Email is Not A Checkbox with Omar Lovert

[00:00:18] Sani: Welcome to nohacks.show, a weekly podcast in which smart people talk to you about better online experiences. Today, I'm excited to have Omar Lovert with me. Omar is a seasoned email marketing strategist, CRO expert, and founder of Polaris Growth, where he helps brands maximize their impact through tailored Klaviyo solutions.

Omar, welcome to nohacks.show. 

[00:00:38] Omar: Hey man, thank you. Awesome to be here

[00:00:40] Sani: so good to have you on. Yes. It's a pleasure to talk to you, to, to meet you this way. Hopefully meet you at a conference in the future. Now, nohacks.show research team, which is me, did a lot of work Googling you and what you did in the past. So one article from 2017 caught my eye immediately.

You know, your Amsterdam marathon recap. One thing you did there, preparing there, a friend created a training program for you. You had 100 days of training. And the longest run was 14 kilometers. Now to anyone who ever tried to prepare for a marathon or read about any marathon training plans, that's insane.

That's just not how it works because you're supposed to have that long run on the weekend. Everyone will tell you that. So what is the equivalent of this approach in the email marketing world?

[00:01:30] Omar: Oh man. All right. That's a good question. Awesome question. I think it all comes down to efficiency. So. If I take that training, it's a specific set of training. Um, and if you look into anyone that has been into running as well, they will tell you, a third of the end, uh, uh, distance you want to be running, training a turret is enough to be able to run the,

The full marathon, like a turtle for a marathon should be enough training.

To be yeah to prepare you to run the full thing um So it's all about preparing and knowing what the cadence is knowing your body knowing What speed you can run at knowing your heart rate that you can sustain this for a longer period and also having some Trust that the process works so Taking that back into email and marketing automation I would say it's part of, uh, good preparation as a ski first, uh, to make sure that you prepare, have a good plan, align with your strategies.

So basically what's the end goal and then preparing, going back, uh, and also being efficient with, with time. For me running the marathon, preparing for that. I have kids that were still a lot younger back then. They're now 10 and 12. Um, so that's, uh, that's seven years ago. They were really small. So Going on a run for two, three hours sometime was not something that I could actually do.

So I had to be efficient about it. Um, and this plan really fitted right into, uh, to that program. I hope this answers it a

[00:03:13] Sani: Oh, it does. But, but that's exactly what, how you should approach something that is basically automation. Like email marketing is all about the automation, like being efficient first and foremost, and then everything else, like that's exactly what it should be, I still, I still cannot believe you ran a marathon with 14 K being your longest run training run like that.

That to me still sounds crazy, but it works.

[00:03:38] Omar: it is the most important thing and, and believing in a plan, because definitely there were times that I was running, I was like, shouldn't I be doing more?

It makes you second guess yourself because everybody else is doing something different but Having the faith in the plan that you work up Um and create and the strategy that you create beforehand and then consistently putting time and effort into that actually does pay off so

[00:04:05] Sani: Absolutely. But you know what, with email marketing as well, if everyone is doing thing A and you try to do thing B, you'll get better. You'll get more people to react to that at least. So, you know, doing something different than everybody else, even though that was not your intention with the runs and you had a reason, but.

But let's say that could work as well. 

So the main topic of today's episode is something that you told me that email is not a checkbox and it should not be a checkbox.

When you say email is a checkbox to some people, what do you mean there?

[00:04:37] Omar: Well, what I've seen in the last, I think two, three years talking with a lot of business owners, a lot of e commerce managers or, um, marketing managers. They're not getting the results from their email marketing programs. Um, I think there are a couple of reasons because, uh, they're not getting, uh, there are a couple of reasons why they're not getting the results.

Um, and it basically, for me, it has something to do with, yeah, maybe, yeah, call it a checkbox, checkbox approach. They don't have the right people in a team or the people are multitask with too many different things that they have to do every day. That are basically checking their boxes. So basically, Oh yeah, we need to send a campaign. Oh yeah, we send a campaign this week or we need to send three campaigns this week. Oh yes, I did that. But either it's lack of knowledge, lack of time. People are just checking boxes instead of proactively looking into, Hey, how can we do better? Are we sending the same things over and over again to the same people?

Should we do something with segmentation? Should we look further than only. Hey, we need to send out an email. I sent out an email this week. I did my work. Um, uh, more and more. I'm getting questions from the founders or from the business owners that, Hey, they actually went into a tool like Latvia that we use a lot.

I started looking around. It's like they even get more questions after looking around. It's like, why are we doing this? Why are we not? Why are we not splitting up things? Why are we not sending, or why are we sending the same message to the same people that already bought this product? Maybe there's. If it's like a mattress, for example, something that people don't buy often, if they already bought a mattress, why keep sending them emails about the mattress?

If they already have one, I'm the chance of getting like five mattresses in the house is slim. Um,

[00:06:37] Sani: Unless there's some crazy things happening at the house. They're very, very slim. Yes.

[00:06:42] Omar: But if you know that, then being a bit smarter about it actually helps you to create new strategies and come up with things. But most of the time it's either. They have lack of knowledge, they don't know how to do it, or there's just not enough time for them to be able to zoom out and, uh, and work on these things.

So I, I call this more, more or less a checkbox approach. Um, yeah.

[00:07:05] Sani: And it is like, if you, if you have a, you haven't, let's say an intern or someone who's like in a general marketing role and they need to send a campaign every week, It's a checkbox. Like it's really a checklist item and they'll send a campaign. No one probably ever checks. And then six months later, they look back all of these campaigns.

They did nothing. Why is that? Let's, we need to do better. And they come to someone like you for, for real advice or whatever happens. So

[00:07:33] Omar: Yeah.

[00:07:33] Sani: passive team attitudes. Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead.

[00:07:35] Omar: something to it? Because it is, it is both. It's on both sides. One, one is lack of knowledge, lack of time, but the other side from the business owner as well, it's also about not giving clear goals or like talking about, Hey, this is where we actually want to go and then having discussions around, how can we get there?

So sometimes it also. It is multi-directional, uh, it, it, sometimes it, it is indeed the team that doesn't have enough time or doesn't have the knowledge to do the work correctly. Uh, or a combination of both. But sometimes it's also from the business owner, the marketing managers that are not aligning their, their goals and trying to see, okay, how can we use email or marketing automation?

How can we, what are the things that we need to do if we wanna grow, uh, 40% this year, for example? How can email contribute to this? What are the things that we could be doing that also puts people into more creative space, uh, to come up with new solutions to do things. And especially what I've also seen that, yeah, sometimes in calls with, with the business owners, they basically say, Hey, yeah, we are getting emails about the updates that the tools are having, but we're not making use of it.

[00:08:52] Sani: Hmm.

[00:08:52] Omar: the things like SMS launched in the Netherlands from Klaviyo, um, and Yeah, they get messages around this, but nobody's using it. So then the question is, okay, does it actually contribute also to your, to your business? There's also something to test out, but there are always like new things coming out, new features coming out that can help. Like with, with the results that you're trying to get, uh, as well. So, yeah,

[00:09:21] Sani: Right. No, that, that, that's a really good explanation, but I think it goes back to For so many brands. And the reason it's a checkbox is because there's no long term strategy. There's no, the, what do you want to achieve? And if you don't know what you're trying to achieve with email, it's going to be like an appendix almost to your marketing strategy.

Like we also need to send this as an email and. You're more likely than not to have bad results if it's like this. So I think starting with, with the, Why you're doing email and why you want to do email is probably, but that goes to everything really, like if you need to know why you're doing any kind of marketing activity before you start doing it.

So, uh, that is a bad way that, that, that's the wrong way to do it. Passive approach, uh, you know, just a check box that we need to do every week, every month. What's a good way to do it? Like, let's say you, you get into a Klaviyo account for the first time and the You need to audit it. Basically. You need to see what's going on.

What's your strategy there? What are the steps

[00:10:23] Omar: Wow. That's actually, I was just wanting to point it out, but you're good that you're bringing it up because this is the. Um, knowing what bandwidth you still have left, knowing on which areas you can still improve. Um, I think part of the CRO back or like knowledge that I've I've gathered over the years as well.

It's also about knowing how much impact can you make at different areas. If you know that how much bandwidth is, I call it bandwidth. Basically, if you know that. The best performing ones are converting at X percent and the worst converting ones are worse performing ones are doing it like 40 percent less.

They know, okay, this is like the bandwidth in which we can operate. If you're in the middle, there's like still half of it that you can improve things on. So, um, ever after seeing, I don't know, hundreds of, uh, Klaviyo accounts over the years, you start getting a grasp of, okay. Revenue is this, uh, Clavey is saying it's, it's contributing by X percent that is then split up between automations and regular newsletters.

Knowing all these different levels gives you a bit of an indication. Okay. Um, the way I normally look at this, it's like, if you have a total revenue, um, you want to have at least 20 percent getting mentioned. The Klaviyo is contributing or email is contributing to it. Now i'm not going to have a discussion around the contribution or the attribution model Klaviyo uses because that's a can of worms

[00:12:06] Sani: best not to open it? Yeah, I was going to say, 

[00:12:08] Omar: not going to dive into right

now um but knowing What I see with other brands compared to Some brands that gives you an idea of okay.

There's still improvements that we can make And also how much reliant are they on email already? If it's like 5 percent of the revenues coming from Klaviyo, for me, that's like a big opportunity to start growing at least 20 percent and then going off a bit lower and that's trying to understand, okay, how are these.

Numbers nice automation. Are they only relying on automation or are they only relying on campaigns? Normally I would want to see a 50, 50 split between those two, 60, 40, or 40, 60. If either or, uh, one of them is higher than the other, like 80, 20, it means the other one can still go up. It's either one of them needs to go up or both need to go up.

And then you go, you start peeling off the onion layers and looking at deliverability, open rate, click rates, conversion rates from email. Try to see, okay, you know, what are the elements that are underperforming and we should start focusing on. Sometimes we, we dive into a camp, like, Dive into, uh, an account to do.

So we have a free audit that we give where we basically walk through all these things together with a business owner or the e commerce manager, record it, and they can have that to work with it. Or we basically look at these things. Um, but also for campaign, sometimes we see like there's an open rate of 15 or 18%.

That's really low because most of them are also like, uh, what they call a machine opens.

[00:13:49] Sani: Can we trust the open rate anymore or is it

[00:13:52] Omar: nah, not really.

Uh, 

[00:13:54] Sani: But if it's 15%, that's a disaster 

[00:13:57] Omar: yes, because part of them are already

like machine open. So also knowing like these things that means, okay, this is really bad. Then if it's so low, they should be sending more often to even reach the people.

So like having an understanding of where things are gives you a good baseline of, okay, we need to be working on deliverability. We need to be working on. Sending only to engage, uh, uh, audiences first and stuff like that. And the other hand, I'm always looking at what is the list growth, uh, uh, look like. So for me, that's like the top of funnel of email is how many people are you getting into your, into your system?

The more people you have in your system, the more people you can email and the more also it will deliver basically. So there are a lot, like a couple of knobs that you can turn. Um, And that's the way I normally go around and do an audit of an account and then that creates some kind of like a Yeah different list of okay.

These automations have not been set up. These these automations are performing Lower than expected and then you can start planning out a road map and that's something that we normally also Yeah for our clients. We basically create a big road map and if you want I can show you how we do that, but if it if it helps but Um I did prepare a couple of like, uh, screens.

So I,

does that work? It doesn't help. Do I, if I share my screen on a couple of things, how we, how we approach it

[00:15:26] Sani: I mean, we, we can try, but there's an audio only version of the podcast as well. So best to keep it out. 

I'll cut this part. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:34] Omar: keep it at this.

[00:15:34] Sani: Uh, but yeah, uh,

[00:15:36] Omar: way we do it. Uh, normally.

[00:15:37] Sani: right. And what is, uh, when you go into a Klaviyo account and you mentioned some of the metrics, let me ask you that first, so there's the, uh, the open rate, click rate, uh, conversion rates, arbitrage, some of them are attribution, but let's not get there.

But there's the benchmark numbers in Klaviyo as well, where it compares you to websites or a list similar to you. Should you bother looking at those or do they matter at all?

[00:16:06] Omar: Uh, it's the same with conversion, conversion rate optimist. They're like, well, that's a good conversion rate. I think if it's better than last month, it's, it's good.

[00:16:13] Sani: Right.

[00:16:14] Omar: it gives you some ideas because in Klaviyo you can actually select the industry where you're in, and then they basically will, will benchmark you against all the other, uh, companies that are within the same, um, within the same industry, it will give you some ideas.

Uh, it will tell you what the best performing things are, which are worse performing things are. Even there it's You'll still need to use your brains to see okay If it's good doesn't mean that it cannot be better. Uh, So also like hey, how can we now make it even better? Um, Most of the time people are giving out discounts.

Yeah, okay that most of the times like Attributions, that's the only part i'm going to touch about attributions as well. It's like if you have a welcome flow

[00:16:59] Sani: Hmm.

[00:16:59] Omar: You're giving an incentive for people to sign up You Which nowadays

[00:17:03] Sani: Everyone does that. Yep.

[00:17:05] Omar: Um, If you want to get more out of that Email flow Try to optimize the welcome flow So basically if somebody signs up they get into Like a welcome flow Try to optimize that, I think Will give you less results than trying to optimize The popup for example Because if you can't get 20 percent More people signing up Will have a bigger impact than any AB test you can run within within the email flow.

So also knowing, you know What are the relationships between what has a bigger impact on the numbers? um But even like the attribution part what I wanted to mention is that for the welcome flow Part of the people would have probably already bought even without an incentive. So How much would you trust those numbers I would also yeah I would at least slide it by, by 50%, uh, to get like a bit of an accurate number there, but we've done some testing, uh, simply do both CRO and Klaviyo.

We've done some A B testing where we basically had, uh, version A was without a pop up version B was with a pop up to have an understanding how the impact of a pop up has on conversions on the website. And we saw At least for this client, we saw a big increase, which for me was a bit something I did not expect completely.

Uh, I think we had an average of 29 percent increase of a conversion rates on the side,

[00:18:35] Sani: Uh, with or without the pop up?

[00:18:37] Omar: with a pop

[00:18:37] Sani: With the pop up. Okay.

[00:18:39] Omar: for me, it was a bit of a, yeah, interesting result because for like, Putting these things, it's, it's intrusive. It's, it's not something people are waiting on most of the times, but it did have a positive impact.

Now we, we, we were giving away a free gift on it, but, um, it had a positive impact on the conversion rate as well. So,

[00:19:02] Sani: That's very interesting because, like, everyone will tell you pop ups are annoying. Like, don't use pop, don't overdo it with pop. I, I agree. I, I, I'm not going to disagree with that. They also seem to work. Like they also really seem to push the business goals. Also, if you say in the pop up, like there's a free gift, if you buy, or there's a, like a 10 percent discount code or whatever, if you sign up, maybe they don't know this without the pop up.

Like maybe that's the small incentive that will get them to buy. So it, I'm not too surprised. I'm the only thing I don't like is when I see multiple pop ups, just, you know, load that that's just like a early two thousands computer with a virus. 

[00:19:42] Omar: bar and you have, uh, this and that. So sometimes it, it becomes a bit annoying indeed.

[00:19:47] Sani: You need to be very careful about it. But like, I like what you said, it's knowing which knobs to turn. Like, maybe you want to get more people to put them into the email funnel. Maybe you need to work later in the welcome flow or in the campaigns. But I agree, like more people, of course, it's going to be better.

Unless you're just buying a list. Let's not say it out loud, but hopefully no one does that anymore. So, um, it's

[00:20:15] Omar: haven't, I haven't had any clients that are doing that, but

[00:20:18] Sani: a thing. 

[00:20:18] Omar: might, might still 

[00:20:19] Sani: It's. a thing. I'm sure it's a 

[00:20:21] Omar: Collaborating, collaborating with other, uh, email marketing lists sometimes does happen. And I think that that's a good

[00:20:27] Sani: right?

[00:20:28] Omar: To combine forces if you have another company that's doing Any services or products that are uh related to your product, but you're not selling and then seeing if you can exchange products or somethings with each other and then

[00:20:42] Sani: And that could make

[00:20:43] Omar: sending out emails to to the same audience with different products.

That's something that could

[00:20:47] Sani: That could make a lot of sense, but 

[00:20:48] Omar: lists, uh, I don't think that's a good approach anymore, especially in europe. I think

[00:20:53] Sani: no, no, no, no, not, not in you. Definitely not in Europe, hopefully not in Europe. So, um, let, let's just talk about, uh, growing a list. Like what are the top strategies for growing a list? Obviously pop up we talked about pop up. What are some other ways you can grow your email list?

[00:21:09] Omar: Man. Um, I think list growth is, is an interesting topic. We have been working with a lot of our clients on a month by month basis to like, okay, you know, we're gonna be sending out campaigns. The work we do is like, we're sending out campaigns, we're building on them, on the automations to optimize them, expand them to deepen them, or add additional, um, automations in, uh, on a month by month basis.

But one of the things that we've been doing as well is continuously. Working on improving that pop up, not only, Hey, do you want to subscribe or do you want a discount? Uh, getting an email address and first name, but also adding additional steps to collect data that's relevant to understand who the people are or like What are their goals?

What are their Yeah, what are they looking for? Uh So basically gets it's like a buzzword zero party data to have an understanding of You Who these customers are so we can better, um, tailor the, the messages to them as well.

[00:22:13] Sani: Right. And then the campaigns, the segments would be based on that. Right.

[00:22:17] Omar: definitely. Some, some of this will be behavioral. So, Hey, people that did XYZ, some of this will be definitely about the information that they have provided, uh, the customers with, or the, the, yeah, the companies we are working with.

Uh, um,

[00:22:33] Sani: Right.

[00:22:34] Omar: can be anything, you know, um, The most simple version would be male, female, but that's, that's a bit

[00:22:40] Sani: That's lazy. That's a bit lazy. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:43] Omar: but if you're selling, um, clothing, it might make sense. Uh, you don't want to

[00:22:50] Sani: No, of course.

[00:22:51] Omar: that up too much.

[00:22:51] Sani: Oh, of course, 

[00:22:52] Omar: but that's also something that behavioral can, can help you with as

[00:22:56] Sani: Mm. And to go back to, to email being a checkbox. And I think everyone starts with most brands starts with email being a checkbox. And. Nothing wrong about that. Like you need to get started somewhere. It's the moving from the checkbox stage to really email being a part of your marketing strategy and in some like 20 percent or 30 percent of your revenue basically.

So what are some of the strategies for the brands who want to go from checkbox to, yeah, we really do email now, like with hiring people, like going from cost centric to value centric hiring mindset. What, what would your advice be there?

[00:23:36] Omar: I think it does come. to first knowing where you want to go with your company, with your business. Um, so for example, if you have a, for 2024, uh, we're now in 2024. Um, but if for this year, for next year, you know what the goals are, if you want to grow with 20%, with 30%, how are you gonna be reaching that goal?

Is it through acquisition? Are you, so there's, you can have goals, but you still have to have like. How are you going to reach that? Is it, do you want to improve your conversion rate on your website? Do you want to work on retention and make sure that retention is going to like drive more of this or you're gonna put 30 percent more, uh, uh money in marketing And marketing is becoming more and more expensive.

This has been the trend over the last years it becomes more expensive because Uh more difficult to reach the right people Um So there are a couple of strategies that on a top level that you already like apply to, okay. We want to grow by X and we're going to do this by A, B, C, D. Um, email should be in there as well.

And email, I think email is not, maybe it's not the right word that email, it should be maybe retention or automation should be part of that. Because for me, The emails is SMS. It can be other kinds of things as well. It can be a loyalty program. It can be multiple things that connect with the email system and then. Issue additional things to, uh, to work with, but it starts with like where we started off with, uh, with the marathon preparing, knowing what the, what the end goal is, and then creating the strategies on a quarterly or weekly basis. Um, half year basis. That's what we actually do as well with our clients. We basically build out a roadmap where on the high level we say, okay, what are the goals that we have for these coming six months that are aligned with that, with the goal that the company has, how can we now make it shorter?

And then what are the things that are going to be driving the most impact? Let's start with those first and then move forward with that. And sometimes there are things that are not. Revenue related sometimes it's like, okay. We need to collect more reviews because In the end it will help us with social proof.

It will help us with uh, maybe even with with with uh advertising that you're able to Get all these star ratings in your ads as well um There are multiple things that you can can prioritize That might have a bigger impact but something that hey, we should be doing that now because this will actually help us You And six months time, if we have, I don't know, 2000 new reviews that we're going to help us boost to the next phase or customer support, having the right tool in there to, to make sure that you are servicing your clients better.

For me, that's also something that we advise our customers with, which also ties back into email. Uh, because one of the tools that we are, uh, uh, advising a lot is gorgeous as well.

[00:26:54] Sani: hm,

[00:26:54] Omar: Connects really well with Klaviyo, it allows us to create segments of people that have open tickets to make sure that we're not sending campaigns to them.

So they're like these things that if you know where the company is headed, it will allow you to create the right strategies to plan that out for the next quarter, for the next six months. And we basically bring it down to, um, what are we working on automations? What are we working on campaigns? What are we going to do on list growth and segmentation?

Um And some like yeah general stuff That we're working on with but these are like the different sections that we focus on on a month by month basis

[00:27:36] Sani: I love what you 

said. I love what you said that, that email, it's not about email. It's about part of the greater retention strategy. And email is just one piece of that puzzle because it really is. It really should be that the email is it's a method. It's not, it's not what you're doing. Actually, there's SMS, there's a, there's loyalty programs.

There's, there's a ton of other different things.

[00:28:01] Omar: I think to encapsulate it actually, it's a customer journey.

[00:28:06] Sani: Yep.

[00:28:07] Omar: Um, and yes, I, I did start out. I used to have my own email marketing platform. So I need some, I think in 2010, something around there. I stopped with that. I had a lot of nausea around running email. Stopped with the way MailChimp was really big back in the day.

So it was really hard to compete against it. But I moved into CRO for a long time for doing a lot of CRO work. The one thing that actually made me move into, into more email again, or combining them because it actually extends the customer journey. So we, as a CRO specialist, you're mainly, a lot of times are expected to focus on the website.

At least that's what the general attendance is, or that's what people expect. Yeah, CRO person helps with the website. While you're doing research, while you're doing interviews with customers, sending out surveys, doing the polls, you start getting more and more information, even looking into the chat logs or the help desk tickets.

You get so much information around what happens around after somebody purchases or the questions people have before they make a purchase. That's like all part of the customer journey. Um, so for me moving into email actually was a way to. Enhance the customer journey because I was, I felt stuck in only doing the web steps optimization.

Like being able to extend that was actually a really, uh, really interesting thing to do. Um, and to bring that back to your, your question. Um, I think that in the end, it is enhancing the customer journey. It's not only email. It's actually trying to understand what touch points you can create or can have with customers to create a better service to them.

to tailor better to them and have happier customers in the end. So this is about improving the whole customer

[00:30:03] Sani: 100%. And then it becomes a collection of checkboxes, a holistic collection of checkboxes where you really are. I wouldn't say handholding the customer throughout the customer journey, but mindful of every single touch point they have with your brand and with your company, and that is the only way to do it.

One final question for you. Uh, if someone wants to learn about email marketing, what's the best resource for them to do so?

[00:30:29] Omar: Man, I mean, there, there are different courses left and right. I've not yet find, found one course that actually is like ultimate best one. Um, in the end for me, yeah, just practice and, and. Being really curious and just doing things on your own as well. I mean, um, we're basically Klaviyo agency. We do a lot of things with Klaviyo. Klaviyo has some really great free resources. They have videos, they have knowledge base, they have a community, which I'm also part of, uh, helping them. But there's so many information there that actually you should actually just start to have an understanding of customer journey. I think there are some good books that.

Um, talk about database marketing, have some knowledge around RFM, um, have some knowledge around how, yeah, marketing works actually is the most important thing to do. Like the technical sides of how to build an email, what a good email looks like. Those are things you can either go to reallygoodemails. com and start looking at all the different emails.

In the end, it does come to. Um, knowing what the end customer wants, um, what the goals that they have and being able to tailor the messages to them. And then, yeah, the technical things, I mean, every tool is a bit different. Um, so you, you have to create or choose a tool that you can work with, uh, efficiently and then try to learn as much from it as possible.

[00:32:15] Sani: just get your hands 

[00:32:16] Omar: in the end, the, the whole, the whole, yeah, database marketing. Um, for me, it's been a journey, uh, on my own. I haven't done a lot of courses. It's been reading a lot, trying to, yeah, be always curious, talking to people. Um, so there's not, not a real answer I can give you there,

[00:32:35] Sani: but that is a good answer. The, the, the answer is you need to do this. Like you can't just Passively learn about it. You need to act. I mean, there are courses that Klaviyo Academy, I believe it's called. They, they have a lot of good resources there

[00:32:47] Omar: definitely.

[00:32:48] Sani: and that's a good way to be familiar with the platform, the basics of email marketing, all that.

But unless you're doing it, unless you're curious about your customers, about your, your, your list and people on it and what they need. Magic is not going to happen. So that is a perfect response. And maybe, maybe there's room for a real course by someone like, uh, Omar, who has been doing this for years. We don't know.

[00:33:14] Omar: yeah, that, that, that's, I was actually thinking that, but one of the things that I've noticed that, uh, recently, a lot of, or recently over the years, um, I've gotten, I'm, I've been getting more and more requests from other people in the, yeah, that are starting out or have had like one or two years of experience doing the things on their own that actually wanted to join Polaris as well.

So basically learn, uh, learn more from. People like me or other people in the team. So, um, that might also be one way. Hey, see who's actually actively sharing information. Who are the people that are, uh, top leaders out there and connect with them, follow what they're doing, uh, ask them questions. Uh, maybe even see if you can, uh, can join their, their team, uh, and learn from that.

I think that's, that's a pretty good, uh, learning school.

[00:34:06] Sani: Oh, always, always. Absolutely. So just to say it again, emails, not a checkbox. Don't treat it as a checkbox. That, that is the worst possible way to treat email. If you get started like the first few weeks, I need some campaign checkbox. Sure, but don't long term. It's not a checkbox that will kill you. That will kill your efforts.

Omar, I want to thank you for being a nohacks.show guest. This was an amazing episode. I learned a lot. I know the audience learned a lot. So what's the best way for them to connect with you?

[00:34:35] Omar: I think, um, on LinkedIn, I'm always available on LinkedIn. Um, if you, if you type my name is Omar Lovert, but if you look at the URL, it's, uh, it's actually Klaviyo. So, um, I've been in Klaviyo for a long time. I think I'm the biggest advocate of the, of the platform. Um, and otherwise they can always reach me to omar at PolarisGrowth.

com.

[00:35:00] Sani: There we go. So thank you again for being the guest and to everyone listening to this episode, please consider rating, reviewing, sharing the episode, and I will talk to you next week.