Uncovering the Gold Mine in Your Agency’s Email List with Reade Milner | Ep #759

Uncovering the Gold Mine in Your Agency’s Email List with Reade Milner | Ep #759 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Smart Agency Masterclass, a decade of interviewing the smartest agency owners all over the world to show you how to start, scale, and possibly sell your agency one day. Speaker 3: I have a question for you. Are you tired of being stuck in the daily grind but you're scared to let go and really drive real growth because you don't know how? Now, it's time to break out of that rut and I want you to level up. Speaker 1: I want you to join me and a select group of like-minded incredible agency owners for Elevate. Speaker 3: Now, this just isn't another networking event. Speaker 1: It's your chance to really transform into the leader and the agency CEO you've always wanted to be. Elevate is a place where you're going to make meaningful connections with other top-tier agency leaders who are openly sharing their game-changing strategies to really help gain clarity and boost your confidence while fostering relationships that will last beyond the event. Head over to elevatemyagency.com and grab your spot so you can level up. Speaker 3: Go to elevatemyagency.com now. Hey Reade, welcome to the show. Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me, Jason. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. Tell us who you are, what you do. Speaker 2: Yeah. So my name is Reade Milner and along with my wife, Nikki, we own Rogue Pine. We're a digital marketing agency, really heavily focused on the middle of the funnel and email marketing, but we also do video and social. And we are based out here in Northeast Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta. I've been doing this for 10 years now. Speaker 3: Awesome. That's great. I mean, we've been doing the podcast for 10 years, which, you know, those 10 years just fly by really quick. So how did you get started creating your agency? Speaker 2: This is a funny story. So I got started, you know, I'll talk about how I got started in digital marketing and that kind of lily pads over to the agency. So I was actually working with a family business. I was in high school. I want to say it was like 2007 and my uncle and my cousin, my cousin was about to start running the business and they brought me into their office and they said, Hey, look, we understand that we need to be getting customers from the internet now. And you're the youngest person we know. So you need to figure that out for us. And so I said, all right. And I don't even know if they were, you know, I don't know how serious they were. Right. But it was one of those things where it kind of sent me down a path. And I was like, look, I'm, if I'm going to figure out some way to And if I can provide value and build a niche for myself as a career path, then this seems like a smart thing to really figure out. So I actually started a business in college. It was a total failure, but it continued or it helped me to continue down that path of like, hey, there's this thing here. And I had a little bit of an aptitude for marketing and content. And so I did join up with a marketing agency, a larger agency out of college. I went to Emory University here in Atlanta, got on with a nice good size agency. We did a lot. Now, they're called Marsden Marketing. They actually were sold a couple of months ago, I think, and Marsden, who was a huge influence on me back then. So, I think they just sold the agents. Speaker 3: Never heard of them. Solar Velocity was in, you know, we sold in 2011 in Atlanta. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: And so, I knew all those agencies then, but maybe they started after that. Speaker 2: Could have been, yeah. So, this was around the time where the HubSpot inbound marketing, you know, the partner agency thing was huge. And so, I mean, I kind of went to the school of HubSpot in a lot of ways. That was like, you know, I'd graduated from college, which taught me nothing about digital marketing in a formal sense, but going through a lot of those HubSpot certifications, believe it or not, were how I developed a lot of the initial, like, we'll call it like the terminology, right, the academic knowledge of digital marketing, of inbound marketing, as it was called at the time. And yeah, then I did that for long enough and, you know, I started to pick up some, It's just side project work with some small businesses here and there. Another family business reached out to me and actually started working with them for free, as a matter of fact. They asked me to do some stuff and I helped them to build out their Facebook fan page at the time and it worked so well that they were like, hey, if we gave you some money, could you do even more of this? And so that was actually how my agency began. Speaker 3: Very nice. Well, let's talk about kind of the goldmine a lot of agencies and businesses are sitting on. You know, obviously you work with financial advisors and lawyers. And, you know, they're very similar business. And you were kind of telling me there's a there's a goldmine. A lot of these businesses are sitting on. Tell us a little bit more about it. Speaker 2: So I am breaching this up and down to anybody who will listen, I think, especially if you are in, you know, an industry that perhaps is a little bit slower to adopt. Especially in modern marketing, you are probably sitting on a gold mine of hundreds, maybe even thousands of email contacts. Old clients, old connections, people that you have just exchanged communication with over the years as you've been building the business. And if the business has been around for a long time, I'm willing to bet there's quite a lot of them that you've just got maybe in a CRM, maybe in a spreadsheet, maybe just laying around. And so one of the things we're really hammering is that you need to collect those and you need to get all of those contacts, every single client, every single customer onto an actual email list. And you need to start putting out content to those folks so that they, number one, know that, hey, you still exist or that you exist and you're growing and you're thriving. That you deeply understand the problems that has got them up at night, you know, worried and stressed and that you've got a way to solve those things. We never run out, like there's, you can never communicate that too much that, hey, I understand what you guys are dealing with and we're here to help, right, at a base level. You notice I'm not talking about anything really complicated. I haven't mentioned AI or any kind of tools, but you just need to have a solid communication system in place for all those people that kind of know who you are so that they really know who you are and they know how you can help them. Speaker 3: And when I chat with agencies, I always ask them how often do they talk to their clients, their old prospects? Do they send out anything to their list? And they're like, well, we have this huge list. We don't want them to unsubscribe. And I just started laughing. I'm like, well, yeah, they can unsubscribe if you don't send them anything. And they're not going to remember you because I can't tell you how many companies they've done work for me. And then I just forget their name. Speaker 2: And it's nothing personal, right? You've got a full plate of things to do and it's not because that firm that you once worked with and you were really pleased with the interaction. It's not that you don't like them, but they're just not the first thing that comes to mind the next time you might need their help, right? It's our job, I'm speaking as a business owner now, it's our job to promote ourselves. Look, and I was very, very fortunate to have had some Great influences in my life and career. One of the things that I remember learning super early in my career is kind of twofold, right? Number one is if you don't ask, the answer is always no. And then the other one is every no just puts you one step closer to a yes. So, if somebody unsubscribes, that's fine. I'm okay with that. I'd rather them not be on my list because if they have no interest in hearing from me or talking to me, what good does it do me to have them on my list at all? But I want to make sure that I'm there. And a very professional and service minded way to say, Hey, look, here's a little bit of info that you may find helpful. And by the way, it's in the content, but I'm not, I'm not screaming it. Here's how we can help very specifically. And we do that for our clients and it has helped them to grow significantly. And it's one of those things that they come back to us. And it's why we've had clients for years and years, because they say, Hey, We did that last newsletter. We've been doing this email, this monthly or biweekly email for a long time and somebody reached out to us and they said, yeah, I've been reading your stuff and it hasn't been the right time, whatever the reason. It wasn't our budgeting season or it wasn't a concern of mine, but now because of some new tax law or whatever that I've been hearing about, now it is. And so you guys were my first consideration. I didn't even think of anybody else because you've proven to me time and again that you understand what I'm dealing with and you're the expert. Those are a couple of things that I'm just, I just can't preach loudly enough. Speaker 3: How much is too much? I'm not going to talk about volume yet, but how much is too much in an email to their list? Like, for example, some people put in newsletters together and it's like just piled of stuff. Like if someone really went through all of it, they'd be like, holy shit. I've always been the mentality and I've always marketed the way I wanted to be marketed to. I want to attract people kind of like me, low attention, you know, creative, kind of goofy, right? So like my weekly newsletter is really kind of like, hey, here's a really cool video for this. Like when this goes live, I'm going to say like, Hey, here's the goldmine that you're sitting on that you might not be using right now. Check this episode out. How much is too much? Speaker 2: So I'm going to steal this. This comes from, I think Sean Puri said this, if anybody listens and watches or listens to the My First Million podcast with Sean Puri and Sam Parr. Sean Puri says, there's no such thing as too long, just too boring. I love that quote because I have seen and I subscribe to newsletters that If you really went through it, the entire thing would take you an hour to go through. It's that deep and it's that much content. Now, I'm like you, man. I don't have that kind of attention span, right? But I don't mind skimming through that because there's so many nuggets that are in a lot of those. Now, if it's totally useless, it can be one paragraph and that's too much. That's of no interest to me. Again, I have seen them all over the place. We kind of have a sweet spot that we feel like is a good place to start. We recommend three sections in a newsletter if you are either just getting started or if you're really trying to establish that consistency. I like to have an original content section, a curated section, and then I'll just call this kind of a highlight section, whether that's highlighting A case study, whether that's highlighting a client situation that you helped solve or it's highlighting a product or service. We do a lot of work in the SaaS space and software space. So sometimes we'll use that section to highlight a feature of our client's platform. And that we feel like is not so much where it's overwhelming, especially if you haven't been communicating regularly. But it's enough to feel like it's a nice meaty piece of content that I can spend a few minutes looking through and it becomes memorable for me. Speaker 3: Is the story or the highlight, is that the third or I'm just trying to... Speaker 2: Yeah, I like to keep that as a third section because again, we're trying to lead with value, right? The first thing we're leading with is, hey, this is an original piece of content. It's educational. Thought provoking or it's otherwise, you know, informative in some way. Speaker 3: And then what would be the second, the curated part? Speaker 2: The second will be the curated. So when I say, when I talk about curated content, I might pull in our newsletter, we do this. I like to pull my favorite social posts that I came across, you know, in that, that last week, I like to include an article that I found really helpful that I think would be useful or interesting to my, to my newsletter subscribers. And then a video. Now, those are just three different sources that I regularly will pull content from. You don't have to do it that way, but I like that. It's just a simple, memorable thing for me. And then, yeah, the third section of the newsletter would be that like product or case study kind of highlight feature. Speaker 3: What are the subject lines? Do you keep that consistent or do you lead with kind of that first piece to get someone's attention? Like, or do you say like, you know, our newsletter is called Agency Insights. So for a couple of months ago, if you looked like we would say Agency Insights, volume five or 56, whatever, and then have a bunch of stuff. And then I'm like, whenever I see that, like my mind goes boring. And then I'm like, You know, just put in like, do you want to know the goldmine you're missing out on? Speaker 2: You know, this is a hotly debated subject, no pun intended, right? And look, I think there's a really strong case to be made for building a brand within your subscribers inbox. Just know that that's like a, that's a big It's a challenge to take on, right? If you're trying to, you know, I want people to see every one of my subject lines and I want them to see the same phrase, you know, agency insider, and I want them to be excited to open it. Well, I hope you are able to do that, right? I hope you're able to, and that's great, right? If somebody could do that, I am, you know, fist bumping and I'm giving you high fives, I'm clapping for you. I just think that's really challenging to do. I would rather I test a whole bunch of stuff. Most email marketing platforms have that automatic A-B testing feature or just go from post to post or email to email, test different styles, test a sentence case, right? And I've got no beef with clickbait, right? This one tip will increase your sales by X percent, whatever. That might be a little bit too baby, but you get my point, right? I also like to go with the titles, right? They're really interesting titles. There's the old tried and true method of number habits of highly blank professional, you know, insert professional title there, right? That one works like a charm every time. Is it going to be your 50 plus percent open rate subject line? Maybe not, but I promise you it's going to do better than the industry benchmarks for your industry. It almost always does. We're trying to overuse it, but it almost always works. Speaker 1: One of the most stressful things about running an agency is proposal. It feels like controlled chaos, right? You rush to get them out the door with complete accuracy, just hoping you don't miss something crucial. One wrong move could lead to costly mistakes or possibly not landing the deal at all. That's why I'm excited about Smart Pricing Table. It's an award-winning proposal software built just for marketing agencies. Now, it's designed to handle your unique challenges and cut down the time you spend on proposal as much as 90%. With Smart Pricing Table, you're going to turn your crazy process into a smooth, predictable system that works for you, not against you. Oh, and by the way, the creator is a former agency owner and a past Mastermind member, so you know Smart Pricing Table is built with the right strategies behind it. Say goodbye to the proposal stress and hello to confidence. Go to SmartPricingTable.com slash Smart Agency to see if this is the missing piece your agency is looking for. Plus, just for the listeners, schedule a demo and get half off for the first two months. Check out SmartPricingTable.com slash Smart Agency. Speaker 3: What's the goal for open rates and click-through rates? Speaker 2: So internally, we have kind of a rule of thumb. We say 40% is the new 20%. For the longest time, 20% open rate on an email was kind of seen as the gold standard. If you could do more than 20%, And I think for a lot of reasons, that number has been sort of inflated upwards just because there are so many email platforms, email clients that are auto opening emails as a method of security. And this is, I'm getting outside of my depth and talking about the technical piece there, but that seems to have occurred over the last few years. That probably bumps you by as much as five or 10% right there. So we almost just take that off the top in terms of the percentage we're looking at. We aim for 40 plus percent for all of our clients because we feel like that's just the job that they're paying us for. As far as click through rate, and by the way, most of ours are getting well above 45 to 55 percent open rates because we really are focused on making sure that we're putting out really high quality content. We're also helping to kind of prune those lists. I mentioned I don't want people on my list that have no interest in what I have to say, so we are offering plenty of opportunities for them to say, hey, this isn't for me, and that's okay. In fact, when we rebranded our agency newsletter about a year ago, We culled that list down by a few thousand subscribers by just putting out an email that said, hey, look, this is the kind of stuff that we're going to be talking about and, you know, pretty regularly in the future. If this is not for you, here's a big old unsubscribe button right here. Go ahead and take advantage of that. And that was totally fine with us. We've had much better and truer engagement numbers since we did that. But to your point or to your question about open rates, I would say the same thing applies. You're probably looking at doubling what your expectations should be. With the big caveat here that if you are optimizing for click-through in the first place. So it's also important to note sometimes our emails, we've tested with this and we have liked the outcomes we've seen from this. We'll put the entire content, all the content for the long form kind of article style section in the email. So we're not necessarily concerned about click through rates there. And frankly, the curated content, that's going to other places on the internet. So that's also not a huge concern for me. It does indicate And we're trying to get their level of interest and engagement with the content. So that's a, it's a signal to us that we're doing something right, but we're not really optimizing for clicks at that stage. Speaker 3: If someone was trying to get, use us as an example, right? So I already kind of told you what we do now is we give a brief overview. Hey, here's the, the goldmine that you may be missing out. Here's a really good episode that we did. You know, it's 20 minutes long. What would be your expectation on a click-through rate for a healthy list versus a list and like are there numbers that would say, hey man, like we probably need to clean up this list if the numbers were under? Speaker 2: So, to be honest, if I'm thinking about the health of a list, I'm looking at open rates there, right? If we've got a super low open rates, then that's a concern for me. We had a client that came to us and they had 15,000 or so contacts and they were getting like one or 2% open rates. And we, yeah, we throw up a major like, you know, red flag, like stop everything. We got to figure out what's going on here. And in their situation, it actually turned out that their product was targeted towards students, right? So think .edu email addresses. Well, that type of list is going to churn at a much higher rate than a regular email list because every year about a quarter of college students are graduating and they're not using that. So it just turned out that those emails, but here's, you may remember this or You may have read this. It isn't like those email addresses. I think I still have access to my EU email address. Speaker 3: I still have Hotmail. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, they still get, yeah. It's not like those things get deleted, right? So they technically exist. But no one's checking that. So anyway, so that's one issue that we're really looking at to try to fix that. If we're getting good open rates and low click-through rates, there's not really a point at which I'm super concerned about the health of the list. We are just going to want to, one, figure out what we're optimizing for, right? If we were trying to drive traffic to say like, you know, the Apple podcast download page, then we're going to tweak the language. We're going to tweak how we actually are using those copywriting principles to get people to read the content that's in the newsletter and specifically get them to click the link. So we'll focus on those things. But again, if the open rate's good, I'm not really concerned with the health of the list, but I do want to spend a lot of testing time on, you know, buttons and, you know, length of the email and all that kind of stuff so that we're getting the type of click through rates that we want. Speaker 3: That's really interesting because I always thought the opposite. Like I always thought click through rate was more important rather than open rate. But you think, why do you do a newsletter to stay in front of someone dummy? And if they're at least reading it, You're doing that job. And then the plus is if they click. So the click-through rate is always going to be probably significantly lower, I would presume, right? Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. I mean, you're going to see sub-10% click-through rates and that's okay, right? I mean, because there's so many fewer people that are, especially if the call to action is to something like a You know, book a call page or something like that, right? And specifically in the case of a lot of our clients that, again, are in legal and financial services, there are so many reasons why a potential client of a law firm loves everything that their lawyer's newsletter is saying, but they just simply have no need right now. Now, that need And I think that could have immediately pop up because of some life-changing event or some new bit of information. I mean, in, you know, there's a, there's a spike every year around like, you know, tax prep season and income tax season. Right. And then in the financial advisory world, wealth management world, whenever there's a huge, you know, bit of news or correction in the market or spike in the market, they'll get a big spike. But you can't predict really either one of those things except for the tax prep season, right? But like if there's a death in the family and all of a sudden, you know, Joe Smith is set to inherit a couple million bucks from his baby boomer parents. Well, like there's an immediate need for an estate attorney right then, right? Can't plan for that. So what you can do if you're in that situation is just make sure that you're there. It's like being a good friend, right? It's like, hey, I'm not just going to show up. When I think you can do something for me, right, when you can pay, you know, you can pay me for something, it's, hey, look, I'm always here. I'm here to help. You know how to find me. And just that consistent, those consistent touch points, it just makes a huge difference when that time is right. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 3: I mean, that's a good way to. To think about it that I haven't been thinking about. I don't think many people think about it that way. There's they want that immediate gratification. Well, this newsletter, I expect some clients. Speaker 2: Well, I mean, we were talking about this before the camera started rolling that, like, I get that email marketing is not the sexiest marketing channel out there, right? And I even sometimes feel like I'm having to, like, I feel a little bit like a boomer marketer, right? Because I'm talking about something that was super popular 20 years ago. It is really hard to ignore the data there, right? And we talk about this a ton, right? The sales after exposure, meaning when somebody purchases, they purchase 40 times more often after they've received an email from a brand than if they just saw that brand on social media. And a number of others. The other thing we talk about is the ever-changing algorithms on social media. Now, we love social media. We're using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. We're using them all and we're using them to drive traffic for our clients, for ourselves as well. But I've seen it happen. You've seen it happen, Jason, where Facebook or X or LinkedIn will decide to make a change to their algorithm. By the way, Google is doing this too with their search. And then overnight, the traffic that you're getting from that platform can fall through the floor. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, you're on rented land that they can kick you off at any time with an email list. I mean, and the assets that you own, like even putting videos on YouTube. You don't own that platform. They could kick you off. Now, with the podcast, I own and I pay for putting on iTunes and iHeart. Now, they could kick me off, but I'm on other platforms. But on the email list, I own. And to kind of hit your point home, most people that join our community, our masterminds, they've been listening to the show for years. Speaker 2: That's right. Speaker 3: They've been lurking in the distance. Speaker 2: I can't tell you how many times we hear that from clients of ours. We hear it from our clients' clients, right? We're hearing it from our clients. They'll say, Yeah, this guy Jason, he reached out the other day and he's actually selling his business and he needs an M&A attorney. Turns out he's been an email subscriber for four years, five years, and just, we thought it, we didn't even know, it was a Gmail account, right? Speaker 1: Like we didn't even know what it was. Speaker 2: And all of a sudden they filled out a scheduled call form and they're trying to figure out how they can sell their $8 million business, right? Those types of things, we hear them all the time and we love those. And I'll say this, this is another point or another argument for email marketing and to the point of it not being super sexy. Look, we get how fun it is to have a post or a video or something go viral, right? We had one the other day. I put out a video on LinkedIn. It got like almost a million views and my wife was making fun of me because I kept checking it, you know, because it's impossible not to, right? You kind of get sucked into that. But you know what? We've gotten a heck of a lot more business from emails that we've sent out and we've got a 42% open rate on it and three people filled out a form and one of those people happened to be a six-figure relationship for us over a couple of years, right? And it's not something super exciting. We didn't send the email out. And then swans and doves, you know, flew out of the sky and a light shined on us. It wasn't as exciting as going viral, but it makes freaking money, man. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, steady Eddie wins the race and just got to be a patient and just keep doing it and just stay in front of your clients. So, well, Reade, thanks so much for coming on the show and for all of you guys listening, if you guys want to be a part of our community, make sure you go to agencymastery.io. Check it out and we can have a conversation and put you in contact with some of the best agency owners out there and learn their strategies and then share back and forth and create the best relationships because you can always go farther with a group of like-minded people rather than, I mean, you can do it faster, but I like to do it farther and faster at the same time. So until next time, have a swanky day.