352 – Why email marketing is still alive: insights from Rytis Lauris of Omnisend

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 352 entitled why email marketing is still alive: insights from Rytis Lauris Omnisend. It was published on Thursday, the 30th of November, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and we'll get to that interview in a few short moments, but before then a few bits and pieces to share.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, actually it's one of the sponsors that I've just mentioned. It's Rytis Lauris, who is one of the co-founders of Omnisend, and today we're going to be talking about why email marketing is still a thing. We talk about the enduring effectiveness of email marketing. The importance of owning your own content, which should resonate with you WordPressers. How Omnisend integrates with WordPress and WooCommerce to allow you to alter your campaigns based upon what is being viewed.

We also talk about email marketing and how it can drive revenue and improve customer engagement, and lots of other topics, including some AI things that might be dropping. In the future. I hope. That you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Rytis Lauris. Hey, Rytis, how are you doing?

[00:04:29] Rytis Lauris: Hello. Hi. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting.

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: You are most welcome. This is a subject we rarely stray into, so dear listener of the podcast, hang on, because it's not the usual WordPressy stuff, although we will definitely combine it with WordPressy things. We're going to be talking today a little bit about email marketing. more or less everything, I think, that we can touch on email marketing.

How it's changed over the last couple of decades, what you can do these days, how expensive is it? All of those different kinds of things. And in order for Rytis to be somebody that's credible to listen to, we need to know what Rytis's credentials are. So Rytis, bit of a dull question to begin with, but we need to know.

tell us a little bit about your background. How come you have any authority talking about email marketing? Who do you work for? And all of that stuff.

[00:05:21] Rytis Lauris: Okay. Yeah. Thanks. Definitely. We'll introduce. And yeah, email is still effective. Email is not dead. And prior to recording, we had a couple, we touched already a couple of questions, which I believe we'll touch here as well. And yeah, so I'm co founder and CEO of a company called Omnisent. So we are marketing automation platform for those who.

mainly sell online or do any kind of online businesses. So we help our customers to, to communicate with their customers, via email, primarily, via SMS messages and the web push notifications. And we played around with Facebook messenger, WhatsApp as well. So we can touch those, ways of communication, and why we found those are not as effective as still email.

is for anyone who runs online business. yeah, and we, Tom Nissen, we already getting to the 10th year anniversary, we'll be celebrating next year. So we launched this product almost, 10 years ago. Initially that was a really just an email marketing platform for, small and medium sized businesses.

So I would say maybe for micro sized businesses at that time. Now we have grown up to really. Comprehensive marketing automation platform helping our customers to automate more and basically communicate with their customers in the, less intrusive way. So basically the automation and the, data we help our customers to collect about their Customer's behavior.

It helps us to automate communication and send more relevant messages. And that's our vision in general to make marketing relevant that fewer messages, and better engagement and better acceptance from everyone who is, who is actually getting advertising because we're still, it's advertising, but, but we believe that, due to automation, due to, some signals tracking, it can be made.

Welcomed by anyone who is receiving

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a really interesting subject, because if you were to rewind the clock, oh, I don't know, 15 years ago, email was really just confined to the machine on your, desk, you'd have to come in, sit yourself down, switch on the machine, and then, click a sync button and, dial up to your internet and all of that kind of stuff.

And the email would come in slowly, and all of that. But now, the advent of the iPhone, I don't know how long that is, but it's a long time ago. You really are, you really are able to get into people's, consciousness on a more or less permanent basis. It really, everybody that I know... Maybe we'll get into the demographics of that a little bit later and whether that's skewed towards older people and younger people.

But, I, was wondering, and we talked a little bit about this before the call began. I wondered if there had been a decline in the, opening rates, let's say, or the effectiveness of advertising, using email as the primary thing. Due to, The dominance really at the moment of, things like, oh, I don't know, Facebook and the fact that people seem to communicate on those and, name any sort of messaging app, people are using Signal and WhatsApp and all of these different things, Telegram and all of these things, but your, the fact that your company is a growing and be investing, in the WordPress space tells me that you've got a different intuition.

You, you are, you're pretty convinced that email, is here to stay. Maybe you've got some data that can tell us that it's in fact growing. It's something to invest your time and money into. Forget about the proprietary social network platforms. Why is email still a good bet?

[00:09:06] Rytis Lauris: So that's a good, very good question. And once we start, once we launched and start developing, but what Onmisend is now, so we were looking for investors and everybody said, come on guys, what are you launching the new email marketing platform? it's all messengers. It's all conversational commerce.

Email is dead. So that was 10 years ago and nobody was willing to invest in us. Finally, that, that was a good thing to happen because up until today we are bootstrapped or as we call we are customer funded as our

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's better. Yeah. I like

[00:09:39] Rytis Lauris: yeah, we just, our customers pay us for one month in advance and there are no long term contracts, there is no lock in so they make a decision if they believe that the upcoming month we will create value for them or not.

So that's how we fund our business and that's how we fund our growth. so yeah. 10 years, 10 years, after we see, like really successful IPO is happening and the markets is already back, again to email. And why is it Probably it's unique. There is one unique thing about email, about inbox.

Yeah. you said to try anything, but if it, now you have email everywhere, you have it in your phone, you have still in the box on your desk at work. In email, in books, you have a full control when and what to read based on the subject line, based on the sender, et cetera. And sometimes I meet people and they say, Oh, email is bad.

Okay. So when they challenge them, I could bet that there are newsletters that you subscribe and we say, no, I don't subscribe to anything. Okay. Maybe you don't subscribe to, online stores, emails, but. but you subscribe to some like professional emails and definitely you receive some newsletters and you have brands, which you like either those, for someone is the, apparel brands for someone is maybe professional marketing brands or marketing courses, et cetera.

And you do subscribe and this is the email. It's the only inbox you have a full control and then you can read later when you have time to do that, et cetera. And it's completely different with all other communication channels, with all the messengers you mentioned, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, even text messages, SMS, et cetera, you don't have that control.

And basically people are willing to use those, to personal communication, like messengers. It just, I, prefer communicating to my friends via those because it's I, feel only safe when I have a full control of that inbox, like full control, because I'm more forced to read, to react to it, etc.

I cannot just ignore. And in inbox you choose if today is like very busy day for me, I maybe read no promotional messages. But next day, maybe it's Friday afternoon. I have some spare time. I'm too lazy to do my job, et cetera. And I scroll in my inbox and then I get back to the newsletters, which I missed on Tuesday, on Wednesday, whatever, which is not the case in our messaging apps.

They just do super instant and you have to, deliver instant reaction to those. So that's, I think the unique thing about a meme email, which keep. keeps email the most effective channel. And for anyone who sells online, who runs any online transactions, either it's a physical goods, or maybe someone is like you're selling courses, so you're selling video content, et cetera, digital content online.

So email is unbeatable channel. So this is the most effective by far channel to retain your customers. And in. entire like structure of your revenue for what we see from our customers. It drives like 15 to 30 ish percent of the revenue.

[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:12:56] Rytis Lauris: Yeah, it's it makes a massive impact to your

[00:12:59] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:13:00] Rytis Lauris: massive

[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's really

[00:13:02] Rytis Lauris: in yeah and in comparison to the cost It's like super cheap channel.

It's the return on investment in let's say in case of our customers We count that return on interest is around 1 to 75. So basically 2 for 1 pound dollar euro, whatever currency you are on, invested, you get that return, which is massive. So you cannot even be no other channels even close to that.

So usually if you sell online, what happens that for first, for first, transaction, you spend more than actually earn. You pay for Google, you pay for Facebook, Meta. and the only way to have a proper business, you have to rely on lifetime value of a customer. So basically to invite Nathan to, to buy for a second time, for third time, to fourth time, and that's only when you.

can really have a proper business. Otherwise it will be just a loss. If you will keep just trying to acquire new and new customers and there will be no repeated, purchases and, coming back customers. Yeah. So email, email and, it's like still very effective and it does not go anywhere out.

[00:14:25] Nathan Wrigley: genuinely the only piece of tech, I'm just going to think about whether what I'm about to say is true, and I think it is, yeah, it's the only piece of tech which has been a part of my stack relentlessly since it was invented. It's never not been a feature. and the email inbox is very often the first thing that I will look at in the morning.

listeners to this podcast, just give that a moment's thought, just think to yourself. What do you do on a daily basis? And my guess is that 90 percent plus 99 percent of you email is going to be involved at some point during your day. Now, maybe you collide with Facebook and messenger and all those things, but you can guarantee that not everybody is, whereas email really is.

And the nice thing about email as well, is that you can choose. How you want it to look, you can pick a client and you can have it as a desktop app and you can pick a different way of doing it on your phone and you can, in my case, I've got certain tags set up. So if it spots a certain word coming in, it gets filtered somewhere for later.

I use Gmail or Google workspaces. And they do a really pretty remarkable job of filtering out the things which, really, I didn't ever want to see and, it's called spam and what have you. But it really is, it's the thing which has stuck around. And before we press record, I talked to you about the fact that my children don't seem to have...

Any relationship with Word, sorry, not with WordPress with, they definitely don't with WordPress with, with email. yeah, it's coming, with email at all. And you made the interesting point that, just wait until they hit the job market. And then I think it's more or less certain that any employer is the, one of the first things apart from, maybe getting you the card to get you through the front door will be to get you the email address, right?

You can't avoid email. It doesn't matter whether the kids are using it or not. It's going to be part of the workplace until somebody invents something better, but I don't see that at the moment. Okay.

[00:16:34] Rytis Lauris: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, I think you made a very good point here about the ability to control and to what I said. Yeah. So you inbox read late, et cetera, but you made a very good point about the ability to organize. Can you imagine if WhatsApp or Facebook messenger or any other messenger app could be organized that well?

Yeah. That's okay. You put, you can put in folders, you can put what you read the first, which is a priority that you have to react immediately. What you can read later, what you can read if you just only have time, et cetera. So, again, about your kids and teenagers, maybe at this age, they are just because they are communicating with their, primarily with their like.

Peers. Yeah. Who have friends now. But yeah, once we get the job market, once we, they, they start getting like information overload in general. Maybe they just don't have this feeling yet. Inbox it will be where you can organize and where you can control that traffic and that load, which is not the case in any messaging gap.

So, you made a very good point and that's what. It still makes an email very effective and I'm a strong believer that, there were multiple attempts to kill email, but yeah, it's

[00:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: it fascinating that something, something invented so early on has stuck around because there really is very little that has stuck around and had that sort of longevity. Also, another kind of intuition that I've just thought of, as you were saying, that was the, fact that. I will not allow strangers into my, let's say, WhatsApp.

I actually don't use WhatsApp, but we'll use that as an example. If somebody came in there that was representing a company, that would feel like a weird intrusion. And it'd be like, no, what the heck just happened? How did that get in there? Whereas I have... I am allowing that stuff to come into my email.

I don't really know what's going on with my head there, but the email is the bigger channel. So my friends communicate with me. That's interesting. My friends communicate in there with me and also businesses, but I don't want the businesses in the WhatsApp, but I'm quite happy to mix, both

[00:18:42] Rytis Lauris: Why is it Why is it I think I have an answer because like you have a very, and especially with Gmail, Gmail made a really, Disrupted, I would say this market, cause like now you are more or less, spam does exist, but more or less due to, the fact that you have to use a professional tools to send communication, massive communication, like ominous and other tools in the past, you could just send from your inbox for hundreds or maybe thousands of recipients.

So inboxes are not allowing to do that anymore. tools like us, we prevent. Part of it. And of course we fight like constantly with like spammers with bad actors, etc And the second layer that inbox is like outlook like gmail yahoo, etc They do their job as well to help you filter out the bad actors to help you filter out scammers fishers or just spammers who are just promoting stores without your acceptance and without your, being up to that and regulation on top, which regulates like GDPR or California Consumer Privacy Act, which is like California on the, but basically it's set the standard for entire United States, which became just a practice.

so that's all that combined. You feel way more safer to subscribe because you are so confident that whenever you. will not be willing to receive that information from brands anymore, you will be able to unsubscribe. And just with a click of a button, maybe two clicks, yeah? At most, but it's just instant.

Okay. Maybe try to subscribe. I don't want to receive it anymore. I'm so confident that it's so easy to opt out. And it's just a standard. There's no other way to, to send any promotional messages. You have to obey those rules globally. So I think that's, a thing that makes the email unique.

And this is not the case with any messaging app, because if you start getting something from the brand, how shall I opt out? There are no, no mechanism to do that.

[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: Also, there's the fact that you are really vendor locked in with, let's say that you, again, just using WhatsApp as an example, let's say that you invest all of your resources into that channel. you are locked into that vendor. And if something goes wrong, let's say, I don't know, somebody, one of your employees abuses Facebook just take you down.

That as an example. you are toast on that, that's just gone, whereas the open nature of email and the fact that, there's a spec for that, and we all have to obey that, and obviously laws have come in, like you said, you have to have an unsubscribe link, it has to be sent in a particular way, so that it, the markup in there is sent in a certain way, and you've obviously got the DNS and all of that going on in the background to authenticate things correctly, you're not locked in.

If something goes wrong, the company that you're using to send out email, if that goes out of business, you just pick up and move somewhere else, right? That's totally possible. So there's that, just the longevity. And in the WordPress community, there's a direct parallel there because we're always talking about owning your own content.

And so I can see how. email as a thing is an open thing. WordPress is an open thing. You're not relying on a third party service to do all of those bits and pieces. oh, this is

[00:22:13] Rytis Lauris: Yeah, that's, a very bad, that's a really good parallel. Actually. Yeah. it's about like really open nature and open source by, yeah, of course, for our vendors for our service providers on top of that, but in general, it's, open source and you are, you actually have a full control. You just need to find another.

And, service provider,

[00:22:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You can just

[00:22:33] Rytis Lauris: another developer in, yeah, exactly, But still, you own, and opposite to, yeah, Facebook or other ecosystems, let's say, other site builders, or, content management systems, yeah, that, that are owned by some company. And if company just goes out of business, you are screwed.

And you cannot just, because it does not belong, theoretically it belongs to you, but it does not belong to you,

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Because your follower list, because that's what it is. It's a list of followers is bound to that platform. And if that platform. takes your access away or goes out of business. there's that lot gone, because they're not going to give it to you. whereas, the email thing, you just download a CSV file and take it somewhere else.

Yeah, okay, so

[00:23:22] Rytis Lauris: say and even if they change their rules and I think like Amazon is a really good example Yeah, if you sell on Amazon, you do not have any access to your customers Opposite to a subscriber, email subscriber list that actually you own. And yeah, you can download once you can always keep, and this is your asset.

Yeah. if you collect your subscribers, you ask for permission to obtain. So this is the asset that belongs to your business, to your company.

[00:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: we've gone totally off piste, but this is great. we've got a list of bullet points that I wanted to get through, and we haven't even got to the first one. but it's fine. let's crack into it. I suspect this will be, a little bit of a longer episode, but that's fine. okay. I haven't personally, and so if you're listening to this podcast, you're going to have to forgive my stumbling through it a little bit and hopefully, Rytis can, pick, up where I'm messing things up, but I haven't really used email marketing software for a very long time.

And so my intuitions around that are, going to be bad. So I want to just begin there. If we were to rewind the clock, let's say. 10, 15 years ago, and then compare what you could do then with what you can do now. Ooh, I've just hit my microphone. With what you can do now, I'm guessing the compare, there's a lot to talk about, and what I'm really doing here is, opening the conversation to people like me who haven't really thought about using this kind of software.

Maybe they've been stuck with the same provider for a little while. what's changed? What's the landscape like in 2023 for sending emails? Have you got any sort of like hot things that are going on that have gone on?

[00:25:01] Rytis Lauris: So I would see like a few things that, that, that have changed. So more and more, okay. I would say that easiness of use, probably the first thing. Second thing is like automation and the recent changes that are really coming into the spaces, AI assistance. Oh, AI is everywhere. It's inevitable.

[00:25:21] Nathan Wrigley: yeah!

[00:25:22] Rytis Lauris: okay, I'm not the kind of, I'm a bit skeptic about how fast AI will change our life, but I will touch where it really helps to do, as we call it, like a dinky job, that, the basic things that really required so much time in the past, but just... makes your life easier, does not disrupt, does not replace you and you as a, H I, human intelligence still needed, but it helps you to do it.

Yeah. Just job to do your job faster, more efficient way, et cetera. so, yeah, so the first thing is really, it's easier to use. So basically like platforms like calmness and what it helps you to do is really to. Dude, you should not be a design professional. You should not be, even the marketing professional.

And if you are just like small business and then basically, and, but orchestra one person you can still use. That was not the case in the past because now it's all, those like drag and drop editors. segments, prebuilt segments, prebuilt templates, template libraries, et cetera. So basically we can just install, connect to your website and start using and select from, let's say the big gallery of templates that are either theme related or, Some occasions related Christmas is coming, if it's Christmas or Halloween or

[00:26:48] Nathan Wrigley: Black

[00:26:49] Rytis Lauris: Day, Black Friday, St. Patrick's Day in spring, etc, whatever. So it's, really all that related and you can play with ready made designs. It's all drag and drop, which is easy, to adopt, to make the, what you want them to look, etc.

And then they talk, maybe I will jump to a third topic as well about like where AI helps you to really, so it, there is another layer of simplification where we have as well pre built tools where you can just write text and AI completes it for you. So basically say, okay, I want to talk about this product in that way.

And AI will suggest you the paragraph of how to describe it.

[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: That's

[00:27:42] Rytis Lauris: again, yeah, and you know what, does it change? Does it replace you as a person? No, it does not. But you have no need to hire a designer, professional designer, or try to be a designer yourself if you're not a designer. Of course, if you are a designer, you will make it better looking than the AI will do it for you.

But it's really good. So it really helps you to save time. So I think it's a first thing that has changed in those, let's say, 10 or 15 years. So just way easier to use in the learning curve is, so it's easy to start using and start benefiting from it. And the second thing is, more data driven and based on customer behavior, and that helps to automate properly like segment target more, automate more.

basically more and more businesses are like happening online. And even five years ago, 10 years ago, you should. be selling some physical goods online to be as a e commerce businesses. Yeah. So that's where we had the entire customer journey happening online on the internet. But nowadays, if you are a doctor, so highly likely that entire customer journey, except the patient visiting you is happening already online.

So the exploration phase, someone is Googling. someone is reading decision making phase. Yeah. So someone is reading reviews about your, you as a professional, let's say as a doctor. Yeah. Let's take a doctor as an example. so someone is reading reviews, making a decision, which doctor to choose, but booking an appointment, paying online, visiting you.

And after that we get back to online. So you get the survey about, okay, did you like our service? You leave your own review as. It's to help someone else to, make a decision in the future, if you are satisfied or maybe completely dissatisfied and then the businesses are inviting you to repeatedly come to visit.

So they promote again. So what, happens here is really that about, there are way more data points and breadcrumbs that every person leaves, on the internet online. So basically marketing automation tools can track more of the behavior and Someone could say, wow, but this is bad, but there is a really upside of it because of this data tracking and behavior analysis.

We, our marketing automation tools, we can help automate marketing activities and send more relevant messages. and I would say very illustrative thing is that could not be. imagined 10 years ago, last year, around one third, to be precise, like 36 ish percent of all the transactions that our customers made, our customers, OmniSense customers made.

So basically one third of your revenue was driven by automated emails and it had counted only 2. 6 percent of email traffic. That's power and this percentage is growing so fewer messages the less advertising is still advertising Yeah, so some people hate advertising, but we hate this advertising which is completely irrelevant to us But you know based on data based on signals we're able to send way more relevant messages for the consumers and that means that they are way better received and they convert at the end of the day better.

And basically you as a business, you just, set up automations once and you sleep and automation tools does the business for you.

[00:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the whole 24 7 thing. Let me just paraphrase what I think you just said, just so that we've got it in my head, where things are different from 10, 15 years ago. obviously you're driving down. the technical requirement that you need, to, create this stuff in the first place.

So perhaps 20 years ago, 15 years ago, you would need a dedicated member of staff. You would have needed a designer to put the email together. You would have then needed somebody who really was in the weeds of the software, who understood how all of the complicated bits and pieces went together. And even once you've done that, the automations were probably not.

So all of the things like the pre built segments, the pre built templates, we, know this in the WordPress space, because we've got these page builders and there's a real parallel between building a website and building an email. We can understand all of that. But then you moved on to the fact that.

Now there's a push to with AI or without AI to talk about data and automations. And you, talked about the fact that I think you said 36 percent of your customers, or at least 36 percent of the email, which is egressing your platform is based upon an automation. So fully one third of things.

Is, stuff that they're not even touching on. that bit is new to me. There were really limited automations available. But there were things like time bound automation. wait three days. Send another email in this sequence. can we dig into the automation? you said it makes it more relevant.

It increases your return on investment. Can you just give us a bit of an indicator? What kind of automations can you do these days? And for anybody listening to this who gets it, I'm sorry, but I need to know because I don't.

[00:33:12] Rytis Lauris: So Nathan Fass, thank you for asking this question. So it's, this is a really, good. Just, to, confirm and clarify that maybe it was not 100 percent accurate in this. that's 36%. So let's simplify to that. One third of the revenue we generate for our customers is coming from 2. 6 percent of the traffic of emails that being sent.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Wait, hang on. What? A third of the revenue from 2. 6...

[00:33:42] Rytis Lauris: 0. 6 percent of our emails.

[00:33:45] Nathan Wrigley: All right, that's quite a hard hitting statistic. Okay. Yeah.

[00:33:49] Rytis Lauris: So that's, the power of automation because it's way more relevant because it's way more timely, the time to send it, the content, yeah. So it's very related to, to, to the question you just asked. Yeah. So what examples of those automations? the most popular and the most effective is cart abandonment automation.

So basically, uh, someone, Nathan, is browsing online and is in need of a new phone now. And maybe you are not kind of Apple fan and... Exactly. Okay. If you are an Apple phone, Apple fan, so you are so clear that you need a new iPhone. That's, for sure. If you are, say, Android fan, so maybe you are browsing to look after different models and maybe you don't have a preferred brand, et cetera.

And, the tool identifies that, okay, now you are in the need of a new phone. So basically there are cart abandonment or browser abandonment, they're a bit different. So either we identify that the category you are currently looking at, Cell phones and based on that we can trigger campaign that promotes you only new Android phones maybe if Depends on the key of how much of like of a stock you have of different categories Yeah, we can even identify the price category.

Are you looking to the flagships? Are you looking maybe or more? more cost savings phones. Yeah. So based on that, it's so easy to start automatically running campaigns. Once you are in the look for new phones, identify the price range, identify what kind of models are you looking for and start advertising you only those kind of phones.

So it will be way more accepted by you because you are in the need. Now you don't need a new fridge now. And if someone is advertising new, fridge, any fridge. You don't need those now, but you need a new phone. So that's an example. Second example is really, let's say all the post purchase activities and the post purchase experience.

So when you already, purchased the phone. So it's very important for the brands to send follow up messages to ask, did you like it? Did you receive a parcel to let you know that, okay, we have delivered, we have dispatched your parcel and soon to be received and the courier should deliver it tomorrow or maybe day after tomorrow or today, et cetera.

and again, it does not invite you directly to purchase something from the online store, but it creates the sense that they care about you. And actually they do care about you and it's so easy for the, for, online business to create that sense for their customers. And then they ask, did you receive, was it all good?

Maybe that was like broken the parcel. Was it like not broken? Did you like the courier? Did you like the phone? Is everything working? Et cetera. Do you need any help? How to set up? Yeah. So maybe the phone is just too obvious and everybody has phones, but let's say if you are, I don't know, maybe 60. 70 plus, and maybe it's not that, obvious how to use the newest model for you.

And there are our video tutorials, how to do that, which then we will help you set up just by watching step by step guide, et cetera. So all this experience after purchase experience that can be automated, it's recreating a lot of value for our customer. And the next time someone needs some product, they, you will be on top of mind.

You can, yeah. So just, a couple of examples.

[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, but they're really interesting because as yours as that as the words are coming out of your mouth Dominoes are falling in my head. I'm thinking. Oh, yeah. Oh, of course, so but okay. So how do we maybe we need to talk about, the fact that you're coming into the WordPress space more and maybe there's an integration here with WordPress products like WooCommerce or something.

I'm not sure. But, how, doeOnmisendnd make decisions about, okay, Nathan. Customer Nathan is looking at phones. Not only that, he seems to be looking at Android phones. That seems to be where the preponderance of his time is, and he's looking at high end Android phones. How are these decisions, getting made?

Because obviously, it's trivially easy for me standing over as a human looking at somebody looking at a catalog. I can see it and I'm intelligent enough to know it. But how does your platform How does it even know this kind of information? So let's deal with that bit first. How do you gather this intelligence, and how do you decide, okay, this is the thing that matters.

Right now, this matters. The rest is noise. Ignore the other bits.

[00:38:54] Rytis Lauris: So it all starts with integration. Yeah. So with WordPress and yeah, you are right. So like Anyone can use Onmisend, but the most value that we create, mainly for WooCommerce users, for those who do sell online. yeah, so we have plugin integration, on wordpress. org. So you just install and that's how we connect, online store to, to, omniscient and there are two of data we analyze. First one is the customer's behavior, like shopping data. So it's all comes from your backend, from the database. when did customer Nathan purchased for the last time? Maybe he's, a first time purchasing or did he. Purchase in the past.

What did he purchase with his previous phone? Did he purchase all those? Also a case or maybe he did not did he purchase? Insurance in the past or no. So this is the data which comes from your store historical data and on top of that Once you install our plugin, we put a little front end snippets to be able to track the customer behavior on your front end, on your website.

And all those, two data combined makes, put a lot of records by each of the customer, each of the subscribers. So we analyze, we track this data, we store this data and based on that data, you can build. You can build segments and you can build automations. There are a lot of pre built segments and automations already in place, but you can build your own.

So basically that's the market who then sets the rules. Yeah. So let's analyze the behavior. Someone is looking at this category, specific category. If someone is looking at this category, start this campaign. Boom someone is looking campaign is like our tools checking what's happening. Are there any rules based on this behavior?

Yes, there are rules. Let's initiate the campaign in the campaign. Let's put this default text. Maybe some discount code to Help you to make a decision and to purchase from us not from our competitors On top of that there could be dynamic fields that we say, okay and let's promote the products that Nathan already visited because we know.

And we automatically just pull the data, pull the images, pull, the descriptions, pull the prices, et cetera. And we, lay them out in the, newsletter. And the third block would be, and let's say choose four random other products from this category,

[00:41:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:41:36] Rytis Lauris: and you set up once and it just, runs, we see the trigger.

When Nathan is visiting the category, we check what conditions did the marketer set up. And then it's based on that. We initiate campaigns that are being composed by, by, by a computer basically.

[00:41:54] Nathan Wrigley: So this is all predicated, A, upon the fact that they're a customer. And so presumably, upon the installation of that plugin, you have to be a little bit mindful of things like, I don't know, what your privacy policy says, because now we've got cookies, and we've got tracking going off to Onmisend. And I think you said you're storing that sort of stuff on your server because the, listener to this podcast will be very mindful.

Site for that plugin, which will log you in to WordPress, I'm a等who'm very mindful about the size of their WordPress datable, and so having all of that winter love, just so consumed and sent on your end. and I've used your website before, so I'm logged in, and I'm browsing if I know that's being user generated somewhere.

And, then, again, you hit, and I believe, I'm transmitting to MustameXlarge. com index.

[00:42:44] Rytis Lauris: cases, yes,

[00:42:45] Nathan Wrigley: so, so logged in, logged out, but let's imagine the scenario I'm logged in, you then bind that data to a, Nathan seems like a great candidate for this campaign, this automation that we've got there. Do those automations need to be created by me, like from start to finish, or do you have, in OmniCenter, do you have suggestions of, I don't know, e commerce type things for technology or for apparel or for, I don't know, sports equipment or whatever.

Do you have those kind of things to get me started? Because I would, I'd, I wouldn't know how often to send it, how quickly to send it. I wouldn't have an intuition as to whether, no, that's weird. I was there two minutes ago and now I've got an email. That's just bonkers. So let's get into that.

What are the, how does Onmisend actually, how do you build that in Onmisend?

[00:43:40] Rytis Lauris: yeah, that's, a good question. It's to, to, a question what changed in the past 10 years. So yeah, so one of the, one of the, like how to say, how we build the product, one of the strategic decisions we made that our customers should not. Should never ended a blank canvas. So if by choice, yeah, we do have blank canvas templates, just blank template.

And I will set up everything from scratch because I'm experienced, professional, I'm experienced marketer. If no, so we have all the best practices embedded as a template. So there are multiple automation suggestions. What is the best for your business? There are multiple, newsletter templates.

There are segments pre prebuilt segments that you can choose and then you could just use out of the box yet. You still, it's on you to, uh, enable them. Because we're not sure if you are willing to send, maybe you sometimes use two tools, et cetera. let's say we have forms to collect subscribers, but you can use Onmisend forms or you can use WP forms or Gravity forms or any, other forms on WordPress to collect subscribers.

Push that data, push your subscribers to Onmisend later on. Yeah, so it's on you to, enable, but again, it's very easy to enable just with a click of a dongle, basically you can start using and yeah, from there you can start optimizing and, customizing, based on your needs, based on your business needs or your customers specifics, et cetera, but you will never end in any black.

Unless you are willing to, because you are professional.

[00:45:20] Nathan Wrigley: So you've set up typical automations, which would serve as a good baseline, but obviously you have to. Think for yourself about the frequency it gets sent out, the days that it gets sent out. if it's a high ticket item like a car, it's probably not a good idea to, be banging that every day of the week.

But if it's, if it's something a bit more flippant, you're selling something for a few dollars, maybe there's just a different way of communicating that. And then you can surround it with upsells, things that might be similar inside the same category. What do you, how do people? What's your intuition as to how people react to those automations?

Because on the one hand, if you implement it badly, you get that, no, that's weird. which no, everybody talks about that, don't they? My Alexa is lis sorry, I just said that word. Sorry, my device is listening to me. I was talking about going on holiday to Bulgaria, and suddenly I'm getting messages from this, that, and the other place about Bulgarian holidays.

That's weird. How do you address that kind of stuff? Sorry, I'm going off topic again, but how do you address that kind of.

[00:46:28] Rytis Lauris: No, those are really great topics and I think I really love this, conversation because you ask questions as you said at the very beginning, you're not a professional and you ask questions as, many people ask me those questions and those are really, good questions and we need to address those.

And Thank you. So there are two things. first, it's very important to really have this opt in approach. Yeah. So people have to subscribe to your communication and express their will to communicate with your brand. That's period. Yeah. So this is very important. If you don't have the permission to communicate, it is spam.

This is not legal. This is not according to, it's not legal in Europe. In many cases worldwide, it's still legal, but it's against any. best practice or at least good practice. so that's for sure. That's, the first thing. second thing people, because this is a fair exchange, basically what you offer for the consumer.

So you say, okay, if you opt in, we will track you a bit. But in exchange, we'll get way more relevant marketing messages and vast majority of population, like by far vast majority of population is willing to make this exchange. So you can, pay for some premium video streaming platforms. in order to not to be shown with ads.

[00:47:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:47:56] Rytis Lauris: So that's similar exchange. Yeah. Either you pay money. In this case, you just, you, subscribe to the communication and you give this permission to track your behavior online. but then you know that you will get. more relevant, brand communications with brands. So advertising in general is, in the inevitable in our society while we have money, we will, who will have advertising because we need to spend that money somehow and to make a lot of multiple decisions where to spend money.

So unless, we get back to some kind of exchange society and get rid of money. Advertising it will be with us. So that's basically a fair exchange. Yeah, so you lose a little bit of your privacy, but You get less of intrusive.

[00:48:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting because I think you could boil this whole bit of the conversation down to one word, and that word is trust. If you, trust the brand, and they haven't messed you around in the future, then yeah, okay, that email's arrived, I might open it, I might not. But I'm not gonna bin it, and I'm not gonna spam it, because they seem to be...

trustworthy, given that if we rewind to, let's say that I've just signed up for Onmisend for the very first time, would there be some advice around how quickly to start doing the automations? In other words, is there a benefit in ramp it up slowly? Don't go straight in with the 300 emails a year campaign, start with something a little bit more pulled back, less frequent, less automations and build up a pattern of what is working and, if that's the case, do you have tools to help you understand what's working?

[00:49:43] Rytis Lauris: there are two, two kinds of, there are automation, so there is no rule because automations are trigger based. So basically, basically if someone is actively now engaging with your website and looking for something, so that's okay to have this campaign, straight away. But if once you, you get the trigger that, okay, Nathan has purchased the phone from you, stop.

[00:50:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that trigger's so good. I want that trigger every time.

[00:50:12] Rytis Lauris: Even else, that you already have purchased something and you still see those new marketing ads everywhere.

[00:50:23] Nathan Wrigley: the big platforms get that wrong, right? All the time. Bought the thing, still see the thing being advertised at.

[00:50:30] Rytis Lauris: See the thing. So that's very important. And of course, yeah, but that's, a very good example. And like your reaction to that is really like proving that this is a very good trigger.

Yeah. So that just, what, what makes it like absolutely relevant and simplifies everything. So basically, to your point. So there is no, I would not advise like to be like too conservative, et cetera. So talking about automation says, let's say welcome automation is one of really well received. So if someone just subscribes to your communication, to your newsletters, send a first message just right away. Of course, no need to wait for.

[00:51:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:51:09] Rytis Lauris: Do it now. two minutes delay is okay here. You shouldn't be, not be delaying for 24 hours, et cetera. yeah. And there's other categories. Those are like bulk email campaigns, which are still very effective and that's being sent when you basically as a marketer or a store owner or business owner, you think, okay, maybe I don't have any triggers because I Nathan is not looking for anything in particular now, I have no triggers, I have no information, so I will advertise whatever I want to advertise at that moment.

so.

[00:51:43] Nathan Wrigley: That's not a trigger.

[00:51:45] Rytis Lauris: There is no trigger.

[00:51:46] Nathan Wrigley: Of a trigger is a trigger, that's.

[00:51:48] Rytis Lauris: Exactly, so in those cases, yeah, you should not like over communicate and I would agree. So like once per week, maybe let's start with that. And, I think you already mentioned the example, yeah. If you're selling like some, some cars or, uh,

[00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: We always use the word, if you can't think of a thing in the WordPress space, we say a widget

[00:52:13] Rytis Lauris: Yeah.

[00:52:14] Nathan Wrigley: Selling a widget can be really cheap.

[00:52:17] Rytis Lauris: Yeah, if a widget, if widget like this is cheap and this is the most spontaneous purchase could happen. Okay. You can send more often. You can communicate more often. If you are like high price, long lasting goods. So definitely like you have to be more conscious about, about maybe then you can do campaigns better.

okay, there are new arrivals and then you advertise something, the new model of a car. Let's say car is a good, extreme example of it. So there's a new model of a car, run a one month campaign, which could be more intensive, like with videos, with presentations, etc. About new model, get it introduced, then pause, and then, remind just every two months about that still model exists.

Maybe there are some Black Friday offers or whatever, occasional offers, etc.

[00:53:06] Nathan Wrigley: Does your platform help? Somebody like me, I wouldn't have very good intuitions because I haven't done this for a long time. I wouldn't really have great intuitions about how often to do this. And so I would be, I'd be just thinking, what would Nathan, me, like to receive? And, but I feel that maybe I'm a little bit.

maybe I'm, I don't want to receive email as much as some other people. Maybe I'm an edge case. maybe I'm the sort of person that is happy to read more than other people. I don't know. So in other words, I'd be basing it all on what I think, which is never a good way to run a business because most people don't think the way you think or I think.

so do you have materials? Do you have like courses, learning materials, knowledge based things, which can. shepherd you and take you by the hand and pull you through all of these things that you've got to set up to help people.

[00:53:57] Rytis Lauris: Yeah, so that's one of the areas we are really investing a lot and working a lot. So on our website, Onmisend. com, there is a resources. So we have blog, we have a lot of education video that we call Onmisend Academy. we have a lot of. Blog articles. We have, customer success stories that really illustrates like step by step guides, how to do things, et cetera.

And it's, you should not be omniscient customer, but if you have any questions about email marketing, SMS marketing, how to augment email with other channels as well. So I really invite you to, explore and you will find a lot of. material there, academy, video content, reading content, podcast as well, to help you understand how to better

[00:54:45] Nathan Wrigley: Wait, you just said SMS. That's a bomb.

[00:54:49] Rytis Lauris: Ha.

[00:54:50] Nathan Wrigley: A whole other episode,

[00:54:52] Rytis Lauris: That is, for sure.

[00:54:53] Nathan Wrigley: You can take care of that as well. So there's the opportunity to go in on the SMS channel. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. That seems to be a really underserved thing. It's very rare actually, that an SMS drops into my phone, at least anyway, that is anything other than a friend relation, somebody that I actually gave the phone number to, but it is, but the, SMS is a bit like email, it's just been around forever and I'm, very open to looking at what's come.

To the SMS channel. I've got, an intuition, again, it could be completely wrong, that you've, that there would be a different way of handling an SMS. sequence than a, than an email sequence. I feel that's more closed and more personal and you really need to get buy in for that and opt in separately, I'm guessing.

[00:55:39] Rytis Lauris: Correct so you're right and yeah, it's definitely like another broader topic and maybe if you would find it interesting No, but that's okay. So if you would find it interesting we can make Another episode on more how to augment still email is the base but to augment email with SMS with web push notifications It's really what can be done, especially like SMS is Usually like Europe is the first to regulate things properly but just to regulate things.

But in case of text messages, SMS, United States and Canada actually regulated it better than Europe still, because it's so easy to opt out in the States and that's the reason why SMS is becoming really popular again, because there is. Just to send a promotional messages from a brand to a consumer, you have to, to verify your number.

Do you have to verify your phone number? And basically there is a unified way to unsubscribe. So whenever you don't want to receive any promotional communication, you just reply with the word stop.

[00:56:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:56:44] Rytis Lauris: So that's the reason why again, like SMS is really living its renaissance as a advertising as a marketing channel, because for custom, for consumers, when customers so easy to make this decision because they feel safe.

As we already touched that, yeah, on WhatsApp, it's, would be very difficult to opt out on SMS in the States and then Canada. It's just no brainer. You can subscribe whenever you don't will to get, no, not willing to get any more of this communication from this brand. You just send stop and it stops.

[00:57:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I feel like there's, especially if you've got people as a customer, especially around certain. Things, certain interactions in the customer life cycle. Some of them are just like made for SMS. Like we have shipped your parcel. It is, the delivery driver is two hours away. these kinds of things, they just, it's perfect.

You just want to know, okay, it's coming. I need to go home now. But, but directly advertising straight in. Obviously you're confined by what you could say. There's very limited character count. You don't get all the pictures, all of that. You've got to be much more clever about it. Honestly, this is such a fascinating subject.

I reckon we could go on for days, but, we're approaching an hour. So we're probably going to have to knock it on the head. So much to say, let's, just hope that somebody listening to this, you've wet their appetite. You've just made them think, okay, I need to get back into email marketing. And, where do they go?

what give us all the different bits and pieces. Where can we find Onmisend? What's the best way to get in touch with the company? The best way to get in touch with you. yeah. ha

[00:58:27] Rytis Lauris: so if you would like to explore, so definitely Onmisend. com. So you can find tutorials. So you can just Google Onmisend, WordPress, Onmisend WooCommerce, and you will find like dedicated landing pages. How we do we help, In particular, WordPress and WooCommerce store owners or developers or agencies to, to, finOnmisendnd and to explore it, or you can, download our plugin from wordpress.

org, just to connect there and, yeah, and there's one group, which again, as we already touched, we are relatively new in, in, although we're not new in, in business in general for almost 10 years, but we are relatively new in the WordPress ecosystem. What we are looking for and. customers, of course, but we're looking for partners as well.

So agencies, developers would develop online stores. So do marketing could develop, et cetera. So we have a partnership program. So if you would like Google for omniscient, partnerships, so there is a really, I would say compelling partnership program where we help you to understand what email is, how to do email marketing, how to present it to your customers if you are a developer, et cetera.

So that's, again, that's what I invite everyone to, Who is a developer, who is a marketer, to, join our partner community as well. And myself, I prefer using ClinkedIn as a social network and email, of course. So it is Onmisend. com.

[01:00:09] Nathan Wrigley: you just, that's that's a touchy subject, isn't it? It's a weird one, that one.

[01:00:15] Rytis Lauris: but that's, okay, and then people don't, overuse it. It's pretty safe to do that, so people, they have to, have something to say. Of course, we're advertising again, but I filter them out and I, have filters if it's a mass communication or really a personal.

[01:00:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[01:00:35] Rytis Lauris: So we already touched that, Inbox helped me to, organize it and to, separate who's who.

[01:00:42] Nathan Wrigley: In the way we described, honestly, such a fascinating subject. Let's hope that, you get a whole load of people knocking on your door, trying to restart their email journey, or just migrate from some other piece of software, which isn't working out for them. So Onmisend. com, go check it out. Rytis, thank you so much for chatting to me on the podcast today.

Really enjoyed that.

[01:01:04] Rytis Lauris: Thank you, Nathan. That was a really, great conversation. Thanks for all those challenging questions. Love those.

[01:01:11] Nathan Wrigley: Challenging questions born out of ignorance, as always. Thanks so much. Take it easy.

[01:01:16] Rytis Lauris: Bye.

[01:01:16] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. An absolute pleasure chatting to Rytis all about Omnisend and how it works. If you have any commentary on that, if you want to give us some of your insights, head over to WP Builds.com, look for episode number 352 and leave us a comment there. I am encouraging people to leave us a comment over on our website because after all WordPress has a fabulous commenting system, and it kind of makes sense to use it would really appreciate that.

The WPuildl's podcast is brought to you today by Omnisend. Omnisend the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. Omnisend merchants enjoy an average return on investment of $72 for every dollar spent, which is double the industry average. Find out more at www.omnisend.com, and give your brand the boost it deserves.

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As I said at the top of the show, we're doing more and more things which are live. You can always find them at wpbuilds.com forward slash live, at the time that they are due. But if you want to know when they are due, and you want to keep abreast of the things that we're doing, head to wpbuilds.com/schedule, and you will find a nice, easy to use calendar with links so that you can add them to your own calendar.

Okay, that's all I've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. As I said, leave us a comment. We hope that we'll see you at some point during the week. If not see you next week, have a safe time. Cheesy music fading in. Bye-bye for now.