Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond ecommerce podcast, Greg hosts Michael Epstein of Postpilot, discussing the impact and strategies of direct mail marketing in the e-commerce space. Epstein shares his extensive background in e-commerce and the evolution of Postpilot, which aims to modernize direct mail by making it as trackable and convenient as digital campaigns. He explains how direct mail remains a potent marketing channel due to its proven track record and less crowded nature compared to digital methods. Postpilot’s approach helps brands, particularly those at a scale where they can sustain diversified marketing channels, to re-engage customers and expand their reach effectively, using data-driven techniques and machine learning to optimize marketing efforts.
Video Replay
Key Takeaways
- Long-standing Industry Experience: Michael Epstein brings over 25 years of experience in e-commerce, providing a depth of industry knowledge that informs Postpilot’s strategic decisions, focusing on turning around unprofitable enterprises and leveraging underused marketing channels like direct mail.
- Direct Mail Efficacy: Despite the digital marketing boom, direct mail continues to be a significant channel due to its persistent effectiveness, historical data backing, and the cluttered nature of digital inboxes. Postpilot leverages this channel by applying modern data analytics and technology to streamline and enhance direct mail campaigns.
- Customer Re-engagement: Postpilot specifically aids brands in reactivating unengaged customers through direct mail, which can bypass the limitations of digital channels where customers may overlook emails or ads.
- Data-Driven Targeting and Personalization: Using machine learning and AI, Postpilot refines its targeting processes, enhancing the precision of mail campaigns and improving the relevance of marketing messages to both existing customers and prospects.
- Future Prospects and Growth: Looking ahead, Postpilot plans to further harness AI and expand internationally, focusing on crafting highly targeted, effective campaigns that enhance customer lifetime value (LTV) and support sustainable acquisition costs.
Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Michael Epstein LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mepstein1/
Post Pilot: https://www.postpilot.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg: 0:28
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 18 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. I hope everyone is having a killer morning. Today I’m going to be chatting up Michael Epstein from Postpilot. I would say it’s pretty hard to be in e-commerce these days without knowing who PostPilot is. If you don’t know, they’re a little teeny, tiny company that does postcard marketing. I’m joking. They’re one of my favorite companies these days and they dominate direct mail through some amazing tech that they’ve built, they help brands capture more lost revenue, reactivate old customers and a lot of other really cool stuff, and they’re getting ready to launch a bunch of new things as well to help brands scale their revenue. So buckle up. This is going to be a really fun, really epic discussion. So, michael, thank you so much for being with us today. Great to be with you.
Michael: 1:21
Greg, thanks for the kind intro.
Greg: 1:24
Yeah, I want to start out by saying I really admire both you and Drew and what you guys are doing at Postpilot. I honestly thought when I reached out there’s no way I’m going to be able to get you on the show because I’m just a small fry. I’m at the beginning of this podcast journey, so thank you again for giving me some time. I really appreciate it.
Michael: 1:41
Yeah, of course I’ve known you for a while. I’m happy to be with you.
Greg: 1:45
Cool, all right, before we dive in, would you just take a couple of minutes, introduce yourselves to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today?
Michael: 1:57
Yeah, sure. So, michael Epstein. I’m old, I’ve been in e-com for 25 years at this point. Started a brand in 2000, before Shopify, before Google Ads, before Facebook.
Greg: 2:09
All right, what were you running on WooCommerce? Yeah, it was.
Michael: 2:14
OS Commerce actually.
Greg: 2:15
Oh cool, yeah, yeah which.
Michael: 2:17
I think might even exist still in some form or not today, but obviously nobody’s doing it. But yeah, os Commerce we were running first paid ads we’re on like a go-to I’m going to start really dating myself at this point Predated Google ads, anyway. So, yeah, I built that brand, bootstrapped it to 10 figures over 13 years, sold it to private equity, started doing private equity operating work uh, typically running turnarounds. That’s where drew and I first met over you know 10, 15 years ago at this point and uh, yeah, we, we started basically working with funds to acquire big busted retailers or brands. Typical profile was like uh, nine figures revenue but losing eight figures, losing like 10 million plus, and we would basically get them back to profitable and growing.
Michael: 3:14
And then we’d help the funds exit it and throughout our careers we’d really use direct mail as one of the tools in our tool belt, especially at these big brands. We’d go in. They’d have a customer list of like 5 million customers, right, and then you’d look at the stats and you’re actually only reaching less than 10% of them because by that time most of them are unsubscribed, they’ve never subscribed or they had unengaged with the emails at that point. So it’s like, how do we get some quick wins? How do we get some quick wins? How do we get back in front of these, this rich audience of customers, direct mail. But it was like clunky, it was a stereotypical like find a print house, find paper, batch and blast a whole bunch of people and then use a bunch of spreadsheets to try and figure out what the ROI was. And we were like somebody needs to build Klaviyo for direct mail. And that’s what we did with Postpilot. And here we are.
Greg: 4:05
That’s awesome, and I think that dovetails really nicely kind of into my first question that I had for you is talk to me maybe just a little bit more about why you started the company. Why did you think dang like most brands aren’t sending direct mail? I think something like this would work.
Michael: 4:20
Yeah.
Greg: 4:21
Yeah, I mean most of the brands I talked to. They’ve never sent direct mail in their lives. They never even thought of it. So like, yeah, walk me through that. Like, how did you start that?
Michael: 4:32
Yeah, it’s a great question. So we did have a thesis around direct mail and that was. It was a really proven channel. You know, it’s been around for a hundred years and it’s worked. I mean it still works. It never stopped working. That’s why you still get things in the mail.
Greg: 4:47
I walk out to my mailbox every day.
Michael: 4:50
Exactly. But why I think most brands didn’t use it to your point is it was a high friction, very cumbersome, difficult experience, and a digital marketer a native digital marketer is used to running email campaigns and Facebook ads and having a dashboard and like testing a bunch of stuff and being able to track it really easily is going to not be super enthusiastic about again finding print houses and then sending spreadsheets back and forth to try and figure out. You know how to send direct mail. But you know, know, we had this thesis, that one. It was this proven channel that was ripe for sort of reinvention. Nobody had done anything particularly interesting in this channel. Yeah, who knows how long uh and it worked. And then, second, we we knew that uh, digital was only going to become more crowded and expensive over time. And Facebook ads, meta ads, are increasing.
Greg: 5:48
We’re seeing it right now Exactly. It is insane.
Michael: 5:51
It’s like a dumpster fire, yeah, but it was only going to become more crowded and expensive over time. Emails were only getting more and more crowded. Your email inbox was only getting more and more crowded. Yet direct mail represented this opportunity where it was getting less crowded over time and the price of postage is fixed. So you’re not. It became more attractive on a relative basis. You know, when you could buy Facebook clicks for five cents, direct mail looked really, really expensive compared to that.
Greg: 6:21
Right.
Michael: 6:21
Now you can’t do that compared to that. Now you can’t do that. And as price of postage has remained mostly capped over time, it just makes direct mail look more and more attractive from a cost perspective as well. So that was the thesis, and that’s really played out nicely for us, I think.
Greg: 6:38
How long ago was that, when you came up with this thesis and said I think there’s something here.
Michael: 6:44
It was about four years ago.
Greg: 6:46
Right, smack dab in the middle of COVID. It was right before like right before.
Michael: 6:52
I guess it’s five years ago now because it’s 2014. But yeah, so about five years ago, right before sort of COVID and then right before iOS, and so we sort of had a vision for the product and we’re kind of in the right place at the right time when sort of iOS hit and it really started opening up brands, eyes to the need to diversify, build a more resilient business, find other channels for growth.
Greg: 7:16
Don’t you love that? Right place at the right time. I feel like a lot of businesses. Yes, they work really hard, but luck plays into it as well, of being able to take off like a rocket ship. I love it.
Michael: 7:28
I think you have to credit luck with a lot of things.
Greg: 7:32
Yeah, so talk to me about why it works so well. I mean I’m on LinkedIn way too much. Every single day I see Drew posting case study after case study, comparing post-pilot to email. It’s astounding. I mean, we have so many ways to drive brand awareness, engage prospects. Why is this so dang magical?
Michael: 7:52
Yeah, I think it goes back to people just not necessarily engaging with digital channels as frequently as they used to historically, and I would suggest anybody listening go to, like Klaviyo right now create a segment of all of your previous customers anyone who’s bought one or more times and then create a second segment of anyone who has bought one or more times but has opened or clicked an email in the last.
Michael: 8:24
Call it 30 or 60 days and compare the sizes of those segments and you’re going to see it’s probably less than 10% of your audience.
Michael: 8:31
And you can do the same thing for email subscribers people who signed up for your list fairly recently and then never ended up converting or are no longer opening. So there’s just this high percentage of folks, and we’re not suggesting replace email. We would never say that you should always make your first attempt to, or even your second attempt to, convert somebody off of email because it’s going to be the cheapest. Direct mail is not going to be the cheapest, but it converts higher, and so when you want to get to those people who you haven’t been able to convert off email, it’s a really effective way to get in front of them, get your message to them and then get them to ultimately buy from you, and you can do that for now both customers and prospects. So it’s a great way to just generate incremental revenue and because the conversion rate is high, if you’re targeting folks that aren’t engaging with your other channels, it can look. You know, the returns look really, really good.
Greg: 9:29
Yeah, I love that. I like that a lot. You guys do a lot of different things with the platform. I mean I swear every time I’m on the website you’ve got something new. I mean one of the most recent ones are like the handwritten cards for your VIP customers and I’m mind blown because nobody does that. So because you have so many things, it might look maybe scary to some brands Like where do I start? So maybe you could share with me, like what has been the most popular of your offerings and what has been the most effective. Let’s just say, in Q1 of 2024, what are people doing the most? Sure?
Michael: 10:09
Yeah, it’s a great question One. We have full strategy team, data team and creative team in-house so we can do all of this stuff for you. We know best practices. We’ve seen thousands and thousands of brands and campaigns and millions of cards, and so we know what works and we’ll like make sure that you’re set up for success. That’s why we’re very hands-on, because we know it’s a new channel for most brands. It can be intimidated. They don’t know what, they don’t know best practices, they don’t necessarily have the time or desire to learn a new channel. So we want to make it really easy. But, that said, what are those easy wins? We typically say start lower in the funnel and then work your way up.
Michael: 10:47
So if you haven’t done direct mail, start with retention. There’s tons of easy wins, I promise you, and we can target those existing customers who haven’t engaged with your other channels and haven’t been back in an extended period of time. We can run reports in the dashboard that show you like have they gone well beyond the expected period where you’d expect to see them back, naturally? So you’re targeting this unengaged audience and you’re waking them back up, reactivating them, getting additional LTV, incremental orders from them Easy wins again. And then we can track each of these retention audiences by cohort in a dashboard. So you’re going to say how do my one-time buyers perform relative to my repeat buyers, how do people who haven’t bought in six months perform relative to a year? And by tracking each of those cohorts independently you can say these are profitable groups that I can continue to target, maybe automate. These are groups that are no longer profitable. I guess I can’t go back two years for a one-time customer. I know never to send to that group anymore and I don’t need to spend the money.
Michael: 11:48
So again, start with those easy wins, sort of on the retention side, and then work your way up the funnel from there so we can do things like our mail match. Tech is where we can match an email address of somebody who’s never bought to a postal address and retarget them with a card address of somebody who’s never bought to a postal address and retarget them with a card, and so that’s sort of the next level up. It’s a warm audience but it’s still a net new customer. They’ve gone through your email welcome sequence. They still never converted by the end of your welcome sequence. Let’s match them to a postal address, retarget them with a postcard, try and get that person to convert before you risk losing that lead for good. And then we just keep working up the funnel into site match, which is targeting anonymous website visitors, and then ultimately to things like lookalike prospecting, where we’re taking your best customers, building a lookalike audience the same way sort of Facebook builds that and then targeting cold prospects with cards.
Greg: 12:43
Interesting. So you’re taking the funnel, flipping it upside down and saying we’re going to start at the bottom and work your way up. Well, I mean, basically, you just answered my next two questions. I don’t even know if I need to ask those now. Maybe one follow-up question. Sure, as you go higher up the funnel, what do response and conversion rates look like? I’d assume they get less and less. When one of the ones that interests me the most you said sitematch, that’s the one where it’s an anonymous browser. Is that right? Yes, how well do those work for brands? Because I know that’s interesting for a lot of folks.
Michael: 13:26
Yeah, great question. So the return is going to always just like any sort of campaign, is always going to depend on the audience and the offer. So, targeting more recent, we typically break things up by sort of recency and frequency when it’s on the retention or retargeting side. And frequency when it’s on the retention or retargeting side, how long ago did they buy, how long ago did they sign up? And then how engaged have they been? And then you want to. I’m not going to. I’ll come back to your direct question.
Greg: 14:00
No, you’re good Like a philosophical thing.
Michael: 14:02
A lot of brands think let me maximize my ROAS, and that’s actually not the approach that we like to recommend. The goal is maximize your profits and so if you can get an 8x return on an audience that hasn’t bought from you in six months or a year, you should go back 18 months and two years and two and a half years and keep testing into that and say, if I get a 2x or a 3 X return in two years, that’s still really profitable. So I should, I should still do it. So that’s sort of the philosophical answer. And then the direct sort of answer is as sort of benchmarks or or sort of ranges that we typically will tell brands.
Michael: 14:46
You know, on retention, think five to 10 X should be a good target. Yeah, as you move up the funnel on something like mail match, where it’s warmer prospects, uh, that have given you their email but never bought think more like, uh, three to five. With something like site match, which is a little bit colder, it’s people that have been to your site, clicked around but never actually given you their email or bought. I think more like two to five. And then for cold prospecting, we typically tell brands you should be comfortable in the one to three range for acquisition, If that you know. Can it go higher? Absolutely, we see it go higher often, but it’s not an expectation that we like to set for brands who are leaning into cold prospecting. And think of it like Facebook You’re going to test, we’re going to test different audiences, we’re going to test different creative and we’re going to optimize and iterate from there. Some brands will get a home run right out of the gate, Others will not.
Greg: 15:43
Yeah, and I would say that those percentages that you provided are probably better than some brands get on Facebook for cold prospecting and site match type traffic right, which is just awesome, it’s phenomenal, that’s great. Talk to me about kind of strategy behind this, like, do you work with the brands to kind of set strategy and figure out offers and those types of things, or does a brand need to come prepared and bring those to the table before engaging you? Typically, we’ll, we’ll provide the strategy.
Michael: 16:22
Okay, because we’ve we just seen this a million times we know across sort of every category what best practices look like and what works. And then we have data in our dashboard that we show the brands as well. That suggests sort of how we structure different campaigns. We can say, in your case, 80% of customers who come back and make a second purchase do so within the first 60 days. So we don’t want to target them there because they’re coming back on their own. But then it drops off significantly at 60. For another brand it might be 120 days or six months or something like that. We’ll look at those data insights to inform sort of different trigger points or different cohorts that we want to test.
Michael: 17:02
But in general we’re typically recommending strategy. Then we’ll work with the brands. We’ll do the setup for the brands too. We sort of make it a fully white glove. But if brands have specific goals in mind, sometimes they’ll come to us with that and they’ll say we really want to focus on expanding LTV. We feel like we have a bit of a leaky bucket on retention, so we really want to see if we can move our overall LTV number so that we can reinvest more into acquisition. In other cases they’re like we really really just want net new customers, so really focus on different tactics that can drive net new customers. In other cases they, like you know, just really nice touch points, like the handwritten card. So they’ll help typically give us some guidance on what their primary goals and objectives are, and then we’ll we’ll design the strategy with them.
Greg: 17:54
Cool. Do you just have like a bucket of different types of offers that you pitch and recommend that you could maybe share?
Michael: 18:02
Yeah, so we’ll typically. Uh, because a lot of the brands are running these types of campaigns and other channels. Typically we start by saying let’s start with the offer that you’ve been providing this type of audience already, or maybe bump it up just slightly if it’s an unengaged audience.
Greg: 18:22
So for example One percentage off, something like that, yeah, yeah exactly percentage off, something like that.
Michael: 18:26
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if they’ve been running, say, a 20% off win back offer and they’ve been trying to get to those customers for three months and they haven’t come back, we would say maybe test that same 20% by a direct mail and maybe bump it up slightly to see, because now they’re becoming more and more defected over time. Maybe bump it up and see and then we can track each of those offers. And then, in terms of like, what types of offers again, we typically say be consistent with stuff you’ve already showed them, just so it’s. You know it’s not as confusing or different. But we also recommend to any brand you should always be experimenting with your offers.
Greg: 19:06
Sure.
Michael: 19:06
With purchase things like, or cash back, is a great alternative to just flat discounts, and we would say that, no matter what channel, you’re testing.
Greg: 19:16
Yeah, 100%. I love that. Before we move on to my next big question for you, because I think we’re going to spend a little bit of time there, what size of brand is too small to engage in this type of marketing?
Michael: 19:30
Yeah, great question. We typically recommend a minimum of about 3 million in revenue. Okay, and that’s not because we have a minimum size. We could technically run one card for you. We run our own production. There’s no minimum. Yeah, and it’s not because we don’t want to work with a brand that’s smaller. It’s simply like we’re really transparent around who we think is a right fit and when the time is right to introduce a new channel like direct mail, to be honing in on fewer core channels and developing like really demonstrating product market fit that you’ve been able to crack an offer that starts to get you to some level of scale and then you can start diversifying your channels and then we can help you continue to grow and find other channels to get in front of that audience. But typically we like to say, if you’re less than that, stay focused on fewer things, really demonstrate your ability to start scaling those things and then we’ll come in and we’ll help you really continue to juice those.
Greg: 20:38
Yeah. Are there any who just beg Like no, I want to do this. I’m at a million a year in revenue. I want to do this. Don’t tell me no. And do you see success with those that ever?
Michael: 20:50
there are and we do and we’re not like, look, we’re going to be really transparent and really sort of up front with our recommendations. We do not our our mandate with all of our customer success team is like if somebody’s trying to do something that you don’t have, high conviction is a good idea. You got to tell them that, like really clearly and let them decide yeah, so we.
Michael: 21:14
It’s not worth it to us to have a brand have a bad experience and then go away thinking like direct mail doesn’t work or post-pilot’s not good like we. We want brands to see success and we want to run high conviction campaigns all the time. That’s that if a brand comes in and they have a specific use case in mind for example, we really just want to hit somebody for Black Friday we want to make sure we’re getting to all of our customers, we’ll help you out. If they want to do something really specific a new product launch, another promotion, something like that. They want to do our handwritten cards. It’s just a really nice touch point for their new VIP customers. Say, anyone who comes in and has bought three or more times from us, let’s send them a thank you, a handwritten thank you note, just as a nice touch point. We can help with that.
Michael: 21:57
Typically again, like if it’s something pretty simple and we don’t think you’re going to be spinning your wheels trying to, like you know, optimize and analyze every aspect of it. That’s just not a great use of a founder’s time if the segment size is going to be really small. If you’re doing that so that you can target 100 people. It’s not a great use. We’d rather you focus your time on things that are going to give you a little more scale, whereas once you get above a certain level of scale, then we can really start generating a material amount of incremental revenue. Typically, our goal is like boost a company’s revenue by five to 10%. Uh, in the first, you know, 90 to 180 days.
Greg: 22:37
That’s awesome and that’s huge for a $3 million brand. So, yeah, I love that All right. So when I first reached out to you and I’m like do you have any topics in mind, your response was we’ve got a lot coming down the pipeline. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about.
Michael: 22:59
What are you most excited about that’s coming down the pipeline for Postpilot? I think our acquisition tech continues to get really really good, really good, where we have so much data that we’ve aggregated from a variety of sources and built. You know, we use a ton of machine learning to build these really rich, really robust audiences that brands can now start targeting through lookalike audiences and other things. So, for example, we we we worked with Caden Lane, a baby apparel brand, to target expectant mothers in their third trimester. Like we knew not only that they were expectant mom, we knew where they were in their trimester, a little bit in their pregnancy, a little bit scary, but like a little creepy. Yeah, we can do that. We can find people who are people who buy meat, jerky and shop at Target multiple times a month.
Michael: 23:50
So there’s just a lot of really interesting data and insights that we can help give you. That will be really interesting for you as a brand to understand the nuances of your customer but also figure out how we can target some really effective ones. So, using a lot of the machine learning that we’ve been developing in-house AI because everybody has AI to help not just find new audiences but even further refine the targeting that you’re sending to existing customers and prospects. So maybe this customer should be targeted on day 72, but customer B should be targeted on day 87, based on sort of what we know about that customer. There’s a lot of cool stuff that we’re doing with data to help just further refine and optimize how you’re targeting customers and prospects. So that’s one of the really fun things. We’re expanding more internationally. We just stood up the UK, we’re launching Canada and then yeah, there’s there’s any number of things that we’re working on at any given time. We’re always pushing the team to go faster.
Greg: 24:59
Sure that. Going back to your first point, like really using that data. So I mean, if you can’t share, I mean please, please say, don’t feel like you’re obligated by any means. But are you I’m trying to think through this how this works? Like, are you taking all of your clients and then aggregating all of the data and then figuring out patterns based on users? Is that how you’re kind of doing that? We’re not we’re not.
Michael: 25:25
We’re not aggregating customer data.
Greg: 25:28
Okay.
Michael: 25:29
But we have tons of data that we can aggregate from across a variety of sources and then we can use the customer’s data to model against that Interesting and then say you know, find some really, really interesting insights about each brand’s customers. Both again to inform the brand about interesting insights on their customers and find other people that look like them that is so cool, awesome, um cool.
Greg: 26:00
I mean kind of wrapping things up and pulling it all together, like where do you see things going for e-commerce over the next couple of years? I mean, you’ve got a lot of brands right now who are struggling, but you also have a lot who are growing and having a lot of success. And so, yeah, you know, as I’ve talked to more brands, like they’ve shifted away from this mentality that the brand who can spend the most to acquire a customer wins and we’re shifting more to the brands who can acquire customers profitably wins. And so it’s. It’s shifting business models and, like I said, brands are struggling. They’re trying to figure this out. They’re trying to claw back, you know, margin and profit. Like where where do you see e-commerce going over the next couple of years?
Michael: 26:46
Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I certainly it continues to be an attention game. You know, people are obviously just getting bombarded across every channel, and so how do you create meaningful connections with customers from, you know, throughout the entire customer journey? How do you connect with them through your marketing? How do you connect with them and create meaningful experiences, as you know, throughout their whole engagement with you, so that you just remain top of mind? There’s a great book how Brands Grow by Byron Sharp of mind. There’s a great book how Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. He just talks a lot about salience and mental availability of a brand, and when you can do that, it’s going to allow you to grow both from an acquisition standpoint and a retention standpoint, more profitably because you’re just staying, you’re more top of mind, you’re more immediately recognizable, and so I think that’s definitely one piece of it. It’s just creating an experience that feels distinct, unique, engaging, such that you’re more memorable to a customer next time they’re in the market for something and, to your point, growing profitably.
Michael: 28:03
This emphasis on profitable growth I think we’re rooted in the same thing. I mean, we come from private equity turnarounds, like we don’t know, drew, and I like don’t know how to, you know, just be wasteful at this point. And that’s really how we. It’s really informed our philosophy with Postpilot too. It’s like how do we help brands drive incremental profits that they’re not able to get elsewhere? And to your point, uh, when you do drive higher ltv, you can invest more into acquisition. Right, and that’s really becoming more and more critical because you again, acquisition costs are always continuing to rise. It’s not just who can, it’s a little bit of who can pay the most to acquire a customer, but if you can do so because you’ve been able to optimize the profitability of that customer more than somebody else, you still win. So a couple of thoughts on where I see things going.
Greg: 29:03
I like that, and you know, one of the things that I’ve been preaching a lot over the last I don’t know year or so to prospects and to clients is that LTV isn’t guaranteed, right, it’s like you need to know what it is and you need to figure out how we you know back that out and figure out what your customer acquisition cost needs to be for worst case scenario.
Greg: 29:22
Right out, what your customer acquisition cost needs to be for worst case scenario. Right, and I love you know, drew just wrapped up what was it? The 30 day, the 30 day turnaround series on LinkedIn, and like every post was about cutting costs. It’s like and getting profitable, like it’s just so important for brands. And then I also loved, you know, staying top of mind. I also see a lot of brands right now and I posted about this a couple of weeks ago is, as I’m talking to them, they’re scared, they’re pulling back marketing spend, they’re pulling budget and it’s like when you do that, you’re less top of mind, right, and so you have to balance that, and I’m glad that you brought both of those up. I think that that’s awesome.
Michael: 30:06
Yeah, I think the risk you run to your point is like you go into that death spiral at some point of you pull back marketing, you acquire fewer customers, you can’t cut costs, you can’t cut your way to growth and you can’t cut costs. You can’t cut your way to growth and you can’t cut costs fast enough to keep up with a significant drop-off in customer acquisition. So yeah, try and hold off cutting marketing. Focus on profitable marketing, but try and find ways to optimize your operation before you cut marketing.
Greg: 30:45
I was just going to say that as well. There’s other places you can figure out how to save money and cut costs. Look at shipping, look at packaging, look at overhead. Are you doing five people for customer service when you could? I mean, I think a few months ago we installed Gorgias on top of one of our our clients and uh was able to reduce their head count on the customer service side. Like that’s, that’s ways to save money without cutting customer uh marketing budgets. So I think there’s a lot that you can do there. Cool, all right, awesome, man. Well, that was awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you again for being with us today and thanks for sharing those things. I’m excited to see what you guys bring to the table here in the next few months with your new features. You’re rolling out Awesome. Thanks again. Thanks, Greg.
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.
