1648 – Understanding Your Audience on a Personal Level with Code Crew’s Alex Melone

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0:58with us right now alexander malone and andre marine gentlemen you are the co-founders of code crew you're found on the web at code crew.us it's great to have you thank you for joining us and i was so excited because i don't often get to interview and have uh more than just two people in the room. So thank you each for being here. Yeah. Thanks for having us here. We're a package deal. So we're glad that you let us both come on. Fantastic. I think we can't say much more about ourselves, but yeah, a quick little spiel, I guess about us is we're two of three co-founders. So we actually have a third.

1:38We call her the Supreme boss, but you know, we're her, her lackeys. We do all the, the, the video stuff just cause you know, she's a little too cool for that. But aside, thanks for having us on. Really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, kind of taking a look at your front page here, this is pretty compelling. We exponentially boost email revenue for the world's most exciting companies. Tell me more. Well, we've been doing it for the longest time. We see a lot of value in being niche experts rather than kind of doing, you know, email marketing as part of a grander scheme of things that the company offers.

2:12We see a lot of kind of agencies out there that try to do every single thing under the sun. And unfortunately, they rarely succeed at being really great at more than a single item. And so we've niched down. Alex and myself, we've been in the email space for, I would say, roughly a combined 22 years or change. And then Code Crew's been around for the last five years. We've niched down. We're doing email marketing for a series of different brands, really, as long as they have anything that you could realistically sell online and have a good enough following, we can pretty much step in and make sure that we improve every or any email program out there.

2:54We've been doing it all really for such a long time that we know the benchmarks, we know what they need, we kind of know anything from tech stuff, deliverability, and kind of gruesome topics that a lot of other folks might be scared of, all the way to obviously just strategy, content, design, execution, which goes into every single program under the sun anyway. Yeah. All right. So what are most people doing with their email that maybe they're not doing what they should be? Help us out here. Oh, man. Well, we get a lot of leads in the door. And with a lot of those leads that come through the door, we run an audit, or at least we take a look at the program and see, you know, what they've been doing, what's good, what's bad, what they could do better.

3:39And I feel like more often than not, deliverability is more of an issue than a lot of people see or expect or even know of. And then segmentation as well is oftentimes a key talking point. We do see a lot of brands, especially, you know, those with funding get going up the food chain, get a little bit bigger, doing things usually more often than not pretty well. But that being said, you know, there's always that little hack that only, gosh, decades now, I guess, of experience can really, you know, get through the door for you and really show as added value to the program. Okay. So again, I still, it feels very vague to me.

4:16What's, tell me, what are you typically doing? Or kind of break this down. Imagine that you're speaking to a group of fifth graders, and you're going to explain to them what you actually do, like, what the outcome is. Yeah. Yeah. Joshi, so you and your friends want to put together a lemonade stand and want to start marketing it online, want to start sending out emails. First off, you need to make sure that everybody that lands on your website starts receiving emails kind of on an automated matter. So you need to make sure you have a welcome flow. You need to make sure you have a cart abandonment flow.

4:54You need to make sure you have a browse abandonment show. And then probably I would recommend having a post-purchaser flow on the back end of that, just to make sure that the easiest customer you can get is the customer you've already gotten in the past and you're kind of reconverting him again and again and again. um now what we're oftentimes finding is that we step into email programs and obviously that's the fifth grade version for joshy but uh for clients that are a lot more uh experienced and to alex's point have funding and whatnot we find these more um kind of robust email programs and we jump in and we make sure that the nuts and bolts are tightened down a lot more complexly than just what I've described here.

5:40It just doesn't end with making sure that you're doing campaigning and sending automated messages as well. You need to understand who your audience is on a more personal kind of level. Make sure that you're segmenting out. Make sure that you have a proper sending strategy. For instance, let's say you're sending emails for a brand that's selling kayaks. weird example we've actually had that client not too long ago would somebody that has just bought a kayak in the last four months be likely to buy again no and if so if you're messaging that same person with a sales speech three months into them owning a kayak your likelihood of converting them again is very small your likelihood of annoying them is really really high and so why do that Let's make sure that we know exactly what each segment looks like and what we want to send to each segment specifically.

6:35Because for purchasers, for instance, we oftentimes recommend a much more tailored experience that offers them something else except for just those darned buy, buy, buy messages all the time. Yeah. Was there a change made recently in Google that I thought a lot of people were kind of concerned about how Google was changing Gmail and the ability to track? That really hasn't affected this a whole lot?

7:09you know go for it jay interesting question so i think you're alluding to google analytics moving from the regular one or the older one to ga4 now which has been causing a bit of a a chaos i would say with a couple of our clients who were struggling to get that integration flowing usually we have such a good integration between the esp and the e-commerce that google analytics really doesn't come into discussion in the first place because we're relying on data that we're seeing either on the e-com side of things or on the esp side of things to be able to do proper reporting on the sense that we're uh we're mastering and so i would say no any ga changes haven't really been an issue if that's what you're alluding to if it's something else that it was a tracking pixel that's what i was thinking of yeah yeah yeah so one funny thing is part of our secret sauce here is that there's always a workaround for literally any roadblock that those giants will give us so i mean for instance with uh the ios change flow is it a year and a half ago now um giving a little bit tougher of time for us marketers uh there uh there are workarounds so when it when uh the ios i believe was 14 maybe it was 15 honestly they all blend together at this point in time, there's so many updates, but when it came out, we saw our open rates for all our clients just shoot to the moon, just skyrocket to what about 70, 80%.

8:38And, you know, obviously that's not going to be the case. It was because of a technical change. That being said, we, I don't know how deep I want to go into this just because it is a secret sauce, but we found a workaround that allowed us to actually see real data as to who actually was opening, even though there was a relay, even though, you know, we didn't have nearly as much direct tracking capability as we had before. So I guess the old adage where there's a will, there's a way comes into play here as well. Yeah. So I would imagine you're working with a lot of e-com companies, but who else are you working with and what sorts of outcomes have you been able to create with them?

9:14Again, by looking for, it sounds like, again, if I were to sum this up, right, Looking for opportunities to better, more personalize the email experience and not just treat email like just like a newsletter repository where you're communicating the exact same message to everybody. That is a missed opportunity. Exactly. You know, one of the more up and coming spaces that we're seeing turn up as of, I think, the last year and a half to two years here has been actually the B2B space. So historically, we have these big corporations that have really big sales teams that get on calls with clients and bug them all day long.

9:58But now a lot of these teams are starting to see the light in actually being able to be in your clients' inboxes, have them be aware of you, have them be reminded of your existence without bothering them to the extent of actually phoning in and asking what their day is up or how their day has been going so far and whatnot. not and so we've been building up our b2b um arm of the business um yeah so far especially throughout the past year i would say here with them again seeing a lot more value in being able to be proactive about the way they're selling rather than reactive either waiting for those businesses to call in or calling incessantly until they ultimately either um get asked not to call anymore or get the sale because yeah, email is still a personal way of sending a mass message still, but it's not as intrusive as getting on a call with your clients.

11:01And so we're seeing this space evolve quite a bit more because you've kind of brought up e-commerce and asked what else. B2B would be a big what else that's happening in the past year here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how powerful would that be? You know, and it was just on a, I'm sure at some point I had opted in for, it was a past guest and I was on his website because someone was sharing it with me. I was like, oh yeah, I know this guy. So I was kind of looking around his website. Well, wouldn't you know it? I started getting email from him all of a sudden. So, and a very high ticket B2B and, you know, clearly got on a radar.

11:41Not only that, but was sending me emails about the individual pages I was looking at as well. We're sorry. Oh, it was you guys.

11:57That's great. That's great. So that would be, again, just another example of what you could be doing. what does that look like to implement something like that? Like, you know, technically from an investment standpoint, what does that look like? Honestly, it's just another example of a triggered message as Andre was alluding to a little bit earlier. You know, if as marketers, we have a lot of data on what people do on the websites. I'm sure that that's, you know, news that everyone knows at this point in time. And so, you know, we can't see when, for example, Josh, you land on, you know, Josh's Lemonade stand.com slash, you know, contact us.

12:36We'll know when you're there. So, you know, we can go ahead and take that metric, that data point, go ahead and turn around and use, you know, first understand your intents, you know, why you're on that page specifically, you know, more often than not, we know that just, you know, without having to do much strategizing in any way, you know, it's, it's pretty, pretty obvious what you would be doing. And then from there, we go ahead and, you know, just craft a message, make sure it has, the right angle, the right twists and turns, everything that you would want more information on, and go ahead and send it to you at the time that testing shows us would be best.

13:07We could go ahead and send it immediately. That being said, one thing that we abide by here is always test every single thing you can, because more often than not, you'll learn something new. I can't even count how many times at this point in time, we've been solid in our thought and saying, you know what, this is going to work. Josh is going to want this email at seven in the morning. because, you know, that's just what the industry best practices tell us. But what if you're not awake at that time of day? You know, it's not going to be the right time. So again, just trigger messaging is always a really easy way to make sure that, you know, we're just hitting people at the right time and getting people that messaging that they're interested in, whether, you know, they specifically ask for it or not.

13:49You know, as long as you've been there, we know that you want it. What size company? Oh, go ahead. Please, please, please. No, I just wanted to say, in case your question was kind of more along the lines of what kind of software do you need? How much should you be investing into getting there? You know, funnily enough, when Alex and I started being in this space and acting in this space and learning the ropes and whatnot, it's such a long time ago that these kinds of things used to cost thousands upon thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars every single month. Thankfully, software has evolved massively and competition has evolved massively.

14:25And so right now you can get an ESP going for free if you're small enough. Usually for, let's say, a brand that's, I would say, 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 subscribers in, they would probably pay anywhere in the hundreds of dollars every single month for the ESP. They probably have the e-com expenses figured out by now anyway. and you don't need much else. Sure, you would probably need an agency or a freelancer or a hired expert to run email for you. But other than that, you don't really need much else in order to be able to start implementing some of these things. So thankfully, it's gotten a lot cheaper lately.

15:04The bigger the brand, the more diverse the data points that you might need to be able to be as efficient and as tailored as we were talking a bit earlier about. For instance, think DoorDash and think about all the millions of data points those guys have. We've been on the account. It was interesting to say the least. And just think about all of the complexities that you need. You need a very powerful tool that will not cost hundreds of dollars by any stretch of the imagination. It will cost a lot more, probably in the tens of thousands of dollars at that point. But I don't think you're tripping over the ESP cost if you're DoorDash.

15:42Yeah, no kidding. So your website is codecrew.us. First off, who should be reaching out immediately and what would you recommend they do? Absolutely, everyone. Oh, maybe not everyone. We've had some pretty funny calls in the past. But anyone who wants to see results, anyone who is at that point in time where they think, you know what, I've outgrown what I can do, what my team can do in some cases. and they want to see what their email program can do for them. Yeah, let me quantify that a bit better. If your email revenue is less than 10 % of what your e-commerce revenue is, reach out. Big time.

16:27Yeah. And again, the website, codecrew.us, what would you recommend they do when they go to your website? Go to our contact page or even on the homepage. I think we have a place where you can reach out to us directly. And, you know, we just love the chat. From there, we'll go ahead and hop on a call, see what you're doing, see how we can improve and, you know, just make your life a little bit better, at least with some jokes, if not with some actual revenue coming your way. Yeah. Awesome. I appreciate it. Well, again, the website, codecrew.us, Alexander Malone, Andre Marin. And again, say hi to the big boss for me.

17:06It's great to have you guys. And again, great for the, thank you so much for the conversation. Like Josh, it's been a real pleasure. Take care. Yeah. Thanks for having us.

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