Email Marketing Insights with Val Geisler from Klaviyo

Val Geisler, how are you? I'm super stoked to be here. I feel like we have known each other for a long time and should have had this conversation months ago. But also, what is time anymore? So, you know, here we are. Yeah, I'm so excited to officially meet you. And I know I briefly mentioned right before this, I'm actually so excited about the time and why you wish we connected sooner. The timing of something that you're going to drop in a little bit is going to be, I think, perfect. So yeah, starting kind of with your background. Yeah, for sure. I am not a marketer by trade. I majored in theater. So but the production side, so I'm definitely more in line with like Excel spreadsheets. And that's the way my brain works. So my job has always been in organizing things and communicating them properly. I would say that's the through line of every role I've ever had. I worked in special events, and I worked at a hotel, and I worked in theater, and I worked at a retail store. And I got into marketing through running my own online business and experiencing everything I learned. I started a little over 10 years ago. And the online business space has grown and changed a lot in that time. But I really got focused on email marketing when I took a job in-house at an ESP. So I learned email kind of from the inside out. And I was there for about a year and a half. It was in the middle of my freelancing. I was working on customer onboarding, which I then still did after that. But I had kind of pitched them on a project to do to redo their customer onboarding. And they said, well, actually, we need help doing our own marketing. And then, you know, we're a small startup. So answering customer support tickets and all those things. And you can help us do the onboarding. But you want to come work for us in-house. And it just made a lot of sense at the time. And I was there for a little while. And then when I left, I started freelance consulting and focused on email specifically. And at the time was SaaS focused because I had come from a SaaS. And in my work with SaaS, I met Wilson Hung, who used to run growth at Kettle on Fire. And that's an e-commerce food brand. So they rely on subscriptions to keep their business up and running. And so he asked me to take everything I learned from SaaS and apply it to e-commerce. Because the subscription status in e-commerce, that's the exact same model as a SaaS company. With the difference being that they're actually consuming a product and not just sitting and looking at a piece of software. But a lot of the practices are exactly the same. So that's when I really got interested in e-commerce. And it fixed my turn. The agency that I ran for a long time really focused on subscription brands. So we serve SaaS, e-commerce. We did a couple of apps. We've worked on membership sites. So anything that needs customers to come back month after month after month is my jam. That's awesome. There's so much I want to kind of unpack here. Starting at the ESP, what was the most surprising thing that you learned there? Was it something on the deliverability side? Was it the fact that that was your first kind of foray into email and you learned everything? What was the biggest takeaway with actually working at an ESP? I think it was seeing all the different ways that other people were running their marketing. And looking at the things that I saw consistently over and over again from the successful companies that had their email with us. And then the things that I saw that they were trying and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. And I feel like that was actually the biggest learning for me was I'm watching all these brands doing sometimes the same things and seeing very different results from it. And it's something I say all the time. Every time I give a talk, I have this slide that says, you know, email is all about testing. You can't apply exactly what one brand did to another and think it'll work exactly the same way. And I always say that should be my only slide for the entire talk is that you just have to test it. And I think that testing mentality came from just seeing so many different brands and what they were doing. I love that. That's awesome. And then can you walk me through the mindset of like you were working at an ESP, right? You were employed for someone else. How did you go from like working there to wanting to be self-employed and start as a freelancer and ultimately build an agency? Like what was that process like? Yeah. The company was really growing. So I had my second kid when I worked there. And when I went on maternity leave, we were 17 people. And maternity paid maternity leave there is eight weeks. So eight weeks later, I came back and it was like 32 people. It was like doubled in eight weeks. It's a big. So, you know, you think about company growth and those very early days, I was employee number seven. So the company that I joined was a very different company by the time I came back from maternity leave. And then compounding having a new baby and wanting to work less hours and just, you know, things like that, that just kind of added up to I want to do some freelancing for a while. I knew that I could at least replace my salary, if not do better than that when I'm doing consulting and freelancing, picking up projects here and there. So that's when I decided to leave. And I truly was a freelancer. I was under my name as my brand. It wasn't until about two years ago when probably maybe three years ago at this point, fix my turn became a thing. Because every client I worked with as a freelancer, that's what they said. I want you to fix my turn problem. And or, you know, some version of that statement. So I built the agency to do exactly that. I had as a freelancer, I had a training program where I taught other copywriters how to become email marketers. Because I saw all these copywriters in Facebook groups talking about, well, my client says they need six emails in their welcome sequence. And, you know, I'm like, no, no, no, that's not up to your client. That's you, your job as a strategist to figure out how many emails they need. And people were posting things like, I'm charging $50 an email. Again, that's not how you should price yourself as a freelancer. So I had this incubator program where I trained copywriters to become email marketers. And then it was great because I was actually training them to work for me in the agency. And ended up hiring several of them to work on various projects over the years. And, you know, the kind of full circle of all of it is that I recently took a new role. I'm full time at an ESP again. I'm doing customer evangelism at Klaviyo. Which sounds like a kind of heady thing to do. But ultimately, it's about gathering and telling the stories of the customers. It's the foundation for the way that we've always approached projects. I've always felt like, how can I possibly build email campaigns for you if I don't know who your customers are, what the problems are that they're facing, what the how your features can be benefits, all those things. I need to know your customers. So we always start with customer research. And now that's what I get to do all the time is the customer research piece. And I'm super excited about it. That's so cool. I honestly feel like I'm Klaviyo's biggest unofficial spokesperson. Now you're officially the official spokesperson. So that's so cool. A couple questions. So you went from kind of leveraging your name as a freelancer to kind of a new name as an agency. Was any of that decision kind of conscious of like, I need to get myself kind of removed from the reason that why people, you know, come in and stay and I can actually hopefully be more managerial? Like, was any of that thought kind of like personal brand versus agency and being able to remove yourself from like, having having to do everything and have your hand involved in everything? Or was it just like, people kept saying that term, you found the domain, it was catchy, you kind of just roll with it. A little bit of both. I think it was something I think I started fix my turn intending for it to just be me. But then, honestly, there just wasn't enough of me to go around my inbox was full of people asking for help. And I felt like the only way to help more people at once is to have a team that, you know, understands the way I think about email. And that way, we never have to say no or put people on a waiting list. And, you know, we can just serve more brands at one time. Because there's definitely there's plenty of brands that need help with email. And so, yeah, I think it was a little bit of both. Like, I didn't intend to be an agency. But then they and I think this is how I do everything. I kind of roll with what shows up in front of me. So, I didn't intend for Fix My Turn to be an agency. But then what showed up in my, you know, leads in my inbox was requests for more help at once, which indicated a need for an agency. Kind of like the incubator. I didn't intend to teach a course. That was never something I thought I would do. But then half of my email list became copywriters who were following me to better understand email. They would tell me they joined my list. And the very first email I asked, what's the biggest problem you're dealing with right now? And half of them would tell me, these are my problems as a copywriter and why I'm here. To, like, quote, stalk you. I want to find out everything that you do and then do it. And I thought, well, why don't I just put that into a thing? Like, why don't I just actually show all my cards and you can learn from me? And then maybe I'll hire some of those people. So, and Klaviyo, too, is a thing that, like, just kind of showed up at the exact right time when I was feeling like it was time for a change. I wanted to be focusing more on customer research. I don't even know why I came across the job description in the first place. But I did. And then I, you know, just kept seeing it over and over again. It stuck in my brain. I thought about it a lot. And then I finally reached out to the team and started talking to them about it. And it was just, like, the perfect fit. But yeah, it's that, like, following my gut and not trying to absolutely control every little thing that happens, but noticing the need in the market and what's happening around me. You know, even shifting fast to e-commerce. Like, that, again, it's like, I didn't do that purposely, but I needed to focus my marketing in one direction. And I saw this opportunity in e-commerce, all these low-hanging fruit in email. And I thought, let's do that. So, you know, it's just kind of, like, going in the way that the wind is blowing, but always in the same direction. Yeah, I love that. I do want to dive into the Klaviyo thing in just a minute, but a couple questions before that. So I'd say half of my list is, like, agencies or freelancers, either people that are about to start or people that have already started. Can you talk about, like, the structure of, like, your agency, right? So did you leverage freelancers, contractors, full-time folks? Like, what kind of roles did you hire? You know, any kind of tips on, like, project management? Like, I know that's a lot right there, but if you can kind of go through just, like, briefly, like, your setup at, like, a high level, just that way anyone that wants to start an agency is building their agency. Or even just, like, tips of, like, what you did well, what you can do different. I know that's a lot, so. I think, so the most important thing to know is that the hardest part of building an agency, especially if you've been freelancing, is actually removing yourself from the work. And that's, like, an ongoing battle. You constantly find yourself getting in the way of other people doing their work. So it's a real ego trip in that way, because your ego wants you to do everything, and you know the answers, but, you know, you have to trust your team. So I always think fix my term was more of, like, what I would call a microagency, because we had contractors, not employees. I had one other employee, and that was my husband. He was our CFO, so he managed all the finances for the business. I basically hired out everything that I didn't like doing until I was left with the things that I was good at, and then I still had to hire out for that, too. But the first thing I started with was finances, because I hate doing that, and he's really good at it, so I did that. And we also had a separate, like, bookkeeper CPA that's a contractor. So I had copywriter strategists. So the goal, like, if I were still to be running the agency, the goal would be to separate that out into two separate roles. But as it stood at the end of our last project, copywriter strategists was all in one role, and those were people who had went through my training program. Researchers. So separate researchers to do the customer research side of things, because that is fairly intensive. But it also, there's work to be done on the email side. The strategist and copywriter can't be the researcher, even if they're good at it. That, again, that was a piece where I had to hire out the part that I really liked doing. I have project manager to be basically to be me. To replace myself as the key communicator with clients. So that was a really important role. And then admin to take care of inboxes and speaking requests and things like that. But, yeah, I mean, you really have to, like, everybody says, like, start with the things that you suck at or don't like doing. And I started there for sure. But I actually think if I were to do it all over again, I would probably start with the things that I'm really good at of hiring people to do that. Because it takes longer to let go of those things, even when you have someone who's really good at doing them. It takes longer to stop opening every doc and to stop participating in every Slack conversation. So I would, if I were to do it over, I would challenge myself to do that. To hire the things that I like doing. And then once that's done and I've really gotten good at that, then hire for the things that I don't like doing. So. I love that. No, thank you for that. So we're going to move to the Klaviyo piece in one second. Last question I have is, obviously, I'm pro Klaviyo. You're pro Klaviyo, especially now. But in the role that you had previously, when you were working with all these brands, you talked about ESPs that you also liked and kind of use cases. So Klaviyo, obviously, if anyone's watching for e-commerce, hands down, go use it. For anyone in SaaS or B2B, I get that question a lot of like, what ESPs should I use? What kind of tools should I be looking into? I truthfully don't know the answer because that's not my expertise. Is there any tools that you can kind of talk about that you were a big fan of? For sure. My favorite too, for any other business type, SaaS specifically, because that's who I interact with a lot, is Customer.io. Customer.io and then ActiveCampaign is a good option as well. So those two are my top recommendations for SaaS. Creator type business owners, people who want to be a life coach or business coach or run a graphic design business, service based creator type I would send you to ConvertKit. These are platforms that are built for this type of business. Customer.io and ActiveCampaign, they would probably argue that they're not similar. I think there's a lot of similarities in functionality and it's just a matter of which UI you prefer. Cool. Thank you. All right. So talking about Klaviyo, the other half of my list is brands. So whether it's brand founders or people that work at brands. In your new role right now, by the way, have you kicked off? Is this your first week? No. I don't even start for another week and a half. Okay. So you start right now, we're on the 10th of February. So you start kind of towards the end of February. 22nd, yeah. Okay. So for people that are watching this, this is going to go live this coming Monday. So this will actually go live before you start. But for people that want to get in touch with you earlier, once you do start up, what type of people are you looking to connect with where you can help them, they can help you? Is it brands? Is it freelancers? Is it agencies? Can you talk about who could be helpful in case someone's listening and wants to connect? Yep. So I'll start by saying that this role is brand new. So we're building it from the ground up. So there's a lot of unknowns, and there are definite goals. So the first goal is to gather customer stories. Well, probably the first goal is to figure out the organization once those stories are gathered, and then go gather them. You have to build the backend systems. But gathering those stories is really important. And I think that that's like, it's a huge project. But it's really important that we tell these stories properly. And I know that I can't do it alone. So there will be other people on the team who will be supporting in that various ways. And so I think if you're on Klaviyo, and have a, you know, an interesting story about the way that you have grown over time, I'm not interested in like, Klaviyo saved my business kind of stories or because of Klaviyo, I made $30,000 one overnight, you know, I, those kinds of case studies, I think that's a different kind of story. The stories that I want to tell are the successes of the brands that that just happened to use Klaviyo. And, you know, we, we put a lot of emphasis in SaaS, we put a lot of emphasis on our product. And I think it's really important to put emphasis on our customers. So I want to tell the stories of the customers. Something I was talking about on Twitter yesterday was this hypothesis that I have that brands want to, you know, all we hear is like the big successes, we hear about house now, but we don't hear what Helena went through to become house now. And, you know, all the kind of messy middle. And I, I want to tell those stories, I want to tell about the failed Facebook ad campaign, I want to tell about the Black Friday that sucked. But then like, then that is what defines who that brand is today and made the success happen. Every major athlete has that story of like training camp when they were benched for a week, and now they're the quarterback and at Super Bowl or whatever, you know, so there's those stories of hardship make you who you are. And so I want to find those brands that have those big wins, but have those big wins because of something that they went through and learned from in the past. Those are the stories I think more brands need to hear, because the majority of people are in that hard part. And we need to know as brand operators that there is, there actually is an end of the rainbow, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's not a myth. It's really there. And we just have to like, stick with it. And, and see those, quote, failures as learning opportunities. I love that. I think the timing right now is so relevant with everything that we're going through in the world where a lot of people are unfortunately facing a really hard time. And there are also a lot of people that have really kind of taken advantage of this situation in a positive way to do better for themselves, better for their employees to kind of hire. So I think that's a really cool and relevant thing right now. I can probably come up with a million reasons why everyone else could. Why Klaviyo for you? What does Klaviyo mean for you? Is it the mission? Is it the vision? Is the fact that they have funding to actually make dreams come true? Why Klaviyo? What was the opportunity that really told you, hey, stop what you're doing on the freelance side of the agency. You have a really great thing going. You've built this great, you know, personal brand, this great company. Why leave? Why choose Klaviyo? I think it's all of those things. So mission and vision are really important to why I would choose to join a brand. I've always said as a freelancer, I've never said I'll never go back in-house again, but I have said there are certain companies I would do that for. And for me, it's the team. Who are the people that are working there? And what do they care about? Do they care about launching features and pushing, you know, bug fixes? And do they care about kind of blasting the world with their information? Or do they care about the customers behind the product? Do they want to talk to they put features in beta before they launch it? Things like that, that are real key indicators of who a brand is. I mean, Klaviyo's conference is a great example of who they are as a brand. Obviously, it wasn't able to happen this last year, but I've always felt like it's real humans that work there. And even as the company has grown over the years, and now they have more funding to hire people like me, and other people to grow the team even more. I want to, you know, I like to think that Klaviyo as a team will continue to evolve into this, you know, company that just cares more and more about the customers. And my personal mission is that I am able to tell the stories of the customers internally in a way that every Klaviyo, every person who works there is talking about the customers as they're doing things. So, when engineering is building a new feature, when the product team is working on something, that somebody on the product team says, which customer is this going to help? You know, I use a framework called jobs to be done. So, what is the job that this feature is solving for? And that the sales team can identify these different kind of archetypes of, you know, there's jobs that people are hiring Klaviyo to do, and it's not to send emails. It's, you know, it's to quit their day job. It's to be able to hire their team. It's to retire their spouse. It's to save for their kid's college. There are all these different reasons that people are building businesses using Klaviyo, and that's what I want to get to the heart of, and keep asking why until I find out what that is, and then spread that internally so that every single person on the team talks about jobs and what it is that the customers need, more so than, you know, what's on our to-do list today, and how quickly can we build it? It's not about how quickly we can build it, but how much impact it's going to have. I love that, and I think, you know, myself and anyone watching this, it's clear that you're the right person for the job. So, they did a good job. So, Klaviyo, girl, you're listening. Good job. The last question I have for you, and I really appreciate all your time, is can you quickly, like, at a high level, walk me through, like, what's the process of, like, winding down, like, this agency and this business that you have? Like, how do you communicate that to clients? Like, how do you figure out, you know, when you start the new opportunity and when you end kind of the existing clients that you have? Can you talk through that experience? I got to imagine it's very bittersweet. Yeah, it is. I think if I, had a chance to do it over again, I would put a real, like, break in between and say, okay, I'm not going to take any more clients and then go look for something new to do. But because of my tendency to just fall, you know, things show up in front of me and I go toward them, that wasn't what happened. So, all of this aligned around calendar-wise, the holidays, and the way that we operate, my company takes the last two weeks of December off entirely. So, everyone is off. We don't take on any new projects between Black Friday and the new year. Actually, don't really take on new projects from, like, the beginning of November because of Black Friday. So, it was really this opportunity of the current projects we had were wrapping up February into March. And we had some, you know, we had leads for new projects in Q1, but because the conversations had started with Klaviyo, I wasn't really pursuing those very hard. I felt really strongly about this role. So, I leaned heavily into that and figured, well, if I need to go find all new clients and this doesn't work out and I need to put a call out to get clients in the door, then I can do that and I'm in a fortunate enough position to do that. But, yeah, it was just kind of, like, the way it timed out with the calendar year and the way that our project flows worked. My contractors are continuing to work on the projects to the end of them. And I've connected them with other people in the industry for continuing work for them. It's important to me that they don't feel abandoned in this process. So, one of them has already been hired by another agency, Common Thread Collective, hired Cara from my team, and there's a couple other people in conversations there and other places. So, it's, you know, I think really it just was kind of kismet as far as timing goes. But, yeah, I love when I see people who say, like, hey, I saw somebody the other day leaving Shopify and I'm going to take two months and do nothing. I'm going to, like, work on house projects and read books and, like, not look at a computer for two months and then I'm going to go figure out what I'm doing next. I wish that I had done that. But it didn't work that way. And I'm actually taking all of next week off other than one clubhouse engagement. And that's it. So, I have, like, a little bit of a break to kind of switch gears mentally and prepare for my new role. So, that was incredible. Thank you so much for your time. For people that want to talk to you about Klaviyo, people that want to pick your brain about the agency freelance stuff, just follow you in general, what's the best way for people to connect with you? And whatever you mentioned, I'll drop kind of in the video notes on the description. So, if you're watching this, I'll have all the links. But is it Twitter? Is it your newsletter? Is it your email? What's my favorite medium for communication? I'm on Twitter. Like I said, I am on clubhouse. I'm trying to figure out that platform, quite honestly. And same handle there. So, either place. And I'm hoping to do more on clubhouse and continue conversations on Twitter. That's where I have been hanging out for the last several years and continue plan to continue that. So, come find me. And my DMs are always open. I love talking to people about email and customer retention and agency life and all those things. Awesome. Well, Val, thank you so much for your time. And congrats again on the new role. Thanks, Chase. I'm so excited you invited me. Thank you for having me. Of course. All right. Cheers.