Adam Torres and Dan Nikas discuss email marketing.
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Show Notes:
How can e-commerce businesses use email marketing to drive 30% of their revenue? In this episode, Adam Torres and Dan Nikas, Founder of Elite Brands, explore email marketing and automation.
About Dan Nikas
A former Homicide Detective Sergeant of 17 years, Dan turned his Policing skillset to eCommerce in 2015 when he founded & ran Gearbunch turning over US$4m in it’s first year.
Dan has since become an in-demand Keynote speaker at industry events worldwide & sits on the advisory board of many organisations.
Dan Nikas now brings his expertise exclusively to Elite Brands.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Dan Nikas on the line and he’s founder of Elite Brands.
Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on Adam. It’s great to be here. All right, Dan. So we got a lot to talk about today. So we’re going to talk about driving revenue with data driven email marketing strategies for e commerce. For the people that have been listening to this show for a long time, they know I’m a big fan of email marketing and, I’m always less learning, looking to learn new strategies and to bring them to my clients as well, into my I should say to my audience.
That being said, just to get us kicked off, Dan at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories. So that’s our mission and that’s what we do. What mission matters to you? What do you do? My mission is to help people. I had a career as a police officer, I was a homicide detective for 17 years.
Wow. By transitioning out of that career into online marketing really. Oh that’s because that’s a natural transition. That’s obvious. Very normal. That’s obvious Dan. Okay. But the two. I can’t let you get away with that one man. Well look it’s. Okay, there’s two things that go with that. The first is people remember it like, oh, he’s the dude that used to be a detective.
That’s cool. The second is fundamentally the, similarities between the two. And they’re not obvious to start with, but the first is helping people. That’s what I miss about being in the police or being a police officer. I miss helping people. I get to do that through talking to people like you, helping other brands, got my own brand, like just generally being.
You know, they’re for people. The other thing that marketing is, is similarity that it has to being a detective is it’s the skill is to find people. Now I refined that skill a lot during my career as a police officer, I would find people who committed homicide and there was no incentive for me to find them.
And they generally tried to hide from me. So moving into online marketing, I found it a little bit easier. People weren’t trying to hide from me when I found them. There was something, there was a reward at the end for them, service. And generally people tell you everything about themselves online, what they have for dinner, what their kids name, who their kids are, where they get school, even more so than what we want to know sometimes.
Right. Sometimes a lot more than what we want to know. So look, it’s yeah, look, it’s the transition is not a natural one, but it was something that I found that I had a knack for I’d moved out of policing. I joined, I went to the police. How’d you discover it? What was that? What was that moment or that first thing when you were like, you even found out what online marketing was, cause that’s not an intuitive thing.
Like just to even to even stumble upon it. I remember I, I, my first four way was just kind of like, I saw this guy on Facebook one day and I’m like, what is this guy talking about? And that’s where I got introduced. But do you remember when you first even realized it was a thing? it was out of desperation.
To be honest, I went to the police academy when I was 19. All I ever did was that. And then went to university, college, I never got a trade. I had no other work experience and you can’t transition into another role with another company. You’re either a police officer or you’re not. And I ended up getting medically retired.
The job did take its toll on me, especially the office role. And I needed to find a way to make a living. And, but I also didn’t feel like I was, you know, I was worthy enough of going out and starting another career or finding another career path because I felt like I’d failed at my career, although I hadn’t, I realized I hadn’t, but I didn’t feel that way.
So I sort of hid behind hid at home and behind a computer for a little while and just thought, what am I going to do? I’ve got three kids, a young family, mortgage, beautiful wife, I’ve got to do something. Found out, Hey, look, you can do this thing called online marketing, make money online. So I started When you first got into that, when you first saw it, was it like, almost like it wasn’t real?
Like you had that, like, that’s how, I mean, I’m telling you when I first saw it, I’m like, come on, is this real? Like for real? And then it just like, I started very skeptical. How did it start for you? Cause you didn’t just see it like, Oh, that’s what you do. It doesn’t work that way. Well, I started it, I started a fitness blog.
Like I’m really into my fitness and, you know, being a dad and you know, having this career and doing shift work and how do you stay healthy? How do you stay fit? So I started doing that and then started getting a lot of traffic to it. And then I thought someone said to monetize it? I’m like, well, I don’t know.
Like people just come to the website and they read my blogs and it’s me posting about what I do every day. It’s guy, a friend of mine said, Oh, this is thing called affiliate marketing. You can go on this site called click bank and you can go and get some fitness products and you’re a click bank guy.
Way back when you’re taking me back, go ahead. That’s amazing. And I still remember thinking, Oh, I don’t know if I can make some money out of doing this, would be great. And I remember getting my first check, like that actually sent me out. It didn’t end up in the bank account. It was a check and I think it was for like 27 us or something.
And that was the most amazing thing ever. Wasn’t it? You’re like, this is real. What is actually real? And I can go and cash this now. And that just, and then I thought, well, how else can I monetize it? So I got into some apparel and then I’m like, well, I can only sell to my audience so much. So I got, I took a course by a bloke called Donald Wilson and it was life changing and I credit him for my initial success and he taught us about Facebook ads back in the day.
This was like 2012, 2013. Wow. This is when they were giving them away. Yeah, they were giving them away back then. I didn’t know. I didn’t, I mean, I knew, but I didn’t know until now you see where it’s at now. And you’re like, what? That was like a gold mine of like, it was sanity for those that knew those that knew were printing money.
It was easy, but then you coupled that with my background of finding people and all of a sudden I had this platform where I could like hyper target, hyper focused target people that I wanted to sell things to because I knew everything about it. This is before Cambridge Analytica data lakes.
Yeah, I was just going to say, if you’re talking that early, then all the tools that they’re creating now or that they’ve tried to, you know, they’ve made it better and better. You were doing that before those tools even existed. Yeah. Exactly, exactly, and it was, I just, and I thought You’re the original detective on Facebook ads, that’s amazing.
Yeah, so then I, I was doing this, and I was like, well this is, This makes sense to me. I can do this. I can sit at home. I can work for a few hours a day, get the ads up. Sales just come in. This is, this is great. So it’s that people’s like going, well, how are you doing this? You’re doing something. I said, I’m doing what everyone else is doing.
I took Donald Wilson’s course and you know, this is what we’re doing. And they like, no one else is doing it that way. I figured out a way to do things differently. So I started selling t shirts for a company called Teespring. That did exceptionally well. I then launched my own brand in 2016 called Gear Bumps.
That’s still around. It just had its 8th birthday. Congrats. Congrats. That’s big. Thank you. Thank you. And we’ve gone through a lot. A lot of privacy changes, COVID, everything that goes along with running a business. Eight years later, it’s still around still run it. And it is the sandpit or the proving or testing ground for our agency, elite brands, because I’m a brand owner first, and we test to see if things work on our brand.
And if it does, we roll it out to clients. If it doesn’t, we move on. It’s only our own loss that we have there, but it’s a great way to test theories, strategies, but launched that in 2016. It went from like startup December, 2016 to by December, 2017, Almost 5 million in revenue. Wow. And it was just skyrocketing.
And this was just all on the back of meta ads, Facebook ads at the time. The thing I came to realize is about nine months into that journey, because I’d never had my own brand before. I’d never running my marketing. I was always marketing someone else’s product up to that point. I was leaving so much money on the table.
And when I realized that and I got stuck into, that’s when it really started to shift. It really ramped up. It was amazing. And when did the email part come to like come to like, and focus for you to when, did that become like a central thing to where you’re like, Oh, wait a minute. This is like, this is serious.
Yeah, and it was about nine months into it. So it was just before Black Friday in that 2017. And In Australia, Black Friday wasn’t even a really big thing back then, like no one, no Australian companies were doing it, but I’m selling in the US, I’m manufacturing, selling in the US, I’m like, I’ve got to do this.
And someone said, well, you got to make sure that you’ve got, I think it was Ezra Firestone. He came out with some strategies around Black Friday in my marketing campaigns. It was just like, Is this just sending emails out to my database? I don’t know. And so I dove into it. We had a fantastic Black Friday because we went back to our existing clients with you know, super big discount and that then evolved.
And I’m like, okay, this works. Let’s figure out what this is. I started on MailChimp not long after that shifted over to Klaviyo because Klaviyo is just so much more intuitive and powerful. Cool. And yeah, from that day on at a minimum for our own brand, we were generating at least 30 percent of our, our revenue coming from email marketing, which was amazing.
So, so many brands in e commerce, they may hear that what you just now said, not necessarily a 30 percent number, but that how important email marketing is to, to like monetizing and to to, you know, making use and connecting with and building community with their current existing clients, which in theory be.
Way easier to do than to attract new ones in theory. Everybody says so that being said, why do so many people neglect it? I know, I know you get, I know you get people to this day that have sold a bunch of products they come to, and you’re like, are you sending emails? And they tell you, no, I think there’s, a couple of reasons.
The first is they think it’s outdated. That people don’t read their emails emails have been around since the internet started these same people that think that buy from email I never understand it. It’s like you say have you ever bought something from an email? Oh, yeah But well, then why would you think nobody else would but you would buy something like what?
You’re exactly right! Why do they think that? I don’t know! But am I wrong though? But am I wrong? Or do you get this? Because you’re in that business, so I know you got it. Oh, I absolutely get it. And we just say to people, like, this isn’t like this isn’t just a good idea, like we do it. Yeah! And because it’s my right, I tell them and say, Bye.
This is what we do. And they’re like, I don’t even know what that is because the other thing is they think email marketing is just getting your list and sending a campaign out to say, Hey, we’ve got this on sale or here’s this offer. So they send blasts in these campaigns out good. Gmail ends up putting most of it in spam because having contacted these people in six months, they get all marked as spam.
They get all these unsubscribes and bounces because there’s old emails in there they’ve done no work on and they’re like. This doesn’t work. It does. Oh, I didn’t even think about that. This doesn’t work. That’s a scam. I sent it. It didn’t, we didn’t get it. I’m not retired. So look, it’s, it’s the truth. And I guess that’s where the point of difference is like it’s more complex when people say, but by the way, going circling back to what you just said, that scenario, and , that should be proof to people that it’s not, Outdated or what it was because what the things you’re talking about, like Gmail deliverability, like all these things.
And the fact that you have to be on your game to be effective in that strategy. Now, email is now like it’s become more and more complex year by year. It’s no longer just push the send button and you’re good. Oh, and that’s all I used to do. And I look back at some of the emails I used to send and they’re cringy and you can see why.
You know, they end up getting marked as spam or they didn’t perform very well, but it’s so much more than just sending an email. It’s all about that age old saying that getting a message to the right person. at the right time. And that’s what email marketing is about. It’s not just about sending campaigns.
Like we’ve got a pretty complex flow structure. Now flows are called different things in other platforms. Clavia call them flows. Other people call them automation. Some call them follow up sequences. But basically we track the user behavior on the website and we put them into the correct flow based on their level of awareness or level of intent.
Okay. where they need to be in that customer journey. And we talked to them at that stage of the journey. Now I’m talking initially we’ll set up for brands. If they’ve got nothing at all, we’ll set up seven individual flows straight out the game. We just call them our foundation that evolves massively.
The longer that we’re together with the brand, But we need this. If you don’t have seven flows set up, then you really haven’t got your in my marketing set up at all. And I’m not just talking about, Oh, come back. You left something in the car. Here’s 10 percent off. Like sure that works, but everyone does that.
And that’s not really doing anything except using one strategy to try and get them back to buy something. And that is let’s straight away. Yeah. Plenty of other things that you can do. Before you get to that point to educate them, make them aware, create trust points, talk to them about unique selling propositions, talk to them about reviews, warranties, how it works, why did we came up with this product?
Why you should use this? All of these different things that we can communicate through email because we own the data. There’s no restrictions on what we can and can’t say. There’s no restrictions on who sees it, who doesn’t see it, what time of the day they see it. Sure, we need to maintain good deliverability.
So we’ve got a good reputation in the eyes of the email service provider. But once we’ve got that mechanism in place and we can talk to them at any time that we feel confident that they’re going to be opening and reading it, then we can. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a, it’s such a, if I, and I, I told you before we started this call, I was like, you know, I one of my favorite things is email.
And I’ll tell you if I had one regret, it was that we didn’t start email for like the first three years of this company. And so when I’m everybody at home listening, when I’m judging you that cause you’re not sending email, cause I’m judging if you’re still not sending him, I’m judging you right now.
Yeah. At least doing it or trying, hopefully you’re working with a company like Elite Brands so that you’re doing it right. But at least if you’re trying and hitting the send button, there’s many people that aren’t even hitting the send button, fine. Our first three years we didn’t, and I think that we severely we’re doing well now.
And I mean, we’ve been in business now going on nine years, but So it worked out, you could say, and our reach is great and all that other good stuff. But I’m like, wow, those first three years, I probably did 1500 interviews and I’m thinking about like the user base in the audience we had even back then.
I’m like, wow, like that media compounds, like at what rate, who knows? But I’m like, that’s three years. Who knows that might’ve put a six years ahead. We don’t know. Absolutely. And this is your email followups. Once I got in contact with you was, was the best that I’ve got so far. So I’m on this big podcast.
You know, I want to just get my message out there. I want to talk to as many people as I can. I live in a really small town in Australia. Coastal town on the east coast of Australia. Are you from Australia originally? Are you from Australia originally? Yeah, yeah. Yep. Awesome. I thought so. I just, just asking, just checking.
I don’t know. I don’t know. That could have been a Boston accent. No, I’m No. Joking. Joking. I got a client that’s in Boston and I just love talking to his accent. It’s the best. I’m sure he says the same thing. Probably. Oh, I can’t even take it. The Bostonian and the, here goes the joke, there’s a Bostonian and an Australian that walk into a bar and no one can understand them, including each other.
Oh man. So I want to, I want to get, let’s give a tip or two here. Like and when I say let’s, I mean, you do it. So, so there’s going to be, so there’s going to be some e commerce people listening. There’s going to be some other people listening and they’re saying, and I want to, I want to talk specifically to those that aren’t started.
The ones that. Have started and know they can optimize and know that they’re not doing it right. I obviously want them to connect in and work. I’m going to give you an opportunity to leave information contact information, all that good stuff. But let’s talk to those that are just getting started. What are some high level things they should be considering when they’re getting ready for, for running some of those first campaigns?
Look, fundamentally, you’ve got to connect everything up properly. So the simplest example I can give for e commerce, they all connect with each other either natively by private API or you can even use Zapier to do it. But let’s just look at some simple e commerce. We do more than e commerce, but it gets a little bit more complicated when you’re looking at HubSpot and different things.
But Shopify to Klaviyo. There’s a native integration. Follow the instructions, get it connected up. I say people tell people to do this before they start spending money on ads because Once you turn the tap on and you start running traffic and you’re spending your money, it’s like pouring, like filling a bucket up with water, but you’ve got holes in the bottom.
With email marketing, you fill some of those holes, you patch up some of those holes. Sure, some still slip through the system, but your money’s not going to waste. It’s not all just running out of the bucket. So connect everything up properly. Make sure that the website’s talking to the in my marketing system because what you need to be doing is you need to be tracking your user behavior on there because everyone comes in at different stages.
Some people just come in and we call them window shoppers. They just look at products. Other people have gone and added to the car. Some have started to check out. Some have filled out a lead form. Some of past customers coming back, some we’re looking to upsell to there’s all these different things that people can do, but you need to be connected up.
So you’ve got that data. I’m really big on data. You gotta have that data there and you’ve got to be able to segment them properly. Don’t talk to every person the same way. Think of it like a bricks and mortar store. The very first time you go into a shop and it’s, you know, you’ve never been in there before, the sales assistant will talk to you very differently to when you’re coming back for your fourth or fifth time.
You go to your favorite bar. The first time you go there, you don’t even know the bartender’s name. By the fourth or fifth time they’re talking to you. How’s your day going? What are you doing? We talk to people differently. Once we’ve got to know them. Once we’re familiar with them. Once we feel comfortable.
Once we trust them. Once we’ve. Use their, been to the bar before and really like the service, like all these things. So that all translates to email. You’re saying absolutely. Makes total sense. You have to talk to people differently at different stages of their journey. If they’ve only learned about you.
You need to talk to them, educate them about your brand. If this is the fourth time they’ve come back as a customer, talk to them differently. Of course you’re going to, but people don’t, they just lump them all together and just blast an email. So segmentation is the key. Connect everything up, learn what they’re doing, make sure everything’s working, segment them out accordingly.
Yeah, it’s great, great great advice and and those that do it, I mean, they’re gonna reap the rewards of it. And I’m a big fan of email because as I, one of my pet peeves is in, in my own thing is okay, and we can go down the continuum and we know it’s Gonna continue happening. And this is the only place that it doesn’t happen.
And that is you spend all this time, all this money, not that I’m against this, but what was the original that I remember would be like, okay, we, we built up Facebook groups or Facebook, then they changed the rules on Facebook groups. Mm-hmm . You built up a Facebook business page. So now. You’ve got this huge business page that they’re holding hostage that you got to buy ads to run to your own audience, to your own business page.
So now they suckered you again, Facebook got you again. And if you’re listening, Facebook, I love you. I don’t mean, I mean, not me. I mean, other people then what else? Like every single. Every single time this exact same thing happens and then marketers or people online get surprised. LinkedIn, LinkedIn has the best reach.
Let’s all do that. And then what happens? Like, oh, now they’re figuring out their ad platform and now they’re getting less and less reach. And now it’s like, okay, and now it’s, and then it’s TikTok and the TikTok algorithm will never change because it’s made to do this and this and this. It’s like give me a break.
Of course, it’s going to change because once they don’t need to do it exactly the way they’re doing it now, and they can squeeze out some more money from us, they’re going to do that too. It’s like absolute common sense. If you’ve been through every single platform since the beginning of soap, since my space, it doesn’t even matter every single platform.
So knowing that and understanding. Why do all those? You can still, as long as you’re profitable, figure that out, make your money there to do all that. But at the same time, collect those emails because that’s your asset and that’s what you own. And that’s what that algorithm is not going to change.
Make sure you’re, you got good standing with Google or whatever you’re using, make sure you’re clean on what you’re doing there. And as long as your deliverability is good, which you can, you can be in control of, if you’re not doing crazy things, then You’re building your asset base and then you can reap the reward of whatever the next big thing is going to be and collect some more emails.
Absolutely. And you’re so spot on. Everyone, you go into any Facebook group, you go on to Reddit, you do all these things and everyone’s always looking for the latest hack or the latest tip or the next best ad platform. That they’re always going to come up, but fundamentally use them to build in your own backyard.
What I mean by that is we’re always playing in someone else’s backyard. Email’s ours. It’s owned by your company, it’s owned by your brand. You can communicate however you want, whenever you want, within reason, to your email list. There’s nothing stopping me pulling that out and going to another platform if I really want to.
For sure. You’ve got to leverage these tips and track page, social, Google ads to get your leads. You need to nurture your leads in there. Yeah. It sounds boring, but there’s a reason why you’re coming around the longest and it’s going to continue to be around. Yeah, and it’s also going to be like, to me, that’s the brick and mortar foundation.
Like, that’s the foundation, that’s like the solid, like, that’s pouring the concrete. Like, that’s the, that’s what everything’s built on. And what’s interesting to me, because when I go out and things, and so my team, we’re always looking at different ways to, because we don’t really sell too much by email.
Like, we’re definitely not an e commerce brand. We’re a media brand. But in the sense that, That we don’t really have anything like that type of product we sell, but we’re selling eyeballs. We’re selling audience. We sell advertising to our advertisers, things like that. So that’s our, you know, it’s pretty much the traditional media model.
But so then when I’m looking at like our value, I’m always thinking about how do we collect more emails? How do we get more people to opt in? How do we get more people opening up that? That, newsletter. And so we’ll do like, and even when we’re going out, like we just do, I do a bunch of like in person things, like I just did some at Vegas and otherwise, and what I was thinking about is how do I get some more emails?
And I’m thinking about it like, okay, what is, I play this game with myself and I think you’ll like this, Dan. So I’m always thinking about, okay. So if we were to use traditional advertising for the quality of this. Type of email from this type of like crowd that I’m in. I’m like, okay, I think that’d be at least 10 bucks.
If you are lucky, you’d get it for 10 for like these high level investors. It’s not like your general, like whatever. If you’re lucky, you’re going to get it for 10. If you’re extremely lucky and your giveaway and everything else is going to have to be premium, like. Not to mention like the cost of what you’re going to have to do to actually give them value to where they’re going to give you your email.
So this was my, this was my hack for this Las Vegas investor conference that I was in and whatever. And I’m on stage, I’m doing things. So people at least know who I am. I was giving out these, you can’t see it if you’re at home, but me and Dan are on a zoom. So you can see. He can see it. It’s a poker chip with the, with the thing on it.
And on the back end, it has a a little scanner code. And I was giving these out as, as souvenirs to people. And I, and I could track how many emails I got from it. And I, every time I got emails, like, Oh, that’s 10 bucks. And my mental little, this is so. Small money, whatever, who cares, but it’s a fun game.
So I’m like the poker chip cost me. These are custom poker chips cost me like a dollar 52 bucks each. And I was like, so I was trying to find out, can I get enough emails to justify my, all right, so one email is five poker chips. So I need like. That is great. I love that. I’ve got a QR code on the back of my business card and whenever I go to a conference or something, I tuck it into the lanyard when I’m speaking and stuff like that.
People can just scan it while it’s in front of me, while they’re in front of me and they’ve already opted in. And I do the same thing, but I haven’t got anything physical like that. That’s going to be, that’s a cracker of a one. No, yours is better. This is, and I, I do that. I have that too. And I I’ll do that.
But this is more so like , when I get off stage, like you don’t, you can’t stand there for too long. So I just pass them out. Like when I’m getting off stage and I’ll be like, here you go, here you go, whatever, like, and I’m like, take them to Bellagio and tell them that, you know, you’re on my tab, try and catch it.
And they’re going to kick you out. No. Because this has no monetary value! What is this? Take it to Bellagio, tell him Adam sent you. Insane. I love it, I love it. Well Dan again. Pleasure having you on the show. How can people follow up? How can they learn more? Look, we’ve got our website, elite brands.
org on there. I mean, you can read all about us, what we do, how we can help people. What I want to offer your audience is we like to do audits for people. So if you’re looking to get an audit done, just head over to elitebrands. org forward slash email hyphen marketing. And on there, you can just get a free audit of your Klaviyo account.
And we’ll send that on through to you. There’s no obligation to do anything with us. In fact, most of the time when we do them, it’s really just an exercise to see whether people do need help or whether we can point them in the right direction. Sometimes we end up as clients, sometimes we just pat them on the back and go, you’re doing a great job, like, just keep doing it.
So, yeah, there’s no obligation to do anything with us, but the audit’s a really good place to start to see where you’ve got gaps in your game. And, you know, we can just point you in the right direction. Awesome. That’s it. And what, and that website one more time, elite brands. org forward slash email, hyphen marketing.
Fantastic. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes so you can just click on them and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is the first time you’ve been listening to a mission matters episode or watching us this is a daily show each and every day, we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new along the way in your jour hit that subscribe or fo we’ll see you next time a all you’re doing.
Thanks