AB Testing: Chris Donald in Conversation With Kath Pay

Chris Donald: Hey, Kath. Kath, how are you? Yeah.

Kath Pay: I’m I’m well. Thanks. How are you, Chris?

Chris Donald: Good. I know we’re kind of in a little crazy times at the moment. Everybody’s working from home, very casual, as you see.

Kath Pay: Yes. Indeed.

Chris Donald: With my with my Red Sox logo in the background. Awesome. So today, we’re gonna talk about AB testing in the world of email marketing. Right?

Kath Pay: Yes. Yes.

Chris Donald: And and sort of so give me, sort of, your opinion on the state of AB testing across clients. Right? Kinda what what’s happening out there.

Kath Pay: Yeah. Okay. Great. So what I’ve found this is after I’ve been, you know, speaking to clients. I’ve been, teaching, presenting on testing, all of these sort of things for years.

And the one thing that is really obvious is that AB testing AB split testing in email is still done very ad hocly. Meaning that there’s not much thought put into it. They’re very, very much reliant upon their actual system. That’s, you know, so it’s usually the ESP doing an automated split test for them. Very little thought, very little planning, no hypotheses, very short term results.

So they’re only expecting to get a result for that particular campaign.

Chris Donald: Right. Right.

Kath Pay: Right? They’re not looking to get any learnings for their email program or even insights about their, you know, about their audience.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Kath Pay: So I think there’s huge room for improvement. Now what that looks like is we’ve got a few ideas. So yeah.

Chris Donald: So what do you, you know, what do you see as because we see the same thing. Right? They it tends to be used on a single campaign basis. Right?

Kath Pay: Yep. Yep.

Chris Donald: And if they have a win, right, if they hit a home run with a test or something, they then think that that’s what they should do all the time. Yes. But, of course, generally, it fails moving forward because it was a in a bubble test. Right?

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: Yes. And chances are that the the audience wasn’t even really segmented for the test properly, which probably tweaks their results. I mean, there’s lots of problems. So what do you what do you see? How do you I mean, sort of what’s happening now is they just use the AB testing regular Yeah.

Random split, so to speak.

Kath Pay: Yes. Yeah.

Chris Donald: And with a 4 hour window, most times, rarely does it go past that for most people.

Kath Pay: Yeah.

Chris Donald: You know, what what so what do you where do you see the main problems are?

Kath Pay: Okay. So there’s lots there’s number of problems.

Chris Donald: Yes. There are.

Kath Pay: Most of them don’t use statistical confidence at all. Right? So so therefore, they could be optimizing for a winner that’s actually truly not even a winner. Right? They, not not only that, but they don’t test it multiple times.

And they can’t test it multiple times because they’re not using a hypothesis. The only way you can test, you know, this the same test multiple times is to buy you to use a single hypothesis, which gives you the ability to have, let’s say, if you’re doing subject lines. Right? To have various subject lines, but they’re all supporting their hypotheses. Otherwise, you’re just repeating the same, saying exactly the same thing and you’re gonna lose your audience that way.

Right? So this is a problem. By the fact that they’re not doing it testing it multiple times means that they could be, again, optimizing for an anomaly. Right?

Chris Donald: Right.

Kath Pay: So that’s that’s very problematic. And then like what you were saying before, it’s it’s a short term thing. They’re optimizing for that short term, and they’re very much relying upon the technology, whereas I think what it is and do you know what? It simply is a matter of, email marketers actually just being taught how to do scientific a b split testing. We don’t do that.

That’s it. We are literally led by the tools, and the tools are limited with what they can do. You know, they are technology, and, you know, bless them, that’s what they do.

Chris Donald: Right. That’s their job.

Kath Pay: Right? Exactly. Exactly. But we as marketers need to take, you know, control of this situation and actually use our insights and our learnings and everything. And then we need to be starting to go, what isn’t?

What is going to shift, you know, the needle in this case? What can I learn about my audience that I can apply to not only this particular campaign, but to other ones as well because it’s it’s actually a an insight about my audience? And you can then refine that audience down into segments. So you can do it, you know, newcomers, first time buyers, win back, whatever the story is. So you can break it into the life cycles if you want.

Chris Donald: Personas, whatever you wanna break it into. Right?

Kath Pay: And the bottom line is is that I think it’s a huge missed opportunity that we really need to be jumping onto because this now. You know, we’ve been through okay, Chris, you and I, we’ve been in the email industry a long time. We’ve seen things change. Every year, we’re asked the same questions. So what’s going to be, you know, the trend for next year and everything?

We, in email, are doing a great job and it is evolving, you know. And all those naysayers that say, you know, email hasn’t evolved and email static. Completely wrong. We are evolving, and I think this is the stage that we’re now at, that we’re we’ve evolved so much. Technology is amazing.

Whatever you want to do, you can find technology to help you with your campaigns. Right?

Chris Donald: Yeah.

Kath Pay: So what you ideally wanna do now is to start being savvy and start using your marketing notes and start to refine and optimize because essentially this is the low hanging fruit. Optimization of your campaigns is going to give you those those wins, those easy wins that you’re wanting to do. And once you actually have a good routine to put in place, it’s not as time consuming as you want. And thinking because this is the one thing that really I I can’t understand. A lot of my, you know, clients, oh, can you help us to work out some tests?

You know, we can’t think of any. And I’m like, oh my goodness. Have you does that mean you know everything that you ever wanna know about what works about your clients, you know, literally just if you’ve got any questions that’s where you start and go and create a hypothesis based upon that And then always give yourself room to actually then go, okay, so that’s really interesting. I wasn’t expecting that, you know, because, generally, when you create a hypothesis, you’re going to say, I believe that this has happened. And then you’ve got that very important because, so you’re actually substantiating why you think that this is gonna win over this.

Chris Donald: Right? Right.

Kath Pay: And it and I think that’s actually one of the reasons why people don’t use like using hypotheses because they feel like they’re kind of going to be proven wrong. And to me, don’t. Don’t don’t even consider that. You have still got a winning campaign if just simply be if it’s a statistically confident campaign because you’ve learned something about your your, your audience or about your campaign or about your email program. So even if you didn’t quite get it wrong, don’t worry about it.

It’s okay, you know. There’s no losers when you’re testing like that.

Chris Donald: Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s, you know, it’s it’s odd. We so the part of the problem is, you know, I say sometimes part of the problem is the tools, but it really isn’t. The tools are what they are.

Right? Here’s what they give you. The platforms try to make things easy for multiple reasons, but the main reason is, you know, email you know, if we go back to the, sort of, the main problem. Right? So email doesn’t get the, a lot of times, the budget it deserves.

Right?

Kath Pay: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Chris Donald: Or the the team to actually do the work it deserves. I mean

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: Even in larger companies, we’re lucky to see a 2 person team in a in a large company. I mean, a company where it should be a 5, 10 person team without even trying. Right? Yep. So that’s part of the problem.

Time, resources, money, whatever you wanna call those problems. Right? Yeah. You know, it’s the same problem with data. Right?

We big data was the thing not too long ago. Right? And and I kept saying, why are we talking about big data when we suck at small data? Right? Because we did.

We we weren’t not everybody. I mean, just in general that weren’t wasn’t used well. Right?

Kath Pay: Yeah.

Chris Donald: But you’re right. On the AB testing side, specifically that, what we run into the most is people don’t understand, like you said, having a hypothesis. What is the plan? Right? What is the goal?

Right? What do you think is going to happen here? Or what do you want to happen? Right? And sometimes what you want to happen isn’t what happens, but what you learn is very valuable.

We tell people all the time, a failure you can learn as much from a failure, sometimes more than you can from a win. Right?

Kath Pay: Absolutely. You

Chris Donald: know, that and and a single test doesn’t prove anything except for that moment in time.

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: You need to repeat tests and repeat success to turn it into a a working hypothesis. Hey, this is now

Kath Pay: true. Learning. Yes.

Chris Donald: Because we’ve done this 10 times. Absolutely. We know it’s a it’s a truism. Our our audience now responds a certain way when we do a certain thing.

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: When we do it this way. The other problem I see is, on the splits. Right? When the system automates the splits. Right?

Kath Pay: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Donald: And depending on what the segment is to begin with that they’re using. Right? Because a lot of people will use their whole list.

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: And so we’re gonna we’re gonna take our whole list, and we’re gonna, you know, have 10% go to a, 10% go to b, 80% go to the winner. I mean, that’s your basic deal. Right?

Kath Pay: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Chris Donald: And because they use the random split, the problem is the actives could be in one group, the inactives are in another group, and, of course, the one group’s gonna win every time.

Kath Pay: Yeah.

Chris Donald: Right?

Kath Pay: Yeah.

Chris Donald: And they just don’t understand that’s what happens with the technology, what the technology is actually doing. Right? Yes. They believe the technology is smarter than it is.

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: You know, a friend of mine said, and I I really like this, I won’t say who it was, but anyway, he said, email marketers, especially those without a lot of knowledge, and there’s Yes. And and it’s not their fault. They’re just sometimes they’re thrust it into it. Right? Yeah.

Is when they he said it’s like training a dog using an email platform. Right? Good dogs and bad dogs come from either good training or bad training. Email marketing is the same way. You have to train your technology to do what you want it to do.

Mhmm. If you let it do what it wants to do, then you have a bad dog. Right? This is basically what they said. Right?

Yeah. Is you haven’t taught it what you want. You haven’t given it enough definition Yeah. For what you want to happen and and and prove it. But

Kath Pay: But, I mean, you you you you you you you literally touched on, I don’t know, most of my points that I tend to talk about a lot.

Chris Donald: Oh, I’m sorry.

Kath Pay: No. No. No. That’s no. It’s brilliant.

Yeah. Because all you’re doing is is, you know, I I talk a lot about the fact that marketers don’t take responsibility, that they leave a lot of things up to the technology because we have got such amazing technology. And we sort of think, oh, well, we’ll leave it to them. You know, we’ll leave it to the technology instead of taking control and saying, wait on. I’m the marketer here.

I need to be actually designating and informing and and directing the technology to do what I need it to do. Yeah. And I think that is often the case, though, because of a couple of things. 1, email marketing, we tend to fall into email marketing. No one ever sort of leaves high school or leaves uni and says, oh, I’m gonna become an email marketer.

I mean, because there there are no courses like that for it. You know, so we tend to fall into it. And therefore, that’s why the education at I e educating about, you know, how to do a, a scientific way of, AB split testing doesn’t exist. And so we then are informed by the technology, and that’s why we tend to let the technology lead us. 2, exactly what you said, your first point.

We are under resourced, we are under budgeted, we are underappreciated, undervalued, and all the rest of it in email marketing.

Chris Donald: Even though we drive most of the revenue most of the time. Right?

Kath Pay: Right. And so, what the how that ends up leaving us is that we are literally just we’re on this, you know, sort of like we’re churning. We’re churning out. We’re churning out. We’re churning out.

We’re do we have the time to actually think and think about a hypothesis and put a test in place and then to go and do the reporting and all that? We’ve barely got enough time to actually get the campaigns out. So there’s a lot of problems with that as well. Now the holistic approach for testing, so we call it holistic testing, it’s it’s it’s a really, really simple one, and and it actually solves that problem. Right?

The reason for being so so at holistic email marketing, we believe in taking a holistic approach. Funny that. And so we we carry that over to the testing. So when you think about it, who is your audience? Who are you testing?

You’re testing your target audience. You’re testing your you could be having a segmented or as you say a full database, but you’re testing those that are prospects. You’re testing people that have signed up to you but not have not have purchased, those that have purchased once, those that have purchased multiple times, your loyal customers, those that used to be customers but are no longer customers. Right? So you’ve got the whole thing.

So you are testing everyone. Now these are people you want to know more about because if you end up testing those that have signed up but they haven’t actually converted them, Let’s go and ask some questions. Why haven’t they? Let’s go and put that into a test. Let’s see what we can actually be finding out which is going to be shifting the needle as far as that and converting them into being customers.

This is really, really great information. Now there’s no reason why we can’t then, if we’re using hypotheses, we’re testing multiple times, we’ve actually got a solid conclusion to our test. There’s no reason why we can’t then go and take those, insights and learnings and apply them to our landing pages, our e commerce pages, our social, our PPC, and all the rest of it. So now we’re talking about email because if you think about it, email is the cheapest way to test. It’s efficient.

It’s fast. Yep.

Chris Donald: It’s targeted. You can control your audience. Right?

Kath Pay: Absolutely. If you’re wanting to find out the result, well, then you you just go for, you know, those that haven’t yet converted. That’s gonna be your PPC audience.

Chris Donald: Right.

Kath Pay: So, yeah, so now we’re talking about putting email as being in the center of testing. I’m not saying you don’t go and test your landing pages. You don’t test your PPC and all the rest of it.

Chris Donald: Right.

Kath Pay: But but you can be doing that to be enhancing, to be improving, to be incrementally finding out more information, but at least it’s gonna give you a better starting place if you test it via email. Right? So now more money, budget, resource, everything can be put into email because now we’re we’re we’re actually this is a very important not only are we driving sales and revenue and engagement and everything, but we’re also gonna be finding out more insights. And so your data team is gonna wanna be sit more closely with your with your email team and and really be helping with those tests and all the rest of it. So to to me, it’s exciting because what is a challenge for us to actually sort of get through and do testing, we have actually got that power in our hands to change it ourselves.

Chris Donald: Right.

Kath Pay: Yeah?

Chris Donald: Yep. So yeah. Yeah. I I I couldn’t agree more. Right?

It’s a the conundrum of resource is always gonna be there, unfortunately, I think.

Kath Pay: Yeah.

Chris Donald: You know, the the the mindset of a lot of people has always been email is easy because everybody does it. Everybody sends an email. It’s easy to do. Right? Also, because the platforms have made it very easy to do, you know, people believe that, you know, what they’re doing is really great because they’re using this technology and they’re getting stuff done, and it’s making money.

Because that that’s one of the other problems is you can do things not so well with email and still make money.

Kath Pay: Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Chris Donald: I mean, that’s the other thing. Right? So That’s okay. But and that’s part of the problem as well. Right?

Because, oh, well, we’re making money. I said, yeah. But you’re leaving so much on the table, right, is the problem.

Kath Pay: That is I mean, as you you got you know, you you’re in a similar situation to us. Right? So we always have to convince the c suite that do you know what? We know that email is your highest the channel that gives you the highest ROI at the moment. We understand that.

But do you understand that you’re actually yes. You’re leaving money on the table. You could be making more. And it’s their incomplete tension of it. They they they can’t conceive that because we’re already making the highest amount of ROI, how can we actually be making even more?

Hence, why they’re reticent to actually be investing in more because they’re they’re literally disbelief. No. And and and that that is a problem. Yeah. It’s it’s almost and I’ve I’ve said this for over 10 years.

Email is its own worst enemy.

Chris Donald: It is. Yeah. Because it works, and it’s it you can get up and running pretty easily.

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: You know, yeah, you may not do it well, but like I said, even not doing it well, you can make money. That’s the problem. Right?

Kath Pay: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Donald: And with when we we, you know, we have our battles with the c suite as well. Right? Yeah. And so with them so if you’re an email marketer and you’re and you’re managing your email for a company and you’d like to be able to have more resources, more if you need other technology to make things work or people, Don’t talk about opens and clicks, and don’t talk about automations. Don’t talk about stuff that’s gonna make the seat it’s just gonna make the head hurt.

Right?

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: Talk about the revenue curve.

Kath Pay: That’s That’s nice.

Chris Donald: Really all you talk about. Right? Say, we’ve done some testing, and we proved that by doing a few things, we can raise revenue from here to here. But in order to do it, we need some more resources.

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: Right? And with those resources, through our testing, through our holistic testing, as as Kat says

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: Doing it properly, then we can then have a proven hypothesis that says, if we spend this money and we do x, y, and z, revenue should go up 10 or 12%.

Kath Pay: Exactly.

Chris Donald: If that’s music to their ears. That’s something they’re gonna understand.

Kath Pay: They can understand. Absolutely.

Chris Donald: And that’s the yeah.

Kath Pay: No. No. Yeah. You you you’ve just hit on something else that that’s incredibly important and and is quite controversial though, but I think for me with the I don’t know how many tests, you know, as you yourself, you know, done tens of thousands of tests. Right?

Chris Donald: Easily. Easily.

Kath Pay: The the metrics, your success metric is absolutely key, and I think that’s where we go wrong a lot with email marketing. We tend to choose the easily accessible metrics that opens the clicks. We’re not focusing on the actual real meaningful metrics. And the way that I’ve gone and done it in the past is I’ve gone it and and, you know, sort of tested it. Because whenever you do any test, that’s what you’re going to be doing.

You’re going to measure the opens, you measure clicks, you might measure the click to open, you’re going to measure the if you’re in commerce, in e commerce, you know, average order value, you know, the total sale, the number of sales, blah blah blah, and all the rest of it. So you’re measuring everything. But out of all of that, you’re not gonna choose openness being your your your key success metric. It’s Oh. It’s an it’s an early indicator of success, but it’s not the end success.

Right? So you’re gonna be choosing what is your objective for that particular campaign. If your objective is to actually create sales, make sales, revenue, that’s what your success metric should be Okay. When you’re Absolutely. When you test.

Chris Donald: You know? Yeah. We’ll have clients come to us and they’ll say, hey, we wanna hire you because we want you to increase our like an e commerce company. This happens all the time. They come to us and they say, we want you to increase our open and click through rate.

Kath Pay: Yes. Yes.

Chris Donald: And I’ll say, okay, let’s say we increase revenue, but opens and clicks stay the same, would that be okay?

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: And they go, oh, yeah. I said, okay. Let’s not focus on these. Right? Let’s focus on revenue.

Right? Thank you. Because it’s it it really is. If you your goal you need to understand your goal, and it’s amazing how many companies don’t really have a true goal, right, Other than, oh, we want more sales. Well, so does everybody else.

Right? So what but Yeah. How do we your goal is to increase revenue by what? Right? Sales by what?

And if that’s the number you’re going for, then how do you get there?

Kath Pay: That’s right.

Chris Donald: And then you start to back up. Right?

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: So people go, well, you have a goal and you go forward. No. I said, you have a goal and you go backwards because how are you gonna get there? That’s your that’s where you’re going. You can’t go forward.

You have to go backwards. Right?

Kath Pay: That’s it. That’s it. Yeah.

Chris Donald: Yeah. It’s

Kath Pay: like it’s just and it’s the waterfall. And when you do that, when you start at the right place, everything falls into place and it’s very obvious. You don’t sit there and go, what’s our success our success metric for this campaign? You go, what is our goal? And then the success metric is literally jumping out the page at you.

Right? It it so it it ends up being something as simple as that. Then once you’ve identified the objective and the success metric, you then go, well, what’s our subject line gonna be? Okay. Well, that’s easy.

And then you go, okay. Well, what’s our call to action going be? Oh, well, that’s easy. Well, suddenly, because you’re focusing on the right thing

Chris Donald: Thing?

Kath Pay: Everything falls into place and it’s suddenly really easy. So we do this from a, you know, overarching perspective from the the creating a whole strategy for for your email marketing and your digital marketing. But then, also, you do that on a campaign by campaign basis, and then you also then apply that to your testing as well. It it so much of email is common sense that you just need to actually think it through.

Chris Donald: Right. The right place. And have a goal. Right? Have a goal.

Absolutely. Understand your goal and have a goal. Don’t just do it. And don’t just react either. So, right now, there’s a lot of reaction, right, because of what’s happening.

You know, I’m not a big fan for companies putting out messages just for the sake of putting them out. Right? If you need to tell tell your people something, that’s fine, but don’t bleed it to death. I see lots of bad email going out right now. It’s just it’s crazy.

Right? That being said, I think I I think what it oh, so here’s here’s the other thing is, when we write blog posts, we talk about, even like we’re talking right now. Right? This is a good talk because it’s a general generality. We’re not talking about a specific type of business or what we’re talking about here could work for any business.

Right?

Kath Pay: Yep.

Chris Donald: But one of the things I think as an industry, we make a mistake at is, you know, we put out lots of white papers, we put out lots of blog posts and case studies, and but we don’t give context well. Right? Meaning Mhmm. Like, I’ll have someone call me and say, oh, you know, I wanna do browser abandonment. I said, okay.

You don’t have the traffic volume to spend the money to make set it up. It’s just not worth it. Right? The money could be better spent somewhere else. Yes.

House abandonment has a low conversion rate. Right? He said, well, I read an article that Amazon makes x amount of revenue from okay. You’re you’re not Amazon. Alright?

Yeah. Okay. I love you.

Kath Pay: Terrible too though. Yeah. I love you.

Chris Donald: Right. Right. You know? Or or they’ll say, you know, oh, well, this does okay. You know, they have a 1000000 times more traffic than you do.

Right? Yeah. But Yeah. A lot of times, we don’t you know, a lot of times, case studies will be done, and if they’re blind case studies, they don’t even say the name of the company, which is fine, but it doesn’t say, you know, this company is, you know, a 1000 employees, makes, 500,000,000 a year. Yes.

Yes. So what worked for them doesn’t necessarily translate to your small business. Right?

Kath Pay: That’s it.

Chris Donald: Or even your midsize business, it may not. So a lot of the while a lot of the information out there is really good, how does for someone to absorb that and use it in context is one of the other problems. Right? Because people will see a a win somebody had and go, oh, I’m gonna do that.

Kath Pay: Yes. And it doesn’t

Chris Donald: work, or it goes badly. Right?

Kath Pay: And again, this this comes back down to and I’m not being hard on marketers, see, on email marketers here. It comes back to what we’ve just said. Under resourced, under budgeted, under educated. And so therefore, it’s our natural instinct is if we because we we have the drive, we have the desire to educate ourselves, to learn, so we go and read articles. And we do that, we go, oh, okay.

So that’s it. We have this inclination to look for those silver bullets because we don’t have the time, you know, to be yeah. To be really You wanna hit

Chris Donald: a home run. Yeah. You always wanna hit a

Kath Pay: home run. So this is for someone else. Yeah.

Chris Donald: Yeah. I I tell people if and we like it when we hit a home run, and it happens sometimes, but, you know, most games aren’t hit with won with a home run. They won with singles and doubles, meaning

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: Consistent growth, consistent movement, consistent increase of metrics, you know.

Kath Pay: Iterable, you know. Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Donald: Repeatable. Yeah.

Kath Pay: Yeah. So, I mean, this again falls into a lot of what I speak and write about and that’s all about ask questioning. Questioning best practices, so called best practices. Now there are of course and I’ve written extensively on this, I’ve been doing this for the last few years, there There are, of course, valid, best practices, which I call true best practices. Right?

Authenticate. You know, things like that. Right? Get permission. Absolutely.

No one’s going to be arguing. This is it. Right. And we’re talking about things that are beyond legal. Okay?

So we’re talking about best practices, things that work. These are those silver bullets that everyone says that we need to be doing. There are lots of best practices out there which are touted as being best practices, but there actually are cake best practices. So they used to be and they were valid, but now they don’t there’s no reason for them. Right?

Chris Donald: Right.

Kath Pay: Some of them are self serving so that they’ve actually been created and implemented into the industry by a generally a vendor, a technology vendor because it suits them.

Chris Donald: Them.

Kath Pay: Right? Yes. You know, and then there are other ones, like you were just saying, just because it works for someone and then suddenly a trend happens. And no one, you know and I can I can cite you this is a famous, famous happening? Do you remember when the the the websites with the, the carousels first started coming?

Chris Donald: Oh, yeah. The wheelies. Yep. Yep.

Kath Pay: And everyone was just like, how sexy is that? Look at that. Oh, my goodness. Websites. And you’ve got, oh, oh, so The spinning, flaming logo.

And my my competitors are doing it. Oh, I’ve got to do it. So without any sort of research, any testing, any trialing, they all just went and did it and their sales just plummeted. Because that was only afterwards that testing started doing and they realized that the carousels work if if they’re using them for the same product. Right.

Right? So you’ve got 5 different images

Chris Donald: Views of the same product.

Kath Pay: Exactly. Right? You’re educating and everything. But if you’re showing them 1 and then and they’re still going, oh, your sales will plummet. But that’s what happened because we all jumped on the bandwagon going, oh, that looks really good.

Hey, this is really sexy. Just because it’s sexy for a marketer doesn’t mean it’s actually going to translate into being feasible or appealing to the consumer. Yep. So, you know, and that’s another thing. So all of this ends up being that we as email marketers need to take a step back, question things, question.

I I would say whenever I’m teaching a course or speaking, I say whatever I say to you, question me. Right?

Chris Donald: Yes. All the time.

Kath Pay: Don’t just go and blindly go and say what I you know, go and do what I’m telling you to do. Test it. Everything I tell you, test it to see if it works for you. Now, you know, in most cases, I can guarantee you because I’ve done this a lot, it will work for the majority of you, but for some, it won’t because your audiences are different, your products are different, your buying cycles are different, whatever. And there’s there’s some kind of anomaly that’s different.

So never just blindly implement anything, including best practices other than the true best practices, authentication, permission.

Chris Donald: Yep. Yep. So we’ll try to wrap this up here because I I I don’t want people to be stuck listening to our us too long. They’ll probably go crazy. Yeah.

You know, one of the things I always ask people because I’ll ask people the same question all the time, and the question is always why. So, oh, we wanna get this email out today. Why? Why does it have to go out today? Why is this an emergency?

Right?

Kath Pay: Mhmm.

Chris Donald: Well, we’re gonna have a sale, and, oh, okay. So when did you decide this? Right? So it it so it’s a, you know, why are you doing everything, and the why should make you create your goal. So no matter what it is you’re gonna do, whatever campaign, automation, trigger, whatever, why first.

Right? Why? And and the why is because we want this to happen. We want Mhmm. We want some goal.

Okay. So start with the goal and go backwards. Right? How can you get there? And you’re right about best practices.

Right? Even even the known best, some of the known best practices I mean, you could say, if you have ecommerce, having cart abandonment is the best practice. Mhmm. Right? Because you’d be silly not to.

Kath Pay: Mhmm.

Chris Donald: Now, how you do that can be wildly different

Kath Pay: Yes.

Chris Donald: From company to company. Right?

Kath Pay: I agree.

Chris Donald: And and that’s another thing I’ll so I’ve I’ve I’ve kind of gone crazy on card abandonment lately. Right? Because most card abandonments are not set up well, and they’re screwed up, and they don’t plan for anything. You know, it’s a 3 message card abandonment that we run into most times. Sometimes just a one message,

Kath Pay: but

Chris Donald: a 3 message, that’s over in 48 hours. Right? Yeah. First one goes out in an hour, and the second one, 4 to 24 hours, and the next one, 48 hours. Right?

They’re your basic card abandonment program. The problem is most of these companies run 24 hour sales, which means their card abandonment program is broken.

Kath Pay: Yeah.

Chris Donald: Because somebody’s gonna abandon during the sale, and then it’s gonna keep sending them these card abandonment emails when the sale’s over. And that’s gonna piss them off, because now you reminded me to buy something I can’t buy at that price anymore.

Kath Pay: Exactly. Exactly.

Chris Donald: So Yeah. I I’m sorry. I got a little sideways here. But anyway, have goals. Right?

Have really understand why you’re testing, and ask for resources. Find a way to do it. Show revenue. Show how you’re gonna increase revenue or what the goal is is why which is why having a goal is important. Right?

Kath Pay: That’s it.

Chris Donald: And so to wrap this up, first of all, I’d like to thank you very, very much for your time. I know it’s a tough time for everybody, but I I do appreciate it. I I’ve always, found you to be incredibly intelligent. I know we haven’t had lots of interactions because we’re on the other side of the world most of the time. We do see each other here once in a while at the conferences.

Indeed. But I followed you very, very long and and read all your stuff. I’m I’m a big fan. I’m a big voracious reader. So, I read a lot about all the different people, and you were one of the people top on my list to have this interview with.

So I thank you for your time. I thank everybody for listening. If you ever need help, Kath’s agency is a great agency, Holistic Email. Right?

Kath Pay: Email Marketing. Yep.

Chris Donald: Holistic Email Marketing. And what is your website address? Tell them tell them.

Kath Pay: Yeah. Holistic email marketing.com.

Chris Donald: There you go. So, yeah, please, even though she’s an agency, we’re an agency, this is email. We all love each other. It doesn’t matter.

Kath Pay: Yeah. Absolutely.

Chris Donald: Kath, I appreciate your time. No problem.

Kath Pay: Yeah. Right.

Chris Donald: Okay. Alright. Hang on, Jesher. Here. Okay.

Bye bye.