How To Setup Email Marketing & SEO For Your Shop With Caleb Reinhold

Bruce: Hey, print hustlers. This is Bruce from Printavo, simple shop management software. I’ve taken a little bit of a break as we’ve been working on a lot of product stuff but we’re back, we’ve got a couple of new podcasts coming out. But we’ve got a very, very special guest here today with us, Caleb Ryan Hall. He’s a really smart digital marketing consultant over in Chicago. We actually chatted and he’s chatted with a couple of our customers, other fellow print shops and I wanted to bring him on the show to talk about really SEO and email marketing, which we had a bunch of questions on and we’re just gonna dive in and be able to chat from there, but Caleb, thanks for joining us.

Caleb: Yeah. Absolutely. Very excited to be here.

Bruce: So just first talk a little bit about your background, some exposure that you’ve had to different businesses and how you’ve helped them.

Caleb: Yeah, absolutely. So I got involved in digital marketing about five years ago. I worked for a company called Criteo which is the largest buyer of ad inventory in the world. Got started, wanted to…you know, I got started on the sale side and wanted to be more of a producer and so I taught myself a lot about everything from, you know, SEO to Facebook ads to content creation and I love it. I live, breathe and sleep digital marketing. So it’s a lot of fun. I’ve worked for companies that spend six, seven figures a month on digital advertising and I’ve worked for companies that spend $300 a month. So I had a lot of experience with large, small and international and national and regional and even local businesses.

Bruce: What is an example customer maybe that was spending a $1,000 or so a month that you really helped them? I’m just curious as like an interesting story that you really turned them around and showed them, “This is the light. This is how it works.”

Caleb: Sure. So I do sign NDAs with a lot of my clients, so I can’t maybe necessarily give away names but…

Bruce: Yeah, yeah. You don’t have to namedrop.

Caleb: Yeah. You know, so I worked with a company here in Chicago. Actually was a print shop. You know, they were spending on Google AdWords. They were spending around $1,500 to $2,000 a month. They…we were…they were achieving like a 1.5 return on ad spend which is not great, not where you wanna be. We were able to turn that around. We averaged out that last summer with a 3.2 return on ad spend on AdWords. Just able to basically double what they were getting, you know, essentially in quotes sent out and in orders received. Ultimately doubled that return on ad spend. So that was really a fun project. They spent a lot of time on content marketing and email marketing. You know, they had a lot of other ways to drive business outside of paid advertising, which I think is always…you know, that’s where the real power is in digital marketing. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity that’s left on the table. People think that sometimes that the only way you can make money is to spend money. That’s not always true with digital marketing.

Bruce: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I feel like things have totally flipped on their head as online paid ad platforms like Facebook and AdWords and LinkedIn ads and all those have sprung up to be able to reach so many people so quickly in the last eight or so years. It’s been nuts.

So I’m actually curious. I know we’re digressing off of email but I’m actually curious about that client. How did you measure the return on investment that you talked about? So you said there was like a three point something return. So they called and spend a $1,000, right, and they get $3,000 back in sales, let’s say. How did they measure…did they say, “Okay. This customer came through this ad and we tagged it because they contacted us from a contact…” Or like how do you attribute the ad spend to that dollars…those sales?

Caleb: Yeah. So that’s a really good question and I think that’s where a lot of companies regardless of industry kinda fall off. Attribution is probably the most important thing because if you don’t have a good picture of it you really just don’t know where your money’s going and what the results are. So that’s where I think working with someone who works in digital marketing, you know, on a full-time basis really makes a big difference. A lot of people, you know, are very capable of being able to run digital marketing campaigns on their own. The difference is what I did is I used…it’s called UTM tracking, right. So it’s essentially using tags that are…that go onto the links that you include in your ads or you include in any type of email. It essentially just identifies the link, let’s you and Google Analytics take a look at where, you know, what campaign did this come from, what spend is it related to, and essentially lets you kind of categorize your results or your conversions based on the campaign, the medium of the campaign, whether it’s a cost per click campaign or it’s an email campaign or it’s a content campaign. So what we were able to do is just tie in quotes. This customer used a CRM system that was, you know, specifically designed for digital marketing. They used HubSpot so it was really simple for them to do this. But essentially what we were able to do is identify quotes that came in through a certain campaign and that was obviously this AdWords campaign. So we were able to segment those customers and then track what their value was over the next 90 days.

Bruce: And HubSpot actually has a free version, too, for the marketing…I’m not sure I guess if they can use that for the…the free version, but I do know that they have a free CRM and marketing platform.

Caleb: Yeah, HubSpot’s great. I mean, just on…they’ve got plenty of options that fit for a lot of different types of clients, and then on top of that HubSpot’s, they’re all about putting out good information and, you know, like they’ve created inbound marketing essentially and I would just recommend to anyone just cruise over to hubspot.com, check out all their blogs. There are just tons of value packed information on a daily basis.

Bruce: Yeah. It’s interesting. So especially being able to tie all of that marketing spend into a CRM is pretty neat although it is much more difficult in practice than it is just saying it. And for everyone out there I think attribution like you said, Caleb, is probably the most difficult thing to do. So just as a heads up I feel like for people to know that this isn’t like a very trivial thing that…I mean, even big companies have a tough time saying, “Was it this ad? Was it this ad? How do we attribute it?”

But we actually…in-house we use a company called Close.io at least for our CRM and we just roughly calculate the ROI on ad spend, just based on the people that we sign up each month, doesn’t directly correlate it, right, because even on a…for a print shop you spend X dollars. They may not convert then but they can convert in 30 days. Well, did they click two different ads from Facebook and from Google? Which one do you attribute it that way, right? So there’s all these goofy questions.

Anyhow…

Caleb: Yeah, the best advice I can give is, you know, the earlier you start looking at attribution and trying to understand where your spend’s going, what spend is bringing in, you know, what effort…really not just spend but what effort is bringing in sales and orders. That’s really the most important thing is starting early because it just gets harder and harder to catch up as your business grows and as you start to use digital marketing as more of a tool in your toolbox.

Bruce: Sure. You just actually brought something up that I wanted to ask on. Now it just slipped my mind. But let’s hop into the main topic here. So…

Caleb: Yeah.

Bruce: Email marketing. This is something I push shops on hugely and that’s because that’s how we grew a lot is, initially every time we send on… Oh, actually, I’m sorry. I just remembered. Let me hop back.

Caleb: Go ahead.

Bruce: For a physical company I think attributing AdWords and [inaudible 00:08:54] campaigns to retail sales is easier, right, because Shopify…these big commerce…these tools out there have plug and play options that plug right into Facebook ads, retargeting ads and all that. But what about custom, right? So you go in like the hat you’re wearing…you need 50 of them made. You click on a Facebook ad. That generates a sale. And this is very, very similar to your customer. I’ve always recommended shops to use either a coupon code of some sort or a sale. So a platform-specific sale. So we were running the sale only on Facebook so that way you know that those people who went to that and sold you can exactly attribute that. Is there any other good ways that you maybe did in the past or that you can think of?

Caleb: Well, so this is kind of a sophisticated option but…I mean, that’s a great way to go in terms of like…one, using a coupon code is awesome because you can, you know, you could have different coupon codes for each different platform, right. So that’s always a great way to go. And then, you know, running platform-specific sales is a really good idea, too, because the…so Facebook, right, is demand generation, right. You’re pushing out an offer to someone who’s not necessarily in the market for it. And, you know, you might get lucky, you might…I might need 50 of these hats, but the chances of that happening on a consistent basis are not strong. When you do, you know, something like AdWords that is demand fulfilment, right. So someone has the need, they’re searching those…

Bruce: They’re bidding on the keywords, right?

Caleb: Exactly, yep. So you’re, you know…I…you wanna structure your campaigns differently either way based on the platform that you’re using. But, you know, just the simplest way to, you know, to attribute things if you aren’t very great at analytics and you’re not, you know, you’re not using Google Analytics on a consistent basis it’s just different landing pages. You know, if you can track where your order came in and, you know, where…you know, what the landing page where the conversion happened was, then you know, “Okay. We’re using this landing page for all of our, you know…any of our hat-based sales. We’re using this landing page for any of our T-shirt-based sales outerwear might be, you know, a different landing page.”

Bruce: Yeah.

Caleb: That’s the simplest thing.

Bruce: Interesting. interesting. A lot of these guys…a lot of shops will use WordPress so that’s perfect. So they could set up a page very specific to that audience, maybe tailor the text even to it, right. So, you know, if they’re targeting team coaches maybe it’s, “Hey, let’s get your team, you know, ready for the new year with this apparel. Like fill out this form.” Then they can tag that person once they fill out that form. That then goes to, if they’re using a CRM. If not, you know…shoot, I…just write it on a piece of paper. Anything to people to say, “Okay. Eight customers came from…this is the total sales that we can attribute later.” Smart idea. I like that, Caleb.

Caleb: Cool.

Bruce: Email marketing. So where do shops even get started, right? So I always hammer, we ran a shop. We sent out a bunch of email maybe every other week or so about a sale or a promotion or something to check out that we did and that helped drum up a lot of sales initially for us at a very low cost. Let’s say a shop’s already existing and they’re running. They may or may not be collecting emails from customers. They’re not really sending anything out regularly. Where do we start and like how do we get value from this as soon as possible?

Caleb: Yeah, so I mean, the first thing to do, the first place to start is grabbing every email address, you know, from every customer if…any time an order is placed, hopefully you have a CRM in place already, but getting the email address from your customers, that’s the most important thing.

Bruce: That’s one. Do you ask…do you give them something to get it in return or do you just ask and they don’t need it? Like we don’t need like a coupon? Because I’ve just seen on websites and things, right, it’s like 5% off for your email address or…

Caleb: Yeah, so when…I would say any time someone orders just ask for the email address. It’s a great way. And then give them a reason, right. So send them a digital receipt. Send them something.

Bruce: That’s smart.

Caleb: Even if it’s a thank you, right. Send them a thank you. So that gets you into…and your question about the coupon, when you go to a website you see the splash come up and, you know, that’s essentially saying, “Hey, we can get 25% off today if you give us your email address.” So that brings me really quickly to segmenting, right. So the…grabbing every email address you can is really important, obviously, and then your second step is segmenting. How did you get the email address? What are those people interested in? Segmenting is essentially saying, “This is a group of people who are going to be interested in different things than the entire list as a whole,” right. So if someone gets to the website and they’re interested in a discount they’d be…it’s a clear indicator that they’d be more likely to be interested in discounts moving forward if you were having a sale, if you were doing a Saint Patrick’s Day, you know, special for your shop or you’re printing Saint Patrick’s Day, you know, T-shirts for organizations. If you know that you have a discount-based segment already, those are the people who are gonna be most likely to respond to an offer that you might create, right, rather than existing customers who would be more, you know, more interested in things around their order, you know, or their existing order history. So segmenting is really the second place you start and you can do that really easily using a tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact. I recommend MailChimp to everyone.

Bruce: So MailChimp. Okay, mailchimp.com. I think most people have heard of it. That’s a great tool. They’ve actually gotten really powerful and I keep iterating on the product. It’s pretty neat to see. What about…so segmenting. How do you…so you’re saying if we’re collecting email addresses off of our website that’s a segment. If they actually bought something and they’re our customer and we collected it that way, that’s a segment. Or is it even deeper as far as the type of customer?

Caleb: So yeah. You…really the power is in going as detailed as possible, right. So high lifetime value customers that reach a certain threshold, right. That’s a great list to have. And then knowing, you know, knowing that someone…you know, for a print shop, right, if someone ordered a small order, like they have an organization that maybe has 25 members. They’re not doing large orders. And then you have an organization that has a 1,000 members. They’re gonna order a 1,000 pieces with every order. Obviously you know that the needs of that customer versus the 25 are gonna…there’s probably gonna be a variance there. So having your lists segmented into not just as many as possible, but as many with a strong focus as possible so you can tailor where you’re gonna tailor that message to them. How, you know, how are you gonna make it a different message to the group that…to the group of email addresses that order a 1,000 T-shirts versus the 25?

Bruce: So that’s why we wanna try to segment. Is there any tools out there that can help save time and automatically segment a bit or…

Caleb: You know, it depends. So it…like so let’s say for your landing pages, right. We had talked about kinda using landing pages as a way to do that. Most landing page platforms like Unbounce or Lead Pages, they will automatically integrate with a tool like MailChimp to go, you know…where you can…essentially what you’re doing is you’re adding an email address every time someone fills out a form to request some more information, to request a quote. You’re adding…you select what lists you want to add that person to after they fill out the form.

That’s how I typically approach it. Again that landing page focus approach is kinda the basis for that.

Bruce: Got it. That’s pretty neat. You know, have you heard of Clearbit before?

Caleb: I haven’t, no.

Bruce: So Clearbit’s got this tool being called Enrichment. It’s clearbit.com. Enrichment actually looks up a person and company data using an email or a domain. So if you funnel, for example, a bunch of emails into it you can get more detailed info, first name, last name, phone number, like detailed company name, address, all that kinda stuff. So that’s pretty cool. Maybe something…

Caleb: That’s awesome.

Bruce: Seems a little bit more advanced, right, for some folks who are more familiar with an API or a Zapier, for example, to pull it from a spreadsheet. But that’s pretty neat. But the segmentation makes a lot of sense and not something that I’ve even fully thought through and I think that’s really good. With the goal, right, of sending relevant messages, which is what we talked about the landing pages, right. It was like, “Okay. If you’re sending people from Facebook and advertising to team coaches, that’s a different message than you advertising to Fortune 500 companies trying to pull all their promo product work.”

Caleb: Yeah, vastly different.

Bruce: Imagery, all of it.

Caleb: Yeah. Down to the features that they’re interested in, right. Like a Fortune 500 company may be buying on cost. They may be buying on delivery time. You know, a coach is probably buying on what’s gonna make his players feel like they can perform, right. What’s gonna be comfortable, what’s gonna be…how…you know, those features, those selling features are totally different for each segment, right. And that’s something that is really like a kind of a fundamental part of digital marketing, and just marketing in general is speaking to your audience in terms of what they wanna hear and, you know, as a marketer that’s one of the biggest things that I have to remind myself once I get to know a client really well. I have to remind myself that the client’s customers don’t know the business the way I do, right. So we have to always remind ourselves that we have to speak to…we have to ask ourselves first what does this customer profile actually care about. What are their concerns, right? And always put the customer’s concerns first. And I…you know, that goes for email marketing, for SEO, for, you know, any ad that you create, any content that you create.

Bruce: Got it. Okay, so let’s say we are collecting emails now from all the customers.

Caleb: Yeah.

Bruce: We’re storing them based on if they’re either a current customer or they just came off the blog. By the way, is there any tools that you can recommend for collecting emails off a blog really easily into MailChimp? Like I’ve seen those ones that pop up, you know.

Caleb: Collecting emails off of a blog. Can you…

Bruce: Like it…or not even a blog. Just your website. They go to davesprintshop.com, it pops up to say, “Would you like 10% off your next order? Give us your email address.” You know, that…

Caleb: Sure. So, you know, it depends on what you’re using. I know for Shopify there’s tons of free apps that you can get in the app store on Shopify to put up that splash page and grab an email address. You know, there’s Wix, Squarespace. They all use that. WordPress, they have tools as well, plugins that you can play. It really depends on the client and a platform, but yeah. You know, it definitely…there’s lots of free tools that are available to do that.

Bruce: I saw one also, sumo.com which I’ve just googled. It actually has a plugin right into WordPress, too. So that’s pretty neat. That pops up. That way they can offer their discount or whatever or like get updates even. It doesn’t even have to be a discount, right. Just get updates and collect emails off that. So okay. So we segmented the customers. People who haven’t bought anything, people who have bought things. Where do we go from there? Like what are we using to send it out? What are we sending out? How often?

Caleb: Right. Yeah. So, you know, essentially what you wanna be looking at is what is your company doing that your customers might care about, right. So are you offering a special? Are you…do you have a new product that you’re really proud of or you’re excited about? Is your company doing something that’s really awesome? Like are you telling a story? So the last thing we wanna do is take an email address and abuse it, right. We…the last thing we wanna do is send someone just spam about how great our company is and just asking for an order, right. This is the same thing. I tell people that like social media’s a cocktail party. You know, people…you wouldn’t stand in the corner screaming about the sale you’re having on T-shirt printing right now, right.

Bruce: Right, right.

Caleb: Yeah. So it’s the same thing with email. Even more so, right. It…this is a one-on-one interaction. So, you know, let’s say we have a…just a general list. We don’t know whether or not these people have ordered or not. What we wanna do is we wanna let them know what’s going on in our company. What specials are we having over the next 10 to 15 days that address those customers’ needs? You know, are we putting out…are there events coming up? Is there a holiday that’s coming up? Is there a reason that customers might wanna be printing, you know, printing shirts, printing apparel and can you address that and can you address the concerns around printing for that occasion? That’s, you know, that’s where you wanna start.

Bruce: Interesting. You know what? This actually makes me think, too, because we talked a little bit about the landing pages. You’re collecting an email, right. So say if you’re…I go back to the team coaches idea. You’re advertising, you wanna attract more team coaches in your…the 50 miles radius on Facebook or any other platform. Let’s just say Facebook. They go to the landing page. It specifically says on your WordPress site, you know, “Coaches, we’d love to be able to get your team ready for the new season,” right. Collect their email. You call them, they don’t respond, of course.

But now you’re right, right? You tailor that content to send out emails and you have…you sequenced it. You’re…I’m sorry. You segmented it. So you segment just for coaches. Now you send that content like you’re saying to send directly to the coaches to have them funnel in later, right?

Caleb: Right. That’s the power of segmenting, right. So the more you’re able to segment, the more you’re able to create a personalized message for that customer. And as you continue, you know, to think…not only that. It puts you in the mind frame of what is that person thinking right now? What are their needs right now? How do I serve their needs, right? Obviously in a way that makes money for your business but…just providing those super personalized, super specific messages not only because you’re segmenting, but also because that’s what your customer actually cares about, is the most important thing with email marketing. The last thing I wanna do is wake up in the morning and see that I have to delete 72 emails that don’t have anything to do with me.

Bruce: Yeah.

Caleb: They don’t.

Bruce: Right.

Caleb: They’re just general…they’re just emails to email.

Bruce: Okay. So let’s go really detailed even. Subject line. What’s the best subject line to get the best chance of opening it but that’s not misleading?

Caleb: Right. So what I like to do is…

Bruce: Even for…let’s do the coaches example, too.

Caleb: Sure. All right. Cool. So if you have a first name, right…this is a really nice thing about most email tools is you’re gonna be able to use a form, a field, right, in that email and it will automatically populate with something like first name, right. So you could say, “Hey, Coach Rick.” Or, “Hey, Coach John.” Or, “Hey, Coach Smith.” You can even use the last name if you wanted to.

Bruce: Sure.

Caleb: Right. So personalization is always important in a subject line. If you can do it, you should do it. If you have the information, definitely do it, right. So, “Hey, Coach Steve.” You know, if you know he’s a boys’ basketball coach or, you know, you know he’s a girls’ basketball coach you can say, “Girls’ basketball season is, you know, quickly approaching. Has your team gotten warmups yet? Has your…” You know, ask them about what they may or may not have already done, right. So you’re asking them essentially, you know, “Have you done this? Have, you know…” Something that’s important to them. So you’re…in that subject line you’re calling them out by their name, showing that you know them, and then you’re asking them, you know, a question about what you know that their responsibilities are, what their needs are, right. You’re asking them a question. I think that’s a really good way to go. 

Another subject line strategy is, you know, something around…something…you might know that they need to order jerseys, you know, in the next four weeks in the state of Illinois, right. You know that, you know, there’s three months until girls’ basketball season starts. You know they need to order jerseys or at least get that ball rolling. You can say, “Hey, have you thought about where you’re gonna buy your jerseys yet? Have you ordered jerseys yet?” It’s…again, it’s just addressing their needs in that subject line, making it super personalized and addressing their need.

Bruce: Yeah, that’s interesting. So, you know, and we’ve seen good open rates on just really making it very…not as personalized but like personal. So it’s almost like I was your friend emailing you. How would I email you if I was your friend? Probably just like, “Hey, check this out.” With maybe just the C in Check capitalized. Everything else lowercase. You know, or have 10 minutes to chat, question mark or something like that also has been interesting to play with. It’s funky, right, because, you know, you’re on the business side. You wanna send a professional looking email but so does the other 1,000 companies out there that are sending emails to your inbox and trying to vie for your attention.

Caleb: Right. I think you’re totally right with that strategy of, you know, how do I…when I talk to my friend, right. That’s…I think that’s a really important thing to do. Some cases there’s gonna be situations where you wanna send a super professional subject line or super professional email but the majority of the time…I mean, people are people. People buy from people. They don’t necessarily buy from General Electric or Nike. They buy from, you know, they buy from the commercial, right. The Kobe Bryant commercial where they see Kobe’s personality, right. And, you know, that’s where people buy.

Bruce: Got it. What is a good open rate for people to target? So that way they know to say, “Wow, this is really bad or, you know, we’re killing it right now.”

Caleb: Killing it is 50%. Twenty-five percent would be a solid open rate.

Bruce: Okay.

Caleb: You know, it depends on a number of things like, you know, is the email super specific? Is it time sensitive? Is there a clear and pressing need for that segment that you’re sending it to? But 25% is typically considered a pretty solid, you know, average rate. You wanna be upwards of, you know, 30%, you’re doing well. Thirty-five percent, you’re doing well.

Bruce: Got it. Okay. That’s solid. What do…okay. Let’s get into the body. So we wrote our subject line, we picked something like, “Coach Rick, are you ready for the new season?” The body. What are we doing? How long are we trying to target? Are we putting in attachments? Are we putting in phone numbers? You know, help guide me on that.

Caleb: Yeah, sure. So a lot of people are from the school of thought just keep it a text only email. I, you know, I vary. It depends on the client but I really do like the, you know, just the simplicity of a simple text email, “Hey, Coach Rick, we’ve got specials right now on jerseys, warmups, T-shirts, pullovers. We’ve got everything your team needs right now. Give us a call.” And then sign it with a personal message, right. So, you know, caleb@xyzprinting.com. You know, and foot…put your personal…your cell phone number in there, right. That personalization just like you were talking about earlier…keeping it like you would send an email to a friend. That’s a powerful play and if you do that throughout the entire body of the email and in the signature it seals the deal almost.

Bruce: Okay. So that’s a good point. Send it from your personal…like or a personal email. Not info@…you know, johnsprintshop.com. Send it from john@johnsprintshop.com with your name, John Smith right on there. Okay.

Caleb: Yeah, and, you know, you can…and most of the email clients, you know, like MailChimp or Constant Contacts, or HubSpot even. You can change the reply to address so it doesn’t flood your personal inbox. A quick trick is just creating, you know, johns@xyzprinting.com if your personal email address is john@xyzprinting.com. You know, that way your inbox isn’t gonna be flooded when you send out a 8,000 emails to every coach in, you know, the state of Illinois and Michigan and Indiana. I’ve seen that happen before. It can be bad but you can set it up using different email addresses where it’s…it looks personal, it’s coming out with a personal tone but you, you know, you’re not gonna flood your own email inbox.

Bruce: Sure, sure. I gotcha. So body, keeping it short. Is there negatives like in…oh, wait. Hold on. Is your…can you pull that mic like on the outside? I think it just rubs on the zipper and then it…oh, yeah. That works, that works.

Caleb: Okay.

Bruce: Thanks. The body…so a couple…is there like a target amount of sentences or how are we writing…I’ve seen like people break them out into a sentence almost per line. Is that more readable than maybe three sentences in one paragraph together?

Caleb: Yeah, so if you think about…give me one second.

Bruce: Sure.

Caleb: Sorry. It’s my girlfriend. She never calls me during the day so I was like, “Oh, God. What’s wrong?”

Bruce: Yeah, no. No worries.

Caleb: Yeah, okay. Okay, yeah. So in terms of, you know, in terms of readability, right…so most people are going to actually read…

Bruce: Oh, wait. Hold on. Grab that mic.

Caleb: Outside, right, like this?

Bruce: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it just rubs on the zipper.

Caleb: Sorry.

Bruce: No, that’s okay.

Caleb: Yeah. In terms of readability of an email, you know, the most important thing in writing any type of copy we call…in the marketing world we call…anything that we write we call a copy, right, so the most important thing is to get the person to read the next sentence, right.

Bruce: Right.

Caleb: So your idea of, you know, each line as another sentence, absolutely. That’s a great tactic to use. I’ve seen it be really successful in emails where I’ve actually made a purchase above, you know, $200 because of an email, right. I bought a course or something like that. It’s…every time I read something I wanna read more, right. And you don’t need to include a bunch of information that’s irrelevant to your customer and, you know, the offer that you’re providing them with. So when we talk about, you know, do we include attachments, do we include…you know, do we need to have this fancy outline in an HTML version of our email? A lot of times, no. I would say experiment with it because the number one thing in digital marketing is that you’re not gonna know until you test things. But, you know, if I’m reading an email on my phone, it’s text only, I don’t have to wait for any images to load. It looks like a really personal email. I probably will appreciate that more on a business basis than having to go through and wait for images to load, read a bunch of fluff, not really understand what the offer is.

Bruce: Sure. Sure. That’s a good tool. So MailChimp and you can set all that up there.

Caleb: Yeah.

Bruce: Interesting. I’m trying to…is there any other tricks or tips that you’ve seen with getting…oh, how frequent? Should they be targeting monthly, bi-weekly, every couple of months, what?

Caleb: So I would say, you know, the most important thing to do is to let your…you know, email, if you send it out once every six months, it doesn’t really make a…I guess I would call it an aggregate change, right. So it doesn’t make a big impact. If you do email on say a bi-weekly basis you’re gonna start to build some rapport with your customers. The other thing that’s gonna be nice is you’re gonna keep a clean list, right, because people can unsubscribe from your list and a lot of people think that’s a bad thing to have happened, “Oh, no. Someone unsubscribed. It’s actually very good because you want people who are gonna be engaged with your emails and you…the last thing you wanna do is be sending spam. So if you send every two weeks you’re gonna be able to kinda keep that list clean, people are gonna, you know…you’re gonna get an idea, too, around are these emails that I’m sending out, are they relevant? Are people actually reading them, right? So you’re monitoring your open rate, your click rate on the email. That’s a really important metrics that a lot of people kinda forget about because they’re really just concerned about the open rate. But are people clicking the links that you’ve put into your email because that, you know, that’s what you’re basically telling your customer to do, “Hey, here’s this message I have for you. Here’s why it’s important. Click this link to get more information or to place an order or just schedule a call with a member of our team.”

You know, click rate really ends up being the most important metric. But yeah. Sending emails, I think at a minimum of, you know…I’d say for a print shop, you know, twice a month is a really good way to go, bi-weekly there. And if you do have something that’s important to your customers or you think, you know, there’s a pretty good chance this is important, I would say don’t hesitate to send out an email to your customers let them know about a special you might have, let them know about a new offer you might have. And if your company’s doing something that’s awesome and you wanna tell people about also let them know, you know.

Bruce: Yeah. That makes sense. But that’s pretty cool. You know, I found a recent tool, Mix Max, M-I-X, M-A-X. Have you used that one?

Caleb: Yeah. So we use it a lot in some different campaigns. It’s nice because it allows you to send, you know, personal emails essentially, emails not from an email client necessarily. You can send it from your personal email address. It’s something we use when we really wanna make sure that everyone opens the email.

Bruce: Got it. Very cool. Well, I think that’s a really great getting started, you know, with email marketing. It seems like a lot of the work is getting it set up, getting the sumo.com set up on your website so it collects emails, collecting emails as a part of your sales process or any some…one that person wants a quote or anything. It’s not just the quantity of garments. It’s also their email address and name. And then setting up the campaigns but then it seems like there’s less work kinda trailing which is the maintenance of it, right, with creating the content to send out later and checking in and holidays and events and anything relative to what’s going on that that segment would find valuable that that’s where…one time needs to be created. And I know…so that’s awesome, Caleb, and I really appreciate some of these tips that you’ve put out here. I know we wanted to go over SEO, too. I don’t know how much time we have so we may have to break this into two parts, but let’s just do it in a quick high-level summary for people in five minutes. And thinking through this…I mean, most are more geography focused so, for example, if they’re Nashville it’s Nashville Custom T-shirts in wanting to show up higher. What are maybe five or a couple different tips that people could take away and do on their website or other websites now to help improve for visibility in Google?

Caleb: Absolutely. So number one most important thing is claiming your business on Google, Google Places. Getting…making sure that you claim the listing for your business that shows up in the right-hand column on search results is probably the most single important thing you can do for SEO on a local basis, right. So if you do have a shop in Nashville you need to be able to claim that business, put in your hours of operation, your correct phone number, the correct website on an…you know, from an SEO point, too, when people look up a company 95% of the time they’re gonna do it on their phone, right. You need something right now. You’re having a conversation with someone. You’re gonna google it on your phone and the first thing that shows up on Google results on a cell phone is a map, right, of businesses nearby you. That…getting that Places listing, that Google Places listing, is gonna make a huge difference as to, you know, where your company’s gonna show up.

Bruce: Okay.

Caleb: So that’s, you know, probably the most important thing. The next thing is having contact information that’s consistent across the entire web, right. So using a directory tool like moz.com. They have…that’s M-O-Z.com. They have a subscription service that you can use. I can’t remember what the cost is per month, but basically it ensures that across all the directories on the web…so like yp.com, you know, Yelp, Facebook, Google, your company has a consistent address, phone and website and that’s…

Bruce: Interesting.

Caleb: Yeah, it’s really important. A lot of people forget that but it’s an easy fix and using a tool like moz.com you can solve that problem pretty quickly. You know, and then the next thing really is the page title of your homepage. If you do have a shop in Nashville, Nashville Screen Printing, Nashville T-shirts and Apparel. You know, describe what it is that your company does, the number one thing that your company does, click the locale in front of it and then, you know, put the title of your company and then that’s your page title. That’s really one of the…it’s still really important. A lot of people will say that those tags aren’t important. That’s a…it’s called a title tag. It’s not as important as it used to be. You know, the more important thing is that you have content around what your business does and the search terms that you wanna be found for.

Bruce: Okay.

Caleb: So that leaves…you know, I…there’s three. Four and five would be honestly creating content around the search terms that you wanna be found for. If you wanna be found for printing high school basketball jerseys write a blog about it. Write a blog with bullet points about the most important things about how to print, you know, high school basketball jerseys. That is what Google’s looking for. That’s what people are searching for.

Bruce: Sure.

Caleb: Where can I print high school basketball jerseys?

Bruce: Got it. That’s huge. And I know that’s super quick for everybody but we’ll have to expand on it in a different one. But Caleb, this has been awesome. This is really, really good actionable things and I feel like people are doing…and it also feels like this is something to bake into their business process to do long-term to make sure that it’s consistent. So we’re gonna do this once a month or whatever you feel is relevant for that segment and we’re gonna improve upon it and keep doing it and really bake it in to their process or maybe an intern or someone that can help part-time possibly to just handle this. And of course, you know, you do a lot of digital marketing consulting as well. So I’ll drop your information of course at the bottom, too. But Caleb, thanks so much for joining us. I really feel like this is gonna be huge to help a lot of people. So this has been really great and we’ll share that information below but thank you.

Caleb: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun and if you…I’d love to come back.

Bruce: Awesome. Sounds good, Caleb. Have a good one.

Caleb: All right. Take care, Bruce.

Bruce: Bye.