Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast, host Greg Shuey interviews Michael Diesu, CEO of Revenue Roll, a tech company specializing in identity resolution for e-commerce businesses. The discussion focuses on the new sending requirements from Gmail and Yahoo, and how email retargeting has evolved to comply with these changes. Michael shares his insights on maintaining compliance, effective email marketing strategies, and the importance of first-party data. He emphasizes the necessity of aggressive list cleaning, using multiple domains for different email purposes, and building a robust data set to enhance email marketing and retargeting efforts.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding New Sending Requirements: Gmail and Yahoo have implemented new sending requirements, capping the spam rate at 0.3% to reduce email spam. Non-compliance can lead to domains being marked as spam and potentially shut down.
- Importance of Authentication: Authentication measures like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are crucial to ensure that the sender is legitimate, helping to maintain compliance with the new guidelines and protect domain reputation.
- Strategic Use of Multiple Domains: E-commerce brands should use separate domains for business communications and email marketing to prevent the main domain from being flagged as spam, ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
- Aggressive List Cleaning: Brands should focus on emailing only high-intent and recent contacts, and removing inactive contacts to minimize the risk of spam complaints and improve email deliverability.
- Building and Using First-Party Data: Collecting and utilizing first-party data is essential for effective email marketing and retargeting. Brands should integrate tools that enable them to identify and target high-intent users, ensuring compliance and optimizing marketing efforts.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Michael Diesu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-diesu/
Revenue Roll: https://www.revenueroll.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey: 0:28
Hey e-commerce marketers, Hope everyone’s doing well today and welcome to episode 34 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. Today I’m going to be talking with the founder of an awesome tech company specifically for e-commerce businesses called Revenue Roll, and his name is Michael. We’ll give him a chance to introduce himself here in just a minute. Revenue Roll’s a really awesome technology. Like I mentioned, they make it possible for e-commerce brands to be able to really target unidentified visitors on your website and be able to remarket to those individuals and bring them into the funnel and convert them. Did I get that right, Michael? Yeah, you did. Awesome, Perfect.
Greg Shuey: 1:17
So today we are going to be taking some time to really dive into the new sending requirements from Gmail and Yahoo. They’ve been slowly rolling these out this year, but they put in place the big ones at the beginning of June. So we’re about a month in and we’re going to be specifically talking about how email retargeting has evolved to operate optimally within these new sending requirements. So I’m going to take just a minute here. I’m going to rant a little bit because I don’t know, Michael, if you’re seeing the same thing on your end, but I think those sending requirements are straight trash. I feel like.
Greg Shuey: 2:00
I’ve seen 10 times the amount of email spam over the last three to four weeks, then before the sending requirements were actually put in place and went into effect. So you know, I don’t know if they’re doing any good right now. Are we going to see things tighten up, you know, in the future? I don’t know, but I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the amount of email spam I’m getting. So it’s going to be a fun discussion today and, that said, we do, even though I don’t feel like it’s doing any good. We want to make sure you’re compliant, so that is why we are talking today. Michael, thank you for being with us and taking some time to chat.
Michael Diesu: 2:43
Yeah, thanks for having me, Greg. I agree they’re probably not doing the full job that they should be yet, but they said they’re going to roll them out slowly, so sooner or later.
Greg Shuey: 2:53
I hope let’s hope Spare my inbox please. So before we jump in, would you just take a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story, your work history and then really how you have gotten to where you are?
Michael Diesu: 3:11
today. Yeah, sure, happy to. So my name is Michael Diesu. I’m the CEO of Revenue Roll. We’re an identity resolution company that effectively helps brands retarget users that were previously anonymous. Before I started this company four years ago with my two co-founders, I was a strategy consultant at Accenture, advising on revenue growth strategy. My co-founders one was at Google, another had an ad agency professional sphere noticed that this removal of third-party tracking was really going to upend the game and really change how medium and small-sized businesses were going to be able to run successful ads online, and that’s really what spurred us to create this product. We spent the first couple of years building, investing, researching and developing it, and we launched it about a year ago and have been growing very fast.
Greg Shuey: 4:06
That’s amazing. It’s a huge problem and it’s going to continue to be a bigger and bigger problem as privacy laws continue to tighten and cookies go away. And so you know, if you’re seeing this as a problem, as a brand like, please reach out to Michael. I’ll make sure to include his website, his LinkedIn, in our show notes and just make it really easy to get in touch with him. Cool man. Well, you’re ready to jump in? Let’s do it Awesome. So let’s start with probably the easiest question Can you walk us through what these sending requirements are? For those who aren’t clear on it or maybe haven’t even heard about it, Can you walk us through those In simple?
Michael Diesu: 4:49
terms right. You effectively cannot get for every email you send, or for every thousand emails you send. You can’t have more than three of those emails marked as spam on average. So 0.3% spam rate is the cap that Google and Yahoo will allow before they mark the domain as spam, and they can also shut down the domain and it can no longer be used. Previously the rates were higher, the limits were higher. They were not enforced as strictly. So this whole policy was seen as a way to help people like you, greg, to have a clean inbox and to not be bothered. But on the flip side, there are a lot of brands your listeners that make a lot of money through that email channel and there isn’t a lot of wiggle room there now for them to experiment to try to get that incremental revenue.
Greg Shuey: 5:46
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a perfect kind of explanation of that. And they’ve, you know, google and Yahoo have put in place some I don’t know that I’d call it tools, but like measures for authentication I would say yeah, you know the three big ones, which big ones, which I had to very quickly become an expert in. I had never set those up before, but as they rolled those out, we had to figure it out and put those in place for clients. They are SPF, dkim and DMARC. So why is this authentication so crucial under the new guidelines and how can brands make sure that they are compliant?
Michael Diesu: 6:29
Yeah, I mean they just want to make sure that the people who are emailing folks are indeed who they say they are Right In a sentence. I think, like why is that so important? Because you know, there have been probably folks that have thousands and thousands of domains that have been spamming everyone on Earth.
Michael Diesu: 6:48
It seems like a simple thing. Are you who you say you are, in your email domain or in your signature? You are Great. That’s more or less why they’re asking you to authenticate the folks that are doing mass emailing at scale. That’s a harder thing to keep up with, which is why I think they’re enforcing those so highly.
Greg Shuey: 7:07
Yeah, back in the day when I was doing affiliate marketing, I met up with this company that was literally buying millions and millions and millions of emails and just burning through IPs and servers and sending out mass email. And I’m like one is that even a thing anymore? I don’t even know, but it feels to me like those are the type of fly-by-night businesses that they’re really trying to target, to clean up, and I kind of feel like legitimate businesses who have worked hard to collect their customers’ information and have worked hard to be compliant, are kind of caught in the crossfire right and almost, almost going to be penalized if, for some reason, they get marked as spam. And so you know, like what, what happens if these brands aren’t compliant, if they don’t have spf and dkim and dmark set? Like, are we seeing right now that having a negative impact or are we thinking that’s going to be a little bit further down the road? What are you seeing?
Michael Diesu: 8:12
I’m not seeing that just yet. I’m looking at like all of our accounts, like looking at our Klaviyo scores. It’s honestly pretty flat, like what Klaviyo’s domain health or Glock apps. You know what they’re saying across accounts. So my perspective is that they’re not enforcing as strictly yet. They said June 1st. It’s now a month later. So, like I said at the top of the call, I think it’s going to continue to get rolled out stronger and stronger Yep, kind of like a Google algorithm update.
Greg Shuey: 8:42
They start updating it and it takes weeks and weeks to kind of wrap up and finish up. But I think this one’s going to take longer than weeks and weeks, but I guess we’ll see, you know. So here’s where I want to spend a good amount of time. Given these new requirements, what are some of the long-term strategies that brands should be thinking about and that brands should be putting in place so that they can future-proof their email marketing efforts?
Michael Diesu: 9:14
Yeah, I think that the first thing you got to do is own multiple domains, if you don’t already. You should be keeping. If your main domain is gregcom, keep that, and that’s what all your employees use. That’s how you communicate with your customers. I would almost keep that out of the email process. That domain is just for business communications, and then, at the very least, you should get emails at gregcom, right, or gregemailscom, and that should be what you should be using on Klaviyo. Obviously, you have to warm that up. You have to set up a dedicated sending domain in Klaviyo, all that stuff, but you want to first segment your email marketing from the rest of your business because you don’t want, um, those two to be tied.
Greg Shuey: 9:59
Yeah, I mean step one and then what happens? If your main domain’s flagged, then your employees can’t get emails out like it’s. It’s a mess, right?
Michael Diesu: 10:07
yeah, I mean you want to place that order for your q4 supplies and, uh, it got stuck in spam and you never placed it, like you hear horror stories. So, yeah, you don’t want that.
Greg Shuey: 10:17
Yep Okay. So that’s the first thing. What’s the next thing?
Michael Diesu: 10:19
The next thing is being within that you know your new email domain. You have to be super aggressive in your cleaning and that may sound counterintuitive coming from a SaaS company like myself, but you need to make sure that you’re only emailing the highest intent and most recent folks, right, the highest propensity to buy. If you have a million person list and half of them are like inactive or 60 or 90 days, plus half of them should not be getting emailed, Then you should consider removing them from Klaviyo. You want to make sure that you always have the most recent, relevant and high intent folks in your emails, Because it’s that bottom half that I just, in that example I mentioned, that could get you those five spam rates, five spam clicks, that are going to push you over the edge. So you don’t want to take risks on folks unless they’re at the highest intent of the funnel. Is that a?
Greg Shuey: 11:15
pretty hard and fast rule for you, because I have a lot of clients where we’re running post-purchase surveys and we’re finding that buying windows are sometimes six months out, right, so if we’re scrubbing them out and removing them from the list at 90 days, they’re not continuing to be nurtured. Is that? Do you stick to that? Pretty strong.
Michael Diesu: 11:35
That’s why you need a product like ours, right, because they could be coming back on day 91 and it could be from a different device they have or a different browser, and Klaviyo is not going to pick that up. And so you need to balance the two right Aggressive cleaning, but then maximum identification, so that when they do come back and they do reenter the funnel, you get them back in.
Greg Shuey: 11:59
Got it Cool. Do you have a tool that you recommend to clean your list?
Michael Diesu: 12:03
Oh, I always give a shout out to the guys at Orita. Aaron Schwartz is a friend of mine Interesting. They have a good product. I would say our two products are kind of symbiotic if you will.
Greg Shuey: 12:13
That’s awesome Cool, all right.
Michael Diesu: 12:24
Is there a number three? Well, number three is, now that you have your existing list right Optimal Okay, you should consider rolling out. What we do in our for our new customers is roll out side domains. So it would be try gregcom by gregcom, use Gregcom and that is where you email those colder audiences from. So, like the step two that I described was optimizing your main domain, which should be all of your, you know, opted in most relevant people, and then you use these side domains to email the colder audiences, to react to them Exactly, and then also the incremental ones that I find, people that I identify but aren’t in your list. You should be emailing them on these sidecar domains and only if they click reply or whatever threshold you decide as a brand owner, do we then add them back into the main one.
Greg Shuey: 13:14
Is that fairly automated in clavo to be able to say if someone opens, they are moved from this sending domain and this list into this one. Is it, or is it kind of a beast? Klaviyo doesn’t do that, revenue Roll does that.
Michael Diesu: 13:29
So our product, our integration with them, and yes, then, then, what you just described would would occur, perfect so, and then you’ll push that back.
Greg Shuey: 13:37
Would occur, perfect so, and then you’ll push that back into Klaviyo. Yep, exactly, awesome. Is there a number four, or is it just? Three I keep everything in threes, greg, we’ve. We’ve tapped out, cool. I’m going to actually go back to number one again. So you talked about warming up a domain. Is there a tool that you recommend to warm up a new email address?
Michael Diesu: 13:58
Well, I think, for just to get started, like I’ve used warmup inbox for like revenue rollcom personally, we now have our own in-house warming tool that we’ve developed and use, which our customers are welcome to use. You know there are some other folks in the space that we’ve experimented with and, to be honest, we were never really super impressed, which is why we developed in-house, got it.
Greg Shuey: 14:22
That’s awesome. So you just built all of these different tools and make it really easy. Plug and play, easy peasy. I love it Cool.
Michael Diesu: 14:30
I got two technical co-founders. They handle all that stuff.
Greg Shuey: 14:34
That’s their problem, not yours. I get to have fun with people like you there you go, love it. Um, okay, I know we’ve talked about a couple of these things already, but how does, how do these changes impact a solution like revenue role and what you’re doing for your clients? Have you had to make any pivots or or anything with your product?
Michael Diesu: 14:55
uh, yeah, I mean I feel like you just heard the main one right, which is now giving people the ability to retarget these colder folks in a risk-free way. Right, an expendable dollar a month domain versus you know their main domain. So that pivot. Once we heard of this policy coming down the pipe, we developed this product, so that, I would say, is the main pivot. But truthfully, greg, we welcome privacy policies, we welcome regulations because we’ve always excelled operating just within the bounds of those and getting our clients the most data, you know, the highest intent folks possible.
Greg Shuey: 15:33
Yeah, that’s awesome. So outside of the email, you also I mean, let’s just spend some time here. It isn’t necessarily tied directly to email, but you also do some things with ads as well. Right, with the platform.
Michael Diesu: 15:48
It’s been the talk of this industry for a while, but really what we’re trying to fix, greg, is that retargeting doesn’t work anymore.
Michael Diesu: 16:02
Yes, any marketer out there, right, these new blended AI campaigns like Advantage Plus and Performance Max. Now retargeting is coupled or grouped within that process, and these ad networks have less and less data, right, they used to have a bunch of information about all of these people underneath these IPs and device IDs. They no longer have it, because these attribution windows are shorter, obviously, and because of that, they’re not able to retarget well, and so what I always like to say when I’m talking to brands is, like, those blended AI campaigns are really good at getting you clicks, but they’re not good at identifying the right ones and they’re certainly not good at helping you retarget the highest intent ones, and so, like that’s the revenue role thesis is that the best brands today are building up their own retargeting funnel. Email is a part of that, their own paid ads, retargeting campaigns is another part of that, and then also direct mail and other things like that. So we look at ourselves as the data layer that’s enabling superior retargeting again for brands.
Greg Shuey: 17:08
That’s amazing. You mentioned direct mail. Do you offer direct mail as well, or do you just partner with someone like a post pilot?
Michael Diesu: 17:15
yeah, we, we stay in our lane. We’re a data layer, but we do integrate with post-pilot and share local media and folks like that.
Greg Shuey: 17:22
Perfect. So I mean really, you can open up a whole new revenue channel across any of those. That’s amazing, Cool. So the question that I always get from people is how do I make sure that, once I’m compliant, that I stay compliant? Yep, what tools or what metrics are you looking at to make sure that they are living within those sending requirements?
Michael Diesu: 17:50
I mean Glock apps is really a godsend, so it’s actually not that expensive of a tool we can be checking all of our clients domains. Not that expensive of a tool we can be checking all of our clients’ domains for deliverability. Right, are we landing in the inbox? Are we getting opens? Things like that. I say that is probably the number one stat checker that we use.
Michael Diesu: 18:13
Another tool that I think brands should think about is getting up to par or in line with regulations on those pop-ups, like those first party cookie opt-in pop-ups a lot of brands they jump to, like you know the amped uh, give your email pop-up, which is great and I know it crushes and all that stuff. Um, but I think before that, you really should start considering do they accept tracking or not? And a tool like ours integrates directly with that. If they don’t accept tracking, we’re pencils down. But I think, like the bigger brands, especially like in California, you better have that or you could get in trouble quickly. And that’s not Google and Yahoo, by the way, that’s just state governments, but that’s something that we always remind brands.
Greg Shuey: 18:53
Could you spend a little bit of time there, Because I know that Amped is like really taken off. I hadn’t ever heard of it until about two months ago. What do you mean by? I think the word you used was compliant or trap. I can’t remember.
Michael Diesu: 19:10
So this isn’t. This is more of just a branch choice. This isn’t like what the amp product does. What amp does is, when you come to the site, they know when to put a pop up in your face for you to give your email Right, and they get like 10% something opt in rates, which is great. Still leaves 90% for us to solve. But what I’m saying is, before anything happens on the site, you should have a pop-up for do they accept cookies or do they allow themselves to be tracked? Because that’s what GDPR requires, that’s what CCPA requires and most brands don’t do that. That’s what CCPA requires and most brands don’t do that, and that’s, I think, the number one compliance quick fix that brands can do today.
Greg Shuey: 19:57
Yeah, and that’s any pop-up, I would imagine, not just AMP, yeah.
Michael Diesu: 20:01
Anything yeah Got, it Could be the video pop-up right.
Greg Shuey: 20:05
Yep, interesting, cool, cool, cool, Awesome. You know, as we’re kind of wrapping up here, like, where do you see, where do you see things going Like, do you have any predictions for the rest of 2024? Do you see, you know, Google and Yahoo getting more aggressive in 2025? What are you thinking and what is your team thinking?
Michael Diesu: 20:29
Oh, yeah, I mean we’ve we’ve been betting on that, you know, for a year now, so I definitely think that’s going to happen. To put a date on it is really hard, because they already put two dates on it and nothing happened. So, just like third party tracking with Google, they said they were going to roll that out or remove that. Now they’ve delayed it. They keep delaying it. So I I don’t get caught with dates, but I do think that generally, yes, that is going to get more strict and you have to adopt policies or or um business practices like I was describing on this call, yeah, um, yeah, and I think more and more people this year are going to start waking up to the fact that meta retargeting does not work and that they’re going to start exploring ways that they can own the retargeting funnel similar to how they own the retention funnel, right, and that’s where I think you know we’ve positioned our company to be to help and and we’re here- when they’re ready?
Greg Shuey: 21:21
Yeah, that’s amazing. Where? Where do you think targeting is going to go on the ad platforms? Do you think they’re going to continue to restrict your ability to target? What does that look like over the next 12 months?
Michael Diesu: 21:36
Tough for me to say those platforms are really buttoned up, a bit of a black box. I think that, similar to the retargeting aspect, I think long-term, like long tail I wouldn’t say in the next 12 months but the future is brands bringing an audience to meta and saying I want to target these people. I only have 100,000. I want to target a million. Okay, build me a lookalike on top of this 100,000. I think it’s going to be, especially with these policies which, in my view, are designed to promote first party data collection and storage. Long-term, the brand’s first-party data set, obviously bolstered by a service like mine, would then be the source of who they run ads at in the future.
Greg Shuey: 22:21
Yeah, got it Cool. So brands without a lot of data they may struggle.
Michael Diesu: 22:26
Got to start getting data, Greg.
Greg Shuey: 22:27
Got to start getting it right now, right this minute. Start collecting it. I’m always shocked when I come across someone who’s looking for a marketing agency who doesn’t even have a simple pop-up on their website to start collecting data. It’s like it’s 2024. We’re halfway through 2024. It’s crazy, yep, you got to start collecting that data. You got to start enriching that data and then using it to guide your decisions, and I think that that’s where a lot of marketing is going to have to go, not just email. You know it’s like you have to rely on data and be data driven, so I love that 100%.
Michael Diesu: 23:04
That’s what all the Fortune 500 companies are doing, right? They have their own massive snowflake data sets. Like these DTC brands need to start thinking in the same way.
Greg Shuey: 23:14
Yeah, absolutely, and I think I think if there’s, you know, any agencies listening to this as well I think the value that an agency is going to need to provide into the future is that data and that strategic analysis and strategy, versus just executing against marketing strategy. Right, I think that’s how agencies survive. You know going forward as well. Cool man. Well, any final words of wisdom?
Michael Diesu: 23:38
I think I just gave you my best ones, but start.
Greg Shuey: 23:42
It’s just go and get it done.
Michael Diesu: 23:43
Yeah, start collecting data, start building your own data set and have a relaxing 4th of July.
Greg Shuey: 23:50
Have a relaxing 4th of July. Have a relaxing 4th of July. We’re going to try to get this published before the 4th for sure. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. If anyone’s interested in revenue role, please reach out to Michael and his team. They’d be happy to run you through a demo and show you what that looks like for your brand. Again, those will be in the show notes, but I definitely love what they’re doing. We’ve got several clients who are running on the platform and are seeing amazing success and can’t recommend them more. Yeah, thank you again for being with us today. I really appreciate your time.
Michael Diesu: 24:25
Greg, thanks for having me.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
