Welcome to Ecom Growth Insider, the show where we go behind the scenes with direct-to-consumer founders, marketers, and growth experts who are scaling e-commerce brands to seven, eight, and even nine figures.

I'm your host, Andrej Tomachowicz, founder of Holowgrowth.

And on this podcast, we cut through the noise and get to the real strategies that are working right now.

In today's episode, I'm joined by Michael Rathmann, the founder of AdSumo Digital.

an agency that's helped brands add millions in revenue using email and SMS.

We talk about the exact flows that are working in 2025, how to turn browsers into repeat buyers, and why most brands are leaving six to seven figures on the table.

Welcome back.

I'm here with Michael Rathmann.

How are you doing?

Doing good, man.

How are you?

I'm doing great.

So Michael's the founder of AdSumo Digital.

It's a boutique email marketing agency that helps e-commerce brands scale profitably through direct response, email and SMS marketing.

And they're doing a great job.

I've seen some of the insights, some of the results they're able to generate and they're crushing it in the e-comm space.

So to kick things off, what's your story?

How did you get into the world of e-comm and email marketing?

Yeah, awesome.

Thanks for the intro, man.

I appreciate it.

Glad to be here as well.

Ecom has always been interesting, man.

I first found Ecom probably like every other person our age on YouTube.

when, it went from like watching cool, you know, this is my life as a young millionaire video is how to make money online to finding Ecom and drop shipping and those kinds of things.

And I dabbled with that when, you know, in like 2018, I started a drop shipping store.

or 2017, I was still in high school.

spent all my money on some ads.

I got two sales.

One was my mom and one was some random lady in Ohio.

And then I ran out of money for ads.

I went and got a job.

you sell?

It was, my brand was called Pet Express.

And we were selling those comfort dog beds that had like the crease and the edge.

you can put the dog was comfort.

was, I sold one for like $72.

It was cool.

It cost me like.

It cost me like $6.

was back in the old days too.

It was just Oberlo and Shopify connected with the AliExpress pictures on the product page and on the ads.

Cause I didn't have any, I didn't order the product.

So it was amazing.

But that first Shopify notification, man, know, eight in the morning, I woke up, eight, oh one, I heard the cha-ching and I like, what in the world was that?

And that was like my first taste of online money.

And that's when I kind of like fell in love with.

e-comm and kind of became obsessed with it.

Tried a bunch of things between then and now landed on wanting to get into copywriting and two years ago that snowballed into starting an email marketing agency for e-commerce brands.

Because I know the e-commerce brands out there listening needed more than just a Google Doc with some words in it.

They needed the Klaviyo strategy.

They needed to, you know, come up with campaigns and just to copy on a doc was not enough.

So.

that quickly snowballed into an actual email marketing agency, which we are today.

Nice.

And why, why email marketing?

Because I mean, with copywriting, you could also go into ads, landing pages, websites.

I don't know.

It kind of just happened naturally.

was like the first thing after I was like, I'm going to do copywriting and email copy was just, was just next on the, on the bullet point list down.

And so that's where I started and that's kind of where I stopped because I also really started to like the, the, the business model of an email agency.

other words, the, the kind of brands were helping, um, where, know, as an email agency, emails only useful for brands that are kind of already up and running and kind of getting some results.

So, um, that, that working relationship with brands that are already doing well and we're coming in taking something that they already.

You know, they're already spending money on ads.

They already have a list that they're not utilizing.

Uh, it was just, it was, it was nice and easy to sell at the beginning as well.

Just saying, Hey, you have this email list.

It could be generating you XYZ.

I've never done this before for anybody, but you know, you know, I'd be willing to, help your brand do XYZ and you already have it, you know, no ad spend or anything like that.

Um, so it was an easy pitch in the beginning.

And then, um, It was just more interesting than ads.

I'd never been an ads manager aside from my two sales back in the day.

So, Clayvio just came up first and we stuck with it.

Nice.

And would you say that most e-commerce brands neglect email marketing or that they put too much attention on ads and the other aspects and not enough on email?

I think they underutilize it.

But a lot of the times I'm seeing it's for the right reasons.

You know, if a brand's coming to us and they're doing 150K a month and they've neglected email, five, seven out of 10 times it's because they scaled so quick that the founder stopped running the emails because it was too busy.

He, he maybe they, they maybe send one a week.

Um, you know, if they're, if they're on top of it, maybe they're still sending one a month.

Um, but it's all a lot of the times because they, they scale too quickly or.

Um, and some cases they're like, Hey, we're at 50, 60 K a month, but we've been in business for 15 years.

have a list of 40,000.

We've never emailed them.

So a lot of the times it's because focuses elsewhere and you kind of need to do that in the beginning.

talked to so many brands that are, you know, under 20 K a month and they're like, Hey, I want to get into email marketing.

I'm like, Hey, I'd love, I love that for you, but like, I'd much rather see you spend that money on ads, uh, and, find a good agency out there.

like Andre or anybody that you can find it and get the site traffic to your website.

Then email marketing becomes profitable and ROI positive.

But yeah, so a lot of the times it's for the right reasons or they just waited too long to get into it from that first scaling episode they had.

Yeah, that makes sense.

At what point would you say it's a no-brainer that the brand should invest into email marketing?

Is it based on the traffic, based on the revenue?

Yeah.

Yeah.

A couple of things there.

would say email marketing as a whole, we'll talk about in the beginning, I would, I would at least have a pop-up on the website.

If you're pushing traffic to it, if you're spending money on ads, if you're paying influencers, you're getting traffic to your site already.

You have to have a pop-up.

The pop-up is going to collect the emails, get them on your list.

If not, you're wasting the traffic that you're spending to get on your website.

You know, I think top 10 Shopify conversion rate.

It's like 2.56 % and you're in the top 10%.

That means 97.8 % of people or whatever it is aren't buying.

So what are you doing with those?

You got to capture them.

That's bare minimum.

That should be from day one once your site's actually launched and getting traffic.

Go on Klaviyo.

You don't have to pay any third parties.

on whatever you can find.

Klaviyo is really cheap if you don't have an email list.

And even up to your first 10,000 subscribers, it's pretty cheap.

Um, Other than that, far as full scale email marketing, I also, I've been referring, I've been, I've been telling people to, you know, in the beginning, just get some plain text emails out there as a founder from the founder, write a plain text, welcome email, write a plain text, abandoned cart, write a plain text, abandoned checkout, plain text post purchase.

Just get the basic stuff out there.

Think, think what six emails can I write first email of your main flows?

Um, write them from the founder, plain text, no design that costs you nothing but two, three, four hours of time.

They're going to be in there in your Klaviyo account that you already have because of a pop-up.

And you're actually going to make money from those.

Plain text emails work really well, especially when they're really authentic.

You don't have to be a good writer.

It's probably going to be better if it sounds a little busted from the founder.

So get those going.

That costs you nothing but a little bit of time.

Aside from that, 50 to 80K a month is when you're like, okay, my flows, should be doing 30 % of my sales.

You know, at a certain point that's, that's 15 to, whatever thousand dollars a month.

That's when it starts to become reasonable to look at getting your flows rebuilt, getting consistent campaigns, sending to your list.

If you're at 80 K a month or more, if you're at a hundred, K a month or more, and you're not doing email marketing, that's, that's just a lot of, a lot of money sitting there every month, just waiting to be.

captured from the people you've already paid to acquire on your website and on your list.

So that's kind of the benchmarks there, but there's so much you can do before having to hire an agency.

Yeah.

And the first thing that you mentioned was like the pop-up just to get subscribers on the list.

What would you say is currently like the best offer that you can do to get like a high percentage of people to sign up to the list?

Yeah, my favorite, if the client...

can do it if the brand can make it feasible.

And if it's more profitable is a free gift with purchase.

know there's a lot of one-stop shops out there that don't have other products or complimentary products, but that works really well.

And then a lot of brands are shifting to whatever's more profitable right now.

You know, if you're normally getting an 8 % conversion rate on your pop-up, but you can get a 5 % and save a lot of margin.

Probably a good time to do it with all the terrorist situations going around.

That's what we're kind of seeing.

Aside from that, because I know that could, be gone in a couple of months.

Um, whatever's more profitable is really the best offer.

You're going to, you're going to test as many offers as possible.

You're going to have, you know, seven losers for every two winners you find.

Um, so you're going to have some losers.

You're going to have some down months on your conversion rate cause you're testing.

Um, but quick pop-up like tutorials, like just a little micro commitment, ask a question.

Yes or no.

Or collect some data, you know, what are you shopping for?

Are you here to, you know, I always refer to mud water.

It's a, it's a coffee replacement that has some mushrooms in there.

Some people come because they're ditching coffee.

Some people don't want to do caffeine anymore.

Some people want to explore the mushroom benefits.

Those are three welcome flow opportunities you can kind of use to, boost conversion rates because your messaging can be specific, but that all stems from a pop-up.

So simple yes or no question or collect some data, email SMS, show the code on the pop-up.

Don't push them to your email because someone on YouTube that does email marketing said to only send the code on the email because then it's attributed to email sales.

Put it on the website so they can buy right away is kind of the goal.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Do you have any experience with using like exit intent pop-ups on e-commerce sites?

Because I've heard Alex or Mozi say that for them, The exit intent pop-ups make like 30 % of the overall lead volume that they're getting.

So like a crazy high amount of opt-ins from those pop-ups that only appear when someone tries to leave the page.

But I've never really seen those be used on e-commerce sites.

Yeah, I would say for info funnels, I could see those ripping.

There's some e-commerce brands out there that do it well.

Clavio's exit intent pop-up is so finicky.

You might set it up and you might not even be able to get it to trigger.

And then you factor in if you're on an iOS device, it kind of treats you as a new user every time you hit the website.

And so it's very finicky, but I'm assuming Hermosy works with, you know, if there are e-commerce brands, I know there's some e-commerce brands that follow him.

They're kind of like influencer info products, e-com brands.

Um, with, I'm sure something like ClickFunnels, if you're running a ClickFunnels page for your e-commerce brand, exit intent pop-up with a fat offer.

Cause you know, they're about to leave super, super beneficial.

We've done some things as well where, you know, we only collect the, uh, the email and then we do like, like a second pop-up, um, where this person's already an accountant, Klaviyo.

They've already made an email and now we're trying to get the SMS at a different time.

So maybe the second or third time they've, they've browsed the site, you give them a different offer with an SMS that's worked well, but yeah, exit intense.

It's, it makes so much sense, but I just, it's, there's so few that are done properly and, and for econ brands and play via Shopify, it's just not, perfect yet.

Yeah, that makes sense.

mean, with, e-commerce nowadays, also like the majority of the traffic is coming from, from mobile.

And I think with mobile, you can't do exit intent.

Yeah.

can't browser cursor.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Now I'd like to hear your process when like a brand comes to you, let's say they make like 80 to 100 K per month.

And you look at their Klaviyo set up, their email marketing.

Like what is the first thing that you look at?

Yeah.

So a lot of the brands in that position are coming to us.

Whether it's, our emails are doing 20 % of our sales and I'm currently managing them and I can't afford to spend my time on that anymore.

Or they're coming to us and they're saying, hey, email those 2 % of our sales and we know it's a missed opportunity.

No one does it right now, but we know it's important.

Then we kind of figure out, sometimes the brand is, the biggest benefit sometimes the brand sees is just, it's professional.

You know, they set up fiber flows and they just have the customers perceive the brand so poorly that it's like, first things first, let's get things looking good and hopefully performing better.

And then let's focus on performance.

But when we come to, when we audit these accounts, we think about them in a couple of different ways.

Deliverability is always first.

You know, if your emails are hitting spam, no one's going to see them anyway.

It doesn't matter how good they are.

Then we look at flows, pre-purchase flows, specifically abandoned cart.

abandoned checkout, welcome flow.

Those are your revenue generating flows.

Our philosophy with email is the 80-20 that's gonna get you all of the results.

There's welcome email one, abandoned card email one, abandoned checkout email one.

Those emails combined are gonna generate you more sales than welcome emails and all of your other flows, like three through eight combined.

Those are just the ones that get sent the most.

They have the highest buying intent, so they convert the best.

Then we go post purchase.

It's also really important, especially if you're a repeat business, a repeat purchase potential business, what's your post purchase journey like?

You know, some people forget to exclude, you know, 30 day past purchasers from campaigns and maybe they're selling the same product to them over and over again.

Customers get annoyed, they unsubscribe.

Are you educating?

You know, there needs to be a proper post purchase journey to complete your customer journey.

That's not, maybe it generates you not a lot of sales.

but it's a complete journey.

It's gonna get you reviews.

It's gonna get you good comments on Instagram and stuff because people like the journey, the process.

Then we talked about campaigns.

That's the other 40 to 70 % of your email marketing sales, depending on what kind of brand you are.

Are you sending enough frequency?

What are you sending?

Are you sending the right people?

And all that kind of factors back into deliverability with those campaigns as well.

But the biggest thing is some brands do some of that.

Some brands do none of that.

When we come into an account, we kind of visualize what are the levers we can come in and pull and make a difference?

What's that estimated ROI going to be?

And is it an eight to 10 X what they're going to pay us as an agency to unlock that revenue?

And if that ROI potential and eight to 10 X is there, that's when we start talking about the potential of working together.

And it's really just the basics, man.

It's, it's, you know, the flows, deliverability.

Are you growing the list?

I didn't mention that one list growth because we kind of just talked about that.

The list grows super important.

And then are you sending the right messages to the right people, the right times with campaigns?

Nice.

And when it comes to the split between flows and campaigns, I think you briefly touched on that.

Like for most brands, is it like a 50-50 split where the revenue should be coming from or what do you see for most of your clients?

That's a good question.

And a lot of the brands that have those questions are like sitting around that 10 to 20 mark.

as far as email revenue percentage every month.

And it's hard for them at sometimes it's like, you know, what's not working well?

Is it flows?

Is it campaigns?

The way we see it, it's different for every brand based on the kind of products they sell and the kind of business they have.

Historically, campaign sales for e-commerce brands are a lot of repeat buyers.

We have one brand that sells, it's a CPG brand, they sell Whole Foods.

People buy in bulk, they have $183 AOV.

people buy every three months, often.

So our campaign sales do 78 % of their email marketing revenue, even though the flows convert really well, it's just a lot of campaign sales.

And every third month, we see an extra 30 to $50,000 come from campaigns just because that bulk three month cycle is kind of coming back.

So one month might look bad on campaigns, but we're right there with flows and we're still at 37, 38%.

Every third month we hit a 45 to 58 or 45 to 48 % from campaigns or total email revenue.

And a lot of that's extra from campaigns.

have some clients that are more white label drop shipping type brands.

One purchase, one customer, no one ever buys again.

Campaigns are tough.

Campaigns are tough.

You're going to have to send a lot of volume.

You're going to have to send your thing about your list as non buyers.

What is your best offer to non buyers that you're willing to give them?

How many times can you send that to your list, but also not train them to look at discounts?

You know, if you have a buy two, get three free.

You got to reuse that quite often to drive those sales because you're not getting any repeat buys.

That's where we typically see campaigns or 30 % flows or 70.

50 50 is good to shoot for until you kind of figure out, okay, I just know campaign strategy wise.

there's not a lot of repeat buyers.

So I know that my flows need to do the heavy lifting.

And that's where you kind of start to figure out what's best for your brand and where you should be putting your focus.

Something we could talk about as well is a lot of brands don't know whether their email marketing should be acquisition or retention.

And that kind of plays into that.

Yeah.

I mean, you already mentioned that there are some brands where people just buy once and they never come back.

And from my understanding, from what you just said, They should still focus on email marketing and it is still like a good, channel for them, but it's just for acquisition and for getting like the first time customers, but not for retention.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so, so for example, we have a couple of clients that, that are high AOV, a couple thousand dollars, not a lot of repeat potential buys because there's not any other real products on the website to, to sell them.

And so their strategy, we have a proper, it's a high AOV product.

So there's still a proper post purchase journey to make sure that the customer gets the experience you would expect having spent $7,000 on something.

But where the strategy comes into play and we're still able to generate campaign sales because it's, it's a lot of micro topic educational type emails, but for the flows, the strategy is, is those pre-purchase flows, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, browser abandonment, site abandonment, welcome flow.

How can we make those the main priority?

Can we split the welcome flow based on what they're browsing?

Are they browsing this type of collection or this type of collection?

And split off the welcome flow that way so it converts better.

Browse abandonment.

What collection did they browse?

Let's get specific.

We can break all those flows down an extra way.

Whereas if you have...

You know, 250 SKUs, your welcome flows is going to somewhat be broad or your brand and your about your browse abandonment might be somewhat broad because you have so many options.

If you're a high of product with a lot less SKUs, you can afford to spend that time and break down those flows more specific so that the messaging is better, so that they can convert better.

And then on the campaign side of things, you know, knowing everybody on that list is going to be a non-buyer because they're not repeat buying.

You know, what are the objections you need to get across the table and, and what are the things that they need to see to become a first time buyer?

Um, we do a lot of education, a lot of linking the blog posts on those campaigns.

And what are your thoughts on creating like crazy long email flows?

Um, because like one client has been showing us their like email marketing setup.

And for a very long time, I've been trying to convince them to outsource it.

I even put them in contact with you guys, like I think probably half a year ago.

But for reason they still want to do it in-house.

And what they have been doing is they don't have time to do email campaigns.

So they just created a welcome flow that is I think one and a half years long.

And basically every week or every two weeks, there's like one flow email in there.

And it just goes on for, yeah, more than a year.

So what typically happens there, I'd be interested, I think from what I remember, they're not doing bad with email.

Yeah.

I don't know if you know the updates there, but I don't, but I think they're doing pretty all right.

Yeah, but it's like the overall percentage of revenue is good, but it's like 95 % flows because they're not sending any campaigns only on Black Friday.

Yeah.

And so the interesting thing there is like, what could be happening if they were sending three to four campaigns a week on top of that?

I'm not against having a really long welcome flow at a certain point.

It stops becoming a welcome flow and you just, it's, it's now automated campaign emails.

Um, if it's set up properly, if someone abandoned the cart that are, they're out of that welcome flow because of that filter.

someone browses a product, they're pushed down the funnel out of the welcome flow in the browser management flow.

So now that year long flow is broken and no one's receiving those anymore.

If that's how it's set up, if it's set up to where, you know, no filters, then they get that welcome flow along with all the abandoned carts, abandoned checkouts.

And it's kind of like sending campaigns and flows, but I would be curious if they, they built out that the eight email welcome series based on.

you know, proper welcome flow structure and then set three to four campaigns a week instead of the long flow.

I'd be interested to see what the results were, especially because I know that business has potential for repeat buyers, which is also another thing that welcome flow is triggered when someone joins the list.

Once someone purchases, they're no longer in the welcome flow if there's profile filters that exclude them.

So a lot of things could go into that.

I'm against that like overall approach.

It's just not the most optimal way, especially if you want to split off your welcome flow based on that zero party data you collect on the pop-up.

It just gets a little messy.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

And let's say a brand is like completely overwhelmed, just wants to do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to email marketing.

Like which flow should they do first?

What should they focus on?

Yeah, so we build our flows in three stages because there's not one flow that's better than the other.

It's flow emails that are better.

Let's count.

Welcome email one, abandoned card email one that you can use as abandoned checkout email one.

So we'll count that as one email.

Site abandonment, browse abandonment, potential buyer's flow.

Someone browsed a product three times in the last week, pretty high intent.

And then a post purchase flow.

for overall buyers, the thank you email.

There's six emails right there that I would set up.

Those pre-purchase flows, email one, those are gonna generate you more sales than the back half of all those other flows combined for most brands, for most brands.

And then I would write, at least with AI, could probably get away with writing, you could probably spend the time and write two campaigns a week, plain text only.

and send two campaigns out a week and do those five or six flow emails.

And you'd cover the bases up until you get to, you know, that 80, 100K a month mark.

Nice.

Now, the important part there is those triggers.

You'll set up those flows.

You'll probably use the templates from Clavio.

Be aware the abandoned carts actually a start at checkout, all these kinds of little things.

You don't know the profile filters.

There's videos on YouTube from wonderful guys like us.

There are videos on YouTube to set up those flows, triggers and filters, plenty of guides.

So you should be good there.

But those are the six emails that I'd set up.

Okay.

So in your opinion, it makes more sense to have like from every flow, one email rather than really focus on one flow and make it perfect.

Yeah.

If there's one flow, let's say you're, you're like, that's such a dumb idea, Michael, I don't want to listen to you.

Set up your welcome flow.

Um, it's, it's going to be, if you have a pop up, if your list isn't growing, um, then a lot of times your welcome flow isn't, isn't more profitable than an abandoned cart flow.

Um, but, but yeah.

Yeah.

There's the emails are more important.

Um, if everybody pulled up their Klaviyo accounts right now, they'd probably see the welcome email one and abandoned cart email one is a bulk of their flow revenue.

Yeah.

And like going back to the, to the plain text emails, like I see those crush and I see so many brands are using them nowadays and Yeah, I think it's just because it's still like something different.

Like a couple months or a couple years ago, I think every brand was only doing like designed emails, beautiful looking, high quality designs.

And people tend to like those plain text emails more or equally as the designed ones, just because they're more authentic, more interesting and also look like a normal email that someone sends you.

Yeah.

We've also seen those crush for, some of the brands.

Yeah.

The, keyword there is authentic.

That was like the start of 2025, I wrote an email out to my list.

That was all about authenticity.

And I was like, you know, that's why plain text I think are working.

The plain texts that are working for our clients are these like super specific, micro topic storytelling, direct response style emails where it's like, we're educating through a story.

And it's, in a very interesting, like authentic approach.

A lot of our clients are also sending us voice notes.

I'll expose some sauce here.

We get our clients to send us voice notes, updating us on their, on their brand, their business.

We have one client who sells hats, ripped us a voice note the other day, got into a couple wholesale deals.

He's, he's in buckle.

He's in a couple other store locations.

Um, real excited about the growth, you know, he was just out of stock for a while.

We got some stock and things were going well.

Um, turn that into a couple of plain text emails and every month those plain text emails are the top performers and he's getting emails back and they're like, dude, I love your brand and your story so much.

And he's like, that's so cool.

I'm not even sending them.

People are interested in my story, not the brand, but the story of the brand and my story.

And it's because.

Consumers in 2025, I believe, are craving authenticity.

There's a brand for everything.

There's a hundred million brands for everything.

What is going to get me to buy?

It's my connection to the brand.

It's that world building as you think about a brand like Kill Crew, their shirts and shorts and t-shirts and stuff.

You're buying into the world that they've created.

So when I buy something from a brand and someone asks me, what kind of brand is that?

And then I tell them the story of the brand versus, it's from Amazon.

People want that now.

People are researching.

People want to find the stories.

People want to find the founders on social.

They want to see where they came from, where it's made, how it's made.

And the people giving consumers that content through all kinds of content, but also through plain text are just reciprocating really well with their audiences and almost taking that world building approach to how they talk to their audience.

Yeah.

I mean, we also see that on the ads side of things where like founders ads and like videos or ads where like the founder talks about the brand, talks about the story, talks about how they're building the brand right now.

Or those are just like the best performing creatives oftentimes.

And kind of nowadays, if you start an e-commerce brand, In my opinion, it makes things significantly easier if you at the same time start a personal brand or at least are willing to also like create content, document the journey.

And I know a lot of brands don't want to do that or a lot of founders don't want to do that.

And it also works without it.

Um, but it's just, it makes everything easier because people love those authentic brands.

They, I feel like people think that there's brands.

And then there's creator led brands and like, doesn't have to be such a daunting thing to talk about what you do.

I think we probably also go through some of this as well.

know I definitely do where it's like, I should share more about what I'm doing and what we're working on.

Cause it's interesting.

We just end up not doing it sometimes, but for an e-commerce brand.

And I'm sure Camillo talked about this on one of the last podcasts.

I need to go and watch it.

is, is like marketing and ads needs to feel like content we're consuming.

And as a business owner, you know, I see so much content from business owners, but it's more fascinating to someone who probably doesn't know about business or it's, it's more intriguing to someone who doesn't know like, Oh, I know what that person does all day.

This is their laptop and work just like I do.

But when you start to create that content of simply documenting.

what's going on where your first warehouse, you know, look at me, I'm packing orders in my, in my garage.

People actually really care about that.

I, the brands, the last five brands that I've bought from are from a founder led video that I was like, that's actually a sick brand.

He also happens to be a sick, sick person.

Um, and now when someone asked me about that brand, if someone asked me about that brand, I feel some sort of.

connection to it.

It's like, oh, I almost feel like this is my friend that I bought a brand from or a product from.

And that is, I feel like what consumers want and it's simple content.

It's, it's documentation rather than, you know, super specific curated content.

Just like, just talk about what you're doing.

Those are the brands you go on TikTok.

Um, there's what's the person I see all the time on, um, they reference them all the time on creator led brands.

It's like a bikini brand.

She just posts content about running her bikini brand.

She's from Canada, I think.

But it's simple content.

It's like, here's me working in the office today.

It's like, I did nothing, but like it was a fun day.

dude, that's so easy to post and people want it and watch it.

And I'm sure you see some of those social posts that your clients do that turn into ads, that can be turned into ads.

Yeah, definitely.

No, I totally agree with that.

And I mean, it's with the content, I think it's similar to the like plain text emails where it's not as much about like how much effort you put into it.

It's just about like sharing something valuable, something interesting, something real without editing a lot without, yeah, putting a lot of effort into it.

Yeah, there's, so one of our clients, we do a mixture of all of those things.

We'll have the really nice plain text that that we wrote and then we'll have like the most, like just a brain dump of like founder thoughts.

And those emails are like choppy.

They're kind of somewhat manic in a way on an email person.

Like you would read that email from AI and you'd be like, dude, where are we at with this?

What's going on?

But then you read it from the founder and it's like, we're working on this.

We're doing that.

I'm so excited for this launch.

We just restocked this.

You guys don't even know what's coming.

Um, and you send that like.

grammar mistakes, commas, everything's messed up.

And those will rip the best sometimes.

So I would say a lot of people talk to their email list as if it's an email list rather than just a group of people that like what you're doing.

It's all it is.

It's all it is.

It's not a corporatey thing.

It's just like, it's an extension of your content.

And I think the brands who think about it, that way you get the best results.

Yeah.

That's so cool.

And I mean, when our clients also like create record content, record ads, we always tell them that they should just think about talking to like one person, to one customer or one potential customer, or even imagine that they talk to a friend and just tell them something about the product and not how they think they should talk to like thousands or millions of people, but just to like casually speaking to one person and it makes it way better.

And that's something that I actually just wrote an email about this specific to high AOV brands, but we can talk about it broadly is like your email marketing is essentially just an extended conversation with someone who's interested in buying your products.

And if you think about that, like, like a car sale, maybe not a car because buying cars is fairly normal.

So there's not a lot of talk.

There's still some, but let's say it's more like a white glove.

You know, we're going to buy this house.

Let's sit down and discuss buying this house.

Um, and the, your, your flows are, are where they're at in the buying journey.

So one might be like, I've never considered buying a house before, but today I am.

So one might be like, dude, I've been searching for a house for a year and I just can't quite figure out which one I like.

Some people might say, Hey, I'm, actually moving from this house.

I just sold it.

Now I got to buy this house.

Um, but I'm nervous about financing.

There's different things.

The flows are.

The conversation streams based on where they're at in that buying journey.

You're having that conversation.

You're picking up from where they're at, abandoned cart.

You know, I don't really know if this is going to work.

I don't know, you know, what shipping is going to be like.

I don't know what return policies are like.

Well, start the conversation there and work closer to the sale.

A lot of people don't think about flows as, as those conversations as a sales process.

And then sometimes they think too much about it on campaigns.

We send campaigns, the goal here is one email, one idea, one goal.

Sometimes clients think when they're sending those emails, they have to pack everything, that whole sales process, that whole flow sales process into one campaign email.

And then it's a word vomit that you can't keep up with.

The goal with those campaigns is to educate, to nurture, to build social proof, build your perception of the brand, but sell the click.

get them to the website, get them to a blog, get them to a product page, get them to a landing page and do the rest of the educating and selling there versus the campaign.

And then if they don't buy, they did something on the website.

Now they trigger the flow that triggers the conversation that they need to be having.

And when you think about it like that, it's like, oh, it's just a longer sales process split up in different conversations, which is the best way I think to think about it.

Yeah.

I see a lot of similarities to ads, where also a lot of people think that like one creative, one ad has to do like all of the selling, even though that's not how it works.

Like the ad's purpose is only to get them to click, to get them to go to the website or to consume the content and then guide them forward in the buying journey and not to do like everything.

Yeah, my, my favorite ads are the info product ads that are like, like, Oh, you viewed this and you didn't buy it.

Like those are always the funniest ones.

Cause they're like, so directly like talking into your soul.

They're like, dude, you didn't buy it.

You didn't buy like what's going on.

And it's like, damn dude, how'd you know?

Uh, it's just a nice little retargeting ad there.

Um, but, yeah, I think about it the same, like the ads I feel like are very much the same.

You're just picking off where they're at in the buying journey.

And sometimes you create that buying journey to start.

Oh, I've never seen this before.

What's that click?

Now you're in the ecosystem.

You're in the world.

It's just like a spiral web.

You're just getting them in and you're giving them enough content to, eventually get to the conclusion of whether or not they would benefit from buying your product.

Yeah.

And I imagine, imagine you judge every single brand you interact with on a, daily basis in terms of their email marketing.

Um, would you say that still does email marketing impact your buying behavior from a brand?

Not.

As a personal consumer, think all of my clients are the same way.

Like when, people ask what I do, it's like, Hey, you know, those, those random pop-ups that you get on websites.

It's like, give me your email for 10 % off.

They're like, yeah, like we send out those emails.

They're like, Oh, but that, is not the sentiment, the sentiment for, all consumers out there.

I mean, your brand should be generating at least 30 % from Klaviyo most times.

Um, as a consumer, I don't.

sign up to emails, I don't check my email inbox like that, my personal, right?

And most business owners probably don't.

So when we have those conversations, we're like, oh, that's just so annoying.

I'm like, I mean, it's annoying for me too, but as you see, like the direct correlation of more emails to more recipients equals more money.

Who am I to say that you shouldn't be buying something from an email, right?

So as a consumer, doesn't sway me just because I don't look at it.

But do you know what'll sway me?

An Instagram ad.

100%.

That's what's getting me the ad.

I'm an ad to buy person.

I'm not an ad to email person.

Um, cause I know when I clicked that ad, I'm, I'm almost in already.

So, so that's how I think about it.

um, the consumer mindset is just so different and you really have to, I know a lot of brands when starting to write their own emails, they, they miss everything because they know so much.

It's like, Hey, say that's assumed you know that cause you're the founder of the brand.

you know, let's educate everybody else on it.

So I think the consumer mindset is just totally different.

Yeah.

And I also think that like, at least with ads, a lot of people think that they, they're not impacted by it and that they didn't buy because of the ad or whatever.

But in reality, they saw the ad and it reminded them of something.

It handled one of their objections and in the end led to the purchase and they just don't realize it.

And the best ads you don't even look at as ads.

the, love, love looking at software ads or I love getting software ads because I had searched the software before and I know what I liked about it.

So I'm interested to see what the ads about to show me.

And, and I will see the software ad for something that's a competitor to the, to the software that I wanted to use.

And then I'll be like, Oh, actually I need to go back and sign up for that other one.

So there's like so many things you can say.

You were like doing your own thing, but it's really nice every now and then to just, just get a little reminder, like, Hey, you, browse this or you were going to buy this or like check this out.

You were checking this out.

Um, yeah.

Ads, ads sway everyone.

don't think we can claim that they don't.

A good ad sway everyone for sure.

At least gets you thinking like, what is this?

Yeah.

And going back to email and SMS, like, where do you see the trend going?

Um, especially with AI and everything this year and next year.

think things only get better, man.

AI is so amazing.

You know, we have custom agents for every client.

So it's trained on their brands and, know, 250 plus care, 250,000 plus characters of market research and onboarding form.

And, you know, we scraped Reddit for all these reviews.

There's so many things that you can do with AI.

And as far as like trends, um, I think things continue.

People still crave authenticity.

People still crave real brands that deliver great products.

I think as a brand owner, if you have a great product, it's your obligation to tell as many people as possible about it.

And if you don't feel that way, you probably don't have a great product.

You should be feeling as if everyone should have one if it's right for them.

And so the biggest thing is like the more recipients you can reach with the right message, the more money you're going to make.

I think with AI and everything, I don't think there's one person that benefits more than potentially an e-commerce brand owner.

know, getting to 50 to 80K a month, you've never been more helped with AI.

know, that first landing page copy, that first ad created from Canva, that first five variations of that, that first welcome email, that first campaign.

Even the first ad creative itself, all that can come from AI.

So your, your, your zero to one is so ridiculously cheap.

Now you don't have to find the, the, you know, the design agency to come up with the packaging or buy the first, you know, you know, you don't have any revenue, you know what you can do so many things yourself now with AI that I often think as an agency owner, you know, I feel helped by it, but as an econ brand owner, that zero to one, that zero to 50 to 80 to a hundred K.

You're just like, you just now have so many things that can help you.

I think it's never been a better time to start and it's never been a better time to spend some of that time into, you know, with AI and just figuring out what you can do.

Yeah.

So exciting.

It really, it really is.

Every week's different now, especially with the AI stuff.

Yeah.

Now the last question, if you could tell every e-commerce brand owner to just implement one thing today.

When it comes to their email marketing, what would it be?

If you can write one email a week, 30 minutes a week, spend on email, you can get, know, whether that's a campaign, whether that's this week, I'm going to write the welcome flow, email one, banner card email two, or email one.

After, after a month or two, you're going to have your basics.

If you really care and you really want to be successful and you want to set yourself up, just, just take, just take.

two, three, four hours to write six emails and one campaign a week.

Your pocket's not going to hurt.

It's going to be, it's going to be feeling nice.

And you know, after the first time you write with AI and stuff, it's going to be quicker.

So it might take you two hours.

That two hours is so infinitely valuable for those six flow emails that we talked about earlier.

And in the occasional manic brain dump founder plain text email.

You might feel like no one cares.

You might feel like people don't want to hear from it.

You might feel like it's annoying It's not and you're only gonna make more money from it.

So I think those two hours are Immensely immensely valuable.

I think that's that's the difference between Getting to 50k a month and an already generating, you know a couple thousand dollars a month from email over the last eight months Which is which is nice.

Nice to have a couple extra thousand dollars every every month from something that's 52 hours.

So I think it just sets you up way better once you get to that 50, 80K a month mark.

Yeah.

Love that.

Now, where can people follow you and how can they start working with you?

Yeah, they can look us up on our website at sumodigital.com.

Maybe there's a link below and then my Twitter is MichaelRathbun7.

You can find us on YouTube as well if you just search MichaelRathbun email marketing.

That's probably the best spot to find us on our website or on our YouTube channel.

Awesome.

Yeah, that was great.

Thank you for a lot of very valuable insights.

Thank you, Yeah, have a great rest of I've got to do these more often.

I love talking to the ads guys, man.

All the homies run ads as well.

So a lot of good conversations.

Nice.

Love that.

Awesome, man.

Take care.

Take care.