188 | Revolutionizing E-commerce: Watch-making Meets Cutting-edge Marketing with R.T. Custer of Vortic Vortic Watch Co.

Have you ever wondered how to perfect your email marketing strategy? Well, there's no one better to learn from than R.T. Custer, the man behind Vortic Watches, an expert in leveraging email marketing to its fullest potential.

In this episode, we dive deep into the nitty-gritty of e-commerce and how to master the game. R.T. shares his unique approach, tips, and secrets about the art of email marketing that has propelled Vortic Watches to unprecedented success.

Topics We Discussed:

📧 The pivotal role of email marketing in e-commerce
🎯 How to effectively use Klaviyo for email marketing
🔑 Understanding the importance of customer segmentation
📈 Tracking leading indicators like open rates and clickthrough rates
🔎 R.T.'s take on using AI, like ChatGPT, for email content creation and testing

R.T. Custer is not just a watchmaker, but a marketing maverick who has defied norms to create a unique niche in the watchmaking industry. His story is an inspiration for anyone looking to break into e-commerce, regardless of their product or industry.

Want to connect with R.T. and learn more about his innovative marketing strategies? Check him out on LinkedIn and join his community of e-commerce enthusiasts. It's a chance to learn from the best in the business.

Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover 🙏

Transcript

Isar Meitis: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Matis, your host, and I've got a very special topic for you today. I'm very passionate about marketing in general and about how to grow businesses, but the story today is a very special story. It's a very special story because I don't know anybody anymore who makes stuff in the us. It's mostly offshore and definitely I don't know anybody who makes wristwatches here in the US and that makes it even more unique. And our guest today, RT Custer, is that's what he does. He makes wristwatches here in the US very successfully, really unique watches. And you ask yourself, how the hell do you sell wristwatches that are US made to a population that doesn't even know you exist because you're not swatch or BrightLink and. It's all about good marketing and what R.T. Learned through the years that may be the most effective part of marketing is the stuff that he really owns. Meaning not social media, but rather his email list. And our entire conversation today is gonna go around how to leverage email marketing as an incredible lever for business growth regardless of what you're trying to sell, even if you're in a small niche business of selling us made wristwatches. And I think that's true for probably any industry out there. If you figure out how to develop the relevant email list and you know how to use that to build relationships and grow trust with your audience, you will be able to grow the business based on that. And then nobody can change an algorithm and screw you the next day. And hence, I think it's very important to literally anybody listening to know this information. Before we jump into today's episode, there's something I want to share with you. I've launched another podcast. The podcast is called Leveraging AI And if you like this podcast, you're gonna love leveraging AI because it's a very similar approach. I interview really smart people from the AI world practitioners and experts who share how to leverage AI in order to grow your business and advance your career. So pull up your phone right now, whatever platform you are using in order to listen to this podcast. Search for leveraging ai, check it out. I think you'll find it fascinating. There's a really fascinating interview with ChatGPT as the guest. It's unique and different and fun and interesting, and we talk about the impact of AI technology on businesses and society as a whole. So look for leveraging ai. And if you enjoy it, subscribe to it and also write me a note on LinkedIn and let me know what you think. And now to the episode with RT Custer and rt, I'm so excited to have you today. Welcome to the Business

R.T. Custer: 3:39

Growth Accelerator. Thanks for having me, sir. I'm excited to share the story.

Isar Meitis: 3:45

Awesome. Let's start with when did you figure this out? When did you know what, because you have such a unique story, I don't usually do that, but how the hell did you get to selling wristwatches?

R.T. Custer: 3:57

my business partner, Tyler Wolf and I had some crazy ideas on the golf course back at Penn State, when we were studying, and they all centered around wristwatches. We did a ton of research trying to figure out, like you said, there aren't many, if any, wristwatches manufactured in America and we were passionate about made in U S A and so we said, okay, if we're gonna start a wristwatch manufacturing company, let's try to make it in America. And we did a ton of research and we stumbled on the history of what we call the Great American Watch companies. And about a hundred years ago, hundreds of millions of pocket watches were made in U S A. This was like the railroad era, so like the 18 hundreds. And then the early 19 hundreds, everybody had a pocket watch that was, what was in our pocket instead of cell phones back then. And that was really the only way to tell time besides the clock, and certainly the only way to tell time on the go. And today, fast forward, a hundred years. Most pocket watches are scrapped by pawn shops and places like that for the gold and the silver of the outside case of the pocket watch, leaving the inside what we call the movement dial in hands or all the guts of the pocket watch, scrapped and useless to most of the world. And we had this crazy idea to upcycle those old pocket watches into wrist watches. And since no one makes American movements all the gears and springs for a mechanical watch in the usa, when we upcycle these old ones, now we have a truly made in USA product because we figured out and we thought we would be a little easier to figure out how to make the case and the crown and all the outside of the wristwatch here in America. and we did. So long story short, we put that idea on Kickstarter back in 2014 and we've sold every watch we've made since we call it the American Artisan Series. And our company's called Vortic, V O R T I C, like Vortex and TikTok. And that's what we do. It's like a beautiful clash of old and new.

Isar Meitis: 5:53

That's incredible. Like literally an amazing story. Let's talk about marketing and email marketing specifically. When in your journey, you figured out that this was the big thing for you.

R.T. Custer: 6:06

Yeah. so at some point, I want to say 2018 or something like that, I was emailing all of our customers individually. we didn't really, we had a small email list of basically just our customers and prospects that I had met at trade shows or something like that. And

Isar Meitis: 6:25

so we're talking a few hundreds of people,

R.T. Custer: 6:27

give me a scale, maybe a thousand, 1500, something like that. Yeah. And cuz we had been in business for four or five years at that point. So we had collected, yeah, probably one or 2000 emails and I was just, conversationally emailing those people, talking about watches and more reactive and less proactive and not reaching out to them. And I had a conversation with Tyler and he said something to the effect of what if we promoted you to the point where you're not doing all this day-to-day stuff? We, we hired someone to do the customer service and talk to all these customers and then I could speak to thousands of people every time I hit send instead of hundreds of people, meaning email and social media and just trying to get the word out, and try to speak to lots and lots of people. and that started the journey. And then obviously like over those next couple years, I was trying to figure out how to grow the email list and I did all kinds of stuff to, to grow the list, which we can get into. And then the, it really caught on in 2020. We pivoted, as I'm sure a lot of companies did in 2020, but we were doing, prior to the pandemic, we were doing a lot of custom made to order watches, and anytime you can send us your grandpa's pocket watch and we'll turn it into wristwatch. We call that Convert your Watch. It's a really cool service. But we were doing a lot of custom stuff for, just Hey, I, they wanted a very specific pocket watch. I work with them via email and kind of figure it out. During the pandemic, people didn't want to pay in full upfront thousands of dollars for a custom wristwatch and then wait six months. People wanted instant gratification. And so we pivoted and we started doing this thing called watch of the day. And in June of 2020, we made one new, one of a kind watch every day. and I think at that point we were five days a week at some, at a certain point we went to six days a week. And since all watches are literally one of a kind and a unique piece is what we call it every day, we had a new story. We had a new watch to talk about. And so we posted that online. Typically they sold really quickly, but

Alessandro Bogliari: 8:32

I did this thing called the weekly Roundup where I sent one email a week and I said, here's the five or six watches that we made this week. Here's all of our watches of the day. And that sold out the other watches that we hadn't sold just organically on social immediately. And it just caught on. And so starting, I think I was just looking at my email software, I think it was August, 2020, I started sending a weekly email newsletter on Tuesday afternoon, and then I built a custom flow or a, an automated welcome series and for almost three years, I was doing one email a week and having a welcome series to, to welcome all the new, subscribers in and take them on the journey of our company so far. And that's really when, I would say from 2018 2019 when we had a 2,000 email subscribers, by 2023, we now have, roughly 40,000 subscribers. Wow. and that's just all from focus and intention.

Isar Meitis: 9:34

I have a lot of questions. I'll start with the first one just to get people's attention. What percentage of your sales come from email

R.T. Custer: 9:41

subscribers, if Yes, it's great. Great question. Yeah, and I just, I pulled up my number so I could answer cuz I, I figured that would be a question. in since year to date, so right now it's early May. year to date, 42% of our sales have come from email marketing, and of that 42%, 71% have come from campaigns or my weekly email newsletters. And 30% have come from flows or those welcome series. Yeah.

Isar Meitis: 10:08

Incredible. By the way, these are crazy high numbers. And by the way, these are assumed direct numbers, meaning if somebody's been reading your email and then not clicking on the email, but coming to you to buy something with a, you don't even know. So the number is probably actually higher than the 40 something percent you were mentioning.

R.T. Custer: 10:24

Yeah. so we use Klaviyo and Klaviyo uses cookies and all kinds of other things besides your email address to figure out, got it. Who you are. And then, because I have your email address on my email list, and then you use, as long as you use that same email address to make your purchase. Yeah. So what you just said is accurate. Unless they're using the same email address that I have on my list to make the purchase, which, you're correct in that those numbers are low. I'm sure other people use different emails to make purchases, for all kinds of different reasons. So I definitely, I would say if my software is telling me 42% of our revenue, I would bet it's closer to 50. I think that's probably accurate.

Isar Meitis: 11:02

So half the sales come from email marketing. Yeah. Incredible. So let's really talk, let's break this down into different steps, right? The first step is, let's figure out how you grew your email list, right? You said you went from 3000 to 40,000 in a couple of years. That's a lot of people, and it's a lot of people. You're not talking about how to grow on social media or the coolest kind of coffee or something that a lot of people are interested in. It's like unique wrist watches, which has its benefits, right? It's a. Pretty niche kind of world. Yeah. But you still need to find the people and attract them enough to come and sign up. So what was your process or processes or ways you've used to grow your email list from a few thousands to a few tens of thousands, just two years.

R.T. Custer: 11:48

Y so great question. Number one is consistency. So in order to grow, you have to keep the people that you have and keep them engaged. And I think a lot of our business is word of mouth and people telling their friends like, Hey, you gotta check out Vortic Watch Company. They make one of a kind watches, like it's an old pocket watch upcycled and a wrist watch. It's just the coolest thing and. And so people go, and then, and I'm sure other people say, Hey, hop on their email list. That's the easiest way to, to connect. And obviously we have all kinds of popups and stuff like that, but you have to keep them engaged. So that's number one. And so to do that, you have to tell good stories in the emails. You have to have a distinct reason to send the email every week, which we did. we were making one new, one of a kind watch every day. And so I had that roundup concept of here's the last few watches we made. And I was never spamming people because they wanted to see the watches that we made that week, because either they're shopping for a watch or did they just think what we do is cool. And then I also. I follow Sam Parr and the Hustle, which is, he sold the hustle to HubSpot and he has a amazing podcast called My First Million if you Don't Follow Him, but The Hustle was one of the largest email newsletters for entrepreneurs. And one of the things that, that they did, that I stole, innovation wise is they said, let us tell you what's happening this week, but first here's, a quick note from our sponsor, but first here's a quick reminder of our event. And so I use that same strategy to say, Hey, all the watches that we made this week are below, but first. Here's this thing that's coming up, or here's what we've been working on this week, or here's a YouTube video of me, on a podcast talking about the new thing. or check us out at the trade show that's coming up this weekend. And so that's like the overarching strategy that I use to always tell a story every Tuesday when I hit send on these emails besides just sending people watches they could buy. And so that's number one is just like retention. It's like you have these customers, you gotta keep'em, you gotta keep'em engaged and keep that number always going up to actually get that number going up. I did a few things. One is just all the basics. So going back to basics on the stuff that an ad agency or a marketing guru tell you to do. So we use Shopify for our website. There's all kinds of apps and plugins. for the first three years we used, an app called Campaign Monitor for our email distribution, or that's a, They call it an email service provider, an E s P. So that was the app I used to send the emails. Now as of January this year, I switched to Klaviyo, which I highly recommend. It's just a lot more robust. But those email service providers create really easy ways for you to add popups and flyouts and things on your website. the, it's called an exit intent, right? So you go up to click the x on the top of a website and all of a sudden you get a popup, and it says, Hey, before you leave, hop on our email list so you don't forget about us. We installed all those basic things to try to make sure we obtain someone's email address the first time they're on our website before they leave.

Isar Meitis: 14:54

I gotta ask you a very specific question about that. Yep. me personally, every time a popup shows up on the screen, I don't even see what's in it and I click out of it. Yep. What were successful hooks that you had to get people, because it's usually an exchange, right? Most people will not say, Hey, sign up to our email list. I'm like, why the hell would I sign up to your email list? Yeah. So usually you gotta give them a reason. You gotta give them some value in return for them giving you the email address. What were the most successful hooks you had on those pop-ups to get people to actually sign up?

R.T. Custer: 15:25

For us, it's a little bit different. Our business, I feel really lucky in that we make the coolest watches on planet Earth and the product really sells itself. And so for us, we tried to keep it really simple and we just said, Hey, our watches sell out really quickly. We make just one a day. And when they're sold, they're gone. Don't miss out. Get on the list. It's the only way we distribute these in this information. If you're not on this list, you're not gonna be able to buy the watch that you want. And that works. That worked for us for years. So on,

Isar Meitis: 15:53

on a bigger scale. Scarcity, right? Scarcity works. You create scarcity and people are like, okay, emergency, I re if you want this thing. Yep. And

R.T. Custer: 16:02

that's the way to get it then. So That's what we did. and that worked for us, and I think that works for similar businesses to ours. The other thing I've done and the other way I've used to grow the list is sweepstakes and giveaways. So we are very against discounts. The only discount you can get on a Vortic watch is if you've served the United States military. You get 10% off with code military. That's the only way you can get a discount. And we verify that you've actually have served our country and we thank you for your service and give you a discount. If you have not served our country, you don't get a discount on our products. And we feel really strongly about that. So we always did either added value or, a sweepstakes or a giveaway. And so for years, when I went to trade shows, events, on the website, those popups, I've tried it all kinds of different ways. I've partnered with other brands, but we said okay, we're gonna do most of that time, I did two giveaways or sweepstakes a year. I did like a Father's Day thing. Most of our clients are in customers, are men, and and then I don't know, I'm a dad, so I like dad jokes and like that we had a lot of fun with some of those Father's Day sweepstakes. You get to watch a suit, shoes and like a bunch of socks, stuff like that. and so we always did like a big giveaway and the only way to enter the giveaway is by entering your email address in the software. Yeah. So that's one. And then we always did another one around the holidays. And I use that for two ways. One, to grow the list and two, to keep people on the list. So for my holiday, yeah, they could've gotta stay to win. Exactly. So in order to be entered to win the sweepstakes, you have to stay on the email list. And, there's pros and cons to that methodology. our, when I had about five or 10,000 people on the list, Our open rates were above 20%. Now I have 40,000. Our open rates are slightly under 20%. And so when you have a lot of people that just throw their, the, we all have an email address we use to enter to win stuff. Yes. And then we just really almost never check it. Yeah. so I, I have a fair amount of those people on the list that we just constantly clean up. if you haven't opened an email in the last 90 days, I'm probably gonna just manually unsubscribe to you, or I'm gonna add you to a separate list to, to clean that up. Yep. but sweepstakes, giveaways, things like that are really good for list growth. The other thing I've seen people do that, that we don't, and that's why I address with discounts, is discounts really work. so if you're a brand that can offer 10%, 15% off, by signing up for the email list, that works. I just, I bought, a jacket the other day and I signed up for the email list, got 15% off, and then bought the jacket and I probably would've bought the jacket anyway, but that just made it a no-brainer for me. I'm like, yeah, you know what? that's really interesting. I'm gonna get a discount. And then now I'm on that guy's email list and so I'll probably buy more things. So

Isar Meitis: 18:44

I wanna touch on a few things you said, as a quick summary on maybe behind the things that you talked about. And they're all very important. One is, and I'll start with what we talked about in the beginning, it's all about providing value. Like you won't provide value to people. They will either unsubscribe or stop reading your emails. So that's number one. Number two is finding unique ways for people. Give them a real reason to sign up. But I think with everything you said, and I agree with you a hundred percent, if you give them the right reason to sign up, meaning it's not a hook just to get your email. It's, I wanna provide you value somehow or give you access to stuff you won't have access to otherwise. And so on. That's the real value because people just sign up for the sweepstake are not gonna open your emails. So it doesn't really matter that they're on the list. and the last thing you said that has to do with that, and it has to do both on the technical aspect of the actual health of the email platform as well as your ability to communicate with the people properly, is you gotta constantly clean up your list. Yes. Yep. And so if people are not opening your emails, remove them. And usually what you do is you open a new branch in your email platform and you put them in that branch. And that branch is like giving them chances to come back and open emails and you literally warn them and say, okay, I'm gonna give you, this is your last chance and I'm gonna give you this and give you that. And if they don't, to just remove them from the list because it really hurts all your statistics and it's very hard to really understand what's going on and really hard to understand whether you're doing better or worse because you grew the list with a lot of people are not relevant is Part of that, how much are actual relevant people? Yeah. And with those people, I'm actually doing better or worse. So you gotta, not to mention the fact that you're paying for all the emails that you send. So if you send in 40,000 emails, if there's 7,000 emails you don't need to send, that's 20% that you're paying for. For no good reason. So yeah, there, there are a lot of reason to clean up the email list. I think this was all very solid advice. Let's start talking about the newsletter themselves. Okay. You gave a little bit of context on what kind of stuff you put in the email, but really how do you even approach it from a strategic perspective? Meaning do you have a calendar with a ho, with holidays? Do you have specific times of year that people buy more, like you said, father's Day. and under that, let's start drilling into what's actual the tactics of in each and every one of the emails.

R.T. Custer: 21:05

Totally. So first thing with an email newsletter is consistency. If you are not, if you want to send an email newsletter and you wanna make this part of your business and you don't send an email at least once a week, then you might as well not do it. That's my take, that's my hot take if you disagree. But I don't think at this, in 2023, that is not spam. We all have subscribed to things that send us multiple emails a day and still remain subscribed to those things because either we want a discount or we're a customer of that brand, or we just delete them cuz we don't even care. sending one email a week I think is a must from a frequency standpoint and keeping your consumers up to date with what you're doing and who you are. Basically staying top of mind with your customer. And so for us, we sent one email a week for the last three years in January, I started sending two emails a week. And you can see, 40% of my revenue is from, from emails and that is working, but it is potentially decreasing our open rates and potentially could harm our brand if we don't do it correctly. so one of the things that I use to justify sending more than one email a week is we're putting out a lot of content. And so that's what you mentioned, a calendar. I would say once you decide how frequently you want to send, which like I said, I would send once a week, I think that's a really good place to start. It's also just a good cadence for yourself if you're doing this yourself. You just, you always have the same time and day. Once you figure that out, then it's okay, let's map this out on a calendar. What am I talking about every week? Yes. Start with holidays. Basic stuff. holidays coming up. If, again, if you do discounts or sales or promotions, you can, it's like car dealerships. It's here's the Labor Day sale and the whatever day. it just, there's all kinds of ways you can promote. for us, we release special watches on holidays. Oh, nice. And so like most recent was Star Wars Day May 4th. Yep. and on May 4th we released an all black watch. That was just really cool. And it was like very Darth Vader esque, and I sent an email on that day, and we sold that watch in minutes and it was really cool. And our web traffic spiked when I sent that email. And people, commented and answered the email and said, oh, I missed it. like, when are you making another one? next May 4th probably. But yeah. you have to have a reason to send and then you can create content around that cadence. So for us, for years, about two years, we've been doing a weekly YouTube TV show, called Custer and Wolf Building a watch company. and that's myself and my business partner, and we sit down and. Basically just talk about behind the scenes, all the stuff we're working on. And so we have a YouTube video that comes out every week. And so we have a distinct reason to send an email every week to say, Hey, check out our new YouTube video and look at all the watches we made last week. Yeah. and so that's what we've been doing. Tons of ways. You can do that as another brand. You can, if you don't have consistent content or events or things coming up, I would lay out all the reasons you could talk about yourself and talk about your brand. sales events, new products, new things in life. You can highlight similar things. You can highlight, current events happening in the world. all kinds of stuff like that. you can basically like once a month or once every other month, you can add just a quick and easy email that says, Hey, if you're not, go follow us on social, and take your email subscribers and try to get them to go follow you on Instagram or YouTube or something like that. there's huge lists of ideas around that kind of stuff. What I would recommend is if you don't know what to send an email about, don't just google like email topics, cuz that can get really convoluted and boring. look at social media calendars. There's so much free content about what to post on Pinterest, what to post on Instagram. And those are like, they're trying to get you to post every day. And so now you get 365 examples, you just need 52. And so you can take that and say, okay, here's 365 ideas from. This social media content planner, I'm gonna pick the 52 best and those are my 52 emails that I'm gonna send this year. that's what I would recommend around, what am I sending? and then I just, I want to hit consistency again. Pick a day and a time and send it. At that day, at that time, every week for years, I did Tuesday afternoon. There was one that I missed. And on Wednesday morning I was getting messages, like texts from friends and investors and people are like, Hey, are you okay? I didn't get the email. It's a big deal. Like people look forward to those emails. And for me, I just, I did some research and I said, okay. Tuesday probably has a really high open rate as compared to other days of the week. I would avoid Mondays and Fridays and weekends. People are getting so many emails and they're not at their desks. For me. we have a predominantly male audience that's probably 40 plus. and that has, like a fairly sizable income. And so at Tuesday, at noon Mountain time, 2:00 PM Pacific Time, they're probably at lunch or taking a break or, at their desk, and they get an email from the watch company that they follow and they're like, yeah, I could take 5-10 minutes and read this. that felt good and that worked for us for years. Now that I'm sending two emails a week, I send Tuesdays, Tuesday afternoons and either Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. and I'm testing those.

Isar Meitis: 26:38

So I love what you're saying. I want to touch on two points. One is how important it is to have a plan. Cause if you have to figure it out on the fly, A, it's gonna be really difficult and you're gonna feel like you're chasing this all the time and you're behind the eight ball and not really doing what you need to be doing. And B, you will, not send as good as emails as if you have time to think about it and plan them. yeah. So that's number one. Number two is ideas don't have to come from you. Yeah. You can, a lot of people have really successful email newsletters by sharing news from the industry. Yep. And that's very easy to do. You go to Google and say, okay, what's interesting happening? Not to mention now with like chats and bard and stuff like that, you can know what are the interesting things that happen in this and that industry this past week? And now we can put that together. And people in the industry who, or care about the topic you wanna talk about, will want your email, because that's gonna be their weekly digest on what's actually going on. And then you can sprinkle into that the stuff that you're doing and the stuff that you wanna talk about. So I, I love all the stuff that you mentioned. How do you measure success? Like how do you say, oh, this was good, this was bad, here's what we need to improve on and so on.

R.T. Custer: 27:57

That's a great question. So few ways. One is get yourself a good email service provider like Klaviyo. there are a lot of great ones. Flow Desk is another great one for, unless you're, if you have a physical product and you're on Shopify, in my opinion, you should use Klaviyo. It's a little more expensive. But, Shopify actually invested in Klaviyo. They have an official partnership, on the order of a hundred million dollars. And so they play nice with data. It's well integrated. Yep. It's very exactly, it's very well integrated. And so there's a lot of data you can get directly from the email service provider like Klaviyo. you can also get a ton of data from Shopify in, where did this sale come from? And there's lots of ways you can track, and I am not an expert on data tracking, so I'm not gonna pretend that I know, like how to set up the right u t m and all that kind of stuff. but I trust the dashboards. and the dashboards tell me the basics on what I need to know. As, as far as all those numbers we rattled off and the. Beginning of the podcast. The other thing you can do is a post-purchase survey. And I have one of those and that's really good. And I would recommend keeping your questions in your post-purchase survey more around where they originally heard about you, at least the first round of questions. But the way we're structuring our post-purchase survey now, and that's just if you go on Vortic watches.com, you go all the way to checkout and you purchase a watch right after you click by, it's gonna give you a survey at the top of the page along with your receipt below, and it's gonna say, Hey, how did you hear about us? And then when you answer that question, it'll ask you another question and it'll keep asking you questions for a fuke be if you're willing to share that information, massively valuable for us. And most people are, they are willing to share that info. And so that post-purchase survey is awesome. You want to know how they originally heard about you, but then two, three questions later. If they're still answering questions, you can say, what made you decide to make this purchase email? Social media, advertising, whatever. And, you can also leave some of those blank so that people can just type. And that's massively valuable. People are really free with that information. And we have a lot of people, like I was just looking at our post-purchase survey data yesterday actually, and we got a watch on Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful. From Shark Tank. Yeah. And he did a video that has almost 2 million views on YouTube about our watch. And in that post-purchase survey, the word Kevin comes up, I think 500 people filled out that survey, at least the numbers I was looking at. And I bet I saw that at least 10 times. I saw Kevin O'Leary or Mr. Wonderful, or something like that. which means that person just told me they originally heard about us because they watched that video, or they saw that we got a watch on Kevin O'Leary. And that's really valuable. So it's okay. How do we use that information to make decisions? And I think that's what you're getting at Estar is like how do, if you have that data is power. How do you use that power for the right thing and make really smart decisions based on that data. And the only way you can do that is if you collect that data properly. And yeah, email service provider data, Shopify, your website data, Google Analytics is really good too. That's interesting, but a lot of other facets there. And then post-purchase survey is huge. the last thing I'll say is periodically make your subject lines and your call to action in the email a question, especially in flows like the automated welcome series. Ask a question as many times as you can within reason. I would say if you're doing it in your weekly email newsletter, don't do it more than once a month, cuz people will just get annoyed by that. But ask a question. People will think that you, the founder of the company, sent them a personal email that was beautifully designed and that didn't go to 39,000 other people. And they will answer that email and answer that question. And so that's not statistically relevant data because you're not gonna get too many answers. But that is, I call it feel good data. it's just like I'm asking this question and I have two or three people answer. Okay. People are paying attention, people are reading the email, they're not just opening it. And a small percentage, even three people took the time to sit down and say, Hey, rt, great question. I heard about VTE because of Kevin O'Leary. Or I saw your watch on John Krasinski on Jack Bryan, or, I saw an ad on Instagram or whatever. and that's how I found out about you. Ps they'll say all these other, I have a watch, great customer service. your guy Kyle, just killed it. great job. Keep it up. that's really feel good data for me.

Isar Meitis: 32:32

So I wanna touch on the last topic you talked about, because I think it's massively important and I think too many businesses ignore it because of the first point you touched on. So there's two types of data, right? We have quantitative data and qualitative data. Yes. And today's day and era, you can have all the quantitative data in the world you want cuz it's all digital. You can track what they collect, when they collect, how long they visited, what pages they've seen, how long they spent on each page, see where their mouse went. Like literally from a qual quantitative data, you can get it all. What quantitative data tells you. It tells you what happened. Yep. It doesn't tell you why it happened. Yep. And what tells you why it happened is, Qualitative data. Yes. And the bigger problem with qualitative data is a, it's not automatically collected. You have to be very conscious about asking for it. And the second problem probably just got solved in the last few months is how the hell do you analyze it? So let's say you ask every single person for a review of whatever sort, or how did you hear about it? okay, now let's say you're a bigger brand and you don't sell a watch a day, but you're selling 10,000 things a day. Yeah. How the hell, I'm gonna track that. the way you track that today is that artificial intelligence today can do this for you for either free or almost free. And you can use tools. I use a tool called, numerous AI that basically is an extension of Google Sheets and or, Excel. And you can drop all the data in there, which is probably where it lives anyway. And now you can literally ask it any question about that data and you will give you the answers. How many people mentioned. Whoever, how many people use the word podcast? How many, and you will build the, or what are the main buckets you would put these into? And it will tell you on its own, because it's Chati PT running within Google Sheets, telling you whatever you wanna know on a huge amount of data in seconds. So you don't have to read any of that. It will analyze whether it's positive or negative or like whatever you want to know in a few sentences you can find. So it solves the problem of analyzing a large amount of qualitative data and then like you said, this is where the gold really is. Yeah. Because if you understand, let's take your case as an example, that using high profile individuals that are successful male in your case, in order to promote this thing is the most successful way to promote this. Okay. How do I get this on more famous people and how do I find a way to tell an interesting story about it? That they will actually share the story. But this really gives you the information of why people are taking action. And I love your idea of what made you make the purchase, right? Think how powerful that is to know that information. And you don't need 10,000 people to tell you that you need a hundred percent, because that gives you valuable enough statistics saying, okay, this is the biggest driver. and with these two questions, by the way, those very particular questions, how did you hear about us as OpenText Field and what made you make the purchase as an OpenText field will tell you everything you need to know about how you're generating demand and how you're capturing demand, which are the two most important things for any business who's selling, whether a service or a product. So I absolutely love, the points that

R.T. Custer: 35:52

you raised. Yeah. and just one clarifying point on that. Cause I have had that post-purchase survey live on our website for years. And I haven't looked at it in a long time, but my business partner and I were talking about these subjects and just like attribution, like where are our sales coming from? Cause we, we had a really good month last month, and so far this month we're doing great. And we're just trying to figure out okay, we're, we changed a bunch of stuff, what's working? And we're going through all that data right now and it's really fascinating. what I, listen, I was listening to another podcast, it's called 10 Years in the making, by the guy who started retention.com, which is pretty cool. and he had a guy named Chase Diamond on there, which is a, I don't consider myself an email marketing expert. I'm just really passionate about it and I love it. Chase is an email marketing expert and he's a much bigger scale than I am. but he said start when you start out like your first. Few hundred, responses that you get to that post-purchase survey, leave them open-ended and let people just type things in. And then use a service, like you said, numerous or a word cloud service to figure out what are people answering. And then at a certain point, and at a certain scale, when you're starting to get thousands of responses, you want more qual quantitative data. And so you should take that open responses and then create dropdowns, and save and make it just one of four things. And people just click on one of four things and now you get at scale more statistically relevant data and you don't have to run it through those services and figure it out. You can just look at and say, okay, the last 30 days of PO pur post purchase survey data, 25% of our customers came from an Instagram ad suite. That's working good validation. you can make decisions faster with that, easier to access data, if that makes sense. So

Isar Meitis: 37:35

I'm probably not as successful in email marketing as this guy, but I would strongly disagree with the tools we had today. So until that's fair. Four months ago when you had to manually go and go through that data to put it in buckets and analyze it and it would literally take you hours. I would agree. I think the value of hearing what people have to say in the way they wanna say it, what you get with a dropdown is huge biases. First of all, people will pick something. A lot of people will randomly pick something just because you put a thing in front of them and they will click and you'll see in every time you do a dropdown menu on a large scale, the first option gets a lot more clicks than anything else. Practical people click on the thing and they click on the first one just because they want it to go away. So actually having OpenText mandatory fields that now you can analyze very easily probably wins. hands down. But I'm not saying I'm an expert better than this guy. I'm just saying my personal opinion

R.T. Custer: 38:25

about it. And he was coming from like an eight and nine figure Shopify store. Yeah. So they're getting probably 10,000 orders a day or something crazy, so I agree with you. And for my brand, we're, since we're getting, very small amount of total orders, I prefer the open-ended data, and I agree with you. It's not that hard to go through. it, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of context that's needed to make these decisions and, probably some grain assault that we can add here to say, I run a fairly small business, and if you're running an eight, nine figure Shopify store, Y you should probably talk to somebody about email marketing that has done that kind of scale. Yeah. I mostly speak to like my mastermind for instance, is people that haven't quite made it to seven figures yet. And so my audience and the people I speak to are, are at that scale or even, or maybe my scale, if that makes sense. Yep. Makes

Isar Meitis: 39:17

perfect sense. There's a bunch of other things I want to ask you, so we'll make a quick, rapid fire, segment. Yes. Yep. rapid fire number one, what's the leading indicators like, are there other stuff that's not sales related, like open rates or clickthrough rates or something that you measure and have you found it to really be a leading indicator?

R.T. Custer: 39:38

You're always measuring open rates, click through rates, unsubscribe rates, spam rates, obviously purchase data. typically in dollars, not percentage or rates. There's another thing that, that Klaviyo has that I really like, which is a dollar in revenue per recipient. Yeah. Which is cool. And so you can track like for different segments, how valuable is this segment? and that's neat. And so those are the things you're tracking. Are they leading indicators? I think so. For most businesses, my business is like I said, weird, because we make a very different than niche product to, like you said, that. I wouldn't say they're necessarily leading indicators for me, but it is really helpful to, to look at, especially open rate data. and so for instance, the, when I've been sending two emails a week, my Tuesday email I send to my entire list. It's roughly 40,000 people. My open rates is, 16 to 18%. and so that's, what is it, 5,000 people or so on that email that I'm sending the second email of the week. In order to not spam people, I'm not sending it to the same list. I created a segment called 90 Day Engaged, and you only get that second email this week if you have clicked on or opened an email in the last 90 days. And those in theory, are my more engaged people and followers and things like that. Those open rates are closer to 40%. and the list is about half the size. And so I'm speaking to the same amount of people. When you do the math, it's 5,000 people and it's probably the same people, but it might not be. And my mass email to everyone is probably re-engaging those people. And then the other one is bringing them in and hopefully making'em make a purchase. But yeah, I would say of all those leading indicators and data open rate is the one that I pay attention to the most. Yeah, I agree.

Isar Meitis: 41:35

So last question before I let tell people where they can actually buy your cool watches or follow you or do your mastermind. What tools do you use other than Klaviyo to maybe come up with subject lines or AB test or figure out other stuff, the content. Do you use any AI stuff to write it for you? What other tools you use in order to create this magic?

R.T. Custer: 42:01

So I love chat, G p t, for pretty much all of that. I'm a good writer. I really enjoy writing, and I use, my own, I don't really use chat g p t to edit my own writing as much as I like maybe should. Typically I'll put my writing into chat G p t and say, rewrite this and make it more concise. Yeah. Or use, I forget what it's called. talk to me like I'm five language, basically Yeah. Yeah. make it really simple and straightforward and precise language. So I like using chat G B T for that. And I'm sure there's all kinds of other plugins that are probably better at that, but I just use the main chat, G B T. And then yes, subject lines on chat. C b T are clutch. There's also, I don't think I have it here, but I bought a book on Amazon that's a thousand subject lines, just a a thousand subject line ideas for email marketing. There's all kinds of books and education and blogs out there to talk about subject lines. when we're talking about subject lines though, in order to get ideas, one of the best ideas that I've had, and that I've shared a lot, is if you're sending a weekly email newsletter that's 52 subject lines a year. Yeah. And that's 52 pieces of content you have to come up with. And I know we spoke to this, but I would say, If you're struggling with that, make a list of the 52 frequently asked questions that your audience and your customers have for you. Yeah. And then answer those questions once a week. Yeah. And that's huge. And you can just free write, put that into something like chat c bt and say, write me a subject line for each one of these 52 questions. some of'em will be questions, some will be as straightforward. All that kind of stuff. That's huge. And then if you're doing an automated welcome series that, let's say it's 10 emails long, pick your 10 best performing flows, or your 10 best performing subject lines and emails and content, and, probably your 10 most frequently asked questions. And those are your automated emails that everybody gets when they join your list for the first time. So that's the stuff that I use. And you're really, to answer your question, I like all the standard stuff like Klaviyo, Shopify, that kind of stuff. And then I just use chat, T P T I try to keep it really simple. Fantastic

Isar Meitis: 44:12

rt. This was really fascinating. I think we shared, we, you shared a lot of really valuable information. if people wanna buy your watches, follow you, do your mastermind, see you on social media, what's the best way to do that?

R.T. Custer: 44:26

Totally. So my platform of choice is Instagram. I'm just Rt Custer on Instagram. You can also find me rt custer.com. That's how you can connect with me. Vortic is V O R T I c, Vortic watches.com. Check that out, hop on the email list so you can see everything that we just talked about, live and inaction. And then, yeah, I co-host a and co-lead a mastermind called Fast Foundations. And so I love talking about email, but I mostly teach and talk about marketing in general. and you can find more about that@fastfoundations.com. Amazing.

Isar Meitis: 45:01

R.T., thank you so much. This was really great. I appreciate your time and sharing your knowledge.

R.T. Custer: 45:06

Thanks having me. Sorry. Super fun.