Joe Casabona: Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about my free weekly newsletter called Build Something Weekly. Each week, Monday mornings generally, you will get an email with a little bit of insight around WordPress and/or podcasting, you’ll get the latest of these episodes with the top takeaways, show notes, and more, and you’ll get the latest content from the previous week. You also get a recommendation. It is action-packed for your Monday mornings, it is free, and it is weekly. And you can sign up over at buildsomething.email. Check it out. It’s a free weekly newsletter over a buildsomething.email.
Intro: Something I, and perhaps you, I do terribly is email marketing. I’m worried I’m not going to segment my list the right way, that I email my list too much, and that what I send is not aligned with what they signed up for. But let me tell you, after this conversation with Samar Owais, I feel a lot better.
Samar is an email expert, and we cover a lot of ground from setting up your welcome sequence to when you should sell to your list and how to segment This is a mini masterclass in email marketing and it’s one of my favorite episodes to date. So definitely sit back relax and take notes.
Plus, in Build Something More, we talk about how Apple is changing the way we measure email marketing success. You’ll be able to find all of the show notes for this episode over at howibuilt.it/241. Thanks to our sponsors, textexpander, and Nexcess.
And now let’s get on with the interview with Samar.
Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. It’s Episode 241. Today’s sponsors are Nexcess and TextExpander.
And I am really excited because today my guest is Samar Owais. We’re going to be talking about email audits for ecommerce brands. Samar is an email conversion strategist at Emails Done Right. And if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I am not doing my emails right at all. So I’m excited to talk to Samar. Samar, how are you today?
Samar Owais: I am very well. Thank you for having me, Joe.
Joe Casabona: My pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show. A little behind the scenes how the sausage gets made. I saw Samar tweeted that she was looking to be on more podcasts. And so whenever someone tweets that, I check them out. And Samar happens to solve a problem that I am trying to solve at the moment. So perfect timing. I’m grateful to whoever retweeted that. It was either Jay Klaus or maybe Jason Resnick. Someone like that. So whoever it was.
Samar Owais: I think it was Jason. Quite a few people, to be honest. I was blown away by all the people retweeting, liking, vouching for me. I was blown away. When I sent out that tweet, I thought I’d book two or three. I have ended up booking 14.
Joe Casabona: That’s incredible.
Samar Owais: And the requests keep coming in. I keep saying yes, because this is my dream come true. Like I do want to speak on more podcasts.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, this is great. I mean, for anybody listening, going on podcasts is a great way to raise awareness about what you do and establish expertise in certain areas. As long as you do it right. If you just go on and talk about your product, and how people should buy your product, it’s not going to work out. But if you show people you know what you’re talking about… I have hired people from hearing them on podcasts. So yeah.
So this is great. Well, I’m very grateful to Jason Resnick. I’ll link his episode of the show in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/241. But first, let’s talk about you Samar. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Samar Owais: Yeah, absolutely. I am an email conversion strategist for SAS and eCommerce brands. I have worked with companies like HubSpot, Drip, Pinterest to help them with their emails, whether that’s onboarding or retention. And so that’s what I focus on on the SAS side.
On the eCommerce side, my focus and specialization is in lifecycle emails. So lifecycle emails are the automated emails you get that a brand sets up, right? So when somebody signs up for your newsletter, what emails are they going to get? When somebody buys something from you, what emails are they going to get? So I build out all these email journeys for brands and then we execute them.
Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s amazing. So let’s talk a little bit about the lifecycle emails. Because I think this is probably… for a little bit of background, people who listen to the show are mostly freelancers and small business owners. Many of them do client services, I suspect some of them also sell products. I happen to do a little bit of both.
And so the lifecycle emails is something we were talking in the pre-show about how important they are. Because I’m a web developer by trade, and so I set up my own LMS using WordPress. I connected ConvertKit to it to make sure like all my people were tagged or whatever.
But I noticed that the way I configured my emails and I did not test this myself, which is on me, people when they signed up, especially for my membership, they would get about 10 emails. The receipt, the invoice or whatever, like the confirmation of payment, the account email, the welcome email, and then an email for every course that I offer, because members are automatically enrolled in every course.
So luckily, it’s like only eight courses for me. Oh, and then they would get an email from Castos about the private podcast feed. So they were getting about 10 emails, which is a terrible first impression to make. So let’s start at the beginning.
Let’s say I’m setting up my own eCommerce store to sell courses, I am trying to build my audience and I’ve sold services for a little bit, so I have like a Twitter following, I have a small email list. What’s my first step in setting up a life cycle email sequence?
Samar Owais: All right, I would suggest that you take it from the top. And that all starts from your website. What happens when somebody lands on your website? What offer are you making them? And that usually means the pop-up offer, the signup incentive to the newsletter.
For course creators or service-based businesses, it’s usually some kind of a download or an email course that jumps out over the course of a week or something along those lines. That is your signup incentive. That is the offer that people are going to see when they land on your website.
And if you’re building your audience, then your sole goal is to grow your email list. And so you make that offer as attractive as possible. But make sure that whatever promise you’re making in that pop-up or in your offer, it carries through in the welcome email.
So the first step is obviously sending the welcome sequence, right? Because there’s somebody who just signed up for your newsletter, now what are you going to send them? And the answer is a welcome sequence. And this is where you start thinking, “Okay, what is the main goal of my welcome sequence? What do I want them to do after receiving my emails? Is it check out my courses? Is it contact me for services? Do I want to sell a small product type service that I want them to buy?” You make that decision first and then you plan your emails? So that happens.
After that, dependent on what you want them to do, then you move to the next step. So if you want them to buy your courses, then you need to decide, Okay, what course are they buying? And what emails does that somebody who buys that course, what emails do they need to receive next? So you’re basically mapping out the entire email journey of your subscriber. So all the touchpoints where you want to give them information or have them make a decision that all turns into emails or email sequences.
So for courses, you know, it could be like a post-purchase obviously, it could be also… if you find that somebody… I’m jumping ahead of myself so I’m going to slow down a little bit. There’s also the abandoned cart, if you want to go that route.
And also there is then a sales sequence that goes out when somebody doesn’t buy from your welcome sequence. Because as important as it is to plan for the conversions, it is equally important to plan for the non-conversions. I mean, don’t quote me on this, but at least 80% of your audience is not doing what you want them to do, they’re not buying your courses, they’re not clicking through on whatever you want them to do.
So what are you going to do when the welcome sequence is over and they haven’t bought your course or your product or service or whatever else you wanted them to do? So create a plan for that. And then create an email sequence for that as well.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. For those of you who are listening and can’t see what I’m doing, I’m kind of drawing a diagram. Usually, I’m just taking notes in Evernote or Notion or whatever tool I happen to be using that week. But I’m actually like drawing out some of the things that Samar is talking about here.
Because I think the main takeaway here is the start with your goal, right? Start with why. Why are you sending up this this email sequence? And this is certainly a mistake that I’ve made. Because I have the content upgrades, the 52 ideas for episodes. If you’re a podcaster and you are struggling and come up with ideas, here is one for each week of the year.
And then I just kind of get them into a generic sequence that doesn’t really go anywhere. So maybe my follow-up question here is, how soon is too soon to pop the question? The question being: will you buy my course or whatever? How soon is too soon to sell to them?
Samar Owais: In the welcome email.
Joe Casabona: Okay, cool.
Samar Owais: Don’t sell them in the welcome email. Here’s the thing. So I would say conversion is a single event. But for that single event to take place, you need to offer your audience multiple opportunities. And that is where an email sequence comes in. It’s a number of emails that go out. So maybe don’t sell in the welcome email, but there’s no law that says you cannot sell in any of the other emails.
A welcome sequence is a relationship-building exercise, almost. And so you’re getting your audience familiar with you, you’re building trust, you’re establishing expectations, and you’re telling them about yourself. And then the last step or even during any of these steps, you need to start talking about how you can help them. Because they don’t really care about you beyond finding out okay, who is Joe, and what does he do? But the last question is, how can he help me? That question is what your emails need to be focusing on.
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Joe Casabona: I’ve fallen into this too. Because you know, you sign up for like… an example is Untucked. It’s a great brand for button-down shirts for husky guys. Well, I guess for all guys, but they fit me especially well. They email me every single day with a sale. So I think that some people worry that they don’t want to sell to their audience too much.
But the other side of that token is I haven’t unsubscribed from Untucked emails. I just ignore them. And then I’m like, “Oh, well, I mean 50% off their fall collection. That sounds good. And I need new shirts.” So what would you say to somebody who says, “I’m worried I’m going to sell too much to my audience.”
Samar Owais: I would say look at Untucked. They’re doing a terrible job at selling but they’re still doing it. I have a fundamental problem with eCommerce brands offering discounts. And I get it. I work with a lot of small newer eCommerce brands owned by women or people of color. And so I get it. And I get that until when you’re building your list and you’re just starting out up to 15,000 subscribers, I’m okay. I will not question you offering a sale as a sign of incentive.
But beyond that point, you need to start focusing on building relationships. Because you managed to buy 15,000 subscribers, you’ve managed to build a customer base. Now it’s time to start building a relationship with them. And 15,000 is enough of a number to start seeing money from your emails. So think about value. What value can you provide? Is it free shipping over $30? or $50? Is it free international shipping over $100? Is it a quiz, right?
So for apparel brands, sizing is a huge issue. I have never been able to order a jeans online that fit me the first time I ordered it. For some reason, jeans buying is beyond me, or for at least my body type. And so I imagine it’s the same for clothes, it’s the same for skincare brands. So focus on your audience’s biggest problem or the friction they’re feeling when they’re buying from you, and then see how you can sort it out with an offer. That is not a discount; that is something else.
So quizzes performed incredibly well, free Shipping is great. Extra samples or a free gift is also wonderful. And I share this example of my favorite… my favorite example. I was consulting with a brand and they had a free sample. It was a skincare brand. They had a free sample, and people only had to pay shipping, which was maybe $7 or $14. I forget. And it was not converting. It wasn’t doing well at all.
So we flipped the idea, and we instead of asking people to pay for shipping, we put a price on the sample, and we made the shipping free. And it started converting like crazy.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Samar Owais: So you need to-
Joe Casabona: Do you think it’s…”
Samar Owais: Yeah, go ahead.
Joe Casabona: Do you think it’s because at that point the person that skin in the game, forgive my pun, I guess, it’s because they shelled out a little bit of money so they were personally invested at that point?
Samar Owais: I think it’s more to do with perception. Because when you’re giving away something for free, people don’t value it that much. Especially if it’s a product. So when we put a price on that sample pack, people started taking it seriously.
Joe Casabona: I love that. I love that. And it makes sense, right? Because how many free trials have you signed up for have the listener signed up for software as a service that then you just abandoned later? Because probably because you never tried it. Right?
Samar Owais: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: I’m going to sign up because it’s free and then I’m not going to use it. And then they’re going to be like, “Well, let’s extend…” Canva does this, right?
Samar Owais: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: I paid for it for a little while. Now I use a different service called Design Pickle. And every so often, they’re like, “Hey, why don’t we give you 30 more days of being a pro?” And I’m like, “Great, I have a free month of this thing and I’m probably not going to pay for it afterwards anymore.”
Samar Owais: Yeah, that happens. So this is where strategy comes in. And planning. So if you have somebody who was paying for your service and is not anymore, instead of throwing a free month at them, reach out to them and ask, “What made you stop paying? What made you unsubscribe?” Because I believe in ways of customer research, and qualitative data gives you insights into problems before they become problems.
And so if you set up those emails… and then you don’t have to do it manually. Just set it up. Somebody who cancels, then send out an email to them. And if you really feel strongly about offering a 30-day thing, then yes, give them the option. Would you like 30 days off? Or if not, then will you please tell us what made you stop using.
Joe Casabona: Got you. I love that. I always want to know… well, I can guess no. When people unsubscribe from my weekly email, but I always want to be like, “I want to email them and ask them but they’ve unsubscribed.”
But for the most part, people who are unsubscribing from my weekly email are people who like signed up for a free giveaway like two years ago. Because like contests, maybe you can… I guess you can either tell me why this is wrong or if my perception is right. But I suspect that giveaways are a terrible way to build your email list unless it’s like a relevant giveaway.
Samar Owais: No, I agree. Because people who are not even interested, everybody loves a giveaway. So those people who are not your target audience won’t sign up just because we like what he’s giving away.
Joe Casabona: Free stuff.
Samar Owais: Yeah. And so I feel like that’s almost a counterintuitive way of building your audience.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s really good. Now that said, I’m doing a giveaway right now. But it’s to increase the subscribers on my YouTube channel. Like I reviewed a microphone and I’m giving away that microphone. So my goal was not to build my list but they can get more entry-
Samar Owais: Medium also plays a huge role. So for YouTube, that’s a brilliant strategy. For emails, it’s not so much. And the reason I say that is because your pay for subscribers. And if you do a lot of giveaways and you grow your list massively, a significant portion of your list is not going to be your ideal audience, and then you’re just paying for them. So it’s an expensive misstep to me.
Joe Casabona: That’s a great point. And I guess while we’re here, I listened to like the Deliverability Podcast by ConvertKit. They always talk about cold subscribers and cleaning your list. How often should you do that? I’ve heard their strategy is like, “Well just send them an email and ask if they still want to be on the list or whatever.” But if they’re not opening your emails, why would they open that one? Right?
Samar Owais: Exactly. Okay. So it depends on how fast your list is growing. So if your list growth is, you know, you’ve got ads running, all of that, you’re adding maybe 200, 300 people a day or a week, then you need to clean your list every six months.
There are two schools of thought here. One is you create a re-engagement sequence and you send out an email encouraging them to click through or do something on your emails to show that they’re still opening and reading. Open rates are gone now, so we need to focus on the clicks.
The other is that if somebody hasn’t opened your email for six months or three months, they’re not going to start opening anytime soon. So just quietly take them off your list. You don’t have to make a big deal out of it. But because if you’re actively growing your list, 80% of your attention needs to be on building a relationship with those warm subscribers. The cold ones, yes.
But an aging list is a reality that everybody who has emails list beyond the one-year mark has to deal with. And that’s okay. People evolve, people change, life happens. It’s only natural. Unsubscribes aren’t a bad thing. So either encourage people to unsubscribe or just ping them out if they haven’t [inaudible 00:22:32].
Joe Casabona: I think that’s so great. And this is another point to the sales emails. I send out a sales sequence every so often. And I used to like live and die by unsubscribes. And I’m like, People who are unsubscribing, I was paying for and we’re never going to buy from me. It was a bad relationship that I’m glad to no longer be a part of.
Samar Owais: Absolutely.
Joe Casabona: Now, you mentioned open rates are gone now. I would love to talk more about that in Build Something More. As we record this, iOS 15 just rolled out and I suspect it has something to do with that. So if you are not a member of the Creator Crew, you can sign up over at buildsomething.club for just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. That will give you ad-free extended episodes early as well as a bunch of other fun stuff. Does that sound good, Samar, to talk about that and Build Something More?
Samar Owais: Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. Awesome. I’m really excited about that one. Because just a tease one that was announced in June 2021, for those who are listening well into the future, there was a lot of doom and gloom around that announcement. Awesome.
Well, we covered a lot of ground already. So lifecycle emails. You mentioned the welcome sequence. You said don’t sell in the welcome email. But by the end of the welcome sequence, hey, if you liked what I’m talking about, and you already have a podcast but you want to improve it, check out my podcast audit. Or if you haven’t launched a podcast, check out my Podcast Liftoff Course. It’s just 79 bucks to teach you how to launch a podcast.
So how does one get to know their audience? Because I’ve heard conflicting opinions on this. People like Brennan Dunn think that you should never use tags for anything, that you should always use custom fields. Jason Resnick, who we were talking about earlier in the show, has this really interesting, not rubric, but a naming convention for his tags. Doesn’t matter as long as you’re getting to know them? Am I putting too much weight on getting to know my audience? What are your opinions on that?
Samar Owais: Absolutely not. One thing. The best thing is to segment them when they’re signing up. It will slow down your list grow. There is no denying that. But the people who will sign up will take the time to select who they are within your list when they’re signing up, you will be able to send them a much more personalized experience. But if you are not asking for that, if all you’re asking is for the first name and the email or just the email, then you can ask them to self-segment in the welcome email.
So what the welcome email does is it delivers on the promise that was made in the pop-up box. And then it sets expectations on what’s to come. And then you can do other things as well as long as you’re not selling. I want to circle back to that as well. The welcome email is the only one I recommend you don’t tell at. Everything else…
You can start hinting on your programs in other emails. So any value-providing email that you hit at, you can start linking to your product even if you’re not actively selling. Or you could say in the PS, “Hey, did you know that I have this thing about podcasts?” Of course, check it out.” Start teasing the offer before you segue into hardcore selling.
Joe Casabona: Got you.
Samar Owais: And remember that thing about offering subscribers multiple opportunities to buy from you, this is what… and that’s why sequences are so perfect. You don’t have to wait until the last email to make a sale. You can start mentioning it at different points throughout that sequence.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. So this is really good information. Segmenting your audience when you sign up. This could be… well maybe I’m a unique case but I don’t think I am. I have a couple of different offerings that are pretty discreet. So like I have a course on how to use the Block Editor in WordPress and I have a content upgrade that’s basically how to prepare for full site editing.
Then I’m mostly moving towards the podcast base now and I have a couple of content upgrades. So segmenting based on who picks those downloads. I’m probably not going to throw them both into the same bucket. But then you say in your welcome sequence you can segment even more. So in the welcome email for the podcast if I could say, “Do you have a podcast? Do you want to launch a podcast? Did you start and stop a podcast?” That’s a way for me to segment.
Samar Owais: Absolutely.
Joe Casabona: So how much information should I get? Should it be based on my offers? Or should it be based on just stuff I might want to know in the future?
Samar Owais: So I fall in the camp of getting to know your subscribers. Who are they? Because ultimately we’re making offers and courses for our audience. And if you don’t know who they are, if you don’t know what their problems are, then our offers might not convert as well.
Joe Casabona: Got you.
Samar Owais: The way I approach it is I want to know who you are. So when we’re talking about the Emails Done Right newsletter, I have three distinct audiences. So there are SAS, founders, and marketers, they are eCommerce brands, or they’re marketing people or they’re copywriters.
The welcome email, mine is like… I’m a wordy person. So mine is like not your cookie-cutter small one. It is maybe three 300, 350 words. But at the end of it is something along the lines of “tell me who you are” or like, “choose what describes you best.” Something along those lines.
So it says, “I’m a SAS founder or marketer, I’m an ecommerce brand. I’m a copywriter.” And the fourth option is “I have FOMO send me all your emails.” Yes. Now I remember what the question is. So the question is, choose what you’re most interested in so that I send you emails. That was the premise of missing.
I knew that these were the three people that I wanted to target. This was who the newsletter was for. And so I started segmenting through that. And it really, really helped when I created a course on email strategy for copywriters. Because then the launch emails are only going to the copywriters. The SAS founders and the eCommerce brands are not getting those emails because that offer is not relevant to them.
Joe Casabona: Got you. Got you. That makes a ton of sense. So my follow-up question now is you specifically segmented “I have FOMO send, me everything.” Like I said, I have some tags. I have some segments of my audience. Students is one, members is another, people interested in podcasting, people interested in WordPress more or less.
But then I have a weekly email that goes out to everyone. The weekly newsletter, is this a misstep on my part? Should I be sending maybe two different newsletters to two…?
Samar Owais: No. So the weekly newsletter goes out for everybody. I follow the same rule.
Joe Casabona: Okay. Okay, great.
Samar Owais: Unless my email is specifically for eCommerce, then I just have to ask people. Because I know it’s going to them.
Joe Casabona: Got you.
Samar Owais: But other than that, it goes out to everybody. And the reason I included “I have FOMO, send me everything” is because those are my VIPs. Those people are so interested in what I’m saying that they want to hear everything. So if I want to do a little bit of market research or whatever course I’m making next or a service that I’m offering, I know that I can go to them. I can just email them and ask for help.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. Wow, that’s so smart. That’s so smart. I love that. Amazing. Now I’m going to ask you, as we kind of come towards the end here. I mean, you’ve given us a ton of great advice. We’re going to get to actionable tips.
But my last question, I’m asking for a friend. What if their ESP and the way it’s set up in their tags in their segments it’s just like a complete mess? They’ve got like dozens of tags and maybe everybody’s not properly tagged. Is this something that you see a lot and how can one fix it?
Samar Owais: If you open up my ConvertKit, you just described my situation.
Joe Casabona: Okay. I feel less bad now.
Samar Owais: I am an email person but my zone of genius is email strategy and copy. I have made a mess of my ConvertKit account. And so on my to-do list is either migrate to another ESP or hire somebody to clean it up. And honestly, if you have a profitable newsletter and you’re selling, I would suggest you hire somebody to do this for you.
If not, then I would suggest focusing on grouping your segments of tags into a segment. And this is something that I recently learned because I’m preparing for my course’s next launch. And so I realized that I have all of these different tags related to copywriters. So somehow at some point, I must have set up an email where people will, you know, if they click through to this tag them as new copywriters or people who are interested in eCommerce or people who are interested in the course and all that.
So copywriters divided into 15 other tags. And so I turn them into one segment. That way I’m sending the email. When I want something related to the copywriters, I’m choosing that segment instead of [inaudible 00:32:53].
Joe Casabona: Okay. I did something very similar, where for a while I was just like, “Every link they click on, tag them as interested in whatever.” And I’m like, “This is not great for me right now.” Okay, group tags, multiple tags into segments. Again, they’ll self-select.
Here’s the other question I had regarding that. Another email I send out weekly is my live stream email. So it’s basically every Wednesday at 7 a.m., “Hey, just a reminder. I’m going live over on YouTube today at 11 Eastern Time, blah, blah, blah. Just a reminder, the live stream, once it’s done is only available to members blah, blah, blah. If you don’t want to get live stream emails, click here.” And then they get filtered out. And I send it to the full list minus no live stream.
I guess is this a workable strategy? Or do you think that most people…? I guess, am I at risk of seeing a lot of unsubscribes instead of people self-segmenting?
Samar Owais: No. So this is a very smart strategy on your part. Because what you’re doing is instead of them getting annoyed and unsubscribing, you’re giving them the option, “Hey, you don’t have to receive this email if you don’t want to. Just click here.” It’s as simple as that. And so you’re taking away the friction.
And so they will think, “Okay, so I still will get the valuable emails that are relevant to me. I just don’t want to hear about the live streams.” And that is fine. It’s something that I also do when I’m kicking off a launch in the first few emails. I will always have “These are course launch emails. If you don’t want to receive them, just click here and you’ll go back to receiving the weekly Emails Done Right emails and nothing else.”
Joe Casabona: Awesome. Okay. That’s a great idea. That’s something to think about as well. And then the last bit about this is I’ve had my newsletter or my ESP email service provider for people who like me, like three weeks ago didn’t know that that was the proper acronym. I’ve had ConvertKit as my ESP since like 2018, I have around 1,200 subscribers or whatever.
Would it be a strange move for me to kind of do a, I don’t know, re-welcome sequence right now? Like, “Hey, you’ve been on the list. Maybe I only do it for people who subscribed before like 2020. “Here are the things I’m focusing on now click the one you’re most interested or click this to stay. Keep things as normal.”
Samar Owais: You have all the right ideas, Joe. But I would say that filter out everybody who signed up in the past six months, and then send everybody else.
Joe Casabona: Okay. Awesome.
Samar Owais: Because people have small attention spans and they tend to forget. One of the smartest things we can do as marketers is let people know that we understand that, you know, people’s situation and interest change all the time. And that it’s totally okay to unsubscribe. The more we encourage it, the more we normalize it. As I said, unsubscribes are a good thing. It’s a good thing for your stats, it’s a good thing for your deliverability. And also, it just exudes confidence as a marketer.
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And now let’s get back to it.
Joe Casabona: Unsubscribes are a good thing. That’s like probably the name of this episode I would think. And thanks. I’m appreciative that you’ve confirmed all of these ideas because again I think that I and other people probably are worried about emailing our list too much which is wild. I guess if I give my phone number to somebody I don’t expect they’re only going to call me or text me like once a week. I expect that they’ll call me and text me when they have something to tell me.
Samar Owais: Absolutely.
Joe Casabona: Amazing. As we wrap up the main show here, I do like to offer one or two actionable tips for small business owners. This could be around a particular tool or maybe where to get started. If someone has listened to this and they’re like, “Yes, this all sounds great. “Where do I start?” what would you tell them?
Samar Owais: Oh, I’m going to say start trying. Start doing. This phrase that my coach told me: do the damn work. So do the work. It’s easy. And then implement fast, discard fast. Try something, if it works, keep it, if it doesn’t discard it fast.
What this will do is it’ll help you move forward. So every little thing that you are discarding or trying will either move you forward or keep you where you are. And whatever’s keeping you where you are, you know that it’s not working, now it’s time to try something else.
Just because somebody very popular has said, “This is going to work, this is the way, all of that, and you try it,” and then you keep trying it for months, because that person has said it’ll work, and “maybe I’m just doing something wrong,” you are not doing something wrong. Your audience could be different. Your offers could be different. So if it’s not working for you, move forward, try something else.
Joe Casabona: This is such an amazing thing to drive home. And the person that when you said, “Maybe somebody popular is saying do this because it works,” I’ve learned a lot from him. So this is not like a dig at him. But Pat Flynn is that person for me. The guy has been in the game for a long time, obviously is doing something right. But now when he’s like, “I launched this YouTube channel, if you want to launch this like me and grow like this, do these things.” He already has an audience of millions.
Samar Owais: Exactly.
Joe Casabona: So whatever he does is probably going to work out for him. Whenever he launches, I should say. I suspect that there are people who subscribe to his… It’s called Deep Pocket Monsters. It’s like a Pokémon card channel. I suspect that there are people who subscribed who had no interest in Pokémon before that. So I love that. Just because someone popular or someone famous is doing it and recommends it, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you. And that’s not your fault. Amazing.
I was going to also ask you… I always ask this question. Do you have any trade secrets for us? I feel like you just gave us a really good one though.
Samar Owais: Yeah. But I have another one.
Joe Casabona: Yes, awesome.
Samar Owais: And it’s to everybody who is just starting out and is not sure what to do. Say yes first, freak out later. I feel like this applies especially to maybe women. Because there’s a study out there that says, you know, in a job description, if a man feels like he’s qualified for 50% of it, he will apply, whereas women won’t even if they qualify for 80%. Or something along those lines. I’d have to look at that study.
So for women, I always say, say yes first, freak out later. Because saying yes first gives you that time to freak out and then figure it out.
Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s so good. I like that. Because you’re right. You’re kind of jumping into the deep end, right? When you say yes, you’re at least believing in yourself to figure it out.
Samar Owais: And I want to give a caveat here. That I don’t mean to say yes to something that is not relevant to your field, or that you’ve never done right. I would not say yes to starting a podcast without, you know… because I have no idea.
Joe Casabona: You’re really good at this. This has been a great conversation.
Samar Owais: I’m good at being on podcast because I’m socially awkward. So somebody’s asking me questions and me having to respond is great. It’s the perfect medium for me. But if you ask me to hold a discussion, I wouldn’t be able to do that. So that is a muscle that I haven’t built yet. But anyway. So when I say yes first, freak out later, I mean related to your field, I mean related to your work.
Joe Casabona: I think that’s a really good caveat. If somebody asked me to perform brain surgery today, I’m not going to say yes and then figure it out or whatever. Your example was a lot better because it’s like plausible that somebody would say, “Start a podcast.”
I guess if somebody asked me to build eCommerce site from scratch or whatever, I’d probably not do that from scratch, or build a payment gateway. But if somebody asked me to build a WooCommerce site, I’ll say yes, and think about it, freak out later. That’s cool. I’m just going to have my editor edit out that whole part and end on your point because it was way better.
Samar, this has been amazing. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. As a reminder to the audience, if you are listening to Build Something More, we’re going to talk about how open rates are gone now, thanks to iOS and Mac OS.
And if you are not listening to Build Something More, but you’re like, I really want to know, sign up. Actually, you can get all the show notes that we’ve talked about and the ones we’re about to mention. And sign up for the membership over at howibuilt.it/241. Samar, if people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?
Samar Owais: My website Samarowais.com, which is the site you go to if you want to work with me, if you have a SAS or eCommerce brand and you want to work with me. But if you want to hear more about emails and my thoughts and ideas on it, then go to emailsdoneright.com. I pick an email fight every Wednesday.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Samar Owais: I think about emails a lot differently. It started out as a normal newsletter, but every time I would write and send out a newsletter, it would turn into a bit of a fight because I challenged the status quo. And so the unofficial tagline of Emails Done Right is “picking an email fight every Wednesday.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. I’m going to sign up for this right now. Emails Done Right. I’m signing up as we speak. If that sounds insanely interesting to you, and it should, because who doesn’t love the drama of picking an email fight? That’s why I like landing page takedowns are so popular. If that sounds interesting to you, and it should, you can find all of that and everything we’ve talked about over howibuilt.it/241. Samar, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been amazing.
Samar Owais: Thank you for having me.
Joe Casabona: And thank you, everybody listening. Thanks to our sponsors, TextExpander and Nexcess. Stick around for Build Something More if you can. And until next time, get out there and build something.