Spike New Zealand with Glenn Edley on Sunday Social

Posted by Spike Email Marketing

Glenn on Sunday Social with Vaughn Davis. Fun and email marketing ensue.

Vaughn:
Sing it with me. Spam, spam, spam, spam. Now you might not know this, but when you get an email from a shop, a car dealer or a bank like ASB, it might not be coming from them at all. Whoa, nothing scary, nothing scary, quite legitimate. It might be coming from one of New Zealand’s many email marketing companies. The boss of one of them is a Mr. Glenn Edley. He’s here to talk about his company Spike, which he named after my dog. Welcome Glenn.

Glenn:
Welcome.

Vaughn:
Welcome.

Glenn:
Welcome.

Vaughn:
No, I welcome you, I welcome you. I’m the host.

Glenn:
Oh.

Vaughn:
I welcome you. Welcome, Glenn.

Glenn:
Thank you. Can I just congratulate you on that 177 shows?

Vaughn:
Thank you.

Glenn:
Because after 177 shows

Vaughn:
What do you get? Is that paper? No, gold? Myrrh, it’s myrrh.

Glenn:
Is it?

Vaughn:
Frankincense? I don’t know. What do you give someone for the 177th seventh anniversary?

Glenn:
Probably just a pat on the back, really.

Vaughn:
Oh, you can’t, this studio is so big, so big. If you’re watching a Facebook live stream earlier, you’d know just how big it was. You couldn’t give me a pat on the back-

Glenn:
I couldn’t.

Vaughn:
… without being off air for about 30 seconds.

Glenn:
That’s about right.

Glenn:
So I love the intro song, by the way. And if it’s quality spam, then it’s fine. I think there’s a big difference, though between spam and quality spam. So we, hopefully we can touch on that.

Vaughn:
Yeah, well let’s talk about that in a minute, but first your company, and I love… I mean, I own a small business and I love talking to people who own businesses, who don’t just turn up nine to five and hope that the pay will come in every month, but who get off their bums and take a risk, employ some people and run a business. And yours is called Spike. So tell me about spike.

Glenn:
Well, spike is New Zealand’s premier email marketing lab. We’ve been doing this for a long time now. I went out on my own August, 2004. So we’re tipping over into our 14th year, very exciting.

Vaughn:
Oh, congratulations to you.

Glenn:
Oh, thank you.

Vaughn:
This is just one big hug fest, isn’t it?

Glenn:
It is. It always is when you and I are together.

Vaughn:
We should just put on a song and have a hug, but not in the news edit suites, because the sign’s gone up saying, “No private hugging in the news edit suites.

Glenn:
I like how Time described that as the Wash your Cup sign.

Vaughn:
Yeah, exactly.

Glenn:
Perfect.

Vaughn:
We’re digressing. So 14 years ago.

Glenn:
Yeah. And I saw a chance to get out there and… email marketing is a perennial. So it’s been around for around 50 years now. And I don’t think it’s going to go away in a huge hurry. I saw this opportunity where a single person can keep in contact with hundreds, if not thousands of people and go about their day-to-day business.

Glenn:
So, for example, some of my first clients were real estate agents. So Jill McClatchy up at Harvey’s in Titirangi. And she had all these agents in there and they were… there’s two things in real estate now listing and selling. That takes up a lot of time. So in the meantime, you needed to stay top of mind, and email is still the best out there. I think email is still amazing at two things, staying top of mind and creating an action. And nothing else really does that. I think that prompting and action is that key thing, like every email that you send should basically be trying to get a click.

Vaughn:
So 14 years ago, there was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. There was no LinkedIn. The top website was probably something like Yahoo or Alta Vista or something. Was there a Google even? There was no iPhone. There were very few laptops, we were all on desktop computers.

Glenn:
Yeah.

Vaughn:
And the one constant through that time, because a lot of the big tech companies, the platforms, Myspace, Second Life, Bebo, they’ve all come and gone, disappeared. But email’s kind of being the constant hasn’t it?

Glenn:
It really has. If you think about business these days, you really need to be building your list, always building your list. And that is one of the main things we do with a lot of our clients, is just help them grow their list. Or new clients coming on, especially small businesses, we’re helping them a lot with that, because they’ve got customers coming in and out all day of their shops, you know, like coming in and out of their businesses, they’re on the phone to them. They’re emailing them. And when a guy who’s got a really successful business comes to you and says, “I wish I’d kept a well-maintained database, I’d be in a much better place.” And he’s got a really successful business. I realized that… and that is just a few months ago. I realized that email really still does have just the center place, this really central place in your marketing. And if you’re not doing it, and if you’re not growing your list, when you come to sell your business down the line or think about it-

Vaughn:
What have you got?

Glenn:
Yeah, nothing. You got nothing.

Vaughn:
So a lot of people tonight will be business owners. You know, there might be franchisees of something. Or they might have a shop or a manufacturing firm or whatever, it might just be two or three of them. But they’ll have customers and they’ll want to keep in touch with them. But in 2017, a lot of them will have been told, probably by roosters like me that, “Social media. You want to get a Facebook page. You want to contact people that way and have a conversation.” What’s the advantage of email for a business owner, the advantage of email over, let’s say Facebook.

Glenn:
I think it’s a pretty simple one. You own control your own email list. It’s yours. And when you send out an email to people who signed up for your list to hear from you, it goes to them. It doesn’t like disappear into their news feed or some algorithm that decides what’s going to show. It goes straight into their inbox.

Vaughn:
Well, there’s an interesting thing I had never, ever thought of actually, Glenn. Maybe we’re going to invent something tonight, live on air. Wouldn’t that be amazing-

Glenn:
It would.

Vaughn:
… if we could invent something? So this is for the… if my lawyers are listening, I want you to patent this, email inboxes are chronological, right? That’s how we all view them. There is no algorithm. There’s no sorting. There’s no most important, most relevant at the top?

Vaughn:
That’d be good though, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be good if the emails that the artificial intelligence worked out was important to you, came to the top of your inbox? Because you probably get hundreds day, I get hundreds a day. That’d be good, wouldn’t it?

Glenn:
That’s very good. Google. You need to patent that just because someone on Google’s listening.

Vaughn:
I just did, I just did. By saying it live on the radio, I think I’ve patented it. So you, you deal with a lot of businesses and you know, I thought, historically you’ve dealt with a lot of big businesses, but you’re also dealing with the smaller ones as well. How many emails does Spike send out every year on behalf of those businesses, do you ever stop and count?

Glenn:
Yeah, we do. Because it’s a nice metric, right?

Vaughn:
Yeah, how many?

Glenn:
So it’s about 50 million.

Vaughn:
50 million? So if you’re listening now, you’ve probably, you know, law of averages, Glenn and his email minions have sent you 10 emails in the last year.

Glenn:
Yeah. I mean, if you’re signed up to a lot of the major retailers, you’ve probably had an email from us. So we send a lot of emails.

Vaughn:
Where you’re at a party, I don’t know if you go to parties, God knows I don’t, do you tell people that you’re the email guy or do you just pretend that you play piano in a brothel?

Glenn:
No, I do, because I-

Vaughn:
You play piano?

Glenn:
Well, no, I used to. Not in a brothel, no,

Vaughn:
So you could pretend that you played piano in a brothel?

Glenn:
I could. I think I generally say I own a marketing agency or a marketing business or something. And then they ask, “Well what do you do?” And it’s email marketing. Do you know what’s really interesting, Vaughn?

Vaughn:
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Clowns. It’s the shoes. They fascinate me. You know why have they all got long shoes? That’s what’s interesting, clowns.

Glenn:
No.

Vaughn:
Oh, was that rhetorical? Oh, I’m sorry, Glenn. Tell me, tell me what’s interesting.

Glenn:
Okay. When I first started this business a long time ago, people used to say to me, “Okay, so you send spam?” And I used to so say, “No, no, no, I send quality spam.” What’s interesting is that when I talk about that now, that is really a part of the conversation. Like for me it seems that the conversation about email, especially maybe who I’m talking to, has changed quite a lot. And I’m really enjoying that, because suddenly there’s a whole group of smaller businesses who have maybe been really inconsistent, signed up to MailChimp or something, don’t send any emails, and suddenly they’re like, “Oh actually, this is a good part of our marketing effort.” And back to that thing we talked about, right? You own it. It’s valuable. I used to liken it to a bar of gold, you know, good as gold.

Vaughn:
You know what I think you’re just getting too in love with your own email. Gold is just a little bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it’s bronze, I don’t know. Maybe it’s silver, silver. It’s silver.

Hey, after the break, with Glenn Edley from Spike, we’re going to talk about what you can do to use email to connect with your customers, if you’ve got a small business. Back soon.

Speaker 3:
[inaudible 00:10:00] stamps, to the worldwide web, it’s Sunday Social with Vaughn Davis.

Vaughn:
Hey, welcome back. It’s a party in here. Josie Campbell’s just turned up for the second half, all bright and early, but talking to Glenn Edley from Spike, which is, well by his own description, New Zealand’s leading email marketing lab. Glenn, if I had a small business, and by crikey I do, and I’ve been emailing my customers haphazardly, let’s say, haphazardly. I want to get serious about email marketing. What are some of the first steps I should take? How do I start this journey?

Glenn:
The best way to start, is to generally look at your business strategy. Do you actually have one for a start, by the way, it’s another-

Vaughn:
No. No, no, I don’t actually.

Glenn:
Because you need to align your email marketing with that, you need to actually align what you’re doing with your business strategy, because then you’ll be able to start creating the content you need, to be able to start sending consistently. And you need to start sending consistently, even if it’s once a month, but just making sure you’re doing it once a month.

Vaughn:
But what if you’ve got nothing to say? Let’s say, I don’t know, I’m a panel beater, right? And I’ve got some email addresses from everyone whose panels I ever beat. And you know, I might only see these people every two years when they have a wee crash or a bit of rust. What have I got to say 24 times to them in between those two meetings?

Glenn:
Well, that’s a good question, because I deal with a panel beater. And we don’t actually do it every month for those guys. We actually do a video. They’ll go around and video a repair that they’ve just done. And really it’s just about, for them, it’s about staying top of mind. So it’s only every quarter. But where they’re talking to, is they’re actually talking to the insurance assessors and the car dealers. They’re talking to those guys a lot.

Vaughn:
Right, the more important customers. So I decide how email sort of lines up with my business strategy and I decide what sort of frequency I’m going to do. What makes a good email from a business’s point of view? What’s a good email?

Glenn:
A good email to me is one that gets a really good response, basically right at the end of the day?

Vaughn:
Yeah, so let’s talk about that. So a response to an… If I email you or Josie a response is, you reply. That’s pretty much the only response that I could ever measure. For a business, what’s the sort of response that they’re looking for? What’s the local restaurant looking for when they send out an email?

Glenn:
Well, the local restaurant is looking for people coming in to eat dinner, right? And they can measure that, because they’ll be able to see how many bookings they’ve got. So it’s like, they’ve got to get quite visible of… their goals of the email. So if their goal is specifically to get people to book dinner, well, there has to be a link in that email that says, “Book for dinner.” You know, like I think-

Vaughn:
Rather than just write an email saying, “Hey, we’ve got lots of crayfish. And at the moment the crayfish is delicious. Hope we see you guys soon.” And leave it at that.

Glenn:
Yeah. Not for profits, I think, are the worst at this. There’s so many emails they send out, and none of them will have a, Donate Now button. I mean, how simple is that?

Vaughn:
So you’ve got to come out, and you’ve got to come right out and ask for it?

Glenn:
Oh, you do.

Vaughn:
You don’t ask, you don’t get.

Glenn:
Exactly.

Vaughn:
That’s what you’re saying.

Glenn:
Yeah.

Vaughn:
So a good email one is the one that comes out and asks. What’s a good kind of a response rate for an email? You know, what’s a good percentage? You send out a thousand emails. What does success look like for my restaurant, for my panel beater?

Glenn:
I think if you’re sending out like a thousand emails-

Vaughn:
Well, 10,000, a million.

Glenn:
Yeah.

Vaughn:
It doesn’t matter.

Glenn:
I think for retailers it’s in the late twenties, early thirties or so for most of our clients [crosstalk 00:13:58].

Vaughn:
What does that mean?

Glenn:
So people who actually opened the email.

Vaughn:
Do you mean percent?

Glenn:
Percent, yes.

Vaughn:
You’ve got to spell that out.

Glenn:
I do, sorry.

Vaughn:
Because it’s Sunday night and we’re thinking about our dinner, we’re not listening closely to.

Glenn:
No, if it’s B to B, so business to business, you should be well above 40%. But we have some techniques that we use to do that, right? Like our stats are way better than everyone else’s. And the reason is, is because we resend every single email we send, to the people who didn’t open the first time it was sent.

Vaughn:
Just in case they didn’t have that technology that we just invented in the last segment that makes the important emails come to the top. Now the other thing you can click on, and this, I think, would fascinate everyone listening. The other thing you can click on when you get an email is not Book Now or Beat my Panels, it’s Unsubscribe, right? And you know, when I’m feeling a bit cross with the world, it’s not a good day for email marketers, because when I’m feeling a bit cross with the world and I wake up and there’s 15 emails, I’ll probably unsubscribed to most of them. Let’s ask two questions about this. Firstly, when I am subscribed, is it actually doing anything, or is it like that button on the lift that says, “Close doors,” it just does nothing. It’s just a button.

Glenn:
If it doesn’t do anything, then that business has a problem, right? Because I think there’s a lot of databases being mixed up here where people send out emails with the unsubscribe link and then they upload their list, their new list again, every time. So instead of keeping that existing list and it’s curating it or it’s being edited all the time by unsubscribes, they’re just uploading a new one. So it should work, right? If you see a link that goes through… I’m actually seeing this myself lately, on a few lists that I just can’t seem to get off.

Vaughn:
Yeah. So let’s talk about that. First… we’ll talk about how to get off a list in a moment, but firstly, how the heck do I end up on some of these lists? Like I got an email the other day from the local Aston Martin dealership, Glenn. I know, you’re aghast, I can see your face. Because clearly I’ve set my sights higher than just an Aston Martin. They are desperate to sell me an Aston Martin or at the very least, have me test drive one. I’ve never… I didn’t even know where the Aston Martin dealership is. How are these people getting my email address? How do you get onto these lists? Oh you’re smiling, because you do those emails, aren’t you? Oh, Glenn.

Glenn:
I don’t, I don’t. I used to.

Vaughn:
Well, that’s good. That’s good.

Glenn:
I used to.

Vaughn:
So how are we getting, how, generally, how are we getting on to email lists for companies that we’ve never dealt with?

Glenn:
So that, for a start, you shouldn’t be. Unless you sign up for something, like physically go there to the website and sign up. Sometimes if you buy things though, as you come through a shop, there might-

Vaughn:
So it’ll say by buying this McDonald’s $5 Hunger Buster special, you agree to getting emails from Aston Martin.

Glenn:
Well, there should be an Opt In there. I actually think that’s a very interesting one, because considering I know who that yard is, for you to be able to get on their list, that seems to me-

Vaughn:
It just seems a bit wacky. Josie just very clearly pointed out that perhaps it’s because there’s that one photo online in which I look like Daniel Craig. And they thought, “Yes, yes, that guy needs to be driving an Aston Martin, ideally one where the license plate flips up and reveals a missile launcher.” I wonder if they have those, if you’re listening Aston Martin, and you have one where the license plate flips up and reveals an email that-

Glenn:
They do. They do,

Vaughn:
A rocket launcher.

Glenn:
Yeah.

Vaughn:
That’s the one I need.

Glenn:
Didn’t they come here at some stage. It’s hidden away somewhere. But look, if you end up on a list, business to business, there are, within the Anti-spam Act, there’s definitely ways that you can be marketed to or emailed if you’re a business. And it’s B to B.

Vaughn:
Oh, so it’s different if you’re a business.

Glenn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). But that, to me, is purely… that’s retail, right? They shouldn’t have just grabbed your name and emailed you. We wouldn’t do that. It’s just not the way that it works.

Vaughn:
So I know, in the telemarketing world, which still exists for those people who have landlines, or actually increasingly with mobile numbers, I’ve noticed. In the telemarketing world, there’s like a Do Not Call list that you can have yourself put on, right? I don’t ever want to be called by anyone, unless it’s my nearest and dearest, and not Aston Martin. Is there an email equivalent? Is there one central repository of the Get Off my Lawn Folk?

Glenn:
Not that I know of. So we keep one-

Vaughn:
Yep. Which just covers all your clients.

Glenn:
Yeah, and it’s a suppression list. We monitor that all the time, because a lot of the time we’re also getting honeypots or spam.

Vaughn:
What the heck’s a honeypot?

Glenn:
So a lot of emails-

Vaughn:
I know what a spam is. So spam’s an unsolicited marketing email that you never asked for or signed up, but what’s a honeypot?

Glenn:
So that’s when emails that haven’t been used for a while or accounts that have been stopped, they turn into basically spam traps. And they will be left on your list. And if you start delivering to those, then you will start to… your inbox delivery and everything will start to suffer because you should have taken those off your list. So that’s why my analyst… well, no, I’ve got two of them.

Vaughn:
Your analyst, is it like your therapist?

Glenn:
No, I wouldn’t call Karl a therapist-

Vaughn:
Yes.

Glenn:
Maybe Elizabeth, our Data Analyst.

Vaughn:
Anyway, that’s why your analyst…

Glenn:
They are constantly cleansing our lists of all those kind of things. And it just goes on in the background.

Vaughn:
So bottom line, if it’s a professional company and you hit that Unsubscribe button, it should work, but there is no universal way of getting rid of things. Let’s talk about your personal email life, because I’m guessing it goes one of two ways. Either you subscribe to nothing, because you secretly hate yourself and all people like you, or you subscribe to everything because you want to see what the competition’s up to.

Glenn:
It goes both ways sometimes, because I definitely sign up to all my clients’ lists. I will go and sign up to people I’m interested in, but you know, I do unsubscribe, because I’ve got a lot of stuff coming in. But I like to edit the information I read quite ruthlessly. So yeah, if something isn’t meeting the standards or that I thought I’m definitely unsubscribing… I think I used to be on a lot more or lists, but now yeah, I’m a lot more ruthless with what I want to see. It’s just because I don’t have time, right? So I completely understand people out there because I’m doing it myself.

Vaughn:
You’re sending… let’s just reiterate that, if you were away making a cup of tea while Glenn was talking earlier, you, Glenn are sending 50 million emails a year to our inboxes around New Zealand and there’s more companies like you doing the same?

Glenn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s true. We have like 1.6 million unique email addresses in our database.

Vaughn:
That’s quite a few. With that of course comes responsibility to look after that information, right?

Glenn:
Yeah.

Vaughn:
And keep it private. So how seriously do you take that?

Glenn:
We take it very seriously. And companies like, you know, the Warehouse Group Financial Services really hold us accountable to that. Because we have to do credit applications online for them and things like that. We have got the highest data security that I suppose we could ever have. So we work really, really hard on that. And I think that a lot of companies are so loose. Like people still send us spreadsheets, you know, it’s like, “Come on.” So, you know, we have to train our clients as well, how data gets processes between us. That’s at all levels.

Glenn:
We work closely with our hosting company. We’re at the same place as Xero and Vodafone and all those guys. All IP location locked, things like that. And data is really, really important. You know, I think that when we’ve been going through stages of people talking about big data and all like that, the thing is, is that it’s all useful data, but you’ve got to look after it and it’s not. It keeps getting passed around.

Glenn:
So we like to look after our data, we like to keep our customer data really, really clean. We’re always cleansing their lists of those spam traps, and growing them at the same time. And also making sure that people are getting into the inbox because you know, the fact is, is that we have complete control. We have a full time delivery expert that helps us get emails into the inbox. And like how many business owners out there could say, “Oh, I know exactly how many emails are getting into an inbox.” Because those platforms don’t really give that kind of information.

Vaughn:
Well, there won’t be a few more tomorrow morning once they go have a look at spike.co.nz. Glenn Edley, thank you so much for coming in tonight.

Glenn:
Thank you very much. And again, congratulations Vaughn.

Vaughn:
Oh, I know. I know, right? 177. Hey after the break Josie Campbell joins us with the apps, websites and interesting online news of the week, including a couple of really good pointers is if you’re planning to take a holiday. Back soon.