Email Marketing Insights with Sujan Patel from Mailshake

Hey Sujan, how are you? Good, thanks for having me. I'm pumped for you to be here, man. Do you mind starting kind of with your background and what you're up to? Yeah, so my background is in digital marketing. I started an agency back in the day. Well, I started in-house and then I worked in agency and ended up starting my own agency called Simulgrain. And we work with all sorts of interesting startups and companies and the best ones were SaaS. And so I was like, I need to get on that side of the world. Like I'm helping these companies grow and they pay me well, but I need to be on the owning a SaaS company. So I sold a business, took a job with one of my clients, moved to Minnesota from SF, opposite commute to what most people do in life, froze my ass off for a few years. And during that time, I was a VP of marketing. And on nights and weekends, I would just like test stuff. I'd be at Growth Hacking and I wrote a book called 100 Days of Growth and ended up selling about 50,000 copies of that over the last five years. Most of that was like the year one and two. But when I used that to kickstart my email list and launched Mailshake. And so the original plan was join this company, be here for five years, be on the executive team, learn how to operate a SaaS from non-marketing. I knew marketing, I just didn't know the other stuff. Product sales, customer support, like ops, finance of all that stuff. I was like really weak on that part. So six months in, I built Mailshake and definitely was not an overnight success. It took us about a year and a half to like get the product market fit. And during that time, I got impatient. And my partner and I were like, well, like building a SaaS company sucks. It takes forever. Let's go buy them. Just go buy our way out of this ---- phase, which is product market fit forever. As a marketer who can scale, you're not always the best at product market fit. Because some of the stuff, no matter how awesome my copy is and my conversion rate is, if my product doesn't work, it doesn't work. If there's friction there. So I guess long story short, I bought a bunch of companies. I think over the years, I bought nine companies. So we built two. Built two, Mailshake and Nero. Mailshake's still around. Mailshake's pretty much the biggest one. That one took the longest to actually get off the ground. During that time, I bought eight. And I partnered with somebody on an agency. And then I actually just got out of that, meaning sold it. And sold a bunch of companies. Now we have, in my day-to-day, I manage four businesses. And hopefully soon, in the next month, it'll be three. Okay. Nice, man. A lot to unpack. Can we talk about Mailshake for a second? Not asking for revenue, but team size, number of clients or people using the platform. Is there anything you can share there in terms of the impact that you're having? Yeah. So team is about, I want to say, 23 people. And we've got seven or eight job recs out. So we're growing very rapidly in terms of team. We're bootstrapped. No outside money. I put in 150K into it. Maybe a little bit more in sweat equity or rolling in some revenue there. But that's really it. And then we use that to get to revenue. We did a couple of AppSumo deals to generate another few hundred grand as seed funding for ourselves to grow and build a product. We've got about 40,000 or so active users using the platform. And yeah, I mean, I think the number is like 6,000 plus companies, something like that. I forgot exactly the number, but I know it's 40,000 users. That's incredible. Congrats on that. In terms of that business and the others that you're running kind of day to day, whether it's your own tools or other tools, can you talk to us about tools that have been really helpful, whether it's a project management tool, whether it's just that tool, any couple of tools that stand out? Yeah, yeah. So the good thing about running multiple businesses is that when you face a problem once, you can generally solve it for all your companies, right? Unless you have a massive outage in that one tool that you use, which sometimes happens too, like AWS going down. Who would have thought? But yeah, so we use Jira. So we started off with spreadsheets and really, really simple structure, right? So high level, we use EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, by Gina Wickman from this book called Traction. That's our process for getting what's our 10-year target? What's our goal for the year? What's our rocks? And rocks are kind of like similar to OKRs, like what's the big thing that we're trying to move up the mountains? And the analogy is like, would you rather move a rock or a pebble or some sand? Move the big things, the stuff, all the small stuff will kind of usually move away or be irrelevant or move along with it. And so we use that. We use, on the marketing team, we use Trello for all of our content. It really is now just Atlassian, I guess. Slack for all of our communication. Zoom, none of this stuff is really sexy. Jira for all our dev and kind of org. But I think the real magic is that we use this EOS system and really like simple spreadsheets. We use Pipedrive for our CRM and HubSpot for kind of also parts of our tracking. So that's in one platform. And I would say the stack is somewhat similar. Some companies, we use Drift. Some other companies, we use Intercom. Mailchimp, we use Customer IO. I think the vanity of, so I've been on this, I've been in marketing for 20 years. The conversational marketing trend with chatbots and chat, awesome, rose up. And then everyone did it. And then it's like, not going lower than it started, but we tested actually at Mailshake, we actually tested and beat the chatbots conversion rate to booking a demo, a phone call with just a booking a demo option directly. We found out that everybody wanted to do a call. Everyone who wanted to chat actually wanted to talk to somebody. So instead of trying to circumvent this like, hey, what are you here for? What's your name? Tell me this. Tell me that. When I call, here's a form. Fill it out. Most simple information that we need. Boom, convert. So anyways, that's a lot of stuff. And some other companies, we did that exact same test and it didn't work. So sometimes you have that. But yeah, I think that's kind of my general stack. I like to keep things super simple in terms of like, you know, the right strategy, the right execution is more important than the actual specific tools you use. I mean, we use Mailshake a lot. Like we use that. We eat our own dog food for outreach. Like our outreach game is on point. That's like what we're really good at from a content perspective, like link building partnerships. And then as a result, we get a lot of inbound leads and we use Mailshake for nurturing our inbound leads as well. Awesome. And that's super cool. Two more questions on kind of like the portfolio side that I want to talk about Mailshake and kind of things you're seeing there. The team that you mentioned on Mailshake, is that the same team that also is across the three other companies? So are the four companies sharing resources or do they all have individual teams? They all have their own team. So, you know, I look at this as like, I think the matrix organization and the shared resource is kind of like an agency where you're, you have a single source of talent and group. And then you can kind of, this group is this client and you have four clients. That works really well to save cost and time. Kind of time to like hire somebody because you can, you know, someone's coming, it's getting busy. So you get another person, you train them. But what ends up happening is that you save time, but you lose depth. You lose the depth of like knowledge and focus. You lose depth and focus. And, you know, you can save all the money in the world, but saving money doesn't help you make money. AKA, saving money and having resources doesn't actually help you grow. And SaaS companies are valued by their growth rate, their revenue, you know, obviously product and stickiness and all the other like churn and net retention revenue and whatnot. But I found that the shared resource pool, which we did in the beginning is really effective for my sanity, but really ineffective for going fast and growing. It actually slows our growth rate down because, you know, guess what? Our marketing person's just busy doing something pretty productive for another company and he'll get to it. But that just, no company should wait. That's awesome. I appreciate that insight. Last question I have on the portfolio side is for all the four brands that you run, are they all synergistic in the fact that you can do cross promotion and it's the same customer kind of archetype or are they all different? Fairly different. I will. So on the surface, they sounds like they're all email. So three of them are email. So we got Voila, Norbert, Mailshake and Right Inbox. They're all email centric, right? Right Inbox is kind of like a Yesware and Boomerang fusion, I would say. And so it's like what you do in your inbox. Voila, Norbert is how you find an email address and Mailshake and Voila, Norbert kind of have a, like Norbert provides a service to Mailshake and Mailshake pays for it. We're a customer of ourselves and we do some, you know, co-marketing and whatnot. But I can tell you that it has been peanuts in terms of the value between the relationships of cross promotion to just doing good old fashioned marketing on the top of the funnel, right? Like having a good sales funnel, having a good, just getting, building content and, I mean, not building, building a content funnel, right? Has been far superior than like X brand promoting Y brand. And part of that is a little bit of like the nature of these businesses. Our businesses are kind of in almost like micro SaaS in the sense that they're very specifically focused. Like micro SaaS is like the definition of that is really like a feature of the business. So like you'll want to go and, you know, you're tired of getting, micro SaaS is like, a good example would be like Calendly, right? But they've expanded to become out of that, right? My point is each of these tools are very specific and like have a like very narrow ish workflow as compared to Salesforce, right? Like you use Salesforce, like you're using all these freaking modules, right? And it like, it's pretty broad. MailChimp does outreach and now we've added, you know, phone dialer, we've added more stuff, which we can get into in a second. But like, and each of these companies have added more stuff and they overlap. Some of them even compete with each other a little bit. Like Norbert has an outreach product and so does Right Inbox. But there are different types of customers. So yeah, I guess the short answer is no, we don't do it successfully. I've tried. If somebody here is listening to this video or watching this video and listening to podcasts, whatever, like dude ping me if you have figured this out. I can't figure it out for the life of me. Well, no, I appreciate that. I kind of want to round this out while talking about, you know, MailChimp. That's really why, you know, I really wanted to bring you on first and foremost. Is there any interesting stats or things that you could share around like, you know, number of emails being sent, you know, going to the primary versus promotions across what you're seeing, you know, like average open rates across emails being sent on a daily, monthly basis, you know, things that you think people are doing that are interesting or unique or even wrong. Are there any things that you can share for people that are listening that are really focused on email? Yeah. So I'll start with the easy stuff, right? There's the things you can control. There's the, your copy and the cadence and like your list and all the things related to a campaign. And then there's your reputation of how you got there, right? If you're a snake oil salesman and even if you're selling the best product, like you have that reputation, you have to brush off. AKA, if you've done a lot of bad emailing in the past, you have a bad reputation on your email, has a bad reputation. Deliverability rates, not the greatest. It's like you're trying to like dig yourself out of the hole. There are ways to dig faster, but there is no way to get out of the hole without digging, right? So part of this is just make sure you don't screw yourself up. It's a hard thing to get back. You can get it back. Google has a quick memory, a short term memory. It's about 30 to 60 days. So you don't do stupid stuff for 60 days. You can start over, right? But my point is your email reputation is so critical. Don't mess it up. I think the simple things people do wrong is they don't spend enough time filtering their prospect list. Like they built, like they scrape a bunch of emails from LinkedIn. They use some tool. They put things together. Not only got like, let's say 20,000 emails or 10,000. Well, hire a VA. You do some scrubbing yourself and just sort through the list and turn that 20,000 into 3,000 real people that you really can email, right? Run an email verification. That list of 3,000 turns into maybe 2,500 people and then go at them, right? And it's now that that's, I'd say again, not, it's not always 20,000 turns into 10% of that list size. It's usually like whatever list size you sprayed, bought, commandeered somehow, probably the 30 to 50% of that list is actually good. Um, of like valid information that you should email. Um, some, sometimes it's spam traps too. But anyways, my point of this is like spend a freaking five hours on a 20 person email list and don't even spend the five hours yourself. Spend 15 minutes yourself and then hire an up worker to spend the five hours. And it's like $75 of like for how much you're going to save in cleaning up your email address. It's just worth it. Plus you get better results. So anyways, spend the time filtering. That's, that's rule number one. And again, like don't think of like a cleaning service, a bot, a person doing it for you. Like a cognitive human brain thinking is required to figure this out, right? Um, like meaning like, oh, like this list, some of them are in Europe. I don't sell to Europe. I should just take them off, right? Like some basic stuff like that is, is, is in this list. Always. Um, number two, in terms of the content and the copy and all the details related to like what you say in your first email, right? So what I've found is, um, it's like a third, a third, a third, a third of the leads you're going to get come from your first email. A third of your leads come from your second email. A third of your leads come from every email after that combined. So if you're not sending more than two follow-ups, you're usually missing out on one third of the leads. So at minimum have three follow-ups. Um, I think somewhere between five to nine, 11 is kind of the right sweet spot. I don't have a rule on like exactly the number of follow-ups. I think the larger, the deal, the busier, the person, typically the larger, the larger, the deal, typically the larger, uh, the more senior, the person, the more senior, the person you're emailing, the more touch points you should have, right? If you're emailing a link builder, maybe three to five is good. You're building a link and it's, you're emailing a marketer, SEO, content marketer. If you're emailing the VP of sales, you know, seven to nine over the course of the month, it's like two months. If you're emailing the CEO, don't stop. Like don't do like 11, 12 and maybe the last couple are like spaced out six months apart, three months apart, right? Because you just maybe got in a bad cycle, bad order, you know, what have you, right? Um, what's not important to me today as the, you know, as the head of Mailshake, it might be really important. It's like a fire in three months, right? You don't know. Um, so I think it's optimize the cadences to the seniority of the person and simple is more senior, more cadences. That being said, don't follow up with like, hey, I wanted to follow up. I just wanted to follow up. That is, that's your action, not your words. So you, when you follow up, you are just following up. Say something good now, right? Like, and, and if you do say something good, um, whether you connect with them on a personal level, on a professional level, you solve their personal problem. I always like to solve their, I like to always give context. Like, like if you, like, I don't know if you like sports, but like if I said, oh man, the Rams are awesome. You maybe you and I like the Rams. I don't even know anything about football. So I don't know why I'm using football, but let's just say we both love the Rams. We're cool. But if I'm selling you something like I'm from Mailshake, I'm selling Mailshake and you're like, no, we're good. We don't need this. Doesn't matter how much you love the Rams. They're not going to buy from me. So try to hit the actual problem that that person is going to solve. Right. Um, and the closer you can personalize to that, the better it is. And the reality is you don't have to personalize a lot. You have to be in the right category. Right. So if I'm selling to a VP of sales, they care about their quota for the quarter. They care about generating revenue. They care about operations a little bit, like less meetings. Maybe they take a lot of time out, or maybe, maybe you found a new thing that can make them generate more revenue. Right. Hit the, hit the, hit the categorical right thing. If I'm a CFO, I care about money. I care about my PNL. I care about, you know, like what do CFOs, you can Google that answer, right? Like what do CFOs talk care about? Don't talk to CFOs and figure that out. My point is in that like somewhere between nine and 11 follow-ups, send them something helpful that can help in those one of 10 categories that you're going to actually solve for. So it might be an article. It might be a template, right? Like, hey, you know, I just came, I was thinking if I'm emailing a CFO, I'm like, hey, I just came across this PNL template about like how all SaaS companies are calculating churn wrong. Are you using this? Are you guys, how are you calculating churn? And let's just say I'm selling the L-shape. It has nothing to do with this thing, but I still appeal to them on a category level. Right. Now, hopefully I'm close to that template. Right. But even if you're not, it's okay. So again, always add value. I always find templates, blog posts, and kind of helpful things to be valuable. Always send them links. And yeah, and then let's go back to your first email, right? 33% of your leads come from this first email. Personalization is key, but not personalization as in like you have to get every little detail about them right. I think people overemphasize the amount of personalization you need. You need to personalize the first sentence and you need to make the last sentence should be the call to action specific and easy. It should be a yes, no type of thing without actually saying yes, no, like just let me know yes, no, like that's not helpful. What I mean by the first sentence, let's just talk about that. The first sentence should just be about what you think their problem is and how you can help them, right? Or like how you're like, are you dealing with this? I often find like a question is a good first sentence because subconsciously, psychologically, the person on the other end is like yes or no. If they say no, you're not going to get a response. You're not going to hear from them. But if they say yes, they keep reading, right? And the other part of this is that when it's a question in the preview, the inbox is shown too. So they kind of know that they're going to get it before they actually open it. And the other part is also on mobile, which if you're again, the more higher up you are, the more likely you are checking your emails on your phone in the morning and evening, right? And so let's just assume you're going to email someone during those times. So just make it mobile friendly. And the preview is way larger on a phone typically. And so you can actually see the first sentence or most of that first sentence. So ask a question. Again, if you're emailing, let's just say you have a service that sells to many, right? Mailshake is used by salespeople, marketing people, agency owners, people doing link building, press release, PR and pitching new launches or whatever. But like if I'm emailing a bunch of people, I can just personalize the PR stuff, the PR people to get a PR related question versus the salespeople getting a sales related question. So categorically personalized. Obviously, one-to-one personalization is greatest. I'm not even going to try to say you should do that. You can. It'd be awesome if you did. I know most people are not going to put in the work. So just get the category right. And again, keep your email short, right? Social proof, introducing yourself. That's all a waste of time. Hi, I'm Sujan. You know that because my email name says Sujan on it. Like you don't need to know my name again. Like we've got, you know, 50,000 customers. Cool. That's the subject. Your signature, your email signature should be your social proof, right? Like you know how in like a landing page, they have social proof above the fold, right? You should like logos of companies, baby places you've been featured on. How many companies you serve, whatever. All that stuff goes in your signature, right? How many G2 reviews you've got, like whatever, right? Like X, Y, Z case study that you're going to link to. And by the way, you should always have that. Always have social proof in your signature. But leave that for your signature. Because the first thing that happens when somebody opens an email is that they look to like your eyes literally go to the bottom of who the **** is this. Oh, whoa. They work with Microsoft. I'm intrigued for a millisecond, right? So try that. And again, like instead of trying to put that in your email, you can keep your email really simple. Sentence number one. Sentence number two. End of paragraph. Call to action. You technically could send an email in three sentences. Problem, whatever the hell you're going to sell them, your solution. Wind up on a call. Can I send you more detail? Like can I send you more detail? Why the heck would I say no to that, right? You kind of know you're setting yourself up for it. But if you intrigue them, maybe that's something. So my favorite, I think Paddle is a good company. Paddle is like a payments processor. Like competitors Stripe. Their emails are pretty damn good. And I know this because they're a Voila Norbert customer. And they've worked with me to kind of formulate their list. And they've shown me their copy. I'm like, wow, this is really, really good. And it's what it is. It's like they know you're using Stripe or some other format. Because guess what? You can use like a tech lookup and see anybody's like any Stripe key API, right? Or FastSpring or whatever payment processor you're using. And they say, hey, are you missing out? Like do you have a problem with like international payments? Like would you like to see more? Want to just get more international customers or something like that? It was almost like too hard to say no to the first question. Then the second question is about like Paddle does all the optimization for you and localization. So they have some cool thing. But anyways, I'm not actually a Paddle customer. I use Stripe. But they almost sold me, right? But anyways, it's such a good thing. It's like, why do I not want more money? Sure. And they do all the hard work for me. Awesome. But anyways, and then there's like want to jump on a call, right? Like super simple. Can I send you more information? Three sentences. Now, impossible to do for regular people, regular human beings. They just can't send a three-sentence email. But aim for three. Aim for short and aim for a simple call to action. Don't ask it twice. Don't talk about I was wondering if you would go for the kill and talk to me. Like your email should be a similar to a conversation you would have in person. Like at a networking event. Hey, I'm blah, blah, blah. Okay, you got that because you sent the email. The name and the subject line is what you do. The first sentence should be like the problem you're trying to solve and what you do. And then after that paragraph is over, that other person says some words to you, either yes or no, I'm interested. And then you ask the question, right? You end up on a call. Like can we book a time tomorrow? Right? Stuff like that. So anyways, I like to read my stuff out loud as if I was a 10-year-old because that's what the other end is. Somebody gives like half a second. They're not putting any more brainpower than a 10-year-old would in that half a second and looking at your email. Right? And so if a 10-year-old can understand it, then it's just like you're not going to get a good response. But again, that's what you had your follow-ups, right? So this is this is fire. I'm sure there's a million other things we could go on about, but I really want to be cognizant of your time. So thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate your insight. If someone wants to learn about you, Mailshake, what's the best place? And I'll drop whatever you say in the notes. So where can people find you? Is it Twitter? Is it your email? Is it Mailshake.com? Whatever the website is. Yeah. So if you want to learn more about anything email related, go to our Mailshake blog. So that's Mailshake.com slash blog. I'm publishing a ton of content. I'm always on Twitter just kind of shooting the threes. And if you want to know about, like, building companies and all the portfolio stuff, the marketing side of things, you can go to my blog, SujanPatel.com. Cool. I'll drop your Twitter handle. I'll drop the blog. I'll drop all these links. Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Of course.