Tips and Tools for Digital Marketing Agencies: Interview with QuickMail

Charles: Hey, hey, hey, this is Charles, hope everybody is having a great day or evening, depending on when you're watching this video. Now today we've got the legend himself, if you're sending any type of cold email, for me there's only one solution, the only solution is with Jeremy Chatelaine and QuickMail.io. Hey, how are you doing today?

Jeremy: Hey, I'm great. How are you doing?

Charles: Doing good, doing good. First of all, tell us the story, how did you get involved in QuickMail or how did you found QuickMail, and what made you decide to go that route?

Jeremy: Well, it's three years ago now, it's quite some time and the funny thing is I actually needed a solution like that. The markets at that time didn't have any great solution, they were kind of workarounds. So, I decided to build a few scripts that were useful for me to do exactly what I wanted in terms of visibility on the email I sent, proper detection of replies, and things like that. And believe it or not, I never actually planned to sell it. And I was actually contacting financial planners in Australia and yeah, found out all good in the end that's pretty much how it started.

Charles: Sweet. So, well, first of all, what were you selling to those guys in Australia? What were you selling the financial planners?

Jeremy: I had no idea. I mean, I was just trying literally to start a new business, so, all I was trying to get ... And it's pretty close to what digital marketing agencies are doing, actually, but what I was trying to do is find as many financial planners as I could get hold of and for that I needed a system to send an email and a follow-up if they don't reply and my time was limited to work on my venture, because I also was running a full-time job and I realized that 25% of my time was sending those emails and the follow-up and I thought it was ridiculous. So, I decided to automate that and here we are.

Charles: I can tell you, as a user of about every mailing platform you can ever think of, QuickMail has been, hands down, my absolute favorite, because it actually works, which is a whole new story in and of itself. Now, with that said, for those of you that have an agency and I'm sure you're thinking, "Well, Charles, I can't send email. Jeremy, I can't send email because people don't know me." That's the purpose of a cold email, to get to know somebody.

So, with that said, let's just run through a scenario. What do you think are the big variables in success with cold email? Do you think it's the list? Is it the emails? What makes some ... I'll tell you this, guys, we rolled out a QuickMail campaign, Thursday to today, we're getting like a 51% open rate, so it absolutely works. But what are the variables that allow some people to have massive success, while other people completely just fall off the face of the ...

Jeremy: That's a great question, and we had a cast with Jack, who is also an agency owner actually. And so, he does the sort of like agency side and I do sort of like tech side and understanding of the business and so on.

And we had a conversation and we came off agreeing that it's almost like a 50/50 ... Well, actually, not like 50/50, sorry. It's more like the 80/20, kind of, where we think that success is attributed 80% to the list of people you're contacting and 20% to your actual copy and your value proposition, what you're actually proposing in the email.

I think I attribute a lot of the success mostly, not mostly, but mainly to your mindset and how you approach your situation. A lot of people were trying to sell something very quickly instead of just building a relationship and if you come from the point of, "I'm going to try to build a relationship with this person, I really want to start a conversation, then you're more open to some of the strategies that will actually be successful in the long run.

And if you have a great list, then your copy can be okay, so-so as long as you're really coming from a point of, or frame of mind where you're just trying to start a conversation with another human being.

Charles: I think that is 100% accurate and like you said, it comes down to, are you actually being a ... This is the problem, people use automated systems to send to people they don't know, saying, "Give me money, as you open this email, please give me large amounts of money. You don't know me..."

Jeremy: Buy button at the end.

Charles: Yes, yes, the big orange buy button that goes back and forth with a little scan and it's really about starting that ... Really, just starting that conversation initially and it's not about me. It's about them. What do they need, what do they want and how can I assist them in getting their goals? I think that was just right on the money.

Jeremy: Absolutely. And what's interesting as well is, a lot of people will try to address this lack of understanding of who they're contacting and the value they have to propose to them by volume. And I was one of the ... One of the past webinars I did, we very quickly launched an Excel spreadsheet where it's, "Okay, well, here's a number of leads you're starting or prospect you're contacting, then here's the conversion, here's the positive to negative reply rate," and we just played around with numbers, just give an average number and it's very telling that you don't need a large volume to actually get a certain number of prospect, of leads per week. People who are actually interested in talking to you.

You could very well get away with 20 and have your business flourishing. It really depends on the quality of your list and then the value proposition. But then like you said, the framing in terms of, "Okay, there is an exchange here, this is what I propose as an exchange."

Charles: I'll tell you a quite embarrassing story about me and cold emails.

Jeremy: We all have one. We all have one, that's for sure.

Charles: This one is one of those things where, when somebody says it, it's kind of like, "ow." Working with a company, we were helping them with their Facebook and their Google, just helping them set their ads up.

And we're in the meeting and he goes to the person, whoever is in charge of cold email and they're having this conversation about the amount of emails that are sent out. He goes, "Charles, do you have anything to add to this?" I'm like, "Man, you're going to get in trouble. It's spam, it's cold emails, you're going to go to jail," I said, "And you're not going to make any money because there's no relationship, they don't know you from Adam's house cat."

And I remember the guy looking at me, going, "Remind me not to ask you anything." He says, "We do a few million dollars from this stuff. You need to stick to Google and you need to stick to Facebook." And at that point, like, a few million dollars from cold email? That really, for me, was that journey ... Because I had always assumed, you can't send email, it's spam. But in the world of B2B, you're actually providing value, so that's super exciting.

Well, let's just say right now I want to get started with cold email. I want to get started ... First of all, guys, if you want to get started, just let me save you the time and the hassle. Just start with QuickMail.io. I don't care if there's a cheaper solution or if you've got some magic script that you install on your server, just start with QuickMail.io. You guys-

Jeremy: We haven't changed our price for quite some time as well. So, we keep on adding really cool features and stuff but never bothered changing our price, actually. So, it becomes like a good bargain.

Charles: Dude, it's a steal of a bargain. I will put it to you like this. I've used it before, I have clients that used it before, when I signed up ... Well, how about this. When you sign up, this is the key to making it work. I understand that it's ... QuickMail is the tool, it's like the Ferrari. If you get in the Ferrari with no license, you're going to put it in the ditch pretty quickly. If you come into it with the mindset of, "I'm going to provide value to people, I've got a list."

Now, I will tell you, we got the list from Find That Lead and we actually scraped our own data and this is the key to, I think, one of the big aspects that sets QuickMail apart. You have a Bright Verify integration.

Jeremy: Correct.

Charles: And I'm going to tell you this, this is embarrassing for me. I load up 1,900 emails. Mentally, I scrape 1,900 off of a website and got it from a data provider. Mentally, 1,900 are 100% valid, every email is perfect. I load it into QuickMail, hit Bright Verify and you guys are used to, you have to do some finagling but you guys actually have an API connection, so, within a couple minutes, I'm like, half my list that I knew was perfect and great and these people were going to offer me large sums of money, turns out the emails aren't even valid or they're bad emails or questionable.

That is something I absolutely love about QuickMail, because you can load the list and you're going to know pretty quickly and I think at this point we're hitting maybe two bounces a day, because of that.

So, if I'm getting started, what would be the first steps you would tell me to do to go get clients with cold email? Other than sign up for QuickMail.io?

Jeremy: Well, this is the funny thing. I would actually step one step back, first of all. The first thing I probably would do is I would check the checklist that we have on our website, so, QuickMail.io/Checklist and then you find, I don't know, 15, 16 points and that may be a lot to swallow at the beginning, but try to go through that, because if you don't, then chances are high that you're going to make one of those mistakes.

The first one on the list is, obviously, don't use your own domain. So, if you actually want to do cold email from CompanyABC.com, don't actually go and contact cold people you never actually had a conversation with with just ABC.com. The reason for that is there is a chance, especially at the beginning, when you're not sure how your value proposition resonates, how you're actually collecting those leads and things like that.

I would say don't endanger your main domain, because if you end up having your domain blacklisted, then this is kind of an extra pain for the business and then you say, "Okay, never again doing cold email ever."

But actually, if you go ahead, and it's become common practice when I actually started doing that, it was very original, but nowadays this is very common practice. So, if you go to ABC.com, just go ahead, open ABC.net, ABC.co, ABCD.co, get ABC.com, whatever. But get another domain that you're going to dedicate, make a conscious effort, like, "Hey, this is for cold email practices."

Now, once you've got that, what I would say is the first thing you'll do is you actually don't contact cold prospects. You actually load your list of existing clients, and then you try to re-engage them. The reason for that is, first of all, you're going to warm up your domain, so other spam filter will look at your domain and say, "Oh, it's not that new, it's got some traffic on it, it all looks good. And it's got some reply as well, so Google will be happy about your domain." So everything will look really good.

And at the same time, most of the time, especially within agencies, sometimes you can re-activate some of your old clients. So, you may also end up with more business. So, it's a great way to get started. Once you've done that, then you can go ahead and then do ... So, the second thing, once you've done all of this, you're already in a super good shape.

Then, the next thing I would do is try to communicate with those new customers or the new cold prospects you never talked to, the same sort of way you did with your existing clients.

Because the tone will change, the way you're going to contact them will actually be changed. The mindset will change. It's not going to be like someone completely new, and then try to figure out what one of the clients you love working with, and just let them know like, hey, you've got a great offer you'd like to rework with them one way or another and then go ahead with that.

And I think you'll have much better chance of success, if you go about it that way, rather than just going in and then say, I've gathered my list of prospect. Let's blast an email and see if they want to buy it. That one usually doesn't work at all.

Charles: Sweet. Yeah, unfortunately, I've made those mistakes now.

Jeremy: We all did.

Charles: I'll tell, you, I'll put it to you like this, guys, when I was looking at this stuff and looking at the metrics you guys were talking about, and guys, if you all aren't familiar with the podcast, guys, here’s a link to their podcast, because you guys have a great podcast and I was listening to the podcast and you all were talking metrics and you all were like, you know, 50% cold email open rates, I'm thinking, "I don't get those open rates on people who've opted into my email address and have given me money."

And I followed exactly what you did, guys, the steps when you're setting up and all the domain keys and some of the technical stuff, I followed it. And I'm like, "Okay, I'm just going to follow your advice, there's no way I'm going to get 50%, just because I can't get that with my people who have given me money."

And I load it up, I sent, I don't know, maybe 50, 60 emails and I ramp it up and I'm like, lo and behold, we're getting like, I think 50, 51% opens and I'm sitting there going like, and this is across multiple emails. This isn't just like, Charles did a blast.

I did ... It's literally like, email one, email two, email three and email four and I'm sitting here going, "Holy smokes, this works. It works amazingly well." We've actually ... As a side note, dude, we've closed two contracts this week.

Jeremy: Congrats.

Charles: I can tell you, I know it came from, I can track it back to QuickMail.

Jeremy: Amazing.

Charles: So, that's a huge difference. So, guys, getting started, you want agency clients, pick your niche, exactly like he said. You've got Australian certified financial planners, our financial guys. Take your target market, gather your list, get QuickMail.

Now, there are two plans. What is the big difference between the two plans? First of all, I'm going to tell you, QuickMail is very, very, very under-priced for what it does. I was expecting ... For the features you've got, this could've easily been a $500 a month enterprise solution. It really is that big of a deal. So, what is the difference between the two plans and which one do you suggest?

Jeremy: Okay, great question. So, we do have two plans and the main reason for it is 69 bucks a month is actually quite pricey for a new startup just starting. It's not for ... You're mentioning you just landed two clients, so it pays for itself, right?

Charles: Yes.

Jeremy: Very easily, very quickly and that's what most of the existing business with a clear pipeline have. I mean, just like a side note, that's where ... The way QuickMail is actually positioning itself is more into a pipeline and this is a big difference and a big shift in mindset as well, from a traditional marketing automation where you create your campaign, you blast and then you see what comes. You deal with all the replies, if you got replies, and then you do another blast or you carry on.

Which, QuickMail is more like a pipeline approach where you actually set up things automatically and then every day we contact a certain amount of people, so then you'll get your sort of recurring number of answers without never going into, "Oh, I don't have any answer this week, I need to restart the campaign and wait three weeks until the results come."

So, it's like, this is sort of like a streamlined thing. Now, we do have two plans. So, one for those people starting with auto mail, not necessarily having a lot of money to invest into it and that's what we call a basic plan and basically, this is just a core thing of QuickMail, which is you send an email, it checks the replies, it does all those things like that.

But if you want to be a bit more, let's say, if you are a bit more technical or if you need a bit more tech support in that sense ... It's not support, but if you need more ... There is certain features and functionalities that you may want. Like, for example, if you want to integrate with your CRM, for example, then you can use Zapier and Zapier is an interface between QuickMail and whatever other software that is supported on Zapier.

You got a few things like that, you've got workflow as well, that allow you to sort of like, customize what happens when something happens in QuickMail. You've got plenty of other things like that, like, when you want to take it one step ... One step ... And the thing is, you can very quickly and easily move from one plan to another.

So, if you are on, for example, the basic plan and then you say, "Hey, it'd be great to have some variations," and then add some conditions to them and stuff like that, then maybe that's a time to consider moving to pro. So, you don’t have to make a decision right now. You can switch and everything is great, it's easy to find what you're spending on each plan, so it's very fair, I'd say, to the user. We're not trying to force-feed you into one plan.

That said, a vast majority of the users actually do take the pro plan, the $69, and a lot of digital marketing agencies too. So, maybe I need to visit at some point the basic plan, which is just an imbalance. And then everyone just rushing for the pro plan. But hey, I got other things to think of right now than the pricing stuff and so on, so I don't see that changing any time super soon.

Charles: I can tell you guys, when I signed up for it, it's one of those things, when you automatically sign up for things, sometimes you're wondering, "Do I need this feature? Do I need that feature?" And I was looking at it, I was sitting here going, even on the basic plan, there's 200 people per day you can contact, which is really actually a lot of people.

Jeremy: I think we are one of the most generous one in terms of number of contacts and that doesn't make me proud at all, because really, I should encourage people to more spend time on their getting the hot leads off a list of hot leads instead of actually trying to blast, but hey, that's where we are and it's kind of useful for the follow-ups as well that keeps on accumulating with automated sequences and stuff. Sorry about that, I cut you off.

Charles: And I think, I think that's brilliant from that standpoint. Because I looked at 200 leads, and I'm thinking, let's just say there are five sequences, 200 leads every few days, you've got ... Let's just say every few days you get approximately 200 emails going out over five days, I'm like, that's a lot of touch points. And for me, 200 would ... And for most people I know, 200 is plenty. I looked at the pro plan and the pro plan had a couple things that, to me, were like, "This is truly a no brainer."

It wasn't necessarily that it gave you more ... You do have more volume, but you have it set up in such a way that you can do the lead scoring and when you first log in to QuickMail, it's like, "set up the lead scoring." You get so many points for people that open, click, engage or reply and we set those up across the platform and I wasn't totally sure, I mean, we've used lead scoring from a marketing automation standpoint, but I kept thinking, "This is cold email, I'm not sure how well it will do." It is fabulous. It really makes a difference.

Because now, we're sitting here, we've got four emails in the sequence and we're adding probably another four more. I can look at it and say, "These cats are actually opening, clicking, engaging." And I'm like, that is like, this is the hot list to which these are the people I could call, I could email out of sequence, "Hey Bob, just want to touch bases, blah blah blah." Dude, that in itself is unbelievably valued.

The second reason I absolutely had to go with the pro plan was the ability to do variations and split testing your emails. I was expecting it to be very rudimentary, like, you have the ability to send two totally different email body copies, totally different subject lines, and guys, I'm going to tell you, whatever subject like you think is the best, when you're testing it, you will quickly realize you can beat it.

What I personally picked as the very best subject line was actually the loser in the campaign. I immediately just deleted that email and now I'm like, with just 1,000 prospects, we're quickly saying this is the funnel that gets the most clicks, the most opens and most importantly, the most engagement.

So, I will tell you guys, jump on QuickMail.io, get the pro plan, it's worth it, I can't stress to you enough. Also, guys, listen to their podcast. You and your partner have an amazing podcast, it is cold email ... It's like a PhD in cold email. If you're coming in thinking, "It's not going to work for me," listen to the podcast. You guys are just amazing, I absolutely love it. And if you want to find out more about QuickMail.io, how can we check it out and go from there?

Jeremy: Well, just QuickMail.io, there is a 14-day trial, so you can basically check it out for yourself if it works for you and other than that, then yes, look at the podcast because no matter what tool you're going to go with, the podcast will always be useful for you.

Charles: Yes.

Jeremy: And if you do like it, just leave us a review on iTunes so other people may also benefit from it.

Charles: Sweet. Guys, I'm going to tell you that we're using QuickMail.io, absolutely love it. I've used about everything else on the planet that I can afford and I've had enterprise email products that sucked, I've had free scripts that completely did nothing but get me banned and QuickMail.io, we've had this account going since last Thursday, your support is amazing, Alvin is your ultrasonic wing guy that pretty much...

Jeremy: He's awesome.

Charles: He is on the spot every single time. You guys have just amazing documentation, I just absolutely love it and guys, if you want to run your agency, you want to get new clients, check out QuickMail. And this is something ... For those of you that go, "Charles, but I'm only using Facebook." Okay. Let me just present this to you.

Use QuickMail, send the emails, when somebody visits your site, then your re-marketing campaign kicks in and QuickMail is like the ignition, it gets people to your page. Re-market to them in Facebook, re-market to them in AdWords, on YouTube, re-market to them everywhere. But QuickMail is that initial jolt to get people to your page to see who you are.

So, guys, thank you, check out QuickMail.io, guys, have a good one, this is Charles, talk to you later.