners, right outta school. Yeah. But what we [00:03:00] did learn was email at that time and how effective email was and sort of having our own email list and being able to, to send emails and sell stuff was just really cool. So we kind of found our way into D two C because we, we saw this gap where it was like, why aren't.

D two C brands, why aren't these people selling physical products like, you know, clothes or furniture or electronics? Like, why are they not doing the things that we learned about? Like, why do their emails seem so different? Yeah. Than, than what we're doing. And, and so we were like, well, can we sort of.

Fill that gap. What if we, we took some of that and applied it here, how'd it work? And we weren't sure if it would work. And I think there's a lot of resistance to it. A little bit. Yeah. But it turned out that it actually gets way better results.

Matthew Dunn: So in the, in the rear view mirror perhaps. But what's your, what's your assessment now of why there was such [00:04:00] a gap in the landscape as far as email and, and those sorts of businesses?

Josh Kropkof: So I think that this still exists for sure. I, I think that there's a, a, a dichotomy almost to where people in the D two C space come from. A more traditional, like either marketing or more, more traditional business background. Okay. Which is not a bad thing. This is why I love working with, with these types of businesses because they understand they have to worry about so much more than just marketing.

Right. That they're worrying about fulfillment, they're worried about supply chain issues. Yeah. Real stuff. Inventory products. Exactly. Whereas the, the world I came from before this, they're not dealing with any of that. They're just selling online products online. Yeah. And everything is marketing focused, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that there isn't enough crossover [00:05:00] between the two worlds. I think it's changing more now, but you asked me why, and, and I just think that it, it has to do with sort of the history of where advertising. Came from like classic advertising back in the fifties and sixties was very direct response.

Mm-hmm. But with the invention of tv, it started going way more like branding. Mm-hmm. And so I think over time what happened is it actually became the, the e-commerce world. Came from a very corporate dominated world mm-hmm. Where you've had big retail brands. Right. And until very recently, this is all like, still pretty new where anyone can start their own retail business online.

Yeah. Yeah. The problem is when they start that, a lot of times they're not sure what to do in the marketing sense. Where they'll be like, okay, how do I promote my products? How do I talk about my products? How do I show up? Well, They just look at what the [00:06:00] big brands are doing. Yeah. And they say, let me copy that.

Right. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's actually not a great idea. And we can get into more of that. Right. But, but that's, I think, where the sort of, the gap is. And, and so I'm trying to bridge that gap as much as possible, but it's a, an uphill battle for sure. There's,

Matthew Dunn: there's two other factors that I think. And I'm just spitballing, but I think could potentially play a role in that, in that pattern, you know, have created that that opportunity gap for, for the email agency.

One, if the founders are younger than email itself, it may not be the first channel they think of. Mm-hmm. And I, I know quite a number. The, the D, the D two C brands that jump to mind for me tend to have younger founders. Yeah. We're like, why don't you do it this way? Like from the very beginning, I don't need a brick and mortar store.

Email may not be top of mind. Mm-hmm. For, for them. And I, and I do wonder if that plays a role. The second one, and I do think this is shifting, [00:07:00] the second one is we're all prisoners of our tools. Yeah. To some extent. And if you do a bunch of work to stand up an e-commerce store, None of that work necessarily results in you having the tools at your fingertips For email marketing Shopify Clavio's.

Pair up and strong relationship, I think is changing that on the, on the, it's not just smaller businesses using Shopify, but it's changing it on that particular platform. Right. But someone who does heavy, you know, e e-commerce through, let's say Amazon, you know, as Amazon store, whatever you call that.

Right. Like they don't necessarily have an email tool set. And I know Amazon's kind of poking in that direction now, but, Right. And it's a, it's a substantial separate job to figure out how to do that. It's a lot, lot smarter to turn to an expert and say, how do we do this

Josh Kropkof: effectively? For sure. And yeah, it's, it's interesting about Amazon cuz it's like, That, that's always sort of a, a, an issue [00:08:00] people run into, and I think Amazon, f b a sellers have, you know, great success.

Yeah. With that channel. And, and a lot of times, like now, a lot of my D T C clients who didn't have that are branching into that also. Are they? Okay. Yeah. Revenue generator. But the issue is you don't have the email list there. Right. Yeah. You can't, it's legally you can't have it. Yeah. So that creates a problem for you because.

You know, most of your profit is gonna be made on the back end. Yeah. Right. Through repeat purchases and, and lifetime value and so on. So it's hard to not have that list.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And that, and in that sense, Amazon's an extreme version of big digital ecosystem where. You're renting pieces, but you don't really own the store, so to speak.

Yeah. Or the, or, or the relationship with the customers, which is one of the things that I really like about emails. There's no one in the middle of it.

Josh Kropkof: Right? Yeah, yeah. No, you own it. That's, that's what's so cool about it, is yeah, you own [00:09:00] that traffic. Yeah, and I think more and more people, more and more brands are becoming aware of how important it is because of how much more difficult it is today.

To just start up a store and profit from front end advertising. Yeah. Facebook ads, you know, Google, ppc, what have you. Yeah. That stuff is so much harder today than it was just

Matthew Dunn: two years ago. Well, and volatile cost and, and we, we've got a one of, one of the companies I've involved in, we've got a customer who's done most of their, they've done most of their acquisition over the last couple of years through Facebook acquisition, growing their email list.

And they're not happy with the way their cost have just escalated and escalated. I think the c e o said, you know, if, if I knew it was gonna be like this, I'd a done a lot more early on when it was, you know, less expensive, less controlled, less, et cetera, et cetera. So we're like, okay, focus on your email instead.[00:10:00]

I have seen, I have seen standout success from D two C brands. And they seem, they seem to pop up a lot, at least in my limited experience in that Shopify clavio world because the left hand, the right hand knowing what is happening. Mm-hmm. You know, knowing that I'm buying fill in the blanks, so I might need to fill in the blanks.

Number two to go with it makes, makes for a much richer back and forth in the email channel. And, and if you don't have those pieces wired together, which is no guarantee, you do. It's harder to keep track to, you know, stay relevant, to understand what it is this customer needs from you and, and speak

Josh Kropkof: accordingly.

Yeah. For sure. I think a lot of brands sort of struggle with this because there is an environment that we live in now where, you know, people talk about inbox clutter, people talk about, I get too many [00:11:00] emails. Yeah. And there's sort of a. I think almost a stigma against relying too heavily on the email channel.

Mm-hmm. And so I think that there's sort of this, these all come down to just, you know, over time people sort of becoming more aware of things and I, I think we're trending in the positive direction, but there's sort of a misunderstanding, I think, of how you look at the email channel, because I always say it's not a marketing channel.

Don't think of it like a marketing channel. It's a relationship channel. Well put Yeah. Here, here. And I think that's a big difference is like, people don't, and, and then that makes sense, right? Like, okay, yeah, it is. I I can, it's a relationship channel. All right. But what does that look like? Okay. How do I have a relationship?

How do you do that with someone? Through email? Yeah. And I think it comes down to conversation, actually. I think it comes down to seeing it as a place for conversation. Cuz that's, that's what email is, right? Like that's where it comes from. It was [00:12:00] never supposed to be a place for advertisement. Right.

Just that's not what it initially was for. It got used that way very, very quickly though. Yes, yes. You know but

Matthew Dunn: I think it was Digital Equipment Corporation first email campaign ever. Right,

Josh Kropkof: right. Yes. Seventies, right? Yeah, seventies. And and it was like the most successful spam email in the world.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It, yeah. You know, I dunno if we wanna hug the guy or curse him, would've happened sooner or later. Right? Right. And the fact that it's the channel that doesn't have a gatekeeper and doesn't really have a toll. Running. Right. The cost is sending email isn't when you hit the send button. Yeah. It's all of the pieces involved in what goes out being useful and valuable and you know, right.

For that customer and so on. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, relationship channel, I, I, I like that. There's a, there's a brand that's kind of been going to the back of my head as a good example of D to C. Curse. Curse cursed me for saying this, but I've, I've started [00:13:00] playing golf thanks to a friend of mine, and as I started equipping myself with with clubs from this century I ended up buying from a small, a smallish D to C golf club brand.

And I've been blown away at their email game, like they're really good. If I look at something, they know I've looked at it, but they don't automatically pounce. Mm-hmm. They do. They do stay on the follow up and then the steady stream of, Hey, what club would you use in, you know, watch this video, what club would you use here?

Stuff that's keeps them right. You know, right at the tip of my mind. Even though I think the bag's about as full as it needs to be for my limited skills. It's like they're doing a good job with that channel. And I think I read somewhere. That when they brought someone in to help 'em with email, that's when their sales started spiking.

They started realizing, oh, this is how you do it, because you're not gonna buy one golf club. Mm-hmm. You're just not.

Josh Kropkof: Yeah. Yeah. What for you, I'm just curious like what. What made [00:14:00] you kind of like, want to keep reading their emails? Or was it, I mean, putting aside the fact that you're an email guy, cuz I know we're kind of, we're in the game, so it's, we're weirdos, right?

Be an objective. Right. But if you had to pull yourself out of it, like what

Matthew Dunn: they, they've and I'll, I'll give 'em the, we'll give 'em the compliment here. 15 minutes of fame, guys. It's BombTech Golf up in Vermont. They, they keep a really deft cadence between stuff that's just purely interesting and no sale.

And oh yeah, we've, you know, we've got a special going on, you know, 72 degree wedge or something like that. And I do find myself. Keeping an eye on the sales side of it. Why? Because you're never gonna buy just one golf club. Yeah. But then the other stuff, when I open it, it's almost always like, oh, well that was interesting.

And it was, it had, it had its own it had its own style and personal feel, not. Not like somebody [00:15:00] sat down and, you know, pulled a template off his shelf and tried to fill in my name and put golf club in there when instead of you know, garden tool, like right. It, it's gen, it's very genuinely inside, inside that world material that's, that's coming my way.

And they don't personalize super explicitly, like first name's dead. I think you said, I think you and I were talking about that in advance, but, I know that what I get is probably what you'd get because I've bought other things from them and they've kept track of it. As I said, with that mar marry up between, I'm sure they're Shopify plus CLA view.

I'm just sure of it. Mm-hmm.

Josh Kropkof: Yeah. Well, yeah, it's interesting cuz I think that the biggest. Problem that most companies run into with email is that they're too predictable. It's, it's always the same stuff, right? It's, I know I don't have to open the email cuz I already know what's gonna, what it's gonna be.

Not only are you telling me the subject line that it's another sale, but that's [00:16:00] all you ever send me. That's all you ever send me. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think it's how, how do we get away from that and still be profitable? And I think that it, it, it does come back to this relationship thing because what a lot of these brands maybe don't realize, maybe don't have the, the resources necessarily or maybe whoever's doing the email isn't really treating it this way, whether, you know, not necessarily their fault.

Okay. But you can. Increase the value of that asset, meaning the email list as an asset of your company. Through keeping more people engaged over time. Yeah. Even if those, like you're not sending an a sale email. Okay. You're sending an interesting engagement email. Yeah. That's entering a conversation that's already happening in their brain.

Yeah. But what's interesting is that they're reading, right? If, if you get enough people, more than the typical company gets a greater percentage to actually. Keep [00:17:00] with your emails. Ha. Now doing it this way also, you have great deliverability, which is a different conversation, right? It's true. Yeah, yeah.

But like what if your emails are in my primary inbox? Yeah. Not my promotions tab. Yeah. What if I'm reading them consistently and then when you do have a sale at the end of the year, I'm there, I'm showing up because you've kept me this whole time. Yeah. You're not just sending me sales and things, but.

It's interesting also that like we talk about personalization and everyone talks about that now, right? It's, it's a becoming like a thing, like personalization.

Matthew Dunn: Oh, do tell me your perspective. This will be fun. Yeah.

Josh Kropkof: Well I think it's, look, I'm a little different than, than a lot of the, the people you'll hear talk about this.

So I, I think, you know, what is it not? Right? Okay. What's, what's personalization not, it's not, First name, merge. Tag. Right. Dear Josh. Yes. That's not personalization. Yeah, no. Geotargeting is different to me that's not like, okay. You know, where I live. That's awesome. That's not personalization. [00:18:00] Showing me the products that you think I wanna see maybe.

Okay. To, to me, per personalization is synonymous with persona and personality. I want to connect with you. That's what personalization is. If think about it like this. Why are you more inclined to keep doing business with your local pizza parlor? Yeah. Yeah. Your mom and pop pizza parlor that you've kept going to for 17 years.

Well, there's a personality, there's a connection there, and they're giving you personalized service. But what does that mean? It means that you actually have a connection with that person, and I think that this is a huge missed opportunity in email marketing. It's something that. That maybe is scary to some people and I've, I've, you know, come up against a lot of resistance to this.

I have a great story. I can tell you in a few minutes, but like, why not have a person send your emails? Why not have a face, a [00:19:00] person behind your emails?

Matthew Dunn: Sorry, hallelu. I'm so glad you said that. Yes. Okay. Yeah,

Josh Kropkof: yeah. What have you, have you experienced this? Like, is this something that, that you thought about like, You know,

Matthew Dunn: I had a, I had a guest on this podcast about a year ago, and Mayor Culpa, I am blanking on the name.

Okay. But his approach to the email not in the same niche you're in, but was very philosophically what you just said. He's like, you know, he said, my email list, and this is, I think of one man one man strategic consulting agency. He said, my email list is, you know, such and such big, but. Like 60%, six, 60% read rate or something like that.

And he said, it's because I write every word and it's very much my style, my voice, my subject matter, and, and my name on it. He's, it's not fake. It's a, it's an actual person. And, and I end up [00:20:00] citing him about every other conversation about email. Ben Thompson writes a newsletter called Strati that I'm a loyal subscriber of.

Yeah, the guy's fricking brilliant. He writes prolifically and well, and like there's no question I get Ben Thompson's, you know, voice in those emails. And I pretty much, first thing I open every morning.

Josh Kropkof: Exactly. And that's it. Is this is what brands, I think more are coming around to this now, but it's so important.

Yeah. Because this is partly becoming more important because of what's going on with social media. And because that channel is, is less effective, you have to treat your email list a little bit more like a social channel. Hmm. And that means showing up with a, a personality. And a lot of people, I mean, I've seen both sides of it.

Like there are brands who. I've worked with who like totally would not the, you know, just against not their style. Like I, this needs to be a, a sort of just behind the logo. Like [00:21:00] this is the brand. Yeah. You know, I don't know who's talking to me, you know, I'm reading the email. Is this coming from, you know, a boardroom?

Is this coming from, you know, does the logo have a voice? Right. What is a brand voice? Well, I would argue. Try making a person as the face of, of your brand. Yeah. Yes. I like that. Do we have time for a quick story on this? Absolutely. Okay, cool. So, a few years ago when we were really kind of starting to do this for, for larger companies, for the first time we had like a few smaller clients and then we started to get some, some larger ones.

Mm-hmm. And we got this client who was. They are one of the more recognized home Decker. They're in the, the home decor space and in this particular niche, which has to do with Framing pictures, essentially. Mm-hmm. They're, they're at the top. So they weren't like having much success on the email side.

Email was making up less than 3% of this company's total revenue. And this, at the time, they were a, a high [00:22:00] level eight figure company. They're now a, a multi nine figure company. But when we came in, we had some initial resistance and pushback to this idea. Yeah. And so we, we basically said, let us do a test.

Yeah. Let us. Give you something to test against your current. They had like a, a certain email sequence that would go to a new person who signs up a welcome flow, right? And we said, let us test one. They said, all right, fine. We did this very, very extreme. So they had very typical common branding emails for their company.

Looked like anything else in your inbox. What we did was wrote we wrote plain text emails. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coming from a character we made up. Her name was Colleen and she was the super fan of the brand. She was basically obsessed with this brand and had all their stuff all over her house, and the emails were all telling stories from her standpoint mm-hmm.

Of different ways she uses [00:23:00] the product. They were so scared to try this. I was, at first I was like, I don't even know if they're gonna do it, if they're gonna test it. Yeah, yeah, they did. But at first they were like, we're gonna give you 10% of traffic. So like, all right, fine. Eventually it started working.

They were like, all right, we'll do the, the 50 50. They ran it for a hundred days, it did 85% more revenue. Not only that. That's awesome. Yeah. Not only that, but like click through rate through the roof. Yeah. Yeah. Open rate. Yeah. Way higher. Cuz it's getting inboxed. Yeah. Average order value. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: So much higher.

So much higher. Yeah.

Josh Kropkof: So nice to me. Like that's the ultimate test. That was the thing that really like proved to us. Cuz this was early 2020. Yeah. And we were still pretty, you know, we had only been doing this for a year and a half. Yeah. And we were still very, it was just me and my two business partners at the time.

No team. And we were like, this, this changes like this proves what we've been trying to do. Right. Yeah. This was like our big proof of concept. That's awesome.

Matthew Dunn: That's awesome. [00:24:00] Yeah.

Josh Kropkof: The sad part is they didn't, they didn't want to continue going. They went with it for, for a little while. They went with us for like six months.

But ultimately, like this is a thing with some of these companies is that there is a. An ego factor that can get in the way a little bit. Mm-hmm. And I think people still it's funny, I think I heard some, one of your guests recently, I listened to a few of your, your episodes and they said at the end of the day was the client care about revenue.

And like, that's the number one thing. And man, I wish that were true. I wish that was the number one thing. They might say it is. But you know what, if. If every company said, you know, if they truly cared about revenue as the number one thing, they'd all be sending plain text emails. They'd all be, they'd all be doing direct response, just very personal, like, you know, person in front of the, the, the brand.

And I think that, that, that would be like the majority of what you would see. And I know there's a knowledge gap and we've been talking about it, but I, I, [00:25:00] you know, I've seen this time and time again where, Even when it proves to work so much better, at the end of the day, it's really, really hard to break from sort of just this, this view that, that people have about emailing what it should look like, right?

And what it should feel like. They, I'm not,

Matthew Dunn: I'm not entirely surprised that you see that challenge in the landscape and that you even have a proven successful, you know approach dropped, right? Because. Companies will say that revenue's the focus, but at a certain, at a certain scale, a lot of it tends to be acquisition of internal power is the real focus on an employee by employee basis.

And there, there is a, there is an unwritten sort of template. Yeah, I think you, you kind of touched on it already. You know, as I go through my inbox, I expect stuff to kinda look at, smell, be [00:26:00] like it, you know, like it's supposed to, even though that doesn't necessarily work. And, and as a, you know, I've run creative agencies myself.

I got to where I just couldn't stand the brand police at big companies. Mm-hmm. Because there were so intent on yanking the big cookie cutter out and going that they pretty much killed. Any, any actual creative undertaking, it's like, no, it's not on brand. Well, if your, if your brand's putting everyone to sleep, maybe you should be looking at that, but they wield a lot of power.

Josh Kropkof: For sure. And I, and I don't want people to get the wrong idea, like branding is important. Sure. It'ss super important. Sure, sure. And brand guidelines are important, and we don't, I don't subscribe to, like, I don't want people to think that, like that's what we do because just chuck that out. We very rarely do these days a, a plain text email, although mm-hmm.

We do them when like, as long as a client is, is okay with it. Yeah. That is something that we, we sprinkle that in because it is very, very effective. Yeah. But it goes to this principle [00:27:00] of. Not being so predictable. Yeah, you want to vary because this is what keeps people engaged, like a good email program.

People get hung up on the frequency thing, and I hear this all the time. It's like, don't send, I don't care what you're selling. I don't want to see your, your emails five times a week. Well, here's the thing about that, like I, in reality, no one expects that you're gonna read every single email. But think about do you follow any YouTubers?

A few. Yeah, a few. Okay. Like most YouTubers that are, that are good, that have like a big following, they, there's videos every day, right? Yeah. Sometimes more than once a day, but, but pretty much every day, all the time. Yeah. You necessarily watch it every video? No. Sure. Right. But. The, you're keeping up with it on some level.

Like if this is a YouTuber you're subscribed to, you're interested in like them, you're gonna go back. I do this all the time. It's like when I have some free time, I'm gonna binge watch the videos for the last month because, [00:28:00] Yeah, they're all great. But the key is, what's happening there is I'm connecting with this person.

They're giving me value. There's a reason I'm, I'm watching this person's videos, right? Yeah. So you can do that same thing with email. And that's, I think what people don't quite realize. And you can do it as a brand. I strongly, you know, my view is you should have a person. I think it's very, you know, much more effective if you can.

Yeah. Have a character and they, they at least show up sometimes, right? Yeah. Whether it's a real person, the founder of the company. Yep. Or whether it's a made up character like I just described. But you can still get the same effect, you know, speaking as the brand, but you have to be giving people value.

And what that comes down to is a connection and, you know, being not so predictable, but giving me something that I actually want to read about. And, and this is the, the thing that, like what we run into is, Like you mentioned how there's sort of like a, a [00:29:00] structure with companies internally. There's a struggle where it's like sort of a, you know that cookie cutter way of doing things.

Well, I think what a lot of companies are, are getting, they're sort of missing the mark on email, but this goes to everything else, is that they get hung up on sort of the wrong things. Like, okay, my email. I want my email program to be good. And in order to do that, I have to have my email department and I need, I need coders, I need, I need this sort of like QA system, et cetera, et cetera.

Look, I don't have a single coder in my company. We've never needed one. And that I have nothing against coders. We work with them from time to time. I'm just saying, here's what's essential. We talk to companies who we have to spend time in the beginning with them working on things like their U S P.

Like what makes you unique? What makes your golf clubs different? Right, right. Than every other golf club out there. Yeah. And a lot of brands will say, oh no, we have [00:30:00] this down, but do you really though? Do you really, have you really thought about it? Yeah. And the thing is, it should evolve. Like you, it's not one of those.

Set it and forget it. Things like, Yeah, that's good. Like these, these different things, unique mechanism, u s P, these are, you know, high level direct response things, but like even just understanding the awareness level of the people at different stages of the customer journey. Are they, are they product aware?

Are they, so are they problem aware, solution aware? These are like different psychological levels that people are on when they're mm-hmm. At different stages with you. Mm-hmm. And then a big one, like what are their objections and how am I overcoming them? How am I answering that? Mm-hmm. In copy and, and my branding.

So these are the things that I find. Most people, you know, and I, we work with mostly seven figure companies and, and like eight figure somy figure, but most are in the seven figure. And a lot of times the founder is, they love the [00:31:00] initial part of like our, our onboarding and our, like, getting to know them in the first week or two because we sit down with them and we discuss these things.

Mm-hmm. And then we go and we do our research and then we come back to them because we're online looking at forums like, Places where people are discussing things just really openly and like Reddit forums and things like that. Yeah. And so you, you come back and, and founders are like, holy crap. Like, I didn't even think about it that way.

I didn't know people were saying this about my product, or, you know, that people in my space that I'm trying to get to use my product are thinking this way. They end up changing different other aspects of their marketing that have nothing to do with email, because now we have them thinking in this way of like, psychologically what's going on in the consumer's mind.

So I know, I'm, I'm kind of rambling here. No,

Matthew Dunn: no, no. This, it's really, it's really. An invaluable approach. And you're talking about [00:32:00] such strong fundamentals, right? Right. They're not channel, they're, they're not about the channel, right? They're like, about the fundamentals of what's this business do for whom and, and really pinning that down, right?

So that it's, it's said in the, in the email marketing space that one of the problems with emails that works even when you do it badly. And I think there's some truth to that. Right. Companies can have a relatively limp approach to the channel and still end up making the cash register, you know, ring more than it cost 'em to run the channel.

Which is a far cry from what would happen if you did it really well. Like you're obviously helping your clients do. Yeah. You'll

Josh Kropkof: see it in, in certain metrics. You're, you're right, like overall and cuz you can have people that kind of. Phone it in, in a, in a sense of where like they've been sending the same emails in the same way for years.

Yes. And they make money. We call that sort of a churn and burn though. [00:33:00] Like where, where it's like, Get the lead to sign up, you know, get them the discount. And then if they either, I've heard people use the term buy or die, I hate that term. It's like, ugh.

Matthew Dunn: Like, that's how you think. That's helpful. Right.

Josh Kropkof: And then, but they'll, they'll literally say like, this is the, the, like, they have to buy by this certain point, or they're gonna stop getting emails from me and I'm moving on.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, You can do it that way. You're gonna miss the entire value of the and. And I think people, they don't a lot of times realize how much of an asset, the email list like this gets evaluated when companies do about, when you're selling a company and they're valuation, you wanna put a dollar value on every lead on the list.

So I just mentioned there's metrics where this comes out. Well, the people who are doing what you just talked about, a lot of times that stat. Dollar per active subscriber, or you know, in, in clavio terms, it's like they look at R p r revenue percipient, which isn't as good. It's, it's, it's interesting.

Not quite as good [00:34:00] though. Yeah. I like dollar per subscriber. Dollar per active subscriber. Yeah. Because this is a true measure of the value of that list. And over time, is that going up or is it going down? It's going down. Nice. It'd be going up, yeah. Nice. And the thing is that a company that's not treating the channel like a relationship channel, it will not go up over time.

Right. It'll either be flatline or it'll go, in most cases it goes down over time. Right. Even though your list is bigger, you're making way more, way less per person on the list. Yeah. That's not good. You know, it's

Matthew Dunn: not getting word of mouth and, and yeah. And all the other struggles that go with, and I would bet you've seen churn higher.

On those then on if, if what's what, what, what's the metric you just mentioned? The rep. Dollar per, per active subscribers. Dollar per active. I'm betting if dollar per active is trending up, that your churn rate is gonna be lower than the guy who's dollar per active subscribers trending flat or down.

[00:35:00] Right? Yeah. It's gotta be right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm. I'm fascinated. I'm still kind of, I'm hooked. 15 minutes ago when you were talking about bring, about creating a persona Okay, cool. For the, from on a company. My, my background before I started doing this many years ago now was was a professional theater director.

So yeah, so I've got a long standing. Fascination with narrative and narrative structures and character and character design and stuff like that. And I can totally see the value of the approach. I'm gonna bet there's companies, there are companies who've had that happen kind of accidentally with an actual employee, and they're hooped if, if he or she actually picks up and leaves, like, wait a minute, who's gonna, you know, who's gonna replace you?

Is the relationship fulcrum. With all of those customers out [00:36:00] there versus a persona which they can actually own. Right.

Josh Kropkof: Right. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Cuz, cuz you could have this person, and this happens all the time, right? Where there's a person who's Yeah. Got this connection with the customer.

Yeah. Yeah. And that person leaves. That's why it is still about the brand voice, right? Mm-hmm. For a lot of these companies it's cool that you mentioned Your background being in theater? I, I've done a little theater but I, I used to be a magician. That was my no good, awesome career for many years in high school, college, and a little bit after that.

And so I, I'm familiar with the whole like the performance kind of thing. Yeah. And, and I think that that is a perfect, like, And maybe that's why I approach things this way, but you know, a lot of people ask me, what is direct response? Right? Like, what does that really mean when you talk about direct response marketing?

And I. I might have mentioned this earlier, but like, it's just about that connection. It's about having a connection. It's not, you know, people think of it as like being very salesy or like [00:37:00] pushing a sale on people. Like that's not what it's about. Yeah. It's about having this connection. So a good way to think of it is I use a radio analogy that's like my, my favorite analogy for an email list.

Huh? Is a good, huh? Radio hosts, yes. Will have this connection with an audience. Yes. They're on the radio every day. Yes. Doesn't mean you're tuning in every day for every hour. They're on their two, three. I mean, I've heard shows where the same guy's on five, six hours, you're not listening to the whole thing.

However, if they're a good radio host, They have an audience that has this connection with them. They love hearing their voice. They tune in and they're like, he's talking to me or she's talking to me. Yep. Two of the, these are two very opposite people. And, and I make no I have no opinion on, on either of them, but like the two greatest radio hosts of all time were Howard Stern or still.

Him still there And Rush Limbaugh. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Passed by the numbers. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Kropkof: Two totally opposite people talking [00:38:00] about totally different things. They're probably two very different opinions from each other, but like both of them, tens of millions of listeners. And they really have the ability to have this connection with people.

That is insane when you think about it, how it crosses just every like barrier physically, because it's like these radio waves, right? Not to get into all that stuff, but like my point is with the email list, this actually gives anyone the ability to do the same thing. Talk about the future of email. I actually think in the future way more people will have email lists.

I think it's trending that way. I think more people

Matthew Dunn: yeah, I think, I think you're probably right. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hook it. I'm gonna hook an unexpected thing. I'm gonna hook three unexpected things together at once, if I can here. One, everything you just outlined about the persona approach, which I, I think is wonderful and agree with [00:39:00] fundamentally.

Is one of the reasons why I don't lie awake at night worrying at all about ai, at least the chat form of AI invading the email space. I got a text from a friend this morning cause I wanna talk with you about text a little bit as well. Sure. I got a text from a friend this morning. She happens to be a counselor.

Like, you know, helps clients with the, helps clients work through their, you know, their particular moments in life. Mm-hmm. And she sent me she sent me a rec, she recorded herself saying something that she frequently says to clients and then she fed it through an AI and I forget which one to get. It sort of cleaned up cuz conversational recordings don't look like you want a written document to look.

Okay. But what we agreed on in text, and this is going back and forth in text, was how fricking bland mm-hmm. The AI output was. It was like, [00:40:00] yeah, it sort of got everything you said. And I said, Margaret, ooh, I gave her name away. Margaret Mary, whatever her name was. Sorry. I said, do you remember how blurry the early digital camera pictures were?

Mm-hmm. She said, yeah, and I said, This is the linguistic equivalent, like it got what you said, but it's really fricking blurry and I really don't wanna look at it. Because it's kind of averaged it out and it sounds like corporate speak and it's lost all of the charm and authenticity that was there in what you said and fed into the the beast.

And, and I think we will start seeing, we are, I'm sure seeing a, you know, AI driven copy cuz people are want, people love to cut a corner and I think it's gonna flop because it mostly sucks. You can't always put your finger on why it sucks, but it doesn't have any personality.

Josh Kropkof: Yeah, it's, it is an interesting topic for sure.

It's, it's a huge thing in our, in our space right now. Ooh. Actually[00:41:00] in the direct response space like the more traditional direct response internet marketing world. Like it's Yeah. The topic. Yeah. But sure. What I think is that you, it will evolve, like what, what you're saying is absolutely true.

Like it's not the greatest thing right now. It evolves fast though, right? So here's, here's what it'll mean because I think you're right. People, brands, companies, they, they may try to, as they are, cut corners, some people where it's like, I'm just gonna feed stuff into this machine and spit it out and use that to produce content emails, posts, whatever.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. But, There is a problem with that where like, yes, it can definitely seem like it was written and, and sometimes you can absolutely tell instantly like, okay, chat. G P T did this. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's cool is though, if, if you have a good prompt and this is something I am not an expert [00:42:00] in, but I'm learning it there are a few guys out there that are really really doing some work on this.

I won't name drop anyone here right now, but there's a, a book I read recently Rob Allen, that's who, who wrote the book. It's a, something like how to be an AI prompt engineer. Basically it's, there are ways to. Feed, chat, G p t, the perfect prompts. Sure. So that you get really good stuff out of it.

I think it's what you need is if someone understands direct response copywriting Yeah. That person can actually create really good prompts. That makes sense. And engineer a, a, a perfect response. I'll tell you what I use it for. This is a bit of an inside baseball thing that I don't tell anyone, but I've played around with this.

So we do some cold email. Not a ton. It's interesting though. We actually have some clients who are having us do it for certain things, basically like wholesale accounts, and we're, we're experimenting with that. But we've always done it for our agency. It's the way we started getting [00:43:00] clients in yeah, late 2018, early 2019.

And it's something we've always, even though we get clients other ways now, we still do the cold email just this tradition and, and it, it. It works when it works and sometimes doesn't work, but it's good to have it out there. Anyway, what I've done is I've said, I've taken cold emails and I've put them in the chat e p t and said, write this in the voice of blank and I'll pick a, a TV character.

Yeah. And Oh, it's hilarious. Yeah. It's really funny to see it spit something out. I don't know if you're familiar with the show Mad Men. Sure. But I've had it Don Draper. Yeah. Write this how Don Draper would say it. It's on point. It's so perfect how Don Draper would say it. So it's funny, you can't necessarily just take what it says and use it.

Yeah. You gotta edit and make it your own. But yeah. Yeah. That kind of stuff I think is fun. But, you know, I

Matthew Dunn: hope it, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say you, I, I think we just outlined hopefully some hopefully some of the big email service [00:44:00] providers end up listening to this episode cuz this episode, cause I think we just outlined.

What they'll end up doing eventually, which is do not give me the bland AI to help me with email. Copy me. Copy. Let me buy a persona from you.

Josh Kropkof: Hmm. That's hard. That, that's a, I know it's hard. You know, what I want it to do is I really want the AI to take care of the more technical stuff. That's what I feel like it should be taken care of.

Yeah. I want it to figure out how to make, you know, the email, if I'm using an email that's, that has a lot of graphics that's got, you know, a good visual to it. You know, it should display correctly on every device without us having to worry about Yeah, yeah. Right. You know, worry now about like dark mode and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. AI should be taken care of, all of that. We should not have human beings having to worry about how to, you know, manipulate the software to do certain things. [00:45:00] The software should do those things itself. That's what AI should be used for.

Matthew Dunn: Yep. We'll see. Right. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see Heads exploding somewhere as people who've, you know, spent decades mastering the intricacies of email aged Tim L, which is just a gnarly space.

Right. I like do I think eventually, That there'll be synthetic mastery of that, of that handcraft. Yeah, I do. I hope for some reason you do. It's like we should not have people who are sitting there closing, you know, closing carrots and slashes for a living like, God dang. Right.

Josh Kropkof: Yeah, that's, that's hard work.

I mean, it's grim, man. And, and I'd like to see what AI can do in the design field. We'll see. Yeah. You know, we, Our philosophy, which is, you know, again, pretty different than a lot of the agencies out there, is that the, the design follows the copy. So, you know, for us it is, we're creating a [00:46:00] message. We're creating the, the words that are going to sell your product and create a relationship and get, you know, great engagement, mm-hmm.

And have that connection. Our designers, what they do is the copy is almost like a creative brief for them, right? They have to. That's why like our designers are not traditional like. H T M L designers or like coders, we have more like artists and like illustrators nice. And people who have that sort of creative brain because we will give messaging to them and it's their job to figure out how can I, like, this is a U S P, or we'll call it like a U V P driver email where there's.

Basically a big promise in, in the lead there's a hero image. There's a big promise. There's, you know, I know I'm getting a little in the weeds here, but Yeah, no, there's like blocks where we're, we're describing a certain benefit and yeah, it's their job to figure out visually now what does, what should that look like?

What's the image that goes with that? What [00:47:00] kind of design? Goes with what we're saying here in the email, and I think so many people, that's one place I'll take a hard stance against most other agencies and email marketers is I think people have it backwards. I think they, they usually put the copy into a design, almost like an afterthought.

And, and I, for us, it's always worked the other way around. And I just think that's why it's more effective to use direct response in this way.

Matthew Dunn: Y y i I, I think you're giving maybe more credit than. Is actually merited for the boiler plate stuff in my inbox because it looks to me frequently, like both the copy and the visuals were sort of dragged off a shelf and plopped in place.

It's like, God enough with the clip art enough with the stock photography. Pow. Right. Like it just doesn't register anymore. And, and having an actual, you know, having someone take the creativity. That a visual artist can have [00:48:00] and put it to that message. Not a generic, but that message. That's powerful.

Josh Kropkof: Yeah. That's really powerful. Yeah, I know. And it's, it's not super easy, right? And it's, it's no you know, it's a, it's a task for sure to get this and, you know, we wanna scale this, this whole thing, and that's a little hard, but I think it's worth it though, because yeah. It's, I don't wanna live in a world where email pretty much it's not gonna die.

Right. It's, it's, it is the, and I know you've had tho those discussions over and over, like it's not going anywhere. No, but I think it can be. I. Sort of placed in a certain box by society that, that, that we're kind of almost trying to treat it as now, which is like, it's, it's an annoyance. It's like something I, I, you know, I get too many emails.

I, you know, I, I can't tell you like every day on LinkedIn I see people posting about how proud they are that they just unsubscribe from, you know, how many different, it's like we [00:49:00] have to sort of, as, as email marketers, we have sort of a responsibility, I think, to. Change that and, and we don't change it by, you know, yelling at people or, or arguing that it, it's, you know, email's great.

Like, no. You change it by doing it in a way where you're gonna develop a true connection with a person and help people. I mean, yeah. Yeah. If a brand has a, a real mission, a story that they want to tell, which most brands today do like this is one of the cool things about e-commerce in today's world is, Anyone can do it.

It's, you know, like there are people who are just figuring out, they don't have to do some job they don't like, and you know, they don't have to be stuck in a certain situation. They can actually start a brand. And, and they have a story to tell and they have a mission and a reason why they believe in their products.

So, You know, it's the job of the marketer. And I think email is unique in the sense that we have this [00:50:00] opportunity of being in a private place like someone's inbox to get this. Yeah, yeah. But it's a responsibility to do it the most justice you can to do

Matthew Dunn: well. Yeah. No, that's that's really good. That's really well put.

I'm, I'm curious, you're thinking, cuz you mentioned email and, and SMS at the very beginning of this. Mm-hmm. And I'll throw this out for reaction. Sure. What I see in. Text marketing is like stone knives and bear scans. It's like at the early stages and, and the, the few that I've, the few commercial texts that I've continued to subscribe to, instead of saying Stop, mostly professional curiosity mm-hmm.

Are just sales sale. All they do and all they're doing is training me to wait. Until they put whatever I might want on sale. They're like, do they have good mindshare? Yes. I looked at a text while we were talking, ding. I'm like, oh yeah, that one, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But it's all they're doing is [00:51:00] sales, sale, sale.

It's personality free, kind of value free. And some sooner or later I'll go, pow, stop.

Josh Kropkof: Yeah, I'm the same way. Yeah. Same thing where I'll sign up usually out of professional curiosity. Yeah. And I wish I had some good examples for you. I know that there are people, there are some pioneers with s m s doing it in a more personalized way.

Okay. Personality. Yeah. I think it's, there's a limitation of that platform right now, and I, I agree with you. I think it's, it. We're in the early stages of it. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is very hard to do what we can do on email. Yeah. Because we're so limited by the, the number of characters and so on and so forth.

Right. So I think that the way that you treat s m s as a brand has to be essentially it's a, it's a one level of exclusivity up from the email list. It should be. [00:52:00] Essentially it should be secondary to the email list, but complimentary. So people who get on the s m s list are giving you the most private channel they have.

Yeah. They're giving you access to them in the most private way they can. So you have to respect that. Yeah. And, and you have to sort of, they should get better things than other people do. Yeah, it is right now. Primarily a channel for sales. And again, it's the limitations of the platform, it's the cost and stuff.

Like we're seeing more and we do some engagement and some, some like s m s that are a little bit more personality, a little bit more content. Yeah. It's just hard because you're so limited in the amounts that you can do well, and,

Matthew Dunn: and your, your attention allocation at the other end. We'll get exhausted quite quickly.

Why it's a high priority interrupt, and it is, even if I think your writing is witty and your, you know, corporate persona is great and all [00:53:00] that other stuff, I really don't want to get a ping from you, right? Too often. Why? Because I will look at it, right? And there's no way you're gonna write something that I actually want to look at, you know, twice a day or something like that.

Because man, that was, you know, nanoseconds of my time that just went. Looking at the screen when that thing popped up. Yeah. Got it. Brands that have, brands that have figured out the sort of content personality stuff in the email channel, and then the useful functional stuff on the text channel, you know, your, your clubs are on the way, so to speak.

Right, right, right. Okay. Definitely done. Why? Because I do care about when those arrive. Yeah.

Josh Kropkof: And, and I think definitely for, for those kinds of, of things like the, the post-purchase journey should definitely be, yeah. Yeah. The other thing that, that I found that we'll use it for very effectively is giving people early access to something.

Yeah. Oh, that's good. Whether it's the new product that you're launching or whether it is your [00:54:00] Black Friday sale that everyone's doing most effective thing you can do is let them know, like a week in advance, send a text and we don't. Send texts every day. You don't, it's not the same as email. Yeah. But we'll give people a heads up like, Hey, since you're on this list, you're gonna get something earlier than everyone else.

So look out for this text. Nice. Yeah. And then you send them the text and they are getting it earlier than everyone else. We've found that to be really, really effective. Yeah. Makes

Matthew Dunn: sense. That makes sense. And you would, you would reserve that. Don't, don't fake that one cuz you'll get caught. Yeah.

Josh Kropkof: Oh yeah.

No, of course. No, no fake scarcity. No fake, no fake scarcity. Yeah. No, no fake exclusivity. No. That, that all has to be real. It all has to

Matthew Dunn: be real. Well, Josh, this has been a gas and I'm, I'm trying to respect the time of a guy running in the agency. I think we could probably go on for another hour. Any any parting recommendations if someone's listening and saying, I really need to have my email game, [00:55:00] what, what do you say to 'em?

Josh Kropkof: For sure. Can I tell you about my newsletter real quick? Is that Absolutely. Okay, cool. We have a, an a newsletter called the Email Revolution. And we are basically like, our, our promise with the newsletter is we'll give you an edge in Pretty competitive marketplace by showing you how to use direct response email marketing with your brand or you know, with your company.

So it's called the Email Revolution Newsletter, and I got a URL to make it like super easy to remember. It's email one 20 three.club. Super easy. I. Again, I, I like radio. So we, we want, want you to remember, if you're just listening, email, one 20 three.club is

Matthew Dunn: parked free courtesy of go down. Right. We

Josh Kropkof: just, I did this today for your show, so it'll be Oh, okay.

Matthew Dunn: Cool. Cause I was gonna say, I wanna put the link in the episode notes. Okay. It will be there. It'll be there. Let's make sure. Yeah, we'll make sure. Yeah, we'll, we'll co correspond and, and make sure it's live. There's a great book you might [00:56:00] pick up. Pick it up on a b e books. I'm not sure you can find it on Amazon Empires.

Empires of the Air, it's History of Radio. Freaking great read. Very cool. Great read.

Josh Kropkof: Yeah, I've done, I did two and a half years of radio in college, just on the college station. Yeah. But I love it. I absolutely love it. I, one day I would love to be like on a commercial.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. You got the voice for it too, man.

Yeah. Empires of the, I've read it probably three times. It's just fascinating. Watching a, you know, watching a media that brought, you know, that brought other pers other. People's personalities into living rooms. That was revolutionary. Like that had never happened. Yeah. Before. And you know, think Fireside chats and fdr Right.

To, to get a, you know, glimmer of the, of the impact. Anyway. Well, cool. Josh Crok the email agency, is it the email agency.com? Yes. That's where [00:57:00] people hunt you down. Well, Josh's been a fantastic conversation. I'm so glad you agreed to come on board. Thank

Josh Kropkof: you Matthew. And yeah, this has been really fun.

I think it's, it's really cool what you're doing because the future of email is like the perfect name for these conversations. So I might have some people I could, I could connect you with to have on the show. That would be

Matthew Dunn: really cool. Oh, that'd be awesome. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Send him my way.

Send him my way. Yeah.