Episode 7:
The Intersection of Email & Social Media With Carlos Gil of GetResponse

Scott Cohen: Hello all and welcome to that inbox army podcast. I’m your host Scott Cohen going solo today as my co host, Garin Hobbs, is out on assignment as I like to say. Now I’ve been doing email marketing for more than 15 years and even I recognize that email doesn’t operate within a vacuum or a silo social media and its various channels can play a huge role in business growth and it works together beautifully with email to do just that yes social and email are often at odds with each other usually they’re fighting for the same budgets and resources and all that fun stuff but rather than stay here for an hour and tell you why you shouldn’t be spending money on social media and all of your money on email and frankly that would be hard to do I wanna discuss how the 2 mediums can work together effectively so I went to the social media source joining me today is the best selling author of the end of marketing long time senior digital growth and social media marketing man leader excuse me not a manager a leader and who is now making his entrance into the email marketing world as brand evangelist for Getresponse Carlos Gil Carlos welcome to the podcast What’s

Carlos Gil: going on, Scott? It’s a pleasure to be here on the, inbox army podcast.

Scott Cohen: Absolutely. Looking forward to this. But before we get into the weeds here, I love to learn about people’s journeys, how they ended up where they are now. Tell us about your journey to get response.

Carlos Gil: Well, the the journey here has, it’s been a roller coaster like many of our careers. Right? So you had mentioned 15 years in email marketing, which is right about the the same amount of time that I’ve been working in digital marketing myself. So I started my career in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which is where I’m from originally, right around the early 2000s. And I started my career in financial services and in banking.

And if you remember, 2,008 happened. And like many bankers back then, I found myself out of work. So I turned to social media and I joined LinkedIn, which a lot of people back then and still today do whenever they suffer a job loss. And on LinkedIn, I very quickly discovered that there was a lot of people like me also looking for work. And at this stage of my career, I was I was in my early twenties and I was very green.

I didn’t know much about running a business back then. I I didn’t really know much about marketing. So up to that point, my career in banking was more of on the retail banking side. So I understood customer service and how to sell and overcome objections. But again, man, like, I was really young and and and really, really so I started up an online job board.

As crazy as that as that sounds, I started up an online job board. It’s called Jobs Direct USA. Again, at this point in my life, I knew nothing about marketing, much less scaling and running a business. But the whole experience of starting a company at the ripe age of 25, it taught me a whole lot about getting scrappy and developing that entrepreneurial acumen that has helped carry me throughout my career. And that that was my entry into not just social media marketing, but marketing in general and having no budget and having to get really scrappy and email marketing.

And, you know, I know we’re, like, you know, talking about email marketing now and and saying words like scraping is a bad word, but, you know, learning all the hacks and the tips and the tricks and scraping data to to go ahead and get the the brand out there. Like, these are all the tactics I learned at a very young age. And part of that knowledge was using social media to connect. So I ended up many years after this getting a job at LinkedIn. And the 1st day that I was on the job at LinkedIn, for employee orientation, they asked, well, tell us a story about about LinkedIn, and and how has that helped you throughout your career?

And I use this example. In 2008, when I lost my job in the banking industry, now on LinkedIn, creating a profile, one of the first things I did was create groups for different cities. So I had, like, job search Atlanta, job search Miami, job search search New York, LA, etcetera, etcetera. Basically, what I was doing was I was I was mining data. So as people were joining these groups, which were private groups, they were receiving an autoresponder from LinkedIn.

However, it was directing in the message. It was directing those that were joining the groups to go to my website and sign up and join a profile and build a profile and join Jobs Direct USA, which I scaled very quickly to over a 100,000 users, all for free, really just growth hacking the system. And and I said to myself, wow. This is really, really easy. What if I teach this to brands?

And back then, corporations were very new getting into the world of social media marketing. So I started teaching quickly human resource professionals on how to use social media from a recruiting standpoint, how to build their employer brands, how to find talent, And that led me to getting my 1st corporate marketing gig in 2012 working for a supermarket chain by the name of Winn Dixie here in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I live now. And I started social media for Winn Dixie. I was there for 2 years. I went on to work for another chain called Save A Lot in the Midwest, then LinkedIn hired me.

I got on the speaking circuit. I went to go work for another company I had for LinkedIn by the name of BMC Software. And sheesh, at this point, I’m on the road. I’m producing content. I’m building my personal brand, and there was opportunities that were some starting to come my way.

So in 2017, I left corporate. I started consulting full time. I wrote a best selling book called end of marketing, which came out the end of 2019, and then COVID happened. And when COVID happened, it completely wiped away everything that had worked since 2008 to do. So about 12 years of my career, it seemed like all of it was gone.

There was no more speaking engagements. There was no more consulting opportunities. Every big brand that I was working with at the time from Hertz to DocuSign and Western Union and Kay Jewelers, they were all affected by COVID, so I was out of work. And, it was a blessing and a curse because being out of work like many of us were right there when COVID shut the world down, it forced me to get creative, and it forced me to tap into that entrepreneurial acumen that in my early to mid twenties, I started to develop. And in doing so, I started up an ecommerce business called Outlaw Masks.

That business took off very quickly using TikTok, using social media. Again, very much growth hacking the system. Organically, my partner and I, we grew that business as fast as we grew that business and made a lot of money. That business came crashing down, and we had to pivot. And that pivot was in the form of a sneaker store called the hype section, which for the last 2 years, I’ve I’ve worked very closely in growing.

And this opportunity with with Getresponse, it’s one that it I don’t wanna say it fell on my lap because I believe that, you know, things happen for a reason, but it really did fall on my lap. At the beginning of this year, I posted on social media that I was looking to get back into the corporate world, after being a full time entrepreneur for 7 years and after building 2 brands of my own in the last 4. And I felt it was time. It was time for me to go back to my roots, so to speak, to do what I enjoy, which is helping brands grow. And, there was a gentleman by the name of Mick Griffin out in Poland that one morning sends me a message on LinkedIn, and he’s like, hey, man.

You know, get response to the company I used to work for, and they’re looking for someone to represent them in the US to help them grow. And would you be interested in in me referring you? And I said, sure. Why not? I didn’t know much to be candid with you about the company.

You know, and and the role, you know, seemed, you know, kind of different from everything else I was applying for and interviewing for, which is more of your cookie cutter social media, you know, leader, social media director roles. And, you know, in all of that, when I started going through the interview process with get Getresponse, I realized, like, this is a really cool opportunity. This is a OG, email marketing company. They’ve been around since 1999. They don’t have as dominant, of a presence in the US as some of the other brands out there like a Mailchimp or Constant Contact.

But those are the those are the opportunities, that I personally and professionally seek and thrive in the most. You know, look, I’ve worked for big brands before, and I’ve worked for smaller up and coming brands. And once you work for a big corporation, it’s really, really hard to bring new ideas to the table. It’s really hard to get your voice heard. It’s really hard to be able to help that company even grow because they’re so stuck in their ways.

Whereas when you work for a smaller, less known entity, you know, typically those companies are much more receptive to ideas. They’re more receptive to innovation. And at this stage in my career, man, it’s it’s a good fit. I’ve been on on the job for for 2 months. You actually met me a couple of of, weeks into the gig in Atlanta Yeah.

At Inbox Expo, where I just got thrown to the fire, man. I was asked to to speak at the conference. It was my first email marketing conference I’d I’d ever been at. My first email marketing conference I ever spoke at. And here I am, man, you know, really enjoying this opportunity.

And quite frankly, man, excited for for what the future holds.

Scott Cohen: That’s awesome. You know, I I feel the same way. I mean, I think the large I’m trying to think of the largest company I’ve worked for. I have never worked for, like, you know, multinational huge corporation. I mean, on the agency side, we’ve worked with some of them to help them out.

But in terms of the brands I’ve worked for, it’s always been the the the kinds of companies where you can appropriately take risks, if that makes sense. Right? Like, you can do things that others can’t do, like you said. And I like I can’t be a number on a page, if that makes sense. Right?

Like, you gotta be you gotta feel like you have impact in the everyday of the business. So I I it feels like a good fit for you. I I really I’m I’m excited for you. Like I said, you get you the you’ll learn very quickly the email community. We’re very nice people, but we’re a different breed in some respects too.

So, you know, it it’ll be it’ll be fun to see how how you, you get warmed up into into the industry. Well, let’s talk about, I’ve heard that email has been called this the original social media, and really in in many ways it was. What excites you? Like, you know, going from social to email, what excites you about email that that gave you that push to kinda go, yeah. I mean, the role aside, like, hey.

It’s it’s an opportunity to do something really cool but what is it about email that excites you

Carlos Gil: so I actually want to address what you said before because I have heard that term come up several times now, and I’ve been paying more attention to it since we met at Inbox Expo where, you know, folks say that email marketing or email is the is the original social media. I actually disagree with that. A 100 and 10 percent because it’s not. I would say that the original social media or the OG social network is is America Online. It’s AOL.

Right? And back then we had email integrated into social media, which as I’m even saying this to you, I’m realized, like, I really, really need to make this point known in my next keynotes going forward because we all remember we would log on to AOL. And on AOL, what would you hear besides welcome?

Scott Cohen: You’ve got mail.

Carlos Gil: You’ve got mail. Right? And you would get excited when you had mail, but that was an integration. Right? That was an integration of email within social.

Right? If you even wanna take it a step back, because I know there’s probably some folks that are gonna listen to this and they’re gonna say, well, what about message boards? Right? Message boards in a way were the original social media, right, before there even was AOL. Right?

Early days of of the Internet, there was message boards. But that being said, no. I I wouldn’t I would never refer to email as the original social media because it’s not. However, what I will say is that email marketing itself is one of the OG tools of how you broadcast in mass, how you market in a digital medium. And it’s highly important.

What we have moved away from though is that integration that I referred to before between email and social. And, you know, I could pontificate about this for the whole next hour, but what I am on really a mission to do because I come from, I call it the side of the tracks, but I come from the side in this business of social media and being a social media thought leader for the majority of my career at this point. I’m really looking to teach and inspire for marketers, whether you’re a digital or an email or social marketer, wherever you sit in this ecosystem, for us to get back to the basics of marrying these channels together because they’ve become highly fragmented. And I can I can attest to that to spending the last 15 years working in and out of corporate brands? Right?

Social media marketers, so this is the beginning of the show. They’re fighting for budget. They’re fighting for attention. They wanna get their missions passed. There’s always been this sort of mantra that social networks themselves because they’re cool, they’re newer, they’re fun, they’re they were at one point much more millennial focused.

Now the tides have shifted to Gen z. There’s always been this mantra and this aura that on social media, you you don’t have to be corporate and you can be kind of loose and fun whereas email marketing, if I’m being honest, email marketing has been has become more of an an antiquated system that’s viewed as being more more proper and professional, and all of that needs to change. You know? Going back to the book that I wrote 5 years ago, the end of marketing, the whole premise of the book is to help brands humanize and future proof their brands, which which really means setting themselves up for long term success by being more relatable, more personal, more human. That’s, you know, what you heard me share in Atlanta, you know, at a very, very high level.

But again, man, like, having one one channel or one system communicating to probably the same audience in one zone, but then using the other system being emailed to communicate another tone, like, that is a poor representation of your brand. And and that’s really what, again, kind of going back to Getresponse, why I came on board to answer your question, you know. Obviously, yes, I came into this company to help them grow their market share in the US, You know, and and that over time is going to happen organically, but using who I really am as a marketing thought leader know, to the advantage of the company, it’s really do this. It’s to create more thought leadership around synchronizing social and email.

Scott Cohen: Let’s get into brass tacks a little bit then. Let you know, we talked to I watched your presentation. You had a great section on, like, premium to premium. Where where do these channels really work well together? I know they do, but I wanna hear from you how how they work well together.

You know, let me we can get specific, you know, the roles of each channel. Right? Like LinkedIn for list building, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, like, where do they, like, if you were to sit down and go, alright. I want an acquisition to retention life cycle plan for every channel. Where do you start?

Where where does it all work?

Carlos Gil: I I would say, look, at the highest of levels here, the way marketers historically are using email and social is the same. Okay? And that’s to sell stuff. Right? It’s to get their message out to sell stuff.

It’s not to engage people. So let’s let’s let’s think of a channel agnostic strategy right now. Your objective has to be to build more relationships, better relationships with your customers to have your customers advocate for you. Right? Because people, humans are the best marketers out there.

Like, at the end of the day, if you’re a brand that has, I don’t know, a 1000000 customers in your CRM or your loyalty program. So I’ll give you an example. Many, many years ago, when I led digital marketing at Save A Lot, I was responsible for the loyalty program. At that point in time, the loyalty program had around, let’s just say, a 1000000 customers in it. Right?

Those million customers, just because they shop with you, just because they’ve given you consent to email them, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a loyal customer. No different than if you have a 100,000 people that follow you on a platform like Instagram or Twitter. It doesn’t mean that you have a 100 1,000 people that follow you. The reality is that you have a very small percentage, almost like a a micro fraction of that percentage followers that truly follow and advocate for you. So as a marketer, my mind frame is always in how can I get more people to promote me so I don’t have to work hard to get in front of people?

How can I grow back and tap into other people’s audiences? It’s funny. We we we came on here to the show. You had referenced a very popular Slack group, that we’re both members in. And you had reference, like, more of, like, the culture within that Slack group, which it’s no different than the social media marketing industry.

No one wants to be marketed to. No one wants to be sold to. But there’s a very much a finesse in how you get yourself known and in front of people. Right? And I think that is the the core of what we need to be thinking regardless of the channel.

Right? These channels do the same things, which is drive attention and drive people back to your brand to get them to do an action. So to answer your question, you’ve got premium content or freemium, and then you have free content. What we need to be doing is thinking if I press this button, if I press button a, how’s it gonna get people over here to then press button b? And that’s the challenge whether it’s using social media where you post, like, all of your great top of the funnel content to drive people back over to your website and sign up for your newsletter or sign up for your loyalty program and then your loyalty program is giving them immense value or in reverse, it’s using what you’ve built on email historically to then drive people over to social media to see a really fun post that you want them in turn to share.

Scott Cohen: And what do this is a little bit off script. Let’s put it that way. But I’ve been reading a book called They Ask You Answer. I don’t know if you have read that book or you know the the Tayah concept. Right?

But the con very high level concept is essentially answering questions openly that you hear from customers and prospects and all things like that so like literally writing blog posts doing videos that some companies would go, my god. Don’t give away the secret sauce or don’t tell them that you might not be a good fit for everyone. Right? What I mean, it feels like and I’m reading that going, yeah. Totally makes sense.

Right? You’re looking for the right fit for you because you’re not gonna I mean, I think every company I’ve worked for, 90% of the customers bought once and never again. Even if they loved it, they never buy again. Right? So how do you, and then you have the giant percentage of your total list that’s never bought anything.

And and so I’m wondering how you feel about taking that concept and where does that go? Like, does that just sit on the website? Does that sit in YouTube? Does it sit everywhere? Like, what are your thoughts on transparency in that type of communication?

And how that how does that build customer trust?

Carlos Gil: So historically and this just is it’s speaking from experience of working with, at this point in my career, a lot of different CMOs and digital marketing leaders. So, historically, people are turned on by big numbers. Right? Oh, we have, you know, x number of email subscribers, x number of followers. So what?

If they’re not converting, then you’d know you you’re wrong. I’m sorry. You don’t have 3,000,000 followers on Facebook. I’m sorry you don’t have 10,000,000 email subscribers. Like, you really have to go deep into the data.

And you have to look at the data and analyze. When I set out a campaign, I have the last, let’s say, 10 campaigns, who opened up an email 5 times? Right? Who are the people that opened up 5 times? I have those are those people that opened up 50% of the campaigns who actually clicked.

I have the people that click who took an action. Right? So you have to get that granular to really track who really cares, Who’s really engaged in the same principles work in social media. Right? I always say this.

I’ve said this now for years whenever I do keynotes on social media marketing, the folks that are behind the controls of social media accounts for brands, they’re the ones that you should be able quickly to say, who are your top 5? Who are your top 10 advocates? And it’s easy to interpret that because every time you post content, you’re gonna see the same names coming up over and over again. This person always comments. This person always shares.

This person is always very favorable. This person’s, right, becoming this person’s a cheerleader for our brand, so to speak. So it’s just looking at the data that’s right in front of you. And so many times marketers are blinded by the top line numbers and not the bottom line numbers. So I I I think again, man, I don’t know if that necessarily answered your question, but I believe that as marketers regardless of where you sit on the email marketing or or social media side, you can’t get blinded by these big numbers.

And you you really have to find ways even to use some of these other mediums to put people into a community. I’ve used this tactic for for a while now. Take your most engaged and most loyal customers, pull them into a Slack channel together. Give them early access. If it’s a sale, if it’s a campaign, if if it’s social media posts.

Right? In the influencer world, there’s what’s called engagement pods. Right? Where you put 20 influencers into a Slack group or into a WhatsApp channel or into an Instagram DM group and every single time they post a piece of content then they have 19 other people that’s amplifying that content to help kind of boost or I don’t wanna say game the algorithm, but it is what it is. Well, why not just take that same approach with your customers?

Make them feel like they’re really special because they’re in a VIP program. And I’ll give you an example of that. I am loyal to Marriott. I’ll only stay at Marriott. I’ll only fly American Airlines.

That’s it. It’s it’s nonnegotiable with me. And if Marriott or American were to truly I don’t wanna say they don’t value my loyalty, but the fact is that I’ve mentioned them on podcasts like this, at conferences like inbox expo, and I’ve mentioned them countless times on social media. They’ve never reached out to me. I still stay and fly with them because I’m loyal as a customer to them.

But if one day Marriott or American Airlines reach out to me and said, hey, man. Like, we recognize you’ve got this elite status and you’re always advocating for us. So we wanna put you in a special group on whatever. Let’s just say Slack with other loyal customers like you, you know what? It’d be kinda cool because a, it would provide me networking opportunities.

Right, as a as a b to b marketer, like, there’s value in that. And b, it would make me feel like I’m being acknowledged as a person. I’m not just a number. And that is the that’s really the ethos of the end of marketing. Like, we have to really move away from looking at people as just another number, just another follower, just another email subscriber.

And we have to get back to why are people buying from you. What what compels them. Right? And I don’t care about all these big numbers. Like, I need to focus 1 person at a time.

And I I’ve used this analogy, and I’ll turn it over to you after after I share this. But normally, when I’m speaking at a conference, like your average conference, let’s say, there’s a 1,000 people there. Right? Thousand people is a lot of people in person. Like, you cannot humanly have meaningful dialogue with a 1,000 people in one day.

It’s not really possible. Right? That being said, when I use this analogy, I say, look, imagine these 1,000 people in this auditorium right now that you cannot speak to, but yet you’re using tools to broadcast the thousands of people expecting people to notice that you exist. Focus on the one to one. Even if it’s every day, you’re intentionally by design going out and having conversations on social media with just one follower or one customer or in the world that we live in of email marketing, you’re looking at who are these people that are truly engaged by your brand and intentionally sending them an email thanking them or picking up the phone or finding if they have a presence on social media and just following them and liking their content.

Like, all this mess, to me, it’s really elementary. It’s very easy, but for one reason or another, it just goes over the head of, you know, most marketers and, like, I get it, you know, we’re busy. We got bosses that want us to do things and kids and life. It’s just easier to press a couple of buttons and say, well, wow, we set this campaign and there it is. And whatever happens, happens.

Scott Cohen: You know, it’s funny that on the last episode we do, we had Brian Ryback on, and he made this comment. He’s like, it baffles me the steps that companies will go to not to ask a customer a question. And or or to do that sort of outreach. You know, it is it is a numbers game to an extent, but you you know, whether it’s surprise and delight, whether it’s it still has to feel like like if I go out and buy 10 pairs of shoes from 1 company and Kizzic, if you’re listening, I love your shoes. Right?

Love them. The the slip ons, they’re so freaking comfortable. I love them. And it’s a Utah company, so I’m buying local. I feel good about that too.

But, you know and they have a a pretty good rewards program. You know, you get points, and then you can use points right away. It’s not a hard hard thing to use. It’s great. Right?

Now I’m not one to go out on I’m not on Twitter really anymore. I’m not one to go out and promote it. But, you know, getting a little thing in the mail, getting a little email you know things like that it’s not hard you know like you said one a day could do enough to create a take a good experience and make it great and create influencers. Right? That you are creating these doesn’t have to be an affiliate, but referrals, things like that.

It’s I don’t know if you’ve watched West Wing. I’m a huge West Wing fan, but they you know, they’re talking about you know, when Bartlett’s running for reelection, they’re talking about the New Hampshire primary. And they said New Hampshire is retail politics. Meaning, he had to go in there. He had to be in the room.

He had to shake hands. He had to talk to people. And good marketing has that ability to have to do retail politics. Anyway, let’s talk about a little bit of you talked about, like, how you talk one way in social and in a different way in email. That unified brand voice is a it’s an interesting, very difficult thing to I’m an old copywriter so I I get it in terms of hey you’ve talking a brochure differently and that’s how old I am I’m talking about print but although direct mail is back how given the different requirements of the channel.

What does a unified brand voice properly executed look like

Carlos Gil: Again, it is stepping away from the channels themselves. And at the highest levels, identify who are we as a company. Like, meaning, what’s our voice and tone? What’s our persona? I hate to say the word gimmick, but what is the gimmick behind our brand?

Like, Who are we trying to reach? You know, all these organizations, they invest a lot of money throughout the year to do surveys and and and get research and they know about their customers. Right? So if you know who it is that you’re trying to engage, then build a a a personality around your target buyer. You know, I use this example of chat gbt.

I love Chat GPT. I love where where AI is headed from a pure utility standpoint. It’s not hard nowadays to go into Chat GPT and literally say, hey. I am this brand. So this is what we sell.

So what’s the sneaker company again that you like?

Scott Cohen: Kizzik. Kizzik.

Carlos Gil: Kizzik. So, I, work for Kizzick. We are a sneaker brand. We’re based in Utah. We cater to 35 plus white guys like Scott.

Right? And,

Scott Cohen: I feel attacked.

Carlos Gil: You know, you have to you have to feed chat gbt the like, a lot of data just around who your customer is, and then you ask Chatsche BT, help me define a brand voice and tone that is going to resonate with this audience. What should we be talking about? What should we be posting on social about? What should we be emailing them about? Right?

It’s pretty easy. Pre chat gbt, yeah, you would have to do some focus groups, maybe get your agency involved, talk to a few different team members within your organization, say, yeah, we have this profile. What does Scott like to do? Who is he behind the scenes? How can we integrate ourselves?

Like, you don’t have to do that anymore. You have Chash EBT to do that for you. I’m kinda staying in the realm of of sneakers. Right? So 2 years ago, I mentioned that I opened up a sneaker store.

Here in in St. John’s, Florida, which is outside of Jacksonville between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. So we have a predominantly affluent demographic that we cater to, but yet sneaker culture has very much this urban sort of vibe to it, but our customer, for the most part is not an urban audience. So I had to let Chat gbt know in all of our email and social copy, we still wanna be cool and fun and hip and have that whole sneaker head tone, but our customers are not urban.

Our customers are affluent. So keep that in mind. And, man, I’ve been using ChatChipt now for, gosh, the better part of almost 2 years to write, you know, our email copy. Right? Our social media copy.

And the beautiful thing about where ChatGPT is now is you can literally take a photo from your phone and ask ChachiBT, write me a social media copy. Write me a social media post caption for this photo And within seconds, you have post copy.

Scott Cohen: How far okay. What’s the percentage? How how close is it to a 100% in your view from, like, if I go to because, you know, I’ve I’ve you I’ve dabbled. You know, if I get stuck, like, I’m an old I’m an old writer so that the old habits die hard. I get stuck it’s a great writer’s block beater right oh my god I need subject lines I need this copy or clean this up for me.

Okay. I’m gonna take that and I’ll throw it in my voice. Like, how close is it to prime time in your view?

Carlos Gil: You have to treat chat and this is gonna sound super weird to say about an AI tool. You have to treat chat gbt almost like a junior level copywriter that works for you. So I like to write as well. That being said, Chad Jigeti makes writing a lot easier, but at the same time, it doesn’t. Because I find myself so many times having to sit down, write a draft, and then ask Chat GbT, you know, what do you think about this?

What edits would you make? So I treat Chat gbt almost like a copy editor in a way. But if you’re gonna start by using Chat gbt just to out cold, write social media caption or email email body copy. You know, first of all, Getresponse has built in AI tools that can do that for you. However, if you’re going to use ChatGPT, with within ChatGPT, you need to let it know exactly who it is that you’re trying to reach and write copy that’s gonna resonate with that audience.

To answer your question in terms of how effective it is, it takes it takes a little bit of work to massage the copy so it doesn’t sound robotic. So I find myself oftentimes saying, you know, alright. I’m looking to write a Memorial Day sale for my sneaker store, the hype section, and I’m trying to engage sneakerheads that are between the ages of 18 35 and, write, you know, engaging an engaging subject line, write Very short, concise, engaging, email body copy, and then I just see what it says. As soon as it starts reading very promotional and salesy, I’ll then follow-up and and and say, rewrite this without it sounding promotional and salesy. Write this to sound more human.

So again, it’s one of those things that to answer your question, it’s it’s very far from being 100%. I believe that we will get to a point very soon though, where you will be able to speak whether into your phone or into a microphone like this into ChatcheBT. It’ll know your voice and tone. It’ll know how you speak. That’s like right now, Chat GPT came and crawled videos on YouTube.

Once it can crawl videos, like, it’s game over, dude. Once Chat GPT can listen to your podcast and it knows exactly how you speak and the tone that you speak Yeah. Game over.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I was I was fiddling with Riverside the other day. That’s what we use to edit the podcast, and they have an AI voice function now. And it went, we’ll just use the last few videos of you because I also will record, you know, YouTube stuff on my own for the business. And I said, okay.

How good is it gonna be? So I gave it a script. Other than the delivery, it had my voice stone cold. Like, in terms of the the the timbre and the and the deepness and everything. Like, it was crazy.

I walked upstairs and played the clip for my wife. And I said, what do you think? She’s like, that sounds great. I said, that’s not me. And her eyes went wide.

Yeah. It’s not she said, it sounded a little slow for you. How you talk, I I tend to rise and fall and goes fast and slow and, you know, I’m human. Right? But in terms of the actual voice itself, like, oh my god.

This is scary. This is crazy. I could just throw stuff at it. And if it’s like to your point, if it starts learning how I deliver things, my life might get a

Carlos Gil: little easier actually because I’m a great You’re saying this is I just wanna stop you right there, though. You’re saying this is with riverside.fm?

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Mhmm.

Carlos Gil: So riverside.fm, is it taking your podcast and the transcript and then doing an audio version, or you’re just It’s

Scott Cohen: just audio right now. So, like, it it takes the videos I’ve loaded, right, or, like, recorded and stuff. So it has my voice from other things I’ve done. And then it said, give us words. So, like, I basically copied and pasted a couple paragraphs of something I’ve written and said, alright.

Let me see how it goes. And other than the fact that it did not talk like me in terms of pace and tempo and everything else, it sounded like me like it fooled my wife she was just like man you’re being pretty deliberate I’m like no that’s not me that’s ai and she went well that makes sense But did you see the you talked about LinkedIn a lot. Reid Hoffman interviewed himself

Carlos Gil: No way.

Scott Cohen: Through AI. Yeah. Go look it up on YouTube. It’s crazy where he literally went oh I’m gonna interview an AI version of myself I threw into this engine all of my speeches and all this other stuff it was pretty darn good even the video was good yeah it’s it’s work work I wish AI would do our laundry and our dishes not necessarily my job. But, you know, it’s it’s it’s that’s the meme.

Carlos Gil: I see all the time. Around that the other day that, AI was designed to do dishes and laundry and not, like, take jobs away from people and

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Create

Carlos Gil: art and take jobs away from artists. I agree with that.

Scott Cohen: It’s yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, survive and adapt. Right? It’s it’s it’s just how it is.

Alright. Let’s talk about what social does well that email doesn’t. And what email does well that social doesn’t?

Carlos Gil: That’s actually wow. That’s a really good question. What does social media do well that email doesn’t? Well, first of all, social media allows you to have direct 1 on 1 dialogue in real time with anybody, which email doesn’t. Alright.

With email, you have to hope that someone opts in to your email list to have the ability to email them. So I’d say, you know, that’s a that’s that’s that’s a a plus for social. Social also allows you to listen in in what is being said about your competition. So in real time, you can see anytime someone is saying this brand sucks or I hate this brand. Right?

And you can actually use that to your advantage, and you can engage with those people in real time as well. So, again, advantage of social media. And, again, I think there’s a coolness with social media that exists. Again, we live in this this TikTok era of, you know, everyone’s an influencer and, you know, email is just not as cool. Like, we haven’t really gotten to the point yet where brands are creating personas around their email newsletter.

The email newsletter is just used really as a way to, promote sales and, you know, I think again, social definitely has its advantages to it. The flip side to is that social networks are a, very noisy. Social networks themselves operate as advertising networks. So organic reach in itself is very difficult to come by these days because the social networks want you to pay for that reach. And, you know, algorithms, they they they dominate and control our so if the social network deems that your content is promotional in nature, it’s it’s gonna add AI moderator and it’s going to, limit the reach of your content.

So, you know, it’s rented land versus owned land. That’s a very long way of saying that while I am a big proponent of social media, what it can do for a business, you really need to be on the side of owning your data and owning that land. I’m a big proponent of email marketing. I’m I’m not just saying this because I work for Getresponse now, but I’ve always been a fan of email marketing because, again, having access to email someone, having their email address, having the ability to text message someone, having their phone number is much more valuable than having someone follow you on social media.

Scott Cohen: Amen. Preaching to the choir, you know, my the choir of 1 back here. But absolutely. But okay. Typically, what you find outside of resources is that small, medium businesses act differently than enterprise.

Do you other and other than the, you know, the whole thing you talked about at the beginning of big companies move slow and they they don’t do things. Although Wendy’s social media is on point, by the way. They’re this the level I I’m a snarky comedy guy, so it it works lovely for me. But I’m I’m curious, like, where the dip like, if you were to walk in, you were a consultant for a long time. If you were to walk into an enterprise business versus say, you know, a smaller business shoe business, whatever it might be, would your other than, you know, obviously, the specific what’s in the video what’s in the content outputs like are the strategies similar are they very different like how do you approach size of business in terms of how you approach it?

Carlos Gil: You know, it’s it’s always been it’s always been the same. The biggest and what I mean by the same so that’s actually a 2 part 2 part answer. The strategy is always the same. How to reach more people without alienating your your audience by selling to them. So people don’t wanna be sold to.

They wanna be engaged. That being said, not every brand out there has the budget of a Nike or a Pepsi or Starbucks. Right? So those other brands, they have endless supplies of marketing budget. They can play around different spaces.

They can do different things that feel very cool, and that works for them. A small business owner, they don’t have that luxury so they have to get very creative. So when I go into brands whether it is a enterprise corporation, and historically I’ve worked with enterprise corporations for no other reason than they can afford me, a small business cannot. So a small business owner, I’d rather just give them some nuggets, kind of put them in the right direction where they have to go, an enterprise brand. I’m gonna come in.

I’m gonna analyze everything under the hood, and then I’m gonna give recommendations on what you need to do differently. But the approach and the delivery is the same. Sell less, engage more. Find more people, more buyers using these mediums, and you do that by listing. But first and foremost, you listen to what’s being said about your brand.

You need to listen to what’s being said about your competition, and you need to listen to what’s being said about your industry and then have systems in place to engage these folks. I love Twitter. Nana was x. I love Instagram. The reason why I love these platforms is because it’s really easy to find buyers on these platforms.

It’s really easy to see who’s talking about your competition on these platforms and for you to go directly to the source, meaning directly to the people that are talking about them. Right? A platform like Facebook, a platform like like LinkedIn, it’s a little bit more challenging to do that. So, you know, that being said, the the approach and the strategy is always the same. Do a better job listening, do a better job engaging, do less selling.

Ultimately, we’re all in business to do what? It’s to sell. Right? So there’s an art there in how you do that. The other angle to this is building advocacy.

Right? So whether it’s 1 customer or a 100 or a 1000, right, converting these folks are already talking about your brand or your competition or your industry, turning them into advocates. Any business can do that. And the reality is that it doesn’t cost any money to turn someone into an advocate.

Scott Cohen: It’s true. Yeah. It’s true. I like it. Alright.

Let’s throw in the monkey wrench of SMS.

Carlos Gil: Let’s do it.

Scott Cohen: I yeah. I mean, I like to say I personally hate it, but damn it. It works.

Carlos Gil: Highly highly annoying.

Scott Cohen: Highly effective. Generally, what you know, I’d like to say that you you have a higher level of intent. Right? Because people are literally going, yeah, interrupt me. Please.

Please interrupt me all the time. You know, email has a bit of an asynchronous feel to it. You can get to it when you get to it. Right? Although, I’m a bubble 0 guy.

I don’t know about you, but with my phone, if there’s a bubble that says a notification, like, I know. I I have to read it. I have to read it. It so but where does SMS fit into your channel hierarchy?

Carlos Gil: I would say SMS in a perfect world is at the very top, a notch below email and a notch above social media. And there are there for no other reason than we’ve been on this podcast for, like, going in an hour now. I’ve checked my phone 5 times. Even while I’m speaking without you even realizing it, I can unlock my phone. Right?

I can unlock my phone with my eyes closed. I can just see if anyone has text me. Right? That sort of FOMO that we get from receiving a text message doesn’t exist on social media and it quite frankly does not exist in email whatsoever. The FOMO the FOMO factor, it definitely exists in text messaging.

We’re humans at the end of the day. Right? So you have to understand human behavior and human psychology. We wanna be wanted. We wanna be loved.

We wanna be accepted, and we wanna be acknowledged. And SMS gives you that feeling of, oh my gosh. My phone just went off. Who text me? Right?

It could be your wife or brother or whomever. It could be a colleague, but just that feeling of the text coming through has a lot different emotional meaning than you get a ping from your Gmail going off or you go on social media and you look at your notifications. Like, again, we’re all creatures of habit. We’re all throughout the day checking our social, our email, and our text messages, but I would say that that text is highly effective. That being said, though, the reason why I put it a notch below email is you’re also limited with what you can do in a text message.

Right? Really good SMS marketers find ways to engage their audience without relying on long form to text, photos, or links. There’s an art in that. Yep. Email gives you more versatility.

With email, right, there’s multiple touch points. Like, I would say touch point number 1 in email is the subject line. Subject lines itself almost operates like an SMS text message because you have a very limited amount of copy to then the challenge is to get people to open up email, then the email bodies where you have your photos and your graphics and your header and copy. Right? You have more versatility with what you can do with an email.

In terms of is if one is more valuable than the than the other, I think I think it’s a toss-up. Right? What I will say is you have more friction on email. You have more emails coming through throughout the course of the day on your phone than you do with text message. But again, you’re also limited with what you can do with a text message.

So, again, man, really good question.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I mean, you could you could write a novel in SMS. It would just cost you a ridiculous amount of money to do so. I mean, it’s

Carlos Gil: cost you a lot of money.

Scott Cohen: It was so much money. And, yeah, to your point, I mean, a great test, a little, free advice here for the listeners. If you’re sending images in every single one of your SMS, do a test without. Run it with and without against each other and see if your conversion rates are any different. Guarantee you well, I won’t guarantee you because, you know, it’s testing and I could be wrong, but I’m willing to bet a decent amount of money that it won’t make a difference so you can cut the image and cut your cost and make the same amount of money.

A lot

Carlos Gil: of times and that’s really the point. Also say a lot of times, images, look pixelated when you when you send them through on SMS. They’ll look as crisp.

Scott Cohen: They can.

Carlos Gil: Yeah. Quite frankly, a lot of times, they look like a small thumbnail versus opening up. Right? So, like, if I was texting a 100 people on my phone just an image. Right?

As soon as they open up my text, they’re gonna see that image pop up. Right? It’s gonna take up their their iPhone screen. Whereas Yeah. SMS, you need to be very intentional.

You just now click that thumbnail, open it up, and then just hope and pray that it doesn’t look distorted and it still has, you know,

Scott Cohen: that Yeah.

Carlos Gil: Very crisp iPhone esque, you know, 4 k quality.

Scott Cohen: But you talked about digging deep into the data, like I was saying with higher intent. I found in my last in my previous life, the people that we got about 35% of people who would opt in for email and SMS. SMS. The people that opted in for both were 3 times more likely to convert. So SMS carries that weight.

To your point, there’s limitations. So, you know, I consider them email 1, SMS 2, or Simpatico there. But there’s a higher level intent meaning if I’m saying, yes, I want your text messages, I’m more likely to convert because I’m saying, yes, buzz me on my watch buzz me on my phone if I got buzz for every email I got my my watch would die in 30 minutes because it would just never stop buzzing. So there’s just just a different world. Right?

I mean, like you said, there’s competition in emails. I mean, there’s becoming competition in SMS because everybody’s asking for it. But the people that do sign up want to sign up. Wow. I’m trying to think alright.

One one more question. We could go on forever. And that’s what I love about these podcasts. We could just keep going, but, you know, we’ll we’ll we’ll end on this question. Like I said at the beginning, most most organizations, the social team, and the email slash SMS team are fighting for resources and budget.

If you were dropped into an organization as CMO, how would you get the two sides to work together?

Carlos Gil: How would I get the social team and email team to work together?

Scott Cohen: Mhmm.

Carlos Gil: Well, first of all, it’s it’s one team, one goal. Yeah. That’s very, like, at the highest levels. Doesn’t matter what you’re responsible for in the organization. We have shared goals.

We’re one team. So it’d be reinforcing that message. And it’ll be forcing them to work together to tie the knots together. Again, I’m gonna go back to the AOL example. Back in the day, you get on America online.

You had all these cool bells and whistles from a social networking standpoint, the chat rooms, different groups, but you had built in email capabilities. Right? So when you get back to the basics, instead of forcing your customers to go in all these different directions, funnel them into 1. Right? Make your your email newsletters, like, your hero content.

Right? Your social, right, is fragmented. You are at the mercy of of AI. You’re at the mercy of algorithms. You’re competing against a lot of other accounts.

Right? Someone’s already given you permission to email them. You’re already several steps ahead than having someone follow you on social. So that being said, your email team needs to be producing content that’s really high quality and your goal on the social side to be driving as many people back to your website so they can sign up for that newsletter, and use the tools that social gives you to humanize your email. Like, that’s another whole component about this.

Right? Use tools like Instagram stories. So we have a campaign that comes out and it drops to say on on Wednesday, then you’re taking to your Instagram stories and you’re like, hey, guys. You know, we just dropped all the email newsletter. If you didn’t receive it, make sure you go here, click the link in our bio, and sign up.

But here are 3 things that you may have missed and then refer, like, these conversations. These conversations never happen. Like, I can’t think of a single brand that I’ve ever heard say whether it’s on a tweet or on Instagram stories, refer to an email campaign. That’s a problem.

Scott Cohen: I love it. Alright. That’s a great place to end. That’s just it just it’s just so good. Alright, Carlos, where can people find out more about you and about GetResponse?

Carlos Gil: Absolutely. So first of all, make sure that you go to getresponse.com at get response on all the socials, twitter/x, Instagram. Also follow me at carlosgill83 as well on Instagram and on Twitter slash x. I still can’t get over calling this thing x, by the way. For me, it’s always gonna be Oh, no.

Scott Cohen: No. It’s no. It and and if Musk sells the darn thing, you know it’s gonna go back to Twitter. So 1000%. It’s like fashion.

It’ll come back around.

Carlos Gil: 1000%. And let’s connect on LinkedIn. So if there’s anything that you heard in this, if you wanna connect, have any questions, reach out. I’m an open book.

Scott Cohen: Alright. Thanks so much for joining. Well, me, Carlos. And thank you to our listeners and watchers for tuning in. If you’d like to learn more about Inbox Army, check us out, inbox army.com.

Till next time. Be safe and be well.
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