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Speaker/s name

Shmuel Herschberg, Chief Marketing Officer, Shyn Media

Description

Until now, many marketers think of automation as only a small percentage of their email marketing efforts, put in place primarily to build welcome and abandon cart campaigns. In this session, email marketing veteran Shmuel Herschberg is challenging the paradigm and paving the way to bring more automation into our lives. Join him for a fascinating talk where he explores how to approach email automation with a new perspective to maximize efficiency and ROI.

Shmuel Herschberg is a seasoned digital marketing executive, who lives and breathes email marketing. He is the founder of Shyn Media, a boutique agency that offers creative marketing automation, content strategy, and digital media services. Mr. Herschberg possesses a unique blend of technological awareness coupled with strategic thinking and customer psychology. This enables him to translate customer needs into actionable, winning strategies.

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https://vimeo.com/536508957

Transcript

Skip Fidura 0:12
Hello, good afternoon. It's 330. And we're back.

So my mistake, I hope, if you were into the spoken word, session, you realize that it wasn't on the expo stage because that would be a silly place for it to be. And it was, in fact, on the entertainment stage was very, very good. Hope you got a chance to check that out.

And next up, we have, oh, I just managed to lock my computer. There we are. Okay, next up. We have Shmuel Herschberg, who is the CEO and I believe founder of shyn media

Who is going to talk about something that's, you know, I love this, automate everything. Just automate everything.

And obviously, I think he's gonna be talking about it as it relates to email marketing. But yeah, anything you can automate in life, automate it. It makes life so much easier.

Sure. how are you doing?. You all right?

Shmuel Herschberg 1:09
Yeah, I'm doing great. Am I on main stage? Now? You are on the main stage with me. Hello, give us a wave. Hey, everyone. How's it going? So I think you're so smart. I were just talking backstage. And we're trying to figure out when we met first, and I think I think you're you All right, I think it was a Well, I'm not gonna say how long ago it was. Both.

Skip Fidura 1:33
It's when exact target was a brand. So there you go. That just says it all.

Sure. Let's automate stuff over to you.

Shmuel Herschberg 1:42
Excellent. Excellent. Thank you so much for that nice introduction, skip. And also, thank you, Nellie, and Andrew for putting on today's this week's amazing inbox Expo. It's, it's really awesome to be here, you know, for coming from my home. But you know, I really appreciate having the chance to talk with all of you today. So feel free to drop in the comments where you're watching from where? And of course, if you have any questions, let me know. So good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you're watching from. Just let me just before we get started, let me just say you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter, very simple, my handle is small h on both those platforms. So feel free to post, tweet anything about this presentation, connect with me on LinkedIn, whatever. I'd be happy to chat here. And also offline. I've got a great, great presentation today with some fun quotes intermingled in and I think you're gonna love them. So be sure to stick around because the last quote is a shirt with a smile on your face. So let's start with the first quote of the day. So if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. American writer Mark Twain said that, and I bring this up because as marketers, we sometimes get a bad rap. Sometimes we'll put it in a position to sell, even though we're not salesmen, or we're marketers. And when we go to events like this, we sometimes have to tell half truths about you know, what's going on with our company. But the truth is having my own agency puts me in a unique vantage point. It gives me the ability to share what's really going on in the world of email marketing. So the world of shine media is like this. First of all, I'm Shmuel, Trumbull Hirschberg, and I help companies grow their revenues and penetrate their brand by email marketing. I'm the founder and CMO of shine media and I've been involved in email marketing for over a decade as skip sent earlier. And in the world of email marketing, I basically do four things email audit, where I am bold, where I bold in my clients, email marketing program with the best industry practices implement, and jumpstart their brands into the world of email marketing, I help brands also migrate and then I also run the full suite where I basically, you know, work as email marketing executive, for for for these brands. So, I want to have a frank discussion about email marketing, and automation in particular. So full disclosure, I obviously I'm gonna be, you know, getting over some strategies that I use with my clients and stuff. But, you know, it's gonna be a bit of a blended of blend blended results and strategies and stuff like that, but I know we're gonna have one heck of a discussion today. So again, thank you for joining us. Now going back to the client data is easy, but the truth of the matter is the impetus of the Today's presentation is called from a call that I had with a potential client recently, she wanted me to help her company with email marketing. And I asked her to define automation. That's right, I asked her, you know, I guess I flipped this flip the script. I've been in business long enough to know that, you know, you know, when someone says they want to have email marketing, you know, few, and they're kind of wishy washy about it, they're not really sure what's going on. So. So I asked, I said, Well, what what do you mean by marketing automation, and they kind of just were like, you know, we want to have a welcome email, and then we'll send out more emails like afterwards. And by the way, we have our own internal messaging system that we sent emails out. So you know, that like, kind of, like, stopped me, you know, deer in the headlights, whoa, you know, I think we have a little problem here. Now, I've got nothing against the company's capabilities or aspirations. But when a company says they're doing their email marketing, I kind of say, I kind of believe they're not serious about it. And after looking at this stuff, I, you know, I confirm my convictions that this person was just really scratching the surface of marketing automation.

And I believe marketing automation is a lot more than that. It can be hard. But as one of my favorite authors, a man by the name of Brian Tracy says, says move out of your comfort zone, he can only grow if you're willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new. So, by the way, he also wrote this amazing book titled Eat That Frog. If you haven't read it, that I suggest you do. But back to the statement, it really talks to me, and the world of email marketing and marketing automation. In particular, I love building out complex automations, with wait queries to effectively send the right campaign on the right day of the week, and at the right time. So that was the spark that ignited today's talk, because marketing automation is way more than wash, rinse, repeat, send Wait, repeat sequences. But sadly, that's what I saw with this client. And I hope I hope the people that are here today want to learn more about marketing automation. Because marketing automation doesn't even need to have an email in it. Note, it's called marketing automation, that email automation. And when you push the boundaries of marketing automation, when in fact, when you leave the friendly confines of sending the email and venture out into the unknown unknowns of marketing automation, that's where you finally tap into the real power of marketing automation. And going back to Brian Tracy's quote, you all know, by now, that's where the magic happens. So if I could sum up the world of marketing automation, and a diagram, it would look like this, you know, you have your comfort zone over here. And then way, way out in the distance, you could you move out of it. And that's where the magic happens. And by the way, this is a principle for everything in life, guaranteed. So now we're getting to the meat and potatoes of the presentation, where we're going to delve into the five stages of life and how it pertains to marketing motivation. And I know that you know, there's there's more than five stages to life, but for the sake of time, we're going to discuss these stages and how they relate to email marketing, and marketing automation in particular. In life, we can describe things as infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and then the golden years, and customer lifecycle marketing disciplines like email. We have various stages, even, you know, customer death, also known as churn. Although I've met many people who deny that that's such a such a thing like that even happens, and they have people on their list for years, and years without any indication of life. So for each stage, we'll discuss different things you can do to maximize your automation efforts, and to get everything humming along properly, and most importantly, in an efficient time saving manner to maximize your return on investment. So for each stage, we're going to have a practical discussion about the automations in the infancy stage, we're going to explore what it means like autotrac engagement events means in the childhood stage, we'll talk about list management in segments. And in the adolescence, we'll talk about like queuing and reporting automations that you can run. And as we talk mature into adulthood, we'll explore actual campaigns and how you can make things go evergreen. And then, obviously, last but not least, we'll, we'll talk about those golden years, and stuff like a sunset policy. So the first stage is infancy. And when I'm brought in to companies to run their email marketing program, sometimes it's because they don't have the focus to do it in house. And I understand that we all have our unique talents and abilities. But at the same token, I'm running a lean program. So I'm often given little to no access to the development team. Having said that, I am responsible for building out an infrastructure that is able to run without the help of 1,000,001 Software Engineer integrations, which brings me to exhibit a set up your auto tracking for engagements, before you bring your campaigns to life. This is this is really, really important.

Before you even have contacts on your list, you know, like parents before their baby's born, they start doing things in advance in anticipation of that baby being born. So the same thing with email marketing and marketing automation, you need to build out automations that have to do with tracking email opens, click, click throughs things like site visits, and you tag that on to the customer subscriber record. And then you can understand when people are looking at your emails, when the last time they saw an email, when the last time they clicked on an email when they clicked into their site. And it helps you with segmentation. And that last point, by the way, is really cool. Because I know email service providers can can track on the micro level. Now, you know, Google when they're doing site tracking in Google Analytics here looking at the macro level, you see how many people actually visited your site, but you're not really getting a picture of what schmell hershberg did on your site. But in email marketing, automation tools, you can actually build out these automations. So that on a subscriber record, you can actually know exactly when people and where people are visiting your sites. And then you know, you could use that information to build out you know, really cool animations. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Now. Once we have that data, we're ready for the customers and the world. And that's what we're talking about the welcome funnel funnels. And I actually love this. You know, in past years or in the past years, our email industry has really evolved for more than just, you know, sending out a welcome email. It's more than just, you know, sending out that welcome email waiting 24 hours to send out another one. So in addition to sending out email, email, emails, and the second email of a welcome email sequence, be sure to put in intelligent waiting periods. And by this, I'm talking about following people what they do with your initially now for example, you might have a second email for people that clicked on the welcome email, you might have a different copy for people that only opened the email but didn't take any action with your email. And last but not least, you also want to make sure that if people aren't opening up your welcome emails, you want to have maybe a different strategy for them. One strategy that you might want to actually try is a pure text based email. Now obviously, this email cannot won't won't have a tracking pixel for open so you want to make sure that that you're that you have a strong call to action in there. So you could actually track the seek attract the click throughs. But this is just a good way that you can get your emails going. And the other thing you want to really do with with waiting and intelligent waiting is also time zones. So in b2b right, let's say someone signs up for your E book, right? On a Friday afternoon. You don't want to send that email on Saturday or Sunday for that matter. You actually you actually want to wait. So Bill put in intelligent way periods like is it Saturday or Sunday in your subscribers timezone. And that will help you also deliver a better a better message in your set and your follow up emails.

Okay, so we've come to the childhood section. And, you know, like child, you know, you have this little kid, and it's really exciting because you have a chance to really finally get to know them, right. And when kids are growing up, they try a bunch of turn after school programs, parents often sign up the kids, you know, a child for a basketball program in a cooking program. And now, they often have little or even nothing in common, but that's okay, because we're trying to understand who the child is, what his or her interests are, and what they excel that. So to an email marketing, when someone joins my email list, right half of automation funnels that add people to different subscription lists based on what they sign up for. Now, I like to get people on as many lists as possible. And I'll be honest, it's not because I want to spam or slam people with emails from every single list every single day, it's just that I want to mitigate my risk of unsubscribes. Right, spread your eggs into different baskets. Because when if you're going to send from the same list, and someone unsubscribes from that list, then they're gone for good. But if you actually build that in a funnel, that can actually spread the people out onto a different list. When you email them from those different lists. They're gonna only unsubscribe from those list. Now, two caveats for permission based mind and email marketers like myself, one, always be clear on why they're getting particular, you know, tell them you're getting this because you're subscribed to brand X's lifestyle, y newsletter. This way, they won't be alarmed when they get an email from you about your weekend, z newsletter. And the second point is, please make it clear that they can also unsubscribe from everything if they so choose to. The next thing I like to do is push subscribers to the preference Center. This is a great automation, whereby you can automate emails and encourage people to get on more lists. So it's kind of like a two way street. Before we spoke about how they can unsubscribe and get people, you know, onto different lists. And when they sign up. And here I'm talking about what if they don't sign up for multiple lists to actually build that automations to get them on to multiple lists. And the rule for this can be pre determined based on your needs. For example, people will open specific emails, or people are visiting specific, specific sections of your website, might be interested in other newsletters that you have to offer. And you should start automating those signals to get emails out to the right people at the right time. Now, on to adolescence, this is where I equate to QA reporting, and this is fun, I like to use automations to figure out where everyone is an automate for reporting functionality that your email your email service provider might provide. Now, QA automations are especially good for post migration projects, which I know of, and when you also when when you move on to a new ESB, you might migrate your list to QA and everything is running most efficiently. But behind the scenes automations. This doesn't entail any, any emails at all, right? And by the way, even if you are moving to a to a new, ESP, right, you should try to do this quarterly and set up to make sure that everyone is everyone is that's on your list is going to find a way on two lists that are being sent out, right? You don't want people that you kind of forget about that they're there. So you have to run automation to figure out which which lists people are on and make sure that they're also getting emails from those lists. And speaking of QA should also be getting your subscribers to QA, your work with feedback funnels, so find the people who are engaging and build feedback funnels for them. And this is also it's not just people that are engaging positively, it's also people that are not engaging. So lapsing subscribers find out when, you know, let's say it's 90 days or let's say 60 days, right a few days before then you want to kind of have a an automation journey that will capture them before they actually get into laps. Because you could really, really learn a lot from these people. So the next step of adulthood is adulthood. And this is where you know making everything. evergreen, right? Great broadcast emails, right?

Great broadcast emails are great newsletters are, should not just be a one trick pony, you should actually use them multiple times. Now, adults, like, you know, they have everything figured out. So when it comes to automating things at this stage, I look at the top performing broadcast campaigns, the best newsletters, the creme de la creme and the subject lines, right, and the front name combos, and the top items, methods that garner the highest click rates, and even the conversion rates and gross revenues, and then go back to the pegboard. Right and figure out where I can replicate this in a marketing automation. Now, most likely, it will go back to the beginning of the customer journey, especially with b2c brands. And that's totally fine, because the best time to sell is right after their first purchase. And what I'm saying might be a lot controversial. But what I found is that getting people to open their wallets is harder than that, getting them to pay. So once the wall is open, right, try to get as many purchases as possible. You know, and Amazon is an excellent at this. Because when you're buying stuff you want, right? They're upselling, you stuff you don't need. And actually, that's a little joke, because the truth is their algorithm has gotten so good, that some of the recommendations are actually actually very useful. So when you see a campaign that just like really rocks it, make sure you implement it into an automation, right? Don't Don't, don't just, you know, have it and say that was a good automation. So that's, that's the second point about automation. Now, before we move on to the golden years, and what that exactly that means for more marketing automation. I'd like to bring up one last quote. This one comes from Ben Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of the United States, he said this, after the US Constitution was adopted, he said, after a life of inventing things, like stuff from like the lightning rod, and bifocals, and establishing things like the fire departments, and a university, he was pretty sure and hopeful about his fledgling new country, but he couldn't be certain, obviously. And he was also actually kind of old at that point. So he said, our new constitution is now established, everything seems to promise, it will be durable. But in this world, nothing is certain, except for death and taxes. However, if he lived in the 21st century, I'm fairly certain that he would have added one more example to the certainties of life. Yep. Cool. Ben Franklin, would have added in email to his famous book. We all get them. But the question is to what n. One, will we start getting emails from that free ebook we downloaded in 2005? Or one will that company that holds a raffle to get my email address? Even last, you know, last year decided to stop emailing me or Bernie, even from the company that I signed up last week and asked supporter, if they deliver to Israel where I live, by the way that that company doesn't deliver. So you know, you could kind of tell like, I'm not really interested in their service. So will they stop sending me emails or not? And I think these are all valid questions, us email geeks need to ask. So my friends with this, these questions in mind, we're ready to tackle the last stage of marketing automation, the golden years, this cleaning, sunset policy. Right now, I'm not being pessimistic about about, you know, about the golden years of life and I want to say it out, right, we should all be blessed to get to old age in good health and happiness. But just like I pointed out, Benjamin Franklin said, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes. And the same goes for email. So we need to stop think thinking of unsubscribed as a one way street. Right now, in the past, we used to think of unsubscribes like that, but we have to stop that once people start becoming lapsed subscribers, right? Whether it's 60 days, 90 days, 120 days, whatever works for you, then you need to catch them with these reengagement campaigns. These automations right. And of course, if They, if they don't meet, engage, remember that not everyone stays on your list forever. So make sure you have a sunset policy. And the sunset policy pick up right after the reengagement automation

ends off, or it can be done in relation to gdrp policies in the EU ccpa in California, or, or based on Canada's anti spam law. For example, one client of mine actually sent me a directive from their legal team telling me that I need to delete contacts that have no interactions with us after a certain amount of time. So instead of, you know, going to the system every single day to build this out and query it, I had an automation that basically has a funnel based on if they're purchased or free members. And then the system sends me an email telling me that, you know, people have hit this funnel, and then I have everyone in a very easy place to find. And then I could actually just delete those subscribers. And this helps me stay compliant, which is great. Because being compliant is really important in today's email marketing world. So let's recap the five stages of marketing automation. But instead, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and the golden years, let's review the five stages, but the analogous concepts that we just developed and apply it into marketing automation. So in the infancy stage, we spoke about auto tracking engagements, right. And we spoke about laying the groundwork, before the subscribers are actually in your funnel. Then we spoke about the childhood where it really was about all about the list management and segments and how to actually automate people getting onto different lists, and also automating campaigns to to encourage people to get onto more or less. And then in the adolescence, the QA reporting automations, right, we spoke about how we actually need to build out automations to help you do the right querying. So you make sure that everyone on your list is, is being taken care of. And you don't have people that, you know, for some reason, they just fell off, and you don't have them anymore. And then also, as we mature into adulthood, we have the campaign exploration, right, where we're actually looking at the campaigns and trying to figure out how we can automate the best ones. And then finally, we can have the sunset policy to you know, remember, trim the fat, and keep only the relevant subscribers on your marketing program. And, you know, if you do that, if you, I'm pretty confident, you'll see your results skyrocket, and people on your teams will be in awe about your efficiency as you become a true email marketing, automation, Ninja. So, I want to thank you, again for taking the time to remember I keep it easy on LinkedIn and Twitter small h is my handle sh m U. Ah, and again, I'd like to thank you all and hopefully, I look forward to meeting you all in person one day very, very soon. So with that? I am I am finished with the presentation. I just need to find Skip, skip. Are you there?

Skip Fidura 28:38
I'm here, mate. I was here like a voice from heaven or something. I'm here.

Shmuel Herschberg 28:44
Yeah.

Skip Fidura 28:44
That was great presentation. Thank you very much. I absolutely love that whole life cycle analogy. That's, that's the kind of thing I would do. Listen, quick question for you. What two things one, I love the Ben Franklin quote. And it reminded me of an interesting book that I read, called t mail. And that tml is about how Abraham Lincoln ran the Civil War. Using the Telegraph, and how it completely changed his structure. I don't know. For some reason those two things connected in my head, then, but but the question that I have for you is well, let's talk about reengagement emails for a second, and we do only have a second. But here's here's the question I always, always comes to my mind when we talk about reengagement programs, and reengagement emails. If you re engage somebody, what you were doing before clearly didn't work. So do you have to change Do you have to deliver your reengaged pa a different program? Like do you have to come up? I mean is one thing to put an automation programming that says, Oh, you haven't engaged with us in X amount of time, and therefore, I'm going to send you a couple of automated emails to try to get you to re engage. But once you're really engaged, how do you how do you keep them engaged? Because what you were doing clearly didn't work the first time?

Shmuel Herschberg 30:16
That's an excellent question skip, and I don't think we have enough time to explore all the avenues in that, but I think for sure we are we've evolved, you know, beyond that, one, you know, there's only one email that that can be sent to a client, and that's it, even within an email there, there can be strings of dynamic content that are they're dynamically inserted in. So I think tagging is obviously a very, very important tool that can and should be used for this to kind of develop different strategies, you know, there's so many different ways that we could build out personas. And that that is, I think, the key to how we actually you know, keep those re engaged subscribers by by you know, putting them on different tracks, based on you know, different demographic variables that you that you might have, obviously, gender age, interest likes, stuff that they bought before. And, and then try try try, you know, shifting gears with with them on to different different, different different different programs. One client I have, like, you know, we have actually eight different automation funnels, like in the early stage based on based on specific parameters. So, like, for me, you know, it's based on facts will be easy to kind of like shifted, if I know that something is more pertinent to that person.

Skip Fidura 31:54
That's really interesting. That's really interesting. Actually, that's, that's something I like, I like how you started that answer with that's a longer conversation than we have time for now. Sounds like you and I need to get together offline and put together a speaker proposal for some conference, because that would be a really interesting conversation to dive deeper into.

Shmuel Herschberg 32:12
Yeah, for sure. I'd love to do that.

Skip Fidura 32:15
Cool. Listen, mate, more. Thank you very, very much for your presentation. Again, I loved Love, love the whole life cycle analogy.

You might want to jump into the chat because there is a question from Anna Jimenez in the chat that we didn't get she just came in. I want to jump jump into stage chat and answer that. But for now, thank you very much.

Shmuel Herschberg 32:39
Thank you. Thank Thank you all. Again, and again. Let's Let's hope Andrew and Ellie next year. Where are we going? Barcelona, London. Let us actually,

Skip Fidura 32:51
actually, I think yesterday, it was decided that we're going to Russia. Nice. Yeah, yeah. Now the name of course, it says I said that the name of the town just went out of my head. But anyway, okay. resign, resign. It's near Moscow. And apparently it is the there are six csps there. So it's like the capital of email.

Shmuel Herschberg 33:11
Wow.

Skip Fidura 33:13
Yeah. Okay. There you go. Cool. All right. Thanks a lot. So, ladies and gents. That was a great presentation. I really enjoyed that. So next up, we have another presentation, which I'm really looking forward to. It is recorded last month via Sorry, it's via a through an extra syllable there. Apologies for that ricardas. He is the global strategy director at map digital and he is going to be talking to us about well, he's going to ask the question, are we measuring email marketing wrong? So that presentation starts off at 415. Come back then, and we'll find out what we've been if are we doing it right, are we doing it wrong?

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