0:00: I still think it’s so cool that this other team came and said, like, can you do this? 

 0:02: and you’re just like, oh, I know, we don’t like to admit that we want to have all the great ideas, but that’s not where the magic happens, right? 

 0:10: Welcome to email swipes, where we peek behind the scenes at the emails that catch your attention and earn their place in your swipe file. 

 0:17: Every other week, we’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran, and in the following episode, we’ll dive into the strategies and methods used in the email so you can Inform and inspire your own email work. 

 0:28: I’m Nikki Elvas, the copywriter behind winning emails for 8 and 9 figure sassin e-commerce brands like Shopify, For Sigmatic, and Sprout Social. 

 0:35: And I know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn pie in the sky insights into plug and play actions. 

 0:41: Ready to make inspiration tactical? 

 0:43: Let’s go. 

 0:44: First, let’s read today’s email. 

 0:48: How to win better clients as a Samrush agency partner. 

 0:51: Join the platform. 

 0:52: Andres SEO expert, $2000 per month increase per client. 

 0:56: One client acquired. 

 0:58: Generating high quality leads and setting yourself apart as an agency, a case study. 

 1:03: Andre’s SEO expert leveraged its expertise and familiarity with Semrush to start attracting stronger leads as an official agency partner. 

 1:11: Years of experience, Semrush Academy certifications and a dedicated partner page allowed the US agency to level up its SEO game and become much more visible to prospective clients. 

 1:20: Number 1, become a Semrush certified agency. 

 1:23: Andre’s SEO expert needed to prove its proficiency by passing two certification exams via the Semrush Academy. 

 1:30: Number 2, create an agency partner page. 

 1:33: Once certified, the agency could connect with a global community of marketers and expose itself to better prospects via a dedicated landing page, the perfect place for brands to find trusted partners. 

 1:42: Number 3, attract bigger and better clients. 

 1:44: Thanks to its newfound status as a Stemrush agency partner, Andre’s SEO expert started enjoying higher quality leads versus other partner agency platforms and even landed the largest client on its books. 

 1:55: Being listed on the platform gives me quality leads with an excellent level and ability to understand the digital and organic context. 

 2:02: Andres Castro, CEO and founder, Andre’s SEO expert. 

 2:06: Become an agency partner. 

 2:07: Get found by bigger and better clients on the Samrush agency partner platform. 

 2:11: There’s no time to lose. 

 2:12: Get certified. 

 2:17: Taylor, thank you so much for joining us. 

 2:19: Tell us who you are and what you do. 

 2:21: Yeah, so my name is Taylor Rafa, and I’m the mass email team lead at Some Rush. 

 2:25: Somerush is a platform for digital marketers. 

 2:29: We’re most well known for SEO and we also have a ton of apps and tools to help people in content marketing, creative production, social media marketing. 

 2:38: all sorts of things. 

 2:40: And my role is leading a team of four email marketers who are mainly focused on mass emails and newsletters specifically. 

 2:49: So we do have like a lot of really fun brand campaigns, educational entertaining emails that we get to work on together. 

 2:56: That’s so fun. 

 2:57: So there’s also another team that deals with the automation side of things. 

 3:01: Yes, there’s an automated team as well, and we’re really fortunate to have an email strategist, Laura Toma, as well as an email analyst and then the head of the team. 

 3:11: So that’s a really healthy, I would say set up for our program to support us. 

 3:15: Yeah, that’s so cool. 

 3:17: So nice when you have that structure in place. 

 3:20: Yeah, emails valued. 

 3:21: That’s really cool that some rush now does more than just SEO because yes, I knew it as SEO and you know, I don’t do SEO so I never really followed closely, but that’s cool that now you’re offering a whole suite of things. 

 3:33: That’s really great. 

 3:33: Yeah, tons for PR and competitive intelligence and so on. 

 3:38: Yeah, competitive intelligence, that sounds interesting. 

 3:41: OK, so I imagine that you have segmented, I mean, maybe I’m just projecting, have you segmented according to interest level of what where people are opting in, what kind of services they’re interested in, and then you’re trying to upsell them on different things and like the campaign side of things is presenting all your different services. 

 3:59: Yeah, it’s a great question. 

 4:01: We do have registration source and then we can see what tools people are using, activities, where they’re sort of visiting on our web pages. 

 4:10: So we use a really wide variety of signals and data points in order to segment our list, but generally they all come through registering for some rush,, occasionally through webinars, you know, their leads, but yeah. 

 4:23: We don’t have like dedicated opt in, so we really have that sort of strategy where we’re deciding what emails people receive based on the information that we have. 

 4:33: That’s so great. 

 4:33: You’re less shooting in the dark when you have these just general opt-ins, it’s like, OK, we hope we’re talking to you about the right stuff, but that’s really cool. 

 4:41: That’s awesome. 

 4:42: So these are all people who have registered. 

 4:43: There are no leads aside from like that small segment of webinars. 

 4:46: Yeah, really small segment. 

 4:47: Yeah, wow, cool. 

 4:49: That’s fun. 

 4:50: It’s really the people who are using it well and just need to hear more. 

 4:54: Very cool. 

 4:56: It’s so amazing. 

 4:57: Email at its core is the same, but there are so many ways to do it and so many different. 

 5:02: Everyone I talked to has a different structure and strategy in place. 

 5:05: It’s really fun. 

 5:07: OK, so let’s dig into the email itself. 

 5:09: Tell me, what do you love about it? 

 5:10: What’s the story behind it? 

 5:12: OK, so the story behind this one is that our strategist, Laura, who I mentioned earlier, usually once per year, she creates this deck with some insights about what’s going on with the email channel and she shares that with a bunch of different units and teams around the company. 

 5:29: And last year, we discovered that two of our templates that we created on our team. 

 5:34: Which is optimize your workflow and a case study template, we’re performing really, really well. 

 5:39: So optimize your workflow is kind of like a jobs to be done style email where you give somebody just really easy 123, maybe max 4 steps where they can do something within the tool that will really drive value. 

 5:52: And I mean, it’s a nice email performs really. 

 5:55: Well, and we continue sending it to this day with all different types of workflows, but we had one unit within the company that runs our agency partners platform come to us and say, hey, could we maybe take both of these templates and combine them? 

 6:10: And at first I was sort of like, that is a wild idea, but Let’s try it because sometimes it could be difficult to have these opportunities where teams have both of those things to actually combine at the same time. 

 6:27: So I was like, oh great, OK. 

 6:29: And so we did it and sure enough, 1 + 1 equals 3, and the results were like 3 times what we expected and it was just such an obvious idea sitting there on the table. 

 6:43: Why don’t we just combine our top two performing emails. 

 6:48: You get so stuck into like, this is what we’ve been doing and it takes that outside perspective. 

 6:54: Right? 

 6:55: So this is the time where that really worked well. 

 6:57: Yeah, that’s awesome. 

 6:58: So I’m curious, what do you think contributed to its success? 

 7:01: Was it just two successful ideas can marsh into something super successful or do you think there was something else? 

 7:08: Well, I do think the execution was done really well. 

 7:11: So we had our copywriter, Scott Mason, who’s just excellent, and he wrote really punchy copy, and then Maryam, our designer for email, is like, you know, did a great job of figuring out which words to highlight, and then also condensing the visuals for that case study into this very sort of thin banners, part of the hero banner. 

 7:34: So we have A picture of someone who runs an agency on the platform with their average revenue per client, and sort of the increase and everything. 

 7:45: So it gives us sort of like mini infographic, so very visual way to tell the story right within the hero banner, and then we have a CTA there as well. 

 7:53: So she somehow managed to fit all of this in and I think what is a very clean way to tell a story above the fold before people scroll. 

 8:03: And then we dig down deeper into the actual content of the optimizer workflow. 

 8:08: And I think the fact that the team decided to keep it to just 3 steps was perfect. 

 8:13: And then it almost gets bookended with a quote from that same agency at the end. 

 8:19: So you start with visual, you go into this kind of Block of text, which still has a great hierarchy with that 123, and then you end it with the agencies quote at the end, which is still wordy, but it’s like a reminder of the fact that you too can have this success. 

 8:39: So I think from those standpoints, it worked really effectively. 

 8:43: That’s a really great point. 

 8:44: It really is designed very well in terms of the balance of the information being presented. 

 8:50: The hero is fabulous, that it just, it’s there, that 12 punch is there and then you scroll down for more, as well, the case study aspect, it has this interest of, oh wow, $2000 a month increase, that’s pretty awesome. 

 9:02: But then it immediately goes into, here’s how you can get this too. 

 9:06: So it has the human interest in the story, but it really drives you straight to the benefit that the customer will have themselves. 

 9:13: Yeah. 

 9:13: So how are the results? 

 9:15: So, from the beginning of this year to I would say June, so H1, there were like a total of 16 payments for this particular platform from email. 

 9:28: And this email and by contrast, generated 7 payments immediately after being sent, which was huge. 

 9:36: So for us, that was really effective. 

 9:40: And it’s always great for our. 

 9:42: Team, when we can make another team happy and that we can also find out something that could potentially work for the company as a whole, that could be taken and then used for other parts of the business as well. 

 9:55: I’m curious for this team, have you done other emails where you were promoting the agency partner program? 

 10:00: Yes. 

 10:01: , so this is like a real AB split. 

 10:03: Cool. 

 10:04: Yeah, and I’m glad that you, you brought this up because there has been an evolution over time with how we promote agency partner platform. 

 10:12: So the first time that we did emails, we really sort of stuck our Samrush brand basic templates, I would say, and I just use the word basic because if you take a look at the agency partners platform, the visual identity is very specific, and it’s a little bit different from Stemrush as a whole. 

 10:30: So it’s distinct. 

 10:31: And so we were, you know, kind of coming at it from the standpoint of like, oh, we’re sending from our database as Stemrush. 

 10:39: So back to your initial question about. 

 10:41: OK, people opt in through the registration process for Senrush, but we think that we may be able to cross sell them or convert them to agency partners platform based on information we have that they may be an agency. 

 10:53: And so we were going with the Sunrush branding approach, and I had the idea to suggest that maybe we brand it a little bit more towards the the platform, so we made that shift. 

 11:04: And then this here again is a different shift where we’re really relying. 

 11:10: Heavily upon that optimize your workflow style template, which still, you know, circles back to the somerush brand. 

 11:18: But the difference that I think really makes an impact here is the face of Andres, right, in this email, a human face of a real person that owns an agency. 

 11:29: And if you look at the agency partners platform at the moment, it’s like a sort of illustration style, and this is kind of a departure from that and I think really kind of. 

 11:40: I find that having people’s faces, no matter what the platform, people respond to that and hard to measure in terms of the impact, but yeah. 

 11:49: When I like first forayed into digital marketing, I was originally in branding. 

 11:53: I remember seeing like case study after case study after case study where it was like just when Sas started shifting to illustration, and I remember so many conversion people being like, no. 

 12:04: Pictures, people, this is a bad trend and nobody listened. 

 12:09: Everyone just kept their illustrations. 

 12:12: Although a few people did shift back to pictures and combined illustration and pictures nicely, but yeah, you know, you want that fun new design, that trend, but the human interest, it really, especially for this kind of thing where you really are trying to showcase that. 

 12:28: It’s a community and this is a platform where you will succeed if you join. 

 12:34: So yeah, I hear that argument. 

 12:35: For people, yeah, and I mean with this one, like the goal here is that people will have like face to face calls with the agency to help them meet their business needs. 

 12:46: I think that sort of was maybe more true to what’s going to happen after they click, right? 

 12:51: So yeah. 

 12:52: Point. 

 12:53: So that’s very interesting that it was shifting from the Sarush branding, but still keeping that template, the optimized workflow, kind of this beautiful marriage of both things because it is a Samrush program. 

 13:05: So it’s nice that it has a little bit of that branding still retained, even though it felt like it should be shifted to that the new branding. 

 13:13: I still think it’s so cool that this other team came and said, like, can you do this? 

 13:15: and you’re just like, oh. 

 13:17: I know we don’t like to admit that we want to have all the great ideas, but that’s not where the magic happens, right. 

 13:26: Although you do get the credit for putting it together and having it work nicely. 

 13:31: And now promoting it, giving credit where credit’s due. 

 13:36: OK, so are you sending this email? 

 13:38: I know that you work on the campaign side of things, the one-off side. 

 13:41: So have you sent this one again to new leads, kind of like added it to any automations or anything like that, or this was just a one off and that’s it? 

 13:49: The way that the mass side of our email team works and automated side is that typically things get tested in mass, and then they perform really well. 

 13:58: The goal is to automate them, right? 

 14:00: And it’s funny you ask because the team was just asking for examples today of when that has happened recently. 

 14:07: So yeah, definitely the cadence of such is based upon how often the audience refreshes and back. 

 14:15: To your previous comment about how frequently people are engaged with our tool, that factors into our sunsetting policy for the channel as well. 

 14:24: So the goal, I think, on mass is to engagement, retention, people really enjoying our content through the email channel. 

 14:34: And so we take all of those factors into consideration when we’re looking at who to send things to and at what point within. 

 14:42: Their life cycle and journey, we want to send specific emails to. 

 14:47: So yeah, we have said this multiple times and it’s performed well, but there have been cases where we’re like, oh, this is something that works. 

 14:55: Let’s just keep sending it and then eventually it stops working, right? 

 14:59: I think it’s really common, so annoying though. 

 15:02: I know it’s really annoying. 

 15:03: Why can’t we just find the magic combination? 

 15:06: That’s so interesting because your team is. 

 15:08: It’s, it’s such an interesting structure that it’s, yes, one off sort of mostly, but that it really does play into that, because the one off emails are typically like, yes, they’re segmented, but they’re pretty similar. 

 15:22: It’s more just that you’re changing certain elements to it, you know, like, let’s say you’re doing a win back, so you’re just the offer might be better or the approach that you’re coming that is slightly different, but this is really It’s almost like automated campaigns. 

 15:37: It’s a very cool balance. 

 15:39: It’s really fun. 

 15:40: Yeah, we try to have like as much sort of crossover between the two as possible, which I think is also really great when you look at career growth and challenging the team. 

 15:52: So, yeah, I would say that to have that synergy, where we can communicate with each other about what’s working and what’s not is super important. 

 16:01: It’s also great from a customer perspective, whereas we had someone else on this podcast, Anna Levitin, and she mentioned how often you’ll get emails from a company that are one type and then all of a sudden you get this other email and you’re like, what is this? 

 16:15: Why is it so bad? 

 16:16: And it’s because it’s coming from a different team and they just don’t do email well. 

 16:21: So it’s really nice when you work together and really just create this very cohesive beautiful customer experience. 

 16:27: I mean, you gotta try as much as possible, but clearly we’re, yeah, I mean when you have like really massive automated programs. 

 16:36: I could imagine like some brands might have a really hard time trying to like update everything, keep it fresh, and just going through all the data it’s just like, w, exhausting. 

 16:47: Yeah, for sure. 

 16:48: I feel like everyone’s gonna like start applying to the email team at some rush now. 

 16:52: After they hear this. 

 16:54: Great, sounds very unique and really cool. 

 16:58: Have you experienced any other brands like, do you have anyone in your network who has a similar sort of structure? 

 17:02: I can’t think of like someone or a company off the top of my head, but I have heard definitely of that sort of mass and automated split. 

 17:11: And yeah, it is quite effective for us. 

 17:16: And I think in terms of my previous roles, it was maybe a little bit more decent. 

 17:22: Centralized, and the way that we’re structured is that different units that are managing these parts of the tool or apps and things, they have marketing teams internally. 

 17:35: So that was familiar to me when I first joined Semrush,, the fact that you kind of have this like specialized center of excellence within the marketing or communications department and then other teams within the company also have people who are like literate within that area, but it’s not. 

 17:50: Their main role is more sort of like managing a campaign or product managers. 

 17:56: That’s interesting. 

 17:57: Yeah, so wait, are there also product managers and how do you work with them? 

 18:01: Yeah, there are, and there’s like product marketing people within those teams that we’re mainly in touch with, but for sure, there’s a lot of Slack channels that we have access to that provide us with great insights around the company, you know, like customer support and when Our users request new features that can sometimes give us ideas of like, oh, OK, this is like a pain point for them. 

 18:26: Is there something that we can do with an email to address that, just sort of like get ahead of the curve. 

 18:31: So yeah, definitely trying to connect and network internally is super helpful. 

 18:37: Yeah. 

 18:38: That’s so cool, like gaining customer feedback just from talking to your colleagues. 

 18:43: Yes, yeah. 

 18:45: They have so much gold, the sales teams and the product managers like they understand the customers and so it really is, more companies should be doing it, this internal research kind of little sprints. 

 18:57: It’s so important, yeah. 

 18:59: Have you changed anything in the, the number of times that you’ve sent it? 

 19:02: Has anything changed from the original send to the latest sent? 

 19:06: Well, there’s been other units who have been interested in trying to replicate the success. 

 19:11: So, you know, but every single product and add-on and app has a different price point and a different audience. 

 19:19: So I would say it’s had varying levels of success, and of course, there’s different like sub-brands, visual identities and things. 

 19:27: So the way that it’s come about also is a factor that could be influencing that, but Yeah, I would say it’s been overall quite successful in terms of its ability to kind of adapt, but I can’t point to any significant changes that we’ve made thus far with this particular email. 

 19:46: We found a niche for the moment. 

 19:49: This is the template. 

 19:50: Yeah. 

 19:51: Nobody touch it. 

 19:52: And that’s very interesting about the different price points that it’s working, you know, more or less for the different price points. 

 19:58: That means it really has information that people need, packaged in a very compelling way. 

 20:03: So, cool. 

 20:05: All right, last question. 

 20:07: What are your favorite brands to call email inspiration from? 

 20:10: Oh, I love Lush cosmetics emails. 

 20:16: They’re always just such wonderfully designed, like just a visual overload for them. 

 20:25: And I would say that sensory overload reminds me of being in a lush cosmetic store. 

 20:30: I was gonna say, yes, I like just you talking and saying this is like reminding me of the store. 

 20:36: smell it smell it in the air. 

 20:39: From like a mile away, kilometers away. 

 20:42: Yeah. 

 20:43: So like the fact that that gives me the same feeling within my inbox for that could invoke, like, you know, the olfactory senses, which is our like strongest sense, right? 

 20:53: Where I’m opening it up and I’m like, 00 my gosh, I can like smell the store in my inbox. 

 20:58: That I think is so great. 

 21:00: And I think they’ve even sworn off social media as a brand. 

 21:04: They did at some point anyway. 

 21:07: And so email. 

 21:07: As well as one of their main channels. 

 21:09: I know they also have an app, which is super active and has like a cult following, as well as people who just promote them on social anyway. 

 21:16: But I do think they’re another brand that invests really smartly within the email channel and successfully as well. 

 21:23: Yeah. 

 21:24: Wow, that is such a cool thought to really marry the retail and the e-commerce with your email strategy. 

 21:32: Like, who does that? 

 21:33: That’s amazing. 

 21:34: That’s so, so cool. 

 21:35: Great insight. 

 21:37: All right, thank you so much. 

 21:38: This was amazing. 

 21:39: I really appreciate your time and expertise. 

 21:41: Yeah, it’s been really lovely conversation with you, Nikki. 

 21:44: Thanks again for having me on the podcast. 

 21:46: Thanks for joining me for email story time. 

 21:49: If you enjoyed today’s story, give this podcast a review, so email marketers like you can have more fun with email. 

 21:55: See you next week when we dig into this story’s takeaways.