Keys in this episode

While you're talking into that headset, or that computer, or that microphone, remember there’s a real person on the other end of that

When creating and delivering your webinar think more like a teacher than like a marketer and break your content into steps

Keep your sales pitch short and simple

You do what you do well and hire out the rest

Doug Morneau: Well, welcome back to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we have the privilege and the honour of having Tim Paige as a guest today. So looking at Tim's background and the many things he's accomplished, he's known as the smartest person in the world or a webinar superhero so we’ll be putting him to the test and I'm sure he’ll be happy to share some nuggets on that. He's hosted over 1,000 webinars grossing nearly $10 million in revenue directly from those webinars for the companies that work with him.

He’s also a professional voice actor with clients such as NBC, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Weather Channel and Comcast and more. He’s a husband to one, a father to two and beloved by he says at least three. I'm sure those clients that he made the $10 million for love him as well. His presentations are often littered with comic book references and he bleeds a Syracuse [inaudible 00:00:55]. So we know a little bit more about Tim. So hey, welcome to the podcast today.

Tim Paige: Yeah, thanks for having me. That bio is a result of somebody writing a bio that doesn't like writing by bios. Those things I'm always like, “Okay, I have to talk about myself. I have to make myself sound interesting. I don’t know.” By the way, one thing just so people don't think I’m like some arrogant douche, you mentioned, in the beginning, I think I had written that I'm considered a webinar superhero by the smartest people in the world not that I think I am the smartest person in the world.

Doug Morneau: Well, fair enough. I’m looking at your bio before we connected and then I went to your webinar stats and I looked and I thought, “Man, you really downplay the stuff that you've done. Two in the $10 million but in terms of engagement and number of webinars you’ve done, that's really phenomenal in an age where people trying to get into that space and make it happen.”

Tim Paige: Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. It's been really fun. I have had the opportunity to do some really cool things, work with some great companies and have some just incredible mentors along the way who have just taught me so much and helped me avoid a huge part of the learning curve. I'm a huge believer in mentors and coaches and piggybacking on the wisdom of others to help you avoid a lot of the stuff that you otherwise would have to fall into.

Doug Morneau: So then I’m assuming you have a coach as well?

Tim Paige: Yeah. I've got several coaches in all different areas of my life and business.

Doug Morneau: I thought I’d ask before I went with my next comment, which is often when people say, “Hey, I’d like to coach you.” I’d say, “Well, who’s your coach?” “Well, I don’t have one.” It’s like, “Oh thanks for phoning. Goodbye!”

Tim Paige: Yeah, I think that all coaches should have coaches. If you believe that coaching is necessary then hopefully you believe it's an ongoing necessity. I believe that. I don't think you're ever at the point where “Well I'm done. I don’t need to improve anymore.” Like, “Come on.”

I think that all coaches should have coaches. If you believe that coaching is necessary then hopefully you believe it's an ongoing necessity. I believe that. I don't think you're ever at the point where 'Well I'm done. I don’t need to improve anymore.'

Doug Morneau: We won’t spend too much time camping here but it's interesting drawing a parallel between sports and business.

Keys in this episode

It's never too late or too early to start an email program

Email can create sales fast (or slow)!

The power to building community

Click to tweet: The Godfather of Email Marketing See http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/15/

Doug: Welcome back to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today I've got joining me Bill McCloskey who has affectionately been called the Godfather of Email. He was the technical advisor in a book called The Rebel's Guide to Email published by DJ Waldow. Since 2003, he has been instrumental in driving awareness of the email marketing industry. In 2003, he founded and launched a company called eDataSource. It was the first email intelligence company and he was the first person to write exclusively on email marketing when he pitched Mediapost on the idea on the data that he was collecting from eDataSource. He began the Email Insider column, the first Mediapost Insider series, and went on to develop and host the Insider Summit with Mediapost, and is the Chairman of Emeritus of the conference.

He is currently the co-founder and chairman of Email Innovations Summit, which he'll share a little bit more with us later. In 2003, he began a highly influential Insiders discussion, which drove much of the thought leadership in email marketing, including early discussions, which led the formation of the Email Experience Council. Bill has twice been a finalist for the EEC Stefan Pollard Memorial Marketer of the Year Award and has been named one of the 50 Marketing Leaders Over 50 You Should Know by CMO magazine.

In 2010, Bill left eDataSource to launch Only Influencers, the leading most influential community for email marketing professionals in the world. OI is known in the industry and brings together the world's top thought leaders, movers, shakers, and hosts discussions, meetups, and blogs by leading email marketing experts. In addition, Only Influencers is a vast resource for people that are just entering the email industry and is dedicated to the growth of the individual email marketer, promotions of the companies that drive the industry, and growth of the email marketing industry as a whole. With that large introduction of this super smart guy on email, welcome to the podcast.

Bill McCloskey: Well, thank you very much. Great to be here, Doug. Thanks for having me.

Doug: Well, we followed like I mentioned before we got on recording some of your successes before, and have worked with, and purchased your products in companies. Is there anything that you want to add to the introduction? Anything I might've missed?

Bill McCloskey: No. Well, the only thing that you missed is before I got into email, I was considered the rich media guy. I was one of the early pioneers in the rich media field when I was the ... I have a strange title of being the VRML Evangelist for Silicon Graphics. Part of my job as being the VRML Evangelist, I was a big promoter of using these cool new technologies for advertising back in '97 and '98, and we coined the term rich media. Silicon Graphics, Macromedia, Unicast, and a few others coined that term to sort of describe these new technologies, and so my first marketing teeth were really cut in the rich media space. Then when I had an opportunity to move into the email space and launching eDataSource, my attention moved from rich media into email, and I've been doing that ever since.

Doug: Well, that's super cool. Obviously, you've been the leading edge innovator from the beginning in your career. I had experience with the Email DataSource product with a former company I worked with, and the data and the information that you provided was absolutely amazing.

Bill McCloskey: That was an interesting product. It came to me actually when I had another company called Emerging Interest.

Keys shared in this episode

Online press releases from Newswire show up on Google News

Posting press releases is good branding

Press releases get a lot of readers in comparison to what your blog might get on its own

Learn to effectively manage your time

Click to tweet: PRESS RELEASES GENERATE TRAFFIC FROM GOOGLE & YAHOO See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/14/

Doug Morneau: Well, welcome back to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today, I've got joining me, Doug Brown. He is a press release writing and editing online distribution expert. He has been involved in public relations and Internet marketing for more than 20 years. Doug is currently the editor in chief of Newswire Network. It's a news and press release distribution website. Newswire is a Google partner site.

Doug is also the author of many books and articles, including a best selling book, "How to Write a Great Press Release: A Guide to Creating a Press Release that will be distributed, republished, and read by your target audience". They currently have over 5,000 writers that have contributed over 25,000 releases on Newswire. Newswire releases have been read over 21 million times in the last 12 months.

Welcome to the show, Doug.

Doug Brown: Hey, thank you, Doug. Always nice to talk to another Doug.

Doug Morneau: Absolutely. For our audience that's not familiar with press releases and kind of what you guys do and the opportunities that are there, did you want to fill in the blanks and share anything that I might have missed the opportunity to work with you and Newswire?

Doug Brown: I think you did a good job, in terms of what Newswire is. If you'd like, I can give you just a really quick overview of what an online press release is, because I don't think everybody really knows what that's all about nowadays.

Doug Morneau: Yeah, that'd be a good place to start.

Doug Brown: Okay, super. I've been in the business for a long time, and let me take you through a little bit of history. Maybe 20 years ago, even 15 years ago, a press release was something that a company published and took or sent to the local newspaper with the idea that they were going to provide facts, the who, what, where, and when, to a reporter that was going to write something about their company, their event. Maybe it was a promotion inside the company, whatever it happened to be. That's kind of what a press release was 20 years ago, or maybe even 15 years ago.

Well, everybody knows kind of what's happened to the newspaper industry, and it's not just here where I am. I used to take three local newspapers, and each of them was an inch thick every morning. Nowadays, one of them is out of business and the other two look like they're the little freebie things that you get at the grocery market, right? They're 20 pages each. The point is, there's just nobody home at the local newspapers anymore.

That whole idea of distributing press releases to reporters that were going to write about you, really kind of fell apart as the print newspaper industry fell apart. It was replaced, and it was replaced by something that was really effective, maybe even more effective. How it's kind of morphed through the years, is again, press releases used to be just a who, what, where and when fact sheets that you'd take to a local reporter, and over the years, they've turned into an article that is written by the company, directly to consumers. You take the job of the reporter on as your own, and now you're able to distribute your own news.

One of the things that facilitated that transition, was the advent of Google News. Google News started in 2005, and it was one of the reasons that newspapers kind of fell apart. A lot of people don't really understand the difference between Google Search and...

Four Keys from This Episode:

If your email does not render properly, 80% of your subscribers will delete it, and then 30% of those subscribers will actually unsubscribe

Accessibility of your email is a huge issue. There are 285 million people who are visually impaired and may have difficulty reading your email

Cause for Awareness helps non-profits improve their marketing

Click to tweet: Email on Acid with John Thies See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/13/

Doug Morneau: Welcome back to another episode. I am super excited to have John Thies. He is the CEO and co-founder of Email on Acid, a service provider that gives email marketers a preview of how their emails are displayed in the most popular email clients and mobile devices. His career passion is helping marketers send the perfect email. John also serves as the CEO of Cause for Awareness, a recently formed not-for-profit that empowers nonprofit organizations with digital marketing resources. When he's not either on the golf course or snowboarding in the fresh Colorado powder, he resides in Denver, Colorado with his wife and son. Welcome to the show today.

John Thies: Thank you, Doug I appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Doug Morneau: Happy to have you on. Is there anything that I missed that you would like to share?

John Thies: No, I think you did a great job with that. Thank you.

Doug Morneau: We talked a little bit before we got on-air and there's a couple topic we want to cover. Obviously, we want to talk a bit about the technology and the company that you've got, and then we'll talk about some of the not-for-profits, and the accessibility that you think is an opportunity in the marketplace. Do you want to give us a thumbnail sketch of what Email on Acid, aside from a super cool name, what the technology is and how it helps people?

John Thies: Yeah, so let me just start, like we are in Colorado, but I am not on acid right now, so just to get that cleared up out of the way. What we do is, again, we show you what your email looks like on every email client, mobile device, because they all display emails different, and so ... One statistic that I know marketers love to know is that if your email does not render properly, 80% of your subscribers will delete it, and then 30% of those subscribers will actually unsubscribe, which can have a big impact on your subscriber list and what you guys are doing, because if you've done it right and you've organically built that list, that can have a pretty significant impact. What we do is we'll show you what it looks like, but really kind of how we started was diving into why it displays that it does, and we have this technology where every month we'll send, I don't know, like 400 or 500 emails to every email client to see what it is that they support and they don't support from a code base.

Doug Morneau: That's cool.

John Thies: What we'll do is then with our code analysis, so if it doesn't look right or render properly, you can run that and we'll point out, "Hey, margins aren't supported in Outlook.com unless you use a capital M." Weirdest thing, but those are the types of things that we find that we can give you insight into so that you don't pull your hair out trying to figure out why Outlook is rendering something the way that it does.

Doug Morneau: Well, and I think that a lot of smaller businesses probably don't even know that this exists, that they're likely just sending out an email. I was doing some research for a book that we're publishing coming out in the fall around email marketing, and it talked, and one of the statistics that scared me around rendering was the high number of mobile users who get your email, and if it doesn't display right they don't unsubscribe or delete it; they mark it as spam.

John Thies: Oh, wow.

Key's from this episode

How to set up a referral network and never cold call again!

To increase sales, know your personality style and how to determine your prospect's and client's as well

Special offer: A free coaching session with Patrick

Click to Tweet: HOW TO SELL HOW YOUR CUSTOMERS BUY See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/12

Doug: Well, welcome back to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today I'm super excited to have a friend of mine to join us Patrick von Pander who is a master certified coach. He’s a husband, a son, a friend, a citizen, a great citizen in the community, a neighbor, an entrepreneur, a fitness nut if you follow him online you’ll see his many trips to the gym, a foodie, a sports enthusiast. We’re going to try to stay away from sports because I’m not sure what teams he cheers for, a movie lover and a music fan.

So Patrick is a master certified business and corporate coach and a life coach. He's been helping people for the last 15 years. He's also a professional speaker and a trainer. Most people know that it's important to have balance in life and they understand that the business balance with life is very important in individual thing. So I'm happy to welcome Patrick today who's going to walk us through a whole bunch of stuff that will help us be better entrepreneurs, business people and probably corporate citizens. So welcome today Patrick.

Patrick: Terrific. Thank you so much for inviting me on your podcast Doug. Very much appreciate it. I'm excited. I’m excited to be able to share some of what I know and have learned and helped people with your audience.

Doug: I’m happy we can catch up. I was thinking of you right away as we’re getting started thinking what great value you could bring to our listeners because I know a fair bit about your background and your program. So was there anything I missed in the introduction or anything that you’d like to add before we get started?

Patrick: We’re good to go.

Doug: Okay. So why don’t we just get start right off? Let’s get into business. So why don’t you share with us a major breakthrough or a major success that you’ve had helping your clients to grow their business?

Patrick: My background was in the corporate world. I spent a lot of time in the sales world, corporate sales especially business to business and one of the things that I found was a real breakthrough was how to be able to set up relationships that provide you with essentially a distribution channel to your market. If what you're offering is a service, rather than distributing products out, be able to create almost like that reverse distribution system where that referral network sends you not just onesies, twosies kinds of prequalified ideal referrals but that regular flow.

That's one of the things that I really focus on with business people that oftentimes they really underutilize. They underutilize the conscious approach to be able to set up that referral network that is active, is engaged and that really can take care of a lot of your inbound marketing with those prequalified prospects that could ideally benefit from what you have to offer.

Doug: That's a really cool idea. It's funny I mean to say that kind of tongue in cheek because I often will speak to business groups and say, “Would everyone agree here that it cost 10 times more to attract a new client than to keep an existing client?” Everyone says yes. Then I ask them the question, “So what percentage of your effort and budget is spent on maintaining your existing client relationships?” The answer is normally zero. So we spend all our money on new acquisition and not building a deeper relationship with someone who will stay with us for a long time and like you said will refer us, clients.

Patrick: Yeah.

Key's from this episode

The importance of having a marketing strategy!

Data analysis can provide a lot of answers

The myth that sending more emails is going to create an unsubscribe just isn't true

To succeed, push yourself out of your comfort zone

Click to Tweet: DIGITAL & EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY See: www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/11

Doug:  Well, welcome back to another episode. I am super excited to be talking to Jenna Tiffany. She is the founder and Strategy Director at a digital marketing consulting company called, Let'sTalk Strategy.

Jenna has over 10 years marketing experience in the B2B and the B2C sectors, and experience across a variety of industries on both the client side, as well as the agency side.

She is a current member of the Charter Institute of Marketing, and her expertise ranges in working with both small companies, large brands, to analyze, and develop their key journey and wider digital marketing activities. Jenna creates best-in-class digital marketing strategies and campaigns to deliver ROI both in the UK and internationally.

In addition, Jenna is BPP's freelance marketing tutor. Teaching both marketing principles and CIM certificate in marketing level four. Jenna is also a Communications Ambassador for the CIM in greater London, and the regional board, an elected member of the prestigious DMA email marketing council, and this year's judge at the DMA awards for the best-used search category.

As a proven thought leader, confident public speaker, and publisher, Jenna can be regularly seen sharing her latest trends and key industry topics. When not consulting on business on how to effectively increase their marketing, Jenna is a keen runner with her cocker spaniel Archie, and an avid gluten-free promoter as often seen on the canals of London.

So, welcome to today's show.

Jenna:   Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Doug:    Well, excited and obviously energetic. I find that fitness for me makes a big difference in how productive I am at work.

Jenna:   Yeah, definitely. Well, when you have a dog to entertain, you need to kinda do that on a regular basis. So, it makes me go out even if it's rain. Rain or shine, I am outside running.

Doug:    There you go. And we share similar weather patterns so, it's not always sunny. So, do you want to fill in the blanks? Was there anything that I missed in your introduction or bio that you'd like you to share?

Jenna:   No, I don't think so. I think maybe just I suppose the key kind of difference in my background is that I have worked for both brands and agency sites. So, I have been that marketer that's had that pressure on them to deliver against the marketing budget for an individual brand.

And then I've also been the agency side that has supported and helped provide consultancy, and training for that in-house marketing team that may be struggling with a certain area, or actually, there's a new technique that they want to learn more of.

So, I have been in that position where sometimes it can be incredibly difficult. Particularly if you've got a channel that's not performing, or you're wanting to create a business case and having to really fight tooth and nail for extra budget.

And so, I can really sympathize with the challenge that a lot of marketers face.

Doug:    Yeah, these days who isn't watching their dollars, and there are so many places you can spend your advertising and marketing dollars. So, with your background, and your vast experience on both sides of the table, is there any specific marketing technique or tactic that you want to share with our listeners that you would say you've had major success with, or a breakthrough?

Jenna:   Yeah.

4 Keys from this episode:

The best way in the speaking training industry of getting work is to do work

Give people the opportunity to sample your product before they buy it.

Stay hungry!

We can choose our thinking

Click to tweet: Landing Clients via Caring and Sharing See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/10/

Doug Morneau: Welcome back to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. I am super excited today to have a friend of mine on as a guest, Ryan Walter. I met Ryan several years ago at an Alpha Canada Golf Tournament, the fundraiser for the organization, and have gotten to know both him and his wife on a personal basis and on a business basis, and I'm going to share with you a little bit of Ryan's background so you get an idea of where he's coming from, where he is, and where he's heading to. Ryan, if you're not familiar with him played and coached 17 seasons of hockey over 1,100 games in the NHL. He was drafted second overall by the Washington Capitals in 1978.

He was named 'The Youngest NHL Captain' in his second of four seasons and went on to play nine seasons with the Montreal Canadians, winning a Stanley Cup in 1986, and then, finally returned to his home to play his last couple of years for the Vancouver Canucks. He was named 'Team Captain' in the World Junior Tournament and was selected to play the NHL All-Star Game in 1983 for team Canada, and three world championships. He became the Vice President of the National Hockey League Players Association and was honored as the 'NHL Man of the Year' in 1992. Ryan's gone on to get his master's degree in leadership and business, and he is the author of five books. He created a board game called 'Trade Deadline Hockey', and 'Electronic Transfer Deadline'.

He's a regular contributor to both online print magazines, newspapers, radio and TV. In addition, he co-founded and is the President of two startups, NHL and IIHF coach, a TV hockey broadcaster, a hockey advisor, an actor for both television and movies, and President of the Professional Hockey League. Ryan is a member of the board of directors of the Hockey Canada Foundation and sits on the Seton Hall Stillman School of Business Leadership Advisory Council, and he currently speaks and helps hundreds of companies and organizations leveraging his experience in leadership as he relates that to team performance as a former hockey player. Ryan, welcome to the show today. Is there anything that I've left out?

Ryan Walter: Thank you very much, Doug. That was painful, having to listen to it all, but happy to be with you.

Doug Morneau: I knew you being such a humble guy, you, like myself, you don't like to hear somebody going on and on, but that's just a short overview, the highlight reel if you will of what you've accomplished.

Ryan Walter: I'm very thankful, Doug. Thank you for sharing that with your listeners, and I'm always thankful for the things that we've been able to accomplish in the past, but you and I, we've had lots of time together, and I love your podcast. I love this idea of what works today and what we think works in the future, and that's really the focus that I have in these days.

Doug Morneau: Where are you working today in your role leadership and speaking to companies throughout the world? Can you share with our listeners a major breakthrough or some success you've had using a specific marketing tactic?

Ryan Walter: Yeah. For sure, and we are so thankful, Doug, we've just come off our best year ever. We've probably have connected with around 130 different sessions during the calendar year with companies. We have now both 750 clients, and I've just finished speaking to just over 800 CEOs over the last three years. I want to share how we got in front of these CEOs because I think that's been our biggest marketing breakthrough for su...

3 Keys from this episode...

Kickbox will determine whether or not an email address is deliverable and works with most major Email service providers

The biggest myth to real-time verification is it's going to slow down the process

Rich data is available to all businesses today - no matter the size - to help them make data-driven decisions

Click to tweet: How to Kickbox your Data See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/9/ 

Doug:  Super excited and stoked to be back today. I've got Jack Wrigley joining me as our guest today. Jack is from Kickbox. He is the Vice President of Business Development, Revenue, and Growth. He is focused on building value at early stage companies and new product categories. He identifies relationships and strategic partners that are key to achieving high growth of value and revenue and I think those are things that all of our listeners are interested in, so welcome to the show today.

Jack Wrigley:  Hey, thanks for having me, Doug. It's great to be here.

Doug:  So, talking a little bit before we got connected here online. You're talking about being an entrepreneur, so is there anything that I missed in your bio, in your background, that you'd like to share with our listeners today?

Jack Wrigley:  I don't think so. I think that pretty much sums it up. I currently, obviously, am in email verification of the email industry, but I've been through a lot of different start-ups and a lot of different opportunities and they're all very beneficial and meaningful in their own way. It's all good.

Doug:  In terms of email verification and what you guys do at Kickbox, do you want to share just a little bit of what that means to listeners who might not be familiar with the technology and the process that you guys use and what you do?

Jack Wrigley:  Yeah, absolutely. From an email verification perspective, our technology will determine whether or not an email address is deliverable and that's really important for marketers that are sending marketing campaigns, whether it's a newsletter or maybe it's during the heavy holiday sending period where they're trying to sell items to their customers.

Our technology will analyze an email list and verify all of those emails and tell you which ones are deliverable and specifically tell you which ones are not deliverable and ultimately, that allows you as a marketer to pull out the non-deliverable emails, and doing that will save you money, 'cause you're not sending to something that doesn't exist, but by doing that it will also improve your overall email statistics; your open rates, your click-throughs, all of that good stuff. It's really an important step of the process and it's a product that we've been offering now for about two and a half, almost three years, and a lot of people use it around the world.

Doug:  You mentioned that determines the existing list you've got, so I've got a database in whatever CRM I'm using, so I can export that, you guys can clean it and return deliverables. What about, you mentioned APIs, so I'm assuming that you've got the ability to do this in real time as well?

Jack Wrigley:  Yeah, so that's actually really part of our process. I'll just give you the quick workflow. Typically, people will come to us because they have been potentially stopped from sending by their ESP. Their ESP will direct them over to Kickbox to have us take a look at their list and verify it, at which point then that customer goes back to the ESP and is usually cleared to start sending at that point.

What we offer in that kind of scenario is not only the initial verification of a legacy email database but then we also offer our real-time API to those customers and that allows them to just take a very short snippet of code, embed it wherever they are collecting an email address...

4 Keys to the episode...

Invest in people and in technology that are going to save you time

Prioritize by asking “How is this going to make me money?”

Do what you have to do to keep growing

Start where you are and use what you've got!

Click to Tweet:PRIORITIZE BY ASKING “HOW IS THIS GOING TO MAKE ME MONEY?”  See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/8/

Doug Morneau:  Okay, I'm super excited today to be back in the studio. And with me, I've got a friend of mine joining us, Shane Sams. Now, I met Shane and Jocelyn several years ago, in the Philippines, at a very intimate business conference. Today's show, we're going to learn how two teachers went from making $76,000 a year, to earning millions of dollars online.

When Shane and his wife Jocelyn co-founded Flipped Lifestyle, they did that with the belief that society had it all wrong, when it comes to a work/life balance. And they felt that life should come before work. Since the start of their business in 2012, they found a way to spend more time enjoying their family and doing what really matters most.

In just a few short months, they were able to make thousands of extra dollars through an online business. And just a year after they began, surpass a five-figure income. They started Flipped Lifestyle Blog to help other families change their lives, using an online business. They've been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and they've been featured on all the Who's Who of business podcasts, including Smart Passive Income, with Pat Flynn; Entrepreneur On Fire, with John Lee Dumas; and the new business podcast with Chris Ducker. So, welcome to the show.

Shane Sams:  Hey, Doug. Thanks for having me here. And it's always good to talk to you and catch up.

Doug Morneau: Now, did I miss anything in the introduction?

Shane Sams:  Oh, man, there's so much. That was a good intro, though. I hope I can live up to that intro. I will add one thing to our bio. We recently just sold a business, for a seven-figure sum. So that's kind of a feather in our cap we've added recently, to go through that process of exiting a website. That's one of the most recent things we've accomplished in our business.

Doug Morneau:  That's really cool. And one of the things I've been following with you online, that's not in your business, is that great new deck you've got looking over the lake on your new property.

Shane Sams:  Right. Yeah, man. We got rained out today, but it became a monsoon. So the crew had to go home. But we're about 50%. We're building a 1,000-square-foot deck on the back of our house. And it's going to drop down. We have a 10-acre private lake behind our property. And so, we're going to put a 10 by 20 floating dock out to it, as well, so ... We've got a lot of lumber packed up behind my back door right now.

Doug Morneau: That's super cool. So, today, I was hoping you could share with us a major breakthrough or success that you guys have had, using a specific marketing tactic.

Shane Sams:  You know, I think the biggest thing that we realized, Doug when we first really got into ... We quit our jobs pretty quickly. It was about 13 months until we were able to quit our jobs, from the time we started our business. And we were kind of like, doing guerrilla warfare. We were out there digging through Twitter handles, trying to find people that we could identify as our customers. We were finding forums, finding Wikis, we were basically just like, going out there with a shovel, and digging it around. Right?

Doug Morneau: Yeah.

Shane Sams:  And the biggest breakthrough that we probably figured out is that you can use your money, instead of your time, to buy tools to find your customers for you. That can be done through ads.

Three keys from this episode:

Personalize your email to engage customers

Improve your sender reputation to improve email deliverability

Just because someone unsubscribed doesn’t mean you’ve lost them as a customer. Use retargeting and other methods to stay in touch

Click to Tweet: Keys to Email Marketing in a Snapchat World See: http://www.dougmorneau.com/podcasts/7/

Doug:  Well, welcome back. I am super excited today to be speaking with Kate Barrett. She is the founder of eFocus Marketing and the Email Marketing Academy. And she provides specialty email marketing consulting services and management as well as training to companies all around the world. She has a track record, a proven track record of 12 years experience increasing results from opens and clicks to sales. Kate's experience and passion has helped a large range of companies develop comprehensive strategies to target subscribers with the right message sent to the right person at the right time, implement, manage, and optimize those campaigns as well as solving complex email marketing issues with regards to deliverability.

Some of the companies and brands that she has worked with and trained include Nissan,  Marks and Spencer, Argos, Vision Direct, BT, TUI, Sole Trader, Neighbor and Hotel Group, Photobox, My Voucher Codes, M&M Direct, and Adidas, among many others. Having been elected a member of the DMA Email Council for the last three years, she speaks regularly at events. She blogs, and she's a contributor to Smart Insights and a trainer for the IDM. Kate is always up to date with the latest email marketing news, trends, and techniques to feed her passion for the industry.

She is an author and soon to be published book, Etelligence, Email Marketing Isn't Dead, the Way it Used to Be and should be out in bookstores in 2018. So, welcome to the show!

Kate:  Thank you so much for having me, Doug. I'm really excited to chat with you today!

Doug:    Well, it's good to catch up and it's good to talk to somebody who has a common interest and a passion for email, email marketing, and using that as a vehicle to drive sales.

Kate:  Oh, absolutely! It is an absolutely critical channel. It is the foundation in my mind of all marketing. It doesn't matter what you're doing. It's all going to drive back to your website. And if you don't have your email marketing set up properly to help you to capture that data, you're not going to have that ongoing opportunity to nurture your leads, generate those sales. So it is absolutely vital to any marketing strategy.

Doug:  Well, looking at your CV and the kind of work that you do, I mean, you cover a lot of areas, right from conception right through to deliverability. So, what do you say right now is your, probably the biggest challenge for your clients?

Kate:  Biggest challenge for clients right now, so in the UK at the moment, everyone is gearing up for the GDPR changes. So the new European legislation that's coming through, the general data protection regulation. That's definitely the biggest challenge for people right now [overseas 00:02:45]. It's pretty similar to, in Canada when [CASL 00:02:50] changed over and really tightening up those expectations around consent and expectations of what they're going to receive, when they're going to receive it, but also digging into the right of access to data, the right to be forgotten, to have your data removed, all of those kinds of areas. That's certainly the thing that is a forefront of a lot of my client's minds at the moment and making sure that they are compliant with those changes when they come in May 2018.

But generally outside of that, I think that it's the same things that we see generally, issues with deliverability, not getting your email into the inbox,