Episode Summary
In episode 19 of the 7 Figures and Beyond e-commerce marketing podcast, Greg Shuey converses with Jimmy Kim, the founder of Sendlane, an email marketing service. The podcast highlights Kim’s entrepreneurial journey and the evolution of Sendlane.
Video Replay
Key Takeaways
- Origins of Sendlane: Initially a solution for personal needs rather than a business, Sendlane was co-founded by Kim along with partners who were later bought out. The company grew from a basic tool to address specific e-commerce and email marketing deficiencies into a comprehensive marketing platform.
- Product Expansion: Sendlane has recently expanded its product offerings beyond email to include SMS, reviews, forms, and soon, push notifications and WhatsApp integration. This diversification aims to provide a unified tech stack for customers.
- Deliverability and Market Strategy: Sendlane focuses heavily on email deliverability, leveraging their expertise to stand out in a competitive market. They emphasize understanding the evolving landscape of email systems and spam filters to better serve their client base.
- Future Focus: The future of Sendlane involves incorporating AI to optimize lifecycle attribution and sales cycles for merchants. This strategy is aimed at increasing efficiency and profitability by predicting customer behaviors and purchase timings.
- Entrepreneurial Insights: Throughout his career, Kim has pivoted from various industries, including automotive and internet marketing, to focus on Sendlane. His journey underscores the importance of adaptability and understanding market needs in building a successful business.
Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Jimmy Kim LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkimsendlane/
Jimmy Kim Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/yojimmykim
Sendlane: https://www.sendlane.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg: 0:26
Greg Shuey. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 19 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. I hope everyone is having an awesome day today. Today I’m going to be chatting with e-commerce celebrity Jimmy Kim. Oh man, that’s awesome. Jimmy’s the founder of Sendlane. Are you the only founder? Do you have partners in this business?
Jimmy: 0:49
No, so funny. You know one of those weird business stories. We started this thing not because it was a business, it was a solution for our own selves. So I had two other guys that were putting money in with me to build this thing for ourselves.
Speaker 1: 1:04
When we started business.
Jimmy: 1:06
those guys didn’t really come along. So the business I’m the founder of, I am the co-founder of the tool, but the founder of the business, so it kind of flip-flops a little bit. However, when they got paid out and they did well, they had equity in the business when we launched it as a business and then, you know, eventually we bought them out in 2021, but, like technically, technically, uh, I have co-founders, but they’re not co-founders of the business.
Greg: 1:35
Interesting. I don’t know, that makes my head hurt. Yeah, it’s it’s so.
Jimmy: 1:39
I just call myself the founder, because I haven’t had anybody to work with me. As long as I can remember, I’ve been the founder.
Greg: 1:46
That’s awesome, Cool. So if you haven’t heard of Sendlane before, I mean, the question that I have is what rock have you been living under the last few years? You guys are you’re making some noise?
Jimmy: 2:00
Yeah, no, we’ve. We’ve found our way of breaking into the market and we’ve tapped into the community quite strong and we’ve got a little playbook that we created that ultimately worked.
Greg: 2:13
That’s amazing. Again, if you haven’t heard of Sendlane, they are a unified email, sms review and forms. Forms is new. I didn’t know you had launched forms. How long has that been?
Jimmy: 2:25
Only about a month and a half ago. So we’re just moving, man. We’re evolving on the Forms right now, getting better and better. It’s pretty good now and we’re hoping that a brand does not need to go to a third party and we want to deliver that experience on our side because, honestly, the data alone is worth a lot for everybody and helps everybody out together.
Greg: 2:46
So, uh, yeah, that’s been our newest product release and we’ll continue on this year with a couple more I love it awesome and I would say that you know, right now you are by far clavio’s biggest threat. I’m sure if you’re in e-commerce, you’ve heard of clavio. So I mean, now’s the time to look into Sendlane and see some of the cool things, and I’m excited to see what you guys have in store. I know that maybe we might talk about a couple of those things today and, yeah, I just want to start off by saying thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to be with here Always a pleasure. I love what you guys are doing. You’re pushing boundaries. You’re giving Klaviyo a run for your money. So, before we dive into our conversation, would you be willing to just take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about yourself? Tell us about your personal story, how you’ve gotten to where you are today and whatnot?
Jimmy: 3:41
How far are we going back? How far do you want to know? You don’t care, I don’t care man, give me five, 10 years.
Greg: 3:47
I want to learn about you.
Jimmy: 3:49
I’ll, I’ll give you. I’ll give you a. I’ll try to keep the story brief, but also make sure that I’m touching on some points. So I’m a much older than most people think that I am. That starts, uh, the most younger than I. People think I am Right. So I am older and I’ve been around for quite some time.
Jimmy: 4:05
So in my first career, I worked in the car business. So my story goes one of these weird stories. I always have weird stories. But I was coming out of school in college my freshman, my sophomore year and I used to wash cars in the summer. That was my summer job. I started that in 16 years old and even when I went to college I was doing that. I was coming back.
Jimmy: 4:23
I came back one year and, unfortunately, well, they were full right, they weren’t waiting and holding a job for me. As much as I thought it was special, I wasn’t. So, you know, as I was saying bye to everybody and leaving, uh, one of the general managers pulled me aside and was like hey, like you’ve been around these cars for so long, you’re old enough to sell cars. Why don’t you just sell cars this summer instead of washing them? We need some salespeople, we need some floor coverage, come on up.
Jimmy: 4:45
And I was like, okay, so I went home, found a suit of some sort to put on and showed up the next day and the rest is history from there. And essentially that I went in my first month, did really well, was a salesman of the month, made a ton of money. And I looked at my parents and told them you know, we just saw this dot com bubble thing happen in 2001. Like coming out in a computer science. You know, whatever I ended up doing was not going to make me that much money and I’ve made almost half that money in just a single month doing this.
Speaker 1: 5:16
And so.
Jimmy: 5:16
I said let me go do this, I’ll go back to school. Well, I never did end up going back to school, but I did stop. I went into the car world and I did that for eight years basically, and I rose through the ranks. I eventually got into finance finance directors, general sales manager then eventually I was a general manager, I was general manager of Saturn store and then in 2008, when the whole economy bubble burst- that time again, we had to pivot because Saturn was no longer going to be in existence and we had to move and we became a Kia store.
Jimmy: 5:49
And that’s kind of where my first pivot of career happened. And at that time I was burnt out. I was tired 80 years, 80 hours a week. I was grinding, I was making a lot of money, but it wasn’t like a good happiness. And so I looked around and I had this friend, a friend of mine named Anik, that was running this thing. It was this internet marketing thing that he was running. He was teaching people how to do PPC marketing. He was doing PPC marketing. He was, you know, he was building these email lists and all this stuff in the world, doing this big affiliate marketing company. The hundred pre-filled in there. And so I said to him and he was friends with me and we just never really talked about work. I don’t know if you have friends like that we just don’t didn’t talk about work, we just talked about life. And one day we started talking about work and I told him what I did and you know he knew what I did. But we I told him about how I’m feeling and you know that I want to make a pivot and we made an agreement. He said come.
Jimmy: 6:40
So that was my introduction to the internet in 2008,. Man, and so the first thing I learned, obviously, was the internet had a lot of money to be made, and I fell really quickly in love with email just because I learned that if I can grab a tribe of people, I can send them something and even if it’s bad and they click on it and make a purchase, you could make money, especially in affiliate marketing. Right, it was a very one, two, three kind of thing, and so that was like my first inkling into learning the love of email ultimately. So I started my life learning email and affiliate marketing and that led me to kind of the similar trajectory that everyone else you do it for a while, make a bunch of money, start teaching it, making more money doing it. So I was a content creator back in 2011. I was selling courses and doing webinars and classes. We’re using GoToMeeting and we would teach people what we’re doing, how we’re buying traffic on Facebook back then and when the rules were much easier, where you can send people to just a squeeze page and collect emails. We were doing all that back then, and then eventually, that led me to my clothing company. So how’d that come into place?
Jimmy: 7:41
Well, I had a friend. He’s a semi-famous DJ in Las Vegas and he had this little clothing store. It was a little boutique store. Well, he was coming out with his first cut and sew line, where he was developing his own shirts instead of using blanks and selling third parties, and he needed money. He needed money to fund this big PO that he had received. So I ended up lending him 50 grand and I said here’s 50 grand, we’ll figure out how to pay it. Good luck with your sale. Well, it’s sold really well, and so forth.
Jimmy: 8:09
So a couple months later, I walked back into the business and I was like, hey, like, let’s talk. I haven’t I forgot about it, honestly, but how did it go? Blah, blah, blah. And he told me and I was like, wow, that’s when I knew that, like, the moment happened where I needed to talk to him about being a partner. And that’s what we did, right? So I partnered in instead and we ran his online store and we started to build. This online business went from a boutique store to a full direct to consumer brand. That over 10 million, 2016. So you know, we we ran some pretty good numbers and we grew really fast. Now, where does that all come into Sendlane? This is the interesting part, and you’ll see like my stories always mesh in the weirdest way.
Jimmy: 8:48
But Sendlane started in 2012, 2013,. Because, as affiliate marketers and as e-commerce merchants, we couldn’t find tools that would work for us. Mailchimp was too basic and Bronto was really expensive and we couldn’t afford Bronto. We couldn’t afford. We could afford MailChimp, but it wasn’t doing the job. That we had and it was other tools like Aweber and GetResponse and iContact. They were out there, but, like, no one was really that different back then, cause there was only so much you could do. And so, uh, this is where myself and my other two guys their business. They had their own businesses, their own things. You know, my partner, my, my guy who taught me Onyx, was one of the guys who needed a platform, too, for his business. So we put our money together and we put in 10 grand a month and we built a tool, basically, and, uh, that was the early inklings of Sendlane, of what it was. It was actually called Targetly. Back then we were we didn’t even we didn’t know what it was called, but it was called that and we built this tool, generated over $150 million between the three of our businesses with the use of email.
Jimmy: 9:49
And then, in 2017, I all again that content creator company became a software company, sold and then I acquired, so I exited that business. People bought all those assets out. I exited my clothing business because my partner and I were starting to have creative differences at scale. Just, I’m a capitalist, he wasn’t, he’s a, he was a. He’s a visionary and product guy. And, uh, we we’ve ran into some issues there, but we ultimately parted ways. We’re still friends today, of course, but I parted ways from that and I looked around and I said what should I do next?
Jimmy: 10:14
And I looked at Sendlane or whatever it was back then and said, you know, there’s probably something we can do with this thing. And so I looked at that and I said, but I don’t want to go build another ESP. Like I wasn’t stupid. I saw all these other ESPs in the market and I said, well, what do I really want to do? And I kind of looked in the market and I said, dude, I need to build the unified future, like when I was a brand in 2016,. It’s no different than today. I used to use so many dang tools, stack. The tech stack was worse than ever back then. Now we have the perfect tech stacks, but back then it was a crazy amount of stack and we didn’t really know how to use it, control it as a merchant and so forth. So I said, hey, how do I start building for this future?
Jimmy: 10:53
So I always had this vision of building. I even had my first seed deck still my first time I was raising money, building the future. And the only thing that’s different from today and now is I had ringless voicemail on it because I thought that might be kind of important back in 2017. But eight years later, obviously, now that things could turn to push notifications and everything else, but back then that was a thing ringless voicemail. But besides that, I’ve always had this vision of how do I bring down together this entire life cycle post-life cycle stack. Because I always understood for my business one simple thing getting a customer first time is great, but that second one is profit and I need more profit in order to make money for my business, right? So the faster I could get someone to make that purchase, the more money I can make. So the theory was and it’s still, the continuous like vision and push that we had was, basically, if I can get all the data around everything they’re doing, from you know email to SMS, to the reviews they’re leaving, to the loyalty programs they’re doing, to how they’re browsing, communicate with customer service If I get all that data together, I can start predicting when a person will most likely not only make a purchase but how to accelerate a sales cycle for a merchant, essentially, which will effectively increase cash flow, which will increase the bottom line for the business. So that’s kind of the vision that I’ve been building towards and it was really interesting.
Jimmy: 12:12
Obviously went all in on. It had to go sell because we had no money and didn’t know how to raise money. So we just went to go sell the existing product, which was not very good, but we just went out to sell it because we had a great reputation in market and everyone knew we made money. We were top of market in a lot of the places that we did, so they just wanted to use us because of it. But, though it wasn’t a great tool, people used it and we knew one thing, and one thing only, which we know a lot today, is deliverability. Right, that’s what we were kings of and that’s what the market knew us, as is like the kings of deliverability. Just because we were able to do the, you know not saying I’m ever proud of it, but it was great, right? I mean, at one point or another, great ESPs and great marketers come out of spam a bit and we were doing pretty dark stuff back then at one point or another, and it got better and better over the years.
Jimmy: 12:57
But when you learn with those kind of principles, you tend to know the inners and workings of a platform, especially with deliverability. It’s evolved over the last couple of years, no different. It’s all the same basic principles. We learned a lot of that. We built it 2018. We raised some money, finally, after getting some traction, and found a great company called Zinc Capital that wanted to fund us. They gave us some money. We built it. Took us three more years to build the real platform. I didn’t think it would take us this long, but it took three years.
Jimmy: 13:29
So we came launched in 2021 with email. 22, with SMS. 2023 with reviews. 2024, we have with forms. Today We’ll effectively launch push notifications and WhatsApp this year and hopefully and I doubt it, but hopefully I deliver my next product, which is going to be customer service later this year and then next year we’ll be tapping into loyalty and then hopefully, with that final piece of it we’ll tie in all these little loose end tools that we need to bring in and then eventually start solving lifecycle attribution using machine learning and AI to optimize for the merchant, to increase sales cycle.
Jimmy: 14:05
So like that’s the way that I’m tapping into AI into the future, because I understand it. I’m not trying to layer a chat GPT layer wrapper across my application and call that AI. That’s just lying to people and people don’t realize the power there is behind it. They just don’t know that. We’re just not ready as businesses to be able to institute something like this, you know.
Jimmy: 14:24
So that’s kind of my vision of like what working on. It’s been a very similar vision for the last God, seven, eight years now, and you know it’s been a really a heck of a ride man and it’s been one of the hardest rides and the most expensive educations I’ve probably had. Because you know, for me, you know, being a startup, the first couple, four years I didn’t pay myself, so I was living off my expense of my, off my previous, and I look back and I don’t know if that was very smart, but I did it. And here we are today and you know, obviously we’re on the right trajectory. Now it’s not over, it’s still very early, but it’s very much that we’re at a much better place and we’re almost at a place where I say like we’re not going to die ever now at this point as a business you know, and that’s a good place to be.
Greg: 15:05
That’s awesome. I love that and I love that you’ve had this vision for so long and have just been head down executing. Like you don’t meet a lot of people who’ve been head down executing for seven, eight years. Like you said right, they get bored, they get distracted, they get freaked out, they pivot and it’s just like wow, that is amazing, Cool, and I’d like to go maybe into a little bit deeper in some of those things that we just talked about. But one of the things you talked about is kind of the evolving landscape of of email and deliverability, and I feel like over the last few years, we’ve just seen so many changes, so many changes. So what are things that you know brands need to be thinking about when it comes to that evolving landscape of email marketing?
Jimmy: 15:52
Yeah, you know that’s a great question. You know when? I think it’s always been interesting with brands because most brands have expected deliverability, not understood what it even meant, right, like they have never had a look. When you’re working on customers most of the time and then you’ve got some little bit of prospects and I’ll pop in on opt-in, like the quality of hygiene is quite high and when you have good hygiene it’s not a problem. Now there’s now third-party tools or intent tools, there’s other data sources People are trying to get information from, they’re trying to tie in this list and that list and there is this whole mentality that I think the world continues to latch onto, which is the more people I can get, the more money I will make. Unfortunately, the world of spam filters are going to protect that from actually happening the way that you think. Now, in 2008, greg, I used to go find a list. I’d go buy a list, I’d go put it through some cleaners, I’d hammer it out and make a ton of money off of it.
Jimmy: 16:45
No doubt back then it was a true Intel story. I wish I sent more email back then. I’ll tell you that right now. Right, but as the filters are coming in, I always tell people like, take on alternative perspective. Instead of thinking about why is my business not able to get here, think backwards. Okay. Now, when you think backwards at, like, the email level, who uses the email? The consumer. What is the consumer? And the business of the email provider? What is their job? Their job is to give you the best experience, the best customer experience. Just like we try to give our best customer experience, they are trying to give the best customer experience to that user. So now they have to build their filters, thinking backwards to where that goes into place, which is where behaviors, engagement and data come into place. Right, right, they want to make sure that when a user comes on their platform, they’re checking all their email, they’re clicking the buttons, they’re doing different things, they’re using filters, they’re utilizing tool and they’re checking back often. And what creates people to come back often in email tool, like in Gmail, is you have an email from somebody that you want to read from right. So, customer experiences where deliverability has been this unique challenge, because they’re trying to make it better. They understand that marketers are out there this is where DKM and DMAR come in but they want to reduce the spam footprint. So what do they do? They add a technology layer on it. Now you’ve got to identify yourself and put yourself in the public. You need to do things like making your domain, who is public, not private, because these are important for spam filters to know that you’re a real business, right? So, like, things like that start happening, right. And then the second layer that they’ve been doing, and this has been happening for a while and I think people are freaked out because it’s really interesting. But the closing net has been happening for a while.
Jimmy: 18:22
Back in 20, 2008, it was all about batch and blast. We didn’t care if you opened or clicked or whatever. You just sent it, and the larger you get, the more money you’d make. And there was no principles behind it. Yeah, you can add recency, frequency and all that stuff into your math, but, like, honestly, it didn’t matter because the filters are so open and you played the game of numbers. And then, somewhere around 2015, 2017, we started to learn like, hey, there’s these things that are called spam filters and we need to start tightening up little nets. We’re going to use active, engaged, right. And so we got into that and you know, most people did well, because most people pegged on the open rate, which is more or less a trend line than it is an actual hard fact data, but it’s a good line to give you an indicator what’s going on. And so now we’ve continued to move on and, as we’ve gone on, data and privacy has become the biggest thing, right. So you take the technology layer and now you take on the whole fact that people want to have better privacy and data. So you get less data back, right, and that’s kind of been kind of the interesting thing which forces the marketer often to have to start tightening that, segmenting those data points so that you know different things.
Jimmy: 19:26
Look, a customer, in my opinion, has a much longer life cycle than a prospect. Very simple, right. If they’re not buying, they’re probably not interested after 30, 60, 90 days, especially depending on your life cycle of your purchase, versus a customer who can come back 365, yada, yada, yada. But at the same time, a business owner should be truthful to themselves and say if only 30% of my customers are ever making a second purchase. How many of those customers should I expect to retain? Well, there’s your answer. Backwards, you should expect to retain 30% of your customers and you’re going to lose them off of cycle. So a lot of these deliverability principles are all around better customer experience and delivering email that people want to read.
Jimmy: 20:04
So what has happened now with April and that’s probably been the biggest and latest update is now they’re starting to put. They had that whole technology layer first. Now they’re starting to push on the spam layer 0.3%. At 0.3%, gmail’s effectively saying you are sending spam and we are going to block, halt, throttle you until we feel that you’re going to send more and people are going to react about it. Right now it’s a really low number.
Jimmy: 20:27
I get it and I don’t think that Gmail is going to hold it at that harsh of a level. But they’re setting a guideline because they want to see what’s happening. Like Gmail, for example, doesn’t even track an open, for example, what they do track is they track if you clicked it, if you delete it, if you archived it, forwarded it, replied to it. Like these are the actions that Gmail is tracking. They’re tracking time of the email, how you’re looking at it. If you open it and then delete it immediately, open an archive and save it, all of those actions have a different scoring algorithm within Gmail, so I think it’s a combination of all of this, but they can’t tell the marketer or the end user all of this, so they just tell you that it’s based on spam score.
Jimmy: 21:05
So that spam score number is 0.3%. I’ve seen it. It definitely hurts people, but the good news is is that it seems like it’s a slow rollout and people are making those adjustments on it. Now. Well, people and brands have issues. Dude, in the last three weeks I’ve probably had more customers or prospects sorry now customers, but prospects coming to my door with delivery ability issues coming in. Right, it’s starting to show up more and more in the last two, three weeks coming to my door with deliverability issues coming in.
Jimmy: 21:31
It’s starting to show up more and more in the last two, three weeks and I think it’s going to accelerate and people aren’t noticing because they’re not getting into the nitty gritty. Look at their 30, 40, 50% open rate, but they’re not jumping into the nitty gritty of what’s actually happening. Let’s break it down by TLD, which is the top level domain, right, like Gmail, yahoo, verizon, whatever it might be. Let’s break it down. We should be looking for those numbers, looking at how those are doing. It’s my Gmail and my Yahoo and AOL Well aligned, right they should be. That’s a data point. That is the best practice. They should be well aligned. How are my other channels doing? And those things will start telling you how your real health is behind yourself, behind yourself, and people are starting to understand that. People are understanding deliverability is thing. I know, like my competitors got this big like chart that tells you how bad your deliverability or good it is, and it’s really just using the basic data points, nothing special, but I think that that’s going to be a continuous bigger awareness.
Jimmy: 22:22
And then June 1, which is the next kind of last piece of it, which is around unsubscribe, which most brands. Everybody has that already done. That was already already kind of like not a. It was a quiet enforcement back a couple of years ago when they brought that thing out. Now it’s just becoming more and more prominent because they want to force it. I think once that happens we’re going to really see where the spam score really lays out on.
Jimmy: 22:44
But today I would say that they are slowly throttling it. They’re trying to let people figure it out. They’re trying to let the systems clean up their systems. If you’ve got age contacts over two years, for example, on Gmail, they’re sunsetting those and they’re sending these bounce back emails to us and the ESPs are taking those and processing it right. So, like these things are all happening and I think everyone’s going to get better and hopefully by summer we’ll stabilize back down. But right now it’s a little bit of a rocky environment out there as these kind of new rollouts are happening today. So that’s probably the best thing I can give you on deliverability today.
Greg: 23:17
No, I love that. That’s perfect. I’m glad that you brought that up. I was curious how kind of those changes have impacted brands, and it sounds like some are definitely experiencing that, so that’s awesome. That’s good news for you and your business. In your introduction, when we were talking a little bit about kind of how you’ve gotten to where you are, you mentioned AI. Right, like AI, you can’t log in to LinkedIn without seeing people talking about AI. How do you think AI will impact email and SMS and these channels in the future, if it’s not already?
Jimmy: 23:55
Sure, I think that I’ve always said this and I think people worry too much about the weirdest ways about these things. It’s going to be a great 10x accelerator for people and it’s going to eliminate the need as many people Marketing teams were already lean. I think we’ve already been heading that direction as tools right Tools have been enabling marketers to get leaner and leaner. Ai will come in at the marketing level and continue to, so that might be a quick auto-optimization of an image or writing you the base layer of copy. The thing that won’t go away is the strategic side of what.
Jimmy: 24:27
Email and SMS marketing is right, and I think this is where this is something I talk about kind of often in the market. But email and SMS marketer is different than a retention marketer. A retention marketer to me is a strategic marketer who looks at everything across inventories, customer service. They’re working within the business to make the decision, to make a you know what I mean To drive the program to make a result based around the business needs, not to dress drive pure revenue off of the email and SMS channel Right. So what I’m seeing in the market is very simple. If you’re just an email and SMS market and you haven’t started to evolve and start realizing, like, audience data segmentation, uh, you know, looking at your other channels of a customer service and inventory and business goals and businesses and working on PNLs, like those people will be just fine, but the people who are struck there, we’re going to need less of those people, right, right, you’re not going to need copyrighted designer, uh, you know, uh, like a program manager or whatever they.
Jimmy: 25:24
Whatever these larger organizations tend to have, they usually have a bunch of people responsible for a bunch of different things and I think that it starts getting less and less because you just don’t need those people. So that’s where I look into the future. Like ChatGPT has only given us a very unique small sliver of what can be happening in the world, and I know everyone thinks for some reason that that is the most cool things. And if you’ve got a simple layer where it can write you a subject line or you can type in what the segment is and you write it out, like that to me is like a very poor use of it and it’s giving a lot of misconception around it.
Jimmy: 25:58
I look at this as you know where we’re heading with. This is going to 10x. We’re going to try to accelerate. We’re going to try to auto optimize. We’re going to give the strategist or retention marketer or the person who’s overlooking the bubble, to be able to look down and see it faster. That’s what you’re going to help them do right. You’re going to be able to see it faster. They’re going to execute on it faster, which is going to turn results faster, and that’s what I think I get really excited about into the future.
Greg: 26:21
That’s cool, I like that. So I guess if we’ve got any email marketers listening like, now’s the time to move upstream, right, yeah you need to start expanding your mind.
Jimmy: 26:32
You can’t just be an email marketer, you can’t just be the designer. You have to be more. You have to be the strategist. And it’s not just strategy on email, but your whole retention stack. Yeah, you’ve got to think about loyalty. Your review programs, like all of these all tie in together and if you can tie the string together, you are the most valuable person because you are the strategist across the entire thing, not a single sliver of the business.
Greg: 26:54
Yep Strategist that you send lane. There you go.
Jimmy: 26:58
Yeah, there you go. I like that.
Greg: 27:00
Because you’re going to have a lot of those tools here in the future. So that’s awesome. I love it.
Jimmy: 27:05
Yep.
Greg: 27:06
So you also talked about some of the things. That, of those things, what would you say is the number one and number two thing that you are most excited about, and why?
Jimmy: 27:21
I think if I’m giving two places right. So let’s see, I think the number one most excited thing I’m well, let’s start number two and I’ll go number one afterwards. So number two most excited thing we’re building is the customer service experience that we’re building. The reason why is I think there’s so many tie-ins of sentiment, data, ability to work and do things that are missing today with integration, and I think we’re going to bridge a really unique gap. Now I’m not going to get super into high level automation efficiency, but the thing is with us is we have a workflow builder already, so for us it’s already there to build that automation experience, so it makes that layer already. So for us it’s already there to build that automation experience, so it makes that layer easy. So that’s my number two one. I’m excited about that only because I think it’s. I remember, even as a 10 million merchant, I talked to customers and I’m like what do you do? I don’t want to spend money on that and I just use Gmail, for example right, it’s a disaster.
Jimmy: 28:30
It is and I’m like well, I can help you with that. I don’t have to make the most highly expensive crazy system. I need to make one that’s better than your Gmail that you have today. You can do, because every year we get closer. This year we’re tying some of these other pieces. In Next year we’ll start to really start tapping into it and I can’t wait.
Jimmy: 28:44
I mean, we’re hiring data scientists and different things right now, and the goal for me is the more I can expose and kind of create, I can start giving back out, and that gets me really excited, because that’s, I think, the thing that everyone’s been missing in this market and if we’re going to evolve this space, the way I’m going to evolve this space is to bring you more data, but also have something that can do it and work it automatically for you and then spit that back out. Right, if I can tell you that you need to move this flow of six hours, this review, one day, and optimize these three emails because they’re just poorly performing. It’s going to be a predictive engine that is going to be useful, not just dynamic injections or writing you new subject lines. So I think about the future in that way and I think that we’ll continue to see where that goes. But that’s where I’m excited the most right now as I think about where we’re headed.
Greg: 29:35
Is the customer service piece kind of like a stripped down? Uh gorgeous, is that kind of what you’re thinking?
Jimmy: 29:41
Yeah, it’ll be we. We focus. Okay, Email and SMS will always be best in class in our company. Everything else that we’re building later on down the road is going to be what I call the 80%, and what I say is 80% of customers use a very specific part of the tool.
Jimmy: 29:56
I’m focused on that. If you need highly specialized, you should still use Gorgias. We’ll have an integration to them. It’s going to be great. But the reality is most people don’t need that level and are stuck in this weird place. So I’m not looking to this place, gorgias. Actually, anyone who invests in Gorgias, in my opinion, is investing because they have a ridiculously high caliber of what CS might be today.
Jimmy: 30:15
Right, I’m looking for those who are using a lighter solution today, using no solution today, and I want to help empower them. Get them in folders, give them a little bit of marketing power, be able to add sentiment tags and you search the words and you know, ultimately, over time, greg, like it’ll continue to build and become better and better. But the goal is really that focus. Like I’m not looking to displace, like, if you want to go off and you know, use the greatest and latest. I’m not going to be the latest and greatest in customer service, but I’m going to have the tool available because if you do use it, I could do something magical with it. And so it’s the weight of do I care about this or do I care about money and that’s hopefully I hopefully am leaning on the right side, which is money for in my mind.
Greg: 30:54
I talked to a lot of prospects and when I asked, what are you doing for customer support? Oh, gmail. I’ve just. I have a, I have a company Gmail account and I just want to bang my head against my desk and for a lot of them, gorgeous is overkill. And so having kind of a uh, I don’t know if stripped down as derogatory, like a derogatory, but like the 80% right.
Jimmy: 31:19
Yeah, it’s a focus tool for the things that most people need. That’s the way we think about it.
Greg: 31:24
Yeah, cool In terms of your data, like you talked about. Is that just going to be on the email SMS side? Are you going to be able to pipe data in across the board and be able to like show all of the different touch points and customers? That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right.
Jimmy: 31:40
It’s not just email and SMS. Now we’re going to have review dates. When did they leave a review? When did they visit a review? Right Like, when did they log into the loyalty program? How did that work? When did they drive a ticket? Was it a negative or positive sentiment, like?
Jimmy: 31:52
think about the data that’s floating out there that we’re not using in the human sentiment, because we’ve known now behavioral is way stronger than behavioral data is way stronger than, uh, financial data. Right, financial data is one, but like behavioral data what they’re doing inside of it. So the better I can track and see the human behavior on the real, actual touch points, not just visiting your site, but when they do think that when they leave a review, when they, you know, get more points when they check that email, like that story starts to tie in really quickly together and you start creating patterns of those users. And when you start understanding the pattern you can quickly optimize for the experience.
Greg: 32:28
Yeah cool, I love it, yeah. So what’s coming down like the pipeline in terms of just e-commerce? Do you have any predictions for this year, going into next year?
Jimmy: 32:42
What’s this going to look like? Yeah, I think we’re due for our next cleanup and I think it’s kind of happening right now.
Jimmy: 32:47
And I mean this in the nicest way, but I remember in 2016, 2017, when iOS 14, all the changes started to happen in 2017 and things were imploding into people and there was a lot of agencies that were lost. There was a lot of brands that died because they’re too heavy in different places and their product was not good enough. I think you see the best products survive. You see the best marketers survive right now, but it’s definitely a choppy environment right now. I think that, as much as the media pumps this positive noise of where the economy is, I definitely, on my side working with merchants, know that merchants are struggling right now and there’s still definitely some that are moving up and to the right and doing well, but the majority of them are either flat or down a little bit.
Jimmy: 33:32
And it’s not just me, because I’m seeing it as they’re on other platforms, not just Sendlane users, so like it’s the constant of what I’m hearing. Plus, I talked to a lot of people and so I think that when you see it this early being choppy, are we going to recover this year? Probably not, because it’s also an election year. So election years are weird. Election years are always weird because the uncertainty something that even people that don’t care about politics suddenly care just a little bit about politics on a political year like this, especially one that’s so big this year that’s coming up with a lot of drama behind it that’s been brewing, frankly, for the last four years. So you know there’s that, plus the economical conditions spending powers down, money costs more Like these are things that are just harder when you’re working on direct to consumers. So two things I see is obviously the number one is like we see the choppiness. And then the second thing I’m seeing is I’m seeing more diversification and I’m really happy to see that.
Jimmy: 34:24
I’m seeing more people jump over the Amazon, more people jump into other channels outside of just direct to consumer. Like direct to consumer is awesome and some brands will do great in it, but there’s a lot of brands that will be better if you’re doing it in a more mass marketable solution. I also see a lot of retail happening, which has been great. I mean, some of my biggest brands are bigger in retail and faster in great tail and things are growing faster than their direct to consumer. Their direct to consumer is just a good gross margin business that’s going to come help them continue to grow. So those are kind of the two things that I’m seeing in the market right now. I think it’s going to be interesting. It’s definitely a challenging year, though I don’t think that anyone’s dancing in joy right now with everything that’s going on.
Greg: 35:03
Yep, and if they’re dancing in joy publicly, it may not be dancing in joy privately. Yes, that too. That too, oh man, awesome. Well, do you have any final words of wisdom for our listeners?
Jimmy: 35:16
Nothing really, man. I talk about a lot of the things that I talk about quite often publicly. So LinkedIn or Twitter, if you want to talk chat my DMs are always open.
Greg: 35:26
But yeah, always great to kind of chat on these pods and share what we’re working on and what we’re building towards. Awesome. Well again, I really loved our conversation. Thank you again for taking time out of your schedule. We’ll make sure to include Jimmy’s LinkedIn. You spend time on Twitter, then, as well.
Jimmy: 35:44
I’ve kind of gotten off the platform. Yeah, I’m very strong on well X now, so yes, I do spend a lot of time on X as well as well.
Greg: 35:58
Cool, we’ll make sure to add that link up on the show notes as well, so that you can follow him and engage with him, and yeah, that’s awesome. So thank you again for being with us today.
Jimmy: 36:03
Yeah, absolutely. 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.
