E-Commerce Email Automation at Scale feat. Eric Schechter of GiddyUp

Narrator  0:00  

You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way. With your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis  0:33  

Welcome to the All systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, the founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge, the place online to learn about Small Business Marketing and Sales Automation, where we focus on not just turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers but equipping them with the tutelage the acumen, the curriculum, the resources, the community to become an automation service provider and if you’d like to become one or find out more about our automation packages, go to All systems go podcast comm if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe and share at the time of recording this the All systems go podcast is free to subscribe to. So you can find this show on all main podcasting apps like Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, you can find us on YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts we are there. If you’re new to the podcast, let me first say welcome. I want you to listen to this episode in its entirety before you subscribe so you know just what you’re getting into. But for those of you who have been listening and are not subscribed, please do so if you haven’t left a five star rating and review. It would be greatly appreciated if you do that as well if for whatever reason, you’re having troubles leaving a review in the platform that you’re listening to this podcast in. We’ve got you covered automation bridge comm forward slash review, and we’ll take care of it for you. Okay, this episode this episode, I get to have an open conversation with a co founder I had the privilege to personally work with to scale their e commerce business with automated email marketing. And a pleasure would be an understatement. But I had the joy of meeting Eric while I was conducting a live workshop. And when the opportunity presented itself to jump on board and help. I did and I’m so glad I did as the results and the relationship was well worth it. You’ll learn about it in the podcast. But as the co founder and VP of Marketing Eric oversees giddy ups the global brand marketing and positioning strategy since 2013. They’ve launched over 150, direct to consumer brands, they’ve acquired millions of customers across the globe and profitably driven 1 billion plus in sales for their brand new partners on 100%. commission only it is an amazing business model, how they’ve done it is homage to just

Chris Davis  3:15  

affective marketing, affective strategic marketing, where you get paid to perform. I absolutely love it. When I heard about the model. I was like, This is amazing. That’s my whole career has always been paid to perform. So it resonated with me the work that we were able to accomplish. You all will hear it in this episode. So let me not belabor it anymore. Enjoy the conversation between Eric and I. Eric, welcome to the podcast. Long time come in. We’ve both been looking forward to it. How you doing, man?

Eric Schechter  3:52  

It’s so great. Great to be here, man. It’s been way too long.

Eric Schechter  3:58  

And just excited for the conversation and to to chat with you again, man.

Chris Davis  4:01  

Yes. So listeners you’re in for a treat. Eric and I work together closely, and doing real deep marketing. So some of the conversations that we’ve had, Eric, I think if you could record some of the meetings that we’ve had, and even just some of our side conversations, that it’s probably like a vault of just probably millions and millions of marketing acumen and

Unknown Speaker  4:27  

stuff, right.

Chris Davis  4:29  

So tell our listeners, um, tell us tell us about you as the co founder. And I want you to touch on both businesses that you guys have or let me say giddy up, primarily and then the my daily discovery piece. Let us know again, a little bit about you and in those two businesses.

Eric Schechter  4:47  

Yeah, sure. So giddy up is a partner marketing network and a performance platform. And so what we do is we help create performance partnerships between innovative direct to consumer brands and some of the top marketers around the world. And everything is done in a partnership performance basis. So, you know, kind of what that means is like as a brand, normally, when you’re focused on customer acquisition and growing your business, the traditional model is normally either doing it yourself building a team, which can be really expensive and risky or you go with an agency, and you know, you’re paying retainers, you’re paying upfront fees or percentage of spend. And, you know, there’s just also, there’s just a lot of risk associated with that, mostly because the models are just really, they’re misaligned in terms of the incentives, right, like, if you’re paying someone to spend more, they’re more more than likely going to spend more instead of trying to figure out how to be more profitable. But also, you know, one of the things that we realized when we were coming into the business is that you’re really only working with one brain and whether that’s like your team, you know, who’s trying to figure out how to create content and funnels to scale your business or an agency, it’s, it’s really hard to crack the code with all the variables and all the different ways that you can mark it. And so what we see is a much more decentralized and democratized ecosystem for marketing. That creates win wins for both sides. So the way that our model works is, you know, we work with direct to consumer innovative brands, we invest all of our time, all of our capital into building everything they need to acquire customers online. They don’t pay for anything upfront. And then we connect them with these marketers who spend their own time, their own capital, buying media, figuring out all the best angles, or the best landing pages, the BEST OFFERS, and driving traffic to the funnels, we build and only get paid for the sales that, that they drive. And so, you know, it’s just a, it’s a really amazing model, because you’re working with experts who are specifically experienced in channels like YouTube, that’s all they do. Yeah, and, or native advertising, or this and that. And also globally, like people that are in Italy, that know how to market to Italy, on Facebook, and it’s just an incredible model, because it’s highly scalable. It’s, it’s completely on performance, zero risk. And, and it’s it’s a beautiful thing, and in our experience, to kind of see what these two groups of people can do together when the incentives are aligned, and they both have the tools to be successful. So that’s really what we’re focused on, you know, a giddy up is how do we scale performance partnerships, we believe that’s the future of advertising is, is creating that. And then, you know, this, probably about a year and a half ago, we created the direct to consumer property called my daily discovery. And really, that was our focus on how to create, how to inspire and empower people to live a little better, and doing that through a combination of content and commerce. And so we really started off with email. And that’s where, you know, you and I, and the team started working together, but really focused on how do you create an amazing, like, highly valuable content that gets people excited about opening your email, not like, every day, I see this email come in my inbox and just another promotion, and I start to ignore it over time, or it’s not personalized to me, you know, we took a very methodical approach of saying, Hey, we don’t want to kind of go one to many, we want to figure out how do we build a system, an automated system, to really understand what people want, what they’re resonating with, what you know, what they’re engaging with, and create these flows that give them the most value possible, and obviously, leverage all the commerce opportunities that we have to kind of fuel the entire thing. And so those are the two areas of our business. And yeah, we’re just really excited about growing both of them, man. Yeah. And it’s really great.

Chris Davis  9:00  

I want to paint the picture for you all on just how amazing the model is. So I of course, I’ve got front row seat, I had a front row seat and backstage access to the model, been able to sit down with Eric and toepfer, the other one of the other co founders and really map it out. And just imagine if you had a product or an idea, and you were able to at least get it in some form of production. Right there. Just when you think like Yes, I’ve done it, you’re really just getting started. Because what is the product without consumers to consume the product, right? So to come up with the model to where you guys have the marketing force, from advertising to conversion of that advertising, to help that person that that business owner say, Okay, I want to get this out to as many people as possible. Don’t have the clue where to start, but I know this is a good product. And giddy up comm says hey, look, we’re alive. That is a good product, and we’re going to partner with you, we’re going to take care of your landing, just let’s listen to this everybody, we’re going to take care of your landing page optimized landing page, your spend, you heard Eric say they’ve got marketers and all types of all places of the world. So that if you’re marketing into us in a certain country, there’s a marketer in that country, right that can market and it just brings in such a power, you know, and relieves such a load from that entrepreneur that was just like, Whoa, I didn’t realize I was gonna have to do all of that, after I created my product, to start making money. And

Eric Schechter  10:40  

yeah, I mean, that’s the thing, too, is there’s so much to actually doing the product and the brand side, right, not only coming up with the idea, which took a lot of time and effort, and, you know, just massaging in terms of getting it to the final place, then, obviously, like, you need to launch the business, and you need to kind of have all the infrastructure in place in terms of being able to manufacture it, inventory management, customer support, you know, logistics, yeah, and that is a full time role. And what I see a lot of times is people can’t do both. And so they either tried to do it, and they fail, because they’re spread thin across so many different areas, or they’re not marketers, but they’re trying to be you, or they’re trying to work with agencies, but they don’t understand really what they’re doing. And they’re paying them a lot of money on the upfront. And a lot of these companies and contractors on the marketing side. I mean, you know, it’s unfortunate to say, but a lot of people give a lot of big promises and produce very little results. And it’s just, I think it’s because the model is just kind of completely wrong. And I think, you know, when you can work with partners, people that look at your business and say, we want to partner with you, we don’t want you as a client, we don’t want you as a vendor, but it’s a partnership, when we win, you win, and vice versa, the things that can kind of create some pretty magical stuff, when it comes to the distribution of that said product. And again, it’s just having people that have aligned incentives with the things that matter to them also matter to you. And that’s where, you know, there’s just an amazing symbiotic relationship that can produce amazing results.

Chris Davis  12:14  

Yeah, and I want to say this to you don’t get there without very strategic minds at the founder level, right. And I want to give insight to everybody on how we met, I was doing a training in Eric way, for me to describe Eric, as a co founder, would be somebody who’s got an eye for talent, and a heart to engage in the most authentic way to create a win win. situation by any means possible, which really mirrors gidea. Right, you’re creating all of these Win Win scenarios. So um, a lot of founders that you meet a spread, let me just speak in my personal experience, in let you all know, listening, a lot of founders from afar are just great, right? The from afar, founders, you’d never meet them, maybe you shake their hand at an event or something like that. And you’re like, that’s a great founder. But the true test of their leadership, and their mettle, you know, as a founder, becomes when that proximity gets closer and closer and closer. And that’s where you’ll see a lot of those lofty ideas and perceptions of founders fail. Because you start to see that Wait a minute, they’re they’re not as strong of a leader as they need to be. They don’t really care about people. They’re very transactional. They’re that it’s process over people, not people over process. So as we began to work together, more and more, you pass the proximity test. Right, the closer we engaged, it was just like, Man, you didn’t just, you weren’t just a hard driver for goals, you would create these stretch goals that even you and I would think like, man, do you think that’s possible? Right? It’s just like, well, if we think it’s possible, then it needs to be bigger. Right? So you had that. But you also had the ability to not lose touch with the personal side of it, the the leadership piece, that’s like, Okay, I know that if you’re in your best head state, I’m going to get the most out of you, I’m going to get your best. And how can I create that that environment? And I’ll say this one another thing to say about you, that I’ve learned as a founder is, you’re not afraid to be the, quote unquote, dumbest, you know, let me put it like this. You’re not afraid to not be the smartest person in the room. Let me let me do that. So many times, when we were working together, you’re like, Hey, you, let’s let’s bring on help. Right there. Let’s bring on somebody that knows this area and this, and that’s just so rare, because a lot of times people don’t have that ego in that pride. So just wanted to let everybody know the type of founder who’s on the call today and I want to transition into our work. So we got connected because the company was at a state where you wanted to take advantage of email in a more profitable means. So for all of the e commerce brands out there, this is going to be important for you to listen to Eric, if you take a minute and just talk about what your initial intention was when you looked for a CRM, and what’s your initial aim and desired results were in the very beginning, before we connect?

Eric Schechter  15:26  

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, so for us. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Yeah, in the beginning, all we do is we had a lot of customers, we had a lot of people that were craving things, and we weren’t taking advantage of it at all, just because it wasn’t the core focus of our business. But we knew that it was valuable, like, we know how powerful email is. And we know how powerful or how important customer lifetime value is, but we’re so focused on other areas of the business that we weren’t able to allocate kind of the resources or the, the mindshare to doing that, until it was to the point where I was like, man, we can’t ignore this anymore, we need to go, you know, head on. And so, really, for me, I wanted to create something that I knew I knew the importance of not just slamming a list, you know, with promotion, after promotion after promotion, you know, that we wanted to add value to these customers, we wanted to create the highest engagement, you know, possible and get people really stoked about the brand and the products and the mission and the vision. And, you know, I really, in the beginning, I was just thinking about all right, how do we how do we connect these things? How do we develop content, that does inspire people that empowers them, that excites them, and gets them to buy a ton of products, you know, at the same time, yeah. And that was really kind of my goal, like, I’ve been very strong. On the creative side, I understand, you know, consumer psychology, I understand kind of what moves people to act, just coming from the direct response kind of background. But really, All I knew is I needed to make sure that I had good deliverability, I needed to make sure that, you know, I wasn’t going our metrics weren’t going crazy in terms of spam rates, and unsubscribe rates. And so a lot of just like the core health metrics that, you know, that were most critical to the longevity of the campaign. And in the back of my head, I’m like, also man, segmentation, things like that would be amazing, right, having a much more personalized experience. But I had no idea how we were going to go get that done. And email was a new channel to me, because I’ve spent so much time on paid channels, you know, like Facebook, and YouTube and native channels, and so forth. And so ended up you know, we were on Active Campaign saw that there was some kind of class happening, and in Miami, Florida, yeah. And to learn more, and I was absolutely blown away by the opportunity on how you can actually leverage automation to do so much of the heavy lifting, to ensure that you’re getting incredible results on the back end. And it’s all measurable. And it’s all it allows the system to do the hard work where you have the talented people to do the creative strategic work. And when it works together, man, it’s it’s literally like music, you know, so that was kind of like the before and then opened my eyes. And I was like, Alright, I need to move in this direction. How do I make that happen? I gotta go talk to Chris. Yes, yes.

Chris Davis  18:28  

And I wanted Eric to share that, because so many of you are in that position that you may have a strong front end, and you’re trying to figure out how do I get more on the back end? How do I capitalize more. And furthermore, with all of the the marketers that love the the annual post of email is dead? Email is not. pal is very much alive. So when I got the opportunity, it was such a challenge, Eric, I was like, Ooh, this is very intriguing to me, right? Because usually people are front end focus, how can I use email on the front end to get more customers, but that was already a checkbox. There are marketing partners, bringing in the customers. So now it’s all back in how do we get more out of these customers? And then an added piece to the challenges. There’s no tech, like, technically, there’s no storefront. It’s not, you know, like a place where people can go and just shop. So I’m like, Oh, just keep stacking the challenge. Right. And I’m the type of person that responds really well to those challenges. So we began to engage and do our work together. And I have to say this. One thing that you allowed Eric that I think more business owners and founders need to just couple into their expectation is you gave us a runway to truly lay out a plan. Right? Like I never felt like you were not valuing planning. Right? And that gave me the opportunity to not just create the written documents But also the charts, right? The visual charts to communicate exactly what we’re doing and everything, right?

Eric Schechter  20:06  

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that is I mean, it’s mistakes that I’ve made in the past. And I also see a lot of founders or, you know, senior executives make the same kind of mistake, which is you bring in amazingly smart people, hungry people, dedicated people. And then you think to yourself, well, in order to get this person off, I have to give them this plan, I have to create the processes, so they know what they’re doing. So they can come in and act. And it’s completely backwards, you know, you’re bringing in smart people with experience, you just need to support them, give them the information, so that they can go in and take your high level vision and bring it to life through their own vision, and bring it to you and say, here’s what I’m thinking, because they’re coming in with a fresh perspective, you also want them to own the process to believe in what we’re doing. And you’re there to kind of make sure that there’s guardrails, you know, that, like, we’re not gonna fall off a cliff based on your own experience. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, trusting your people trusting and empowering them to go in and bring, you know, the vision to life through their own area. And what they’re doing is that is the only real way to scale and to keep talented people happy and excited and driven. And so I just had I, it was an amazing experience with you personally, because of how how much of a deep thinker you are, and how you’re able you think like you’re an engineer, right? Yeah. Like, the way your mind works is so fascinating, where like, I’m talking, yeah, mutoko are very vision focused, like, up in the clouds, like talking about all these crazy marketing campaigns. And as we’re talking, you’re just drawing on the, on the whiteboard, and you’re building a machine, you’re building a machine as we’re talking, and I’m like, oh, man, like, yes, this is exactly how it works. And like, so it’s just really cool. And I think that’s the power of combining, you know, people two that are complimentary, and giving the opportunity and the the freedom to allow someone to use their mind to craft it in a way that makes sense to them. And makes sense to us so that they can go execute at the highest level possible, you know, so

Chris Davis  22:18  

it was great for me, you know, at the time I was I was in a I was coming out of a professionally, what will say a professional relationship, right, coming out of one that I would say was fairly abusive, and not in terms of like, physical, but just like, you can be boxed in, right and not unleashed to be able to really let your brain go, and have that level of freedom. So as you guys are in the clouds, and I’m able to start pulling things down and make them visually and concretize them, it did so much. Because one, it allowed us to identify a realistic scope. It was like, look at all of these things, we could do this, these are some of the ways we can execute. And it’s just like, well, let’s scale back a little bit. Let’s focus on this and do that. And once we got the planning phase over, and I’ll say this to everybody listening, that wants to work for a company, or is working for one, you can be generating revenue while you’re planning. Planning isn’t it’s not a like a serial process where we’ve got to do planning, then we got to go make money. No, no, no, no, you’re planning and you’re executing while you’re planning. But essentially, what we did is that first quarter that we dedicated to planning was positioning us for the next quarter, but also getting some baseline data. Right. And as we were collecting that baseline data, it was being proven by generating some revenue. So that now next quarter, because we did quarterly planning. And we made sure that the projections were not lofty, they were based on the data that we collected off the previous plan to get an understanding of what to expect going forward. So when when we say things like double the revenue every quarter, or you know, 10x, whatever. There’s a huge planning effort in there. And I would love to just be like, Hey, guys, I talked to them for one hour, and I came up with a solution. And we put the solution in place, and money just kept coming out, right? That plan allowed us to identify the people, the external people and internal people that we needed in place, it helped us get an idea of the level of effort. So now everybody on the team is aligned to what we’re executing. Now it gets fun, because we don’t have the confusion in the way when we say hey, look, we see a huge opportunity. With segmentation. We’ve got all these leads, we’re only emailing maybe 10 to 20% of them, which right we I created the dashboard and we could see it week over week we were measuring these things and looking at our weekly meeting like wait a minute, what about these other leads? How do I How do we start sending out emails to these other leads, which then opened up segmentation? And the importance of really not just understanding who’s who and we had, we had data relative to what they purchased to start. But then you start to talk about recency and frequency. And just when you add those three, Eric, right, product purchase recency and frequency, that’s really enough to start laying your strong foundation for segmentation, so that your emails can at least at a minimum, start getting delivered, you know, in read and opened, right.

Eric Schechter  25:37  

I think that’s a good point. Because, you know, that is, you know, when I first started thinking about segmentation, again, just as like a marketer, me, I’m like, Oh, we could be, you know, tracking everything that they click on, and everything that they do, and everything on the site. Yeah, start creating this crazy web of stuff that feel overwhelming. And if you don’t have the resources, or the people to actually go execute that they’re like, well, what else are we going to do? But it’s really like, it’s like, I call like, the Tim Duncan of marketing. Right? It’s like, Mr. fundamentals, fundamentals of automation, and segmentation, which is really what you said is like, everybody has that information, especially if you’re in the e commerce world, right. Like, you have what people are buying, you have, how often they’re opening your emails. Yeah. And, and, and what is their flow in terms of like, how new of a customer are they? How long have they seen? How long have they experienced your content, and being able to segment then based on that behavior alone, which is much more? Like, there’s a lot to it, but it’s much more simplistic and focused, you can see some incredible results. Yeah. Sorry. deliverability go through the roof. Right. We’re at first, our open rates were like, you know, 20%, which is good. But or maybe was like, actually started like, 15%? Lower? Yeah. And I think we ended it like 38. Yes.

Chris Davis  26:56  

Now, just for context, everybody, this, we’re not talking about a small database of 10,000 customers. We’re not talking about, we’re talking a quarter million and above database size of emailing. So it’s hard buyers, you know, right. Yeah, it’s hard to maintain a strong open rates when your database starts to grow in the quarter millions and beyond.

Eric Schechter  27:21  

Yeah. And I think that just comes down to Yeah, not treating everybody exactly the same, even though that is the easiest thing to do. But I think there’s just some simple things that you could do in terms of the people that have opened in the last 30 days, you know, like people that have purchased in the last 30 days, like all these things are actually easy to and easier than ever to implement now, even through some of the tools that are available to marketers, right? When you want to go deeper and you want to have a structure, it’s good to make sure you have number one, have that plan ahead of time maps and things out, make sure you understand what your goals are, what business questions are you are you trying to answer? But really like in in 2021, there’s there’s no excuse to do that to not do that level of segmentation. And I’ve seen firsthand, just the power. I mean, so many marketers and business people are leaving crazy amounts of money on the table by not doing any any level of segmentation. It kind of boggles my mind. I mean, I get it, because it’s curation. But now it’s just like, man, there’s so much information out there and so much proof. It’s like, you have to be you have to be there. Yeah.

Chris Davis  28:29  

And that’s what I loved about what I love about our journey together was that it was it was exploratory for the both of us honestly, because I’d done deep segmentation for in other business settings. So I knew it worked. But I’m always surprised at how well it works, depending on the business state as well. So the first time I got to be able to go in deep with an e commerce company was with you all. So as we I just remember the cause man and the congratulatory meetings and everything. As we set these stretch goals of Hey, we did this amount this quarter. What if we double it? And what if you double it? And if you keep doubling quarter over quarter, that number gets gets big, quick, right? And making those shifts? But I’ll tell you this, segmentation was the key in so many in so many ways, and I think we were definitely it is definitely not just an easy and straightforward approach when you go deep funnel, right? because like you said, there were all kinds of indicators that we could have been using. And you were you were you were on the record for saying, hey, look, I know that there’s a whole lot of stuff, but let’s just focus on the main thing. Right? So which was easy because some founders just get up there. Hey, we could do this. are we measuring everything so you are aware? Yes, all of this possible. But Chris, just if we stick to the main thing, I’m good with that. Right. So we were able to

Eric Schechter  29:54  

get you like that can get you the majority of the way again, it’s it’s the fundamentals right and It’s easy to get fancy and try new stuff and you’re not doing the basics right? It’s going to impact you every, every which way down the funnel. And so I appreciated that about you as well, which is like you took this approach where it’s like you are an advanced automation marketer, right? Like, you know, do all the fancy, like, triple in crazy between your legs, throwing it over the back, I’ll be up and like, you can do it all. Yeah, no, man, let’s, let’s focus on dribbling with two hands. We got to be no ambidextrous. And I think that’s so smart. And just just super powerful. And it’s good to take a step back and say, don’t worry about all the noise out here, one of the metrics that truly mattered to our success, let’s get good at analyzing those. Let’s see those improve over time. Let’s focus on those. And that’s how we’ll see wins. But if we’re trying to do so much at the same time, everything hurts is a process, you know, and I think doing is just measuring, having the having clear KPIs that you’re tracking, and you’re being able to measure. And then also, I’m interested in your, in your feedback, too, on this, like, we also implemented okrs, right, which is like an amazing system for setting clear objectives, but then key results that are specific and measurable, and allows us to say, hey, when we complete all these, we’re going to hit our objective and allowed us to stay focused, which is kind of like, you know, I wouldn’t say automation at all. But it’s it’s like a very, it’s similar just on the business side in terms of a very focused approach and making sure that we’re measuring the most important things that we’re focused on the most important

Chris Davis  31:33  

things yeah, now, I will say this, I think we made the biggest jump in terms of profitability when we implemented the okrs. Right? Because it just made that that planning process easier, it was easier to get the entire the entire team aligned with what’s going on and where they played a part in more so who’s responsible for what, right so that everybody had ownership, that’s the biggest piece is, you know, when you’re scaling, and there’s this the system is moving, if there’s one little shake in, there’s questionable ownership, that little bitty shake starts to propagate through the system. And before you know it, that shake is now is now impacting the most critical area of the business. So knowing that, hey, look, your screw shaking a little bit over there, right. And now it’s tightened up, not even not an issue, right, and we’re able to move. And I’ll say this, um, I want to bring up some technology for a minute. And engagement, segmentation, and engagement tracking can be done in pretty much any platform, everybody, depending on the platform, it may be harder, and you may need to use other tools, we were using Active Campaign. So I knew how to use the automations, how to use custom fields, do some date, date, time stamping, and then some advanced searches for people who had done things within particular day. So really advanced stuff. And I say that to say, if you’re good if you’re if you’re at the level, you know, I said quarter million customers are higher, and you’re trying to segment to get more engagement is going to take beyond the basics. Okay, I just want to preface that it’s gonna take but beyond the basics, automation to create those segments, automation to track the engagement, and then even just the logical mind to create the segment, because we asked some advanced segments, right? It was like four cases, if they’ve done this, and if they’ve done this, and if they’ve done these, and those things had to be tested extensively. I’ve, I’m on the record, I’ve spent up to 45 minutes, building out a segment for us to mail. Now, let me ask everybody listening. Why would you Chris, why would you spend 45 minutes on doing that? Once we had it, Eric? What’s up? Oh, it was beautiful, man. It was beautiful. But I like I like to just give people insight because I don’t want them to hear about the big success and out and I’ll let you share whatever you can in what you’re comfortable with, on the type of growth that we were able to achieve. But it was a major success in the workings of that. Yes, automation played a part but look at how we had to leverage automation, building out a very complex segment. It’s not sexy, and it gets confusing. Your brain hurts. You’re like, well, should this be AND or OR we’ve had slack conversations members like well, maybe if we switch this and to Oh, you know, so I just wanted to give people insight on when you go deep funnel, and you’re trying to identify how to just get laser sharp, what’s your what’s your targeting and your messaging? This is the level of effort that’s required, you know?

Eric Schechter  34:52  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s it can feel overwhelming at Especially if your mind doesn’t think that way. But it’s it’s logical in the sense where if you put in the time, you definitely understand it. And the reason why I think you also spent so much time on it was not necessarily just the building of it all. But the testing, because if you go in and you’re not paying attention to detail, yeah, not, you know, looking at the and versus the, or in every part of the thing, like, it will blow up the one small, absolutely, like coding, right, you have one bracket that’s not closed, and the whole thing is broken, you got to go through and really do it. So yeah, doing it right, and making sure you have someone that you trust that can come in and implement it for you. But I think the only thing, right, and I think the power was that we didn’t just do automation for automation purposes, right? So you get it to meet a specific business objective, or a question that we were trying to answer or something that we were trying to a metric that we were trying to move the needle on in a positive way. And then we did that. And then we looked very closely at how that was being impacted by that automation. And I think it’s easy to say in this world of, you know, everyone talking about automation, or whatever this and that like to get lost in just doing it because it’s expected or it’s the cool thing to do or whatever else and not having the planning that says, hey, we’re doing this for this reason, and we’re actually going to, you know, track that and make sure things aren’t moving in a positive direction. And if not, what do we need to tweak? What do we need to go back and update? But yeah, it is a powerful thing. And also, just, I know, I keep reiterating this, but again, like it is complex as you go into the to the more deeper automations. But you didn’t start there. We didn’t start off. We started off with the basic Yes. Because that’s like, it’s like everything else, right? It’s like I get we’re talking about we talk a lot about basketball, right way that I think about is like, it’s like tying your shoelaces, right? Like, if you don’t tie your shoelaces properly. So many bad things can happen. As a result of that you go and sprain your ankle, you’re jumping over, you injure somebody else, like it all starts with your shoelaces, man. And that’s like, that’s where I think that it’s like, it’s not the sexy thing to do. But it’s so critical. It’s like the foundation of your home. And once you do that, man, the stuff that you do when you come in and work your magic and start building more complex plays and systems and all these things like it’s because you did the bottom part. So effectively, that, that you’re able to do that. Because if not, it would be a cluster like I would be going to be like what the hell is happening? And what what is the reason for it? It’s not just because of this, but maybe there’s issues everywhere in the in the system. And so yeah, man, it is a beast of a thing. But man, it’s it’s powerful. Because when you get it right, you start seeing compounding results over time that you could have never believed or possible without continuing to add bandwidth and resources, where when you marry automation with really smart people, you can keep a lean team and still start growing at rates that are unprecedented. I think that’s what we experienced, too. Right? Absolutely. A very small team. Yeah. For the amount of growth and revenue and work that we were doing it it’s because we really planned and automated in a very strategic way. Yeah,

Chris Davis  38:25  

yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. So in our last few moments, man, you know, I know we you’ve got to take off, and I want to be respectful of my listeners time, share, share whatever you’re comfortable with Eric, in terms of the the type of growth, whether it’s, you know, leads revenue, whatever the case is that that you experienced was, but some of the, with the work that we’re able to do together, man.

Eric Schechter  38:51  

Yeah, absolutely. So, it, it started off, as you know, we were getting customers coming in, we had a lot of like, older customers that, you know, we hadn’t engaged with in a while, but you know, we’re in a really unique position, and we’re acquisition is something that we focus heavily on. And so we had a lot of new customers coming in, I think at first, you know, we didn’t really know this is pre Chris, we really didn’t know what we were doing. We were trying to figure it out. You know, we were generating revenue, because these are buyers, but our spam rates or unsubscribe rates, like our deliverability all the things that matter for the long term, just we’re not in a place to scale, you know, we ran into a bunch of issues is causing a lot of work and time. But, you know, from there, I think we were able to grow in each of the most critical areas, which is like, you know, now, in terms of our list, we’re over half a million, you know, subscribers that are super active or open rates are, you know, in some segments as high as 45% love rates over 10% unsubscribes under point half a percent spam rate It’s under point 01 percent, like, in an amazing spot, and we’re still as lean of a team as we’ve ever been. And you know, we were just continuing to grow, like, what we really pay attention to is, yeah, we have like overall revenue goals. But really, we look at our revenue per open and our revenue per subscriber. And you’ve been able to pretty much double that, you know, year over year. And so that’s been absolutely powerful. And that’s, that’s basically through this strategy of putting the right product, giving the right product to the right person at the right time. And using automation to do that. So you’re not going crazy in your head with 500,000 people trying to figure out what they want what they need. But you are systematically providing that which adds more value to them, which makes them want to open more of your emails, which gives you a bigger opportunity to stay top of mind and generate sales. And so yeah, it’s been, it’s been an amazing ride, I think we’re just getting started. And, you know, we’re super grateful for all the work that we were able to do with you. You’re like a Jedi and automation. And yeah, the sky’s the limit. Now, you know, so it’s really now that you have a machine a system, it’s like now, what are the tweaks that we can make? back and that’s what we’re excited about working on in the future. So

Chris Davis  41:26  

I love it, man, I love it. Well, this, this podcast, of course, was just as enjoyable recording as in any of our time together, man any of our time together. So I appreciate it. I would be remiss without allowing our listeners to at least know where can they go to find out more about GiddyUp experience some of the innovative products that you guys have to offer? Where can they go here?

Eric Schechter  41:49  

Yeah, sir, are, you know, the GiddyUp site is giddyup.io, there’s a lot, we just did a whole new brand, and a lot of really cool information there that you can kind of sink your teeth into whether you’re a brand or a marketer. And then my daily discovery, it’s new, we’re growing it were it’s also a new brand that we’re kind of launching in this space. And you can see a lot of the cool products that we have there, which are all from real brands, who are, you know, on a mission to help improve people’s lives, and they have great, you know, great founders, great stories, and they, they just, they do what they say, and so they’re just, it’s an incredible community to be a part of. So I definitely highly recommend you go and and check that out. And if you want to connect with me, bestplaces is usually on LinkedIn. So hit me up, and I look forward to chatting with you guys. And if I can be helpful at all, you know, just let me know. And I’m down to down to help out so great, great, well, I

Chris Davis  42:45  

appreciate it. As always everybody, those links will be in the show notes in case your thumbs weren’t fast enough on your mobile phone right now. So there’ll be in the show notes. So you can just click away, Eric, thank you, man. Thank you. This has been great. Glad to have you on the podcast and overall man, just glad to know you send my semi thanks, warm, welcomes. And I miss you too tougher. And Leo, you know, the that was the trail man that really got everything kick started. So I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity, man. And thank you again for coming on to the podcast. Thanks, man. Likewise, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the All systems go podcast, we just peel back the curtain just a bit, just a bit. When you when you combine a co founder, a visionary who’s willing to invest not only in the people, but all of the resources those people may need, invest in finding the right people, the perfect person for the position, and not holding back not holding back. Eric swung for the fences. And when I saw him swing, I wanted to get behind and support that. And collectively, not just myself and Eric but the entire team, we were able to produce massive results for a lot of people in e commerce success with automation eludes them. So some of the keys that I want to just highlight really quick is you want to make sure you have proper planning in place, you want to make sure that you have vision casting, so someone needs to cast the vision quarterly annually, whatever the case may be, then you need to take that down into Break, break it into a plan that we can that you can start to see the role that automation plays. Okay. And this this goes across all businesses, but specifically to e commerce, you really have to have a strategy for your customers. And that strategy needs to be stronger than the strategy for your leads. Okay, this podcast is exemplary of marketing to customers only. And the results that we were were able to achieve. were amazing. So just a few more pointers. I know we dropped a lot in the episode, but I don’t want you to leave without that. Because I see there’s a wave of e commerce happening right now. In the industry. So I want you all to be able to understand what it’s going to take to leverage automation in a way that’s going to scale your business and increase your profitability, and the lifetime customer value of every customer that you’re paying to acquire. All right. So share this with anybody who owns an e commerce website. If you’re confused in any capacity, just think of it this way. How do they use WooCommerce? Shopify bigcommerce Magento. Those are the real heavy hitters. But mostly you’re going to hear Shopify so if you’ve heard them say that share this podcast with them simple if somebody has said, I use Shopify, I’m looking into Shopify, I use WooCommerce. Oh, we use big commerce, oh, we sell online. Dare I throw Volusion in there, okay. Anybody selling products online, make sure you share this, this podcast with them. And make sure that you’re subscribed, make sure that you subscribe, and you leave a five star rating and review. For those of my first time listeners. This is my invitation. I promised you at the top. Here’s invitation Come on, join the family of listeners, small business owners who are who are dedicated to equipping themselves with all that is needed to grow your business responsibly online, in an automated fashion because we’re dedicated at automation bridge, to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers so that we can meet these small business needs, needs of deploying automated automated marketing and sales systems in their business for rapid growth. But it takes someone that understands marketing strategy in the third, let me say marketing and sales technology to rain, how to put those together and make system so we’ve made it easy for you, everybody. If you’re like, hey, I want to be an automation service provider. Hey, I want to find out more. We’ve made it easy for you to get everything that you need. If you go to VA, if you go to Allsystemsgopodcast.com you get access not just to the latest episodes, you’ll get access to view our automation packages, okay, and these packages are catered to helping you put automated marketing and sales systems in your business. Over the next six months. We have a free Facebook group that you can get access to you can also request to be a guest or refer someone to be a guest on the podcast in any resource or training we mentioned on the podcast. It’s all there for simplification purposes. One URL gets you access to its to it all. And that’s allsystemsgopodcast.com. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. And until next time, I see you online, automate responsibility

Narrator  0:00  

You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way. With your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis  0:33  

Welcome to the All systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, the founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge, the place online to learn about Small Business Marketing and Sales Automation, where we focus on not just turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers but equipping them with the tutelage the acumen, the curriculum, the resources, the community to become an automation service provider and if you’d like to become one or find out more about our automation packages, go to All systems go podcast comm if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe and share at the time of recording this the All systems go podcast is free to subscribe to. So you can find this show on all main podcasting apps like Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, you can find us on YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts we are there. If you’re new to the podcast, let me first say welcome. I want you to listen to this episode in its entirety before you subscribe so you know just what you’re getting into. But for those of you who have been listening and are not subscribed, please do so if you haven’t left a five star rating and review. It would be greatly appreciated if you do that as well if for whatever reason, you’re having troubles leaving a review in the platform that you’re listening to this podcast in. We’ve got you covered automation bridge comm forward slash review, and we’ll take care of it for you. Okay, this episode this episode, I get to have an open conversation with a co founder I had the privilege to personally work with to scale their e commerce business with automated email marketing. And a pleasure would be an understatement. But I had the joy of meeting Eric while I was conducting a live workshop. And when the opportunity presented itself to jump on board and help. I did and I’m so glad I did as the results and the relationship was well worth it. You’ll learn about it in the podcast. But as the co founder and VP of Marketing Eric oversees giddy ups the global brand marketing and positioning strategy since 2013. They’ve launched over 150, direct to consumer brands, they’ve acquired millions of customers across the globe and profitably driven 1 billion plus in sales for their brand new partners on 100%. commission only it is an amazing business model, how they’ve done it is homage to just

Chris Davis  3:15  

affective marketing, affective strategic marketing, where you get paid to perform. I absolutely love it. When I heard about the model. I was like, This is amazing. That’s my whole career has always been paid to perform. So it resonated with me the work that we were able to accomplish. You all will hear it in this episode. So let me not belabor it anymore. Enjoy the conversation between Eric and I. Eric, welcome to the podcast. Long time come in. We’ve both been looking forward to it. How you doing, man?

Eric Schechter  3:52  

It’s so great. Great to be here, man. It’s been way too long.

Eric Schechter  3:58  

And just excited for the conversation and to to chat with you again, man.

Chris Davis  4:01  

Yes. So listeners you’re in for a treat. Eric and I work together closely, and doing real deep marketing. So some of the conversations that we’ve had, Eric, I think if you could record some of the meetings that we’ve had, and even just some of our side conversations, that it’s probably like a vault of just probably millions and millions of marketing acumen and

Unknown Speaker  4:27  

stuff, right.

Chris Davis  4:29  

So tell our listeners, um, tell us tell us about you as the co founder. And I want you to touch on both businesses that you guys have or let me say giddy up, primarily and then the my daily discovery piece. Let us know again, a little bit about you and in those two businesses.

Eric Schechter  4:47  

Yeah, sure. So giddy up is a partner marketing network and a performance platform. And so what we do is we help create performance partnerships between innovative direct to consumer brands and some of the top marketers around the world. And everything is done in a partnership performance basis. So, you know, kind of what that means is like as a brand, normally, when you’re focused on customer acquisition and growing your business, the traditional model is normally either doing it yourself building a team, which can be really expensive and risky or you go with an agency, and you know, you’re paying retainers, you’re paying upfront fees or percentage of spend. And, you know, there’s just also, there’s just a lot of risk associated with that, mostly because the models are just really, they’re misaligned in terms of the incentives, right, like, if you’re paying someone to spend more, they’re more more than likely going to spend more instead of trying to figure out how to be more profitable. But also, you know, one of the things that we realized when we were coming into the business is that you’re really only working with one brain and whether that’s like your team, you know, who’s trying to figure out how to create content and funnels to scale your business or an agency, it’s, it’s really hard to crack the code with all the variables and all the different ways that you can mark it. And so what we see is a much more decentralized and democratized ecosystem for marketing. That creates win wins for both sides. So the way that our model works is, you know, we work with direct to consumer innovative brands, we invest all of our time, all of our capital into building everything they need to acquire customers online. They don’t pay for anything upfront. And then we connect them with these marketers who spend their own time, their own capital, buying media, figuring out all the best angles, or the best landing pages, the BEST OFFERS, and driving traffic to the funnels, we build and only get paid for the sales that, that they drive. And so, you know, it’s just a, it’s a really amazing model, because you’re working with experts who are specifically experienced in channels like YouTube, that’s all they do. Yeah, and, or native advertising, or this and that. And also globally, like people that are in Italy, that know how to market to Italy, on Facebook, and it’s just an incredible model, because it’s highly scalable. It’s, it’s completely on performance, zero risk. And, and it’s it’s a beautiful thing, and in our experience, to kind of see what these two groups of people can do together when the incentives are aligned, and they both have the tools to be successful. So that’s really what we’re focused on, you know, a giddy up is how do we scale performance partnerships, we believe that’s the future of advertising is, is creating that. And then, you know, this, probably about a year and a half ago, we created the direct to consumer property called my daily discovery. And really, that was our focus on how to create, how to inspire and empower people to live a little better, and doing that through a combination of content and commerce. And so we really started off with email. And that’s where, you know, you and I, and the team started working together, but really focused on how do you create an amazing, like, highly valuable content that gets people excited about opening your email, not like, every day, I see this email come in my inbox and just another promotion, and I start to ignore it over time, or it’s not personalized to me, you know, we took a very methodical approach of saying, Hey, we don’t want to kind of go one to many, we want to figure out how do we build a system, an automated system, to really understand what people want, what they’re resonating with, what you know, what they’re engaging with, and create these flows that give them the most value possible, and obviously, leverage all the commerce opportunities that we have to kind of fuel the entire thing. And so those are the two areas of our business. And yeah, we’re just really excited about growing both of them, man. Yeah. And it’s really great.

Chris Davis  9:00  

I want to paint the picture for you all on just how amazing the model is. So I of course, I’ve got front row seat, I had a front row seat and backstage access to the model, been able to sit down with Eric and toepfer, the other one of the other co founders and really map it out. And just imagine if you had a product or an idea, and you were able to at least get it in some form of production. Right there. Just when you think like Yes, I’ve done it, you’re really just getting started. Because what is the product without consumers to consume the product, right? So to come up with the model to where you guys have the marketing force, from advertising to conversion of that advertising, to help that person that that business owner say, Okay, I want to get this out to as many people as possible. Don’t have the clue where to start, but I know this is a good product. And giddy up comm says hey, look, we’re alive. That is a good product, and we’re going to partner with you, we’re going to take care of your landing, just let’s listen to this everybody, we’re going to take care of your landing page optimized landing page, your spend, you heard Eric say they’ve got marketers and all types of all places of the world. So that if you’re marketing into us in a certain country, there’s a marketer in that country, right that can market and it just brings in such a power, you know, and relieves such a load from that entrepreneur that was just like, Whoa, I didn’t realize I was gonna have to do all of that, after I created my product, to start making money. And

Eric Schechter  10:40  

yeah, I mean, that’s the thing, too, is there’s so much to actually doing the product and the brand side, right, not only coming up with the idea, which took a lot of time and effort, and, you know, just massaging in terms of getting it to the final place, then, obviously, like, you need to launch the business, and you need to kind of have all the infrastructure in place in terms of being able to manufacture it, inventory management, customer support, you know, logistics, yeah, and that is a full time role. And what I see a lot of times is people can’t do both. And so they either tried to do it, and they fail, because they’re spread thin across so many different areas, or they’re not marketers, but they’re trying to be you, or they’re trying to work with agencies, but they don’t understand really what they’re doing. And they’re paying them a lot of money on the upfront. And a lot of these companies and contractors on the marketing side. I mean, you know, it’s unfortunate to say, but a lot of people give a lot of big promises and produce very little results. And it’s just, I think it’s because the model is just kind of completely wrong. And I think, you know, when you can work with partners, people that look at your business and say, we want to partner with you, we don’t want you as a client, we don’t want you as a vendor, but it’s a partnership, when we win, you win, and vice versa, the things that can kind of create some pretty magical stuff, when it comes to the distribution of that said product. And again, it’s just having people that have aligned incentives with the things that matter to them also matter to you. And that’s where, you know, there’s just an amazing symbiotic relationship that can produce amazing results.

Chris Davis  12:14  

Yeah, and I want to say this to you don’t get there without very strategic minds at the founder level, right. And I want to give insight to everybody on how we met, I was doing a training in Eric way, for me to describe Eric, as a co founder, would be somebody who’s got an eye for talent, and a heart to engage in the most authentic way to create a win win. situation by any means possible, which really mirrors gidea. Right, you’re creating all of these Win Win scenarios. So um, a lot of founders that you meet a spread, let me just speak in my personal experience, in let you all know, listening, a lot of founders from afar are just great, right? The from afar, founders, you’d never meet them, maybe you shake their hand at an event or something like that. And you’re like, that’s a great founder. But the true test of their leadership, and their mettle, you know, as a founder, becomes when that proximity gets closer and closer and closer. And that’s where you’ll see a lot of those lofty ideas and perceptions of founders fail. Because you start to see that Wait a minute, they’re they’re not as strong of a leader as they need to be. They don’t really care about people. They’re very transactional. They’re that it’s process over people, not people over process. So as we began to work together, more and more, you pass the proximity test. Right, the closer we engaged, it was just like, Man, you didn’t just, you weren’t just a hard driver for goals, you would create these stretch goals that even you and I would think like, man, do you think that’s possible? Right? It’s just like, well, if we think it’s possible, then it needs to be bigger. Right? So you had that. But you also had the ability to not lose touch with the personal side of it, the the leadership piece, that’s like, Okay, I know that if you’re in your best head state, I’m going to get the most out of you, I’m going to get your best. And how can I create that that environment? And I’ll say this one another thing to say about you, that I’ve learned as a founder is, you’re not afraid to be the, quote unquote, dumbest, you know, let me put it like this. You’re not afraid to not be the smartest person in the room. Let me let me do that. So many times, when we were working together, you’re like, Hey, you, let’s let’s bring on help. Right there. Let’s bring on somebody that knows this area and this, and that’s just so rare, because a lot of times people don’t have that ego in that pride. So just wanted to let everybody know the type of founder who’s on the call today and I want to transition into our work. So we got connected because the company was at a state where you wanted to take advantage of email in a more profitable means. So for all of the e commerce brands out there, this is going to be important for you to listen to Eric, if you take a minute and just talk about what your initial intention was when you looked for a CRM, and what’s your initial aim and desired results were in the very beginning, before we connect?

Eric Schechter  15:26  

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, so for us. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Yeah, in the beginning, all we do is we had a lot of customers, we had a lot of people that were craving things, and we weren’t taking advantage of it at all, just because it wasn’t the core focus of our business. But we knew that it was valuable, like, we know how powerful email is. And we know how powerful or how important customer lifetime value is, but we’re so focused on other areas of the business that we weren’t able to allocate kind of the resources or the, the mindshare to doing that, until it was to the point where I was like, man, we can’t ignore this anymore, we need to go, you know, head on. And so, really, for me, I wanted to create something that I knew I knew the importance of not just slamming a list, you know, with promotion, after promotion after promotion, you know, that we wanted to add value to these customers, we wanted to create the highest engagement, you know, possible and get people really stoked about the brand and the products and the mission and the vision. And, you know, I really, in the beginning, I was just thinking about all right, how do we how do we connect these things? How do we develop content, that does inspire people that empowers them, that excites them, and gets them to buy a ton of products, you know, at the same time, yeah. And that was really kind of my goal, like, I’ve been very strong. On the creative side, I understand, you know, consumer psychology, I understand kind of what moves people to act, just coming from the direct response kind of background. But really, All I knew is I needed to make sure that I had good deliverability, I needed to make sure that, you know, I wasn’t going our metrics weren’t going crazy in terms of spam rates, and unsubscribe rates. And so a lot of just like the core health metrics that, you know, that were most critical to the longevity of the campaign. And in the back of my head, I’m like, also man, segmentation, things like that would be amazing, right, having a much more personalized experience. But I had no idea how we were going to go get that done. And email was a new channel to me, because I’ve spent so much time on paid channels, you know, like Facebook, and YouTube and native channels, and so forth. And so ended up you know, we were on Active Campaign saw that there was some kind of class happening, and in Miami, Florida, yeah. And to learn more, and I was absolutely blown away by the opportunity on how you can actually leverage automation to do so much of the heavy lifting, to ensure that you’re getting incredible results on the back end. And it’s all measurable. And it’s all it allows the system to do the hard work where you have the talented people to do the creative strategic work. And when it works together, man, it’s it’s literally like music, you know, so that was kind of like the before and then opened my eyes. And I was like, Alright, I need to move in this direction. How do I make that happen? I gotta go talk to Chris. Yes, yes.

Chris Davis  18:28  

And I wanted Eric to share that, because so many of you are in that position that you may have a strong front end, and you’re trying to figure out how do I get more on the back end? How do I capitalize more. And furthermore, with all of the the marketers that love the the annual post of email is dead? Email is not. pal is very much alive. So when I got the opportunity, it was such a challenge, Eric, I was like, Ooh, this is very intriguing to me, right? Because usually people are front end focus, how can I use email on the front end to get more customers, but that was already a checkbox. There are marketing partners, bringing in the customers. So now it’s all back in how do we get more out of these customers? And then an added piece to the challenges. There’s no tech, like, technically, there’s no storefront. It’s not, you know, like a place where people can go and just shop. So I’m like, Oh, just keep stacking the challenge. Right. And I’m the type of person that responds really well to those challenges. So we began to engage and do our work together. And I have to say this. One thing that you allowed Eric that I think more business owners and founders need to just couple into their expectation is you gave us a runway to truly lay out a plan. Right? Like I never felt like you were not valuing planning. Right? And that gave me the opportunity to not just create the written documents But also the charts, right? The visual charts to communicate exactly what we’re doing and everything, right?

Eric Schechter  20:06  

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that is I mean, it’s mistakes that I’ve made in the past. And I also see a lot of founders or, you know, senior executives make the same kind of mistake, which is you bring in amazingly smart people, hungry people, dedicated people. And then you think to yourself, well, in order to get this person off, I have to give them this plan, I have to create the processes, so they know what they’re doing. So they can come in and act. And it’s completely backwards, you know, you’re bringing in smart people with experience, you just need to support them, give them the information, so that they can go in and take your high level vision and bring it to life through their own vision, and bring it to you and say, here’s what I’m thinking, because they’re coming in with a fresh perspective, you also want them to own the process to believe in what we’re doing. And you’re there to kind of make sure that there’s guardrails, you know, that, like, we’re not gonna fall off a cliff based on your own experience. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, trusting your people trusting and empowering them to go in and bring, you know, the vision to life through their own area. And what they’re doing is that is the only real way to scale and to keep talented people happy and excited and driven. And so I just had I, it was an amazing experience with you personally, because of how how much of a deep thinker you are, and how you’re able you think like you’re an engineer, right? Yeah. Like, the way your mind works is so fascinating, where like, I’m talking, yeah, mutoko are very vision focused, like, up in the clouds, like talking about all these crazy marketing campaigns. And as we’re talking, you’re just drawing on the, on the whiteboard, and you’re building a machine, you’re building a machine as we’re talking, and I’m like, oh, man, like, yes, this is exactly how it works. And like, so it’s just really cool. And I think that’s the power of combining, you know, people two that are complimentary, and giving the opportunity and the the freedom to allow someone to use their mind to craft it in a way that makes sense to them. And makes sense to us so that they can go execute at the highest level possible, you know, so

Chris Davis  22:18  

it was great for me, you know, at the time I was I was in a I was coming out of a professionally, what will say a professional relationship, right, coming out of one that I would say was fairly abusive, and not in terms of like, physical, but just like, you can be boxed in, right and not unleashed to be able to really let your brain go, and have that level of freedom. So as you guys are in the clouds, and I’m able to start pulling things down and make them visually and concretize them, it did so much. Because one, it allowed us to identify a realistic scope. It was like, look at all of these things, we could do this, these are some of the ways we can execute. And it’s just like, well, let’s scale back a little bit. Let’s focus on this and do that. And once we got the planning phase over, and I’ll say this to everybody listening, that wants to work for a company, or is working for one, you can be generating revenue while you’re planning. Planning isn’t it’s not a like a serial process where we’ve got to do planning, then we got to go make money. No, no, no, no, you’re planning and you’re executing while you’re planning. But essentially, what we did is that first quarter that we dedicated to planning was positioning us for the next quarter, but also getting some baseline data. Right. And as we were collecting that baseline data, it was being proven by generating some revenue. So that now next quarter, because we did quarterly planning. And we made sure that the projections were not lofty, they were based on the data that we collected off the previous plan to get an understanding of what to expect going forward. So when when we say things like double the revenue every quarter, or you know, 10x, whatever. There’s a huge planning effort in there. And I would love to just be like, Hey, guys, I talked to them for one hour, and I came up with a solution. And we put the solution in place, and money just kept coming out, right? That plan allowed us to identify the people, the external people and internal people that we needed in place, it helped us get an idea of the level of effort. So now everybody on the team is aligned to what we’re executing. Now it gets fun, because we don’t have the confusion in the way when we say hey, look, we see a huge opportunity. With segmentation. We’ve got all these leads, we’re only emailing maybe 10 to 20% of them, which right we I created the dashboard and we could see it week over week we were measuring these things and looking at our weekly meeting like wait a minute, what about these other leads? How do I How do we start sending out emails to these other leads, which then opened up segmentation? And the importance of really not just understanding who’s who and we had, we had data relative to what they purchased to start. But then you start to talk about recency and frequency. And just when you add those three, Eric, right, product purchase recency and frequency, that’s really enough to start laying your strong foundation for segmentation, so that your emails can at least at a minimum, start getting delivered, you know, in read and opened, right.

Eric Schechter  25:37  

I think that’s a good point. Because, you know, that is, you know, when I first started thinking about segmentation, again, just as like a marketer, me, I’m like, Oh, we could be, you know, tracking everything that they click on, and everything that they do, and everything on the site. Yeah, start creating this crazy web of stuff that feel overwhelming. And if you don’t have the resources, or the people to actually go execute that they’re like, well, what else are we going to do? But it’s really like, it’s like, I call like, the Tim Duncan of marketing. Right? It’s like, Mr. fundamentals, fundamentals of automation, and segmentation, which is really what you said is like, everybody has that information, especially if you’re in the e commerce world, right. Like, you have what people are buying, you have, how often they’re opening your emails. Yeah. And, and, and what is their flow in terms of like, how new of a customer are they? How long have they seen? How long have they experienced your content, and being able to segment then based on that behavior alone, which is much more? Like, there’s a lot to it, but it’s much more simplistic and focused, you can see some incredible results. Yeah. Sorry. deliverability go through the roof. Right. We’re at first, our open rates were like, you know, 20%, which is good. But or maybe was like, actually started like, 15%? Lower? Yeah. And I think we ended it like 38. Yes.

Chris Davis  26:56  

Now, just for context, everybody, this, we’re not talking about a small database of 10,000 customers. We’re not talking about, we’re talking a quarter million and above database size of emailing. So it’s hard buyers, you know, right. Yeah, it’s hard to maintain a strong open rates when your database starts to grow in the quarter millions and beyond.

Eric Schechter  27:21  

Yeah. And I think that just comes down to Yeah, not treating everybody exactly the same, even though that is the easiest thing to do. But I think there’s just some simple things that you could do in terms of the people that have opened in the last 30 days, you know, like people that have purchased in the last 30 days, like all these things are actually easy to and easier than ever to implement now, even through some of the tools that are available to marketers, right? When you want to go deeper and you want to have a structure, it’s good to make sure you have number one, have that plan ahead of time maps and things out, make sure you understand what your goals are, what business questions are you are you trying to answer? But really like in in 2021, there’s there’s no excuse to do that to not do that level of segmentation. And I’ve seen firsthand, just the power. I mean, so many marketers and business people are leaving crazy amounts of money on the table by not doing any any level of segmentation. It kind of boggles my mind. I mean, I get it, because it’s curation. But now it’s just like, man, there’s so much information out there and so much proof. It’s like, you have to be you have to be there. Yeah.

Chris Davis  28:29  

And that’s what I loved about what I love about our journey together was that it was it was exploratory for the both of us honestly, because I’d done deep segmentation for in other business settings. So I knew it worked. But I’m always surprised at how well it works, depending on the business state as well. So the first time I got to be able to go in deep with an e commerce company was with you all. So as we I just remember the cause man and the congratulatory meetings and everything. As we set these stretch goals of Hey, we did this amount this quarter. What if we double it? And what if you double it? And if you keep doubling quarter over quarter, that number gets gets big, quick, right? And making those shifts? But I’ll tell you this, segmentation was the key in so many in so many ways, and I think we were definitely it is definitely not just an easy and straightforward approach when you go deep funnel, right? because like you said, there were all kinds of indicators that we could have been using. And you were you were you were on the record for saying, hey, look, I know that there’s a whole lot of stuff, but let’s just focus on the main thing. Right? So which was easy because some founders just get up there. Hey, we could do this. are we measuring everything so you are aware? Yes, all of this possible. But Chris, just if we stick to the main thing, I’m good with that. Right. So we were able to

Eric Schechter  29:54  

get you like that can get you the majority of the way again, it’s it’s the fundamentals right and It’s easy to get fancy and try new stuff and you’re not doing the basics right? It’s going to impact you every, every which way down the funnel. And so I appreciated that about you as well, which is like you took this approach where it’s like you are an advanced automation marketer, right? Like, you know, do all the fancy, like, triple in crazy between your legs, throwing it over the back, I’ll be up and like, you can do it all. Yeah, no, man, let’s, let’s focus on dribbling with two hands. We got to be no ambidextrous. And I think that’s so smart. And just just super powerful. And it’s good to take a step back and say, don’t worry about all the noise out here, one of the metrics that truly mattered to our success, let’s get good at analyzing those. Let’s see those improve over time. Let’s focus on those. And that’s how we’ll see wins. But if we’re trying to do so much at the same time, everything hurts is a process, you know, and I think doing is just measuring, having the having clear KPIs that you’re tracking, and you’re being able to measure. And then also, I’m interested in your, in your feedback, too, on this, like, we also implemented okrs, right, which is like an amazing system for setting clear objectives, but then key results that are specific and measurable, and allows us to say, hey, when we complete all these, we’re going to hit our objective and allowed us to stay focused, which is kind of like, you know, I wouldn’t say automation at all. But it’s it’s like a very, it’s similar just on the business side in terms of a very focused approach and making sure that we’re measuring the most important things that we’re focused on the most important

Chris Davis  31:33  

things yeah, now, I will say this, I think we made the biggest jump in terms of profitability when we implemented the okrs. Right? Because it just made that that planning process easier, it was easier to get the entire the entire team aligned with what’s going on and where they played a part in more so who’s responsible for what, right so that everybody had ownership, that’s the biggest piece is, you know, when you’re scaling, and there’s this the system is moving, if there’s one little shake in, there’s questionable ownership, that little bitty shake starts to propagate through the system. And before you know it, that shake is now is now impacting the most critical area of the business. So knowing that, hey, look, your screw shaking a little bit over there, right. And now it’s tightened up, not even not an issue, right, and we’re able to move. And I’ll say this, um, I want to bring up some technology for a minute. And engagement, segmentation, and engagement tracking can be done in pretty much any platform, everybody, depending on the platform, it may be harder, and you may need to use other tools, we were using Active Campaign. So I knew how to use the automations, how to use custom fields, do some date, date, time stamping, and then some advanced searches for people who had done things within particular day. So really advanced stuff. And I say that to say, if you’re good if you’re if you’re at the level, you know, I said quarter million customers are higher, and you’re trying to segment to get more engagement is going to take beyond the basics. Okay, I just want to preface that it’s gonna take but beyond the basics, automation to create those segments, automation to track the engagement, and then even just the logical mind to create the segment, because we asked some advanced segments, right? It was like four cases, if they’ve done this, and if they’ve done this, and if they’ve done these, and those things had to be tested extensively. I’ve, I’m on the record, I’ve spent up to 45 minutes, building out a segment for us to mail. Now, let me ask everybody listening. Why would you Chris, why would you spend 45 minutes on doing that? Once we had it, Eric? What’s up? Oh, it was beautiful, man. It was beautiful. But I like I like to just give people insight because I don’t want them to hear about the big success and out and I’ll let you share whatever you can in what you’re comfortable with, on the type of growth that we were able to achieve. But it was a major success in the workings of that. Yes, automation played a part but look at how we had to leverage automation, building out a very complex segment. It’s not sexy, and it gets confusing. Your brain hurts. You’re like, well, should this be AND or OR we’ve had slack conversations members like well, maybe if we switch this and to Oh, you know, so I just wanted to give people insight on when you go deep funnel, and you’re trying to identify how to just get laser sharp, what’s your what’s your targeting and your messaging? This is the level of effort that’s required, you know?

Eric Schechter  34:52  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s it can feel overwhelming at Especially if your mind doesn’t think that way. But it’s it’s logical in the sense where if you put in the time, you definitely understand it. And the reason why I think you also spent so much time on it was not necessarily just the building of it all. But the testing, because if you go in and you’re not paying attention to detail, yeah, not, you know, looking at the and versus the, or in every part of the thing, like, it will blow up the one small, absolutely, like coding, right, you have one bracket that’s not closed, and the whole thing is broken, you got to go through and really do it. So yeah, doing it right, and making sure you have someone that you trust that can come in and implement it for you. But I think the only thing, right, and I think the power was that we didn’t just do automation for automation purposes, right? So you get it to meet a specific business objective, or a question that we were trying to answer or something that we were trying to a metric that we were trying to move the needle on in a positive way. And then we did that. And then we looked very closely at how that was being impacted by that automation. And I think it’s easy to say in this world of, you know, everyone talking about automation, or whatever this and that like to get lost in just doing it because it’s expected or it’s the cool thing to do or whatever else and not having the planning that says, hey, we’re doing this for this reason, and we’re actually going to, you know, track that and make sure things aren’t moving in a positive direction. And if not, what do we need to tweak? What do we need to go back and update? But yeah, it is a powerful thing. And also, just, I know, I keep reiterating this, but again, like it is complex as you go into the to the more deeper automations. But you didn’t start there. We didn’t start off. We started off with the basic Yes. Because that’s like, it’s like everything else, right? It’s like I get we’re talking about we talk a lot about basketball, right way that I think about is like, it’s like tying your shoelaces, right? Like, if you don’t tie your shoelaces properly. So many bad things can happen. As a result of that you go and sprain your ankle, you’re jumping over, you injure somebody else, like it all starts with your shoelaces, man. And that’s like, that’s where I think that it’s like, it’s not the sexy thing to do. But it’s so critical. It’s like the foundation of your home. And once you do that, man, the stuff that you do when you come in and work your magic and start building more complex plays and systems and all these things like it’s because you did the bottom part. So effectively, that, that you’re able to do that. Because if not, it would be a cluster like I would be going to be like what the hell is happening? And what what is the reason for it? It’s not just because of this, but maybe there’s issues everywhere in the in the system. And so yeah, man, it is a beast of a thing. But man, it’s it’s powerful. Because when you get it right, you start seeing compounding results over time that you could have never believed or possible without continuing to add bandwidth and resources, where when you marry automation with really smart people, you can keep a lean team and still start growing at rates that are unprecedented. I think that’s what we experienced, too. Right? Absolutely. A very small team. Yeah. For the amount of growth and revenue and work that we were doing it it’s because we really planned and automated in a very strategic way. Yeah,

Chris Davis  38:25  

yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. So in our last few moments, man, you know, I know we you’ve got to take off, and I want to be respectful of my listeners time, share, share whatever you’re comfortable with Eric, in terms of the the type of growth, whether it’s, you know, leads revenue, whatever the case is that that you experienced was, but some of the, with the work that we’re able to do together, man.

Eric Schechter  38:51  

Yeah, absolutely. So, it, it started off, as you know, we were getting customers coming in, we had a lot of like, older customers that, you know, we hadn’t engaged with in a while, but you know, we’re in a really unique position, and we’re acquisition is something that we focus heavily on. And so we had a lot of new customers coming in, I think at first, you know, we didn’t really know this is pre Chris, we really didn’t know what we were doing. We were trying to figure it out. You know, we were generating revenue, because these are buyers, but our spam rates or unsubscribe rates, like our deliverability all the things that matter for the long term, just we’re not in a place to scale, you know, we ran into a bunch of issues is causing a lot of work and time. But, you know, from there, I think we were able to grow in each of the most critical areas, which is like, you know, now, in terms of our list, we’re over half a million, you know, subscribers that are super active or open rates are, you know, in some segments as high as 45% love rates over 10% unsubscribes under point half a percent spam rate It’s under point 01 percent, like, in an amazing spot, and we’re still as lean of a team as we’ve ever been. And you know, we were just continuing to grow, like, what we really pay attention to is, yeah, we have like overall revenue goals. But really, we look at our revenue per open and our revenue per subscriber. And you’ve been able to pretty much double that, you know, year over year. And so that’s been absolutely powerful. And that’s, that’s basically through this strategy of putting the right product, giving the right product to the right person at the right time. And using automation to do that. So you’re not going crazy in your head with 500,000 people trying to figure out what they want what they need. But you are systematically providing that which adds more value to them, which makes them want to open more of your emails, which gives you a bigger opportunity to stay top of mind and generate sales. And so yeah, it’s been, it’s been an amazing ride, I think we’re just getting started. And, you know, we’re super grateful for all the work that we were able to do with you. You’re like a Jedi and automation. And yeah, the sky’s the limit. Now, you know, so it’s really now that you have a machine a system, it’s like now, what are the tweaks that we can make? back and that’s what we’re excited about working on in the future. So

Chris Davis  41:26  

I love it, man, I love it. Well, this, this podcast, of course, was just as enjoyable recording as in any of our time together, man any of our time together. So I appreciate it. I would be remiss without allowing our listeners to at least know where can they go to find out more about GiddyUp experience some of the innovative products that you guys have to offer? Where can they go here?

Eric Schechter  41:49  

Yeah, sir, are, you know, the GiddyUp site is giddyup.io, there’s a lot, we just did a whole new brand, and a lot of really cool information there that you can kind of sink your teeth into whether you’re a brand or a marketer. And then my daily discovery, it’s new, we’re growing it were it’s also a new brand that we’re kind of launching in this space. And you can see a lot of the cool products that we have there, which are all from real brands, who are, you know, on a mission to help improve people’s lives, and they have great, you know, great founders, great stories, and they, they just, they do what they say, and so they’re just, it’s an incredible community to be a part of. So I definitely highly recommend you go and and check that out. And if you want to connect with me, bestplaces is usually on LinkedIn. So hit me up, and I look forward to chatting with you guys. And if I can be helpful at all, you know, just let me know. And I’m down to down to help out so great, great, well, I

Chris Davis  42:45  

appreciate it. As always everybody, those links will be in the show notes in case your thumbs weren’t fast enough on your mobile phone right now. So there’ll be in the show notes. So you can just click away, Eric, thank you, man. Thank you. This has been great. Glad to have you on the podcast and overall man, just glad to know you send my semi thanks, warm, welcomes. And I miss you too tougher. And Leo, you know, the that was the trail man that really got everything kick started. So I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity, man. And thank you again for coming on to the podcast. Thanks, man. Likewise, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the All systems go podcast, we just peel back the curtain just a bit, just a bit. When you when you combine a co founder, a visionary who’s willing to invest not only in the people, but all of the resources those people may need, invest in finding the right people, the perfect person for the position, and not holding back not holding back. Eric swung for the fences. And when I saw him swing, I wanted to get behind and support that. And collectively, not just myself and Eric but the entire team, we were able to produce massive results for a lot of people in e commerce success with automation eludes them. So some of the keys that I want to just highlight really quick is you want to make sure you have proper planning in place, you want to make sure that you have vision casting, so someone needs to cast the vision quarterly annually, whatever the case may be, then you need to take that down into Break, break it into a plan that we can that you can start to see the role that automation plays. Okay. And this this goes across all businesses, but specifically to e commerce, you really have to have a strategy for your customers. And that strategy needs to be stronger than the strategy for your leads. Okay, this podcast is exemplary of marketing to customers only. And the results that we were were able to achieve. were amazing. So just a few more pointers. I know we dropped a lot in the episode, but I don’t want you to leave without that. Because I see there’s a wave of e commerce happening right now. In the industry. So I want you all to be able to understand what it’s going to take to leverage automation in a way that’s going to scale your business and increase your profitability, and the lifetime customer value of every customer that you’re paying to acquire. All right. So share this with anybody who owns an e commerce website. If you’re confused in any capacity, just think of it this way. How do they use WooCommerce? Shopify bigcommerce Magento. Those are the real heavy hitters. But mostly you’re going to hear Shopify so if you’ve heard them say that share this podcast with them simple if somebody has said, I use Shopify, I’m looking into Shopify, I use WooCommerce. Oh, we use big commerce, oh, we sell online. Dare I throw Volusion in there, okay. Anybody selling products online, make sure you share this, this podcast with them. And make sure that you’re subscribed, make sure that you subscribe, and you leave a five star rating and review. For those of my first time listeners. This is my invitation. I promised you at the top. Here’s invitation Come on, join the family of listeners, small business owners who are who are dedicated to equipping themselves with all that is needed to grow your business responsibly online, in an automated fashion because we’re dedicated at automation bridge, to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers so that we can meet these small business needs, needs of deploying automated automated marketing and sales systems in their business for rapid growth. But it takes someone that understands marketing strategy in the third, let me say marketing and sales technology to rain, how to put those together and make system so we’ve made it easy for you, everybody. If you’re like, hey, I want to be an automation service provider. Hey, I want to find out more. We’ve made it easy for you to get everything that you need. If you go to VA, if you go to Allsystemsgopodcast.com you get access not just to the latest episodes, you’ll get access to view our automation packages, okay, and these packages are catered to helping you put automated marketing and sales systems in your business. Over the next six months. We have a free Facebook group that you can get access to you can also request to be a guest or refer someone to be a guest on the podcast in any resource or training we mentioned on the podcast. It’s all there for simplification purposes. One URL gets you access to its to it all. And that’s allsystemsgopodcast.com. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. And until next time, I see you online, automate responsibility